| May 2002 | ||||||
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | |||
| 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 |
| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 |
| 26 | 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | 31 | |
| Apr Jun | ||||||
This site is no longer maintained.
My current weblog.
Sunday, May 05, 2002ARTS & FARCES: New York Times on Tom Waits.I also want to be clear that Radio is an inferior product to CityDesk, and I've spent way too much time trying to make it do what I wanted instead of what it wanted. It's outright USER HOSTILE in my opinion. Dave & Co. could take lessons from my pain, and make a publishing system that "just works" like CityDesk does.
Tom Waits is a story teller of the highest order, through music. And he's the biggest artist that you've never heard of. You probably have heard his music, but not on mass-market radio. IMDB lists 23 composing credits.
Tom Waits is an acquired taste. I'm dating myself by saying that a friend I met through the BBS scene introduced me to his music in '94. It wasn't until 2000 that I purchased my first Tom Waits CD, and now I have four. "Beautiful Maladies" probably is the easiest to listen to, but "Mule Variations" is my favorite.
Slashdot: Traffic Cameras in D.C.
New Jersey tried to put speeding cameras on the turnpike while I lived there. Thankfully an existing "Driver Responsibility" law put a quick halt to that. Other states have similar laws, I'm pretty sure that Florida does. Florida also has rear-only license plates 
WAP Wars
It was a royal pain, but eventually we got my roommate's weblog to generate valid WML. The emulators are all happy, Pocket IE is happy, the Ericsson T68... is not happy.
The T68, and likely other phones, have a severe handicap -- a small stack, in the neighborhood of 1.5KB. WML files largers than that will not render, giving the phrase "micro-browser" whole new meaning.
It's a shame. My roommate's original WML rendering placed a week's worth of entries within a single WML file and utilized WML's navigation features. Load time on a 9.6kbps device would be long, but faster devices would have reasonable load times and there would be no further round-trips.
Anyone know of a way to split Movable Type entries? At this point I suspect that some code will be required.
Forecasts for wireless, Net security, ASPs: "The biggest challenge that remains today for ASPs is that it's hard for some CIOs to let go of their servers," Karpovich said, "especially because a lot of these systems are fundamental to day-to-day operations."
ASPs suck because:
- They lack hosting options: Getting a CIO to give up control of their servers might be easier if they didn't have to give up physical proximity. Consider Server Appliances and outsourced server management.
- Application lock-in: Common ASP applications are completely proprietary. Switching ASPs or moving to a self-hosted solution is difficult at best.
There are other problems with using ASPs, but most derive from these two. The first is most critical. Depending on the Internet to provide applications necessary for a business to function should terrify any IT professional. Today's Internet often does not route around failures quickly enough, especially where Tier II or lesser networks are involved.
There are few things more expensive than an idled workforce.
Distributed Enterprise Applications are the future. An ASP's centralized servers continuously replicate data to remote server appliances (or managed servers). Place appliances where they are justified, let smaller offices and remote users depend on the ASP's servers.
I was working towards this model with the CMS that I designed for my former employer. Placing content closer to users (fellow employees) became critical as more groups came to depend on the system for daily operations.
It's coming, it's coming, May 31st! Oh, oh, I can't wait, I'm watching the preview from Apple now...
I am a huge Clancy fan. The Sum of All Fears is one of his best works, a thrilling look into how bad terrorism on the domestic front could be. The timing is terrible, but it could have been worse... it could have been Debt of Honor.
I'm not sure about Ben Affleck as Jack Ryan, I don't understand how they could remove the Ryan family (they were a central plot element in the book), and I really don't like that Middle-East terrorists have been replaced by Neo-Nazis, but you can be sure that I'll be in the expensive seats three weeks from Friday.
30 Second Movie Review
<insert 26 second pause here>
Go see it. Two or three times. Pre-order the DVD. Hold your breath for the sequel.
