J.C. Penney Rules June
Grok Headline matches for J.C. Penney Rules June
J.C. Penney on the Rise
J.C. Penney on the Rise
08/17/2004 05:16 PMThe retailer hits its stride after shedding Eckerd Drugstores.
A Penney Saved
A Penney Saved
01/26/2004 04:06 PMThe department store retailer cuts jobs and restructures.
Perky Days for J.C. Penney
Perky Days for J.C. Penney
05/18/2004 10:17 AMThis cornerstone of the American mall is outrunning its rivals.
Penney Kicks Drugstore Habit
Penney Kicks Drugstore Habit
08/03/2004 10:53 AMThe retailer has completed its sale of Eckerd Drugs to focus on
selling clothes.
Damien Penney has a few comments for
Chomskyites:
Damien Penney has a few comments for
Chomskyites:
12/09/2003 06:10 AMCATCHING NOAM CHOMSKY IN A LIE, .. read on Daimnation .. taken to task
.. Damian Penny
damianpenny.com/archives/002022.html
track this
site | 5 links
Internet sales at J.C. Penney rise 40%
in first half
Internet sales at J.C. Penney rise 40%
in first half
08/02/2004 08:27 PMInternetRetailer.com Aug 3 2004 0:45AM GMT
Recent Forum Discussions (June 13 - June
19, 2005)
Recent Forum Discussions (June 13 - June
19, 2005)
06/22/2005 02:40 AMThe MacMerc Forums are an excellent
place to ask questions about something you're trying to do with your
Mac or post
comments about the news floating around the Mac web. Here are a few
threads that...
[~ This is just a sample, visit MacMerc.com for the full story! ~]
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: June 13, 2004 - June 19, 2004
Archives
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: June 13, 2004 - June 19, 2004
Archives
06/17/2004 04:37 PMBush seeking political favors from the Vatican .. Josh at Talking
Points Memo .. No, you can
not
talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_13.php#003065
track
this site | 4 links
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: June 20, 2004 - June 26, 2004
Archives
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: June 20, 2004 - June 26, 2004
Archives
06/22/2004 04:37 AMAckerman reports that the anonymous intelligence agent doesn't think
we can win a battle of ideas in the Muslim countries .. Here's a
depressing article .. bloody-handed fantasist ..
Click
talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.php#003082
track
this site | 5 links
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: June 06, 2004 - June 12, 2004
Archives
Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah
Marshall: June 06, 2004 - June 12, 2004
Archives
06/07/2004 05:12 PMTalking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: June 06, 2004 - June
12, 2004 Archives .. something big that Kevin didn't see .. Josh
Marshall has more ..
TPM
talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_06_06.php#003046
track
this site | 4 links
Web sales at J.C. Penney rise 40%
year-over-year in first half
Web sales at J.C. Penney rise 40%
year-over-year in first half
08/17/2004 05:43 PMInternetRetailer.com Aug 17 2004 9:36PM GMT
GeorgeWBush.com :: Official Blog :: June
20, 2004 - June 26, 2004 Archive
GeorgeWBush.com :: Official Blog :: June
20, 2004 - June 26, 2004 Archive
06/25/2004 10:19 AMBush Campaign Web Ad: Kerry's Coalition Of The Wild-Eyed (Excellent)
.. left is going bonkers .. Calm
Optimism
georgewbush.com/blog/archives/week_2004_06_20.html#001194track
this site | 6 links
Matthew Yglesias: June 20, 2004 - June
26, 2004 Archives
Matthew Yglesias: June 20, 2004 - June
26, 2004 Archives
06/23/2004 07:43 AMMatthew Yglesias' mom passed on today at age 53 .. who lost his mother
today ..
died
matthewyglesias.com/archives/week_2004_06_20.html#003606
track
this site | 5 links
Court Rules Evel Knievel Is A Pimp;
Knievel Rules Judges Are Bimbos
Court Rules Evel Knievel Is A Pimp;
Knievel Rules Judges Are Bimbos
01/04/2005 08:20 PMReally not quite sure what to make of this one, but it's too amusing
to pass up. Apparently, a few years ago, ESPN posted a picture of
famed daredevil Evel Knievel with his arms around two women (one of
whom was his wife) with the caption: "You're never too old to be a
pimp." Knievel, not realizing this was a (weak) attempt at
complimenting him, sued ESPN for defamation. A lower court tossed out
the ruling, and he appealed. Now the Appeals Court has ruled against
him as well, noting that, based on the context no one is actually
going to think Knievel is a "pimp," and, in fact that the statement
was supposed to be a positive one, as the slang of the day suggests.
