October 25, 2003
Search your Bookshelf
Amazon just added full text search of books - 120'000 and growing. This makes many of my books much more useful, especially those with crappy indexes (which would be most, unfortunately).
Apparently Udi Manber (Amazon's Chief Algorithms Officer) already imagines how users would take pictures of their bookshelf and let them search all the books they own. Cool, "Search my room", I always wanted that (but actually for non-book material, too). Another interesting information point: Scanning a book nowadays costs about one dollar. Not very much, but unfortunately destructive (they have to rip off the spine of the book).
Some visions of paperless offices included the scanning and archiving of incoming paper material. The paperless office never caught on (as a smart person once noted, if you had invested in paper companies when the paperless office was announced, you'd be rich now), but the combination of RFID-stamps on incoming papers, effortless scanning and the universality and intuitiveness of search sounds like a powerful combination to me. Especially to me :)
October 16, 2003
Big Databases
Werner Vogels reports some more from HTPS '03: How are databases used at big customers? — Big like in eBay, Schwab, NASDAQ, Merrill Lynch.
Besonders interessant ist das eBay'sche Backend: "application enforced referential integrity, application level sorting, application level join". Is the age of the DumbDB upon us?
Via the always interesting Chis Langreiter.
October 15, 2003
Keeping in Touch with Family Abroad
My brother just bought an iSight. He is currently in Mexico, improving his spanish (read his blog for stories from there and a lot of malas palabras..).
A phone call from there to Switzerland costs almost a dollar per minute. That is about the same amount he has to pay in his internet café per session (surf as much as you can). And with the help of iChat AV, his new iSight and my old JVC GR-DVL100 digital camcorder, we are now video-conferencing for next to nothing. This is bridging distances.
October 10, 2003
Template Systems
I just read Harry Fuecks' slides from the last PHPUG meeting (via Bitflux). It is indeed a nice summary on many different concepts in template technologies for PHP.
There are a few thoughts, I'd like to add though. Maybe they were already discussed at the meeting; unfortunately I wasn't able to go there.
One thing was, that XSLT seemed to be out of the scope of the talk, although it is often promoted as a solution for separating design and code. Greg once told me about an interesting idea: Applications could output XSLT that transform a XHTML template (instead of the common way, where your application outputs XML which is transformed by a XSL Template into (X)HTML). This allows the usage of Dreamweaver and other tools, but requires the adherence of some rules about the naming of CSS classes, pseudo attributes and/or filler texts.
The other thoughts stem from our experience. In our projects the ratio of the number of design elements to repetitiveness and conditional logic tends so much to the code side, that templates would be an unnecessary complication and having direct HTML generation in code (probably organized in similar ways as one would output XML from code) is the clearly more feasible solution for us. And if not that alone, internationalization (or in the case of Switzerland rather 'nationalization') would definitely slant the ratio to unbearable. We use a simple label based translation table, which works wonderfully for translators. But I don't want to imagine how templates that use that much conditional structures and then only translation labels would look like.
Equipped with these lessons, the latest development in CSS based designs (and web designers learning these techniques) makes me wonder, wether moving the abstraction layer of design and code separation to the browser wouldn't be a very feasible solution in much more cases. Using similar patterns already used to output XML through a controller part (in MCV), one could output XHTML with a rich variety in CSS classes and the design would be determined solely through CSS. No traditional template systems at all. We will definitely move in this direction, in fact newer projects are realized in this way only. IMHO, this also goes towards what Jon Udell is talking about, i.e. the increased reusability of content.
October 09, 2003
Holy Shit
The Catholic church has now reached the level of religious genocidal propagandists.[via Hixie's Natural Log]
October 04, 2003
Kitchen Comet
Last wednesday our astronomy club held an event for the "Fäger", a program by the city of Bern that organizes events for kids in the spring, summer and fall vacations.
Our event was Discover Space and sported a 2 hour program including a water rocket, some real meteorites - including one from Mars - (generously borrowed by the Bern University's Space Research department) and a peek through the telescope of the Muesmatt observatory.
My part was explaining comets. This includes my all-time favorite experiment in astronomy education: The Kitchen Comet. Using water, various kinds of dirt and dry ice you can build a nice dirty snowball with crackling sound effects. Of course, it is only a model of a comet nuclei and there is no tail, but still you can image how excited the kids are to actually handle a comet in their hands! As the recipe says: "It's fun, it's a mess, and it's one of the most memorable and scientifically accurate demonstrations in astronomy". I tried to moblog the creation. Next wednesday, I will cook another one...