Sanjiva on 10 Years of SOAP
I just noticed that in April, Sanjiva Weerawarana posted his own thoughts on 10 years of SOAP, with a somewhat more positive perspective than mine. I also see that his posting predates mine, so it seems we each noted the anniversary independently. For those who don’t know, Sanjiva has been one of the most important contributors to SOAP and Web Services, starting with the 1999 IBM prototype work described in his posting. Worth reading.
Topics: History of computing, Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Gig alert: 2010 World Bass Tour Starts tonight
…and, for that matter, it ends tonight too. In fact, I’ll just be sitting in on bass for just a few songs with my good friend John Landau, who is making one of his regular appearances at the Caffe Concerto restaurant in Shepherd’s Bush, in London. If you’re one of the three people in London who won’t be home watching the World Cup, come on down and enjoy some good Italian food and a little music. By the way, John has a terrific new CD out called Journey through the Dark (the band is John Landau and the Giants — you can buy or download it from Amazon, among other places).  John also runs the terrific Petworth Sounds recording studio in London. If you’re in London and looking to do an album, a demo, or even just to find good rehearsal space, check it out.
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Topics: Music | No Comments »
Audio Web applications
By way of Slashdot, it looks like the folks who are building the experimental audio support in Firefox are making really fine progress. You get to manipulate the raw audio data using Javascript, more or less in real time. They’ve even had some success with doing the FFT’s in Javascript (I didn’t expect that would be practical with this generation of CPUs and language interpreters). This is going to open up a lot of really interesting audio applications on the Web.
Topics: Music, Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Ten Years of SOAP
Ten years ago today, at the 9th International Web Conference in Amsterdam, we held a panel discussion to introduce the SOAP networking protocol to the Web community.  Just a week before, the SOAP 1.1 specification had been posted as a W3C Note.  Many legitimate criticisms have been aimed at SOAP in the years since, but it and XML-rpc were big steps toward the creation of simple, data-driven Web applications, and toward the widespread availability of portable, standardized, information integration protocols. A large number of SOAP implementations were built, almost immediately, for a wide variety of languages, and of course vendors such as BEA, IBM and Microsoft eventually provided very deep SOAP integration with their middleware stacks. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: History of computing, Web, Internet, Computing | 3 Comments »
Improvements to the posting on saving Nikon D300 and D300s settings
The January post titled Nikon D300 hint: saving your settings has been the most popular of the year. I’ve just updated it with some clarifications to the information about getting back to the camera’s factory default settings. Follow the link above to see the updated post.
Topics: Photography | No Comments »
Retiring from IBM
Today, April 7th 2010, I retired from my position as a Distinguished Engineer at IBM. Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 9 Comments »
Music with Robert Cedrone in Lexington – April 10
As I mentioned in the posting below, Robert Cedrone and I will be appearing again this Saturday at the Starbucks (map) that’s on the north side of Lexington, MA (not the one in the center of town!) It’s only an hour, but if you feel like stopping by for some coffee and a little music, please do! Robert and I go on at about 7PM, but there are also a couple of other groups on ahead of us, so come early.
Robert plays acoustic guitar and sings a mix of covers including Van Morrison, Al Green, Southside Johnny, Roy Orbison, etc., and some originals too.  We’ll be joined by Ron Chancey, who is a terrific guitar player. Robert and Ron have for years been in the legendary Boston-area blues band, the Urge, and these local gigs give them a chance to get and do something a bit quieter.
The gig will be at:
Starbucks
60 Bedford St
Lexington, MA 02420
(781) 863-1189
Topics: Boston area, Music, Non-technical | No Comments »
Three Gigs This Week
This weekend, Friday and Saturday April 2nd and 3rd, I will be playing bass with Rock City Band at two clubs north of Boston.
Read the rest of this entry »
Topics: Boston area, Music, Non-technical | No Comments »
A nice little tutorial on modern trends in processor architecture
Greg Pfister at Perils of Parallel has a nice little tutorial up on the tradeoffs among superscalar, VLIW, and “Simple Multicore”.  I guess you’ve got to care a bit about hardware for this to be worthwhile, but I’d encourage anyone with an interest in modern computer systems to take a look. It’s reasonably accessible even if you’re not a hardware expert, and it says a lot about the systems we’ll all be programming in the coming decades. Of course, these debates have been going on for at least 20 years, but it’s a very good posting (leaves out superpipeline, but I guess that’s not so popular anymore).