Knievel, apparently lacking a sense of irony over this particular
case, has responded by
calling the judges
"bimbos." The full quote is: "They ruled against the law. What
good is law in the United States of America if five or six goddamn
bimbos are going to rule against it?" You think he intended that as a
compliment? Anyway, in the meantime, feel free to go on captioning
photos on the web while calling people pimps.
Online Resume Rules Sound Like Offline
Resume Rules
Online Resume Rules Sound Like Offline
Resume Rules
09/13/2004 02:14 PMUSA Today is claiming that the
rules have changed for resumes, now that they're
mostly sent via email instead of snail mail. However, when they get
into the details, they sound amazingly like the "rules" many of us
learned back in the days before you emailed resumes: focus on results
from previous jobs (read: throw in lots of useless percentages to make
it look like you improved something), use "descriptive or significant
terms" (read: make sure you include the BS buzzwords-of-the-moment to
make it through that first pass filter), don't send the wrong cover
letter to the wrong company (read: don't be completely stupid), and
don't apply "above your skill level" (read: don't waste HR's time so
much). I remember hearing all of these years ago as well, and they
don't seem any different in this "new age of electronic resumes" as
the article would have you believe. Then, of course, there's the
biggest recommendation for this supposed new age: they suggest you
spam as many companies as possible. Again, has there ever been a time
when people were told to send out
fewer resumes? If anything,
it seems like this strategy is the
wrong strategy in the
digital age where HR folks are
so
inundated with resumes that some have found that going back to
paper
resumes is much more effective in getting attention.
Some Like It Hot in June
Some Like It Hot in June
07/08/2004 03:23 PMHow did several women's apparel retailers fare during a fickle month
for retail?
What should I do between June 4 and June
10?
What should I do between June 4 and June
10?
05/19/2004 06:03 PMAs you can see, I have to be in Naples on June 4 and Helsinki on
June 10. It's kind of a waste to fly back to Japan and turn around and
fly back to Europe again. Is there anything interesting going on, or
can we make something interesting happen in Europe between June 4 and
June 10? I've started a wiki
page to think about what to do between the 4th and the 10th. If
you have any ideas, let me know. Thanks!
"June 11, 2004 09:36 AM
"
"June 11, 2004 09:36 AM
"
06/15/2004 12:12 AMSunbeams, June 10
Sunbeams, June 10
06/10/2004 01:14 PMI’ve subscribed the aggregated feed over at
Planet Sun, mostly in curiosity at
how this experiment turns out. Since we’re now somewhere around 300
contributors and growing fast, I won’t be able to keep up down the
road; but at the moment I do see a lot of interesting stuff go by, and
what I’ll do is aggregate the bits that catch my eye every little
while here under the label
Sunbeams. Today’s take includes
Moazam Raja on
Omniscient Debugging (I’ve subscribed
to Moazam separately, he’s essential), Hung-Sheng Tsao on
all sorts of geeky
sysadmin stuff, Frank Lagorio’s
scorching smackdown of marketing in
Sarbanes-Oxley space, Ron Ten-Hove on
JBI (the programmer’s-eye view into Web Services),
Josh Simons’
adorable albino squirrel (I’m not kidding, check it out), and
finally MCWong’s must-read
guide to Kopi in Singapore.
June 20, 2005
June 20, 2005
06/22/2005 02:35 AM
“The software development world
desperately needs better writing. If I have to read another 2000 page
book about some class library written by 16 separate people
in broken ESL, I’m going to flip out. If I see another hardback book
about object oriented models written with dense faux-academic
pretentiousness, I’m not going to shelve it any more in the Fog
Creek library: it’s going right in the recycle bin. If I have to
read another spirited attack on Microsoft’s buggy code by an
enthusiastic nine year old Trekkie on Slashdot, I might just poke my
eyes out with a sharpened pencil. Stop it, stop it, stop
it!”
