dr. mabuse's house of fun

It's astonishing enough that a post-midnight conversation turned Blog You! Blog You! Blog You! into a reality. But what amazes me in particular is the overwhelmingly positive reaction to it. As of this post, Tom and I have been swamped with review requests, which we absolutely intend to carry out. Without revealing the exact purpose of this experiment, I'll say this much: by and large, people get it. And that alone seems to signify to me that blogging is more of a populist art form than anything else.

Bullshit! It amazes me too that there that there is an overwhelmingly positive reaction to it. But I guess my amazement is different from Ed and Tom's! Ed and Tom? They remind me of a talking horse and a cheeky wee mouse yet without their character or other saving graces. I suspect that these so-called weblog critics - wannabe reviewers? - are just trying to drive traffic to their site. The best thing to do would be to ignore them but like the irritating little back-biting bugs that they are it's difficult not to scratch that itch. Should webloggers conform to what they consider to be the weblog 'art form'. Hell no!

I guess I should ignore them. They reviewed this site entirely of their own accord. There's no way I would have asked them to review it. I don't write this weblog for them, or anyone else I don't know for that matter. Sometimes for I write for my students. Sometimes for my family. Sometimes for my friends - real and virtual. But mainly for me - for the discipline.

As Andrea points out

Heh, they didn't even realize that Duncan uses Conversant to maintain his blog. To them, anything that looks similar to some Manila blogs, is a Manila blog.

You have to wonder on this eveidence just how long Ed and Tom dwell at a site before turning in their tired old cliches. Anyhow, they've had their five seconds of infamy on this site as far as I am concerned.

If I ever refer to them again I'll be sure not to include a link to their site. As for their main criticism:

the copy's as dry as a stale cheese sandwich. Speaking of stale cheese sandwiches, Tom and I had a few last night when we experienced a rolling blackout. But the sandwiches in question were tastier than the morsels here. Interesting links can propel a blog to a point. But there's no life to the commentary.

To a certain extent I agree that my personal weblog commentary recently has not been up to snuff but then I've a life, a family, and work ;-)

Al [ViewFromTheHeart] Critiques Blog You! Blog You! Blog You! (Blog You*3)

You know the most annoying thing about BY3 is that they gave me the same rating as Al's site. Al deserved much better than that! Anyhow, if nothing else BY3 has helped to cement a sense of camaradarie amongst those critiqued. And I appreciate the kind words that have been directed to those of us that may feel put out. Funnily enough, I couldn't give a toss about the BY3 reviews - they have shown themselves to so fundamentally flawed that I'd never trust their opinion on anything. So there! ;-)

And to paraphrase Forrest Gump: "That's all I have to say about that".

Making a Semantic Web by Joshua Allen:

If you've paid any attention to the web standards discussions, you may have heard the phrase "Semantic Web", or perhaps even been pressured to use standards with names like "Dublin Core Metadata" or "RDF". If you've attempted to read any of the available documentation on these topics, you were probably intimidated by terms such as "reify" and all sorts of artificial intelligence concepts. This document attempts to explain what all of this chatter really means, and help you decide which parts you should care about and why. I have tried to use common-sense, real-world examples and stay away from complicated terminology.

Talking of the Semantic Web:

Facilities to put machine-understandable data on the Web are becoming a high priority for many communities. The Web can reach its full potential only if it becomes a place where data can be shared and processed by automated tools as well as by people. For the Web to scale, tomorrow's programs must be able to share and process data even when these programs have been designed totally independently. The Semantic Web is a vision: the idea of having data on the web defined and linked in a way that it can be used by machines not just for display purposes, but for automation, integration and reuse of data across various applications.

The Semantic Web Activity is a successor to the W3C Metadata Activity.

Are Users Stupid? (Alertbox Feb. 2001)

Summary: Opponents of the usability movement claim that it focuses on stupid users and that most users can easily overcome complexity. In reality, even smart users prefer pursuing their own goals to navigating idiosyncratic designs. As Web use grows, the price of ignoring usability will only increase.

The Art Of Unix Programming by Eric Raymond:

This book will attempt to capture the engineering wisdom and philosophy of the Unix community as it's applied today -- not merely as it has been written down in the past, but as a living "special transmission, outside the scriptures" passed from guru to guru. Accordingly, the book doesn't focus so much on "what" as on "why", showing the connection between Unix philosophy and practice through case studies in widely available open-source software.

...

