Update: piers has added some fantastic commentary that I believe adds several keypoints of significance to this overall discussion,

KeyPoint:

>> There may be something to be gained from the recuperation of the other-space of “non-economy”,

Keypoint:

>> however, it seems the free (as-in-speech) economy is already inherent in the software development triangle of resources, time and money…

Keypoint:

>> (or, even better, if you can turn your clients into a resource you can draw on for innovation, beta-testing, or information and editing, like wikipedia), the money side of the triangle approaches zero.

I agree 100%! From the software development standpoint, I believe these are some of the most fundamental areas in which we need to place focus such that we can bring Corporate America to our aid instead of to our detriment in regards to our fight for a “free-as-in-speech” culture.

While I recognize that the Free Software Foundation has *ALWAYS* been about free-as-in-speech software, unfortunately there is a free-as-in-beer side effect that in many ways has pigeon-holed their efforts into a “free-as-in-everything” type-cast. The problem with this, of course, is that you can’t exactly build a business model and an underlying business economy on top of a donation-based revenue stream.

Actually, that’s not true…

(and while you’re at it, Gmail too? Thanks!)

GMail beta - Is “beta” a version name or part of the product name? Wondering as it stays forever… - O’Reilly XML Blog

Beta status meaning that they open to suggestions.

Huh… Well that certainly clears things up.

That said, I do wonder what will would happen if they were to ever remove the “beta” tag though. Would this then me they are now “closed to suggestions”?

Google Customer Service Rep Speech Synthesized Bot: “Oh, hey good suggestion, but do you see a “Beta” tag anywhere on the site there idea boy?!” User.Next()!

Shouldn’t it be “2years ( and still in beta)” instead of “2GB (and counting)”?

More than 2 years I have been using GMail, but I never impressed by its reliability. It always gives problems. Some times clicking on mail loads the message for ever until you click it on again. It frustates me particularly when I see an important message in Inbox, but couldn’t open it. There are sitiuations where I felt “what if GMail cannot open this important message forever?”. Some times it keeps sending the mail for ever until you click it on send button again. From the last 30 minutes(09/28/06, around 10:30PM MST) I have been trying to send a email that I composed, but I couldn’t. After 2 minutes of hanging with the word “sending” in top right corner it displayed the Java Script alert message “Oops, the system was unable to perform…..”. I can’t even save it is a draft. How come a product which is 2 years old is still buggy? For God sake, its still in beta. (if the product name is “GMail” not “GMail beta”-:)). How come a company like Google can keep the product in beta for a long time? Oh boy!

How many complaints about GMail issues?. Will Google ever focus on fixing the GMail issues instead of adding new features? I doubt it only adds features to make the headline news or to impress Wall Street. Instead of fixing the issues, Google concentrated on merging GTalk with GMail(which most of the time won’t work inside proxy, even if it works it keeps disconnecting, connecting….), increasing the mail box size, RSS feeds in GMail etc. Do we need all these features with out core mail functioning properly?

MSN launched live mail(Ajax versions of hotmail) recently and its no more in beta. But the 2 year old GMail still stays in beta. Can’t Google fix the problems and take the GMail to next level? Surprisingly its still not open to public, its still by invitation only. Can’t they handle the load on serves if it is open to public? If they can’t handle the load I doubt that how( the hell) they handle the 2GB(and counting) mail boxes?

Another good(worst) feature from GMail is POP3 access which will be out of sync with web version. If you read a mail in web, its not read in POP3 and vice versa. All your emails including sent mails will show up in inbox. Cant identify the actual inbox mails vs sent mails. Anyway, this is a design issue not a reliability issue.

I am damn sure that I will see GMail beta version forever!!!! Are you having the issues with GMail? Share your horror experiences here in comments.

YOU ROCK!!! :D

(more detail as to why below)

Update:

The crime of the so-called ‘wisdom of crowds’ is that when the crowd gets it wrong, they can keep it wrong for a long time.

