30 July 2006
Dave Johnson: Beyond Blogging: Understanding feeds and publishing protocols
Tim Bray's post alerted me to this excellent slideset explaining feeds, giving an excellent clear history of RSS and Atom.
TriXML2006-BeyondBlogging.pdf (application/pdf Object) "Beyond Blogging: Understanding feeds and publishing protocols" (Dave Johnson, Sun Microsystems, 2006).
16 July 2006
Vint Cerf interviewed on net neutrality
As a Google employee Vint Cerf clearly has an agenda on net neutrality, but he's certainly earned the right to have a strong opinion on this given his involvement in the Internet John Battelle's Searchblog: Cerf, Part 1: Excuse me, but we don't get a free ride at all
14 July 2006
SignOfTheTimes
This picture is of a sign near the Holy Cross pub on the Cork Road (en route from Cork to Waterford, near the outskirts of Waterford city). It's actually down the side road (the cork road is bigger than this...) map. The road has a local GAA club (a sports field where they play Gaelic football) and so there's a warning about children running across the road (but the sign used for this in Ireland looks like you are supposed to aim to aim to hit the children with your car, c.f. Warning Signs). Ironically this warning has no impact on the speed limit that remains at 80km, the legal maximum for a non-primary route. So the combined result of the signage is that it looks like you should speed up and try and hit the kids!
12 July 2006
Barcodepedia
This site processes images of barcodes you upload Barcodepedia.com - the online barcode database. Cool. No wonder it's getting Slashdotted.
11 July 2006
Vinoski Reviews "Enterprise Integration with Ruby" by Maik Schmidt
In this posting Steve Vinoski links to the PDF of his review of "Enterprise Integration with Ruby" by Maik Schmidt, published in the July/August issue of IEEE Internet Computing: Middleware Matters: Enterprise Integration with Ruby. The informative review recommends the book, and recommends taking a pragmatic approach towards both REST and SOAP styles of enterprise architectures, with any tool, including Ruby.
8 July 2006
Meadhbh Brónagh Ní Fhoghlú
Our daughter Meadhbh Ní Fhoghlú is now just over 7 months old, born at the end of November 2005; here's a recent picture of her looking fairly happy! For those who don't know much about Irish pronunciation, the Anglicised spelling of Meadhbh may be easier to understand - Maeve.
7 July 2006
The Network Neutrality Debate
The recent flurry of activity in the USA on legistlation to determine whether network operators can prioritise certain types of Internet traffic over others in order to use this ability to leverage funding for the service providers who use the Internet to deliver Internet-based services has raised amany interesting issues. The debate has revolved around the new term Network Neutrality. This article by By Robert X. Cringely
PBS | I, Cringely . June 29, 2006 - If we build it they will come (subtitled "It's time to own our own last mile") is a thoughtful contribution to the debate. The argument is at a high level over whether the system of networking infrastructure ownership itself is wrong for the next generation of Internet-based services. This links to one of my hoby horses, the concept of the StockholmOpen community owned network infrastructure model (for wireless and broadband). It will be interesting to see how these models develop over the next twenty years.