That's from my introduction to The Best
Software Writing I: Selected and Introduced by Joel Spolsky, now
in bookstores. It includes 29 great short pieces of brilliant,
insightful, and often hysterically funny stuff about software. You can
read the introduction here.
June 13, 2005
June 13, 2005
06/17/2005 02:22 PM
The
interns report: “In Aardvark, for
example, I initially attached some new connection-specific handshaking
code inside a class that controlled the windows taskbar icon for our
program. That probably sounds a bit silly, but it actually made a
reasonable amount of sense.” Riiight.
Meeting up in the UK June 6?
Meeting up in the UK June 6?
05/26/2004 04:43 PMPlanning on arriving in the UK on June 6th. Anyone want to get
together in the evening?
I've set up a
wiki page to plan this.
June Zeitgeist
June Zeitgeist
07/03/2004 11:13 PM # % Search String
–––––––––––––––––––––––
–––––– 1034 7.7 % free ram 840 6.2 % cicada pictures
598 4.4 % .dmg 458 3.4 % dmg 329 2.4 % madthumbs 230 1.7 % buick grand
national 170 1.2 % movietitan 155 1.1 % itunes remote...
June 21, 2005
June 21, 2005
06/22/2005 02:35 AM
Some reviews of The Best Software Writing
I:
Rooneg:
:Weblog: “The whole book is fantastic though, and you should
absolutely pick it up when it's available in dead tree form, I know I
intend to.”
Marc A. Garrett:
“Mr. Spolsky, with the help of his readers, has assembled an
outstanding collection of essays. A few of them are likely to be as
relevant five years from now as they are today, and that’s saying
something. Highly recommended.”
Where else can you get Rory's hysterical comic strip about how
people use Excel as a database ("I'll have to take a photo of the
printout with my Kodak Funtime digital camera...") alongside Adam
Bosworth's ISCON talk saying basically the same thing ("That software
which is flexible, simple, sloppy, tolerant, and altogether forgiving
of human foibles and weaknesses turns out to be actually the most
steel-cored...")? Where else will you find Bruce Eckel's proposal to
use unit tests as a replacement for strong type checking to insure
correctness of applications written in late-bound scripting languages,
alongside Leon Bambrick's hysterical critique of Windows Search ("Why
is a dog asking me questions?") Where else will you find the most
important writing about social interfaces, from danah boyd's brilliant
dismissal of social networking products ("Why on earth should we
encourage people to perform a mental disorder in the digital world?")
to Clay Shirky on Kaycee Nicole ("changing your identity is really
weird")?
Well... on the inkernet, I guess, but if you like to read in the
bath, while driving, or in the Himalayas, or you want to preserve your
eyesight for that hunting trip you've been planning, you should read
the dead-trees version.
The Best Software I is available from Amazon.com and on all the local Amazon
sites (although some of the international ones still have an old title
for the book -- you'll have to search for "Joel Spolsky"). And I was
just joking about reading while driving.
June 15, 2005
June 15, 2005
06/17/2005 02:21 PM
Recruiting
To
Gretchen: recruiting successfully isn't only up to recruiters. The
best recruiting department in the world can't make people want to work
at a company that's moribund, that can't figure
out how to ship a compelling upgrade to their flagship OS, or
update their flagship database server more than once every five years,
that has added tens of thousands of technical workers who aren't
adding any dollars to the bottom line, and that constantly annoys twenty year veterans by playing Furniture
Police games over what office furniture they are and aren't
allowed to have. Summer interns at Fog Creek have better
chairs, monitors, and computers than the most senior Microsoft
programmers.
Recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at the
Gretchen level. No matter how good a recruiter you are, you can't
compensate for working at a company that people don't want to work
for; you can't compensate for being the target of eight years of fear
and loathing from the slashdot community, which very closely overlaps
the people you're trying to recruit, and you can't compensate for the
fact that a company with a market cap of $272 billion just ain't going to see their stock price go up. MSFT can grow by
an entire Google every year and still see less than 7%
growth in earnings. You can be the best recruiter in the world and the
talent landscape is not going to look very inviting if the executives
at your company have spent the last years focusing on cutting benefits, cutting
off oxygen supplies, and c
utting features from Longhorn.
