Categories
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.

Categories
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?)

Categories
Diversity Technology

Geek out of work

Nothing like being an out of work geek in a technology recession. The only thing worse, is being an out of work geek in a recession who also happens to be a woman.

Gender bias — that strikes me as a hell of a good topic right about now.

On March 8th, Jonathon posted the following comment:

You and I both know, Dave, that the breathtaking hypocrisy of “Where Men Can Link, But They Can’t Touch” isn’t going to get “looked at” any time soon, not by the BlogSisters nor by anyone else in the blogging universe.

I was amazed that no one jumped on this. I didn’t at the time as I wasn’t feeling well. I also wanted to save this particular nugget for a weblog rainy day. And guess what! It’s sunny outside, but the rain is falling in weblogdom for me today. Splat. Splat.

Can women, a group that has been excluded longer than any other group in the history of “man”, exclude in turn without being seen as hypocritical? After all the whole concept of BlogSisters is that women bloggers — and only women bloggers — can post to the weblog. One could say that the entire weblog is sexist in the extreme. Right?

Bah!

Sexism is discriminating against the opposite sex in such a way as to prevent the members of the opposite sex from having equal opportunity of participation, regardless of the venue. This means that yes, you can have all boy clubs and all girl clubs and all green people clubs — as long as the participation in said club does not give said members of the club more opportunties for academic or professional advancement than people who are not members of said club.

That’s been the whole slam against the good ole rich cat boy clubs in this country; many have been avenues of networking that give men (bluntly, white men) professional advantages — advantages not accessible to non-members (i.e. women and non-white men).

You know, I could really care less about belonging to a club of men who spend their day huntin’ and spitten’ tobacco or comparing sizes of their penises or whatever boys do in an all-boy clubs (sexist nature of statement fully intended, BTW). But I do care about being a member of a club that opens up doors to employment and opportunity in my profession.

Unfortunately, most of the clubs I’m most interested in don’t have a charter or a membership drive, or a door that one can walk up to and bang on for entry.

Case in point: last year, I gave a presentation at O’Reilly’s first P2P conference. At the time, I remember looking at the speaker list and commenting to Andy Oram — an editor and one of my favorite O’Reilly people — that there didn’t seem to be many women in the roster. In fact, for the longest time, I was the only women speaker out of several men. It was only just before the show that a few other women appeared in the speaker list, primarily moderators of panels.

I am a geek. In fact, a friend persists in calling me an ubergeek. I feel comfortable talking with geeks, and love exchanging emails and weblog postings with other geeks. However, there are few things that can make me feel more of an outsider — a non-member — than walking into a room of other geeks or ubergeeks, and being the only woman present. There might not be a sign outside the door saying “No gurlz allowed”, but it’s there, buried deeply in the minds of the guys, in my mind, and in the minds of a a society that still persists in propagating a most blatant message — girls are nurturers, boys are geeks.

I can bring home the bacon, fry it up in a pan. And never, ever let you forget you’re a man — cause I’m a woman….

Bah!

Back to BlogSisters and the “great hypocrisy”. There’s nothing about BlogSisters that stops any man from having an equal say within weblogdom. Or starting up a BlogBrothers weblog. Or preventing men from gainful employment, equal academic participation, religious opportunity, freedom from oppression, and accessibility to the masses. In fact (sorry a little metablogging here) that’s a great thing about weblogging, isn’t it? Anyone can say anything they want — weblogging truly is equal opportunity.

Hypocrisy? Sorry, bark up another tree with that tune, mate.

It’s interesting, but I had my own hesitations about BlogSisters, and still do, but not because I consider the concept hypocritical. I won’t post at BlogSisters for the same reason that I won’t join any of the women in technology support groups in the area, though I know I am depriving myself of the comfort of said support at times.

I won’t join any organization whose criteria for membership is based on sex because I want people to see me beyond something that is nothing more than an accident of birth — a random modification within the DNA that created me.

I love being a woman. I am so glad I was born a woman. But being a woman has nothing to do with my ability to create systems that can rock the house, code applications that make junior programmers run in fear, handle massive database systems, mega-user networks, and work with and discuss the most complex computer technology issues imaginable. However, being a woman can throw up barriers that prevent me from doing these things, and the work I love so much.

As for the BlogSisters — blog away ladies. And more power to you.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

Closing this generation of techblog

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I closed TechBlog down and I’m keeping it closed. My technology is as much a part of me as every other aspect of my life — I’m not going to arbitrarily split it off. When I want to “TechTalk”, I’ll say what I want here, in Burningbird.

I have to jump on to two postings of John Robb’s: one on RSS feeds and one on what he calls the Next Generation P2P Systems. I’ll cover the RSS topic in this posting, the P2P topic in a posting later today. In fact, it will probably be split into a separate page as it’s not going to be small.

Part of the weblogging process to me is visiting each person’s unique site. The words and the surroundings form a unified whole that communicates more than just the words themselves. I like being notified when a person’s weblog is changed, and check weblogs.com regularly. But to strip a person’s thoughts and plunk it into a queue that gets spit out to me on this plain white background — this isn’t a true group forming and communication process, is it?

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