Googlisms - hours (well, minutes...) of fun.

Vignette acquires Epicentric.

Yoz Grahame writes Chandler: The return of Lotus Agenda some good reasons to keep an eye on OSAF.

We tend to think of software functionality as being on a linear good-bad scale. Good tech evolves and thrives, bad tech dies. Yet this is one case where some obviously good technology had to sit in the dustbin of history for many years before being revived; it's lucky it's being revived at all (and it still may not be, given Chandler's current non-existence).

(via BoingBoing)
I ___ her lifeless body from the pool
What do you call the long sandwich...?
What do you call the night before Halloween?
...and this one baffles me: What do you call an easy course?

Steve Gillmore: Not Fade Away - a long and winding ramble through Web Services and stuff. He's quoting Groove's John Burkhardt

Groove is being transformed by edge services. "[Microsoft] is trying to figure out how to build massively scalable applications that they're going to run on these megaservers that can handle millions of clients hammering on this thing," Burkhardt says. With Groove, he says, "now you have your own little, personal SOAP server."

More from sweetcode: evilfinder. Type the name of your bogeyman-du-jour. Refresh, repeat.

"As file sharing and internetradio bring better music than ever straight into your home, there is still one reason left to listen to your local radio stations: local news". Matrix Public Net gives a way to do this. (via the incomparable sweetcode)

(via Hoejberg) Wifi's Next Hot Spot: You. Am I alone in feeling this -- anything with near-skin-contact 802.11 -- might get a little too hot? There are better technologies (lower power, different band, even non-RF) for the purpose.

On the other hand, I wish my new toy camera had (a) 802.11b, and (b) a Web server built in. "http://camera/". It has a chunky enough processor and tons of memory, after all.

For the curious: a few photos. 1, 2, 3, 4. Nice place, this.

Don Park says "What I am afraid of is the erosion in the sense of value for software... I believe OSAF is a richman's Destructive Crusade against Microsoft's monopoly". Maybe so.

Of course I'm totally in favour of selling software (having spent a large part of my working life at companies which primarily sell software rather than services). I think there will always be software worth paying for, on whatever grounds you justify its cost. Also, it'll always be possible to build various network-centered control points - think servers - in any interesting system; those can turn an application into a service line. Subscription games. Hosted facilities.

Open source infrastructure, or commodity tools, are a great thing. Publishing free software creates a commodity category (and often the best, if not the most used, products in that category). Ximian Evolution is quite close to a commodity app; it's roughly feature-parity with the market leader. But I think OSAF will be significantly different: we haven't seen a massively-successful Agenda-style application, ever. This is not (at least initially) a commodity play.

Mitch Kapor has a weblog where he introduces the Open Source Applications Foundation and its future product. (The technology is more interesting than the feature list). This could be quite interesting.

Sam Ruby asks a good question in Dealing with Diversity: what's '1'+'2'? A great story; provocative, too.

Even the really base datatypes are so hard. Strings, I talked about a while ago. Dates? (I clearly remember an erudite three-page essay in "misc/time.h" many years ago). Numbers: don't even get me started on numbers.

Then the kids come along and spoil things. Dylan started playing with Python. What happens if I write "abc" * 5, he asks. Well, son, that's.... (eek! abcabcabcabcabc I was not expecting.)

(via Scott Loftesness) Gartner's ten predictions for the next eight years. My take on some of these:

I'm looking for cheap Linux web&mail hosting, to move this site away. Hubnut have done well, but had problems recently, and I'm feeling the pain of my server being across the pond. Any suggestions?

John B writes:

One advantage that people have claimed about REST is that it can take advantage of caching, but its debatable whether or not this really makes sense in a Web Service.

Why is this important? Because [a REST-ish "network-based API" vs. library-based API] differentiates a system where network intermediaries can be effective agents from a system where they can be, at most, routers.

John Robb:

The inevitable: we will all eventually have the vast majority of books, movies, and music ever produced on our hard-drives. How it gets there is the only question left.

Microsoft XDocs may look like FrontPage, but sounds really quite interesting: a proper schema-driven XML editing environment. Now, if that were the native format for Sharepoint, could be fun. Or plugged into a distributed XML environment?

It's Groove's fifth anniversary - Ray has written some thoughts, including some really fascinating background material.

Uche Ogbuchi: The Past, Present and Future of Web Services. Part 1 covers the past: part two next week. Must reading.