sotto.org

The trend towards a client-rich server-poor paradigm for the web marches onward. KnowNow has open-sourced their asynchronous message routing technology as an apache module. KnowNow has developed software consisting of smart routers on the server and local microservers on the client (simple javascript) to create a system which allows for asynchronous messaging with nothing more [...]

Another good series from the Tribune: Supercar - The Tanking of the American Dream. The series finishes with its third installment on Tuesday.

David Brooks mistakes schlocking product, which has existed since the birth of the technology industry, and those folk who make the cold calls, pitch the sales, close the deals and drive the horizontal market in tough economic times such as these, with the scientists and avant-garde visionaries who kindle the fire for technology innovation. [...]

With the exception of having to rewrite the default templates, the switch to Movable Type over the weekend was fairly simple and somewhat uneventful. MT is a nice product, with a good, active community behind it. One of the main reasons I decided to migrate was that mt creates static content pages instead of [...]

There’s an interesting discussion
about the changes Google has apparently made to their PageRank system, that
have caused concern among the “people who care about search rankings” community.
I don’t count myself as one, but I’ve always been interested in the heuristics
and technology that Google uses to achieve their sub-second indexes.
Apparently, you can no longer googlebomb, but can [...]

I remember visiting the French search engine kartoo a while back when it was still beta. I poked around there today and thought it was sort of interesting what they did with the place. The main interface uses flash to render the body of the search results as a visual map, using interconnected lines to [...]

The USPO trumps its previous stupid moves by rewarding ActiveBuddy an all-ecompassing patent on IM bot creation. Luckily, there is enough prior art (especially on the Perl side) to negate this quickly.

REST + SOAP essay. I consider myself firmly in the resource camp. While poking through the specs, I saw lots of new drafts from the W3C that I haven’t had a chance to read yet: In addition to the SOAP 1.2 draft, there’s XHTML 2.0, which is not backward compatible with HTML 4 although Mozilla [...]

Mozilla gets cooler and the plugins get more utilitarian: Bannerblind, which blocks banner ads. Still not as fast as AdSubtract, but it’s free and it’s only RC1.

A View of Development and Testing at Microsoft: it’s a dated document (circa 1995), but I’m sure not that much has changed at Microsoft.

Onion Networks has a CONTENT-addressable web solution which follows the P2P model I discussed a week or two ago:

“Here’s a rough DESCRIPTION of how it works: Say you have a video you want lots of people to see. You configure your server computer with some of Onion’s capabilities. When someone downloads your file, that person’s [...]

I was reading a story on Slashdot recently concerning the initial results of their move towards a subscription-based model when it suddenly dawned on me just how revolutionary concepts like P2P and distributed-computing models like Gnutella or Freenet actually are in light of this economic problem. The reason for moving towards a subscription model for [...]

I’ve been reading about the new EJB 2.0 specification, especially as it relates to resin which is the servlet engine this site runs on and the one I use exclusively to develop. This blurb about their CMP (Container-Managed Persistence) makes me want to investigate even more.

If you’re not familiar with REST (REpresentational State Transfer) Applications, get started. Sooner or later (if it hasn’t happened already), it’ll hit the tech-industry hype bin and we’ll be up to our ears in people talking about it. Actually you are probably intimately familiar with REST already: its beating heart is the basic HTTP web [...]

Another unannounced Google Service: “Live Researchers answer your questions on any topic for a fee.”

IBM has reversed their decision to seek royalties on a patent filed in relation to ebXML. As an addendum to the previous post about their patent claims, it appears that the patent per se was not the crux of the issue with ebXML, it was the possibility of paying royalties upon said patent that had [...]

IBM does an about face and files a patent claim on ebXML, a XML encoding standard originally intended as a royalty-free specification for business information exchange. Actually, the patent claim in not on the specification itself, but on the protocols used to transmit or receive ebXML documents.

According to IBM’s disclosure statement, the company has one [...]

Ever since I’ve discovered the joys and liberation of an 802.11b wireless network (I use a NetGear WAP attached to my existing broadband router), I’ve been tempted to work by the pool, which is a short walking distance from where my hub is located. Should I need more gain from the antenna on my wi-fi [...]

Subversion: “a version control
system that is a compelling replacement for CVS in the open source
community.”

Fascinating article about electromagnetic pulse weapons (EMP) like the ones seen in the Matrix. The ability and effectiveness of such weapons are very real and the fear is terrorist groups can construct a poor man’s ebomb from parts that total less than $400 dollars.

“Knock out electric power, computers and telecommunication and you’ve destroyed the [...]