Network Load Balancing Works
For the first time ever I was able to install today's round of
Microsoft patches on our web servers without bringing the sites down
at all. I'm very happy about this, since this was the main point of
upgrading the web farm.
We have two web servers, web1.fogcreek.com and web2.fogcreek.com,
each with their own IP address, but using a feature built into Windows
2003 called Network Load Balancing, they both share
the web site load using a third IP address, which I've named
webnlb.fogcreek.com. Whenever a request comes in on that shared IP
address, it is distributed to one of the web servers at random. If
requests come in from the same class C address range, those requests
will prefer to go to the same web server that previously served that
address range. So for the most part the same user will always go to
the same physical machine, if possible, so stateful web applications
still work even if the state is maintained on one computer.
I actually like the NLB system a bit more than using a dedicated
hardware load balancer. Here's why: there's no single point of
failure. If you have a hardware load balancer and that needs to be
updated or rebooted or if it fails, you're off the air. Whereas
Windows NLB is all-software and each server in the cluster is a peer,
so any server can die and the rest of the system stays up.
When I needed to install today's Windows updates, here's what I
did:
- Told WEB1 to drainstop. That means "finish serving any requests
you're working on, but don't take any new requests." This took three
or four minutes before it flatlined; WEB2 silently picked up the
entire load.
- Installed the upgrades on WEB1 and rebooted it.
- Repeat for WEB2, while WEB1 held up the entire load.
As far as I can tell nobody should have seen a single hiccup in the
sites served from the new web farm.
June 02, 2005
June 02, 2005
06/05/2005 11:33 PM
Michael Pryor reports: “Once you get
Subversion set up and running, if you are on Windows, you will be
amazed at how useful a good Subversion client can be. Steve King has
created a fantastic piece of software, the TortoiseSVN client, and he
has spent some time making sure that it works perfectly with
FogBugz.”
Mystery from next door
We share the floor of our building with a
contracting firm, White&Carr, who moved in shortly after we did.
We were always on good terms with them, and they seemed like a
generic, successful contracting company. They were talking about
opening a new office in Philly.
The founder of the firm, Raymond White, often came by our office to
chat and be neighborly. Some of you may have met him at our open house
last year.
A few weeks ago, as I left the office, I noticed a woman banging on
the door to the office. "Have you seen anyone from this company
lately?"
I hadn't. But I told her that Raymond had an apartment down the
street. "Did you check his apartment?"
"He's not there either," she said.
As the weeks went by we noticed nobody was coming or going, and we
could see under the door that an awful lot of mail was piling up
there.
The landlord told us they had stopped paying their rent. The
building super told us that the workers stopped coming in to work
because they weren't getting paid.
Weird.
I'll bet you think I'm going to tell you what happened. I don't
know!
June 17, 2005
June 17, 2005
06/17/2005 02:21 PM
Folks, give Robert Scoble a break. Folks over at Microsoft
are feeling a little defensive these days, and he just wanted to point
out that Microsoft can still be a great place to work. Apparently
Hillary Clinton, the President of Indochina, had lunch with Malcolm
Gladwell there, where they signed his super tablet computer. Rock
on.
That wasn't really my point. My post was replying to a
n article by a recruiter at Microsoft who complained about the
talent landscape:
“Hiring Managers (and I’m referring to Microsoft Hiring
Managers … but I know this problem exists in other companies) not
‘getting’ the talent landscape. Not only do they not
seem to understand that brilliant software engineers don’t grow on
trees (you don’t, do you?) … but they can’t seem to get it
through their heads that 1) Microsoft isn’t the only place
hiring, 2) Working at a big company isn’t everyone’s dream, and
3) Redmond is not the first place people say they want to move
when they wake up in the morning.”
That's a recruiter who works for Microsoft talking, not
me.
