Warto czytać (realpublisher)

Today's focus:  How to keep on top of new free e-books

By Dave Kearns

I often recommend the free electronic books from
realtimepublishers.com as an inexpensive way to build up a
library of tips, tricks and techniques for IT professionals. The
books are free because they are sponsored by vendors. The
vendors typically have products covered in the area of the
book's subject, but they're far from being "infomercials" hyping
some overpriced tool.

Disclaimer: I have written a couple of e-books for the company,
but I was recommending realtimepublishers.com long before I
became one of its authors.

Typically, one of the books will explain a technology or service
in detail while the sponsor (separately) gives you a message
that its product can help you do the job more quickly or
efficiently. As an example, there's the recently published "The
Definitive Guide to Securing Windows in the Enterprise" by Dan
Jones, sponsored by ScriptLogic. Jones says of his book: "You
can spend a lifetime attempting to master Windows security and
spend much of your free time discussing and debating the topic
with other IT professionals. However, this guide will
concentrate on security as more than just philosophy and
policies - security is a practical topic with real-world
impact." ScriptLogic's message is that its tools will make the
job easier.

A recent development at realtimepublishers.com should make the
job of keeping on top of new titles even easier. Content Central
(  ) is the portal to all the
company's publications. Here you'll find news about upcoming
e-books, recently released chapters and a complete listing of
all previously published works. Click on "Windows Enterprise"
and a cascading menu of the four different series appears:
Definitive Guide, Tips and Tricks Guide, Administrator Shortcut
Guide and Developer Shortcut Guide. Clicking any lists the
titles in the series currently available. For example, clicking
on the "Tips and Tricks" entry brings up links to:

1. "Tips and Tricks Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting"
2. "Tips and Tricks Guide to Windows 2000 Group Policy"
3. "Tips and Tricks Guide to Windows 2000 and Active Directory Administration"
   

Each of these links, in turn, brings you to a description of the
book, a bio of the author, the table of contents and links to
all chapters currently available.

No longer do you need to visit each sponsor's Web site to
register or download a new chapter, you now can do all that at
the Content Central site. You can even get an XML/RSS feed to
use in your favorite aggregator so you can be kept informed
about new developments without having to visit Content Central
every day!

Check it out, it's all free. And while you're there, sign up for
the latest publications:

1. "Tips and Tricks Guide to Network Configuration Management 2005 Edition"
2. "The Video Guide to Protecting Internet Access and Communications"
3. "The Definitive Guide to Securing Windows in the Enterprise"
4. "The Shortcut Guide to Network Compliance and Security"
5. "The Definitive Guide to Active Directory Troubleshooting and Auditing"

I did.

Błąd Torvalds-a

Pierwsza demonstracja na żywym jądrze Linuksa praw intelektualnych (IP) oprogramowania closed-source!

Linus Torvalds' BitKeeper blunder

Neil McAllister, InfoWorld

03/05/2005 11:27:42

Open source developers, as you might expect, typically use free compilers, editors, and other tools to build their software. But three years ago Linux creator Linus Torvalds began using a proprietary, closed-source software version control system called BitKeeper to maintain the source code for the Linux kernel. It was a controversial decision, to be sure, and one that appears to have finally -- and perhaps predictably -- come back to bite him.

Version-control systems facilitate collaborative software projects by maintaining a central repository of source code. Developers can "check out" a copy of the code from the repository, make their changes, and then check their modified versions back in. The system resolves discrepancies between the different versions so that all the changes are eventually worked into a unified whole.

To check out code from a BitKeeper repository, you must use the proprietary, closed-source BitKeeper client software. Although BitKeeper's creator, Larry McVoy, offered the client to open source developers free of charge, provided they complied with his license agreement, this arrangement didn't sit well with those who preferred to maintain the spirit of free software in everything they did. Nonetheless, Torvalds felt BitKeeper was the best tool for the job, so he brushed these complaints aside.

Enter Andrew Tridgell, uber-hacker and Samba creator. Tridgell felt that if the Linux kernel source was to be kept in a BitKeeper repository, there ought to be another way to access it using open source tools. So he wrote a tool of his own after reverse-engineering the BitKeeper protocols. That's when McVoy called foul.

McVoy claims Tridgell's client violated the noncompete clause of BitKeeper's license agreement. He says you must use the no-cost version of the official BitKeeper client, the commercial version, or nothing at all.

Tridgell protested. He hadn't violated any license, he said, because he'd never agreed to one. He'd never even used McVoy's BitKeeper client; he merely intercepted the server's communications as they went across the wire and decoded them. But ultimately McVoy, still annoyed, chose to recall the free version of his client software in late April. From now on, open source developer or not, if you want to use BitKeeper, you must pay.

Let's ignore who's right or wrong in the McVoy/Tridgell debate for now. The upshot is that the Linux kernel project needs a new version-control system. And that makes Torvalds unhappy. The problem is, he should have known better from the start.

Torvalds seems to have fallen for the "free beer" argument: He didn't have to pay for BitKeeper, so he figured it was good enough. But not having to pay is not, and has never been, the real purpose of free software. The point is to avoid the situation Torvalds eventually found himself in: McVoy didn't like how his product was being used, so he took his ball and went home. Could you afford to switch gears in the middle of a project if one of your key software vendors did the same?

The business community likes to distance itself from the ideological debates surrounding free and open source software, but the BitKeeper case is a prime example of why enterprise IT management can't ignore software licensing issues. You don't want your PBX vendor telling you how to use your phone system, or your printer vendor telling you what to print. Wouldn't you prefer software that didn't tell you how to run your business either?

Różności

Organizacja obiegu dokumentów w każdej firmie (nawet naszej) zaczyna się od:

1. Wprowadzania do obiegu elektronicznego wszystkich dokumentów papierowych (no, może na początek dokumentów przychodzących). Mamy w firmie zakupiony pakiet PaperPort Pro, który wg. ocen czasopism komputerowych świetnie się do tego nadaje. Zadanie konwersji powierzyć sekretariatom.
   
2. Do tego należy dorzucić oprogramowanie do przekształcania PDF w inny format np. DOC (do ustalenia wybór pakietu).
3. Zaopatrzenie każdego pracownika w narzędzie do konwersji plików aplikacji biurowych do formatu PDF (bezpłatne pakiety PrimoPDF lub Tomahawk PDF)

Warto przejrzeć (COMING SOON)

Here's a preview of just some of the articles you'll find in the June issue of asp.netPRO:

• Alvin Bruney shows how ASP.NET developers can leverage Microsoft Office technology in their Web applications.
• Ken McNamee introduces a couple of free tools you can use to debug your WSE-enabled Web services.
• Dino Esposito looks at some practical implications of programming with a disabled viewstate.

Microsoft develops Python

Microsoft develops Python:

Microsoft is developing its own version of the open source Python scripting language to run on its .net framework, which is used to develop Windows applications.

Called 'IronPython', the Microsoft version is seen by the company as a way to make software development easier. Microsoft also claims IronPython is 1.8 times faster to use than the original Python when used in the .net environment.

IronPython is currently at version 0.7 and Microsoft is working on version 1.0. IronPython 0.7 can be downloaded from Microsoft's gotdotnet.com developer site."

Z innej beczki Windows 2003 Server jest dostępny na platformie 64-bitowej.

BetaNews | Google App Speeds Up Web Surfing

Idea wstępnego pobierania stron wg. zapytania uzytkownika jest szczytna, ale nie zawsze użyteczna. Pomijając sprawy prywatności, chodzi o to, że zwykle szuka się informacji w znanych źródłach (miejscach, serwisach) a nie po całym Internecie. Do tego celu lepsze są czytniki RSS.
BetaNews | Google App Speeds Up Web Surfing: "Google App Speeds Up Web Surfing
By Nate Mook, BetaNews
May 4, 2005, 6:33 PM

Now that it's mastered loading search results in fractions of a second, Google has opened up its massive computing power to the masses with one goal in mind: to speed up Web surfing. The company has released the Google Web Accelerator, which routes browser activity through Google machines to make Web pages load faster.

Google Web Accelerator employs a number of different methods to speed up Web browsing, including caching frequently looked at pages to make them more accessible. Google will only refresh a Web page when it has been updated, saving the user from reloading content when unnecessary.

The application only benefits broadband users, Google says, because it utilizes techniques such as prefetching, which involves downloading a Web page that Web Accelerator assumes will be visited -- such as the top search result -- even if it is not. Google has implemented similar functionality on its Web site for Mozilla Firefox users.

Google admits there are some potential privacy concerns associated with the application. Although it does not handle requests for secure sites, cookies and passwords submitted via an unencrypted Web page, may be temporarily cached by Google. The company has setup a privacy page specific to the new application that outlines what information is collected.

On the client side, Google Web Accelerator uses a cache separate from the Web browser, which it may be emptied at any time. Additionally, acceleration may be disabled for a specific page.

To prove the application does indeed work, Google Web Accelerator breaks down the time it has saved users. The Performance Statistics page lists the number of pages loaded and the time it would have taken without acceleration enabled.

'One mundane time-waster we all contend with, for example, is waiting for web pages to load. The tantalizing promise of a web page is only seconds away. But even on broadband, the wait's too short to do something else - and just long enough to be irritating,' says Google engineer Marius Eriksen. 'Let's face it, those seconds add up.'

Google Web Accelerator, currently in beta, works automatically with Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows XP and Windows 2000. The application does work with other browsers, but they must be manually configured to use the program for HTTP connections."

SAP Allies with Oracle's Competitors

SAP Allies with Oracle's Competitors: "
Updated: Enterprise applications customers reap the benefits of SAP's competition with Oracle; meanwhile, the software company announces partnerships with IBM, Siemens, Microsoft and Macromedia.


