Moving Day- October 13, 2003 This will very likely be is the last post at this weblog. After some delay, all the parts are in place, and I have a new weblog at www.eighty-twenty.netblog, and I expect that all my future posting will take place there. I'm attempting to redirect the RSS feed, but I'm actually not sure how many aggregators support this, and AFAIK, there's no way to get Userland's servers to do a proper 301, so we'll see. Update: It looks like none of the 3 aggregators I tried (NewsGator,...http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/10/12.html#a328 Intuit and the lost art of personal finance programs- October 9, 2003 Ted Leung relates his frustration with Intuit. Intuit lost me long before the DRM thing, by acting like a bunch of used car salesmen. These days, you install Quicken and get 10 icons on your desktop and spend weeks turning off the screens asking if you want to give more money to Intuit. I recently found a Python based checkbook program, as well as CBB, written in Perl. My demands aren't much more than something that will let me balance my checkbook and keep track of my mortgage, and maybe...http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/10/09.html#a327 Python in DrScheme- October 4, 2003 Matthias Felleisen announced that the latest CVS for DrScheme allows you to write Python in DrScheme. Nifty. I've noticed that DrScheme has a Java view as well - with Python support, it supports all the languages that I write in Eclipse except Ruby.http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/10/03.html#a326 A quick primer on SOAP- October 3, 2003 Les Orchard recounts Sam Ruby's quick primer on SOAP. It's pretty aggravating that SOAP toolkits never take Sam's approach. A number of approaches that I see that I don't like: Hiding the transport under some sort of "service" object. SOAP4R did this, last time I looked. It makes it a pain to configure the transport - I couldn't figure out how to put HTTP credentials. Why not just have the client create the transport and have the SOAP envelope serialize itself Hiding the raw XML. SOAP.http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/10/03.html#a325 A new Lisp Book- October 3, 2003 lemonodor pointed at drafts of Peter Siebel's new book Lisp book, to be published by Apress. The other day, I added an RSS feed in NewsGator, hoping that I'll get a notification when Peter's book gets published. You could get the same thing in Atom format, as well. I also created a feed to let me know when new Lisp books are released (RSS 0.91).http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/10/03.html#a324 Moving Away From XSLT- October 3, 2003 Martin Fowler is moving away from XSLT. I agree completely with all of his criticisms. For a great example, look at the abomination I had to go through to get ISO-8601 dates into an Atom feed. The assumption is that the release date for a book can serve as both the issued and modified time. I do have decent date information coming from Amazon, but it's in a format like "3 October, 2003", and the day of the month is omitted for unreleased items. It's not too hard to parse this: if.http://radio.weblogs.com/0106046/2003/10/03.html#a322 |