According to C|Net News

Amazon.com on Thursday unveiled a new service that lets bookworms search through pages of thousands of books available on its online store.

The service, dubbed "Search Inside the Book," lets people type in any keyword and receive results for all the pages and titles of various books that contain that term. In the past, Amazon customers could search only by author name, title or keyword.

I am impressed by how in one move Amazon made their search feature utterly useless. I just tried to search for "open source xml" and "java xml" books on Amazon it and it was a fucking disaster. Even the top 10 hits that were returned were polluted with books that simply had the words "Java" or "XML" somewhere in the book. In fact almost every search I tried returned Oracle9i JDeveloper Handbook  in the top 10. If ever a feature needed to be turned off by default it is this one.

 

Every once in a while I notice links from educational institutions that use my writings for their classes in my referrer logs. It gives me the warm fuzzies to know that I'm actually [indirectly] teaching a generation of CS geeks. In the past month I've seen the following referrers/references to my writings

•  1.125J Web System Architecting: Building Web Services offered at MIT uses RSS Bandit in their class work.
  
  
• CSE 544: Principles of Database Systems offered at the University of Washington uses An Exploration of XML in Database Management Systems
  
  
• CSE 1203: Java 2 offered at Monash University uses A Comparison of Microsoft's C# Programming Language to Sun Microsystems' Java Programming Language
  
  
• G22.3033-008 Web Services and Applications offered at New York University uses An Exploration of XML in Database Management Systems
  
  
• CS 538: C# offered at the University of Wisconsin - Madison uses A Comparison of Microsoft's C# Programming Language to Sun Microsystems' Java Programming Language
  
  
• CS 8803G: Object-Oriented Systems and Languages offered at Georgia Tech uses A Comparison of Microsoft's C# Programming Language to Sun Microsystems' Java Programming Language
  
  

My corrupting influence spreads...

 

I picked up a Belkin Mobile iPod FM Transmitter. on a whim last night. At first, I had issues with the amount of static and feedback that were being emitted from the speakers but once I figured out that I was supposed to turn down the volume on my iPod and turn it up on the car stereo it was heaven. Since this was an impulse buy I didn't shop around but if I had I may have decided on an iTrip instead since there are no dangling wires and batteries are not required. I'll see how I feel about the Belkin device in a week or so.

According to Slashdot, B0rg Central didn't have anything nice to say about the launch of iTunes on Windows. Looking beyond what seem like obvious sour grapes it is a bummer that iPods don't support the WMA format.

My favorite B0rg hater, Russell Beattie, has this to say about the iPod

So here's my thoughts: 1) The current iPod needs a successor and soon because consumers will start to balk at the B&W interface. 2) With the color screen and all that storage, it'd be dumb not to show multimedia like Photos and Video. 3) If Apple's going to show multimedia, they'll probably want to use Quicktime to do it... 4) If they're going that route, they'd need a Mobile OS to run it on. (Not to mention for other needs like supporting Wireless access to the iPod via WiFi or Bluetooth).

I guess I'm about the reveal myself as being a Luddite but I have no problem with the B & W iPod interface nor am I interested in taking pictures or playing videos on my music player. This annoying convergence of features has not interested me in my cell phone (which happen to have lost useful features over time like password protected address books for frivolous shit like games, web browsing and taking pictures) and I definitely don't want it in my music player especially if it keeps the price high instead of allowing it to drop to a more reasonable amount so I can pick up a few as Xmas gifts.

 

Many have complained about the fact that one of the major problems with RSS aggregators is the fact that if one uses an aggregator on multiple machines (such as at home and at work) then there is no easy way to synchronize the readers on both machines. This was one of the problems I set out to solve when I first started working on RSS Bandit, now thanks to some prodding from some of the co-developers on the RSS Bandit workspace multiple solutions have been implemented. Click below for details.
 

Dave Winer writes

Just had a phone talk with Scoble, and finally I have a clue why people use aggregators integrated with email clients. He had a couple of compelling reasons. 1. Since it's integrated with email he can easily forward an item to people he works with via email. 2. He has a folder where he drags items he wants to write about later. BTW he uses NewsGator. I still prefer the blog-style interface of Radio's aggregator.

Both of which are features RSS Bandit supports. There is one feature requested by Jeff Sandquist which Newsgator has and RSS Bandit does not; the ability to specify a username/password combo when accessing a particular feed. Torsten and I will see about getting this in by the weekend so Jeff can use it next week.

My bed beckons but so do my recent purchases that just arrived in the mail; Chinese Super Ninja and Shaolin Challenges Ninja.

Bah, sleep is for the weak.

 

The original impetus for designing XML was to create "SGML on the Web". Six years later, although XML has found widespread applicability in the software industry it seems to have failed at its original goal. Some thoughts about this follow.
 

Rob Volk writes

Is XML Evil?