Be the first to comment on this article


SAP is emitting a dizzying flow of news from its Sapphire users conference in Copenhagen this week as it partners with giants in the tech world: IBM, Siemens, Microsoft and Macromedia. At this rate, analysts say, Oracle better learn how to partner like its arch rival, lest it wind up the wallflower at the enterprise applications dance.

To wit: On Tuesday, SAP AG announced that it will jointly develop software with Microsoft Corp., combining SAP's business applications and Microsoft's Office desktop applications.

SAP capabilities such as time management, budget monitoring, organizational management, and travel and expense management will hook directly into immensely popular desktop applications such as Excel, Outlook and Word—a combination that analysts say will set the bar for Oracle Corp., whose productivity tools have to compete with the popular Office software, and IBM, which could stand to integrate its various software offerings better."

Commercial database vendors embrace open source

Commercial database vendors embrace open source
Po co to robią? Po to aby opanować większy procent rynku baz danych w nowym środowisku Linux, które MS sobie odpuścił. Forrest Research przewiduje, że coraz wiecej będzie zastosowań baz danych typu open-source w dużych, krytycznych zastosowań. Skutkiem tego oczekuje się, że Linux przekształca bazy danych w commodities (artykuł powszechnego użytku).

Microsoft Excel: The king of BI

Microsoft Excel: The king of BI Dlaczego Excel jest taki popularny? Dlatego, że jest łatwy, dostępny, funkcjonalny. Wady? Oto one: utwierdza jednokierunkowy przepływ danych z DW (data warehouse) do użytkowników, każdy z nich wybiera dane wg. własnego filtru, każdy je "masuje" wg. własnego upodobania (efekt: multiply version of truth) i NIE ODDAJE DO HURTOWNI (one-way). Rozwiązanie: dwkukierunkowa wymiana danych (two-way) między Excelem a DW.
Mimo tego wiele firm wyznaje religię arkusza kalkulacyjnego (Actuate, AnalySoft, Applix, Business Objects, IntelligentApps, MicroStrategy, OutlookSoft, QlikTech, ProClarity and, of course, Microsoft.)

Mozilla SVG Project

Mozilla SVG Project: "Introduction

Since you have come this far, you probably already know that SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics, and that it is an XML language for sophisticated 2-dimensional graphics. SVG is to graphics what XHTML is to text, MathML is to mathematical equations and CML is to the description of chemical molecules.

SVG is similar in scope to Macromedia's proprietary Flash technology: among other things it offers anti-aliased rendering, pattern and gradient fills, sophisticated filter-effects, clipping to arbitrary paths, text and animations. What distinguishes SVG from Flash, is that it is a W3 recommendation (i.e. a standard for all intents and purposes) and that it is XML-based as opposed to a closed binary format. It is explicitly designed to work with other W3C standards such as CSS, DOM and SMIL."

Native SVG vs. plug-in SVG

The Mozilla SVG implementation is a native SVG implementation. This is as opposed to plug-in SVG viewers such as the Adobe viewer (which is currently the most popular SVG viewer).
Some of the implications of this are:

• Mozilla can handle documents that contain SVG, MathML, XHTML, XUL, etc. all mixed together in the same 'compound' document. This is being made possible by using XML namespaces.

• Mozilla is 'aware' of the SVG content. It can be accessed through the SVG DOM (which is compatible with the XML DOM) and manipulated by Mozilla's script engine.
• Other Mozilla technologies can be used with SVG. XBL coupled with SVG is a particular interesting combination. It can be used to create graphical widgets (I wonder when we'll see the first SVG-based chrome!) or extend Mozilla to recognize other specialized languages such as e.g. CML (chemical markup language). There are samples of these kinds of more advanced usage patterns on croczilla.com/svg/.

Inne ciekawe technologie: XBL, XPCOM

Netscape ma znowu dziurę

PC World | Netscape laid wide open by security flaw
Netscape w wersji 6x. i 7.x jest dziurawy w komponencie odpowiedzialnym za wyświetlanie obrazów. Dotyczy to Netscape (z AOL) i środowiska KDE dla Unix/Linux. Zespół AOL pracujący nad przegladarką jest skromny, łatki są za późno (wersja 6.x ma 29% nispaczowanych błędów, 7.x ma ich 53%). Ciekawe jak nazywa sie eksperymentalna przeglądarka AOL mogąca wyświetlacć strony w formacie FF i IE?

Raportowanie

DataVision Home
Other Reporting Tools (oprócz oczywiście DataVision!)

• JasperReports is a powerful report-generating tool that has the ability to deliver rich content onto the screen, to the printer or into PDF, HTML, XLS, CSV and XML files.
• JFreeReport is an open source report writer for Java with features like full on-screen print preview, XML-based report definitions and output to PDF.
• JFreeChart is an open source Java class library for generating charts. JFreeChart is brought to you by the same people that created JFreeReport.
• Report Manager "is a reporting application (Report Manager Designer) and also a set of components for Delphi, Builder and Kylix, also supports development environment accepting ActiveX controls (Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, any Visual Studio.Net language...), also a C dynamic standard library with exported functions is provided to use the engine with any other language like GNU C. It also includes a TCP enabled Report Server so thin clients can obtain reports processed in the server. Also a fully functional web report server application is available, generating Adobe PDF files on the fly. A true net and web report server with no license fees and multiprocessor support."
• Agata Report is a Database Reporting Tool and EIS, MIS tool (graph generation), like Crystal Reports. Its written in PHP-GTK and allows you to edit and get SQL results from several databases as Text or PostScript Files.
• Crystal Decisions, makers of Crystal Reports and other fine reporting and analysis tools.
• RLIB, a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) reporting engine.
• "SpoolTemplate is a report system based on templates. Based on XML configuration file it allows to build easyily report from database query, using few lines of PHP code."

Następne zadanie dla Linuksa

Linux's Next Frontier: Database-Intensive Apps
Przewiduje się, że nastepnym zadaniem stojącym przed Linuksem jest rynek aplikacji wykorzystującyhc bazy danych (np. zarządzanie oceną ryzyka, zarządzanie portfelem i inne operacje związane z rynkiem analitycznym). Pierwszym przykładem adaptacji L. w sektorze finansowym jest NYSE TradeWorks system serwis. IBM ogłosił nawet specjalny program dla ISV (eServer Linux Impact Team) pod nazwą Chiphopper. Więcej na ten temat jest na eWeek.

Mają dosyć platnego Linuksa?

Badania ankietowe przeprowadzone przez firmę DataEvans Group pokazały, że wśród developerów Linuksa coraz mniejszą popularnością cieszą się płatne dystrybucje tego systemu (419 ankietowanych = 34% chce używać bezpłantnych dystrybucji/ 28% korzysta z płatnych). Trend ten różni się od podobnej wyników podobnej ankiety przeprowadzonej dwa lata temu (19%/39%). Powodem takiej decyzji jest cena, możliwość częstego ściągania aktualizacji oraz dostęp do forum internetowego.
Oznacza to, że firmy Debian, Mandrake czy Gentoos mają zapewniony byt na rynku mimo miażdżącej przewagi SuSe i RH. Na podstawie http://ct.zdnet.com.com/clicks?c=135416-314540&brand=zdnet&ds=5

OOffice jest za duże

Ostatnia konferencja developerów OpenOffice nie była zbyt wesoła. Do trudności stojących przez społecznością rozwijającą narzędzie rywalizujące z MS Offfice należą:

• monolityczna budowa pakietu (nie można ot tak poprostu zacząć brać udział w projekcie poprawiać kody źródłowe) i duza baza kodu,
  
• zgrzybiałość - niektóre fragmenty kodu mają po 20 lat (i pracowały w środowisku Windows 3.11 i OS/2),
• mała kadra stałych developerów (Sun oddelegował 40 programistów, Novell/Xiamian -10, open-source-wych aktywnych jest około 4,
• nie ma wciąż wersji 2.0 (mimo obietnic składanych od połowy poprzedniego roku)
• ciągle przedkłane są wersje developerskie nad wersjami stabilnymi,
• brak aktywnych, dodatkowych wsolpracownikow,
• dlaczego IBM, uzywjacy OO nie wnosi wkladu do tworzenia kodu

Adres zrodlowy

Co się dzieje z Linuksem

Ostatnio jest wiele kontrowersji na temat wykorzystania narzędzia BitKeeper (do zarządzania wersjami kodu źródłowego jądra) w projekcie jądra systemu Linux. Autorem jest firma BitMover, założycielem jest rówieśnik Tornvalda. Autorem pomysłu wykorzystania BitKeepera zamiast np. CVS (dobre, ale bardzo wolne jeśli chodzi o aktualizacje ogramnej bazy źródeł jądra - około 100 MB) jest sam Tornvald. Ostatnio stosunki z tą firmą są napięte z uwagi na to, że narzędzie to jest komercyjne i grzecznościowo użyczane społeczności open-source. O niebezpieczeństwie takiego precedensu ostrzegał od dawna inna znana osobowość open-source Stallman. Oliwy do ognia dolał autor Samby, australijczyk Trdgell, który przy pomocy "reverse" engeenering napisał klienta BitKeepera (fakt ten ostro skrytykował sam Tornvald), nie udało mu sie jednak napisać cześci serwerowej. Rozgniewana firma BitMover zaprzestała użyczać swego oprogramowania społeczności o-s. Spowodowało to konieczność szybkeigo zastąpienia tego narzędzia czymś nowym. Dlatego sam Tornvald przystąpił do projektu "git". Co ztego wyjdzie, zobaczymy! Adres:
Computerworld | After controversy, Torvalds begins work on "git"

Kernel (computer science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Świetny artykuł na temat budowy systemów operacyjnych. Okazuje się, że Unix/Linux ma budowę monolityczną (monolithic kernel), zaś AIX ma budowę mikrojądra (microkernel). System MS Windows ma budowę hybrydową (hybrid kernel). Istnieje jeszcze jeden typ jądra, najnowszy - (exokernel). Adres: Kernel (computer science) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Inny, ciekawy adres słownika komputerowego - http://kilobug.free.fr/hurd/pres-en/html/node4.html

Istota bolączki każdego CMS

Poważną wadą CMS (a nawet jego piętą Achillesową) jest wprowadzanie danych (zawartości). W większości przypadków odbywa się to poprzez "user-friendly" edytor na stronie www witryny. Mankamentem tego rozwiązania jest ograniczona funkcjinalność edycyjna takiego sposobu. Idealnie, edytor ten powinien przypominać możliwościami MS Word. Oprócz wbudowanych w CMS lepszych czy gorszych edytorów, można kupić takie edytory u niezależnych firm (np tu). Jedynie MS SharePoint Portal Server ma możliwości edycji i publikowania zawartości przy użyciu wszystkich narzędzi MS Office 2003.