[Original Post]

Lawrence Lessig

The real challenge here will be Richard Stallman’s. His work helped launch important movements of freedom — free software, most directly; free culture, through inspiration, and examples such as Wikipedia. It also helped launch a movement he’s not happy about, the Open Source Software Movement. Much of the latter builds on the former. And these movements have been joined by many who share his values, some more, some less. (Again, see Torvalds). These movements have built much more than he, or any one person, could ever have done. So his challenge is whether he evolves these licenses in ways that fit his own views alone, recognizing those views deviate from many important parts of the movement he started. Or whether he evolves these licenses to support the communities they have enabled. This is not a choice of principle vs compromise. It is a choice about what principle should govern the guardians of these licenses.

Can enough gratitude be given to Richard Stallman for what his ideas, ideals, and subsequent work has accomplished? Nope! The idea that anyone should be able to tinker with the source code of a software application, improve upon it, make it better, and so forth has been the foundation of many great and wonderful “freedom movements” since the Free Software Foundation was first founded.

The problem, of course, is that true and pure freedom does nothing to control that in which is derived from one idea to the next, even if the original idea was never intended to become the foundation of something we would have wanted it to become.

These movements have built much more than he, or any one person, could ever have done. So his challenge is whether he evolves these licenses in ways that fit his own views alone, recognizing those views deviate from many important parts of the movement he started. Or whether he evolves these licenses to support the communities they have enabled. This is not a choice of principle vs compromise. It is a choice about what principle should govern the guardians of these licenses.

Yep.

Tomorrow, Thursday Sept 28, there will be a virtual conference which will feature descriptions and case studies of SOA projects that are based on experience with actual ESB deployments in Fortune 1000 companies. The vendors include Sonic, IBM, BEA, and Sun. The format of the event starts out with a panel style Q&A at 12:00 EST that includes a set of tough questions that require that the panelist talk about actual customer deployments. For more information go to ESB-CON II. Hope to see you there! After that, there are vendor presentations in one-hour slots. At 2:00pm EST I talk about the SOA Maturity Model, referencing many F1000 customers, but feature the BGN Bookstore chain in the Netherlands, which is the world’s first business to combine item level RFID tracking with a SOA throughout a supply chain.
Dave

I was first introduced to Trac by Bruce D’Arcus in December of 2004. At that point in history one could easily claim that setting up Trac was very much NOT Pythonic**.

On the other hand, using Trac for the first time was my initial introduction to the “Pythonic method” (if there is such a thing), in this case, the Pythonic approach to managing software development.

Firstly, what is Trac?

Trac is an enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for software development projects. Trac uses a minimalistic approach to web-based software project management. Our mission; to help developers write great software while staying out of the way. Trac should impose as little as possible on a team’s established development process and policies.

Okay, so while the focus is primarily on software development, in my own experience, Trac can easily be used for managing MUCH more than just software development. In fact, I would definitely go as far as suggesting that in many ways Trac implements (again, if there is such a thing) the Pythonic method to workflow management, and as such, can be applied to any type of project, software and non-software related alike.

Just to clear things up, what does it mean to be Pythonic?

Update:

… you don’t invent the next new thing; you breed it.

Update: I queried len in regards to the correlation between hackers and musicians.

His recent response,

Music and programming: two media originating one set of mental skills with the exceptions being another computer can understand the output of code but can only replicate the output of music.
Music is God’s voice in the human heart.

You can emulate that process with a computer, but it’s just processed signal. The gap is small but of enormous importance. A friend of mine told me once that code is the real post-modernist poetry. It’s value as tender is assigned by the people making the transaction. Just as poetry has little sale value into today’s culture, code is becoming equally devalued in some currencies. That doesn’t make it without value in other currencies. The choice is one of currency.

Giving my songs to the web for free downloading was the only legal tender I had for all of the great code I was being given. It seems fair. Music is a language of human emotion. If you can work out where the heart of a computer is, you may discover a correlative value but the value of music is in the emotions produced in composing it and in hearing it.

Beyond *WOW* I think I’m going to let this one speak for itself.

Thanks len!

When all software is free, what is the value of software? Is it worthless, or priceless? In hindsight, it is pretty obvious that people like Kevin Kelly and others of that ilk were very wrong about the trends, where ultimately everything would become free and a grand new society of plentitude would emerge. Gas, while dropping down in the last few weeks, is still trending upward, food is becoming dearer by the day, the cost of health care services is rising dramatically, and indeed the costs of most raw commodities - trees, metals, oil, and so forth - has been aggressively pushing upwards, and will likely continue to do so, though not without a few corrections here and there.

