leave developerworks?

David Shields advises me to:

leave the firewall and use WordPress. It's more fun and more reliable outside the firewall. You'll also learn more from those who will only be able to read your blog because it is in the real world.

I'm not behind the IBM firewall. Developerworks is completely outside of the IBM firewall.

I switched from a blog at blogger to this blog at developerWorks about 3 months ago. Why switch? My new job entails doing some community outreach, so I thought it was appropriate to do some of that, via blogging, at an IBM site. And the price was right.

dWorks is currently using roller, and so I suppose there is some peer pressure involved now, since I occaisonally have a beer or coffee with "the Roller guy", Dave Johnson. But seriously, I do like roller, generally. Better than blogger, when I was using it.

There are some downsides with the current blogging situation:

1. Our roller is set up to use Velocity as it's templating language.
2. It supports tags, but can't automatically generate feeds based on the tags. Though you can hack that. My understanding is that this is resolved in a later (or future) release.
3. I don't feel as 'free' to post purely personal stuff at the IBM site.

I also had a blog inside the firewall, and I will concur with Dave on all his points w/r/t those types of blogs. I don't have time to blog here the way I'd like to; managing another blog isn't very practical. Likewise, per one of the points above, I'd been thinking about setting up a separate personal blog, for those times when I wanted to get personal. But like an inside the firewall blog, it's another resource to manage, so I'm not going that route now.

I'm not sure that there are limitations on any IBMers creating blogs at developerWorks, so if any IBMers out there want a blog here, let me know, and I'll pass the info along to you. I just asked for one, and got it in two days. I asked for a wiki at the same time, and got that in one day (we use Confluence for our wiki software, which is fantastic).

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Photo 'Firewall' with a nice CC license, by Lili Vieira de Carvalho. Found using the Flickr's Create Commons Search.

can't teach an old dog new tricks?

On JSON, recently:

Dave Winer: IT'S NOT EVEN XML!

James Robertson: Yeah, I really want another parser in my application ...

I'm reminded of the 'debate' between evolution and intelligent design.

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Photo 'Change Priorities' with a nice CC license, by Christine. Found using the Flickr's Create Commons Search.

Five things

Bill tagged me.

Five things you didn't know about me:

1. That device I'm staring at while on my afternoon walks is not a Blackberry, I'm not reading email. It's a Palm Pilot, I'm reading Planet Intertwingly.
2. I was a garbage man at my dorm, freshman year in college.
3. My first computer was a PCjr.
4. I was asked to leave St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, because I kept putting my hat on.
5. I own a couple of pairs of pants.

Tag: John, Nick, Dave, Rick and Robert.

2006-12 International PHP magazine articles from IBMers

In the December 2006 edition of the International PHP Magazine you'll find articles by some of my IBM colleagues:

• PHP - A Language Implementer's Perspective - Experiments With the PHP Engine
  By Graeme Johnson and Zoë Slattery

  In this article we will describe some experimental work in building a PHP engine from existing virtual machine components. We were interested in seeing if we could reuse high performance VM components to create a high performance PHP implementation. We will talk about the process that we went through and what we learned about PHP along the way.

• Service Component Architecture for PHP - Reusable Components and Effort-free Web Services
  By Matthew Peters

  In this article we will survey some of what Service Component Architecture (SCA) for PHP offers the programmer. We have high hopes that the combination of reusable components, which can be called either locally, or remotely via Web Services, with the same interface will be of interest, and that anyone who works with Web Services may be interested in the ease with which an SCA component can be deployed as a Web Service: a simple matter of adding annotations and dropping the component under the web server's document root.

Both Matthew and Graeme presented on these respective topics at the International PHP Conference last month.

Graeme; sorry I had to link you to my blog, I still can't find yours :-)

wii guitar

yummy ...

MIDI Control for Music with Wii Remote: Teaser

Must. Hookup. To. Guitar. (via Ableton Live via TonePort)

I can already imagine the hours of practice I will be avoiding.

Isn't it great when folks use standard componentry?

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Photo 'I wanna be a guitar hero', with a nice CC license, by ckirkman. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.

Technorati Profile

New personalized license plate

Thought I'd take the opportunity to teach the boys the concept of hexadecimal.

Thank you Mr. X

Dave Shields posted a blog entry the other day, "Yogi Yarns - On being lucky. First is not always best", in which he talks about his involvement in IBM's first official open source project, Jikes. Dave's current posts are a great read on open source in general. Highly recommended.

I couldn't resist sending him a note though, about a small piece of source code that I managed to convince my IP Lawyer at the time, Mr. X, to 'give away'. This was 1994, and giving away source code wasn't something that normally happened in IBM at the time. Dave reposted my note in his blog.

Of course, the real credit goes to Mr. X. I swore I was going to give Mr. X a heart attack at some point, with all the "crazy talk" that I threw at him. For some reason, he actually listened to me during my tirades, and realized that this particular rant, of wanting to give some customers some relatively harmless / worthless code, was not a completely stupid idea, and ran with it. The resulting license that he had me add to the distribution bares a striking similarity to open source licenses you see today. Remember, this was 1994.

Of course, the real reason I responded was that it's impossible to resist someone saying a record can never be broken. The question is, who's going to break Mr X's record?

