Premature Extrapolation

'We should listen to Donald Knuth when he said, "We should forget about small efficiencies, about 97% of the time. Premature optimisation is the root of all evil." This is the most important thing that you'll ever hear as a software developer.'

-Cal Henderson, Building Scalable Web Sites

If it breaks, make it heavier. If it doesn't, make it lighter.

-Paul McCready, Gossamer Condor

A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse's chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet...

Like the other weapons of influence, this one lies deep within us... It is quite simply, our nearly obsessive desire to be (and to appear) consistent with what we have already done.

-Robert Cialdini, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Read-Write Web -- Web 0.1?

I vote for Tim Bray's preference for "read-write web". As I understand it that was the original intention of the web, so let's go back to it

Web 0.1?

Feeling Strest?

A blogless(!) friend points me to this item on lowering your strest level...

The vast majority of supposedly 'REST' Web APIs are simply abusing HTTP to carry function calls. I call these APIs 'Service-Trampled REST', or STREST.

Griddle Cakes

OK, I could not come up with a bad title. The best I could do was a really bad title, so to make up for that, here's a recipe for cornmeal griddle cakes. Enjoy.

On to the business at hand...

I'm fairly sure XMPP is to Grid and JINI as HTTP was to WS and CORBA. Give it a few years - instant messaging is where real commodity grid action will take place.

Neat.

Prematurity

Mike Herrick panics from fuzzy about WS-*...

The truth is there is massive premature standardization occurring.

He's got a lot of good posts, subscribe, read them all.

Big Time

Tim Bray on JavaOne and big, formal conferences generally...

If you’ve been to a camp-style event or unconference, some aspects of the whole sit-and-listen-to-the-guy-on-the-stage thing start to grate.

The best "conference" I attended last year was a Code Camp.

Continuations

Tim Bray has an entry that is a continuation from Gilad Bracha, and others have continued from there. Dynamic languages, continuations, and the JVM... the thing about continuations is they are not immediately obvious because they are not available in most languages.

Those that have them have found they are not useful for the everyday programmer's applications. But they do provide a fundamental building block that simplify the several of the building blocks that *do* end up in the everyday programmer's applications.

By the way, continuations *are* implemented in the Rhino Javascript system and the SISC Scheme system for the JVM. I believe they are also in the JVM and dotnet backends for the Bigloo Scheme system. They would be more efficient in the JVM per se, but I'm just saying...

You're not going to see an overwhelming number of programmers saying, "we want continuations!" That will not be an effective gauge for determining their value at the VM level.

The Future of (Presentation|All) Software

Jon Udell writes...

...it's democratic, not elitist, to believe that presentations ought to be first-class citizens of the web, viewable by any standards-based browser with full interactive fidelity. If we've failed to fully democratize the necessary authoring software -- as, so far, we have -- then shame on us. There's no longer any good reason why we couldn't make it easy for people to create effective presentations through the web as well as for the web, and there are plenty of good reasons why we could and should.

A Thousand Points of Light

Steve Dekorte recalls...

Let's see, so far Bush has:

• started preemptive wars by lying to the public
• killed tens or hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process
• created secret prisons that employ torture
• exposed CIA operatives for political reasons
• instituted a massive illegal surveliance on millions of Americans

Did I miss anything?

Yeah, well, there's that little incident down in New Orleans. There are the Halliburton-built detention centers. There were the threats made to politicians if they did not vote for the prescription drug plan give-away to the pharmaceutical industry. There's... it's a long list but a short weekend.

Oh, yeah. There was that attempted overthrow of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. And...

Um. Thinking. There was that one guy... Osama something, that Bush let get away when he was thought to be cornered in Afghanistan. Of course at one point Bush said... "I don't really think about him very much. I'm not that concerned." But then in the 2004 presidential debate he said... "Of course we're worried about Osama bin Laden. We're on the hunt after Osama bin Laden. We're using every asset at our disposal to get Osama bin Laden."

Then there's that fake news reporter in the White House, Jeff Gannon, who also turned out to be a gay porn star with several unexplained visits. But there's the whole anti-gay marriage drama to get Bush re-elected.

And speaking of fake news, there are those news footages which turned out to be supplied by the White House to the media to run as real news. Although Bush acknowledged having them made, he would not agree to discontinue the practice.

And, sigh. Remember we are just stupid, gullible monkeys. And he's the leader of the monkey world. What more can you expect?