No, ironically, it is only those things that are fundamentally intangible that are diminishing in cost - software, movies, music, the value of the US dollar, that sort of thing. Finished goods are reaching a critical breaking point - they aren’t selling anywhere near in proportion to the amount being produced, but at the same time the cost to produce them continues to rise in proportion to both raw material costs. Labor costs still factor - in some areas there is something of a labor crunch going on, yet the crunch is nowhere near as grave as it was in the late 1990s, and at least anecdotal evidence seems to indicate that this is easing except in limited spot markets.

Quick Update: I keep reading TONS and TONS of blog posts in regards to both why this deal is both good and bad in regards to YouTube. I think I should clarify why I believe this deal is a good thing overall.

This has nothing to do with YouTube. Whether YouTube survives the HypeBubble or not is up to YouTube and its ability to prove that profit can be derived from all 100million (and growing!) of those daily video views.

What this does have to do with is the fact that a major presence in the music industry has made a significant move in what I believe to be the right direction: Treat your customers like customers instead of criminals. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yes, this is only one company, and its only one division of one company for that matter. But its this simple change in thinking that has already shown signs of other industry players opening things up a bit more. Its not going to happen overnight, though as more and more companies realize that other companies are generating a revenue stream from a previously untapped source, it could happen fairly quickly. Furthermore, their product is now being advertised to 100’s of millions of daily visitors. For those that do it right, there will be simple ways to allow someone who sees a clip, likes the song in the background, and would like to purchase that track for themselves, can do just that.

Oh, you wanna know who’s probably going to be the first folks to do it right?

Enter WebTV MSNTV (theres just something about technology, Microsoft, and the number seven (as in seven years *too* early (CDF? 7 years too early. DHTML, err, I mean Ajax? 7 years too earlier. Internal browser storage persistence? 7? Yup!)

In short: These are not new ideas. Just a new way to apply the old ones.

[original post]

via a link from Sylvain (thanks Sylvain!)

Slashdot | Warner Opens Video Library To YouTube

“From the article, ‘Warner Music has agreed to make its library of music videos available to YouTube, marking the first time that an established record company has agreed to make its content library available to the user-generated media company. Under the agreement, YouTube users will have full access to videos from Warner artists. They will also be permitted to incorporate material from those videos into their own clips, which are then uploaded to YouTube. Warner and YouTube will share advertising revenue sold in connection with the video content.’ This is in contrast to how Universal is handling the situation.”

So, to my letter,

Dear Jack Valenti,

Step One: Don’t Sue Your Customers
Step Two: Find Innovative Ways To Turn Your Customers Into Marketing Machines
Step Three: Save Money By Not Having To Pay Lawyers To,
Step Four: … (Not) Sue Your Customers
Step Five: Pay The Artists You “Represent” More Money Because Of All The Money You Both Save and Gain as a Result.

Yours sincerely,

Your former customer(s?)

Anyway > Blog > Archive Autumn

“The weather has changed here at 49 ° latitude north, the days still warm and sunny, but the nights are cool. The memories of nights when we slept with the fan running and the windows open are receding fast, soon to be filed with memories of previous summers…”

And thus begins a wonderful snapshot of life by Lauren Wood, a reminder to us all that life isn’t about 0’s and 1’s, err, I mean <binary-data><binary>00000000</binary><binary>11111111</binary></binary-data> and instead everything that this same mentioned binary data allows us to represent and communicate with others.

Thanks for the reminder, Lauren! It’s easy to forget sometimes, and a reminder such as this helps reset the brain, placing back in focus the things that matter most.

NOTE-TO-WW:* - What does this have to do with XML? EVERYTHING! and nothing, all at the same time.

Enjoy your Monday :)

I’ve been thinking about the Kudzu principle a lot lately. This particular “rule” was something I first observed in about 1999, and it goes something like this - XML, once introduced into a system, will over time continue to expand into that system. Kudzu was originally introduced into the American Southeast in the 1800s, in order to provide a way to more readily secure the loose clay soil that’s so predominant there. Unfortunately, like many invasive plants it very quickly expanded beyond its original boundaries and became one of the most aggressive weeds in the region.

