The Blog




Plastic | "Now With MORE Genes!" -- Mystery DNA Found In GM Soya : But what I find consistently in these threads is a bias against caution. I find it just a little worrying that the GM industry is beta testing it's product in the same biosphere I live in.

News: Zap! ... and your PC's dead : With $500 and a trip to the hardware store, saboteurs can build a device capable of remotely disrupting computers, automobiles, medical equipment and nearly anything else dependent on electronics Now how can I get it in a car so I can zap the speed cameras?

Edd Dumbill - Edd Dumbill: "Perhaps some of the uneasiness is due to the fact that web services proponents have never demonstrated how to do any more than retrieve a stock quote." [Scripting News] Edd shame on you. And this from an O'Reilly contributor as well. But still some good points about the degradation of the word "Standard".

The Times : Tiny bull leads charge to micro medicine Japanese researchers have used nano machine tech to build a bull sculpture at the micrometre scale.

The Natural Life Cycle Of Mailing Lists : The Natural Life Cycle Of Mailing Lists from 1994 and as true today as it was then.




Linux Today - Guest Column: Will Open Source Lose the Battle for the Web? : There will be Apache defenders who will bristle at the suggestion that it is a vanilla webserver. Look at PHP, they will say. PHP actually has greater market share than ASP. You can build fantastic web applications with PHP at a fraction of the cost of any commercial alternatives, including Microsoft.
That's great, but when will PHP grow to become something more than a web scripting language? Where is the PHP enterprise component architecture? What about clustering and failover? Where are the WSDL and UDDI implementations? Don't show me bits and pieces here and there. Show me a framework. Show me a reference implementation. Show me a friendly interface. Not there yet? So PHP has been left in the dust as well, while ASP is morphing into ASP.NET, the browser delivery front-end of the Microsoft web services platform.


This site is built in PHP. With my interest in UDDI and web services, I would love to see SOAP built into the PHP release and UDDI implementations built with PHP-MySQL-Apache. But all the SOAP and XML-RPC implementations I've seen in PHP so far are still flaky. XML support in PHP is limited and DOMXML support is still experimental. Damn, come on guys!

The trouble is, the way the big J2EE vendors are repeating history is textbook Santayana. Their greed for high margins is causing them to abdicate the low end of web services to Microsoft and .NET. Big mistake. ... It needn't be this way. J2EE doesn't have to be an expensive alternative at all. There is an excellent Open Source J2EE server called JBoss, which provides a solid foundation on which to base a platform. Most Open Source enterprise components such as databases, directory services, message queues, mailservers and the like already support J2EE interfaces. What we need to do now is add Open Source implementations of web services standards (WSDL, UDDI, ebXML) and combine them all with a nice user interface (can anyone say "drag and drop"?). In fact, some of these standards are already implemented as Open Source (e.g. pUDDIng). That would be the Open Source answer to .NET.

It's worth checking what Enhydra are up to. A lot of commercial implementations of J2EE use BEA who have just announced SOAP-WSDL-UDDI support. A lot of these same implementations do their J2EE development on Enhydra which is usually only a few weeks behind BEA and have development running on these same web services.

The vast /. discussion on this paper is here.




Could you be fired for allowing your Win NT desktop or laptop to be infected by Code Red? If you work for Lucent, the answer's yes!

Automatic for the Pedal - Recreational cyclists face many problems: behemoth SUVs, fiddly helmet straps and the trick of selecting the right gear. Now, Shimano says it's taking the brains out of bicycling with an automatic gear-shifting system. By Louise Knapp. [Wired News] Choice Quote: "My periodontist is very intelligent but he just cannot figure out how to shift gears on a bicycle," said William Cook, owner of Barcroft Cycles, a bike manufacturer in Virginia. "He's like a lot of people. Some people just can't figure it out." Doh! My kids worked this one out aged 8. It's some neat tech, but come on guys, do we really need this?

Virtual fish - Californian company DALi Inc are attempting to create an online "ocean" called DALiWorld filled with Artificial Life fish connected across a peer-to-peer network to client's computers. [kuro5hin.org] At last. A sensible use for P2P tech.


Maggie Thatcher Fans! You just have to check this out - But be warned, it may make you feel funny

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