XML-Deviant: Eternal Refactoring
Grok Headline matches for XML-Deviant: Eternal Refactoring
A Refactoring Example
A Refactoring Example
10/28/2003 11:08 PMMichael Schwern explains how to use refactoring techniques to make
code faster.
Database Refactoring
Database Refactoring
10/08/2002 07:08 AMScott W. Ambler talks about
database refactoring, which is
about making simple changes to a database schema to improve its design
while retaining both its behavioral and informational semantics. For
example migrating from a system that assumes addresses and names are a
specific format to one that handles addresses and names for multiple
countries.
"tri" On a different topic, here are some discussions on the ADOdb
forums on PHP and
Interbase and Object-Relatio
nal mappings in PHP that might be of interest. Feel free to post
your responses.
"zeldman.hc"
Off the top of my head: linklog
refactoring required...
Off the top of my head: linklog
refactoring required...
09/12/2004 07:24 AMSo Paul Hammond created webkit2png
which is a lovely little command-line script for a Mac that goes and
grabs a full screenshot of a web-page - full length on the page. It
can also do a variety of other whatsits and hoojis which are really
cool. So what I want someone to do now is to make a little app that
sits your Mac which you can stick your remaindered linkloggery into
that:
- Is templatable;
- Posts the links to del.icio.us and any other link aggregation
place (damned if I'm going to leave all my lovely posts on someone
else's system without hooking into mine);
- Grabs a screenshot of the page concerned (can be overwritten if
you're linking to something random);
- Posts the whole she-bang to your linklog (complete with lovely
little screencap) via the various weblog APIs;
- If someone could make it some kind of plug-in for my browser or
make it triggerable via an AppleScript or something, that would be
nice too.
To be honest, I'm not sure this is quite what I want, but it's
becoming clear to me that the area of the linklog is in enormous neat
of some refactoring and rationalisation work. I don't really think
it'll sort itself out until one or more of the weblog companies
actually puts in some templates and structures designed to support it
directly, but I'm not sure how likely that is to happen...
Read the
comments
Features: XML Europe 2004: Refactoring
XML
Features: XML Europe 2004: Refactoring
XML
05/05/2004 06:17 PMThe recent XML Europe 2004 conference showed that it's time to use the
experience gained in the last 6 years to optimize the use of XML. Eric
van der Vlist reports on sessions from the show.
On hybridised RSS feeds as evidence of a
need for webl0g refactoring...
On hybridised RSS feeds as evidence of a
need for webl0g refactoring...
02/05/2005 10:08 PMRight then - I feel a bit like I've got the wind behind me and it
might not last so I'm going to plough right on into another subject
before the demons of fear crawl up my leg. Dave Shea's written a
really insightful little piece (after
Haughey) on the curr
ent trend for hybridised RSS feeds merging del.icio.us feeds and Flickr
photostreams with normal weblog posts. Here's some of the best
stuff:
The problem I have is quite similar to what Matt
describes: when new items show up in my newsreader from people I enjoy
reading, Im often mildly disappointed when its simply a new camera
phone image, or a couple of sparsely-described links to stuff Ive
already seen. Ill go one further though, and say this about the
practice: its really damaging the signal-to-noise ratio of content I
otherwise love.
And all I can say is that I couldn't agree more. My RSS feed at the
moment is a monstrous atrocity. It's vile and clumsy and ugly and
infuriating. But it's as vile as it is because that's where the
software and systems that I want and need to use have led me. I want
to fix it. I'd love to make it better, but to do so I'd have to
sacrifice something somewhere along the way.
When I started weblogging it was all about the links, and the
little asides and the one-liners and guff like that. I believe
fundamentally that weblogs are communicative and social rather than
being publishing ((Weblogs and) The Mass
Amateurisation of (Nearly) Everything) and this seemed like a
natural register for that kind of thing. Everything was nicely
informal and easy. But the systems had their problems - Blogger style
permalinks were an ugly and clumsy way to reference particular pieces
of commentary, so people moved towards using Movable Type with is individual
archives and built-in comments. Page-per-post sites, though, require a
different form of writing - people change their interactions and the
sites become less agile and less cross-conversational. Shorter posts
get lost, posting becomes more of an effort and many things that one
might like to talk about in passing get thrown away. There are
benefits, it's clear - you write longer, better, more considered
things. But they're not the same things that we used to be writing.
