How Linux is Inadvertently Poised to Remake the Telephone and Internet Markets

One of the cheapest Linux computers you can buy brand new (not at a garage sale) is the Linksys WRT54G, an 802.11g wireless access point and router that includes a four-port 10/100 Ethernet switch and can be bought for as little as $69.99 according to Froogle. That’s a heck of a deal for a little box that performs all those functions, but a look inside is even more amazing. There you’ll find a 200 MHz MIPS processor and either 16 or 32 megs of DRAM and four or eight megs of flash RAM — more computing power than I needed 10 years ago to run a local Internet Service Provider with several hundred customers. But since the operating system is Linux and since Linksys has respected the Linux GPL by publishing all the source code for anyone to download for free, the WRT54G is a lot more than just a wireless router. It is a disruptive technology.

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Researchers at Lund University in Sweden grew “nanotrees” out of semiconducting materials, Science News reports. Lars Saumelson and his colleagues spray gold nanoparticles onto nanowire “trunks,” just a few microns in length. (In comparison, a human hair is around 100 microns thick.) Exposing the seeded trunk to a mixture of specific gasses causes branches to grow. The trunk and the branches can even be composed of different materials so that the parts have specific functions:

“For instance, in one experiment, the Lund team made trunks out of gallium phosphide and parts of the branches out of gallium arsenide phosphide. The researchers expect combinations of materials such as these to produce a light-emitting diode: The trunk would carry current to the branches, where the gallium arsenide phosphide would convert it into light. Alternatively, the branches could serve as light-harvesting structures, as in a solar cell, which would then shuttle excited electrons into the trunk.” Link

Text processing is one of the most common tasks in application development. Whether it is a Java Servlet or a VOIP application, the conversion from a raw text-based input message to a machine-readable internal representation almost always requires parsing (or tokenization), which, in its current form, refers to a process of extracting tokens (the smallest unit of relevent textual information) and storing them in null-terminated memory blocks, also known as strings. Over the years, people have invented various automation techniques and tools, e.g. regular expression and Lex, to reduce the complexity of manual parsing. Proven both useful and stable, those techniques and tools have stood the test of time. As a result, the current framework of text processing is generally considered to be fairly well-established.

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So you want to write a program to read RSS and Atom syndicated feeds. Sounds simple enough. After all, RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (or “Rich Site Summary”, or “RDF Site Summary”, or something), and Atom is just RSS with different tag names, right? Well, not exactly.

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This article attempts to clear up the mystery that seems to surround XML 1.1 and its companion specification, Namespaces 1.1. With this information in hand you are prepared to deal with XML 1.1 should you ever be asked to support it in your programs. XML 1.1 is not a revolution — it’s merely an evolution of XML 1.0 that does not require major changes. Most people will end up with XML 1.1 processors as they upgrade their parsers, just as all the Xerces users already did. Indeed, since version 2.3.0 was released over a year ago Xerces Java can parse XML 1.1 documents! And since the recent version 2.5.0, Xerces C++ can too. So, even though you may not know it, if you have already picked up one of these versions or a more recent one you can already process XML 1.1 documents. The nature of the changes brought by XML 1.1 and Namespaces 1.1 do not necessitate such a change in the Infoset specification. When the W3C released the other two recommendations, they also released a new edition of the XML Information Set Recommendation in which the impact of these specs is described, but basically it is limited in what content one can find in the Infoset. No structural change was made to the data model, and therefore you don’t need to define new information items or modify existing ones.

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Looks like Google is pushing ATOM (a standard that ‘competes’ with RSS) with the launch of the Google Groups2 beta. They have added ATOM feeds for thousands of Usenet groups.

Much of what is written about the Web has to do with the problems developers encounter today, such as a lack of uniform standards and accessibility compliance. While on one hand that is appropriate—providing knowledge and skills for today’s challenges—on the other, this tight focus on the here-and-now is doing us a disservice. We continue to operate in a reactive space, one where the way we are thinking is not attuned to the opportunities of tomorrow. It keeps us on a perpetual treadmill, thinking and working in a tactical and compartmentalized way. We view the work we do narrowly, in the moment, not understanding the greater context, much less the startling changes that are just over the horizon.

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The spaghetti of namespaces in, say, a WSDL file can lead to a lot of confusion. Resource Directory Description Language (RDDL) packages information on a namespace. If you use URLs for namespaces, use RDDL as described in this article to provide useful guides to users of your XML documents or Web services.

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Interesting article by Randall Hyde over at ONLamp.com on writing good code:
The world is full of case studies outlining software engineering disasters. Almost every programmer has had to work on a project involving “less than stellar” source code that was difficult to read and maintain. On rare occasion, some programmers get the opportunity to work on a well-designed system, an awe-inspiring piece of craftsmanship that usually produces the exclamation, “This is truly great code!”
Clearly, professional software engineers should strive to achieve this level of greatness in all their code. But the real question is, “What makes code great?” Simply “meeting specifications” is not how one writes great code…
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Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi scolded rookie lawmakers Thursday for reading comic books and sending text messages during legislative sessions. [textually.org]