Memory Hierarchy

A few years ago I read an interview with Mike Cowlishaw where he mentioned benifits of mainframes: quietness (fanless terminal on your desk) and stablity and longevity of data and programs (programs written in assembler still runs a few decades after their creation).

I wouldn't give up my PC (after all it's mine and personal) but I'd gladly pay money for a secure remote storage + cpu with practically infinite uptime.

I suspect fax is one of the biggest technical hurdle for BPM. Now I despair even more: my office phone's clock is stuck in daylight savings time. At home I had to change 10 clocks by hand to reset the time. Only clocks I did not need to reset were the clocks in computers.

Slightly off tangent -- for amusement see how Einstein and Poincaré solved the problem of synchronizing clocks nearly a century ago (also called special relativity).

adding one more: ACM Queue on dvelopment tools especially Debugging in an Asynchronous World.

I like thinking about distributed computing, web services (or rather web of services), SOA, etc. One question I ask myself about these technolgies is: How dependable or reliable are they? As luck would have it, the LAN I was using went down and even after it came back every print job failed. Apprently we have to powercycle the printers! Considering network printers have been around for a long time, I say this kind of failure bodes ill for much larger scale distributed computing.

I've been wireless for last few hours but alas battery is running low. When people say "wireless" they conviniently forget power wires.

Update at 10:30 -- wifi stopped working suddenly and I had to find spare ethernet cable and port fast. So much for the un-wired lifestyle.

[A followup: the problem was "solved" by power cycling the wifi router. These days everything is solvable by toggling on/off button!]

Thankfully I don't get that many spams and I haven't been paying much attention to the latest anti-spam brainstorm out there. Now people are saying merely filtering spams with bayesian filter is not enough and spams should be stopped before they get transmitted. And the way to transmit only the legit mails is trust network of digital certificates. Glenn Fleishman's short summary seems to cover the subject well enough.

Even if we can build this network, can it stop virus infected mails and notifications from stupid virus checkers flooding inboxes? The lastet Microsoft virus fiasco shows otherwise. If you can keep on stealing or "borrowing" enough legit certs with virus, what good is this trust network?

One of my pet peeves is to hear nonsense "yeah, our software is internationalized because we use unicode". Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Many people linked to Joelonsoftware on "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" The article, nice as it is, does not cover what I consider to be minimum set of knowledge: understanding of encodings, character sets, fonts and glyphs. For a short take on the subject see Tim Bray's post on Unicode. For more details, look at many books listed in Sun's developer web site on globalization. Naturally Sun's web site is about Solaris and Java but much of the content is widely applicable to other technologies. (The Sun engineer Karl Hong, whose picture graces the banner on the Sun web site above, and I worked on localizing Java 1.2 with many others in Menlo Park, Dublin, Beijing and Tokyo.)

Someday I should write an essay or two on release engineering, QA and project management in this business as well as all kinds of pitfalls and traps that await the innocent developers. But time is scarce these days.

FlashPaper looks interesting. I wonder if there is a web service to convert any file to FlashPaper? Acrobat has free online converter for PDF.