Tuesday, March 25, 2003

Ah, a system for patching Win32, as implemented by Microsoft Research... 7:59:15 PM    comment []

Monday, March 17, 2003

JNIDirect is released! The code is checked in to Source Forge and there is a white paper describing what it's all about. Using native methods w/o JNIDirect is like debugging with stone tools... 3:25:59 PM    comment []

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

Wow, the IPv6 transition is really a mess. This article describes why it is being bungled. Perhaps they need that networking saviour, Stuart Cheshire to step in and come up with some clever solutions. 8:22:16 AM    comment []

Wednesday, February 19, 2003

This item from MacCentral boggles the mind: Microsoft acquires Virtual PC from Connectix Here are a couple things Microsoft might do: 1. kill the VirtualPC product for the Mac, to lock Mac users out of future versions of this powerful PC emulation engine. 2. recompile the Windows bits as PowerPC native code, potentially hugely accelerating the performance. If they chose option 2, then who knows, maybe they'd release PowerPC code generators for their compilers, and things could get weird pretty fast. 11:20:07 PM    comment []

Thursday, February 13, 2003

OK, I finally get this RSS stuff. Represent news items as XML, aggregate them in a page. Voila! You have a web log. For a long time I didn't get it. What would an end user want with all that XML? Well, not much really, it's only valuable if it's displayed in a format the user can use. But one never knows what it might become useful for down the road. Makes you think... Being an editor is the most crucial thing. Sure, you get lots of RSS stuff thrown your way, but you sift the good stuff from the chaff, and decide what YOU think is interesting. One thing I'm curious about is attribution. For example, I just posted a blurb about Apple which included attribution to MacSlash. Must I do that? Are there rules about this stuff? 11:00:34 AM    comment [] Just saw this on MacSlash: Apple Posts XML Schema For Keynote Very interesting. Makes Keynote all the more attractive over PowerPoint. Microsoft uses XML file formats too, but they don't document it, and have so many extensions that it isn't very useful XML. If Apple stands behind this specification, this is a really good thing (tm). 10:45:21 AM    comment []

Tuesday, December 3, 2002

I recently posted a blurb about TuneXML in which I referred to a transcription of a tune in TuneXML format. It turns out that if you look at this with IE 5 on the Mac, you'll get a parse error. It parses and displays just fine in Chimera 0.6. The problems seems to stem from the inclusion of a Byte-Order-Mark (BOM) character at the beginning of the XML file, which is what you're supposed to include so that a UNICODE file is perfectly portable. This character seems to mess up IE 5.2.2. 8:16:32 AM    comment []

Sunday, December 1, 2002

I've been thinking a lot about representing music in XML. There is a good survey of this topic here. MusicXML seems to be fairly dominant, and is getting commercial support behind it. Although, it isn't terribly easy to read and is quite verbose, it looks like a good interchange format, which is certainly a good use of XML. Still, it is overkill for how I want to use XML to represent music. My application is representing Jazz tunes, which consist of chords, melody, and sometimes lyrics. I would like to develop a library of arrangements of Jazz tunes in XML format. Here's an example of the tune All The Things You Are encoded in what I'll call "TuneXML" format. 10:44:45 AM    comment []

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