mobrec

So
Tim Bray has a brief posting with what is likely to turn out to be an incendiary issue: if you come from a Java background, you will write better librarys (and code) in other languages than if you didn't have a Java background. I can see this particularly outraging much of the Ruby crowd, who seemingly live to smugly disparage anything that is not Ruby.

technorati tags: java, ruby, programming, ideas

So
While reading through yet another article on SOAP vs REST, I came across a quote from Tim O'Reilly that confirms something that I always suspected about SOAP:

I think there are also some political aspects. Early in the web services discussion, I remember talking with Andres Layman, one of the SOAP architects at Microsoft. He let slip that it was actually a Microsoft objective to make the standard sufficiently complex that only the tools would read and write this stuff, and not humans. So that was a strategy tax that was imposed by the big companies on some of this technology, where they made it more complicated than it needed to be so they could sell tools. [Emphasis added]

Everything I have seen about SOAP has let me to this conclusion. The funny thing is that many corporations cling to SOAP as if they couldn't possibly have web services without it (though many crafted and successfully implemented their own simple XML over HTTP services before the SOAP spec saw the light of day).

I think that Tim missed the boat with this comment as well:

It’s not necessarily just Machiavellian scheming. I think Microsoft really believes that you can create better user experiences with tools that give people so much more power.

Not quite. It took vendors like Borland (who has now left the compiler/IDE business) and others creating much more robust and productive environments in the 80s for MS to finally wake up to the need to have a viable IDE. In typical monopolistic fashion, MS latched on to the IDE as yet another means to vendor lock in. So, once it inserted itself into the IDE business, MS 'strategy' has always been creating the most obscure, convoluted means to implement code, libraries, frameworks, etc to tie developers to their toolset, plain and simple. If the languages and frameworks were able to stand on their own, there would be no lock-in to the MS tools. Incidentally, you will hear similar arguments around JavaServer Faces and Sun tools as well.

technorati tags: soap, webservices, development, standards, jsf

So
Over on Alphaworks, IBM has released a Web Ontology Manager:

IBM Web Ontology Manager is a lightweight, Web-based tool for managing ontologies expressed in Web Ontology Language (OWL). With this technology, users can browse, search, and submit ontologies to an ontology repository. Developers can discover new ontologies without having to develop the ontology themselves; reusability is thereby promoted and development time and effort is reduced. This technology includes a Web interface for easy uploading of ontologies in an .owl format by any user of the system. It also includes an interface for generating (using Jastor) Java APIs from uploaded ontology files.

technorati tags: alphaworks, semanticweb, ontology, ibm, tools

So
A new version of FlickrExport, a superb plugin for iPhoto that makes it incredibly easy to upload and tag photos on Flickr. Of all the Flickr upload tools out there, this is absolutely my favorite.

Oddly enough, this version was released as beta yesterday, but it's good to go today.

I did find one significant bug — if you don't have any photos selected and you click on File->Export, iPhoto will hang (apparently due to flickrExport hanging). If you let it sit for a minute or two it will select your entire photo library to export — probably not what you intended. I am confident that this will be quickly and proficiently fixed.  I stand corrected — this is a 'feature' of iPhoto: if you have no photos selected when you Export, it assumes that you want all of them exported.

technorati tags: flickrexport, flickr, iphoto, photography, tools

So
Apparently this site (open.bbc.co.uk) contains 75 years worth of information about every program that the BBC has aired over the years in a searchable format using semantic web technologies under the covers.

I wanted to try this out and write about it a bit, but apparently the site is not responding. Is this a server problem or a Ruby problem? Either way it probably has to due with enormous demand at the rollout of this new tool. I guess we will find out later...

technorati tags: bbc, rdf, semanticweb, webtools, ruby

So
Today Google has released Sketchup, a 3D drawing desktop application. From the little demo animation that they have on the linked page, this looks like the rare combination of a very powerful, yet easy to use tool for creating 3D renderings. Renderings can also be used in conjunction with Google Earth, presumably as some sort of a layer or overlay.

Unfortunately, the Mac version of it is 'coming soon' even though the pre-Google acquisition product already ran on OS X. I'll have to wait for the Mac release to get into this any further. I hope that the delay is something a simple as switching over the branding and a few other minor tasks it truly will be available RSN.

technorati tags: google, sketchup, googlemaps, desktop, 3d

So
Graham Glass has an excellent anecdote about a lesson he learned in high school regarding critical thinking.

...Once the pleasantries were out of the way, he started the first lecture, which was about the composition of the atmosphere. Everyone started taking copious notes. He told us that Nitrogen was 78% of the air we breath, with Oxygen accounting for 21% and the remainder taken up by Argon, Carbon Dioxide, and other gases.

He then proceeded to explain that Nitrogen had a pink color and a slightly sweet smell. Like good students, we continued to record this valuable information into our study notes. After several more minutes of lecture he stopped, and then exclaimed “are you students morons??!!”. Needless to say, this caught our attention and we instantly brought our heads out of our books.

He continued: “If Nitrogen was pink and formed 78% of the air, the classroom would look pink! Are your brains even turned on right now?!” He proceeded to berate us for being so gullible, and then used the situation to segue into a discussion of the ingredients of science; observation, theory, and rigorous testing.

technorati tags: education, thought, ideas

So
As always, a compelling and insightful commentary by IBM's Irving Wladawsky-Berger (via AlwaysOn); this time discussing the effect that technology standards are having (or will have) on IT Strategy. One of the points that he makes is that standards aren't just about software leverage; hardware and web services standards are going to allow enterprises to grow and share in ways they couldn't easily before.

Now, what we have seen is the continuing emergence of standards as we keep going up the stack. In this world of grid computing, what you're really trying to do is share all kinds of IT resources—computing capacity, storage, files, applications, and so on—all built around the common standards that everybody uses. So you can essentially begin to virtualize the system so that people can access your resource without having to know precisely where that resource is. A very difficult example that must have been used in let's say supercomputing systems is that you can form a grid out of multiple supercomputers in a location or in a country, and when somebody submits a job they submit it to the grid. And then the systems themselves get their act together, find where they have capacity, and make sure they can access everything, but you're essentially sharing all the extreme capacity that wasn't there before.

technorati tags: strategy, standards, opensource

So
In what feels like a return to the heady 'spinning logo, flaming logo' days of early web design, Yusuke Kawasaki has created a way to produce cube image rotations in Javascript. While this is wonderful eyecandy and some pretty deft Javascript programming, I'm not entirely sure how useful this might be in practical terms. via Ajaxian

technorati tags: graphics, ajax, javascript, eyecandy, webdev

So
I found this posting by Danny Weitzner on Privacy, practical obscurity and the power of the Semantic Web to be very thought provoking. It does an excellent job of summarizing the legal concept of 'practical obscurity' and provides some food for thought on what this might mean as more and more information can be joined together and made available through Semantic Web activities.

technorati tags: semanticweb, law, ideas