Najlepszy serwer WWW do domu - PC World Komputer

Najlepszy serwer WWW do domu - PC World Komputer Test niewielkich aplikacji. Dobra ocena dla XAMPP, Krasnal się nie sprawdził. A tak wogóle pochwała Apache 2.0.

GMail ma swoje ograniczenia - Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger

Scobleizer: Microsoft Geek Blogger
Poczta wraz z zyskami z reklam podsyłanych do skrzynek odbiorców (np. Hotmail ma ok. 100 mln. subskrybentów) oznacza również koszty związane z utrzymaniem poziomu usług. Zdaje sie, że z tego zaczyna się zdawać sprawę Google oferujący swój GMAIL. Okazało się, że nie można sie poszerzyć grono klientów GMAIL (już nie wysyła zaproszeń do przystąpienia do poczty GMAIL) i zaczyna mieć kłopoty ze skalowalnością. Tak przynajmniej wywnioskował znany MS evangelista _Scoblizer_ po rozmowie z Chrisem Uhlikiem (kierownikiem zespołu GMAIL) podczas spotkania organizowanego przez O'reilly.

Misja bloggera

Mission Statements And Why Do You Blog

By Wayne Hurlbert

Mission statements. They are usually the feel good creations of endless committees and countless meetings. The wording is discussed and talked over innumerable times.

The end result is often an very ambiguous mission statement, comprised of a few cliches, about...well...nothing much.

Your blog should have a reason for its existence too.

It's often a good idea to write your blog mission statement down. It's also important to have some purpose for writing your daily posts.

When you think about it, there are probably many reasons why you blog. Occasionally, a blog just sort of happens.

In my own case, I started my blogs to provide information to others.

Ideas on search engine optimization, marketing, and public relations are meant to be shared with other business people. Hoarding ideas, as if they were treasures to be kept guarded and under lock and key, goes against my concept of business.

I believe in helping others achieve their goals, whether in business or in life.

When one person succeeds, as a result of our assistance, we all succeed.

Since my initial blog post, I have attempted to provide helpful information to my readers. By means of e-mails, telephone conversations, internet radio interviews, and in live meetings, my goal has always remained the same.

Whether it's talking or writing about SEO, or discussing marketing ideas, or thinking about public relations, my mission is to provide information and ideas to help other people achieve their business and personal goals.

I can even sum it up into one short sentence.

Sharing knowledge to help others succeed.

There is my mission statement.

What's yours?

Serwis monitorujący stan FS w Linux

Mały kłopot - nie działa na każdym *nix-ie!
This next-gen, dnotify replacement meets file system event-monitoring needs in the 2.6 kernel

Level: Introductory

Eli M. Dow (emdow@us.ibm.com)
Software Engineer, IBM Linux Test and Integration Center
12 Apr 2005

Inotify is a file system event-monitoring mechanism slated for inclusion in upcoming Linux™ kernels that is designed to serve as an effective replacement for dnotify, which was the de facto file-monitoring mechanism supported in older kernels. Inotify is a powerful, fine-grained, asynchronous mechanism ideally suited for a variety of file-monitoring needs including, but not limited to, security and performance. Learn how to install inotify and how to build a sample user-space application to respond to file system events.

File system event monitoring is a necessity for many types of programs ranging from file managers to security tools, but dnotify -- the standard in earlier kernels -- had limitations that left us hoping for something better. With that in mind, meet inotify, a more modern file system event-monitoring alternative.

Why inotify?
There are many reasons to use inotify instead of dnotify. The first is that dnotify requires opening one file descriptor for each directory that you intend to watch for changes. This can become quite costly when you are monitoring several directories at once, since it is possible to reach a per-process file descriptor limit.

Additionally, the file descriptor pins the directory, disallowing the backing device to be unmounted, which causes problems in scenarios involving removable media. When using inotify, if you are watching a file on a file system that is unmounted, the watch is automatically removed and you receive an unmount event.

The second reason dnotify is inferior to inotify is a bit more complex. It is important to note that straightforward file system-monitoring granularity using the dnotify infrastructure exists only at the directory level. For more fine-grained monitoring with dnotify, application programmers are forced to keep a cache of stat structures relating to each directory being monitored. This user space cache of stat structures is needed to determine exactly what change in the directory occurred when a notification signal is received. When notifications are obtained, a list of stat structures is generated and compared with the last known state. Clearly, this technique is sub-optimal.

An additional advantage of inotify is that it uses a file descriptor as the basic interface to let application developers use select and poll to watch the device. This allows for efficient multiplexed I/O and integration with Glib's mainloop. In contrast, dnotify uses signals with which programmers often have more difficulty and that they find to be less than elegant.

Inotify solves these issues by providing a more elegant API that uses minimal file descriptors and ensures finer granularity of monitoring. Communication with inotify is provided through a device node. For these reasons it should be your clear choice when monitoring files on Linux 2.6 platforms.

Oryginalne oprogramowanie firmy Microsoft

Oryginalne oprogramowanie firmy Microsoft
oczywiście dla legalnych posiadaczy MS Winsows XP

Sterowniki do baz danych

Adresy:

1. Bezpłatny - http://jtds.sourceforge.net/
2. Komercyjny (ok, 6000 USD) - http://uda.openlinksw.com/
3. Komercyjny - http://www.inetsoftware.de/English/Produkte/SYTO/default.htm
4. Dodotkowe informacje - http://www.stylusstudio.com/xquery/xqj/
5. Łącza do innych producentów - http://www.sqlsummit.com/JDBCVend.htm
6. Nowe łącze dodane 20.04.2005 - http://www.datadirect.com/products
   

Sterowniki JDBC do produktów bazodanowych Sybase

1. Opis (pdf) -"Serving AS Anywhere Database using Apache and PHP" - http://www.sybase.com/detail?id=1019695
2. Adres do ściągnięcia sterownika - tutaj
3. Trochę teorii
   

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

Doug McIlroy, the inventor of Unix pipes and one of the founders of the Unix tradition, had this to say at the time [McIlroy78]:

1. Make each program do one thing well. To do a new job, build afresh rather than complicate old programs by adding new features.
2. Expect the output of every program to become the input to another, as yet unknown, program. Don't clutter output with extraneous information. Avoid stringently columnar or binary input formats. Don't insist on interactive input.
3. Design and build software, even operating systems, to be tried early, ideally within weeks. Don't hesitate to throw away the clumsy parts and rebuild them.
4. Use tools in preference to unskilled help to lighten a programming task, even if you have to detour to build the tools and expect to throw some of them out after you've finished using them.
   

He later summarized it this way (quoted in A Quarter Century of Unix [Salus]):

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Rob Pike, who became one of the great masters of C, offers a slightly different angle in Notes on C Programming [Pike]:

Rule 1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places, so don't try to second guess and put in a speed hack until you've proven that's where the bottleneck is.

Rule 2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured, and even then don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.

Rule 3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Fancy algorithms have big constants. Until you know that n is frequently going to be big, don't get fancy. (Even if n does get big, use Rule 2 first.)

Rule 4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones, and they're much harder to implement. Use simple algorithms as well as simple data structures.

Rule 5. Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming.[9]

Rule 6. There is no Rule 6.

Ken Thompson, the man who designed and implemented the first Unix, reinforced Pike's rule 4 with a gnomic maxim worthy of a Zen patriarch:

When in doubt, use brute force.

More of the Unix philosophy was implied not by what these elders said but by what they did and the example Unix itself set. Looking at the whole, we can abstract the following ideas:

1. Rule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
2. Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
3. Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected to other programs.
4. Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
5. Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
6. Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
7. Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
8. Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
9. Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data so program logic can be stupid and robust.
10. Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
11. Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
12. Rule of Repair: When you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
13. Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
14. Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
15. Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
16. Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for “one true way”.
17. Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.

Różności

• Szczęśliwy Scribus (http://business.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/06/1545203&from=rss) - Small-business forms using Scribus and PDF. I am a small business owner, and like many self-employed Linux enthusiasts, I am constantly drawn to open source solutions to small business issues. Two months ago I migrated all of my office paperwork over to PDF format designed with the open source Scribus, and I haven't looked back. It's universally readable, there is no sacrifice on quality, and as a bonus I get to do my work in Linux.

• Nowe fakt z NetCraft (http://newsvac.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/04/06/2110238&from=rss) - Apache rządzi (3:1) z IIS

Consuming ASP.NET Web services with ASP

Consuming ASP.NET Web services with ASP

Porzadki w rejestrach

Przyśpieszenia Windows XP:

• uruchomić Registy First Aid i/lub registry Compressor z firmy www.rosecitysoftarew.com

• otwierania - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOptimizeFunction zmienić Enable na Y

• zamykania - nie czyścić pagefile - HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management zmienić ClearPageFileAtShutdown na 0 i zrestartować system.

