Mícheál Ó Foghlú's Weblog

How top level domains are decided

Jothan Frakes on GG, IM, and JE: Welcome (officially) to ISO3166, Good Bye GB. That's got me reeling.....

O'Reilly Trademarks "Web 2.0"!

Tom Raftery on O'Reilly trademarks 'Web 2.0' and sets lawyers on IT@Cork!

Mobile Gaming

Brady on Mobile Gaming O'Reilly Radar > Where 2.0: Pixie Hunt - looks like it is really starting to hot up as a topic. I hope we can get involved from the TSSG in designing and developing some good mobile games with a location-based element.

Is the Desktop Metaphor Dead?

Bill on Is The Desktop UI Metaphor Dead?

Bernie at EdTech 2006

Bernie's at EdTech 2006: IrishEyes: Sound education in your pocket

Sphere could be the next big thing in blog search

Brady on Sphere's Blog Search.

Sphere launched a month ago, but i only just got to really check it out last week when i sat down with tony conrad, ceo and founder (Tony was previously involved in Oddpost and is an advisor for Automattic). The technical team is the crew that brought us Waypath.com - an early blog search engine.

Sphere is an impressive blog search engine and one that is sure to rise in traffic. In a very short time it has already reached feedster's traffic levels and surpassed Pubsub (they have a while to go before reaching Technorati).

As they build their index they are focusing on avoiding splogs and pulling in quality (reminds me of techmeme.com's approach). Their index allows for a search to run over a 4 month period and they have a very useful UI element that allows you to see the post distribution for your query. You can use this tool to focus your search on a custom date range (the default for a search is a week).

Confluence, Oblix, Oracle Ummmm

I stumbled across this interesting article by Sekhar Sarukkai & David Cohen on Web services and the forgotten OSI Layer Six (of a company called Confluence posted in Spetember 2003). I quite liked the idea of describing managaement in terms of the OSI layers, and linking network managament at the lower layers with application management at the higher layers. In fact, although we do this in the TSSG, I had rarely seen a big picture statement like this putting things in context.... I went to read the whitepapers from the company, only to discover that they had been acquired by Oblix in 2004, and then Oblix had subsequently acquired by Oracle in 2005. Pity I didn't spot that article in 2003, I might have been onto something :-) So, now the technology has been integrated into Oracle's identity server (COREid), as described neatly by Pamela Dingle in Oracle COREid Tidbits:

Oracle’s Identity suite is very exciting! The products that are part of this suite (at least the ones that interest me) are:

• Xellerate - aquired from Thor
• COREid - aquired from Oblix
• OWSM (Oracle Web Services Manager) - aquired from Oblix who aquired it through Confluence (iirc)
• Virtual Directory - aquired from OctetString

The good news it that this is a spectacular set of functionality. The bad news is that you will NEVER FIND what you need on their godawful website. So - here is my “frequently wished for but rarely found” list:

....

For some wacky reason, the COREid stuff is considered to be logically part of the Oracle Application Server. I know, that makes no sense, since the core service does not run in a container, and it is perfectly possible to run COREid and never have anything to do with the Application Server. Still, for browsing purposes, this information is CRITICAL.

Juniper try to define "IPv6 Capable"

WebWire report WebWireｮ | Juniper Networks Launches 'IPv6 Capable' Report to Aid Federal Agencies in Understanding Technical Requirements of IPv6 that Juniper have published a report to try and define what it means to "IPv6 Capable". Given that many contracts are trying to future proof new equipment purchases, this is a wise move, as there is lots of room for equivocation here (from: we will have an upgrade path... to: it is supported - but not what features are supported).

Juniper Networks, Inc. (NASDAQ: JNPR) today announced the launch of its report, IPv6 Capable: A Guide for Federal Agencies, to provide technical guidance for the transition to IPv6 by June 2008, as mandated by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This report will assist federal agencies in understanding and meeting technical goals based on their unique requirements and missions, while achieving high-level objectives outlined by OMB.

Evauating Ruby

Martin Fowler on Evaluating Ruby. This gives a unique perspective on the very current debate around web deveopment frameworks, a contribution from someone with a very strong reputation in heavyweight enterprise architectures. If he sees value in the lightweight dynamic alternatives (as he expresses here), then maybe there is a real shift happening here. I like the down to earth pragmatic tone he adopts.... a refreshing change from some more shrill voices.

