A flurry of books on Lisp

For a supposedly dead language (ducks behind cover), Lips is gettng a fair number of new books:

• Practical Common Lisp: "Practical Common Lisp"
  
• "Successful Lisp
  

"Hackers and Painters" has some Lisp references too.

Talking of Paul Graham, an update to "On Lisp" would be great. "On Lisp" is a great example of going beyond an intro book - it really shows the power of the language by going beyond the simple cases. I'd like to see other books that go into GUI, database etc. at a more detailed level. Of course, a disadvantage of Lisp (and Smalltalk) is tha therre are many ways to skin those Cats, so a book of contributions covering the most popular alternatives would be great.

What about Smalltalk? There are some fairly recent Squeak books, but perhaps there will be more along in a while.

XML.com: WSDL 2: Just Say No: "To put it simply, these specifications are astoundingly bad."

Architecture Astronauts

Joel on Software - Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You: "Architecture Astronauts":
A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture, thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name of a song and listen to it right away.

Ouch! no Xmas card for him !

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:World's most depressing country uses the most anti-depressants

Have no back to break, but have got hearts and minds

Scott iis rght:Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment

There will always be some hot heads taking pot shoys, but adopt policies to reduce them to an unsupported minority.

UML and SOA

James Governor makes some important points on SOA and UML:James Governor's MonkChips: BEA, SOA, UML

SOA is not about bits and bytes, or XML, or some other standard du jour. There is a big picture to it, and an integrating vision part as well.

Then lets generate the XML!.

Fix UML 2?

Good summary of UML vs. DSL:Why not base domain specific languages on UML?

Some of these can be fixed.

And there is a potential downside for DSL - what if I want to combine models based on different metamodels?

An interesting debate - hopefully this moves us to languages with greater expressive power than todys programming languages.

Did I Blog this before ?

The same malaise which keeps m from blogging much also means I have lost the ability (or will) to search. Anyway it's still great !!
smart stuff

IBM and Smalltalk

IBM & Smalltalk

Is IBM blowing their Smalltalk ship out of the water just when the tide is heading again for dynamic languages?

My interpretation of the newsgroup thread that is pointed to is "No"; sounds like a holding statement to me. Plenty of people reading between the lines and speculating though!

Great hackers revisited

This article reflects many of my opinions about Paul Grahams article:Great Hacker != Great Hire

I too enjoyed the essay, but I too rankled at some of the strictures (Obviously I am not a great hacker!)

I really don't understand the part about not wanting to work on customer stuff - ultimately that IS what matters. The number of jobs you can do without pesky users is severely limited - back to academia ?

Also, team work is just so important; are there pretty great hackers who are more productive than most, but aren't prima donnas ?

Hope this isn't true

BBC NEWS | UK | MoD denies US missiles set for UK

Not so much whether we have the missiles or not, but how the decision has been made scretly (if it has).

Closing the presses

I thought most of the world had come to realise that allowing states to close down presses is a bad idea, unless you want to undermine democracy. Here is the modern equivalent of shutting down the presses: Home Office in frame over FBI's London server seizures | The Register : " What does this action say about freedom of expression and freedom of the press?"

September - the month of evil

Much fun with the SenderID debacle at IETF with some great houmo[u]r:Evil of September 2004 :: OSDir.com :: Open Source, Linux News & Software: "users are just friends who haven't submitted a patch yet"

Good, fun article.

Tinderbox..... for the Mac

After reading Mark Bernsteins article I took a look at his:Eastgate Tinderbox: the tool for notes : "Tinderbox is a personal content management assistant. It stores your notes, ideas, and plans. It can help you organize and understand them. And Tinderbox helps you share ideas through Web journals and web logs."

Sounds really good but I don't have any Macs to try it on. Linux version some day ?

Oh darn

10 Tips on Writing the Living Web: A List Apart: "Write for a reason, and know why you write. Whether your daily updates concern your work life, your hobbies, or your innermost feelings, write passionately about things that matter."

But that takes time !!

A recommended article, even though I do find myself wincing every now and again - perhaps I shouldn't write at all :-(

Back from Paris

Had a great time, met some great people, learnt many "interesting" things, but tripled the length of my TODO list !!

Off to Paris

Daniel Barlow -- Diary: "Off to Paris tomorrow (work trip)." What a coincidence -so am I!

Managing via blogs?

