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Monthly Archives: April 2002

If Any Web Page Deserves a Link

If any web page deserves a link, this one does.

Cringely, a well known tech industry commentator, must be going through hell. This week his baby boy, Chase, died on his lap from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS). He was only 74 days old. His article describes the tragedy, as well as details of the condition. More bravely, he has made a call for people to assist him in finding a way of avoiding this horrible killer.

“That’s my plan, but I can’t do it by myself. I need your help. I need hardware engineers, software engineers, I need people experienced with biomedical sensors and sifting mountains of data. I need folks who make tiny processors and RAM chips. I need people who know more about this stuff than I do. Yet they must also be people who are willing to believe that there is an answer, since the medical establishment seems to have given up.”

If you fit one of the profiles, please follow the link and get in touch with Robert.

Mozilla Ate My Blog


Mozilla Ate My Blog

So tonight I gave Mozilla 1.0 Release Candidate 1 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.0rc1) Gecko/20020417) a good test drive. I was inspired by the fact that you can open windows within the same browser, and move between them with tabs. Very similar to one of my favourate features of Opera. I even added a bit to my Blog (the BlogSnob link on the left to be precise). However, in doing so, my blog template at Blogger got completely mangled. It took me a while to notice, but my Blog’s format was so chewed that the table did not work at all. Over an hour later I managed to re-work all the re-work that I had just completed.

Lets just say I won’t be trying Moz again for a while. When I do I’ll be backing up my template. Which reminds me….better go do that now.

Its Not April Fools! Right?


Its Not April Fools! Right?

In what appears to be the cheapest way for Microsoft to side-step the fact they have just announced a further delay in the shipping of their .NET Server until next year, they are blaiming the rest of the industry for the over-hyping of Web Services.

Microsoft are by far the biggest offender. For example, take their adverts found in many many magazines (for those really interested one can be found in the two page add on the third and fourth page of the April 8th Information Week). “Introducing Visual Studio .NET”, “The world takes a little step into the future.”, written on an Airport flight times billboard highlighting a trip to Mars. It goes on to say, “the first toolset built from the ground up for XML Web services development. Just one keyword-WebMethod-turns your existing application into a Web service”. Wow, all I need is this tool and I can create a Web service. Wrong.

They fail to mention that most of the industry standards are not mature yet, that some of the other standards are not yet standards, and that the whole concept is so immature that no single company has deployed a true Web Service application in its much hyped end state.

They blaim Sun Microsystems for a large part of the hype. However, Sun (who I currently work for), state from the outset that its Sun ONE strategy will start slowly and integrate your current applications into a state that makes it easy for you at a later date (when standards are more stable and mature) to migrate to a true “Smart” Web Service. This approach is agreed upon by most, if not all, Web Service consultancy firms.

See this article at Webservices.org for a couple of links to media reports and a web poll.

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