Archive for the ‘web’ Category

dr. dobb’s deceased

Friday, February 13th, 2009

I received a notice in the mail today that Dr. Dobb’s Journal will, as of the February 2009 issue, no longer be providing the hardcopy magazine. Instead, it will transition to an all-online publication. There will still be some DDJ print appearing the InformationWeek once a month. This was a big surprise to me though it seems it’s been common knowledge for a while.

DDJ was one of the few independent technical publications I subscribe to as it is, in my mind, one of the best produced. I carried the issues in my bag for weeks and read an article when I had a short break in the day. I usually read most of it, especially the regular columns.

I find the cancellation as disturbing as when I found out Software Development was no longer to be printed and was absorbed by DDJ. I viewed DDJ at that time, as I do now, to be a great publication but it wasn’t Software Design. They overlapped but definitely hit different niches.

It’s similar, too, to when I was deemed no longer eligible to receive Embedded System Programming, which apparently is now Embedded Systems Design, for free. The subscription rate isn’t horrible ($55 as of today) but, for me, it was more the principle. I’m not actively working on embedded systems anymore and really would have no reason to purchase products from the advertisers so I can see the reasoning.

The cancellation is just unfortunate on a number of levels.

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review – programming collective intelligence

Monday, January 12th, 2009
Cover - Programming Collective Intelligence
copyright O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Programming Collective Intelligence: Building Smart Web 2.0 Applications
by Toby Segaran
2007 O’Reilly Media

Rating:

Late last spring, maybe early summer, I picked up a copy of this book. I didn’t really have time to engage it until a little before the fall semester started as I included it in a class. The more I worked through the text, the more I realized that this book is a lot of fun. It’s not for the novice or those who want things more fully explained.

Still, if you want to learn a great deal about how to perform mining on data openly (mostly) accessible on the web with the understanding the technical details are often left to the reader which may mean much investigation outside the text, I highly recommend it. As I said, it’s fun.

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kindle – and the eLibrary concept

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007

The news of interest this week is Amazon’s launch of their eBook service, Kindle. Newsweek published an article about it on Monday and Amazon made the Kindle available on Tuesday. From the technical and use perspectives, it’s intriguing. It looks as though Amazon has arrived at a good physical design: The feel is reported to be ideal, the electronic paper is easy on the eyes and, since the device is focused on only a handful of tasks, interaction seems simple and intuitive.

It’s interesting to note that on Nov 20, 2007, the Kindle had received 275 reviews as of 8:30AM. On Nov 21 at roughly the same time, the review count totaled 438. Given the launch happened this week, I am not sure how useful the reviews are. Even at both counts, the reviews average to 2.5 stars out of 5 with a 40% rating the device with one star and the remaining 60% being evenly distributed from 2 to 5 stars. Really, though, the reviews seem to be based on speculation (some outright wrong) or based on the Amazon provided documentation. But it is entertaining reading.

I have some mixed feelings about the thought of going to a completely digital format. I like the tangible. It’s perhaps an artificial comfort but one that I can’t deny. Also, the habits from years of pre-internet activities make the potential paradigm shift uncomfortable at best. This isn’t to say a digital world isn’t without its advantages but it is certainly a trade off.

In thinking about whether or not I would find a Kindle worth purchasing, I started to weigh the pros and cons of a tangible library, one with physical books, versus the Kindle-brary.

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review of ‘ambient findability’

Thursday, November 15th, 2007

copyright O’Reilly Media, Inc.

Ambient Findability
by P. Moreville
2005 O’Reilly Media

Rating:

This review was several months in the coming. To be honest, I found the book difficult to engage at first.

The first four chapters of the book were difficult to experience. The tone of the author was a bit self-indulging in the sense that the discussions seemed to be unnecessarily drawn out and the examples and references felt to be a tapestry of hip: quoting William Gibson and Chrsitopher Alexander, including various du jour technologies and well as the liberal sprinkling of buzzwords. One extreme example was the term ‘ubicomp’. It was never defined in the text. There was a specific mention of ‘ubiquitous computing’ but it was after several instances of the abbreviation and the formal connection between the two was never made (or so is my recollection).

Starting in chapter five and through chapter seven, the book’s focus shifted enormously and the discussions went from cool technologies to the impact of socially defined metadata. That is, information on the web is tagged (classified) by any user (folksonomies), rather than experts (taxonomies), via bookmarking services such as del.icio.us, blog aggregators like Technorati that catalog tags bloggers use on their posts as well as vendors like Amazon where users tag items the service sells.

If the book had developed the content of chapters five through seven, dropping the glamour of the previous chapters, most of which didn’t particularly go anywhere, it would have been a better read.

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desktops no longer on the desk

Monday, September 10th, 2007

I recently ran across a rather significant AJAX application. Perhaps “meta-application” is the better term. Ajax13, a company that has pushed the envelope with what is possible with Ajax and web-applications, has developed an Ajax-based desktop environment called ajaxWindows. There is a demo mode that is accessible and is worth checking out.

ajaxWindows provides a virtual desktop. Ajax13 describes it as a virtual operating system, as well as webOS, but I’m not sure I would agree with that description. From the point of view of needing to describe what it is to the general public, it is probably a reasonable moniker but it is rather misleading. An OS has so many more responsibilities than providing a user interface. It is missing many of the elements that make up an OS such as process/thread management, memory management and hardware management.

What I would call ajaxWindows is a framework. It enables (certain) web applications to work within its context. In addition to displaying the user interface in the virtual desktop, the application can access the virtual file manager to let the user organize and save files.

Whether you view ajaxWindows as an OS or a framework does not diminish it’s capabilities. For the most part, users will not be interested in anything more than being able to access and manage their space and applications from anywhere. And it is certainly an insanely extraordinary demonstration of what the web can be. Below I give some thoughts on the features and behavior of ajaxWindows.

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more on web apps: google gears

Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
Google Logo Small

Google recently (in last two weeks or so) announced the beta release of Gears. In previous post, I discussed some of the issues with replacing desktop applications with server-based solutions such as those offered by Google (such as gmail and docs). One of the key problems was the requirement that users have network access. Gears intends to be a solution to this problem.

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replacing desktop apps with web-based apps

Thursday, March 29th, 2007

In this month’s issue of IEEE Computer, the article, “Replacing Proprietary Software on the Desktop”, by Don Hardaway, discusses the various options facing enterprises that want to evolve away from expensive vendor products and perhaps look to open source solutions. He suggests that most enterprises will probably stay with the common denominator that is the PC and will be more likely to consider alternatives for their applications.

This sounds reasonable. In fact, a group of students in my capstone class a year or so ago performed an analysis for a large organization which investigated the feasibility of migrating the entire corporation, PC’s and servers alike, to Linux – specifically the enterprise version of RedHat – and open source productivity tools. The study determined, for that particular organization though it would probably be true for similar organizations, it wasn’t feasible (financial or otherwise) at that time. (Before the Linux zealots start foaming at the mouth, this isn’t suggesting Linux can’t work for certain organizations. It was a statement about the needs of this organization, and organizations like it. Plus, since I can’t really get in to the details, it’s a bit anecdotal. I realize some time has passed as well so the conclusion today might be different.)

Religious wars aside, the article’s point was that there are options available and tried to categorize the options. In addition, it talked about the fact that web-based applications, as with traditional desktop ones, have both proprietary or open source flavors. The attractiveness of web-based applications goes back to the “dumb terminal” concept: We can maintain a single instance of the application and its needs in one place. Users point to the application location and run it, i.e., thin clients rather than thick. Administration becomes significantly easier as upgrades do not require an upgrade on every machine, just the server.

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