Another "Hmm" Moment

Following 'Things that make me say, "Hmm"' a couple days ago, another thought hits me like a ton of bricks...

Why is WinFS part of the file system rather than part of Share Point?

Hmm.

Context, Hierarchy, and Value Chains

Via Phil Windley, a Radiant Logic whitepaper on context and hierarchy ... definitely related to Ralph Kimball's work.

Why Open Source should not combat Longhorn

Headline: Read all about it. Open Source to Combat Longhorn.

Mozilla and Gnome have gotten together to look at how they can combat Microsoft Longhorn's strategy of merging the web and desktop experience.

What "Open Source" should do instead of combat vaporware is to continue its multi-pronged, evolutionary, march toward providing a solid and secure platform upon which a multitude of innovative ideas can germinate and flourish. The aim should not be "combating Longhorn".

Just focus on providing incremental value to end users and developers of all stripes.

Now you understand why the Pentagon was so upset by the bureaucratic snafu that led to the release of those casket photos. It looks like Messrs. Ledeen ("I think the level of casualties is secondary") and Kristol ("I think the American people are going to have great tolerance ... for more casualties.") may have been a little too optimistic about the public's taste for blood. (American blood, I mean. As in Vietnam, Americans appear perfectly willing to fight to the last Iraqi.)

http://billmon.org/archives/001429.html

How low does the credibility of the U.S. government have to sink before support for the war collapses entirely? After Tet, everyone understood -- even if they rarely admitted it -- that the United States was fighting simply to postpone the political and psychological aftermath of defeat. Have we now reached that point in Iraq? Or are there too many illusions left that still need to be destroyed?

But, gluttons for punishment (other people's punishment) that Americans are, the endgame might not play out so simply. The speed with which public opinion has turned against the war could just be another cultural artifact of our increasingly scatter-brained society -- in which the daily death toll is tucked away somewhere between the next American Idol and the latest pretrial developments in the Michael Jackson case.

Things that make me say, "Hmm."

Why is the premier application software of Longhorn, i.e. WinFS, not a service-oriented system based on the premier system software of Longhorn, Indigo?

Hmm.

Here's the scene

Here's the scene, then: A president who pulled family strings to get a berth in the Texas Air National Guard, and then couldn't even show up for that cushy job, sends out a vice president who won multiple draft deferments and candidly admits he had "other priorities" more important than fighting under U.S. colors, to attack the "judgment" of a Democratic candidate who both fought for his country and had the guts to turn against the war when its folly became evident.

The Horror. The Horror.

[A]nytime you need an RSS feed to track new specs, something is, prima facie, horribly, horribly, wrong.

Run away!

Vacation Ideas for N. California

Jeremy Zawodny is looking for vacation ideas in northern California.

A fascinating stop driving north on 101 is the Solar Living Institute. You can take in a workshop or just do a self tour for an hour or two on your way to somewhere else. 90 some miles north of S.F. The site is also home to the Real Goods store.

If you want to drive a bit further (20 mi. south of the Oregon border), I highly recommend the Smith River and the redwood forests around Jedediah Smith Park.

Some of those forests have the distinction of being the location for filming the Return of the Jedi.

Self 4.2.1 with optimizing compiler for Mac OS 10.3

Sun has released a new version of Self (4.2.1), including a port of the optimizing compiler for Mac OS 10.3 (Panther).

If ever there were a reason to go out and buy a big ass Mac box, this would be it.

A Self tutorial in HTML.

For Camp Smalltalk

In a message to the Camp Smalltalk list I wrote...

I'm interested in learning Seaside. Additionally, I've been wanting to learn Mozilla/XUL, and how it is different from HTML.

Here's a bit more of what's been forming in my mind...

• I implemented a "Naked Objects" like system in Jython and SWT, late at night, a couple hours at a time. A Naked Objects user interface is non-modal.
• I'm ultimately interested in something like the "Object Lens" which is kind of an enhanced Naked Objects.
• Related to this is the Haystack system, which also makes interesting use of continuations for "rich" user interfaces. These kinds of continuations could allow a NakedObjects GUI to be "end user customized" into a more "task-oriented" user interface without much scripting, if any at all.
• Smalltalk is a good platform for something like the Object Lens.
• Seaside might be a good platform for something like Haystack's particular use of continuations, which granted is not as intensive as with HTML but at least as interesting.
• XUL might be a good platform for user interfaces for these kinds of systems because the interaction is "rich" and yet these systems still use a relatively fixed set of interactions. The Javascript could be canned at design time and downloaded from the Smalltalk server.
• Mozilla does support extensible scripting via XPCOM (Cross-platform Component Object Model). Javascript is the default, but there is a Python binding. Smalltalk could be a good candidate too.

I write hardly any code anymore, hardly any for the last few years. This summer I'll spend a week at Camp Smalltalk, which might be a good chunk of time to march somewhere down this list, whether or not someone wants to join in on my specific agenda. Certainly that'll be more time than I piece-mealed into the Jython code last year.

Bad News for Ruby

In Ruby, it's close. I got a factorial of 1,000 but once I hit 10,000 I got a stack overflow.

Advantage: Lisp

But the general feeling I have is that Scheme's match syntax is like having the power of a regex, but at the markup level, instead of matching on the raw text.

Exactly. Most languages can only dream of this simplicity.

She blinded me with science

What the f...