Fortune.com - Technology - It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog: "It's Hard to Manage if You Don't Blog". Hmm, I can see how blogs, well done, help get a message out ( though they should be about 2-way communication), but how does it help manage ? I assume he (Schwartz) means managing people. Does Sun have internal blogs too ? That would be neat.

Finally a use for the internet

NewsForge | Thanks to Linux, this beer's for you!

There is a guy "at" work who always offers me a drink when I help out - but in 3 years we have never actually met (different continents)

So, team building for the distributed team - just add a couple of videolinks and we're away!!

Vive la France

Spotted in WebMink

Beware ye seers

A reminder of the perils of looking too far into the future! manalang.com ? The Home Computer of 2004

Reminds me of those Victorian pictures of the future of air travel - they were more sophisticated balloons.

Still, the exercise of imagining the future is good - gives a path forward even if the vision proves to be wide of the mark.

And it gives our descendents a good laugh

Just stop it!

Blogging is bad, bad, bad!
Spotted in Joi Ito's Web
Stop tempting me with gadgets , darn it !
Must resist, must resist ......
... do the Eagle Creek folders fit in the large Waterfield?....... must resis...

Back to "normal"

If the posts have been few and brief, it was because I was the single-parent of a 3 child family. All kids go to different schools, have music lessons, dancing, sport etc.

Fortunately my wife has returned from her walking holiday to share the load.

WS- *

Sean McGrath has some great quotes and pointers to quotes:

The whole WS standards thing has more moving parts than a 747. Much of it recently invented, untested and unproven in the real world.

and:

Given that there are no exceptions to Gall's Law:

A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked.

Serve the cheapskates right

Frankly, if you are not willing to pay MS properly , then you get what you deserve: Slashdot | Early Warning For Microsoft Premium Customers: "Early Warning For Microsoft Premium Customers"

IBM Open Source's Basic Voice Reco Software

Spotted in Slashdot

What war on terror

Dowbrigade News: : "John Kerry, asked to comment on today's milestone in Iraq - a political softball to his wheelhouse, just begging to be swatted over the wall - answered, in his gaunt, sonorous and sepulchral tomes, 'Over 1000 of America's sons and daughters have now given their lives to the war on terror.'

NO, NO, NO, John. That is the Bush lie. They have given their lives to an obscure, oil-drenched Texas family feud, to a personal vendetta that has nothing to do with the real security of the United States and in fact is making us less secure by breeding a million widows and orphans who blame us for their misfortunes and will spend the rest of their lives trying to get back at us.

The Real War on Terror is tracking down Osama, rooting out the entrenched hate-mongers in our 'allies', Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, stopping the massacres in Africa, finding the Anthrax killer, and getting real about protecting our borders, airports and container ports."

Oh that sort of notebook...

Spotted in Joi Ito's Web

Looks cool - Victorian adventure anyone?

Oooh, this looks nice!

Clove Technology - Fujitsu Loox 720

Of course, I bought my iPAQ 5550 only a few months ago. This looks lovely, and it has Windows Mobile 2003 for Pocket PC Second Edition, which HP will not be providing as an upgrade (grrr!)

When to update hardware

Ted has an eye for good looking hardware:Ted Leung on the air : Lunchbox multiprocessor

The thought occurred to me though, that I have not upgraded my hardware for a while either. Perhaps this is a trend? I did build myself a box a few months ago, but it was low-tech: the aim was a small, cheap and quiet box. In fact it is a Duron processor, which is fine for Web usage, a bit slow for starting up the word processor.

If I am honest it was the kids games that used to drive most upgrades, so either they are more diligent with school work(!) or advances in games no longer requires increases in hardware power.

Is this "The Innovator's Dilemna" in practice? If PC manufacturers focus on more an more power, will they be beaten by other who focus on other facets? For instance, beautiful design, size, power , noise ......... Perhaps Ted's choice has power and these other factors!

OCL: " The semantics of OCL is unclear in many places, and there are likely many pitfalls in mapping it to a well-founded language like PVS. However, the potential for making a contribution to the UML development and to our understanding of OCL is great"

Scott Rosenberg's Links & Comment: "I can't imagine anyone watching Miller's frothing speech and feeling reassured about the direction Bush is taking us. It was an outburst of intimidation, intended to cow. Dave Winer heard the jackboots behind it: 'Why was the Miller speech so scary? Answer -- you're next. That's what Miller was saying. After this election we put on the brown shirts.' That may be a little over the top, but the fact that's it's only a little over the top is itself chilling."