So, my point to Gretchen, sympathetically, was,
“recruiting has to be done at the Bill and Steve level, not at
the Gretchen level.” Want to solve Microsoft's recruiting
problem? Open a downtown development center in Pioneer Square and
another one South of Market in San Francisco. Then split up the
company into lots of small, well-funded startups and give people stock
options in their own products, which actually have a fighting chance
of growing. Then create some spinoffs with their own personality. Spin
off X-Box so it feels more like a cool gaming startup rather than a
big corporate “General Motors Trying to Sell Hip Things to an
Appealing Demographic.” I'm sure there are a million other
ideas, but none of the kind of decisions that would make Microsoft an
even more attractive workplace are in the hands of the recruiting
department or even the hiring managers. No wonder there's so much
frustration.
Years and years and years ago when I started this site I
wrote that “a software company has to think of recruiting
the right people as its number one problem.”. After five years
of running Fog Creek I still think that way, which is why we set up Project Aardvark.
Seth Godin wrote: “I feel sorry for Judy Verses. She's the Chief
Marketing Officer of Verizon, a brand that is justifiably reviled by
millions of people. Is Verizon disdained, mistrusted and avoided
because Judy's not doing a great job? Of course not. She's doing a
great job.”
Read what Seth has to say. Marketing is the CEO's job,
since that's the only person who can really drive the kinds of changes
that the public cares about. And recruiting is the CEO's job,
too.
June 15, 2004
June 15, 2004
06/15/2004 08:38 AM
Oh, goody, FireFox 0.9 is
here. And it's less than a 5 MB download. I have long since switched
to FireFox for web browsing. I switched for the popup blocking but I
stayed for the tabbed browsing.
Here are three reasons to switch web browsers today:
- You'll get fewer viruses and you'll get no annoying
popups asking you if you want to install lame spyware that will ruin
your computer forcing a complete reinstall.
- You can open all your bookmarks in tabs, all at once, and let them
download in the background while you read them.
- You'll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers.
Microsoft took over the browser market fair and square by making a
better product, but they were so afraid that Web-based applications
would eliminate the need for Windows that they locked the IE team in a
dark dungeon and they haven't allowed improvements to IE for several
years now. Now Firefox is the better product and there's a glimmer of
hope that one day DHTML will actually improve to the point where
web-based applications are just as good as Windows-based
applications.
June Harvest
June Harvest
06/17/2005 04:39 PMPretty well all of my creative energies in recent days have been
consumed in thrashing at the Java underbrush, so instead of actually
thinking and writing, I’ll cough up some undigested links, ain’t
the Web grand? First, this Mati
sse Project demo has been getting tons o’ buzz, but what I like is the silky-smooth Czech
accent. Second, Dervala’s friend Tim Vetter got an astounding
Mission-district picture. Third, David Megginson simultaneously explored Ruby on
Rails and PHP, never previously having considered either; his
conclusion may be surprising. Fourth, Clint Combs writes up anot
her interesting RSS/Atom app. Finally, John Cowan is
pumping out technolinguisticophilosophical gems, several per day in
recent days, don’t miss ’em.
W3C Talks in June
W3C Talks in June
06/05/2005 10:46 PM2005-06-01: Browse W3C presentations and events also available as an
RSS channel. (News archive)
Sunbeams, June 13
Sunbeams, June 13
06/14/2004 12:26 AMHerewith the latest harvest from the Sunbloggin’ posse:
John Clingan is
on a bit of a roll; his top quote questions the whole “technology
analyst” ballgame, and second from the top, he washes some dirty Sun
laundry in public (who says we don’t let it all hang out?). Eduardo
Pelegri-Llopart does
some basic
consciousness-raising about J2EE and Application Servers. And
Martin Hardee
writes about the horrendous difficulty of keeping
something like Sun.com organized and (ideally) useful; that’s a
problem I wouldn’t be brave enough to anywhere near.
MSNBC - And Its Only June
MSNBC - And Its Only June
06/27/2004 04:47 AMOn Friday, Democrats and Republicans went to war over a new Bush
reelection campaign ad that uses images of Adolph Hitler in bashing
Democrat John Kerry .. MSNBC - And It's Only June! .. The Newsweek
article
msnbc.msn.com/id/5298664/site/newsweek
track this
site | 3 links
The June Builder.com top 10
The June Builder.com top 10
07/20/2002 12:59 AMCNET Jul 20 2002 0:14AM ET
June 17, 2004
June 17, 2004
06/17/2004 05:57 PM
The Web Hypertext Applications
Technology Working Group is working on extending HTML4 forms to
make Web applications work better.
