Massimo Morelli's Weblog

sabato 30 novembre 2002

The element of style is online. 12:07:35 AM      comment []

mercoledì 27 novembre 2002

Time to upgrade. Making tabbed browsing even more useful, you can launch the browser with a group of bookmarks as your start page. This loads several pages into tabs at startup.  Mozilla 1.2 Unleashed [Slashdot] 4:16:20 PM      comment []

domenica 24 novembre 2002

Ocado, the last dotcom. On the Economist the story of the last dreamer of the new economy. 8:52:38 PM      comment []

lunedì 18 novembre 2002

WSJ article on weblogs. [Scripting News] 10:43:47 PM      comment []

sabato 16 novembre 2002

The Flashbuster: SVG 1.1 Becomes W3C Proposed Recomendation [Slashdot] 6:44:59 PM      comment []

giovedì 14 novembre 2002

Yes. I will use it. I'm doing an interesting project to backup a Radio installation into the cloud. Eventually this will allow people to synchronize work between office and home, a common feature request. In the process, I found a new use for RSS, as an interchange format for weblog software. Almost everything we store about a weblog post is now suppored by RSS, and for those bits that aren't, we can define a namespace. I feel this in some way ratifies the work we did with RSS 2.0. If it can handle all that a reasonably mature blogging tool can throw at it, it's getting pretty mature itself. [Scripting News] 10:06:09 PM      comment []

martedì 12 novembre 2002

Joel on Software: the law of leaky abstractions: Abstractions fail. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. There's leakage. Things go wrong. It happens all over the place when you have abstractions. 9:14:50 AM      comment []

sabato 9 novembre 2002

Knuth: If we go back to Latin roots, we find ars, artis meaning "skill." It is perhaps significant that the corresponding Greek word was tecnh, the root of both"technology" and "technique." Computer Programming as an Art. Donald Knuth's 1974 Turing Award lecture.  [Lambda the Ultimate] 3:47:30 PM      comment []

venerdì 8 novembre 2002

Jon Udell [Mark Baker] on the subject of generalization: Elsewhere Mark  [Mark Baker] illustrates using this progression: getSunwStockQuoteRealtime() getIbmStockQuoteDelayed() An obvious next iteration would be; getStockQuote( "SUNW", "realtime" ); getStockQuote( "IBM", "delayed" ); However, generalization doesn't have to stop there. We could do this; getQuote( "Stock", "SUNW", "realtime" ); Eventually however, generalization has to end. I suggest that this is as far as one can go with it; get( http://nasdaq.org/quotes/stock/realtime/sunw ) otherwise known as; GET http://nasdaq.org/quotes/stock/realtime/sunw Web Service Architecture Working Group Mail Archives [Jon's Radio (full-length descriptions)] 10:31:46 PM      comment [] Good management is often just common sense. A CRM success story. The CEO of Boise Office Solutions suggests that giving customers greater economic value might just lead to a better ending. [Computerworld News] The last thought I'll leave you with is that adapting a customer-focused approach to technology in most companies requires a cultural change. IT is often viewed as a department that supports all of the other functions of a company. Unless the entire company is committed to viewing its systems from the customers' perspective, IT will continuously be asked to support projects that meet the short-sighted goals of internal departments. As CEO, a key part of my responsibility is to make sure that the entire company understands the value of our new CRM systems and business model. I stayed very close to the work, and I personally presented our new capabilities to many of our customers. 10:08:05 PM      comment []

martedì 5 novembre 2002

The semantic web is often made of little things: Web namespace design: de facto standards.  As the strengths of the Web's URI-oriented model reassert themselves, some longstanding issues of namespace management return to the fore. [..] you can see that we have sort of, but not really, standardized on a URI format for search queries. It seems pretty clear looking at this sample that Google's style is the de facto standard, namely: http://domain/search?q=... I've often thought more standardization in this area would be useful. In general, there's no reason why names like "search.pl" or "query.html" or "search.php" need to exist, or why the root pattern "/search?q=xx" can't be supported. Usually it's possible to control the namespace in the Web server, using mod_perl or an ISAPI filter to map the standard pattern into something site-specific -- and ideally, to hide that site-specific pattern from the user. [..]Some other de facto standards that could benefit from direct or indirect standardization: /about, /products, /faq, /press, /news, /developers, /jobs. [Jon's Radio (full-length descriptions)] 12:09:54 AM      comment [] Speaking of Joel in italian and serendipity kicked in. New version of his Bug Tracking Package: November 04, 2002.  FogBUGZ 3.0 is now shipping! This is a really huge upgrade; FogBUGZ moves up from being a simple bug tracking package to a rather robust management system that handles the entire development process. [..] there are some other things that FogBUGZ intentionally does not do. For example, inspired by software testing guru Cem Kaner and of course Dr. Deming, FogBUGZ does not provide individual performance metrics for people. If you want a report for which programmer makes the most bugs, or the infamous "which programmer has the most bugs that they allegedly 'fixed' reopened by testing because they were not really fixed," FogBUGZ won't give it to you. Why? Because as soon as you start measuring people and compensating people based on things like this, they are going to start optimizing their behavior to optimize these numbers, and not in the way you intended. Every bug report becomes an argument. Programmers insist on recategorizing bugs as "features." Or they refuse to check in code until the performance review period is over. Testers are afraid to enter bugs -- why antagonize programmers? And pretty soon, the measurements give you what you "wanted": the number of bugs in the bug tracking system goes down to zero. Of course, there are just as many bugs in the code, those are an inevitable part of writing software, they're just not being tracked. And the bug tracking software, hijacked as an HR crutch, becomes worthless for what it was intended for.[Joel on Software] 12:03:30 AM      comment []

venerdì 1 novembre 2002

Anil Dash: Microsoft's Weblog Software. via [Scripting News]. A thorough but negative review: Couple the technical weaknesses of SharePoint with its complete lack of support for the biggest areas of weblog development, such as RSS output, XML-RPC interfaces, and TrackBack support, and suddenly Microsoft's presence in the realm doesn't seem nearly as intimidating. Perhaps most damning, SharePoint requires not just a notoriously high-maintenance Windows server to run, but depends on the even less secure underpinnings of the FrontPage Server Extensions. With the increasing prevalence of wireless networks in the enterprise, system administrators are often unwilling to expose themselves to the risk of such frequently flawed platforms even within the firewall, especially when competing products run on free platforms. 3:55:52 PM      comment [] The first Hidrogen bomb, Ivy Mike went off exactly 50 years ago. 12:37:14 AM      comment []

© Copyright 2005 Massimo Morelli. Last update: 14/12/2005; 17.52.43.