And: ' "Today, at the same time young Americans are dying in the sands of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, our nation is being torn apart and made weaker because of the Democrats' manic obsession to bring down our commander in chief."

Strip this of its spin and modifiers and what Miller is saying is, "While Americans are dying, the opposition party is trying to win the election, and that hurts the nation." '

Still relevant today...

Jan Smuts in the Houses of Parliament on "Thoughts on a New World": perhaps more so than in 1943.

We are facing to-day probably the most perplexing complicated human situation that has confronted the world for many generations, and anybody who thinks he has a panacea at his command to deal with these problems must either be sub-human or super-human. . .

This will never catch on ...

From the previous reference:A CODE OF CONDUCT FOR EFFECTIVE RATIONAL DISCUSSION

A use for philosophy!

The Fishbowl: The Principle of Charity

I knew there was (at least one) hole in my education - a use for philosophy ! Any others?

Insert your favourite language here

The Fishbowl: The Joy of Bombast: "More importantly, whenever I start hacking Ruby, I am overwhelmed by the feeling that this is... right. And I find myself going back to Java and thinking 'Why does this language keep getting in my way?'"

I might put Python instead of Ruby, or perhaps Smalltalk (less familiar).

I agree with the sentiment though! Whether Java is doomed is another question altogether - maybe it will become undead like Cobol.

GMailFS

Heez crazy!:Danny Ayers, Raw Blog

Mandrakesoft GLobeTrotter: wrong answer

Mandrakelinux Globetrotter FAQ: "Can GlobeTrotter be upgraded to future versions of Mandrakelinux?
This is not officially supported by Mandrakesoft. It should be possible (and not too difficult if you know Mandrakelinux well) but we won't be able to give you any support if you choose to do so."

The product looks interesting - this upgrade policy looks dumb

The MSDN Camp vs. The Raymond Chen Camp: "The Microsoft culture is about creating the newest, latest greatest thing that 'changes the world' not improving what is already out there and working for customers. When I read various Microsoft blogs and MSDN headlines about how even though we've made paradigm shifts in developer technologies in the recent years we aren't satisfied and want to introduce radically new and different technologies all over again. This bothers me. I hate the fact that 'you have to rewrite a lot of your code' is a common answer to questions a customer might ask about how to leverage new or upcoming functionality in a developer technology."

Open Source Article

Manufacturing lines they are a changing

Bill de h?ra: Add Nothing But Value

An excellent perspective. We have lots of promising, intelligent programmers, and treat them like idiots.

Classic Pilgrim

Spotted in dive into mark

Most developers are morons, and the rest are assholes.

Assessing Java code quality

AMK's Journal: Computing Archives: "'The problem here is that programmers are not as scared of using threads as they should be.'"

More on static typing

Ned Batchelder: August 2004:

"Static typing prevents certain kinds of failures. Unfortunately, it also prevents certain kinds of successes"

The Fnordistan Department of Software Engineering ? What Java Owes to Smalltalk

More regrets

The Fnordistan Department of Software Engineering ? What Java Owes to Smalltalk:

That’s the sort of thing I didn’t really notice until I started working with Smalltalk. Now I shake my head and wonder how much better life would be if it had been Smalltalk rather than Sun’s Java that had been poised to catch the wave in the 90s.

Forget the particular languages mentioned here (though I do agree), there seems to be a lot of feeling that things haven't improved in the area of language design. I see Python, Groovy, Ruby etc. restating older things, almost looking over the morrass of C, C++, Java, C# et al which form a tar pit between now and then. Of course other languages like Smalltalk, Lisp etc. have waded through; but are they prepared to move forwards themselves ?

Return of Java

The article refernced here is wierd:Slashdot | The "Return" of Java Discussed

Slashdot asks whether Java has been anywhere, but I wonder what makes us think it is getting renwed attention. The article cites:

• Jon Schwartz of Sun saying Java helps keep the cost of substitution low: cost of substitution is just part of the costs, and anyway you can only substitute vanilla installs - must Java apps sit on app servers and you certainly can't easily substitute those
  
• VCs think games can be written in it
  

I'm convinced !!


Personally I think the whole Prog Language game is more wide open than it has ever been.

Spotted in Dilbert
Darn what's my excuse?

More heresy!

IT industry warned over wasted money | The Register : "It [the survey] highlights the need for the industry to deliver tangible benefits, focus on selling practical solutions not technology for technology's sake and most importantly to improve after sales customer service. With the customer in mind, it is also important for us to focus on integrating new technologies with existing systems and not automatically adopt the 'rip out and replace' mindset."

