My Personal Infocloud
So
Google have released the API for their new Calendar offering.
In related news, a Wordpress Widget has been released for Google Calendar. Based on developer comments, it will be modified to utilize the new calendar API in the future.
technorati tags: google, calendar, wordpress, widgets, webdev
So
I have tried several times today to add this new blog URL to my technorati profile. The profile update appears to just be broken — it doesn't give any error message; nor does it update my profile. If I try to add a new URL it adds two new blank sites instead.
I don't suppose anyone is paying too much attention because it is Easter weekend.
Perhaps this will get fixed sometime in the coming week.
UPDATE: 20.APR.2006 — Appears to be working now; I was able to add this blog and have it update properly.
technorati tags: technorati, broken, suckage, blogging, mobrec
So
I thought that this was very creative — coloring Easter eggs using onioin skins and ferns. The results are pretty unique and part of the fun is figuring out what combination of things will produce interesting results.
Happy Easter!
So
Welcome to all who have made the transition from the old Blogger-based site to this shiny new Wordpress site. There may be a few glitches as I learn my way around Wordpress (and the new hosting service that I am using).
If you were subscribed to the previous site, please update your feed reader with the links to the right or manually update the feed URL to http://mobrec.com/feed .
So
Sun announced earlier in the week that it is open sourcing (via netbeans.org) some significant enterprise-level tools. These include:
* 2-way UML modeler for architecting and reverse engineering complex enterprise applications. UML tools generate diagrams and keep them in sync with source changes without adding markers to the source code. Full support for the current version of the UML specification is provided. * A set of XML infrastructure and visual editing tools which help enable developers to manage complexity in their XML files. These tools are intended to provide a base that can be extended by third parties. * Orchestration and SOA tools are included for building composite applications. These leading-edge SOA tools leverage the business integration technology and expertise from Sun's acquisition of SeeBeyond.
I am quite happy to see that there might finally be a decent open source two-way UML tool available. Last time I looked at this space, there was not much on offer and what was there was pretty sketchy.
Hey, I know that Sun's tools aren't as “cool” to use as Eclipse but there is no reason why the Eclipse community can't swallow hard and look at how to incorporate these new tools into their IDE.
technorati tags: sun, netbeans, ide, uml, development
So
This week I saw an announcement on Ajaxian that several high powered engineers were leaving Sun Microsystems for JackBe. I recognized all of the names of the engineers from the influential Core J2EE Patterns book that they collectively co-authored.
Unfortunately, visiting the JackBe web site does not give a very good first impression, particularly the large-ish advert that might as well read “make your company fully buzzword compliant with our Ajax assessment!!”. This reminds me of around 8-10 years ago when every consulting company was offering a 'Java assessment' or 'Java Jumpstart' and how such things will give you a 'technical/competitive advantage' to anyone who would take the bait. Repeat the same for client-server, object-oriented programming, eCommerce, agile programming, INSERT_YOUR_FAVORITE_HERE.
This is not to say that Ajax does not have value (it does, when applied appropriately), but it is to say that anything can be oversold.
technorati tags: sun, ajax, jackbe, hype, consulting
So
I recently discovered a handy little tool at cl1p.net that lets you 'store' a chunk of text or a small (less than 2MB) file at a URL of your choosing and then retrieve it again using the same URL. As the site states, clip has some interesting use cases:
Getting around firewalls. With cl1p.net you can easily move data from one machine to another. All you need is a URL.
Enhance Instant Messages. Instant messaging clients do a poor job at sending large blocks of text. With cl1p.net you can create a cl1p and post the URL in an instant.
Improving productivity. Cl1p.net is the fastest way to post to the Internet. Why go to the trouble of logging into e-mail just to move data?
So
You can just hear it now: Is that a couple of gigabytes in your pocket or are you just happy to see me!?
This is an interesting take on flash drives: the more data that you put on the drive the more it puffs up. Not sure how practical this is, but it is definitely a novel indicator of free space on a storage device.
technorati tags: flashdrive, visualization, fun, humor, ideas
So
I was a little surprised at how little coverage there has been of the RedHat acquisition of JBoss — could it be acquisition fatigue or general disinterest. The latter is a little hard to believe considering that both parties have at some point been the darling (or bane) of the open source community/movement. With the general love/hate relationship with RedHat, I'm not sure that having the bombastic Marc Fleury on the roster is going to be much more than a liability.
This blog post over at zdnet was one of the better I saw on the merger.
technorati tags: redhat, jboss, opensource, merger
So
Earlier in the week, the Guardian had a great article titled Spread the word, and join it up. It covers some of the usual ground about how HTTP was about presentation and the semantic web is about Data and serves as a good introduction to the topic.
What some of the later comments in the article got me thinking about was how the forces behind the growth of the web and the adoption of open source may (finally) be driving factors behind the growth of more semantic content on the web. The web, I think, really changed the thinking in most corporations in that it became 'okay' to share without having to control the sharing.
Open source changed the way that corporations and individuals thought about collaboration and product development. Adopt some time tested code into your own (internal) project and be that much further ahead in the development cycle. Contribute some code or even an entire project to the open source community and (based on the merit of the code or product) see it take on a new life and grow in ways that the originator never imagined.
Stir in the relatively recent development of products and even companies having APIs (web 2.0?) that allow users to combine them in new and creative ways and you have a pretty interesting environment for your data, which, after all, is what the semantic web is all about.
Now, get your data 'out there' in RDF and see what creative linkages and constructions that can be crafted on the web. In some cases, I can see this having a real multiplying effect — as more and more quality data is available in a machineable format the value increases — much like the network effect that was seen with fax machines. While the fax network effect was strictly about point to point communication, the semantic web impact will be in bringing together diverse data sources in new ways and creating new value in the combinations.
technorati tags: semanticweb, rdf, opensource, ideas, guardian