XML is a mechanism for abstraction. Unlike OOP typed objects, however, the abstraction does not place specific requirements upon the local mechanism for implementation - instead XML forms a document object model where each particular element represents what in other languages would be considered classes or class properties (either implicitly declared - i.e., a string object, or explicitly declared). Because of this, it becomes possible to manipulate that particular object model using a generic set of commands that in general are unaware of the underlying semantics of the given class or property.

I’ve been laughing so hard from what follows that its taken me five minutes just to get to the point where I could type again…

Brutal honesty with a smile, :)

From: Sylvain Hellegouarch
To: “M. David Peterson”
Date: Sep 14, 2006 6:51 AM

> G:\PyPod.Net\trunk\SaxonConsoleTest\bin\Debug>SaxonConsoleTest.exe
> Setting configuration
> <hello-world xmlns:clitype=”http://saxon.sf.net/clitype”><output>
> 1.4142135623730
> 951</output></hello-world>
>
> :D
>

I know we’re geeks but what did you just say?

Hmmm… I guess when I sent the copied portion of the above message as part of an unrelated thread it would be make sense that Sylvain would have no idea that I was saying “SWEET! Extension functions are working! :D”

I’ll remember to add “SWEET! Extension functions are working! :D” to the top of the message next time ;)

Thanks for the laugh, Sylvain! :D

Amazon Web Services Developer Connection : Want to buy someone’s Beta EC2 account …

This is the title to a recent post in the EC2 Developers Forum.

The post now reads (not sure what it originally read, but I assume it was something that matched the title.),

I’m all set.

Thanks!

Message was edited by: hooji

Not sure of the details, nor do I plan to find out. What I do want to point out is that when you have people attempting to purchase slots into your beta program, it seems to me you can pretty much write this same beta and related final release into computings history books of successful products.

Maybe its just me, but I am beginning to develop a sense that AmazonAWS can “Do No Wrong.”

Hey Google, now *THATS* the kind of corporate slogan I can stand behind. ;)

via a recent message I found flashing in a GoogleTalk window on my desktop,

Sylvain:
http://www.milowski.com/software/atomic/
have alook :D
APP extension for Firefox

via this same link,

atomic

Atomic is an Atom protocol client implemented firefox extension. It can communicate with any number of different Atom protocol servers that support introspection.

Sweet! Nice way to start my development day as this is the one piece of my own APP implementation that I haven’t had time to do any work on. Looks like (at least for now) I don’t have to. Nice! Thanks for the link, Sylvain!

Click. Read. Understand. Smile.

Snippets and Links follow,

Pushing String >> Microsoft’s new promise: a welcome development

Today there’s been good news on the IPR front: Microsoft has published what it calls an Open Specification Promise that has the effect of offering a non-assertion covenant on a host of specifications that Microsoft has authored and co-authored. For a legal statement, it’s remarkably clear and easy to read.* Here’s the main bit:

Push Button Paradise | Blog Archive | Microsoft frees 35 standards

I got this link from Eve, and to think, I never even knew there was a consortiuminfo.org. The Microsoft Open Specifications Promise irrevocably lets any interested parties implement and use a list of technologies without fear of getting sued (at least sued by Microsoft). It is similar in tone and scope to earlier declarations about the Office XML formats, and the declaration from Sun about UBL. I’m not a lawyer, so if I’ve described this badly, get a real lawyer to explain it. :-P

NICE!

DISCLAIMER: The title is not intended to suggest that AJAX is a bad, horrible, and evil thing in which requires an Anti-AJAX activist effort. However, it is to suggest that usability should *ALWAYS* be the primary focus of any web-based and/or desktop-based application. While not directly related to Asynchronous communications, Javascript, or XML, given that the feature of an AJAX-enabled page that is most often noticed and therefore implemented is that of an active/re-active interface, there has developed a strong connection between an AJAX-based web page and poor usability practice. Therefore, the connection with the title.