In the previous rounds of HTML enhancement, the world's great
graphic designers (like Jeffrey Zeldman) made the most noise and got
us things like CSS which allow the kind of pixel-perfect page layout
that the marketing people like, done in an intelligent way that
separates content from presentation. Kudos. They got what they wanted,
mostly, and quieted down. Now it's time for us application developers
to start clamoring for the features we need to develop great web
applications. Here are some examples of the kinds of features I'd like
to see in web browsers:
- Improved inline editing (step one: make contentEditable work in
Gecko just like it does in IE 5.5+)
- Javascript features to do fast REST queries back to the server, so
I can implement things like a lush spell checker with the dictionary
on the server. It should be possible to have a 300,000 employee
directory on the server and create a web app that has a list box where
you can type the first few letters of an employee's name and see a
filtered list as fast as you can type on the screen.
- A rich set of standard controls for application development that
provide better ways to upload files, better ways to drag and drop with
the desktop, etc
- Compiled or compressed JavaScript, so that web applications can
use really large amounts of JavaScript with decent performance
- Better standardized windowing features. At the very least I'd like
modal and modeless dialogs that pop up instantly, a standard
way to do a menu inside a web page (with ONE consistent UI, not
everybody's wacky DHTML menu that are all a bit different), TreeView
and ListView controls, and a standard way to make a
toolbar/button bar
- The ability to get a "device context" (in a platform neutral way)
on an HTML control and wail on it to paint just about anything you
want
- A far richer set of events. At the very least I need to be able to
use the entire keyboard. Combined with #6 I should be able to develop
any custom control I want that is 100% client side.
- Media integration, so I can play sounds or stream music in
standard ways without relying on <objects>
- Graceful degradation for legacy browsers (IE. It's time to make
Microsoft play catchup again. Fire and Motion Baby.)
This is just a random list, nothing organized. These things
would have happened if browser development hadn't ground to a
halt in the late 90s due to the misgu
ided Netscape-rewrite-project and the
lock-IE-developers-in-a-dungeon project.
What I do not want to hear about:
- Proprietary tools like Macromedia's or Java Applets that embed
clever widgets in rectangles in a browser. I want this stuff
integrated with DHTML and CSS, deeply in the fabric of the web
- Things that don't have any chance of degrading gracefully on
legacy browsers. You have to be able to construct an interface that
gets better if you install Firefox, but still works on IE, without too
much testing on the part of the developer.
- Boil the ocean schemes that require 400,000,000 users to install
some thingamajig before you get anything useful. Such schemes will not
go anywhere.
What are your ideas for improving the HTML/CSS/JavaScript
infrastructure to make web app development better? Write them up and
post them somewhere; I'll point to the best ones from my blog. Please
don't email me your suggestions -- post them on the web and email me a
link so everyone can benefit. I just don't have enough time for
private email conversations (yesterday's API Wars article generated
well over 200 thoughtful email messages which I can never hope to
respond to adequately). It's time for application developers to start
clamoring for the next generation of the Web now that the graphic
designers got their wish list taken care of.
Sunbeams, June 16
Sunbeams, June 16
06/17/2004 03:48 AMSimon Phipps’
FISL: In
Translation is an elegant argument for expanding your language
repertoire and your mind; Richard Giles has one nifty little piece
about
bass vibrato and Google and another on how his new
self-publishing podium has
opened some doors for him. Ron Ten-Hove gives us
a
small, densely-written essay about metadata in the Web
Services context. Brian Cantrill’s
remarkab
le opening outing dives deep, with a metaphorical side-trip
through cerebral malaria, into
dtrace, which is
causing some heavy heartbeats among kernel-weenies. On a lighter note,
our GNU Desktop Mechanic pens an
ode
to Bloomsday from Denver, Dave Edmondson gives his car an
enterprise-clas
s audio upgrade (you
have to see this to believe
it), and Scott Hudson
takes home a Star Destroyer. (No,
ongoing is not going to turn into BoingBoing, I miss
writing the longer bits and will again, it’s just that between
coding furiously on the Zeppelin and den-mothering the Sunblogfloggers
well I’m busy.)