So why does the industry get away with this approach? I think it may partly be because elements within the customers also like to focus on technology, haven't thought through what the business wants etc.

Treating workers well increases productivity?

Dangerous and subversive ideas: IT company gives workers free beer - wins award | The Register : "n fact, AGI spends around $1m a year on freebies and perks for staff, according to the Detroit Free Press. As a result, workers are more productive, motivated and enjoy coming to work - while the company saves buckets loads of dosh in recruitment and training."

Billionaires For Bush: Our Candidate

Frustrating lack of choice

Shame there are only (really) 2 to choose from, especially when on so many topics they seem tro have identical stances.
Preston L. Bannister:Yes, I want “someone else” for President.

Where is Python going ?

Pensieri di un lunatico minore: The joy of Smalltalk distributed programming:"mostly because I’m bored with Python, and think it’s zooming off into lala land in some ways"

WHich ways, please ?

Spotted in Ted Leung on the air

Those of us fortunate enough to use a Symbolics or a Dorado know that an expressive language and good tools are not mutually exclusive. Perhaps someday there will be another system that combines both. But for now, I'm still looking for a home.

Spotted in Ted Leung on the air

people would pay a service to make up a lie for them so they could get out of a date

Amazing Like hiring a lawyer to get out of a marriage

Spotted in dive into mark

Babies are all-consuming. She¢s fine now, she¢s at her regular kennel and quite happy there.

Baby dog ?

Spotted in Joi Ito's Web

At the Brainstorm conference in 2002, I heard Shimon Peres say, "What can you learn from History? Very little... History was written with red ink, wth bloodshed. We should educate our children how to imagine, not how to remember." I think his words are extremely relevant.

Making it stick.: "We need to think less about the VM (and even less than that about the OS) and more about (sometimes distributed) interprocess communication. But we need to do this without the heavy burden of the WS-* ice field."

bknr: another LISP based web system. Worth a closer look - glad these to-do lists are infinitely long!!

Back from Vacation

Well, that is not the only reason for a paucity of entries, but hope to do better over the next few days.

By the way , we took a week to go around Southern England ( which is where we live). Amazing how many places there are to visit ( and our outstanding list didn't get much shorter). The weather was fantastic: beaches were great, water warm, body-boarding was good. The sailing was fantastic - beautiful sunshine, constant but reasonable breeze. The best sailing I have done in ages.

Now back to work, and it is raining more but still warm. Oh well.

Purgatory?

Lisping at JPL: "programming in Java means a life of continual and unremitting pain."

Pocket PC Notes - BizOrg

BizOrg is an easy to use pocket software for PocketPC. Pocket organizer, PIM, manage notes tasks, contacts journal and more. pocketpc freeware. synchronize, outlook synchronize.

Will report back when I get to try it

Trivilazation of ....

I agree with this:The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Triumph of the Trivial. It is certainly happening more in the UK too.

And I wouldn't limit it to TV either: it seems to me that more and more column inches are given over to trivia.

Maudlin, Welsh mare

Just when everything is picking up in my favourite Welsh/Dorset reality sitcom, this happens:Chocolate and Vodka :: Have some Lamington: "http://chocnvodka.blogware.com/blog/_trackback/111808"

I ask you, who writes the plot lines for this? Too unpredictable to be plausible!!

Quote of the day

Lisp Quotes: "Most papers in computer science describe how their author learned what someone else already knew.

- Peter Landin"

"Most software platforms are a rehash of older platforms, with a new buzzword -- Keith

Smalltalk Marketing

This is very imprtant point: Sean Malloy: The ball is rolling...

Sick as a parrot (not a python)

Not been feeling top notch recently - summer flu or some such. Hope to get back to more blogging soon.

Amen, brother

UrBlog: "If only I could be working in a dynamic language such as Smalltalk or Python"

Got a clue ?

From UrBlog via Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

And Smalltalk folks will shake their heads and wonder when people will finally get a clue.

Must try Gemstone some time. I'm certainly enjoyting my programming play time right now - relearning Smalltlak, seeing what has changed after all this time. I hope my play application might actually get some real use, but if used at work it will have to be re-written in something else ......

Quote of the day test

Who said this, and is it correct:? :The Independent Weekly: With trembling fingers: "'It is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.'"

