Guido Casper's Radio Weblog

Weblog Moving

Sun, 18 Jan 2004 15:10:47 GMT

just moved my weblog here

The principle of too much magic

Tue, 06 Jan 2004 19:56:40 GMT

You should have a look if you want to find out if you've used Too Much Magic [via Marcus Crafter]

The software biz is about services, not manufacturing

Sat, 03 Jan 2004 10:46:35 GMT

Tim Bray: ... IBM is doing very nicely by OSS, but not by selling middleware or mainframes; ... The big winner is Global Services, which can charge the big bucks for deploying systems and not have to compete with software license charges for the buyer’s buck. Basically, IBM learned the lesson that Eric Raymond ably outlined in The Magic Cauldron, that the software biz is (at least in part) naturally about services, not manufacturing.

Distributed Internet search architecture

Tue, 30 Dec 2003 18:39:59 GMT

As the number of pages on the Internet is still growing exponentially and more and more people are realizing that knowledge (and the ability to learn) is the ultimate business asset and that data != information and information != knowledge, searching becomes the most prominent problem domain of the Internet. Even Microsoft seems to be interested in building its own internet-scaled search engine lately.

Several approaches to the semantic web claim to know how to build the ideal meta data based searching infrastructure. As Tom Bray's excellent series on searching told me, there is always a trade-off between having the desired set of meta data and actually getting people collecting these meta data (being able to search is the only reason you collect document meta data in case you didn't know :-) - given that navigation is a special searching discipline).

Google's major achievement are useful page ranks without having someone to collect explicit meta data.

However having a single giant index for the whole Internet seems to be flawed from the start. So I am happy to see people stepping forward suggesting distributed search architectures for the Internet. What I don't like with this proposal is that it uses SOAP. Immediately Tim Bray's proposal came to my mind. It somehow appears most suitable for that kind of architecture.

Moving on from the Web?

Sat, 15 Nov 2003 10:32:04 GMT

Tim Bray: what about “moving on from the Web”? Maybe; could happen. But I’d bet against Microsoft doing the leading. The next big thing always comes out of the weeds where nobody’s looking.

Semantic Web

Mon, 10 Nov 2003 07:09:23 GMT

Clay Shirky on the Semantic Web and Tim Bray answering both are very nice reads.

Interestingly Tim mentions XBRL:
Now, I wouldn’t go so far as to assert that all the inferencing-machinery goodness that TimBL prophesies and that Clay Shirky pisses on, both from a great height, would spontaneously emerge. However, if all of a sudden there were a million machine-readable business facts there for anyone to read, I think that quite a few software-savvy and accounting-savvy entrepreneurs would retreat into their garages and there would be some considerable surprises in store.

Tue, 28 Oct 2003 10:42:53 GMT

Looks like Gianugo's session about WebDAV and Cocoon at ApacheCon is mentioned on www.webdav.org

Sun, 19 Oct 2003 14:24:58 GMT

[via Heise]: Believe it or not, Microsoft got a US patent for Cookies.
The patent has already been requested in December 1996.

Wed, 08 Oct 2003 13:49:57 GMT

[via Heise]: Microsoft got a US patent on activity monitoring in IM networks.

Mon, 06 Oct 2003 10:28:47 GMT

The Cocoon GT2003Hackathon just started.

I wish I could be there. Lots of interesting talks about real blocks, flow, woody, etc.

Matthew, Sylvain, Bertrand, Gianugo and others try to keep us poor updated. Thank you!