My ambitions for this book are not small. With the assistance of the community, I hope to create a true classic here, a book that will speak with authority of and for for the Unix tradition -- and convey the essence of that tradition to the new generation of programmers who have grown up with Linux and the Web.

I thought this quote from Chapter 1: Philosophy Matters succinctly summarised my own philosophy to programming:

Rob Pike, one of the great early masters of C programming, offers a slightly different angle in [NoPiC]:

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. (See Brooks p. 102.)

Rule 6. There is no Rule 6.

I wasn't altogether surprised that I popped out as the first link from a Google Search: smeed but I didn't imagine I'd make it into the top 20 (currently 16th) links from a Google Search: duncan!

As a wee experiment I tried a few more firstnames of virtual and real friends and what d'ya know Andrea's Weblog gets second link in a Google Search: andrea. Fame at last Andrea!!

Finally a Google Search: jotter cites this site as the 2nd top hit. Curious as to what the top rated jotter.com was I followed the links and lo and behold JotterSaf Features: Create Your Own News Feeds. I've never seen this mentioned amongst the Radio Userland community but it seems to have some parallels with aspects of RU. It's a small world!

Well enough of this displacement activity - back to work ;-)

PS I really think I should only associate with friends in high places (in google searches) ;-) But where does that leave John?

The search stopped at #870. I'm still not there. I guess I'm not famous.

But he's

...second or third searching under Curmudgeon!

so we can still be friends then!

PPS But this is definitely not Al of ViewFromTheHeart. Mind you Al's weblog title for today was Taken In so you never know ;-)!! Update But Alwin is #1. Friends in high places indeed.

During some vanity google searching I came across this rebuttal Re: NOTICE OF REVOCATION OF INDEPENDENCE (the "US Reply")

Al's Lost For Words:

It's All About You I was going to write about the empowering experience of writing your own weblog, but it turns out Miss Hayden has already done so on A List Apart:

DOING GOOD

You don't get paid to do it. No one is going to hand you a golden statuette. You won't make any money from it. There's no IPO for doing good in the world.

For that is what you will be doing if you accept the challenge: doing good in and for the world. I want you to empower and entertain people. I want you to teach and to guide and to learn. I want you to contribute. I want you to give back to the web, thereby giving back to the world.

A superb article by Glenn Fleishman [Wait, I Didna Shoot the Editor!] prompted Dave to reiterate:

Hey we still make Mac software (I'm stubborn, I know), so if you cover the Mac, please consider evaluating Manila and Frontier. Did you think the Mac isn't on the SOAP network and can't interop with Microsoft .NET? Think again. All the stuff we're doing runs on the Mac as well as Windows. Perhaps one of the best ways to undo the bad vibes of the early 90s in the Mac biz is to take another look. Manila is unique, and it does run on the Mac.

I've thanked Dave before and now seems to be a good time to thank him again. So, sincere thanks Dave for making great Mac software!

Here are some highlights from a Search for Pentium 4:

• The CPU Scorecard - Top CPU Benchmarks & Comparison Scores
• The Register
• Sharky Extreme - PC - Articles - Intel Pentium 4 Unveiled
• The Register: Intel 'Going for AMD's balls'
• Pentium 4

  There will no doubt be a plathora of industry comment about the P4 so I'll start to keep a list of links brought to my attention or I've stumbled on myself.

• emulators.com - Pentium 4

  This article will be a great starting point for my CAD students forthcoming Pentium 4 assignment!

• The Tech Report - Intel's Pentium 4 processor

Planet IT Mobile & Wireless TechCenter: Java Silicon 55 Times Faster Than Software

SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Intellectual-property developer InSilicon Inc. has developed a hardware coprocessor for Java that can run at up to 200 MHz, giving portable systems such as personal digital assistants and smart cards up to 55 times the performance of a Java virtual machine in software.

Interesting link from http://www.scripting.com: OpenCola Technology Overview

Brute-force computing solutions are not appropriate for many of the problems facing the Net as it expands. OpenCola represents an approach where simple technologies are used to enable a particular side of human nature: the tendency to form communities of interest. As an enabler of activities that people pursue naturally, OpenCola puts humans back into the loop of finding and refining resources on the Net, while not presenting this activity as "work". The result is projected to be an internet that presents itself to the user as an organized collection of relevant documents, instead of an amorphous Web.

Must remember to keep an weather eye on Python.Scripting : Python, XML-RPC and SOAP