About a month ago I was asked by a contractor I work with who needed to import some very plain, fixed-width, ASCII text file data into SQL Server. In fact, this SQL Team post is very much like his situation, in that he also was going to convert PLAIN, FIXED-WIDTH, ASCII TEXT (did I mention that already?) into XML and THEN import it into SQL Server...  <snip />

Fortunately (!) we use SQL Server 7.0 so none of the XML extensions were available for him to use. As it turned out I already had a bcp format file that could read the text format he needed to import. So, with ONE LINE OF SQL, I was able to do something he would have had to write over 100 lines of C# to parse the file, XML-ize it, and then save out to ANOTHER FILE so that he could import it (using about 12-20 lines of SQL, or more) Using bcp also would've entailed one DOS prompt command. Even DTS would've been harder to use to accomplish the same thing.

So, exactly how is XML making this process easier? Where is the ease of use and interoperability it's supposed to provide? I'm completely astounded that so many people have been so thoroughly brainwashed by the XML hype that they not only see it as the best way to do something, but as the ONLY WAY TO DO IT.

Situations like the above were my motivation for writing the article Understanding XML on MSDN. Using XML for a software development project buys you two things (a) the ability to interoperate better with others and (b) a number of off-the-shelf tools for dealing with format. If neither of these things apply to a given situation then it doesn't make much sense to use XML.

Applying the interoperability litmus test, unless the data in the text file in the situation described above is going to be shared with partners there really isn't any reason to convert it to XML to gain interoperability. Even then one could argue that it may make more sense to just pull out relevant data from the database and convert that to XML as needed when data needs to be exchanged with partners. As for the gains from off-the-shelf tools, given that there were already tools existing for the format used by the text file that performed the required task there really wasn't anything to be gained by converting it to XML.  

Applying this litmus test makes it fairly easy to figure out when to use XML and when using it isn't such a good idea. This is one of the reasons I consider articles such as Parsing RSS At All Costs as setting a bad example because they encourage the notion that it is OK to produce and consume ill-formed XML. Of course, once you do that you can't really interoperate with others and traditional XML tools cannot be used on the ill-formed documents so you might as well not be using XML.

 

I found a link to an article entitled The Great Walmart Wars via a link on Robert Scoble. The main thesis of the article is that although consumers like Walmart it is actually bad for the overall economy of a region, they don't their employees that highly and they drive smaller competitors out of business leading to homogenization.

I wasn't really interested in the veracity of the claims or otherwise. Instead what I found interesting was the overlap the article had with similar screeds I'd seen against large booksellers like Barnes & Nobles and Borders as well as a number of the rants on "Why Microsoft is Evil" style websites such as What's So Bad About Microsoft? on the No Pity For Microsoft website. The complaint about driving smaller competitors out of business seemed to be an underlying theme in such diatribes.

It seems that at a higher level the problem people seem to have is with the inherrent competitiveness of the capitalistic system. Few would argue that consumers have chosen with their feet that they prefer the goods and services of Walmart, Barnes & Nobles and Microsoft to those of their competitors due to being happier with their prices and convenience compared to alternatives. However the inherrent nature of competition is that there will be winners and that there will be losers. In a way, competition amongst producers in capitalist systems is a Zero Sum Game.

I am curious about examples of companies that have grown dominant in their particular markets without there being parties that complain about similar damage to the ecosystems of those particular markets. This would prove enlightening.

 

Tarantino serves up a homage to chop socky movies from yester-year including cameos from greats like Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu as well as beats from the Rza. Although it kicked off kind of slowly the movie was a feast to behold and laugh out loud funny in a bunch of places as well. Score: **** out of *****
 

The author of the "Reflecting on Microsoft" blog  writes

Why Doesn't Microsoft have a Blogging Tool?

Have you ever wondered why Microsoft doesn't produce a blogging tool? To me, it seems a surprising omission.

AOL seems to see a commercial opportunity to interest a significant proportion of its subscribers. However, so far as I am aware Microsoft has no plans in this direction.

Microsoft already offers Office to students at a discount. Why not offer a blogging tool too?

The odd thing ... at least it seems odd to me ... is that Microsoft has many of the parts of a great blogging tool already in place but the parts have not been brought together yet.

To me this has been the most interesting aspect of working at Microsoft. Before I was assimilated I'd hear complaints about lock-in and how people hated the fact that Microsoft was unfairly competing by building software products that competed with offerings from other companies or making products work better together. Since I used to hang out on Slashdot a lot I usually got the "Microsoft is a greedy, evil company that is trying to rule the software world" perspective.

Working in B0rg Cube I've found out that in many cases there is significant customer demand for the actions Microsoft takes that its competitors rail against. Customers do want everything and the kitchen sink to be built into the products they buy so they don't have to buy multiple products or deal with multiple vendors. I suspect the main problem people have with the Microsoft isn't that it tries to satisfy customer needs for more functionality and software that works better together but that in some cases it builds the software itself instead of licensing from others and thus contributing to the software ecosystem. From what I've seen this isn't the general case, in general this extra value is added by Microsoft Partners but in the cases where partners become competitors there are always hard feelings.

Disclaimer: The above comments do not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer. They are solely my opinion.