dive into mark

Apple: Developing for the J2EE Tomcat Platform Training Course. This is the course I’m teaching. It’s a 5-day course; the next class begins Monday, January 14th, 2002. To register, call 1-800-848-6398 and select option 3.

Microsoft: Windows Desktop Product Lifecycle Guidelines. [via Scripting News] This is a graphic (literally) representation of what I was talking about yesterday: falling off the back end of the upgrade treadmill. I know people who are still running Windows 95. It is now dangerous to run Windows 95, because security hotfixes are no longer released for it.

SGML/XML Tools for Macintosh [via XML Cover Pages]

Several kind readers emailed me various ways to set the default buffer size for CMD prompts. Basically, it’s a registry value (figures), in an inconvenient format (figures again). The height and width are both stored in one value; the low word is the width, the high word is the height. This will set it to 80 x 4096:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Console]
“ScreenBufferSize”=dword:20000050

So if I can figure out where in the registry each of my piddly little settings is stored, I can create a (plain text) .reg file and just double-click it when I set up a new computer. Marvelous. So the only hard part is discovering where in the blasted registry each setting is stored, but once I find each one, I can add it to the file and never have to find it again. Marvelous again. I can’t imagine why I haven’t done this before.

Here’s another one to play with and put in my .reg customization file:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
“User Agent”=”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Win32)”

MSNBC: Google targets catalog business [via Tomalak's Realm] Actually, a more appropriate headline would be “Google aims to partner with catalogs”, since vendors still have to produce the catalogs that Google then scans (with optical character recognition), parses, and makes searchable. With some pending strategic partnerships (mentioned in the article), Google could get pay-per-click kickbacks by allowing users to click on pictures of items in the scanned catalog and redirecting them straight to the correct page on the vendor’s own web site where the user can buy the item. That’s integration, baby.

IBM DeveloperWorks: XML-RPC as object model. [via Daily Python-URL]

XML-RPC is a remote function invocation protocol with a great virtue: It is worse than all of its competitors. Compared to Java RMI or CORBA or COM, XML-RPC is impoverished in the type of data it can transmit and obese in its message size. XML-RPC abuses the HTTP protocol to circumvent firewalls that exist for good reasons, and as a consequence transmits messages lacking statefulness and incurs channel bottlenecks. Compared to SOAP, XML-RPC lacks both important security mechanisms and a robust object model. As a data representation, XML-RPC is slow, cumbersome, and incomplete compared to native programming language mechanisms like Java’s serialize, Python’s pickle, Perl’s Data::Dumper, or similar modules for Ruby, Lisp, PHP, and many other languages.

In other words, XML-RPC is the perfect embodiment of Richard Gabriel’s “worse-is-better” philosophy of software design (see Resources). I can hardly write more glowingly on XML-RPC than I did in the previous paragraph…

Ximian: Red Carpet Express [via Slashdot] Ximian, makers of a very popular version of the GNONE desktop for Linux, is moving to a premium subscription service. The regular free service will still be available, but it will be slower (bandwidth throttling) and offer fewer updates (security fixes and base system updates, but not popular third-party software like VMWare).

Note that this portends (is that a word?) two payment models for software: pay up front / get free updates (Mac OS, Windows), free up front / pay as you go (Ximian). There is always the “choice” of getting Linux (even the Ximian desktop) for free up front and manually updating forever, but few people know how to do this, fewer will do it properly, and doing so will eventually become so complex that people and companies who care about staying current will inevitably subscribe to a service like this (maybe from Ximian, maybe from a distribution vendor like RedHat, maybe somebody else — the field is wide open because none of the players actually own the software they’re updating, so it’ll be harder for them to lock anybody else out).

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