You can see some of the transitions that occurred when I moved to
using Movable Type in the visualisations that people did for me last
year: Visualisations lead to Self-Knowledge.
I think this shift was really what caused the desire for people to
start link-logs. Sites on the internet that we responded to
emotionally but couldn't find time to write Movable Type-length posts
about were getting no commentary at all. People who were busy found
that they simply weren't writing anything for their sites at all - the
length of posts that using MT seems to inspire (in my case anyway)
started to be incompatible with post-work energy levels. The concept
of a simple, throwaway linklog seemed to present a cure to this
situation. People could post things and get their thoughts out into
public quickly and easily. Or - just as importantly - they could keep
track of the links that they wanted to keep track of - back to the
weblog as personal link-organiser. It seemed like the perfect
solution.
Certainly it didn't seem to matter much whether or not the links
were unique or whether everyone else in the world had posted them too.
This was the time that saw the emergence of what I call microcontent voting. The more people linked to something,
the more people saw it, obviously - but now it was becoming an
exponenial relationship rather than a linear one. This was because of
the newly significant presence of aggregators like Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati. Now there was an
effective feedback loop - if something got the attention of a certain
number of people in the ecosystem, it would be brought to the
attention of even more. A site that got only a few links could be at
the top of the aggregators within a day, and experience thousands of
visits immediately.
The links had - in part - ceased to be just something you did
individually and instead became something that you did as part of a
community that one way or another helped information bubble up. I
think this found its best expression to date in Hotlinks, which I really
think needs only to be abstracted into a more generic service to take
over the world.
But linklogs had their own problems - how should they be integrated
into a weblog site? Should they be individually permalinkable or
should they be aggregated in daily clumps? Should they sit in central
bars or be relegated to little-read sidebars? Different weblog authors
found different solutions to these design problems - with kottke and Anil probably being the
groundbreakers in this area. But it still felt a little clumsy. The
weblogs were capturing everything again - covering a whole range of
content from long-form essays through to the smallest particles of
link data - but it wasn't sitting together well - the weblog softwares
didn't seem (and still don't) to have found a way to really
consolidate this kind of combination management / conversation /
publishing role. I personally strongly felt that my link-logs should
be posted in daily digests as part of my main weblog. I'd done groups
of links as posts for years, and I didn't see why that should change
now. But these things were far from simple to perform.
The introduction of moblogging caused another problem - the
infrastructure for handling phone to weblog stuff effectively had
never seemed to emerge in an elegant, simple and un-hacky way -
clearly they'd need different templates for a start, and again
decisions had to be made about how to integrate them with the design
and layout of sites. Should the photos be in a sidebar? Should they be
a different and separate weblog? Should they be posted each day, or
immediately as the photos were taken and coming in?
The two sites that - for me - changed this picture enormously were
del.icio.us and Flickr in that they both provided me
with new tool-sets for managing stuff and they both also gave me
mechanisms for posting to my weblog in ways that seemed to afford more
benefits than they had costs. Firstly, del.icio.us gave me the ability
to organise my links more effectively than my weblog had - and made
the process of refinding my links much much easier - and some slightly
provisional settings do exist for publishing a daily digest to a
weblog. So I get the space to file my links in a way that makes sense
to me, and get to expose this action back to people. Except of course
it's not a finished piece of functionality - I can't give it
alternative formats for the title, I can't change how each link is
formatted and I can't stop it publishing everything to both my site
and weblog with extra fields of information exposed that I don't want
people to see (like the del.icio.us tags that each post has). I can
hide these tags on the web because I control the stylesheets. But it's
much harder (rightly) to do that kind of thing in an RSS reader. The
consequence? The posts generated by del.icio.us in my RSS feed are
ugly and feel clumsy - they're functional, but they're not how I would
have them...