Wireless Networks for the Developing World

Tim O'Reilly on Wireless Networks for the Developing World

The need for wireless connectivity is increasing. This is especially true in developing countries that are lacking in infrastructure. Rob Flickenger, former O'Reilly editor, is currently publishing books to assist with this need. His first can be found at WNDW.net and is entitled “Wireless Networks for the Developing World”. It’s available as a free PDF (40K downloads so far). It leads its readers through the design and security of a network to building low cost hardware. Work on the book has continued on the site's wiki where the community has been adding case studies and links to other online wireless resources.
His next book is being funded by an NGO. The book will be about bandwidth consumption. Commonly sysadmins in developing countries do not know how to manage their assets efficiently. They have satelite connections and they run their entire network through them. This book aims to teach them what to run locally and help them save on their bandwidth bills.

TrafficGuage

Tim O'Reilly on TrafficGauge rocks. Looks like there is a market for dedicated hardware with GPS/Mapping functionality.

Atom Newsreel

Tim Bray on Atom Newsreel:

I’ve been accumulating things Atomic to write about for a while, so here goes. Item: You’ll be able to blog from inside Microsoft Word 2007 via the Atom Publishing Protocol. Item: Sam Ruby has wrangled Planet to the point where it handles Atom 1.0 properly. Item: Along the way, Sam reported a common bug in Atom 1.0 handling, and his comments show it being fixed all over (Planet, MSN, and Google Reader, but not Bloglines of course); the Keith reference in Sam’s title is to this. [Update: Gordon Weakliem extirpates another common bug from the NewsGator universe.] Item: The Movable Type Feed Manager is based on James Snell’s proposed Threading Extensions to Atom 1.0; Byrne Reese seems to think that particular extension is hot stuff. Item: Nature magazine is extending Atom 1.0 for their Open Text Mining Interface. Item: The Google Data APIs are old news now, but it looks like they’re doing Atom 1.0 and playing by the rules. Last Item: Over in the Atom Working Group, we’re getting very close to declaring victory and going for IETF last call on the Protocol document.

Evaluation of Web Development Frameworks

Curtis Poe on How to Love a Framework You've Never Used - O'Reilly ONLamp Blog

He argues there is an economic justification for the use of Ruby on Rails as a lightweight development framework.

Your Mobile Phone is Watching You

Phil Windley on Phil Windley's Technometria | Your Cell Phone Is Watching You ...

Your Cell Phone Is Watching You

One of my favorite programs from last week was Nathan Eagle’s Where 2.0 presentation on using cell phones to predict user behavior. Using only publicly available data, Eagle was able to deduce relationships between pairs and groups of individuals.

There are privacy concerns to be sure. Your cell provider already has much of this data. Every time two cell providers merge, what little protection we get from disparate carriers is broken down.

What interested me most though it not the privacy concerns, but the potential to infer and enhance social interactions using the wearable computers each of us carries around everyday.

What’s needed to make this not only more private, but also more useful is real user-centric identity that trasfers across carriers and domains. People often move past identity to get to the fun stuff, but it’s the identity infrastructure that makes it all useful and practical.

DNS and ENUM

In an interview with Cricket Liu, the author of the DNS and BIND book (that deals with managing the DNS servers that allow the resolution of names used, for example in URIs such as this website's address, into the underlying IPv4 and/or IPv6 addresses), the discussion addresses many interesting issues including the use of ENUM to map telephone numbers into the DNS and how this can be supported to deliver integrated VoIP services Cricket Liu Interviewed: DNS and BIND, 5th Edition

Internet Identifer Consumption (CAIDA)

In this interesting report on Internet Identifer Consumption CAIDA (Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis), perhaps most famous for their excellent graphs of the Internet topology, present an overview of the issues around the depletion of IPv4 addresses, referencing studies by Geoff Huston and Tony Hain. This is a very succinct and complete description of the problem.

Irish Broadband

The good news: my local exchange in rural Ireland has been upgraded and I have ordered broadband.

The bad news: Damien Mulley ｻ Blog Archive ｻ Broadband in Ireland - Coverage Map

The discussion: Atoin on Sweeping broadband woes under the carpet.

Ho hum, the good news is really good for me as I've been asking about it since 1999 and now it's here!