The Form Assembly

The Form Assembly: "The Form Builder

The Form Builder is a tool for creating standard compliant web forms. It integrates the wForms extension and relies on a set of technologies like XML, XMLHttpRequest, XSLT and DOM (a.k.a Ajax) to provide a seamless single-screen experience."

IBM computing algorithm thinks like an animal | CNET News.com

IBM computing algorithm thinks like an animal | CNET News.com
Wiedzieć jak widzą zwierzęta?

Łącznik z artykułami na FURL-u

Cennik MS SQL Servera

VS05 Pricing, Shipping PlansPosted 04:00 PM
Shipping dates for Visual Studio 2005 are becoming fuzzier at the same time the prices have become concrete. An unnamed spokeswoman is being widely quoted that the shipment timing will become clear after the next beta appears in the near future. As for the price, Microsoft announced Monday that Visual Studio 2005 will range from $49 for the Express Edition to $799 for the Professional Edition. The price tag for the Professional Edition increases to $2,499 with a premium MSDN license. Volume licenses for the Team System start at $3,191.

One minor note: Several Web sites reported that Microsoft missed a deadline by not shipping a beta of VS05 at our VSLive! conference. This rumor then got picked up by some news organizations as fact. We organize VSLive!. I can tell you that there was never a concrete plan to release a beta of VS05 at our conference.

One of the negative aspects of the blogosphere is the way wannabe Matt Drudge's make up nonsense, then their peers all point at one another reinforcing the assertions, acting as if the number of links a post gets relates to its veracity. It doesn't.
Last month, Microsoft announced pricing for SQL Server 2005, which is wed at the hip with VS05. Express Edition: Includes simple management capabilities. Free. Workgroup Edition: Includes support for backup log shipping. $3,899 Per Processor. Standard Edition: Features Fail-Over Clustering And Reporting Tools: $5,999 Per Processor. Enterprise Edition: Includes advanced business intelligence tools and data-mirroring capabilities: $24,999 per processor.

Kojot w s³oñcu

Firma SUN zapowiedziala wyposa¿enie NetBeans w jêzyk skryptowy w ramach swego projektu Coyote (jêzykiem bêdzie JPython i Groove). Wszystko na razie w powijakach, Rywalizuj¹ce œrodowisko Eclipse nie ma nic takiego.
Odnoœniki:
http://www.computerworld.com.au/index.php?id=259966263&eid=-301
https://coyote.dev.java.net/

Nowoœci

Œwiêta, okres odpoczynku i porz¹dkowania sowich myœli.
Raport dwóch naukowców zaprezentowany na konferencji RSA wykaza³ wy¿szoœæ W2K3 nad RH (http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1hgw,1,gitx,36b3,48gk,84du). ród³o raportu http://www.securityinnovation.com/resources/linux_windows.shtml.

Should IE stay or should IE go?

Should IE stay or should IE go?
Autor porównuje IE z FF, jego zalecenie - utrzymac dualizm tj. FF do polaczen zewnetrznych, IE do srodowiska korporacyjnego.

CDN losów VB.COM

Wersja 6 Visual Basica (zwana również dla kontrastu z VB.NET) VB.COM ma szansę na przeżycie. Analitycy zwracają uwagę na analogię z firmą Coca-Cola, która również kiedyś miała kłopoty z nowym produktem (jego akceptacją) i była zmuszona zachować stary smak w postaci Classic-Cola. W przypadku VB.NET nie jest to ulepszona wersja VB 6 ale całkowicie nowa jakość wprowadzajaca nie tylko pełne OO ale również podporządkowana zasadom uruchomienia aplikacji w ramach .NET Framework i CLR. Dlatego MS ma prawo na ten ruch.
Wskazuje się na zasługi jakie ten prosty język VB 6 zrobił dla upowszechnienia platformy grubego klienta (rich client platform). Mimo, że po zaprzestaniu rozwoju VB 6 w 2001 i wprowadzeniu Visual Basic .NET firma MS zaoferowała ścieżki migracyjne, jednak przeniesienie aplikacji z VB 6 na nową platformę jest niezwykle trudne. Petycja proponuje zapewnienie rozwoju VB 6 oraz VBA (Basic for Application) dalszej, rownoległej do paltformy .NET ścieżki rozwoju uwzględniającej masowe zapotrzebowanie użytkowników. Nowa wersja VB 6 nosiłaby nazwę VB.COM w celu podkreślenia, że bazuje na technologii COM i współdziałałaby z .NET Visual Studio.

CDN losów VB.COM

Wersja 6 Visual Basica (zwana również dla kontrastu z VB.NET) VB.COM ma szansę na przeżycie. Analitycy zwracają uwagę na analogię z firmą Coca-Cola, która również kiedyś miała kłopoty z nowym produktem (jego akceptacją) i była zmuszona zachować stary smak w postaci Classic-Cola. W przypadku VB.NET nie jest to ulepszona wersja VB 6 ale całkowicie nowa jakość wprowadzajaca nie tylko pełne OO ale również podporządkowana zasadom uruchomienia aplikacji w ramach .NET Framework i CLR. Dlatego MS ma prawo na ten ruch.
Wskazuje się na zasługi jakie ten prosty język VB 6 zrobił dla upowszechnienia platformy grubego klienta (rich client platform). Mimo, że po zaprzestaniu rozwoju VB 6 w 2001 i wprowadzeniu Visual Basic .NET firma MS zaoferowała ścieżki migracyjne, jednak przeniesienie aplikacji z VB 6 na nową platformę jest niezwykle trudne. Petycja proponuje zapewnienie rozwoju VB 6 oraz VBA (Basic for Application) dalszej, rownoległej do paltformy .NET ścieżki rozwoju uwzględniającej masowe zapotrzebowanie użytkowników. Nowa wersja VB 6 nosiłaby nazwę VB.COM w celu podkreślenia, że bazuje na technologii COM i współdziałałaby z .NET Visual Studio.

Bardzo ciekawe linki z www.windows2003.pl

1. Rezygnacja z .NET: http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=9211/ddj050201dnn/
2. Co warto czytać: http://www.microsoft.com/poland/developer/press/default.htm
3. Office 2003 i XML i Smart Client: http://www.windows2003.pl/news.aspx?pn=2&order=&cat=D#
4. Ciekawy blog: http://www.michal.osmenda.com/
5. Przechwytywanie Webcast-ów: http://msdn.microsoft.com/SQL/WebcastDownloadInstructions.aspx
6. Szukamy blogów: http://www.windows2003.pl/news.aspx?cat=M&id=1811
7. Inny ciekawy blog: http://www.windows2003.pl/communities.aspx?cat=4
8. Jeszcze jeden: http://www.howto.blog.pl/
9. WS: http://www.news2news.com/vfp/?article=5
10. WS po raz drugi: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnfoxtk03/html/ft03g.asp
11. Sysinternals: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/freeware/psservice.shtml

Ciekawe adresy JavaScript

The following additional Internet resources may help you as you enhance your Web site.

1. Creating Custom Behaviors in FrontPage 2003
2. JavaScript.com: The Definitive JavaScript Resource
3. WebReference JavaScript Articles
4. HTML and DHTML Reference

Wiadomości dnia

1. Netscape 8 Beta: Powerful But Buggy.Netscape is the Elvis of browsers. It started out lean, sexy, and breathtaking. But as it aged, it became a bloated, lethargic joke. With Netscape 8, released in beta on Thursday, the King is back.If you can't wait, the browser is a free download from Netscape, which is a business unit of America Online, which in turn is part of Time Warner. (na podstawie)
   
2. Pod koniec marca kończy się support dla Visual Basic 6.0, oznacza to brak krytycznych poprawek i aktualnień SP. Język ten rozwijany jest od 1999r. Do firmy MS wysłano petycję z prośbą o przedłużenie okresu bezpłatnej opieki (opieka płatna będzie świadvzona do 2008). Petycję podpisało ok 130 developerów (MVP m.in. Rich Levin) wskazując na podobny precedens (C++ jest nadal wspierany mimo promowania C#).
   

Jak zatrudniać

Everyone thinks they're hiring the top 1%.

Martin Fowler: “We are still working hard to hire only the very top fraction of software developers (the target is around the top 0.5 to 1%).”

Me: “We get between 100 and 200 [resumes] per opening.”

I remember when I started working for David Shaw he told us they only hired "1 out of 200."

I hear this from almost every software company. "We hire the top 1% or less," they all say.

Could they all be hiring the top 1%? Where are all the other 99%? General Motors?

I had an insight the other day.

Quiz: If you get 200 resumes, and you hire 1 person, are you hiring the top 0.5% of software developers?

"No," you say, "your screening process is unlikely to find the best person out of 200."

Agreed. OK. Let's say you had a magical screening process that actually allowed you to find the "best" person.

"No," you say, "people are good at different things. There's no absolute, forced ranking of developers that makes sense."

Agreed. Let's simplify for the moment and assume that all software developers in the world could be ranked in absolute order of skill, and that you had a magical screening process that found the "best" person from any field.

Now, when you get those 200 resumes, and hire the best person from the top 200, does that mean you're hiring the top 0.5%?

"Maybe."

No. You're not. Think about what happens to the other 199 that you didn't hire.

They go look for another job.

That means, in this horribly simplified universe, that the entire world could consist of 1,000,000 programmers, of whom the worst 199 keep applying for every job and never getting them, but the best 999,801 always get jobs as soon as they apply for one. So every time a job is listed the 199 losers apply, as usual, and one guy from the pool of 999,801 applies, and he gets the job, of course, because he's the best, and now, in this contrived example, every employer thinks they're getting the top 0.5% when they're actually getting the top 99.9801%.

The top 0.5% usually have jobs. They have jobs where they do very well, so their employers pay them lots of money and do whatever it takes to keep them happy. (I know. Oversimplification. Lots of employers try to drive out the good software developers because they complain a lot and demand high salaries. Still.)