And the same is true of my Flickr photostream. The pictures that I
take are aspects of my life, and I want them to be exposed to people
in the same way as my overt posts are - but I have non flexibility. I
can have them posted directly to my site, but then they don't feel
cleanly on my site in that they're still hosted elsewhere. And
I can't aggregate them into clumps usefully - every photo appears as I
take it, and I can't make a daily archive of them to be posted into
the body of my site. So feedburner becomes the best
option for bringing these very separate things together - except it
has design problems of its own. Titles of Flickr photos don't seem to
update and the integration of feeds - while beautifully elegant
technically - does seem to create unbalanced or confusing feeds to
experience... And if you're asking why I want to keep everything
together in one Feedburner feed at all, it's because the functionality
that feedburner affords me in tracking the number of people reading
the damn feed is so incredibly useful to me. And I wouldn't get that
ease or accuracty of calculation by having multiple feeds...
Phew! So that's the history of all weblog functionality in a
nutshell, which wasn't quite what I was expecting to write. But the
point is that all through the history of weblogs, the technologies
have opened up new doors and created new problems. Different
functionalities make it possible to do one thing much more easily or
effectively, but they come with a smaller cost elsewhere. We're
definitely moving in a positive direction, but each time we make a
leap to a new level of functionality, things get more complicated and
fractured and difficult for a while. Our feeds are ugly, and
they don't quite work right and neither do our sites. But this is
because the technologies that we're using to organise and collate our
lives aren't quite communicating perfectly and aren't splicing
themselves together in the way that we might like. And things are
getting ever more complicated, and we need to do something about
it.
And I'm beginning to think that the thing we have to do is start to
reconsolidate and refactor the weblog concept itself. We need to take
a step back for the first time in years and re-ask the question - what
is it for? How do we find something hard and shiny in the middle of
all these hybridised trends and make it the ideal shape to support all
the other services that will grow upon and around it. In a whole range
of issues - from the collation of our browsing to the handling of our
photos, from the posting of our opinions to the way we're relating to
our social networks - the traditional weblog format is starting to
buckle. So rather than concentrating on the specifics of clashing
informational streams in our feeds and looking to fix them, I'm going
to make the problem even larger and ask - are these clashes evidence
of something more seriously broken? Does anyone really have any idea
what we do next?
Read
the comments
Refactoring C# Code Using Visual Studio
2005
Refactoring C# Code Using Visual Studio
2005
08/05/2004 03:28 AMI'd bet you would agree that a significant part of any engineer's day
is spent re-working existing code to become in some way 'better.' In
many cases, 'better code' is a subjective term, but some common
improvements include: adhering to OO-best practices, increasing type
safety, improving performance, and increasing code readability and
maintainability.
Refactoring is a formal and mechanical process, used to modify
existing code in such a way that it does indeed become 'better' while
preserving the program's intended functionality. In addition to
improving a program's overall design, the refactoring process tends to
yield code which is far easier to maintain and extend in the long
run.
The Eternal Sun
The Eternal Sun
12/24/2004 12:24 PMMERRY .....
Eternal Lands 0.9.6
Eternal Lands 0.9.6
02/15/2004 03:44 PMA 3D MMORPG.
Eternal Lands 1.0.0
Eternal Lands 1.0.0
08/23/2004 02:21 AMA 3D MMORPG.
Eternal Lands 0.9.8
Eternal Lands 0.9.8
05/05/2004 02:50 AMA 3D MMORPG.
Eternal Lands 0.9.5b
Eternal Lands 0.9.5b
01/25/2004 11:39 AMA 3D MMORPG.
Eternal Lands 0.9.3b
Eternal Lands 0.9.3b
12/30/2003 07:22 AMA 3D MMORPG.
