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Tuesday, October 15, 2002 |
Moving
Please update all links!!!
Ham Journalism is moving to manero.org/weblog/, and this site will no longer be updated.
Thanks to UserLand for introducing me to a nice app, but it's time to move on.
Cheers,
Tony
11:34:16 PM 
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Wednesday, August 07, 2002 |
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Tuesday, August 06, 2002 |
Windley's Enterprise Computing on Earthviewer 3d:
If you like maps, even a little, you'll love this program. The program uses Keyhole satellite data to give you a view or anywhere on earth. The software allows you to fly over the landscape. Type in an address and you "fly" there in seconds. I had fun going from where I grew up in Idaho to my brother's house in Virginia. If the target point is in a metro zone, you can see things with 1m resolution.
I've known about Earthviewer for a while, and I was completely blown away by it. My friends were amazed when I showed them, too. I absolutely love EV3D, but since I'm a student, I can't afford the expensive license. It's a shame, too, because Keyhole could make so much money charging $50 or so for a single metropolitan area worth of 1m resolution to the home user.
10:38:21 PM
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Ulrich Mayring on Cocoon in the Corporation:
Have you ever wondered why PHP and similar technologies are so successful in the market? They are easy to install (mostly come pre-installed with Apache anyway), easy to configure, easy to use. They are fast, stable and secure enough for webhosting. Nowadays almost every serious webhoster offers something like PHP or Perl - but who offers Cocoon? Sure, the industry sees the value of XML-based processing, but they don't adopt Cocoon, they are either building their own thing (Roxen) or extending their existing technology (Perl).
Nowadays it's hard to find a content management system that does not loudly proclaim to support XML. It won't be long before almost every CMS will be able to do XML-based processing and to publish dynamically on the Web. None of the CMSes that I know use Cocoon for that, instead they're all developing their own thing.
So, at one point in the future Cocoon will lose its advantage that it has no competition. And if it loses that, it won't be the best thing since sliced bread anymore. I've tried to win people over to the Cocoon1 platform, when it still was current. Many of them, however, said that it was too hard to use. They'd rather wait for their existing technology to support XML. When I told them that their existing technology will only ever support XML as an afterthought, while Cocoon1 is built from the ground up to work with XML, they said: "that's as maybe, it may not be elegant, but we can leverage our existing knowledge and the less time we need to port our apps over, the greater the return on investment."
4:42:32 PM
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Monday, August 05, 2002 |
SVG Snippet: Animating and looping a shape's stroke-opacity.
...
<g transform="skewX(-20)">
<rect x="300" y="400" width="100" height="200" style="fill:none; stroke:red; stroke-width:2">
<animate
id="fadeOutAgain"
attributeName="stroke-opacity"
attribute-type="CSS"
values="1; 0; 1"
begin="0s"
repeatCount="indefinite"
dur="1s"/>
</rect>
</g>
...
This took me a while to figure out. I tried linking a couple "animate" elements together, but it didn't work. I eventually came across this PDF that showed me that I could use the "values" attribute inside the "animate" element.
4:42:47 PM
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Cocoon: Building XML Applications (A mini-review)
I got my copy of the first Cocoon Book finally. It's looking good, and it's nice to have a hardcopy version of this book. I'd like to have a larger review up by the end of the week, but it's finals week for summer semester, so I will probably be too busy studying.
This book is the first out of the gates, filling a large hole with respect to the documentation of the Cocoon project. The book starts out at a very leisurely pace. The first chapter explains the problems that the authors were trying to solve with Cocoon, and their reasoning behind it. The second chapter gives some background into the technologies behind Cocoon: XML, XSL, Java, and so on. Finally, in the third chapter, the book gets us started doing things with Cocoon.
Although the book starts out at ground zero for obvious reasons (Cocoon is complicated), it ramps up at a decent pace and gets into advanced topics such as the creation of components roughly halfway through the book.
All in all, the book is very good for a wide range of users, beginner to advanced. However, it is apparent that this is the first edition. Check out the messed up formatting in the code on page 155. Ooops :) Aside from that, and a few questionable places where acronyms weren't capitalized, the book seems pretty good for a first edition. Hopefully this book won't be too outdated in a year.
2:33:46 PM
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Thursday, August 01, 2002 |
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Tuesday, July 30, 2002 |
Large and in charge.... finally wireless. I'm sitting in a study area on campus about 15 feet from a kiosk, and there are no wires connected to my iBook. Hooray! :)
1:36:01 PM
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SOAPy Mail (via Brett Morgan and Rebelutionary)
Kate Rhodes thinks an XML-RPC SMTP/POP3 implementation would be cool. My initial impression was, "Why not just use SMTP and POP3?" - HTTP is for sending Hypertext, not mail. Do we really want to be sending *everything* over port 80 in 5 years? To me, it seems like cramming stuff like email, etc, down the port that's mainly used for sending web pages goes against the idea of having separate ports for separate services.
But why the hell not? Even if it doesn't take off, it would be an interestesing proof-of-concept.
Perhaps instead of replacing SMTP and POP3 (or even IMAP), someone could write a frontend. The client could talk to the server using SOAP, and the server could still relay using SMTP. This would at least allow one to send mail to the rest of the net, and not have to be limited to servers who can talk web services at each other.
On a side note, I know Mozilla has XML-RPC client stuff built-in, and Brett claims that it also has SOAP capabilities. Which reminds me. Some day, be it in two weeks or in two years, I want to learn Mozilla's XUL stuff.
11:17:54 AM
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Tuesday, July 23, 2002 |
Weblogs at Salon (via ScriptingNews)
Recently updated, and the main page.
It's starting. High-profile. I'm tempted to get a Salon premium subscription just for the hostname.salon.com virtual host.
Eventually a great writer will be uncovered here. Maybe even more than one. This will prove that the Net is the Great Tool For Democracy.
My only question is whether we have to purchase a new Radio license to publish on Salon. If I purchase a Salon Premium subscription, can I point my vanilla installation of Radio at their community server?
11:17:03 PM
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Interesting... apparently Bill Amend, the author of FoxTrot, has something that resembles a weblog! Cool! I emailed him telling him to look at something like Radio Userland. I'd love to get an XML feed of this...
8:07:55 PM
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© Copyright 2002 Tony Collen.
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