J2EE vs. .NET shootout at OOPSLA

Any "discussion" about this topic is bound to be fun:Spotted in Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants

And adding a Smalltalk perspective should make it funner Will Alan represent Cincom Smalltalk or Cincom as a whole?

Quote from Hackers and Painters

Spotted in Bill Clementson's blog quotes from Paull Graham's Hackers and Painters, including this:
"A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen. Static typing would be a fine idea if people actually did write programs the way they taught me to in college. But that's not how any of the hackers I know write programs. We need a language that lets us scribble and smudge and smear, not a language where you have to sit with a teacup of types balanced on your knee and make polite conversation with a strict old aunt of a compiler." P22

Ancient Greece vs. Soviet Russia

Spotted in David Buck - Blog :

There are two conflicting forces driving software development. The first force tries to help developers by giving them the tools and environments that let them do anything they need to do to solve the problem at hand. They give the programmer the freedom to create whatever solutions they deem necessary.

......

Do restrictions in the environment help? I believe that they only help a little and usually cause more harm than it's worth. They increase finger typing, hinder productivity, slow down development, increase refactoring efforts, and decrease code readability

Wheels within wheels

Re: More Alan Kay notice
Spotted in Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants :
But late-bound has some deeper and more profound properties that include abilities to actually change the both the structure and metastructure of the language itself. Thus an important new idea can be assimilated into the constantly evolving process that is the system.

Another aspect of late-binding is the ability to change one's mind about already instantiated structures that are already doing work. These can be changed automatically on the fly without harming the work they are already doing.

Long lasting software

Good thinking, as usual, from Dan:
Software That Lasts 200 Years

One thing I have been struck by recently, is how many times we reinvent the wheel ; we produce a new platform, in a new technology ( including hardware/OD platform), with a new interface. However, to the application the new features are not that great - perhaps there are a few new things, just enough to warrant a re-write.

But surely, there is enough demand for new software that we can still employ our current developers and perhaps more. Of course, they might be specialists in other areas who can develop on the longer lasting platforms.

OK, I'm starting to get this...

In this paper by Daniel Friedman:mex.pdf (application/pdf Object) he quotes Jon Rossie :
Programming languages are the box outside of which most programmers, architects and managers cannot think.

I guess this includes me !!! Or maybe included me.....

Productivity quotes

I hadn't seen these before ( must have been prior to my taking another look at Smalltalk):
Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: Experts say Smalltalk is better:

"Kent Beck (Mr XP) said (at ESUG 1999 in Ghent) that, 'I program at a third of my Smalltalk speed in Java.'

Bran Selic (RealTime UML guru, built the tool that is now the RT part of Rational Rose) said (at UML 2000 in York) that, 'I was sorry to see Smalltalk lose out to Java because Smalltalk was the only language in which I noticed a real difference in my productivity'."

I know one of these gentlemen - I must get his latest thoughts on the matter......

uhoh.... be very afraid!

Scripting News: 7/11/2004

Re: Ted Leung on the Air: Croquet video

Ted Leung

Ted's last paragraph is interesting on a few counts: is the LISP community too fragmented? Is the Smalltalk community split between Smalltalk and Squeak? Also, I'd love to know Ted's take on where Python sits in this ? Can't the Python community (or Ruby, ....) push computer science forwards?

Paul Graham's sneaky strategic advantage

And here is the Paul Graham article referred to: Beating the Averages: "Another unusual thing about this software was that it was written primarily in a programming language called Lisp. It was one of the first big end-user applications to be written in Lisp, which up till then had been used mostly in universities and research labs. Lisp gave us a great advantage over competitors using less powerful languages."

Strategic advantage and keeping quiet about it

Here is the quote I referred to earlier:: ONLamp.com: The Pragmatic Programmers Interview: "Ultimately, it comes down to ease of expression. If I can express myself in code at a level closer to the problem domain, then I'm going to be more effective, and my code is likely to be easier to maintain and extend. Paul Graham makes a big deal out of the way Lisp helped him while building the software that became Yahoo Stores, and he's right. These languages, applied properly, are a strategic advantage. I know some companies are using them with great success. And you know -- they're keeping quiet about it."

Is this the big secret?

I will dig out the refernce, but I saw a blog entry a while back talking about how vaiuos small companies are using certain languages as a competitive example, and they are keeping quiet about it !! I remember it cited Paul Graham's LISP implementation of Yahoo stores(note find pointer to his essay).

