Let's do a BBQ in July!

Do:
Check out the new (v. 2.0) Creative Commons licenses.
Issue a Blogger Pass to your co nference (which Tony Perkins is doing again).
Re think the HTML — whether it works just isn't an issue if it's kept on the Web and out of the mail. (Yeah, yeah, my predilections and biases are showing again. Ideally everyone should have the choice.)

Don't:
Abandon your old Blog*Spot domain!

[Bag and Baggage]

It will be great to see Denise Howell this summer.  I wonder if she'll bring the family?

What should I do July 30?

The July surprise

July 19, 2004

One of the biggest weaknesses of Microsoft Outlook has been the search feature. It takes so long for Outlook to search that the feature is almost useless.

Searching is not a hard problem, and a lot of plug-ins sprang up to solve this problem. Lookout was one of the best. It just works. Searching five years of accumulated email takes less than a second. Indexing is done quietly in the background and never slows down your system. Suddenly email is useful again.

So what happens? Microsoft buys Lookout. That's nice, good for them.

But look more closely at the Q&A:

Q: Why can't I download Lookout anymore?

We will be focusing our efforts on integrating our expertise and working on next-generation technologies.

Huh? What's going on?

Q: What is Microsoft going to do with Lookout? ...

The existing Lookout product will no longer be available, but its technology will be part of an exciting vision that MSN has for delivering new and innovative search services.

MSN?! Lookout is going to be part of MSN? What about Outlook?

Our vision is to take search beyond today’s basic Internet search services to deliver direct answers to people’s questions, and help them find information from a broad range of sources.

What? What the hell does this have to do with searching email? Could Microsoft have possibly bought Lookout just to shut them down? Even at my most paranoid, I can't for the life of me figure out why Microsoft wants searching in Outlook to be worthless. Maybe just Hanlon's Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

"July 2000"

Fourth of July

July 23, 2004

July 4, 2004

July 25, 2004

I know that Rome empties out in August, but if any Joel on Software readers plan to be there on Monday, August 16th, it would be nice to get together for dinner. So far, we've done these dinners in Berkeley, Oslo, and Montréal, with great success. We'll take over a room in a restaurant, eat, drink, be merry, and talk about software development. If you can attend, or would like to suggest a good place to meet, post a message here.

Marshall T. Rose, in RFC 3117: “Counter-intuitively, Postel's robustness principle (‘be conservative in what you send, liberal in what you accept’) often leads to deployment problems. Why? When a new implementation is initially fielded, it is likely that it will encounter only a subset of existing implementations. If those implementations follow the robustness principle, then errors in the new implementation will likely go undetected. The new implementation then sees some, but not widespread deployment. This process repeats for several new implementations. Eventually, the not-quite-correct implementations run into other implementations that are less liberal than the initial set of implementations. The reader should be able to figure out what happens next.”

The July Builder.com top 10

July Zeitgeist

4th of July!, New CHM Help Edition, FTP
PHP,

July 16, 2004

Ah, finally, my second book is on its way to the printer.

Yes, it's mostly reprints of articles which you've already read on this site over the last four years. But there are three huge advantages to the book version. 1) It has been professionally edited. I have finally learned to use semicolons instead of commas to separate complete sentences, and somebody smarter than me has sorted out all the "whiches" and the "thats." 2) You don't have to read it on a computer. 3) You can hurl it at your boss or coworkers to make a point, and the impact will be much more powerful than emailing a URL.

I'm hoping it will be out in a month or so.

OTC 12" Figures In July

One happy, one sad

.HAPPY

The issue was a misnamed Form variable. :)~ Saw it in the first 5 mintues this morning. A fresh head always helps.

.NET's code behind feature is great. I getting used to using it properly. One pet peeve. I learned VB purely from the Microsoft Documentation and a couple of books. The code samples are too complex in .Net's documentation. They need to provide smaller pieces of functionality. For example, to describe creating a web component, they try and take you through an entire application. Not very XPish of them. too much clutter. All I need for an example, is an example of the component and the component being embedded in the page. All the rest confuses the issue.

Very Very Happy

veryveryhappy.blogspot.com/2004_05_23_veryveryhappy_archive.html #108553067569781729
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Happy

Happy Pi Day!

Are you happy now?

Or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Lorcan Dempsey posted some astounding numbers to his blog yesterday. Emphasis below is mine. Prepare to be amazed.

WorldCat in Your Pocket

“WorldCat is our union catalogue of about 56 million bibliographic records, which represent approximately a billion holdings. It is about 50 gigabytes in MARC Communications (100+ gigabytes in XML) format and about 23 gigabytes compressed.

OCLC Research recently acquired a 24-node (48-cpu) Beowulf cluster with 96 Gigabytes of memory. According to my colleague Thom Hickey, whose team has been working on the machine, the cluster speeds up most bibliographic processing by about a factor of 30. This means that what might have taken a minute now takes two seconds, what might have taken an hour takes two minutes, what might have taken a month takes a day. For jobs that will fit entirely in memory (e.g. a `grep' of WorldCat) avoiding disk i/o gives another factor of about 20, reducing 1-hour jobs down to 6 seconds. We can 'frbrize< /a>' WorldCat on the cluster in about an hour.

WorldCat is also now more mobile. Thom has a 40 gig iPod which can accommodate WorldCat on its disk with room left for 5,000 song tracks. Now, you can't do much with the data on the iPod, but you can certainly carry it around. Again, it takes about an hour to get it on and off the iPod.” [Lorcan Dempsey’s Weblog, via It&rs quo;s All Good]

They’re all amazing numbers, but think about that iPod statement for a moment. What does it mean when a patron can carry around the whole, freaking WorldCat database? We’re not that far off from the introduction of the personal, mobile server in your pocket.

Happy PFD!...?

If You're Happy and You Know It...

Features : DVD : July 16, 2003

Swisscom to launch 3G July 1

July 13 is Computer Ate My Vote day

Game Boy Advance for July

TSS Live Calls- July 6

Next Harry Potter on July 16

So now you know! Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince will be available from July 16th 2005 (and I do hope you consider it a decent birthday present, Delleve-who-posts-at-the-Leaky-Cauldron... not that I was watching the fansites on Monday night or anything...)

Are You a "Christmas In July" Person?

W3C Team Talks in July

Pro News : July 22, 2003

Features : DVD : July 23, 2003

Happy 4th.. err... 5th of July