—

Fly-out menus that are activated via a mouseover event are what I would term an Anti-Usability feature as in *MOST* cases they are designed to fly-out over the top of the text of a given page, covering up whatever it is you happen to be reading. This is fine when the action requires a click (or the Enter key if you are tabbing your way through links), but when all that is required is a mouseover, more often than not the action is activated at a moment when you have no desire for it to be activated.

If a page has been designed using usability as the primary focus, things such as menus, in-line ads, and other often “active” elements contained within any given page should never fly-out unless an action that can be deemed as “user instantiated” (such as a click) has taken place.

The reason?

I have been hearing lot of good things about the Ruby on Rails, but why it is the least language used in Ajax development? This BZ research survey shows that 50.5% of the people are using Java and 10.4% are using Ruby in their Ajax development along with XML and JavaScript(I think some of them are using more than one language which is why the total percentage is greater than 100).

Interestingly, development is evenly split when it comes to platforms for deploying AJAX-based server applications, with 52.1 percent saying they’ll use Java or J2EE, and 51.9 percent saying Microsoft’s ASP.NET or Atlas–a statistical tie. An additional 19.7 percent are using or considering Macromedia Flash, 9.8 percent Ruby on Rails, and 5.5 percent ColdFusion.

I wasn’t surprised by the most used language, but I couldn’t understand why Ruby is the least language considered for Ajax development? Ruby on Rails is good and fast to develop Ajax applications. But why it is lagging behind all others to attract the crowd?

This has been a bad month for the Scalable Vector Graphics movement Because of a developing family medical crisis, I’ve had to step down from chairing the SVG Open 2006 conference, a decision which, combined with other issues that the conference has had, led to the mutual decision by the SVG Open board to cancel the conference this year and hold it in 2007. This decision was hard to make, given the importance that this conference has for many people and not a few companies, but it is also a reflection of larger factors that have seriously buffeted the standard over the course of the last year.

Adobe this week made an announcement that was, while not unexpected, yet another blow - they were choosing to stop supporting the Adobe SVG Viewer in any fashion, to make it unable for download by the end of the year and to effectively dismantle the last vestiges of SVG outside of the fairly secondary roles that that standard plays in Adobe products in favor of their own FLEX language, acquired from Macromedia during the merger last year.

In my recent blog I wrote that the people realized the importance of accessibility and vendors are working on resolving the accessibility issues. While the efforts are still in progress, a federal court ruled that a website can be sued if it is inaccessible to the blind people.

U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California ruled yesterday that a retailer may be sued if its website is inaccessible to the blind. The ruling was issued in a case brought by the National Federation of the Blind against Target Corp. The suit charges that Target’s website is inaccessible to the blind and therefore violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), the California Unruh Civil Rights Act, and the California Disabled Persons Act.

I also mentioned that accessibility is the major hurdle for federal sector because all federal government web sites/applications has to meet the Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. But as per this ruling, it seems that non federal government websites also need to meet some rules(?).

This is too scary!!! We all know that the sites developed using Ajax tool kits and frameworks are not 100% accessible. Most Ajax applications use Ajax widgets that may or may not support accessibility. For example, a lot of Ajax toolkits don’t have support keyboard navigation (mouse-less operation). So every Ajax based website can be sued according to this ruling. Only exception is if the site provides non-Ajax version. But how many sites provides the non-Ajax versions which can be readable by screen readers? Gmail and Google maps has the non-Ajax versions(yes Google maps has the non-Ajax version which just displays the map as image with out any dragging/zooming features. Turn off Java Script and go to maps.google.com, you will see the non-Ajax version). But Google video, reader and all other Google products doesn’t have non-Ajax version. Similarly all live products from Microsoft except live mail doesn’t have non-Ajax versions. Yahoo has non-Ajax versions for most of their products as they have older versions of the products which they are using as non-Ajax versions.

So do you think all these sites can be sued as per the ruling? Oh! boy this is scarier than I can imagine!

Now enterprises will be careful before adopting Ajax as currently there is no toolkit which promises 100% accessibility. Vendors like Bakbase, Bindows can improve the accessibility features, but cannot meet the requirements as Ajax is kind of desktop functionality inside a web browser. And its a real challenge for Ajax developers as they cannot develop just to say “ooh look at me I’m web 2.0 too!”. They need to develop the applications by keeping accessibility in mind.

