Category: Technology

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Technology

Stealth P2P

Found this thanks to Rogi:

It seems as if a little extra functionality has been riding along with Kazaa when you download the file/music sharing software — P2P technology that will allow the user’s machine to be integrated into a true P2P distributed computing network.

Well, that’s not such a bad thing — P2P is good. However, the problem is the people who downloaded the Kazaa software did NOT know they were downloading this extra piece of functionality.

Now, it’s true, the company behind the software, Brilliant Digital hasn’t “turned on” the software yet, and won’t without asking first. However, I find the deviousness of this process to be appalling.

I said last year that for P2P to be successful, distribution of the software would need to be viral in nature. What I meant by this, is that one would need to use different approaches to distribute software, such as through email. And that the software would need to be modular and lightweight.

I did NOT mean that the software would be silently attached to other software, and distributed without the user’s knowledge.

My suggestion: if you downloaded Kazaa, dump it. Now. Uninstall it. And then contact Brilliant Digital for specific instructions to follow to ensure that no trace of this software remains on your machine.

And next time — be a little more cautious about what you download.

Categories
Technology

Will not be speaking at NextWare

Well, I’ve pulled out of presenting at the NextWare conference in Baltimore in May. The Penton folks were just terrific and left the door open for me to speak at the Fall conference instead. I need to focus on getting the two books for O’Reilly finished AND finding a job. Definitely finding a job.

Speaking of which, there’s an “About BB” link to the right there, with a nice downloadable copy of my resume in Word format. Please feel free to grab a copy and distribute to the HR person of your choice. There’s an autographed copy of one of my books in it for you 😉

Once the books are done, I want to turn to other things, try other things out. Woman does not live by technology alone.

Woman also doesn’t live by weblogging alone, either.

There’s a Playwright Cafe here in San Francisco that I want to join. They meet every month to talk craft and discuss scenes, chat, hear from professional playwrights, and generally have a lot of fun.

I want to write a play. You’ll all be my stars. Stick with me, I’ll make you famous.

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Technology

No such thing as a full peer

Sorry, a break on earlier topic to jump back momentarily into technology:

In regards to the release of Userland’s Radio Community Server — there is no such thing as a full peer. Any machine that must be on 24×7 to serve a community of clients is called a “server”.

Why must some people seek to re-write the history of technology by re-defining terms and technologies in such a way that it looks like they are the “originators” of same?

Boggles. Boggles my friggen mind.

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Technology

Excited about tech

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I am not going to get into the “excited about technology” frame of mind. Every time this happens, I get disappointed because I’m left feeling that what I’m saying isn’t connecting. Or exciting people. Or working. Or worthwhile. Or interesting.

And I love getting into debates and exchanges about new and interesting technology. When it doesn’t happen, I just get so damn disappointed.

I’ll just stick with my books and the presentations I am considered acceptable for and be content.

Update: Screw this — I live for this type of excitement, and others are welcome to ride along.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Techie discussion about Radio

Warning: Technical discussion about a new Radio implementation feature ahead — those with other interests may want to wait on next post.

This will probably add to the buzz pushing this item to the Daypop 40, but such is life: Userland released a new aggregator architecture that allows the introduction of new drivers for unknown XML formats such as RSS 1.0.

With this architecture, you can basically attach processing information for new XML formats on the fly (i.e. without having to re-compile or modify the underlying Radio implementation).

If you’re a C++ developer, you’ll recognize the architectural concepts as being extremely close to vtable lookups. If you’re a COM/DCOM/COM+ developer, at first glance this looks to be similar to vTable binding, but I’m thinking that it more close resembles early binding — primarily because a “type library” in this context doesn’t apply. The XML aggregation architecture is also somewhat similar to CORBA’s bind operation, or Java RMI’s reflection. If you know these technologies and are interested in Radio, check it out, see if I’m wrong in my interpretation.

BTW, don’t let the word “compile” in Dave’s description of this new change mislead you — this is attaching Radio script to a format, not actually “compiling” the code so that it runs at machine level such as a compiled C program would. And that script is interpreted, right Radio buffs in the audience?

With this architectural change, new XML vocabularies can, supposedly, be introduced to Radio. The concept is good, but I wonder how performance will be — lookups have been notoriously slow in other technology implementations. I’ll also be very curious to see if this will work with RDF/XML — a metadata vocabulary described in XML that, in turn, describes other data. The metadata aspect of this pulls this vocabulary out of the context of “top-level” XML object, doesn’t it?

(Is there a Radio 8.0 ad stapled to my butt?)