Those 200 resumes you got from Craigslist? Those consist of the one guy who happened to be good, but he's only applying for a job because his wife wants to be nearer to her family, and the usual floating population of 199 people who apply for every single job and are qualified for none. And now you think you're being "super selective" but you're not, it's just a statistical fallacy.

I'm exaggerating a lot, but the point is, when you select 1 out of 200 applicants, the other 199 don't give up and go into plumbing (although I wish they would... plumbers are impossible to find). They apply again somewhere else, and contribute to some other employer's self-delusions about how selective they are.

In fact, one thing I have noticed is that the people who I consider to be good software developers barely ever apply for jobs at all. I know lots of great people who took a summer internship on a whim and then got permanent offers. They only ever applied for one or two jobs in their lives.

On the other hand there are people out there who appear to be applying to every job on Monster.com. I'm not kidding. They spam their resume to hundreds or thousands of employers. A lot of times I can see this because there are actually hundreds of "job" aliases in the "To:" line of their email. (Some evil part of me wants to "reply-to-all" the rejection note I send them, but I usually overcome the urge).

It's pretty clear to me that just because you're hiring the top 0.5% of all applicants for a job, doesn't mean you're hiring the top 0.5% of all software developers. You could be hiring from the top 10% or the top 50% or the top 99% and it would still look, to you, like you're rejecting 199 for every 1 that you hire.

By the way, it's because of this phenomenon—the fact that many of the great people are never on the job market—that we are so aggressive about hiring summer interns. This may be the last time these kids ever show up on the open market. In fact we hunt down the smart CS students and individually beg them to apply for an internship with us, because if you wait around to see who sends you a resume, you're already missing out.

Ciekawy skrypt

SCRIPTING ANSWERS: Who's with Whom
By Don Jones, Contributing Editor

Here's a little trick with the Active Directory Services Interface
(ADSI) WinNT provider. And pay attention: The WinNT provider
works great with Active Directory domains, as well as local
computer user accounts and groups!

Let's say you have a user name in variable sUser, and a group
name in sGroup. You want to know if sUser is a member of
sGroup or not (a handy trick for logon scripts, for example).
Start by using ADSI to get a reference to each object:

Dim oUser, oGroup, sUser, sGroup
sUser = "Don"
sGroup = "Domain Users"
Set oUser = GetObject("WinNT://MyDomain/" & _
sUser & ",user")
Set oGroup = GetObject("WinNT://MyDomain/" & _
sGroup & ",group")

Here's the cool bit, which isn't available with Active Directory's
native LDAP provider, but which works dandy with the WinNT provider:

If oGroup.IsMember(oUser.aDSPath) Then
'He's a member
Else
'Not in the club
End If

You can also shortcut this; here's the entire example:

Dim oGroup, sGroup
sGroup = "Domain Users"
Set oGroup = GetObject("WinNT://MyDomain/" & _
sGroup & ",group")
If oGroup.IsMember(("WinNT://MyDomain/" & _
sUser & ",user") Then
'He's a member
Else
'Not in the club
End If

A quick and easy way to check group membership.

********** THE TIP **********

Use nested div elements to standardize browser behavior when
seeking information, such as padding size, from JavaScript

If your JavaScript needs to know the exact position and size of
elements on the page (e.g., to create and control DHTML effects),
you may have some problems with the many variations between
browsers. For instance, to dynamically calculate the size of
paddings and borders (assuming these might change in your
application), you'll need different approaches for different browsers.

One shortcut that sometimes works to simplify these sorts of
calculations is to add extra nested

tags. For instance, say
your element has padding. You can nest another

inside that
and place your content there. That way, you can use offsetLeft
and offsetTop to find the position of the inner element in
relation to the outer one instead of using the browser-specific
approaches for returning the padding value.

Przeszukiwanie pulpitu

Google udoskonala swoją wyszukiwarkę lokalną wraz z udostepnieniem API do wykorzystania we własnych rozwązaniach

Google updates desktop search tool

Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service

08/03/2005 08:46:36

Google is set to launch on Monday an updated version of its desktop search tool whose enhancements include the ability to search the full text of Adobe Systems PDF files and the metadata of multimedia files, a Google executive said.

Until now, the product could only index the names of PDF and multimedia files, such as image, music and video files. But the new version improves on this by indexing the entire content of PDF files and the metadata of multimedia files, such as song and artist names in music files, said Nikhil Bhatla, a Google product manager.

With this version, the product officially exits its beta, or test, phase and is now considered a finished product that, as is customary for all software, will continue to be regularly enhanced. "We've taken the product out of beta because now we have all the file types and features that were high on the list of user requests," Bhatla said, adding that by removing the beta tag, Google is hoping more users will feel encouraged to download and install the product.

Competition is fierce among providers of tools such as this one that let users index and retrieve information found on their PCs, a task for which few products existed until recently. Desktop search is viewed as an important area of the overall search engine market, because increasingly users expect to be able to find information on their PCs in the same way they find information on the Internet.

Although it isn't clear yet how search engine vendors will make money from these tools, most of which are free, it is generally agreed that a user who becomes loyal to a desktop search product is highly likely to extend that loyalty to the tool maker's Internet search engine. In recent years, the market for online ads that search engines serve up with their query results has exploded. However, a big challenge for search engine vendors is to find ways to foster loyalty among their users. Studies have shown users feel little attachment to particular engines.

Google introduced its desktop product in October of last year, joining Lycos and several smaller, niche players, such as Copernic Technologies, X1 Technologies and Blinkx, which already had desktop search tools available. However, Google beat big search engine providers such as Microsoft, Ask Jeeves, Yahoo and America Online, all of which subsequently released their own test versions of desktop search tools. Yahoo partnered with X1 and AOL with Copernic for their respective desktop search entries.

Other improvements in the Google desktop tool, which is free, are support for the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail application and for America Online's Netscape browser and e-mail application. Previously, the product supported only Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and Outlook and Outlook Express e-mail applications.

Moreover, Google is also releasing on Monday a tool kit for developers to create plug-in applications that extend the functionality of the desktop search product via open application programming interfaces (APIs.) The software development kit will be available at http://desktop.google.com, along with documentation, sample code and some plug-ins that have already been built.

One such plug-in lets users index instant messaging (IM) conversations from Cerulean Studios' popular Trillian IM application; the original version of the product only indexed IM sessions from AOL's AIM service. Another plug-in that will be available later will let users search the metadata of music files acquired from Apple Computer's iTunes music store, Bhatla said.

Soon, a third-party developer will create a plug-in that, using speech-to-text technology, will allow the product to transcribe the content of audio and video files and make it searchable, thus deepening the indexing capabilities of those files beyond metadata, Bhatla said.


Although this desktop search tool is designed for use by consumers, Google continues to work hard at developing a version that is appropriate for the workplace, he said. However, this new version does have one enterprise feature: It recognizes Microsoft group policy parameters on a PC and cancels its own installation if the parameters state that the Google desktop tool can't be run on that machine.

Finally, Google's desktop search tool will be available on Monday for the first time in Chinese and Korean, which means that the product's interface, support and documentation have been translated to those languages

Taksonomia - Gmail, Technorati, WinFS - cogitating reticulation

Gmail, Technorati, WinFS - cogitating reticulation ITworld.com, Ebusiness in the Enterprise 3/9/05

Sean McGrath, ITworld.com

I am ever-so-slightly synesthetic[1] when it comes to words. Take the word 'reticulation', for example. I recently added this one to my vocabulary. In my mind's eye, the word appears as a square sheet of aluminum, folded into origami patterns, painted the color of hubris, smelling of harpsichord and humming like magenta.
Actually, no, it doesn't. I made that up. Making up silly definitions of words helps me to stop forgetting them. I do not want to forget what 'reticulation' means. It is too useful a word to forget. Besides, this article could not exist without it.

Pull up a chair and I'll tell you what happened. It all started when I made a comment on my blog[2] to the effect that hierarchies are things we cannot think within, but equally cannot think without. I am not quite sure what it means but it sounded good at the time.

A fellow blogger, Hamish Harvery[3] linked to my blog and recommended Arthur Koestler's book 'The Ghost in the Machine'. I have not read it yet but I understand that it talks about social structures. It talks about how we create organizational hierarchies (arborization) and then join these hierarchies together into complex organizational networks (reticulation).

What on Earth am I talking about? Sit back down on that chair and I'll tell you. I am talking about digital information and how it is organized. I am talking about how we humans manage to navigate the infinite seas of digital information without our heads exploding.

Here is how we do it. If your head works the way most people's heads work, your first port of call in organizing raw information of any form is to put it into a hierarchy. There comes a point however, where you find that hierarchies are not enough to capture the rich structure of information. You start to join bits of hierarchies to each other in complex ways. As information hierarchies mature, they have a way of ceasing to be pure hierarchies. Arborization turns to reticulation.

We humans have been doing arborization for a long, long time. From the Dewey Decimal Classification system to Taxonomies of living things. We humans take to hierarchies like fish take to water. They combine great power with great simplicity. It helps greatly that hierarchies map naturally to the physical world of words on pieces of paper. Hierarchies have a natural ally in paper books as they can be linearized into a sequence of pages. If you have ever looked at a table of contents (say 'yes') then you know what I mean.

We humans have also been doing reticulation for a long time. However, it historically has been a more challenging information management technique as it does not map to the physical world of paper very easily. Even simple forms of reticulation like cross references are a pain in the real world. Anybody who has ever tried to read a piece of legislation and found themselves with a dozen separate books on their desk for following the complex cross-referencing knows what I mean.

Then, the web happened. A better incubator for reticulation techniques is hard to imagine. Hypertext subverts hierarchy. Actually, no. I don't think it does. I think hypertext supplements hierarchy with a basic form of reticulation.

