Seth Ladd's Blog

Fortune.com - Technology - Can Google Grow Up? When the numbers pertain to Google, they look very, very good. In 18 months the company has quadrupled in size, now employing more than 1,300 people. Annualized revenues have sextupled, to about $900 million. Annualized pretax profits have grown by a factor of 23, to about $350 million, according to a handful of people who have been told the figures. Only a few high-tech companies in history, like Apple, Compaq, Sun, and more recently Amazon.com, have generated that kind of revenue growth so fast. None has made as much money doing it

Wireless Internet access through cellular/PCS networks Wireless Internet access through the cellular/PCS networks For U.S. markets.

CEUR-WS.org/Vol-89 - 1st Int. Workshop on Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems (PSSS1) Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Practical and Scalable Semantic Systems

webservices.xml.com: Protocol Design: How Many Bytes? [Nov. 25, 2003] The updated HTTP 1.1 presented a solution that did not have these problems, a combination of length prefixing and an end of data indicator. When data is generated on the fly, it is assumed to be generated as a series of "chunks", each chunk being at least 1 byte long.

SuSE mailinglist: Re: [suse-oracle] 9.2 iAS installation fails on linking $ORACLE_HOME/precomp/lib/ins_precomp.mk Installing Oracle on SuSE tricks. It's like giving birth to a demon.

NIC Inc. - The People Behind eGovernment Need to build eGovernment services? Partner with NIC to enhance how your government does business. My new company!

Core Developers Network After a longer and more difficult process than expected, the 2.4 version of the Servlet Specification has been completed by JSR-154 and is due for release before the end of 2003. The aims of this revision of the specification were some modest feature enhancements, improved deployment descriptors and general clarifications of existing functionality. These aims, with some notable exceptions have largely been met. This article reviews the most important additions, changes, omissions and remaining problems in the specification. The key new features are introduced and some explanations are given for those that are missing in action. Problem areas that remain in the specification and those that have newly been added are also discussed.

Principles behind the Agile Manifesto Wise teachings from people a lot smarter than me.

Bruce Eckel's MindView, Inc: 5-2-03 Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing In recent years my primary interest has become programmer productivity. Programmer cycles are expensive, CPU cycles are cheap, and I believe that we should no longer pay for the latter with the former. Ahh, Python: my new love affair. So easy to say what I want to say in that language. No long compilation steps. Easy to move from idea to code to execution. My vote for most productive language. Ruby is a close second, just doesn't have the mindshare yet.

Traction - Product - Intro Traction Software's Enterprise Weblog products are deployed by business and government teams to create an information sharing system that works like the web. Traction provides a dramatically efficient communication, collaboration and knowledge-sharing medium that presents business information and working communications in context, over time.

Open Source in Government Run by Todd Ogasawara, the eGovernment Team Leader for the State of Hawaii ( my home state ).

Java Update v.1.4.1(Panther):Information and Download The Java Update delivers functional enhancements and improved stability for running Java applications and applets. It contains support for both Java 1.4.1 and Java 1.3.1. It is strongly recommended that all users install this update.

The Java Community Process(SM) Program - JSRs: Java Specification Requests - detail JSR# 168 The Portlet specification will define a Portlet API that provides means for aggregating several content sources and applications front ends. It will also address how the security and personalization is handled. Sounds like portlets are designed to build sites in a pull manner. That is, the page declares what content it will show and pulls it from different content providers (portlets). This is different than the servlet push manner, in which the servlet compiles the content and pushes it to the page to be rendered. It's defined from the perspective of how the resource's content is defined.

Portlet Open Source Trading site The POST site provides a forum for portlet development by taking advantage of the new JSR 168 and WSRP portal standards. What does a Portlet do that RSS syndication can't? Time to investigate.

XML.com: A Web of Rules [Oct. 23, 2003] Good overview of some rule systems that might help build the semantic web.

<a title="Analyze this !" href="http://www.artima.com/intv/jackpot.html">Analyze this ! James Gosling talks with Bill Venners about his current research project, code-named Jackpot, which builds annotated parse trees for programs and can help you analyze, visualize, and refactor your program. What if you could interact with your program's AST just like you could the source code? On one hand, it might lead to interesting ways to visualize and operate against the entire system. On the other, though, a good IDE shouldn't require you to ever interact with the AST. Only now are we seeing IDEs with the kind of power we've wanted (Eclipse, etc).