I'm also reminded of an opposite case. Way back when, this guy I'd never heard of, Ward Cunningham, had a program on his web site called WikiWikiWeb. I was facinated. So much so that I wrote a lame clone of it in REXX for OS/2. And then told Ward about it. This was about the same time, 1993 or 1994.

Ward emailed me a few months ago, asking me if I still had the source. I never distributed the source, because, that was something that simply wasn't done. I had written some of it at work; it was IBM property, I couldn't just give it away.

I had a fun night, that night I got the email, trolling through lots of my old source code. I have stuff going back to the early 90's. But I couldn't find my wiki clone. Sad. If I HAD given the code out, there'd be a much better chance of it still be available, somewhere.

Update: Mr. X is Greg Doudnikoff.

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Photo 'Mr - X', with a nice CC license, by Luiz Carlos. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.

choose JSON

In Should You Choose RELAX or JSON Now?, Robert Sayre claims "100% of the data-oriented use cases can be served better and faster by JSON. No 80/20 truism."

+1

I've had a love / hate relationship with JSON over the last year, but I'm currently very positive on it. It has all the basic data types you need, and no more: numbers, strings, boolean, hash tables, arrays, and null. And it's not a document.

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Photo 'stop', with a nice CC license, by MarkNick. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.

Wiiiiiiii!!

Yes, we camped out. At our local Target, which we believed was going to have 60 wii's available, and they did. My wife got the 5pm - 10pm slot, I got overnight. Kids stayed the entire time. It was frosty cold; literally. One of the shots in the flickr set shows the frost on one of our sleeping bags. The hot apple cider, hot Bojangles biscuits and hot Krispy Kreme doughnuts helped a little, but not enough.

I should point out this was the kids' idea. I was quite happy to wait till they became available on Amazon, and order from there. But they've been working us for the last few weeks about camping out, and when it finally came down to it, we folded pretty easily. The plan had been to head over at about 4am. Plans changed when we drove by at 4pm and saw about 9 people in line. By about midnight, there were 47 people in line. I think we could have arrived at 4am and just made it.

The crowd was great. Mostly young-ish nerdy types. The only shots I heard came from the Gears of War session someone had going. Power supplied by Lowes, next door, via an extremely long extension cord. Target really did this right. Came out at about 7pm to tell people they'd be opening the doors at 8am, and handing out vouchers at about 7am. That's the boys, to the right, holding our #16 voucher. Target let folks in early to use the restroom, also. Everyone was very friendly.

The Wii setup was easy, I guess. My 13 year old did it. I got it added to the network; it was no more difficult than adding any new device to our network was. Which for me, is a number of steps (security, dhcp, etc). For most people, I'm sure it will just 'work'.

The boys played Wii Sports all day; that's not my type of game, but they enjoyed it. Note you will need to have more 'open space' in your gaming area than normal, to allow for folks making full swinging motions with bats and rackets, as well as making plenty of boxing motions.

The boys didn't have enough money to get any games, so I bought one, and gave them the choice of Super Monkey Ball, Need for Speed, or Excite Truck, which seemed like the only ones I'd really play. They chose Excite Truck. Finally got to play last night at about 10pm.

The wii controller is quite cool. Bluetooth. Wonder if my Mac can see it, and what it would do with it? For the driving game, you basically hold the controller horizontally, then tilt it to steer and some other actions. I felt like I had to hold the controller a little unnaturally to do this, but once I got in the groove (a few minutes), it was pretty comfortable and easy.

BTW, as an additional non-proprietary thing they've done, you can use an SD memory card with the system, somehow; looks like it will show pictures from a phone or camera right now.

The internet connection doesn't seem to do much right now. One section of the system seemed to indicate that we'll be able to browse the internet soon. Showing an image of a Google web page. I guess if you're trying to show people you can connect to the web, showing them Google gets the idea across right away. Though it makes me wonder if there isn't some Google linkage coming. I'll be interested to see if they have some way to 'extend' web pages to do something interesting on them, when browsing on the wii. Also interested to see if people end up finding some networkable things on the wii. I was able to ping mine, but it doesn't have port 80 open.

Looking forward to downloading VectorMan from the Genesis section of the downloadable classic games area. Hope it's just $5, like a lot of them are.

International PHP Conference research presentations from IBM

Two of my IBM colleagues, Julian Dolby and Graeme Johnson, recently presented at the International PHP Conference. Their presentation, PHP: A Language Implementor's Perpective, is available here.

I should point out that the topics presented here are research topics undertaken by IBM. Both presentations are the result of IBMers taking research and development experience in programming languages and applying that to PHP. And specifically, the challenges that PHP presents.

Brief overview ...

Julian's presented on static analysis of PHP, specifically, how static analysis can be used to identify security problems.

Graeme's presented on looking at the PHP runtime through the eyes of someone who has been developing Java VMs for the last decade.

Interesting stuff for folks interested in the nuts and bolts of dynamic languages and runtimes, and of course, specifically, PHP.

BTW, this was the same conference that Tim Bray presented on web frameworks, and then blogged about in Comparing Frameworks.

Enjoy ...

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Photo "the art of runtime performance optimization", with a nice CC license, by bitmapr. Found using the Create Commons Search Site.