Finally, I am getting to the piece you want to read. Interesting forms of reticulation are popping up everywhere these days. It is as if hypertext is now part of our collective consciousness and we have lost any fear of it. We are happy to use it as a base for more powerful forms of information management.

What on Earth am I talking about? Sit back down on that chair one more time and I'll tell you. I'm talking about the label system in GMail[4]. Have you seen how that works? There is no great big folder system to speak of. The folders in GMail are created on-the-fly based on the labels you attach to individual e-mails. You are no longer restricted to putting an e-mail in one place and one place only. You are no longer restricted to a hierarchical filing structure. The time honored metaphors of the filing cabinet and the shelf are no longer helpful.

I'm also talking about the faceted classification in WinFS[5]. Think of the way you organize files on a file system. Now, instead of thinking about fixing the names of folders and picking one folder to put your file in, think about that file being, effectively, in as many folders as you like, all at the same time. Last but not least, I'm talking about the emergence of Folksonomies[6] and the intriguing Technorati tagging system[7].

GMail, WinFS, Technorati, all these developments are reticulations of one form or another. It is as if overnight, the world has woken up to the power of it all. (In reality, it is I that has woken up to the power of it all.).

Metadata enthusiasts the world over must be shaking their heads in disbelief. Finally, it's happening - that's great! However, it is not really happening the way the metadata enthusiasts (or theorists) would have predicted. Welcome to the World Wide Web where the only thing that is completely predictable is its total unpredictability.
[1] http://www.apa.org/monitor/mar01/synesthesia.html
[2] http://seanmcgrath.blogspot.com/archives/
[3] http://weblog.hamishharvey.com/mishmash/2005/01/on_hierarchy.html
[4] http://www.beelerspace.com/index.php?p=806
[5] http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/01/WinFS/default.aspx
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
[7] http://www.technorati.com/tag/

Walka trwa (Java vs .NET)

Na sympozjum organizowanym przez TheServerSide paneliści zastanawiali się nad rozwojem Javy. Poodkreślali jest dojrzałość i stabilność, zwrócili uwagę również na witalność platformy .NET. Krytykowano, że .NET jest kontrolowany przez MS (Java zreszta też jest sterowana przez Sun-a). Niesłuszna to krytyka, ponieważ MS uruchomił program CTP (community Technology preview) w którym zaangażował wielu deweloperów w celu nadania kształtu nowym narzedziom .NET. Podkreślono, że Java dla Enterprise powinna być bardziej uproszczona za sprawą nowych szablonów (Framework) np. JavaServer Faces (JFS) lub jej open-source wersja MyFaces (Apache). Na tym polu SFS rywalizuje z Struts (Apache Shale) pod względem funkcjonalności obie technologie się zazębiają (podobnie jest zresztą z EJB 3.0 i JDO jeżeli chodzi o zapamietanie trwałości stanu np. bazy - persistent). Mówiło się, że wersja JSF 2.0 ma mieć funkcjonalność AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML HTTP Request) dla wspomagania tworzenia grubych klientów (tzw. rich Internet application) - chodzi o pobieranie danych z serwera bez przeładowania strony (każde przeładowanie strony oznacza wobec bezstanowej właściwości protokołu HTTP utratę stanu informacji). AJAX będzie rozszerzeniem do przeglądarek Mozilla i Internet Explorer. Czasu jest mało, wiadomo, że JSF 1.2 będzie włączona do J2EE 5 w 2006 roku (i kto tu mówi o opóźnieniu Longhorna), zaś specyfikacja JSF 2.0 będzie zaproponowana wkrótce (bo pod koniec roku) jako JSR (Java Specification Request).

LinuxWorld | Java vs. Microsoft .Net debate rages

Java vs. Microsoft .Net debate rages
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

08/03/2005 08:21:10

After describing Java as a stable technology with no great surprises likely to come, Java experts during a conference panel session fielded questions about the competitive power of Microsoft's rival .Net platform.

Speaking during a session Saturday at TheServerSide Java Symposium, panelists acknowledged the vitality of Microsoft .Net development technology but defended their prized Java platform. The session was entitled, "Future of Enterprise Java Keynote Panel" and featured executives from companies such as Sun Microsystems and BEA Systems.

An audience member identifying himself as a Motorola employee expressed concerns about Java's future. He asked why developers should be confident that J2EE would survive the Microsoft onslaught.

"I can see some of the new (projects) that are in the works. They're all .Net. All the younger developers that I'm associated with are all in .Net," he said.

Panelist Mark Hapner, Web services strategist at Sun, cautioned against relying too much on Microsoft technologies. While .Net is a strong competitor. it is tightly controlled by Microsoft, he stressed.

"Basically, Microsoft sucks the air out of .Net for everything that they classify as being of strong interest to themselves and there really is no place for other contributions," he said.

"If you just do (development) for .Net, you're propping yourself up on (Microsoft's) economic model. They get to change it however they choose," Hapner said.

J2EE, on the other hand, supports a collaborative community, Hapner said. "I think (J2EE is) the place where developers and vendors and open source communities can really work together in a way you can't do in .Net," said Hapner.

A day earlier at the conference, Rod Johnson, founder of the Spring framework, had argued that Java had fended off the .Net challenge. He also served on Saturday's panel.

Another audience member questioned how to lure Microsoft developers into the Java camp and how to simplify Java.

"I think that's where you're seeing a lot of these frameworks develop," such as Hibernate, to make Java easier to use, responded panelist Cliff Schmidt, an official with the open source program office at BEA.

Panelist Dion Almaer, an editor at TheServerSide.com, said he witnessed significant interest in Java at Microsoft's TechEd conference last year. "I was amazed at how interested people were in Java," Almaer said.

JavaServer Faces (JSF) technology is being used to make Java development easier, Hapner said. JSF provides reusable user interface elements for building the visual interface to a Web application. Components are rendered into page elements such as text and hyperlinks.

Citing Microsoft's reputation for providing easy development, Johnson stressed Microsoft's strength in marketing messages about ease of use.

"If Microsoft has something that's easy to use, they have a budget to tell you how easy to use it is," Johnson said.

Commenting after the panel session, Floyd Marinescu, founder of TheServerSide online community for Java developers, said he did not believe there would be many conversions from Java to .Net and vice versa, unless there was a specific need. The platforms do the same thing, said Marinescu. "I think there's always going to be committers," to the different camps, he said. TheSeverSide also has an online site for .Net.

Discussing the future of Java, panelists cited wishes such as boosts for asynchronous messaging. "More of this will come because people realize that there is not (just) a single programming model," in Java, said panelist Gregor Hohpe, enterprise integration practice leader at ThoughtWorks.

But for the bigger picture, the Java stack is maturing, Hohpe said. "I think we're going to see a slow maturation, which is already under way," said Hohpe.

Panelist Linda DeMichiel, EJB 3.0 spec lead and a senior staff engineer at Sun, said she anticipated further simplification of J2EE. Schmidt said he expected open source to play a bigger role in corporate development.

Responding to a question about the viability of service-oriented architectures, panelists responded that many companies already are deploying SOAs without actually referring to it as such. "I think it's actually happening. It's just that some people aren't calling it that," Schmidt said. Users are adopting SOA-related technologies such as asynchronous messaging, he said.

On Friday at the conference, the spec leader for the existing JSF 1.0 specification hailed the technology during a session entitled, "JavaServer Faces: Dead on Arrival or a Raging Success?"

Rebutting criticism about the quality of JSF components, Craig McLanahan, spec lead for JSF 1.0 and a senior staff engineer at Sun, said only the standard components have been at issue. "We're seeing libraries of components (coming from) all over the place," McLanahan said.

Components have been available from companies such as ESRI and IBM, he said. Meanwhile, an alternative implementation of JSF, called Apache MyFaces, is available at Apache, he said.

"I will claim that JSF has been successful for its first year," McLanahan said.

One factor impacting JSF adoption is the large number of applications written for Struts, which presents redundancies with JSF, according to McLanahan, who also is the Struts framework founder. He said he has proposed an Apache project, dubbed Shale, that would get rid of overlaps between the two platforms.

Overlaps would be eliminated in areas such as JSF validation and Struts navigation. Although McLanahan had proposed that Shale become Struts 2.0, it instead has been accepted as a Struts sub-project at Apache.org, he said.

Requirements gathering for the upcoming 2.0 version of JSF is under way, McLanahan said.

Version 2.0 is expected to feature AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML HTTP Request) functionality, to boost rich Internet application development, said Edward Burns, Sun staff engineer and a spec lead for JSF 1.2. AJAX serves as extensions in the popular Mozilla and Internet Explorer browsers, Burns said after a Birds of a Feather session on Friday.

"It's ubiquitous," he said.

Version 1.2 of JSF, meanwhile, is due as part of J2EE 5 in approximately 2006. It will feature in-progress tree creation and content interweaving. JSF 2.0 will follow some time after that. "We want to get the JSR (Java Specification Request) filed (for JSF 2.0) pretty soon,' by the end of the year, Burns said.

Jednak będzie patent w Europie

EU Council Passes Software Patent Law
By Nate Mook, BetaNews
March 7, 2005, 1:03 PM
As expected, European governments have approved a controversial bill allowing software patents, despite objections from Denmark, Poland and Portugal. The draft legislation, called the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive, will now be sent back to the European Parliament for a second reading.

The directive's fate is still uncertain, however, as the parliament could demand further changes. The EU Parliament has previously expressed dissatisfaction with the bill, requesting that it be returned for a first reading in February.


The European Commission denied that request for fear of disrupting standard legislative process and setting a precedent for future directives. Internal Market Commissioner Charlie McCreevy says he will work with the parliament and EU governments to ensure a compromise is met.

