When
· Naughties
· · 2005
· · · June
· · · · 12 (4 entries)
Java Generics, Arrays, and Comparables · This is an educational story (and therefore painful; O’Reilly books unfortunately were harmed in its making) about all the Java whatnots mentioned in the title, with pointers to the solutions to the problems. [Update: correction from David Hall.] ...
June Harvest · Pretty well all of my creative energies in recent days have been consumed in thrashing at the Java underbrush, so instead of actually thinking and writing, I’ll cough up some undigested links, ain’t the Web grand? First, this Matisse Project demo has been getting tons o’ buzz, but what I like is the silky-smooth Czech accent. Second, Dervala’s friend Tim Vetter got an astounding Mission-district picture. Third, David Megginson simultaneously explored Ruby on Rails and PHP, never previously having considered either; his conclusion may be surprising. Fourth, Clint Combs writes up another interesting RSS/Atom app. Finally, John Cowan is pumping out technolinguisticophilosophical gems, several per day in recent days, don’t miss ’em.
Technorati, Tags, Semantics · Hey, the Technorati beta is up. Looks much nicer, though I wish they’d lose the dude with the megaphone; goatees are so 1993. (Hey look, Technorati and Newsweek, sitting in a tree.) Among other things, the technorationals are making a concerted effort to prove that my doubts about tagging are misplaced—so are Shirky et al at You’re It!. It’s become obvious that tags are useful enough as a place to park search words for pictures & music & other stuff that doesn’t have words to search. Furthermore, I’ve heard a dozen compelling stories from people who are using tags to organize their own information and track trends; so it’s looking like the answers are: Yes, tagging is useful; No, it’s not a replacement for full-text search, even partially. On the subject of search, Sun’s Search Guy Steve Green is trying to push over the boundary between search and semantics.
On Threads · Last week I attended a Sun “CMT Summit”, where CMT stands for “Chip Multi-Threading”; a roomful of really senior Sun people talking about the next wave of CPUs and what they mean. While much of the content was stuff I can’t talk about, I was left with a powerful feeling that there are some real important issues that the whole IT community needs to start thinking about now. I’ve written about this before, and of the many others who have too, I’m particularly impressed by Chris Rijk’s work. But I think it’s worthwhile to pull all this together into one place and do some calls to action, so here goes. [Ed. Note: Too long and too geeky for most.] [Update: This got slashdotted and I got some really smart feedback, thus this follow-up.] ...