Eternal Lands 0.8.8b
Eternal Lands 0.8.8b
11/15/2003 02:13 AMA 3D MMORPG.
Eternal Lands 0.9.2
Eternal Lands 0.9.2
12/19/2003 01:07 PMA 3D MMORPG.
The Gorge of Eternal Peril
The Gorge of Eternal Peril
08/03/2004 05:24 AM
It's rare for any speaker to draw a standing ovation from the
OSCON audience,
but that's what
David Rumsey
did last week. And Rumsey isn't one of the heroes of open source
software. He's a philanthropist who collects historical maps, scans
them at high resolution, and publishes them on the Internet as open
content that anyone can access and repurpose. His motive is partly to
connect many people to content that few would be able to view in a
museum:
I thought about donating it to a university, but their libraries focus
on preservation, they'd have put my collection in a vault and there
would have been no access. Along comes the Internet, and I found we
could do even more with the digital content than with the originals.
We serve over 7000 visitors a day. A typical map library will serve
200 visitors a year.
But expanding access, while lovingly preserving the feel of the
artifacts he has collected, is only the tip of the iceberg. Although
you can view these images in the expected ways -- zooming in and out,
panning around -- Rumsey wants us to do more. He hopes we'll use the
online maps to tell one another stories about history, geography,
culture, and the environment. To that end, he's commissioned the
development of a family of clients. For starters, there's a
browser-based interface that you can use to view, pan, and read about
the maps. Then, using an installable Java client, you can add
annotations to the maps, crosslink points on different maps, and link
from points on maps out to the web.
...The Eternal Appeal of Punctuation
The Eternal Appeal of Punctuation
12/19/2003 11:35 AM Punk-Tuation:
Is It The New Anarchy Or Boring Old Fascism All Over Again? How
anal serious about apostrophes are you? Just how far
would you go for a perfect semi-colon? Do you regularly reach for
heart pills before you read MetaFilter? Take comfort in this:
Lynne
Trusse's wildly popular
Eats Shoots And Leaves is
this year's surprise
bestseller in Britain. And I've limited myself to the
MeFi-adored
Guardian, just to make my (as it were) point.
So... how important is punctuation to you? My own suspicion is that
punctuation is the new spelling. It
is important.
(
And, lest this seem carefree and frivolous, let me confess
right away that MetaFilter may well be the worst offender, in this
regard, ever to have blessedly existed.)
Eternal Lands 0.9.2 Beta
Eternal Lands 0.9.2 Beta
12/15/2003 12:10 AMA 3D MMORPG.
The Eternal Question: Are We Out of
Beer?
The Eternal Question: Are We Out of
Beer?
05/07/2004 11:29 PMStudents design wireless beer pitcher monitoring system: Meticulously
researched, designed, and documented, two students solve the eternal
problem of ensuring that pitchers are promptly refilled and that they
don't miss last call by accident. A sensor monitors the pitcher's tilt
and then alerts a remote system via radio signals. [via Slashdot]...
Eternal Lands 0.9.4 Beta
Eternal Lands 0.9.4 Beta
01/05/2004 07:56 PMA 3D MMORPG.
For those with fat pipes who aren't
afear'd of eternal damnation
For those with fat pipes who aren't
afear'd of eternal damnation
01/18/2004 12:22 AMTrailer for Tarant...er, Mel Gibson's Kill Christ .. mocking The
Passion film
homepages.nyu.edu/~scs273/01.mov
track this
site | 4 links
Browser bugs sprout eternal
Browser bugs sprout eternal
04/06/2005 12:24 PMFresh vulns for Firefox and IE
XML-Deviant: What Next, XML?
XML-Deviant: What Next, XML?
03/14/2005 05:44 PMMicah Dubinko debuts as the new XML-Deviant columnist with a look at
the recent debate about the future of XML. Will there ever be an XML
2.0?
