Kategorie: Tim’s Weblog

Fascinating stuff: „Rainbow is a program that performs statistical text classification.“ It can use Bayesian classification to automatically categorize documents. Jon Udell tried it out last year: “ There’s been some discussion in the blog world about using a Bayesian categorizer to enable a person to discriminate along various interest/non-interest axes. I took a run…

Found an old piece written by Micah Dubinko – „The Brain Attic“, where he’s asking for Personal Information Management software. (He’s written his own software now – using plain text files: „It’s the Data, Stupid“) „What we really need is a better way for our computers to be our brain-attics, freeing us up to do…

A lot of the advantages of Python over Java apply to PHP as well: „A programmer can be significantly more productive in Python than in Java. How much more productive? The most widely accepted estimate is 5-10 times. On the basis of my own personal experience with the two languages, I agree with this estimate.…

There’s a lot to consider when dealing with multibyte characters in your programs – see this JavaWorld article: „Most J2EE servers can support multibyte-character languages (like Chinese and Japanese) very well, but different J2EE servers and browsers support them differently. When developers port some Chinese (or Japanese) localized applications from one server to another, they…

Jeff Lowery at ONJava.com – Do As They Need, Not As They Say: „‚Do it the way we’ve always done it, except better.‘ This is the unstated initial requirement of any new system I’ve been asked to develop. Nobody really wants to change the way things are done, even though they recognize the problems. It’s…

Jon Udell on Radical software customization: „We can all agree that software must be customizable. But when programmers alone decide how users can do things, you often end up with a scenario like Aunt Tillie’s OS X adventure: a dashboard packed with incomprehensible dials and knobs. If the dashboard was built with a dynamic language,…

Tim Bray on Web Services Theory and Practice: „I think somebody needs to stand up and start waving a flag that’s labeled ‚WS-Simplification‘ or ‚Real Web Services’ or something, that’s all about building applications with what’s here today and what works today: XML, HTTP, URIs, SOAP, WSDL, and that’s about it. People who need solutions…

At ONLamp.com, Robert Jones has lots of good advice for Planning for Disaster Recovery on LAMP Systems: „Don’t get me wrong, disaster recovery is a critical issue. It’s just that it can be a very painful process for those of us who come from an informal development background. […] I know I’m not the only…

Jakob Nielsen has advice for B2B websites: „Build a reputation for being easy to do business with and for standing by your products with great service. This is where the Web shines: you can provide excellent post-sales support online at a fraction of the cost of older methods. Unfortunately, most of the support sites we’ve…

Andy Lester – The pen is mightier than the laser: „In the World Of Business, there’s no reason to bow down to the God Of Laser Printing […]. Pen and paper works on the small scale, too. Extreme Programming uses the concept of the „story card“, a 3″x5″ handwritten index card that shows high-level tasks…