Philosophies of Programming

In this excellent article, Dave Thomas, of Bedarra Research Labs, discusses the use of different philosophies of programming: JOT: Journal of Object Technology - The Impedance Imperative Tuples Objects Infosets = Too Much Stuff!.
The metaphor is that squares (relational tuples), circles (objects) and triangles (XML info sets) provide different ways of thinking about programming solutions, and the underlying point is that few programming development environments allow for these different views to be integrated.
Dave Thomas exhorts us:

SURELY WE CAN DO BETTER!
The impedance of incompatible type systems imposes a constant runtime overhead in addition to the syntactic burden. We need to move beyond the three solitudes and go beyond the gratuitous complexity that exists today. There is no reason we can't develop languages that are as productive and easy to use as 4GLs and which have underlying execution semantics based on integrated type system where tuples, objects and infosets are all first class. Microsoft .NET has already demonstrated that it is possible to have an OO language that can contain tuples and records as native types.
There are some early exemplars that show lots of promise. Xduce [6] provides an interesting semantics for Infosets and related research. Xtatic investigates XML as a native type in an OO language like C#. The recent research paper on the unification of tables, objects and documents [7] provides an interesting example of how an existing OO language such as C# or Java can be semantically and syntactically enhanced to address the problem.
We need to step back and consider the accidental complexity that arises when all of the various technical components are presented to a business developer. In isolation each of these technologies has clear merits but even a simple business application is far too complex when we compose the parts. We need to apply our considerable efforts to developing languages/tools as simple and useful for business users as 4GLs have been and continue to be. We need a computationally complete end user programming language, which will allows a mere mortal to create and deploy applications across a federated collection of semi-structured information.

In a more recent article (this previous one dates back to September 2003) he adds Dave Thomas on The (Re) Emergence of Agile languages and Domain-Oriented Programming:

Many at the PDC and JAOO were in shock as Erik Meijer http://research.microsoft.com/~emeijer/) and the VB team showed off VB 9 features that combine clever type inference and structural sub-typing to simply and elegantly manipulate squares (relational tuples), circles (objects) and triangles (XML info sets) as simple polymorphic collections.

By the way, it is good to see dynamic languages included in the debate about new paradigms of computing, and to see discussion of how to target the JVM and th CLR from such langauges.

The JAOO conference in Aarhus, Denmark has become one of the most enjoyable and informative developer conferences in the land of OO. Originally a Java conference, it has expanded to cover a wide variety of topics from MS.NET and Java technology to best practices in software engineering. This year's conference followed on the heels of the Microsoft PDC earlier in the month. Both conferences featured tracks and sessions on scripting, dynamic languages and domain specific languages. There was also a Dynamic Languages Symposium (http://decomp.ulb.ac.be:8082/events/dls05/program/) and Ruby conference at OOPSLA. These efforts are all aimed at lowering the barrier to developing applications. Hurrah!

References
Dave Thomas: "The Impedance Imperative - Tuples+Objects+Infosets=Too Much Stuff!", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 2, no. 5, September-October 2003, pp. 7-12. http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2003_09/column1
Dave Thomas: "The (Re) Emergence of Agile Languages and Domain-Oriented Programming", in Journal of Object Technology, vol. 4, no. 9, November-December 2005, pp. 7-10 http://www.jot.fm/issues/issue_2005_11/column1

Nokia 770 Internet Tablet EUR355

A review of the Nokia 770 from the Silicon Republic: SiliconRepublic.com: Ireland's technology news service providing Irish tech news & analysis

How to Quote in an RSS/Atom Feed Content

Bill de hﾓra on There's no such thing as neutral content:

"lets look at how I quoted Rick. I started with his name and post title, followed by the quote. That style of quoting - "someone at this link said this: - " is quite deliberate. I call it "Ruby Quoting", since I picked it up from reading Sam Ruby's weblog. The reason I use it is because this post will be pumped through any number of aggregators including ones that will strip out the structure and indentation that makes the quote visually distinctive, as is the case with traditional media like print, or with HTML web pages. At quick glance or topline scanning (typical reading modes for feeds), the quote can be mistaken as your words. The lead in helps avoid that from happening."

Interesting, I'll try adopting this style of quotation.

Languages and Platforms

Bill de hﾓra on The Library of Imaginary Machines (where he discusses the folucus on platforms:

"Maybe language development isn't sexy anymore. For a lot of developers now, I think programming languages just aren't all than interesting in terms of a target abstraction, or for playing around with. My generation (graduating in the late nineties) might be last that actually were interested in programming languages as an end in themselves, and even then platforms like J2EE, CORBA, and the Web were much more interesting to many."