With all this will it slow the Ajax momentum? What ever it is, at least it raises people’s attention on accessibility as we all went for Ajax almost “blindly” by ignoring the key issues.

Technical … Stressings

The future home of the n[ui]x Development Libraries.Heres the whole scoop;
On auguest 2nd 2006 my house was robbed. Stolen were my iBook G4, an iPod and 2 thumbdrives. The iBook was my only Macintosh computer and my development box. The iPod and one of the Thumbdrives i was using to backup on a daily basis. So i’m stuck. I have no Mac to continue my work, the only burned backup i have was 3 months old at that point (hard to do as it was 4 DVDS).

As soon as i can get my hands on another Macintosh, and an iPod i will continue development. Untill then, Molten Visuals will continue to host the current downloads untill Feburary 2007. At that point assuming i have the funds this stie will host the files. This site will also become the active host as soon as development continues.

Anyone thowing away a working G4 or Newer Macintosh, would be willing to part with it, and would like to support this project please contact me. Contact details can be found at Xargos.

Due to problems at Molten Visuals the blog formerlly there will now be hosted at TechnicalStressings.com.

Glenn Martin
n[ui]x Developer.

Firstly, to whom ever it was that robbed Glenn’s house,

A while back I made the statement,

Of course Tim Bray is doing his best to ensure that this doesn’t happen and if anyone is capable of accomplishing the task of (ironically, given the roots of the term “Java”) waking up the Java insiders to the fact that there are a TON of people who could care less about Java as a language, but have interest in Java as a language neutral platform, it would be Tim. But in all honesty, it may very well be too late. Then again, we’re talking about Tim Bray, so maybe not. Time will tell.

I guess time has told,

ongoing � JRuby Love

Charles Nutter and Thomas Enebo, better known as “The JRuby Guys”, are joining Sun this month. Yes, I helped make this happen, and for once, you’re going to be getting the Sun PR party line, because I wrote most of it. [Update: It strikes me that thank-yous are in order. Given that Sun is in the process of (appropriately) slashing some of its engineering groups, new hires are a little tricky. A lot of people helped, but I think the biggest contributions were from our Software CTO Bob Brewin and especially Rich Green, who approved the reqs about fifteen seconds after Bob and I raised the issue.]

First XML, then Atom, now this = Both the greatest decision *AND* investment Sun Microsystems made in 2004 (or was it 2003? Lets just say both, and be done with it ;)

Tim, I’ve never been shy to speak my mind on things, and I’m not going to stop now: Yet again, your talent and capability to get the job done and done right absolutely astonishes me. Your humble approach to demanding respect (e.g. earning it with your actions instead of demanding it with your words) is something I think each and every one of us, including and, even more so, *especially* me, both can and should use as an example to follow in our own lives.

Thanks!

To the rest of the world: Buckle up folks… I’d say we are about to witness something truly spectacular in regards to the competition in the VM space and therefore a better overall world of computing as a result.

SWEET! :D

Code Search - O’Reilly Labs

Enter search terms to find relevant sample code from nearly 700 O’Reilly books.
The database currently contains over 123,000 individual examples, composed of 2.6 million lines of code — all edited and ready to use.

SWEET! To whomever built this @O’Reilly: Thanks! :D

Quick Update: As would be expected, there’s a web feed to keep you up-to-date in regards to updates @O’Reilly Labs.

One problem with standards based on text or formalisms only, is that it is very difficult to test them. RDF’s original home-made grammar for example. By contrast well-formedness, validity, Schematron, test suites: all of these are directly testable and provide a bedrock for XML development: the standard-provider needs provides the other side of the coin to “trust but also verify”: be trustworthy but also verifiable.

As per Dr. Kay’s announcement earlier today on the Saxon-Help mailing list,

The recent working draft of XML Schemas 1.1 (Structures) seems sensible, small-scoped and solid to me. I hope vendors will hop on board and implement it when it comes out.

