Cox Crow

Items that I haven't strung together in a paragraph yet

Practical VoIP (O'Reilly)

Microsoft Phones: Smartphone and PocketPC Phone Edition (don't forget MSN Messenger and the Xbox).

Ode to Failure: Fast Failure, Failure is the Best Medicine, Accounting for Moore's Law (and counterpoint)

1:48:41 PM # Google It!
categories: Industry

Beauty in Text

Inluminent pointed out Textism's Refer for tracking referrers using MySQL and PHP. Textism reminded me that I love typefaces, and haven't done enough to spruce up my site. I'm particularly fond of Garamond, Goudy Old Style and Gill Sans, though Caslon and Sabon are wonderful.

12:27:30 PM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Learning, Slowly

After discussion of how to make aggregators' fetches more efficient, Dave Winer supported conditional GETs using ETags in Radio Userland, and Brent Simmons is working on it for NetNewsWire. This, and some of the changes made for redirection, simply make aggregators better HTTP user agents. How the user agent should react under certain conditions is specified, while in other cases a facility is provided that enables other behavior.

For all the talk of avoiding wheel invention, this industry does it constantly. Mark Pilgrim notes the similiarity between aggregator behavior and that of the push clients, such as PointCast. Streaming media sites have problems with excessive connections overwhelming both their bandwidth and their server farm: one solution is multicast; another is Akamai. Security patches and other updates generate a lot of traffic. Behind Microsoft's Windows Updates is the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). Software distribution sites have mirrors, and now BitTorrent.

There is more than one way to do pretty much anything. But sometimes all you need is to learn what has been done before.

10:21:47 AM # Google It!
categories: Writing Online

Praxis

And what's the worst thing that happens? Huge corporations that make owners and shareholders rich will cease to be a viable economic model and lightweight coops of engineers and product specialists will become the norm. [Chuck Shotton's Logic Faults]

c.f. Red Mars

9:21:56 AM # Google It!
categories: Industry