Here James Robertson points to a very important application ofthe experiments I have been doing:Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants: How dynamic is dynamic?: "I can't imagine trying to manage a server without this capability. This blog hasn't been taken down in months, but I've made major changes to the underlying code base. How? By making use of the facility keith mentions, that's how."

This is an advantage I hadn't thought of before - my thoughts were on much smaller timespan benefits for client apps. Coolll!!

How dynamic is Python?

OK, this lunchtimes experiment was Python. Created a class and produced an instance, then modified the class by adding a method - the instance did not have this method available. However, a new instance with the new class did.

I have no idea whether ths old class and its instances stay around, disappear with gabage collection etc.

How dynamic is your (programming) language?

I'm doing some experiments on changing classes at runtime without affecting existing instances.

With Smalltalk ( at least with Visualworks) this was a breeze: added the code for a variable, accepted it and, hey presto, any inspector open on an instance got a new variable field set to nil.

Even tried Lisp, which I haven't used for $%$ years. Why ? 'Cos you can do anything in Lisp can't you, especially this dynamics stuff? Well, I tried CLISP first, and guess what ? A redefinition to add a new slot invalidated existing instances ( or so the message said). Not taking no for an answer I accessed an old instance and crashed the whole environment.

Now it has to be said that, from the docs I have read, I wasn't sure what the behaviour should have been. Finally, I found a doc which seemed to be adamant that it should have worked. So I tried the free version of Franz' Allegro Lisp..... and it worked.

What next? Well, what can other languages such as Python and Java do in this regard? Also try to be more scientific with Lisp and Smalltalk: add/remove variables, add/remove methods, add/remove supportable etc.

BTF Blog post without title tag

Thanks to James Robertson for updating the blog posting tool to remove the title tag,

Now I just need to get the subject line to appear!!! If I surround it with say h2 tags it completely disappears. Hmm

Lisp is procedural

A bit dated but I thought htis was interestingLSlashdot | Creating Applications with Mozilla: "Lisp was just procedural, while XML is more like logic programming."

Discuss(20 marks)

Logical Methods in Computer Science

Spotted in Lambda the Ultimate - Programming Languages Weblog

This is the trend of the future, by-passing the big publishers

Croquet: the movie

Croquet: A Collaboration Architecture

Takes about a 90 minutes, but I felt it was worth the effort!

You tell'em Dwight

Many people have quoed this excellent piece:Escapable Logic

But the section which leapt out at me was the 2nd Eisenhower quote about the military-industrial complex. Surely this influence is a major factor in Iraq.

the other salvo

Scripting News: 7/5/2004

...got most of the facts wrong...

Which ones ?

Just the facts, Dave, just the facts

I wish Dave would take the time to clarify what the facts are. Given the way this farce was announced, muttered about, rescued, it is hardly surprising that there is some confusion.

I'd like to see a sober setting out of the facts that show why the end of the service had to be announced, before a rescue package could be put together.

Another fact of importance would be,"when did the users get informed that they were being hosted by Dave, rather than Userland?" I think this escaped a lot of people.

Dave's latest salvoes:

Re: So Yale doesn't feel totally out there, Harvard Law School also took took a shot at me during the flamefest. Their comment about RSS is pretty nutty (it's a format, not software, it can't be licensed under GPL). They say they got their facts from Wired, so they're just passing on what they heard. I guess that's an okay excuse. Anyway, thousands of people weren't stranded and we got all the sites back on the air within a week. It would be nice if they published that part too.

So why haven't the btf posts shown on the web ?

See if this flushes the system.

Yep, sems to be working.

If you are having problems posting from BottomFeeder under Linux - re-install!!

This is a post from Bottomfeederon Linux

This tool is now claiming that it is posting, as opposed to just hanging. All I did was reinstall !!

However, nothing has actually shown up on the site yet.

Update: but it does in the blogger console ......

Croquet : Screenshots

Wow: Croquet Project

This looks truly wonderful.

LISP from Java

Cool; not sure when it would be used, but cool nonetheless!!
SourceForge.net: Project Info - Jatha - Java LISP library

PLT Scheme

This looks interesting:PLT Scheme

I don't know the details of LISP vs. Scheme but they look similar enough that the DrScheme with tutorial sounds like a good way to get started in this general area.

Let me know if I'm wrong !

Spotted in

Glenn Ehrlich: Could Croquet Be Getting Close To Release?

Spotted in

Croquet Project

Does Success in Tech Ventures Follow from Better R&D? Think Again - Knowledge@Wharton