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Linkedin

 These days, I mostly post my tech musings on Linkedin.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanmcgrath/

Saturday, May 03, 2003

Yup, its Eamon alright

He's listed on the Artima bloggers page. The modem firmware escapade in Z80 assembler he talks about in his little bio on the aforementioned page was with Datacode Electronics. I worked there, as did Paddy Holahan, now CEO of Phone Blogging companyNewbay.

Actually, Guido does have an RSS feed

Its here.

A fellow TCD grad joins the fray - I think

Eamonn McManus - from my year in Computer Science, Trinity. *I think*. Its been a long time - 1987.

Guido has a blog

I found out today on Jon Udell's blog that Guido van Rossum has a blog. Excellent. No RSS feed though.

The US Presidential Race and Blogging

I've been boring people for quite some time about every right-thinking politician needing a blog. The US Presidential Election is likely to get the ball rolling on this big time. I see today for example, that Gart Hart has a blog.

Friday, May 02, 2003

DocSOAP

Oh dear. Document style SOAP. Designed "to handle the large business documents associated with e-commerce integration and the development of composite applications.".
Well, we have a perfectly good document system suitable for large business documents. Its called XML over HTTP.
Its silly having a technology for document transfer (HTTP), on which you build a big edifice to create an API abstraction(SOAP), only to use that API abstraction to *recreate* a document transfer system (DocSOAP).
Let's throw this SOAP stuff in the fire and start again.

Pining for notification

This book Loosely Coupled is not available on Amazon in the UK. Is it possible to get notified when a book becomes available? Anybody know? I'd hate to think the only option is some polled ping of a URI or (worse!) a SOAP interface?
If I had one wish it would be for the Web to have a Publish/Subscribe system. What's that I hear you say, "back to back HTTP"? Why hasn't it caught people's imaginations I wonder?

Wednesday, April 30, 2003

Symmetrical and Assymetrical System Design

From ITWorld, an article I wrote about system design, my preference for symmetries and musing about the odd way we implement symmerty on top of assymetry on the Internet. Symmetrical and Assymetrical System Design.

Monday, April 28, 2003

Where is 'above' and where is 'below' in Weblog writing?

A thought just occured to me. When a blogger says "the comment I made above" they really mean "the comment I made below" because weblogs are written from the bottom of the page up, not the top of the page down. Hmmmm.

From feedreader to bottomfeeder to Syndirella

First I used feedreader but every now and then it just did totally weird things and consumed vast amounts of memory. Then I used bottomfeeder for a short while. It did not grow on me. Now I'm using Syndirella and so far so good. It does the embed IE thing which works well and its UI keeps you informed of what the heck its doing which is very useful.

Sunday, April 27, 2003

Great Futurama line

Futurama, last night on Sky. Fry is dating a robot. "Your cute", says Fry. "Your cute", says the robot. "Your cute", says Fry. "Your cute", says the robot. "Your cute", says Fry. "Your cute", says the robot.
Professor sizes up the situation - "She's in an endless loop and he's an idiot".
Priceless.