Autor: Tim Strehle

Joel on Software: „When Unix was created and when it formed its cultural values, there were no end users. Computers were expensive, CPU time was expensive, and learning about computers meant learning how to program. It’s no wonder that the culture which emerged valued things which are useful to other programmers. By contrast, Windows was…

There’s a nice comparison in the „Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves“ article: „Think of your [software] project as your home. If you put things back when you’re done with them, take out the trash every few days, and generally keep things in order, it’s easy to tidy up before having friends over. If you…

O’Reilly had a nice introductory article on The Master Key to Oracle’s Data Dictionary: „Oracle’s data dictionary views are all based on tables, but the views provide a much more user-friendly presentation of the metadata. For example, to find out the names of all of the relational tables that you own, you can issue the…

Navigating trees and graphs in 3D looks like fun with the free H3Viewer – the data file format is plain text, which is great…

I’m currently thinking about „metadata in context“, and how to realise this using Topic Maps concepts. It would be very elegant to be able to attach metadata inline, especially for long texts. Here’s a nice Wikipedia sample article linking to people, dates, places, and other subjects. Exactly what I’d love to do, but these links…

Navigating through Techquila’s Topic Map World Topic Map may help one understand what Topic Maps are about…

Werner Vogels: „The lack of understanding that Web services primarily support the document-exchange contract is one of the root causes for many of the misconceptions about them. […] Web services share none of the distributed object systems’ characteristics. They include no notion of objects, object references, factories, or life cycles. Web services do not feature…

Robin ‚Roblimo‘ Miller on NewsForge: „Writing software is fascinating, even somewhat addictive. People in the writing business are familiar with the phenomenon of „compulsive writers“ who write not for money but because that’s what they do. […] The free software movement is full of compulsive programmers.“

„TMAPI hopes to do for topic maps what SAX and DOM did for XML – provide a single common API which all developers can code to and which means that there applications can be moved from one underlying platform to another with minimum fuss.“ And this is what it looks like.

Ethan Cerami: „A major element of web services is planning for when things go wrong, and propagating error messages back to client applications. However, unlike SOAP, REST-based web services do not have a well-defined convention for returning error messages. In fact, after surveying a number of REST-based web services in the wild, there appear to…