Liudvikas Bukys

IRS Blasts Worm With Autonomic Software: Basically an ad for Tivoli Software Distribution, Remote Control, and Enterprise Console

Wi-Fi Networking News:
Case Western Opens Its Network to Cleveland:

It’s an ambitious project that allows the public to take advantage of an expensive, but bursty and abundant service. The university has over 1,200 access points, and unless it’s a unique case, there must be businesses, apartments, and houses sprawled all around and on top of it that can take advantage, as well as visitors to the campus. The project is labeled OneCleveland.

Jon Udell: Acrobat and InfoPath:

The only missing InfoPath ingredient is a forms designer that nonprogrammers can use to map between schema elements and form fields. That’s just what the recently announced Adobe Forms Designer intends to be. I like where Adobe is going. The familiarity of paper forms matters to lots of people. And unless Microsoft’s strategy changes radically, those folks are far likelier to have an Adobe reader than an InfoPath client.

Phil Wolff: “a klog apart: The syndicated blogosphere will reach 300 million feeds in 3 years” covers the basic architectural scaling issues related to widespread adoption of RSS. Polling a single site can’t last forever. New protocols for publish, subscribe, multicast, flood will be invented. Old protocols (NNTP) may even revive.

Network Computing (June 26, 2003):
Authentication Gets Into Stanford

Phil Wainewright:

• Tale of Two ITs:
  

  The problem here is that there are two separate information technologies today, just as in the early years of the last century there were two forms of transportation. In making that assertion, I am of course alluding to another HBR article, Marketing Myopia, by Theodore Levitt, which first appeared in July 1960. Levitt’s article made the seminal observation that the railroad companies declined “because they assumed themselves to be in the railroad business rather than in the transportation business.”

  Today, the IT industry is led, and has its agenda set, by companies who believe themselves to be in the enterprise-scale software business. What they don’t yet realize (or perhaps are helpless to do anything about — see Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave, by Bower and Christensen, HBR January 1995) is that actually they’re in the distributed process automation business. If they and their customers don’t adjust rapidly to their new market environment, their destiny will be to end up as a minor footnote in a future article in HBR about the astonishing decline of the one-time giants of our present-day IT industry.

• The end of software:

  Consolidation means contraction. When five leading firms propose mergers in the same week, the prognosis for the enterprise software industry looks dire. Especially when in the same week, the most vocal exponent of their nemesis took a bold new step into their universe.

Norman Walsh: XML Is Not Object Oriented

Bill Venners: What’s Wrong with XML APIs:
«
Elliotte Rusty Harold talks with Bill Venners about the five styles of XML APIs, and the problems with data-binding APIs.
»

E-BUSINESS IN THE ENTERPRISE – Web services: IT churn or IT revolution?:

I will leave you this week with a joke that illustrates the risks inherent in treating a new technology (Web Services) as an old technology revisited (RPC).

A lumberjack walks into a hardware shop and explains that his manual saw method limits him to felling four trees a day. He expresses an interest in one of those new chain-saws he has heard so much about and read about in the trade magazines.

The shop sells a chain-saw to the delighted lumberjack and promises him a five-fold increase in productivity. A week later, a very tired looking lumberjack comes back into the shop looking for his money back. He claims that with the chain-saw, he cannot fell more than six trees a day.

The shop assistant takes the chain-saw and starts it up to examine it.

The lumberjack steps back in amazement and exclaims: “What’s that noise?”

Sometimes, the real value in a new technology lies in looking at things differently. Bear this in mind the next time you hear a developer waxing lyrical about the benefits of putting a web services wrapper on an existing application or on an existing integration architecture.

Tim Bray:
Characters vs. Bytes:
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This is the first of a three-part essay on modern character string processing for computer programmers. Here I explain and illustrate the methods for storing Unicode characters in byte sequences in computers, and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. These methods have well-known names like UTF-8 and UTF-16.

The next essay will consider string handling in the Java, and to a lesser extent C#, computer languages and argue that it is significantly broken, both in terms of efficiency and correctness. The third essay will propose a new approach to string handling in Java.
»

Tim Bray:Programming Languages and Text:
«
Welcome to another installment in ongoing‘s ongoing tour through
text-processing issues.
This one is about programming-language support, and while it makes specific
reference to Java, tries to be generally applicable to modern software
environments.
The conclusion is that Java is OK for some kinds of text processing, but
has real problems when the lifting gets heavy.
Last time out I said this
was going to be a three-part essay, but now I realize I’d already written
two other text-processing-centric pieces before that, one an
intro to Unicode, and the
other entitled
On Character Strings.
The present essay will recapitulate some of the material in that second note,
but no matter how you cut it, we’re already (to quote Douglas Adams) on
volume four of the trilogy.
To make it worse, I’m gestating some essays on full-text-search,
so we’ll just call it a continuing series.
»