This one sounds like another late april fool’s joke, but it’s real: Boot Camp is a piece of software from Apple that lets their new Intel-based machines boot into Windows. You have to bring your own Windows CD.
Boot Camp is a free download and will also be shipped with the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard).
Windows people who are afraid of Mac OS can now safely buy Apple for the high-quality hardware without making “the switch.”
I somehow managed to miss this one on April 1st … Google Romance — because, “when you think about it, love is just another search problem.”
Brilliant.
(via AG NBI)
Oh, I didn’t know that W3C has a Web API Working Group, and that they are standardizing the XMLHttpRequest object, the base technology of AJAX.
XMLHttpRequest already works pretty much the same across browsers. Nevertheless, an official W3C stamp of approval will be a good thing.
Sometimes there are lucky coincidences. I tried to find time for writing a review of this extremely fascinating book, which I finished reading a couple of days ago. But today Guy Kawasaki has an interview with the author:
There are some books that are “must reads” for entrepreneurs; some for marketers; some for salespeople; and some for programmers. And then there are a handful that everyone should read. IMHO, one such book is Influence—Science and Practice by Dr. Robert Cialdini, a psychology professor at Arizona State University.
The main theme of the book is that people are not very rational in their decisions, but use all kinds of shortcuts without much thinking. We assume that higher price means higher quality, that professors must be smart, that it’s correct to do what other people around us do. Cialdini explains the most important shortcuts that we use in interactions with other people. And he points out how “compliance professionals” — salesmen, evangelists and con artists — use this to their advantage. And how to defend against their tactics.
The book is readable, full of real-life examples, and quite useful to better understand everyday life. Highly recommended.
On the semantic-web@w3.org list, Harry Halpin makes a good case for why attempts to standardize on a Unified Formal Ontology (UFO), such as Cyc and DOLCE are ill-considered. Harry provides lots of literature. Hard to argue with that.
I just don’t want people to think UFOs are a good idea without knowing there is almost 40 years of well-respected people saying they are a genuinely bad idea. And that most foundational ontology/KR based companies minus Cyc more or less crashed and burned in AI Winter, a sort of analogue of the dot.com crash. Feel free to try again, although currently venture capitalists are more interested in tagging than ontologies. I also feel like occasionally UFO advocates pretend to represent the mainstream of academic AI and philosophy, which is not the case.
The basic point: Build the Semantic Web bottom-up, starting with concrete ontologies for specific domains.
(You can’t build complex systems, unless you have unlimited funding and dictatorial control. In a marketplace, complex systems must be grown.)
Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration.
An interesting factoid from this recording of a Kathy Sierra talk: Computer game designers have long known that levels are essential to keep players motivated. Reaching the next level is the player’s reward for all his hard work. But while boys are motivated by the simple fact of having reached the next level, girls ask: “What’s the point?” They need some additional reward, some gimmick or power-up to gain motivation. Which is, of course, a much more sensible attitude.
This is interesting, but not too surprising. The impulse to see a challenge in any random obstacle, to endure hardships for the sheer satisfaction of reaching an arbitrary goal, to climb a mountain “because it’s there”, may very well be the typical male trait.
I wonder why nature made us that way. There must be some evolutionary advantage to this apparently pointless impulse. I’ve no idea what that advantage might be.
The folks at the Simile project always seem to have a cool project or two up their sleeves. Have a look of this three-minute screencast of Sifter, a Firefox extension built by David Huynh.
It’s kind of hard to explain what it does (that’s why David made the screencast), but it’s quite fascinating. According to common wisdom, screenscraping is a bad idea. Sifter happily ignores this and takes it to its logical conclusion.
There doesn’t seem to be any download or documentation (or even website) yet, but here’s a paper about Sifter.
I think Simile should commercialise this. Not as a browser plugin, but as a web service that web site operators can use to cheaply add faceted search to their sites. I’m sure some site operators would pay for this.
On 2006-03-30 the developer CVS server had a hardware issue that required us to take the service offline. We are actively working on this problem and hope to have it back up soon. There is not a current estimate for the duration of this outage, but when we get one, it will be posted on the site status page (this page). We currently expect this outage to last 48 hours, at minimum.
96 hours and counting.
The SourceForge engineering blog, which would be the most natural place to keep customers informed about issues, currently has this to say:
Warning: pg_connect() [function.pg-connect]: Unable to connect to PostgreSQL server: FATAL: database is not accepting commands to avoid wraparound data loss in database “postgres” HINT: Stop the postmaster and use a standalone backend to vacuum database “postgres”. in /var/local/s9y/include/db/postgres.inc.php on line 38
In the meantime, the SourceForge bigshots have sent out one of their happy monthly newsletters, without a word about the problem.
I love SourceForge. Open source wouldn’t be what it is today without their service, which is provided free of charge for most users. But this sucks.
(Update: It works again. After five days.)
I was trying to figure out how to automate, in some fashion, the creation of release notes. My project is using CVS so I could get a dump of commit messages using cvs log. But the CVS log output is extremely verbose and certainly not suitable for management or other non-technical parties.
Enter StatCVS:
Among other things, the tool does a nice job of formatting the commit messages, excluding the files that had no changes and grouping commit messages intelligently.
StatCVS also provides statistics based on user. You can see how many commits each developer has made, when those commits were made, as well as files and the number of lines of code affected. While this might seem a bit Orwellian, it really is useful information for a team lead.