XML-Deviant: XML, the Web, and Beyond
XML-Deviant: XML, the Web, and Beyond
12/19/2004 03:49 PMXML community coverage; browser technology and open content join
traditional XML topics in the new-look XTech 2005 conference; plus
debate on when multiple schemas are the best way forward.
XML-Deviant: Something Useful This Way
Comes
XML-Deviant: Something Useful This Way
Comes
06/09/2004 06:50 PMThe Semantic Web appears to be powering ahead: so why are there so
many doubters in the XML world?
Deviant Art
Deviant Art
04/14/2004 10:31 PM
Deviant Art is an
incredibly rich resource of the
profound, the
visually impressive,
amusing, and
surreal.
XML Deviant: Instant RSS
XML Deviant: Instant RSS
05/23/2002 10:39 PMXML-Deviant: On Folly
XML-Deviant: On Folly
12/19/2004 03:48 PMXML-oriented programming languages? Crazy! The Semantic Web? Nuts! Or
perhaps not. Edd Dumbill on how the crackpots were right all long.
XML-Deviant: Politics By Any Other Name
XML-Deviant: Politics By Any Other Name
05/12/2004 06:55 PMThe recent News.com interview with Bob Glushko spawned a rash of
debate among XML developers. The topic? Standards, of course! Kendall
Clark offers his own views, and reports on the surrounding community
debate.
XML-Deviant: RDF Roundup
XML-Deviant: RDF Roundup
09/22/2004 06:24 PMEdd Dumbill's report on XML community discussions covers how to write
XML documents as RDF models and more incredulity at the WS-* web
services specifications.
XML-Deviant: What are Microformats?
XML-Deviant: What are Microformats?
03/23/2005 08:00 PMMicah Dubinko asks what microformats are and whether they are here to
stay.
XML-Deviant: The Cost of XML
XML-Deviant: The Cost of XML
12/19/2004 03:48 PMThe apparent overhead of using XML is once more in the spotlight, as
is the financial overhead of using eBay's web services. Edd Dumbill
reports.
XML-Deviant: Forming Consensus
XML-Deviant: Forming Consensus
06/05/2005 11:54 PMIn his latest XML-Deviant column, Micah Dubinko outlines a plan for
combining the XForms and Web Forms 2.0 communities.
XML-Deviant: Deconstructing
Certification
XML-Deviant: Deconstructing
Certification
03/17/2005 04:21 AMMicah Dubinko asks what business and personal value XML certification
might have.
XML-Deviant: Models with Character
XML-Deviant: Models with Character
03/14/2005 05:43 PMMicah Dubinko tallies up the score in the new W3C specification,
called "charmod" colloquially, about the use of Unicode in XML
applications.
XML-Deviant: Specification Proliferation
XML-Deviant: Specification Proliferation
06/17/2005 04:28 PMMicah Dubinko examines the problem of specification proliferation and
looks to a similar area — open source software licensing —
for possible solutions.
XML-Deviant: XTech 2005
XML-Deviant: XTech 2005
06/05/2005 11:54 PMMicah Dubinko's XML-Deviant column summarizes the highpoints of XTech
2005, the recent European XML conference.
XML-Deviant: On Practical Elegance
XML-Deviant: On Practical Elegance
04/06/2005 09:21 PMIn his latest XML-Deviant, Micah Dubinko investigates the hidden
meaning behind several permathreads found on the XML-DEV mailing list.
XML-Deviant: XQuery's Niche
XML-Deviant: XQuery's Niche
12/29/2004 08:49 PMXQuery has been much hyped, but is it sufficiently different from XSLT
to be successful? Edd Dumbill follows a debate looking for XQuery's
niche.
XML-Deviant: Browser Boom
XML-Deviant: Browser Boom
07/14/2004 05:29 PMEdd Dumbill reports on the boom in web-browser innovation as well as
Mozilla and Opera's mysterious desertion of the W3C as a forum.
Grok Description matches for XML-Deviant: Eternal Refactoring
GrokA matches for XML-Deviant: Eternal Refactoring
XML-Deviant: Eternal Refactoring
