Ali's Weblog

My Blog Has Moved!

Sun, 02 Nov 2003 02:05:02 GMT

Since I am not home much, I have had a near impossible time blogging. To make my blogging life a bit easier I moved over to TypePad as my blogging service. My new weblog can be located at http://www.aliaghareza.com. If aliaghareza.com isn't forwarding yet, the new blog is located at http://ali.blogs.com

iTunes for Windows

Sat, 18 Oct 2003 02:58:47 GMT

Apple's frontpage claims "Hell froze Over".

Ha!

Tue, 23 Sep 2003 01:59:03 GMT

I finally found my radio serial number! While I don't feel I have anything profound to say right this second, I will make a post just to get one out of my system. The only way to get out of a blogging slump is to keep writing. I guess I have spent too much time just waiting for something enlightening to say before I say anything. So, I will take the advice of many people I have spoken to and just write as much as I have time to write and see what happens.

Radio's Navigator Xml

Sat, 23 Aug 2003 00:30:13 GMT

I was bored last night so I wrote an xslt that converts my exported opml blog roll to the Radio navigator format. The navigator format is what is used to have links on the right side of your Radio page, and most news aggreators export in the opml format. It’s a pretty trivial xslt, but it can come in handy if you use Radio.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xsl:stylesheet version="1.0" xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform" xmlns:fo="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Format">
<xsl:attribute-set name="set">
  <xsl:attribute name="name"><xsl:value-of select="current()/@title"/></xsl:attribute>
  <xsl:attribute name="pagename"><xsl:value-of select="current()/@htmlUrl"/></xsl:attribute>
</xsl:attribute-set>
<xsl:template match="/">
  <xsl:element name="navigator">
   <xsl:for-each select="/opml/body/outline">
    <xsl:element name="item" use-attribute-sets="set"/>
   </xsl:for-each>
  </xsl:element>
</xsl:template>
</xsl:stylesheet>

Extreme Programming

Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:35:42 GMT

Wow, Wired has just put up a article on extreme programming. Check it out.

RE: Attention Concentration and becoming a place

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 15:07:58 GMT

Joi Ito: At some point, these "places" became public places and I ended up becoming a custodian. It's like having people come over to your place to party leaving you to clean up the mess. I lost control of the community, but not the responsibility. If it was called "Joi Ito's list" I think people wouldn't have come into the discussion thinking that it was a public place.

Like Joi, I wish people would use trackback more and comments less.

[via Sam Ruby]

I wonder if trackbacks will ever be a part of RSS. I thought RSS was supposed to be exposing metadata to the world. Aren’t trackbacks metadata? Everyone raves about how Sharpreader threads posts. Well, should this be just a “feature” of a news aggregator, or should it part of the syndication. I also think in Sam’s case, having trackbacks in RSS would eliminate the need for comments all together.

Though google trackbacks would need to be filtered out.

Random Stuff

Thu, 29 May 2003 06:00:28 GMT

I just realized that the "…" in a google search result description is a delimiter for different snippets of the page.

Started playing with InfoPath. I have a feeling you can't consume a web service that requires a soap header.

I built a WinForm App a while back that consumed the google web service. I picked up a few advanced commands which are very useful. Ex.

asp -site:www.asp.net -site:www.microsoft.com

This will exclude both the asp.net and microsoft.com site from your search. Also if you search through google groups you can use "-group:" to do group restrictions.

Matrix Reloaded

Thu, 22 May 2003 21:10:11 GMT

This link has an amusing and interesting discussion of how the authors of “The Matrix Reloaded” made use of a real-life cracker tool in the movie. Gotta love touches like this.

[via CraigBlog]

Cool!

BootStrapper Example

Thu, 22 May 2003 20:04:51 GMT

Micrsoft downloads now has a 1.1 version of their Bootstrapper Sample:

Overview

The Setup.exe Bootstrapper sample demonstrates how to create a single setup program that, when launched installs the following items:

.NET Framework version 1.1 Redistributable package (Dotnefx.exe)
.NET Framework version 1.1 language packs (Langpack.exe)
.NET Framework application

[MS Downloads]

Java

Thu, 08 May 2003 16:27:32 GMT

I have never been a big fan of Java's whole "Build Once, Run anywhere". Swing never looked liked it matched the OS the app was running on. If you wrote a java app, it looked like a java app on windows, and it looked like a java app on linux. This is definitely something that always bothered me about java. I think other people feel the same way. I checked out the enhancement log for jdk 1.4.2 and I saw this:

Release 1.4.2 includes many bug fixes and these major enhancements:

The Microsoft Windows XP look and feel. If you are using the system look and feel on the Windows XP platform, Swing components now match the platform.
The GTK+ look and feel. You can now customize your look and feel to a particular theme

Pasted from http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/changes.html

I haven't tested it out, but it definitely seems a step in the right direction for java.