Keeping the Code Clean at InformIT.com Keeping your code clean is just as important as getting it to work. Clean code allows you to extend and maintain your modules, whereas dirty code ties you in knots. I can't stress this enough: Software professionals don't leave their code in an unclean state. They don't tolerate sloppiness, wanton duplication, or messiness. Professionals take pride not only in getting their code to work, but also in keeping it simple, small, and easy to read. Good basic article on TDD. I wouldn't have chosen to make the FooToXML code a static class. Why not just place that functionality right into the Foo class? The way Martin has it, it reminds me too much of EJBs (not very object oriented). I like to place the methods that operate on my data in the class that holds the data. But when Martin speaks, you gotta listen. Good cooking analogy at the end.

AgileAlliance Articles Follow the Agile Alliance articles as they get published.

Raw: Shirky's Men of Straw A huge discussion in blogspace has errupted over a piece written by Clay Shirky. Try to keep up!

Socialtext -- Enterprise Social Software Trying to make a business with blogs, wikis, etc.

Wired News: Will Microsoft Wallop Friendster? Speculation about Wallop began immediately following the company's low-key announcement at last month's Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles that it was working on a tool that incorporates blogging and social-networking capabilities. Some observers surmised it was a blogging tool for the 2006 launch of Microsoft's Longhorn operating system. Others suggested it was knowledge-management software,

Politics1 - News Blog Coverage of American politics, especially Presidential Race 2004.

Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 Extensible Markup Language (XML) 1.1 Now with more legal line breaks!

Project Rave Sun announces a new generation tool for Java application development. This effort, code named "Project Rave" brings together the power of the Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition, with the kind of simplified development model acknowledged by many developers as the most effective, most productive working environment. Sun trying to make a VB-esque environment for Java development. Is this a windows app or a Java app?

Principles of Extreme Programming Eliminate waste. Amplify learning. Decide as late as possible. Deliver as fast as possible. Empower the team. Build integrity in. See the whole Principles of XP outlined. People might not attack these as much as they attack the practices. I hope not, I find these principles a good reflection of what XP tries to teach us.

Index of /2001/tag/fdesc54 An attempt at a formal description of the web architecure.

[redland-dev] Redland and Raptor status 2003-11-06 Apart from bug fixes, there are some things in the pipeline for Raptor and Redland. I thought a quick status report was in order since there's not been a release for a while. Some of the changes include a N3-esque parser (including N3 features but omitting stuff like {}). Also, a RDQL implementation in Q1 2004.

ONJava.com: JSP 2.0: The New Deal, Part 1 [Nov. 05, 2003] The wait is almost over: the latest version of the JavaServer Pages (JSP)specification, JSP 2.0, is about to be released, along with all of the other J2EE 1.4 specifications. The jump to a new major revision for this JSP version signifies that all of the pieces are now in place for using JSP in a new way: there's no need for Java in the pages, thanks to the new Expression Language (EL) and the JSP Standard Tag Library (JSTL), and reusing code is much easier, thanks to two new ways to develop custom actions. I like the expression language. Having used it in the past, I can say it reminds me of using a scripting language. And that's what this is all leading to anyway: using a high level easy scripting language to develop web sites.

Cocoon: Internet Glue: Google Crawling IRC? Google has been placing bots in IRC channels. Google rocks.

InfoWorld: Sun, Zend integrate PHP with Sun's Web server: November 03, 2003: By : Application Development Sun Microsystems Inc. has partnered with Zend Technologies Ltd. in a move to let developers deploy applications written using the PHP scripting language on Sun's Java Web server, the companies announced Monday. It's odd they (Java) love PHP so much. It's also going to be the scripting language built into java (for some JSR in the works). PHP is such a directionless language. It's very weak. Now, what's wrong with Jython?

CSS House (3D Border Demo 2) by Chris Hester CSS House A whole house built in only CSS. Of course, barfs on IE.

Report From the W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets Report From the W3C Workshop on Binary Interchange of XML Information Item Sets I don't see the issue here. I think it would be a good thing, especially since many specs already talk about the infoset.