June 25, 2004
June 25, 2004
06/25/2004 03:53 PM
Brendan Eich recently wro
te: “The best way to help the Web is to incrementally
improve the existing web standards, with compatibility shims provided
for IE, so that web content authors can actually deploy new formats
interoperably.”
Dave Shea nicely summarizes the conversation about web applications.
“The recession is over, the slump is ended. Web development is
in demand, and the demand is only going to increase.”
Patrick Breitenbach pointed me to General Interface, a company
that has built a commercial windowing/UI system on top of DHTML
allowing almost-rich-client-apps inside the browser. They lean a bit
too heavily on IE-only features for now and the overall look is more
like a rich client app than a web app (very much like Oddpost), but
hey, it's one way to do it.
Ben Nolan has a
dusty library called phplive. “It's event driven programming for
the web - but the whole page isn't refreshed - whenever you click a
button, focus an element, or fire any event that has a handler on the
server - an RPC call is dispatched to the server...”
I
an Hickson of Opera: “Our own position was that any
successful framework would have to be backwards compatible with the
existing Web content, and would have to be largely implementable in
Windows IE6 without using binary plug-ins (for example using scripted
HTCs). We were the only ones to even remotely suggest that the
solution should be based on HTML.”
Espen Antonsen shares his wishlist: “As a web
developer I find many tasks more time consuming and difficult to
accomplish when building a web application - we develop a web-based
ERP system.”
SysAdmin Week
I just wanted to announce that SysAdmin Week will hence be known as
"SysAdmin Fortnight."
June 23, 2004
June 23, 2004
06/23/2004 10:24 PM
SysAdmin Week
This week is sysadmin week, in
which I catch up on a few months of accumulated system administration
headaches.
On Monday I went down to Peer 1
Networks' colocation facility in New York, where the main Joel on
Software server lives. Peer 1 provides free bandwidth and a wee
shelf (shown at right) for Joel on Software, for
which I am extremely grateful. Michael and I installed the original
server there about a year and a half ago, and it's been running fine
ever since, down only because of Windows Updates. (Don't get
me started.) Sometimes the server didn't come back up properly after
one of the reboots required for patching Windows, so we installed a
remote controlled power strip, which has a web interface allowing us
to power cycle the server. There's supposed to be such a thing built
into the server itself, something Dell makes called RAC, but it
crashes more often than the server, requiring a full power cycle to
get it back to life, which defeats the purpose...
Anyway the reason I went down on Monday was to slide in another 1U
Dell server into the rack which will serve as a "hot backup" in case
the main server dies. I'm going to set up some simple replication from
the main server to the hot backup so we should be able to switch back
and forth between the main server and the backup server without more
than a few seconds of downtime. The replication will use robocopy for
files and log shipping for SQL databases like the database behind the
discussion group.
Peer 1, by the way, is doing incredibly well. When I installed the
server there last winter they only had two rows of racks, mostly
empty. On Monday when I went down there the whole data center was
crammed with racks and they were turning away new customers until they
could arrange for a bigger data center. Joe Cooper, the NY manager,
told me they had gone from 20% to 90% capacity in their colo facility
and were trying to reserve the remaining 10% for existing customers. A
nice problem to have. I couldn't be happier with their hosting
services and they're the nicest people, so even though I'm completely
tainted since they host my site for free, I most heartily recommend
them if you're looking for colocation (or wicker furniture, har dee har
har).
June 23, 2005
June 23, 2005
06/24/2005 03:18 PM
The Best Software Writing I is #1 in
computer books on Amazon!
The publisher told me they sold out of the first printing in three
days. Apparently it is completely whuping "PMP Exam Prep (4th
Edition)", which is number 2. They probably didn't think to put Leon Bambrick's drawing
of a cow in their book.
Her
Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, on Sony UI
design: "I have a lot of trouble with your
remote controls. Too many arrows." Me too.
SFR to launch 3G in June
SFR to launch 3G in June
02/11/2004 03:02 PMTelecoms.com Feb 11 2004 6:15PM GMT
Grok Description matches for J.C. Penney Rules June
GrokA matches for J.C. Penney Rules June
J.C. Penney Rules June