…and the countdown starts… - Desktop Team - by Desktop Team

We’ll ship a new weekly next friday. Too busy planning and working on new stuff this week

While I don’t want to hold my breath, If the title of the above piece has ANYTHING to do with (scroll to the very bottom),

“Let the countdown to document function support begin.”

Well, I’ll tell ya what — Opera is going to become my new favorite browser — again. ;)

Yo, Glen! :D

The big dates for SGML are 1986, when the IS 8879 standard finally was published; 1990, when editor Charles Goldfarb’s annotated version The SGML Handbook came out, and 1996 when XML was mooted at the SGML ‘96 conference. Charles once told me that when IS 8879 first came out, they half expected it to take over the world; only to be utterly mystifyingly held back by WYSIWYG, which stole the usability thunder from SGML. Well, after 20 years, “WYSIWYG is dead” and markup is king. Or, at least, WYSIWYG now uses styles and flexible window sizing, and SGML has succeeded by abandoning the Wiki-like markup feataures.

Unicode 5.0 was released a week ago: congratulations to all concerned. Unicode now has about 99,000 characters defined, though many of the improvements in Unicode 5.0 are related to how to use characters (their properties or display algorithms) rather than additions. There are only 1369 new characters compared to Unicode 4.1; and no milestone for implementations such as Unicode 3.1 in 2001 when the number of characters broke the 16-bit range.

I find Unicode very inspirational. Of course the mad scripts like Tifinarg not to mention the beautiful Burmese have their own fascination. But the diligence and effort in Unicode demonstrates a community with a love of communication and refined respect for culture. There are three main drivers for enhancements:

• For Western text, the basics have long been in place and the emphasis is on additions for specialist publishing, academic and historical scripts: maths characters, Phoenecian,
• For text from the industrializing nations, the emphasis is on completeness and coping with national variation: variant glyphs between China, Korea, Vietnam and Japan; the pronunciation used by Koreans, improved bidirectionality algorithm for Arabic for example.
• As the codes, algorithms and properties for national languages sort themselves out, it becomes politically possible to address the requirements for minority scripts: Balinese, for example.

If Microsoft wrote this, we would be up in arms: “people have been able to exchange spreadsheets using completely undocumented formats, such as Excel’s, for many years so this notion that documents “can’t be exchanged” until every jot and tiddle is written down is simply untrue.” What a snowjob! Actually, the quote comes from the ODF website.

But the thing that freaks me out more is the definition of an Open Standard given on that same page: on the one hand they say that implementations of Open Standards may be extended, or offered in subset form but on the other hand that you cannot have licensing requirements to inflict embrace-and-extend tactics. But it is the Hacker’s fallacy: embrace and extend is not obviated by open licensing, because most people do not have the technical capability to code up their own alternative to their platform or vendor’s immediate offering. We need non-fuzzy Open Standards because not everyone has the power or capability or deadlines to take advantage of Open Source or Open Licensing: standards should reduce the risk from the decision to outsource (i.e. purchase or download) systems and applications. In practise in Open Formula, they seem to be doing things the right way, and are having conformance levels: well-defined groupings of functionality in clear namespaces.

DISCLAIMER+SPECIAL NOTE: If your initial reaction to the titled attempt at a Scheme expression was: “That doesn’t even make any sense!” my response to you would be,

• Firstly, how many people on this planet actually know that, technically speaking, it’s complete non-sense?
• Secondly, you try writing a title for a piece using a technically correct scheme expression that includes a function, list, a lambda expression, and its evaluation expression, and then come back and tell me that it technically doesn’t make any sense! ;)
• Oh, and before you snap open DrScheme, there fly-boy, remember that your technically correct expression must all fit on one line! ;)

—

[Post]

Dare Obasanjo recently had this to say about multithreaded-programming,

Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - (thread.Priority = ThreadPriority.BelowNormal) is Bad?

This is yet another example of why multithreaded programming is the spawn of Satan.

Eric Fleischman then followed-up with,

FWIW, there is something worse than multithreaded programming….distributed programming. Concurrency on a node is hard, concurrency across N nodes is even harder. :)

To be fair, I don’t completely disagree with either of their points. That said, I also don’t completely agree, either.

Here’s why,