Curiouser and Curiouser!

Curiouser and Curiouser! on don-park http://matt.blogs.it/ RSS feed for topic don-park Copyright 2006 Matt Mower Squib/0.1 self@mattmower.com self@mattmower.com en-gb Don't start with me Thu, 04 Sep 2003 19:57:21 +0100 Thanks to Don for blogging his <A href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2003/04/06.html">discovery</A> of jusched.exe running on his system. I've just disabled that and a few other applications that have kindly been installed for me.  I should probably install Mike Lin's <A href="http://www.mlin.net/StartupMonitor.shtml">StartupMonitor</A> to prevent further unwanted guests. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001609.html Patenting over our right of way Wed, 17 Sep 2003 13:06:37 +0100 <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2003/09/16.html#a895">Patents</a>. </div> <a href="http://tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/09/15/SWPatents">Tim Bray confesses about having two patents</a> in the pipeline and goes on to talk about software patents. I also have a couple of security-related patents in the pipeline. To me, it's not the software patents but patents that violate public's right of passage. GIF patent was legit but Unisys was standing there and charging toll on what most of us considered public road. What is public road and what is not? The distinction is simple. If your enforcement of the patent hurts your public relations more than it adds to your bottomline, then you are standing on a public road. To be more precise, if your patent gives your solution advantages in quality of service, then it's legit. But if your patent leads to the only solution, then you are a troll. If your patented formula makes cars go faster, I am fine with that. If you patented the idea of automobiles, I am not all right with that and all for public's right to steamroll over such patents. My justification is this. Since patent laws can be changed or even banished by the people, the people has the right to selectively change or banish any specific patent it chooses. Implementation is problematic, but the principle is sound IMHO. <div style="margin-left: 40px;"> [<a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/">Don Park's Daily Habit</a>] </div> Don's really captured my feelings on patents. It's like toll-roads over here.  In principle I'm okay with private money being used to build toll-roads to relieve congested public roads.  On the other hand if it was suggested that a toll-road be the only way to get from A to B then I'd have a big problem with that (like for example what happened on the <a href="http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/ray_shields/bnews.htm">Isle of Skye</a>). So it is with patents. A few days ago Simon Phipps was <a href="http://www.webmink.net/2003_08_31_oldblog.htm#106279620209462444">talking</a> about the problem of patents retroactively breaking established standards (in the light of the EOLAS patent dispute).  As Don says the issue of implemting a sensible approach to overriding patents is complex, but I think it's necessary if we are to keep building. The case in Europe doesn't look great.  It seems the vested interests are wielding their mighty chequebooks as effectively over here as they do in Washington. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001624.html Ungrokked RSS-Data Wed, 08 Oct 2003 13:25:54 +0100 <div style="margin-left: 40px;"><a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2003/10/07.html#a959">RSS-Data</a>. </div> What I like about <a href="http://radio.weblogs.com/0113297/2003/10/01.html">Jeremy Allaire's RSS-Data proposal</a>: <ol style="margin-left: 40px;"> <li>Reduced need to change RSS schema, binding, and parser to support new payloads. </li><li>Possibility of reusing XML-RPC code and SOAP code. </li><li>Arguably faster to parse. In my experience, element-rich XML documents are faster to parse than attribute-rich XML documents. But this is not important given readily available processing power at the consuming end.</li></ol> What I dislike: <ol style="margin-left: 40px;"> <li>Ugly and harder to read although not as bad as RDF. </li><li>Increased need to change RSS application to support new payloads. </li><li>Contextually inconsistent and verbose. <name> <name>value</name>  <name> <name>name</name>  <value>value</value> </name> </name> </li></ol> With RSS-Data, developer's attention will shift from RSS parsers to RSS application frameworks capable of supporting new payload types and routing mechanics via plugins. Despite <a href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/10/7/172247/665">irksome cosmetic downsides</a> of RSS-Data, I like that. Only problem is that one can make the same arguments for RDF which makes me a hypocrite. No news there, but I find it ironic to see RDF folks attacking RSS-Data. <div style="margin-left: 40px;"> [<a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/">Don Park's Daily Habit</a>] </div> Hmm... .I tried to read Jeremy's posts on RSS-Data but found there was too much stuff in the way of understanding the basic proposal.  What seems to be suggested is a generic framework for transporting data in an RSS item which isn't terribly astounding so I guess there must be something more exciting going on to raise all this fuss. Is there an RSS-Data in a Nutshell post to be had? http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001658.html Considering RSS-Data Wed, 08 Oct 2003 23:09:56 +0100 I was going to leave this as a comment on <a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/2003/10/08.html#a961">Don's piece on RSS-Data</a> (hello Don!) but it grew to the point where a post felt more appropriate.  Anyway my grateful thanks to Don, for his short but sweet explanation. <div style="margin-left: 40px;">RSS-Data = Typed maps for RSS2.0 right? </div> Okay i'm glad it's an RSS2.0 extension.  But is it a good thing? I guess I have bought into the idea that one of the things we bought when we paid for XML was the notion that the tags carry semantic value. Applications having to understand the semantics is one of the prices of doing something useful.  Or at least that was what I thought. But maybe that shouldn't be the case for things such as extensions.  I guess i'm wondering whether <a href="http://matt.blogs.it/specs/ENT/1.0/">ENT</a> would have been written as a separate module if RSS-Data had been around in April.  Maybe it would have been easier to simply identify a few RSS-Data entries to add to an item to convey topic information...? My gut instinct is that it might have been easier to sell, but that it wouldn't make as much sense.  Describing ENT tags strictly as a set of attribute:value pairs would be more confusing and possibly harder to process.  I think ENT has a distinct flavour and that this is not a bad thing. There's room for both approaches, we'll just have to see. Oh and a caveat:  Your data isn't going to be named signature, value and cert unless you want them clashing with any other possible applications of those names, so you'll probably end up prefixing them as in: <ul> <li>com.docuverse.blah.signature</li> <li>com.docuverse.blah.value</li> <li>com.docuverse.blah.cert</li> </ul> http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001662.html It's not a simple world (thank god!) Sun, 18 Jan 2004 19:49:01 +0000 <blockquote><a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/EntryViewPage.aspx?guid=1bf3d661-844f-4a17-9543-33dfd8987868">Java is Mature</a>. Java is a mature proven language for non-GUI applications.  What it means is that it does what you expect it to and there is a large body of open source software you can leverage.  <a href="http://www.manageability.org/">Carlos E. Perez</a>'s enumeration of <a href="http://www.manageability.org/blog/stuff/open-source-web-crawlers-java">Open Source Web Crawlers Written in Java</a> is a good example. C# and .NET, on the other hand, has a long way to go still and there is no easy to extend IDE like Eclipse for developers to rally around.  Working with .NET at this point is like working in a new town destined to grow, maybe like Chicago was around 1840.  As for my involvement with .NET, I enjoy the rough life. <img width="0" height="0" src="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/aggbug.ashx?id=1bf3d661-844f-4a17-9543-33dfd8987868"> [<a href="http://www.docuverse.com/blog/donpark/">Don Park's Daily Habit</a>]</blockquote> As someone who wrote his first C# application on Friday I could get to like the language. But it's not cross-platform and Visual Studio.NET 2003 is, compared to Intellij IDEA, a piece of junk. I guess if all I did were write apps for Windows boxes every day it would be fine. I don't yearn for that kind of simplicity though. http://matt.blogs.it/entries/00001831.html