"I will work to make sure these concerns are taken into account in the interest of a balanced result," McCreevy told reporters.

The software patent bill has met with objection from the start. Polish representatives twice rejected its adoption, while Spain and the Netherlands have supported a restart. In February, hundreds of protesters gathered in Brussels to convince European lawmakers to drop the proposal entirely

Maguma for free (PHP)

Maguma OpenStudio will be the 7th of march 2005, 3 days before CeBIT in Hannover, Germany begins.
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Submitted by Maguma on Thu, 03/03/2005 - 17:43. Articles Developer
Maguma GmbH will open the source of Maguma Studio, the company's first PHP IDE, naming this distribution Maguma OpenStudio on the 7th of march 2005, 3 days before CeBIT in Hannover, Germany begins.
Maguma OpenStudio will be licensed in Open Source under the Mozilla Public License (MPL) 1.1.Maguma Studio will continue to sell a commercial version of the product for (19,99 Euro) and with the difference to Maguma OpenStudio being the integrated CVS.
Maguma will support Maguma OpenStudio and the community under www.phpwizard.net. Maguma OpenStudio and the documentation will be freely downloadable after the 7 march on www.phpwizard.net, www.maguma.com and www.sourceforge.net.

Jak to się robi w Google...

A Glimpse Of Google

By Charles Babcock Courtesy of InformationWeek

Google Inc. owes its success in part to the unique computing architecture it invented to suit its business--serving up searches of the Web to millions of users with lightning-fast speed.

Attendees at the EclipseCon conference in Burlingame, Calif., Wednesday were treated to a glimpse of how that technology was developed in Google's early days and how that technology operates today, courtesy of a speech by Urs Hoelzle, Google's VP of engineering.

EclipseCon is the second annual meeting of users of the Eclipse open-source programmer's workbench, a platform that helps unrelated software-development tools work together.

To invent Google's technology, developers had to throw out assumptions previously used in large data centers and implant new ones, Hoelzle told attendees. And because exactly what will be searched for on any given day is never predictable, keeping the 10 billion pages of the Web close at hand is a daunting challenge.

Hoelzle, a man with a short black beard and quick wit, told audience members that a Google search on "Eclipse" produced more results for solar events and the Mitsubishi car than their favorite development environment. "So everyone here, get back to work," he admonished his listeners, who chuckled in response.

Hoelzle showed pictures of the early Google hardware data center, which consisted of two desktop machines "that no one else was using" in a cluttered setting at Stanford University in 1997. By 1999, it was a large set of thin, rack-mounted Intel servers with a maze of cables coming out the back. By 2000, it was a much cleaner set of 1,000 dual-processor servers in racks that incorporated switching to eliminate the cables.

"The underlying hardware is pretty darn cheap, but achieving scalability has many different aspects," Hoelzle said.

Ensuring reliability was another concern. With so many commodity hardware servers, "expect to lose one a day," he said. Google decided to "try to deal with that in an automated way. Otherwise, you will have lots of people running around trying to restart servers."

Hoelzle then flashed a picture on the screen of six fire trucks at a Google data center. "I can't tell you what happened, but it's not about one machine going down," he said. He didn't disclose when the incident occurred. "No users were harmed in this picture," he added.

To cope with outages of a variable nature, Google built the Google File System, which was closely geared to Google's search computing tasks and had a high tolerance for server failures.

Google operations are built around large files that are broken down into 64-Mbyte chunks and scattered across multiple "chunk servers." A description of each file, its number of chunks, and chunk locations are kept on a master server. Each 64-Mbyte chunk is also replicated on two other servers, so a total of three copies are kept with the path to each retained by the master server.

By scattering its files across many Red Hat Linux servers, Google gains reliability at a low cost. The master server regularly polls chunk servers with a heartbeat message, asking if they're alive. If it fails to get an answer, or if a quick check of the contents on a server indicates that its data has been corrupted, the master server sets about creating a new 64-Mbyte chunk on another server, "usually in a matter of minutes," Hoelzle explained.

Google suffers the loss of a file only if all three copies of the chunk, each on a different server, are lost simultaneously, Hoelzle said. Such a loss would require a lengthy rebuilding process by collecting replacement data off the Web.

Google has indexed the Web through its many Web crawlers that send back summaries of the Web sites they find. Building an index of the Web is a large task that "takes several days on hundreds of machines," he said. The index is renewed constantly.

To search the index quickly, Google breaks it "into pieces called shards," scattered across servers so they may be searched in parallel, each server coming up with part of the answer to a question and feeding it back for aggregated results.

Google's file system, indexing technology, and grid of commodity servers allow it to achieve search times of a quarter of a second on a typical query. The replication and constant heartbeat messaging built into the file system gives it high reliability and availability, he noted.

In addition, as Google servers parse queries, they break them down into smaller tasks and make one trip to the database for a result that may satisfy many users. The process is called "map reduction." Hoelzle said Google once "lost 1,800 of 2,000 map-reduction machines in a large-scale maintenance incident." Because of the load balancing built into the system, Google still completed all queries by steering uncompleted tasks to the machines that showed they had processing power.

"You want to split that huge task into many small tasks, spread across many machines," Hoelzle said. This architecture "makes failure recovery easy. If worker W dies, re-execute the tasks done by that worker elsewhere."

PC World | Internet: Visual appeal

Site of the month

Getting the right graphics for your pages often makes or breaks a site. And for this column, there's not so much one site of the month as several that come highly recommended.

While sites such as www.freeimages.co.uk provide some useful graphics, top-quality photography usually requires some payment. With that in mind, I suggest visiting the big-name stock image agencies like Getty Images (www.gettyimages.com), Corbis (www.corbis.com) and Image 100 (www.image100.com). Getty and Image 100 offer some graphics royalty-free for personal use

Osiołkowi w żłoby dano...(SVG vs. Flash)

SVG And Flash As The Same Species

By Maricon Williams

We can name several technologies for displaying 2D interactive vector graphics on the web however, two names rises among other contenders.

These are the Macromedia's Shock Wave Flash (SWF) and the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG). Unlike Flash SVG is not for sale.

Adobe's SVG browser plug-in has achieved barely around 10% penetration, compared to Macromedia's 90% for the Flash plug-in. Flash has already established an outstanding standard nevertheless, this did not make SVG an inferior technology.

In the past Flash was considered a de-facto standard under control of one single vendor. For this reason, W3C proposed a recommendation to achieve standardized 2D interactive vector graphics on the web. This resulted to the birth of SVG. Its first version was Recommendation 1.0 which was introduced in 2001. The current version though is 1.1 which was released on January 2003.

Some people asserts that SVG is as powerful as Flash. Some say it is superior. But still there are others who think it's the other way around. Which is which really?! To help you decide here are some vital facts:

Use Flash in the following instances:

1. You must use Flash if you want to make a Flash-like website. To replicate it using SVG is hard to do.

2. If you want to create complex animations or games you can use any of the two. However, you must be aware that SVG's built-in SMIL animation engine is very processor exhaustive. Conversely, good results can be achieved using JavaScript animations.

3. If your users are not that computer literate like for example children for a children's site or a site appealing to a broad audience, you must use Flash.

4. SVG supports sound. Nonetheless, if sound involves important intricate details, use Flash.

5. Use Flash if you prefer WYSIWYG to script.

SVG is advantageous in the following instances:

1. Use SVG if your task is fully scriptable. You can try DOM1 (part DOM2) interface and JavaScript. It means that you can build your empty SVG image using JavaScript.

2. SVG can effortlessly be created by ASP, PHP, Perl and extracted from a database. Be cautious though in setting mime-types on the server.

3. It is XML meaning it can be read by anything that can read XML. Flash can use XML but it has to be converted first.

4. You need not apply Flash's action-script because SVG does not code per browser. It has a built-in ECMA-script engine.

5. SVG runs on IE/NS4+NS6/Mozilla and on PC/MAC/Linux.

6. SVG can be transformed through an XSLT style-sheet or parser. It also supports standard CSS1 style-sheets.

7. Texts used remains selectable and searchable. Graphic "objects" can be grouped, styled, transformed or composited and embedded text can be searched or indexed.

8. Features of the specification include nested transformations, clipping paths, alpha masks, filter effects, template objects and, of course, extensibility

9. You need not buy Flash since only texteditor is needed to create SVG.

By now, I know you already have a choice. Take your pick and enjoy the features of your chosen technology

JDO 2, too little, too late

Nowa (2-ga) specyfikacja JDO to tylko draft (4-8 miesiecy potrwa proces approval), skrytykowana przez uczestników JCP poniewaz specyfikacja EJB 3.0 znacznie ja przewyzsza funkcjonalnie jezeli chodzi o zapewnienie trwalosci (persistant) - stad powyzszy tytul.

Java object spec set for open source Apache licensing
Paul Krill, InfoWorld

07/03/2005 08:02:16

Java Data Objects (JDO) 2.0, a specification for Java object persistence that has been controversial of late, is to be offered under Apache open source licensing, said a Sun Microsystems architect at the TheServerSide Java Symposium event on Friday.

The more liberal Apache licensing will allow users to do what they wish with the technology, said Sun architect Craig Russell. Version 1.0 of JDO had been offered under the more-restrictive Sun Community Source License, Russell said.

JDO 2.0 features improvements in areas such as query functionality.

JDO was recently the subject of a petition drive after an initial vote within the JCP (Java Community Process) rejected the specification. A new vote announced this week approved a public draft. But JDO 2.0 still must be subjected to a four- to eight-month final approval process by the JCP Executive Committee, Russell said.

The EJB 3.0 specification is expected to supersede JDO as a method of Java persistence, although Russell noted users can still deploy JDO.

"JDO will live on as an Apache project, no question about it," Russell said.