He also mentions that my friends in the IBM “fabs have managed to put DRAM on the same silicon as the POWER7 logic”.   Getting DRAM densities and power consumption on on the processor chip is a big deal; I hadn’t noticed IBM had pulled that off.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Neil McAllister responds to my response
A few weeks ago I posted A Response to Neil McAllister on the Mobile Web. Neil noticed my posting and he has now responded with a comment of his own; I have in turn posted a brief reply.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Gig alert: Rock City Band — this Saturday in Haverhill
This Saturday, Feb. 20th, I’ll be filling in on bass for my friends in Rock City Band. We’ll be at The Lasting Room in Haverhill, MA from 9PM to 1AM. The Lasting Room has a nice, traditional wooden bar, and an alcove around the side with a small dance floor. Rock City plays really good covers of pop music ranging from the occasional 60’s oldie, right up to present day hits. Typical sets might include Van Halen, John Mellencamp, James Brown, P!nk, The Pretenders, Melissa Ethridge, Michael Jackson, Sam & Dave or Carrie Underwood. This weekend we’ll likely have everything from Joss Stone to Zeppelin.
Rock City hasn’t played the Lasting Room in quite awhile, and I haven’t played an RC gig in about a year. So, we’re hoping to get a big crowd. If you’re anywhere near Haverhill this weekend, stop in (no cover).
Directions:Â the Lasting Room is at 122 Washington Street, in the center of downtown Haverhill (map).
Topics: Boston area, Music | No Comments »
One year on the air
It’s been just about a year since this blog went “on the air“.  In that time, almost 2000 people have “visited”, from over 75 countries. I don’t go out of my way to promote this blog, and these numbers are tiny in comparison to the most widely read blogs. Still, it’s very, very rewarding. Thank you all! My particular thanks to those who have taken the trouble to post comments, to help me sort out a reasonable copyright policy, and to link this blog from other places. One of the things that’s gratifying for me about working on the Web itself is knowing that I’m contributing, albeit in a very small way, to the technology that lets things like this happen.
Topics: Arcane domain blog, Web, Internet, Computing | No Comments »
Nikon D300 hint: saving your settings
One of the first things that bothered me when I got my Nikon D300 a couple of years ago was: it’s got all sorts of interesting settings to try, but how can you get back to your usual settings after you’re done experimenting, or after adjusting the camera for some unusual situation? After trying various tricks, I’ve found a way of doing it that works pretty well. It’s right there in the manual if you bother to read to page 325 (there’s nothing in this posting that will be new to experts) but otherwise it’s easy to miss, and there are some subtleties to using it well.
In fact, many novices are discouraged from experimenting with exotic D300 settings for fear that they won’t be able to get the camera back the way they want it. Once you’re comfortable that you can, you’ll find that some of the fancier modes of the camera (like AF-ON only for focusing) can be really useful, and playing with them can be a wonderful way to learn.
Topics: Photography | 4 Comments »
The Feynman Messenger Lectures on Physics are available online
Several of the legendary 1963 Feynman Lectures on Physics are now available for viewing online at at Microsoft Research’s Project Tuva (direct link to videos). (UDPATE: oops, my mistake! It’s not the 1963 Caltech lectures, it’s the Messenger Lectures from Cornell — see first comment below).
Feynman was one of the great physicists of the 20th century, and these lectures, which cover a range of basic topics, are famous for their clarity, insight and wit. Very highly recommended not just for physics students, but for anyone with an interest in science and/or good teaching. (I’m not thrilled about the proprietary Silverlight encoding, but the lectures are wonderful. By the way, right now I’m having trouble getting lecture #1 to stream — the others look good.)
A companion book to the Cornell lectures, The Character of Physical Law (the Messenger Lectures, 1964), is still available. Also, for those with $120 to spend, a boxed set of the famous book version of the Caltech 1963 Feyman lectures remains in print. For a much lighter introduction to Dick Feyman and his hijinks, Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman is still good fun.
Topics: Books, Science | 1 Comment »
Web user interfaces should scale
Over the years Web user interfaces have become more flexible, more refined, and more dynamic, but one thing that annoys me is: too many of them do a bad job of adjusting to different window sizes and font sizes. I think that’s something to which we should all pay more attention.
Topics: Web, Internet, Computing | 6 Comments »