"The future evolution of JDO will depend on the needs of the Java community," Russell added.Â

The petition drive last month in support of JDO 2.0 drew more than 1,000 signatures after the JCP's initial tally on approval fell short, 10 votes to five. JCP member JBoss, in voting no, said JDO 2.0 constituted more than a maintenance release and would cause confusion with EJB 3.0.

Also at the TheServerSide event, an Oracle executive said the company plans to upgrade its portal-development technology by adding the ability to do portal development via the company's JDeveloper development tool. Currently, development is browser-based.

"(The improvements) will allow a more rich design time because you can do more in a desktop tool (like JDeveloper) than a browser," said the official, Ted Farrell, chief architect for the Application Development Tools Division at Oracle.

The new functionality is enabled via support of JavaServer Faces technology for building Java-based Web applications.

Install AD\AM, the Secure Windows LDAP Service

Install AD\AM, the Secure Windows LDAP Service

AD\AM is a very simple, yet powerful, LDAP service you can use to handle authentication for your online applications, without requiring a full-blown NOS directory. Get a step-by-step demonstration of the AD\AM installation process.
by Rob Hawthorne
ust about everyone implements a roll-your-own security mechanism for his or her software applications. I've done it, many software companies have done it, and I am sure you have as well. But guess what: you don't have to! With the release of Windows Server 2003, Microsoft introduced a portable, scalable, and secure Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) database based on their Network Operating System (NOS) Active Directory (AD). This service is called Active Directory [surprise, surprise] Application Mode, or AD\AM for short.

Although AD\AM and AD share the same code base (and general purposes) and even are developed by the same MS development team, a couple of major differences allow AD\AM the flexibility to be used in online architectures that just can't be afforded to a full blown NOS.

This article demonstrates the AD\AM installation process. It isn't intended to be a features list or sales pitch for AD\AM, but without an understanding of the reasons to implement it, you wouldn't have much incentive to go any further. So it begins with a brief—and I mean brief—introduction to AD\AM.

Why Use AD\AM?
AD\AM is a LDAP database that is primarily used to store users, groups, and other objects that represent organizations or other associations. It allows you to easily implement security within your applications, without having to write a huge amount of validation or user management code.

AD\AM provides the following capabilities, which separate it from AD:

* Simple backup and recovery – AD\AM uses a single .dit file, which contains all the database information.
* Easy installation and clean uninstall – It doesn't require you to have DNS working nor to install additional components on a server.
* Extended support for X.500 directory naming rather than just DNS directory-style naming.
* Effortless schema extensions without impacting on production Active Directory environments.
* Free download from Microsoft – AD\AM itself does not have a license cost associated with it.
* Can run multiple instances on the same machine (similar in concept to multiple instances of SQL Server 2000).

AD\AM has a number of great features that make it perfect for an online authentication system:

* Password Policies – AD\AM provides the ability to ensure that a user's password meets certain complexity requirements (e.g., number of characters, case, alpha-numeric, etc.). Have you ever tried to write that code? What a pain!
* Encrypted password store – AD\AM uses the same password encryption store as Active Directory, and as such, passwords cannot be reverse-engineered (unless you store them in reversible encryption).
* Ability to use Active Directory authentication for internal users – AD\AM can pass off the authentication to Active Directory, allowing AD to authorize internal users to use the online application.

AD\AM has the ability to scale out in proportions similar to Active Directory. So given all the great things about AD\AM, what are its limitations?

* AD\AM installs only on Windows XP (SP1 or above), Windows Server 2003 Standard, Enterprise, and Data Center Editions, but not on Windows 2000 (any edition) or Windows Server 2003 Web Edition.
* For Windows XP, the AD\AM install is a limited release. You are limited to 10,000 objects within the AD\AM instance.
* AD\AM currently does not have complete integration with Microsoft's Authentication Manager (nick-named AZMan). However, this is reportedly cleaned up in SP1 for Windows 2003 (no promises though!).
* AD\AM has no capabilities for Kerberos. If you wish to use Kerberos, you need to implement Active Directory (and probably not over the Web!).
* Pass-through (or user-proxy) authentication requires domain membership.

Which Version of AD\AM?
AD\AM comes in six different flavors. When you download AD\AM, be sure to select the correct version for your requirements.

AD\AM provides support for both 32- and 64-bit Windows platforms, as well as providing the following specific download versions:

* Retail: This is the most common version for use within a business environment. It is subject to the standard Retail End User Licence Agreement (EULA). Use the ADAMretailIA64.exe and ADAMretailX86.exe files.
* Redistributable: Application developers use this version to package AD\AM with their applications for redistribution to their users. These versions are subject to the Redistribution EULA. Use the ADAMredistIA64.exe and ADAMredistX86.exe files.
* MUI: The Multilingual User Interface (MUI) pack for AD\AM allows for multiple-language support. Before installing the AD\AM MUI pack, the Windows MUI pack and a retail or redistributable version of AD\AM must be installed on the computer. Additionally, Hotfix 828745 must be installed. Use the AdamMUIia64.msi and AdamMUIx86.msi files.

Table 1 shows the file packages that are available for download.

File Name Platform Download Link File Size (Bytes)
AdamMUIia64.msi 64-bit AdamMUIia64.msi 3,574
AdamMUIx86.msi 32-bit AdamMUIx86.msi 9,880
ADAMredistIA64.exe 64-bit ADAMredistIA64.exe 10,895
ADAMredistX86.exe 32-bit ADAMredistX86.exe 8,467
ADAMretailIA64.exe 64-bit ADAMretailIA64.exe 10,891
ADAMretailX86.exe 32-bit ADAMretailX86.exe 8,463
Table 1. AD\AM Comes in Six Different Flavors

You can review the information about the individual downloads from the Microsoft AD\AM download site.

This article does not demonstrate redistributing an application and uses the ADAMretailX86.exe version. Ensure that you select the correct version for the OS you are running.

Coś dla ludożercóww - czas na tłustego...(klienta)

Wzbogacony kilent (Rich client) - fragment aplikacji uruchamianej na komputerze klienta, który wykorzystuje i agreguje zdalne usługi sieciowe (remote Web services) oraz dane lokalne i zdalne pozwalając na nie spojrzeć przez pryzmat jednej, spójnej aplikacji funkcjonalnie i wizualmnie nie różniącej się od natywnej (lokalnej). Znaczenie RC jest coraz większe w dobie upowszechnienia się architektury SOA (service oriented arch.). Tradycyjne interfejsy webowe nigdy nie były w zamyśle porjektowane pod kątem aplikacji interaktywnych. Internet był źródłem serwowania dokumentów a nie jak to wymaga SOA serwerem usług dynamicznych. W tym rozumieniu interakcja (symulacja dynamiki) aplikacji polegała na ciągłum przeładowywaniu dokumentów i wymagała ciągłej komunikacji z serwerem aby uzyskać nową zawartość. Bardzo mało działo się na stacji kilenta a jeżeli zabrakło połączenia z serwerem aplikacja była martwa. Takie uzależnienie aplikacji od połączenie nie jest optymalnym sposobem na obsługę klienta. Wymagane są zmiany w zakresie:

• uczynienia interfejsu bardziej dynamicznym (podobnie jak grubi klienci - thick clients) wykorzystujący możliwości okienkowe środowiska w któym jest on uruchomniony.
• luźnego powiązania warstwy prezentacyjnej z logiczną - dzięki czemu można zmienić interfejs użytkownika lub usługi na serwerze bez obawy o działanie aplikacji
• lepszej integracji danych lokalnych ze zdalymi - możliwość dostępu do danych przechowywanych zdalnie jak i lokalnie.

Takie aplikacje już istnieją np. MS Excel potrafi pobrać poprzez WS dane giełdowe z Internetu.
Ważne jest utrzymanie swych rozwiązań w zgodzie ze standardami takimi jak np. WSRP:

The OASIS Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard exists to simplify integration of remote applications (services and information) into portals. This standard's goal is to provide a mechanism where portal administrators choose from a selection of remote content and services, and aggregate them in their portal, typically without programming. Thus, just as you create composite applications using remote Web services, you create portals using the same paradigm. WSRP defines standard Web services at the presentation layer and exists on top of the existing Web services stack. The WSRP interfaces define themselves by using Web Services Description Language (WSDL). Also, WSRP defines metadata (self-describing) for publishing and locating WSRP services that exist in registries. WSRP services are necessary to implement some SOAP bindings. The WSRP standard defines interface-oriented Web services along with a well-defined interface and protocol for processing rich client user interactions. Moreover, WSRP provides presentation fragments for mediation and aggregation by remote portals. WSRP also offers conventions for publishing, finding, and binding such services. The objective is to have all Web services that implement WSRP plug into all WSRP-compliant portals, and do so without additional programming. WSRP defines how this is done without service-specific adapters and instead uses a service-independent adapter on the portal. The idea of WSRP is to create rich clients from prebuilt interface-oriented Web services and define standard interfaces and protocols that fit into the existing Web services stack. The success of WSRP is dependent on the adoption rate, or how useful the existing portal and application server vendors will find WSRP, as well as the movement to rich clients and interest in more dynamic interfaces for portals.

Wchodzi RSS, co z RDF?

FEATURE: Review: FeedForAll 1.0

RSS technology is really taking off. According to a recent study, 5% of Internet users

say they use RSS. That's almost 46,700,000 users! As a Web developer, part of your job

may be to create RSS feeds or develop a method that a client can use directly. In the 

past, this was usually done manually or through the use of Perl scripts, but now there

are several software applications that make the creation process much easier.

FeedForAll is one of those programs.

http://nl.internet.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=1,1fi4,1,f982,7kd8,48gk,84du

Cytat dnia

"Time will bring to light whatever is hidden;
it will cover up and conceal what is now shining in splendor."
 Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65 BC-8 BC); Roman poet.