techno.blog("Dion")

Engadget does something both smart, and cool.

Note the following next to advertising on the site:

Comment on this Advertiser (11 comments)

This offers new incentive to make sure that quality ads are placed on the site. Ads that make sense in that community, are not too flashy/marketing-y, etc.

TiVo should let me thumbs UP and thumbs DOWN on the rare times that I have to watch commercials on TV :)

Mark Igra is looking to others to help make decisions and learn:

The term semicolon insertion informally refers to the ability to write programs while omitting semicolons between statements. In both ECMAScript 3 and ECMAScript 4 there are two kinds of semicolon insertion:

Grammatical Semicolon Insertion
Semicolons before a closing } and the end of the program are optional in both ECMAScript 3 and 2.0. In addition, the ECMAScript 4 parser allows semicolons to be omitted before the else of an if-else statement and before the while of a do-while statement.

Line-Break Semicolon Insertion
If the first through the nth tokens of an ECMAScript program form are grammatically valid but the first through the n+1st tokens are not and there is a line break between the nth tokens and the n+1st tokens, then the parser tries to parse the program again after inserting a VirtualSemicolon token between the nth and the n+1st tokens.

Grammatical semicolon insertion is implemented directly by the syntactic grammar’s productions, which simply do not require a semicolon in the aforementioned cases. Line breaks in the source code are not relevant to grammatical semicolon insertion.

Line-break semicolon insertion cannot be easily implemented in the syntactic grammar. This kind of semicolon insertion turns a syntactically incorrect program into a correct program and relies on line breaks in the source code.

After working in languages that don’t require;
putting semi colons;
at the end;
of;
statement;
It is nice to have the option to not have too;

As long as:

a) it is implementable
b) it doesn’t cause other horrible things to happen in the language just to make it implementable.

NOTE: I can understand reasons why you may like semi colons (history, java, periods in language). This is one of those personal feel things for me.

Bob Liodice, CEO of the Association of National Advertisers, blames advertisers for killing television.

Here here. Whenever you hear people frustrated with certain advertising (some TV ads, online crazy popups, SPAM) someone will come along and say:

It obviously works else they wouldn’t do it.

It could work… but maybe it could work BETTER.

I have the crazy vision that advertising should be so good that the consumer actually wants it.

Sound really crazy? It happens at my house. I can see catalogs for IKEA, Pottery Barn, and er Victoria Secret (all my wife’s honest!) laying on the table. My wife WANTED these catalogs. She goes through them from time to time voluntarily.

This is a whole tomb of adverts that we wanted

Try to put ads around content that the consumer wants….. or at the very least…. make the ad entertaining ;)

Graham Glass is continuing to discuss his philosophy on building good technology with How to Produce Good Software, Part 6.

Common sense is a common key to Grahams thoughts. It is nice to hear anecdotes which back up that common sense:

I

I have got nothing against XML. It is a good format for DATA, and often is the right choice. But it doesn’t ALWAYS mean it is the right choice :)

So, here is a tongue in cheek retort to Nathan Lee’s tongue in cheek entry :).

10. No need to worry about escaping characters
9. Hmm… what if I don’t want to create a programming language out of it?
8. Self describing data… well apart from the semantics ;)
7. Human readable? Have you see the XML coming out of SOAP?
6. We don’t need heirarchical data
5. It’s working in out project now
4. I don’t need to futz with SAX, DOM, JAXB, blah blah blah, I can just suck in a properties file
3. I am not interop’ing with something else
2. I don’t need a schema
1. Name/value pairs make more sense for what I am doing (see 12) (and not in the form: <name>foo</name><value>bar</value>)

There is another war of the braces happening on the Groovy side of the house. It revolves around the need to have:

something.foo { ….. block

and not allowing:

something.foo

{ ….. block

I think that you should be able to use what you want. I also wish that we could get past some of the style issues. This always brings me back to the idea of having an IDE which shows code in “your view” of the world.

We can do that in a poor way:

• Always convert from other format to YOUR FORMAT when you open a file
• Always convert from YOUR FORMAT to ProjectStandard when you save a file

However, that is hokey. It would be nice to not really do the conversions. There would be one ’standard’ format which could be a project/company standard… but in fact it wouldn’t matter as you would never see it (other than via ‘vi’). The IDE would do the conversion on the fly, yet on disk it would look different. This abstract will of course come at a price (hard to implement… “look at line 5″… etc.).

However, I still wish that the New IDE could do items like this. It would fit into “Those who coded also coded”, and collaborative coding, and much more. You would have your ‘preferences’ and whenever you look at code (e.g. in a web page) a ghoul would come along and make it look nice for your eyes.

Maybe you could even say ‘hide the damn ; or at least put them in with tiny font’ :)

Why the Patent System Inhibits Innovation Today looked interesting to me. It does have some good points, but it takes a long time to get to them. The bulk of the commentary surrounds the evolution of open source software.

That is something I talked about over on OpenXource.

I don’t agree that the evolution is purely:

Good code succeeds; bad code fails and dies off.

I think there is a lot of great dead code :) Although, it does get back to “what is good code”?

Here is a little more from the article:

It is a sad fact that genetics and bio-engineering are areas today where so many patents are being awarded. Many of us will recall how U.S.-based Ricetec patented Thai Fragrant Jasmine Rice. With such patents being awarded, especially on human genetics, perhaps this line of thought will not hold true for much longer.

The question arises, if a company can crack the genetic makeup of rice and patent it, control its use and for all intents and purposes, own it, what then will happen with all these patents on human genes? Will it mean that in being born, we are infringing on a number of patents — using the genetic code without a license?

This silly situation started a quarter of a century ago on June 16th, 1980, when some bright microbiologist (who was probably more of a lawyer than a scientist) won a patent for a modified strain of bacteria. Before this, and rightly so, patent law was applied to inventions, not discoveries, and could not be applied at all to living things.

I have a fun and busy couple of weeks coming up:

TheServerSide Symposium

This week I will be in Vegas for the 3rd TSS Symposium. It is always a pleasure to see everyone, have some good geek talk, and some drinks ;)

I am going to be presenting on AJaX technology, Groovy, and may even be on a panel ;)

Microsoft Developer Technology Summit

I am really looking forward to the Microsoft summit, with the likes of Matt Raible, Ben Galbraith, and everyone else. It will be really interesting to see what Microsoft has to say to us, how they pitch it, etc. I am going to soak up having the time to spend looking at Indigo and the like.

I was even going to see if Don would like to bring in his kids to do some Ruby, but I guess now It’s down to Scheme or Logo :)

AOSD

AOSD is in Chicago this year, which is nicely down the road. I will be chairing a panel, and spending time with great guys to discuss libraries for AspectJ 5, which I am really excited about.

All, in all, a great few weeks! I hope to see some of you there!

Bill Gates to Receive Honorary UK Knighthood.

This was brought to my attention from a friend IM’ing me:

Lloyd: man they give that crap to anyone.

Of course, we won’t call him ‘Sir’ since he isn’t a brit. Although, if he gave enough money I am sure the monarchy would change that rule ;)

Erik Hatcher has published a Meet Lucene online presentation (slides + audio).

The presentation is a nice introduction to Lucene. There are still a lot of people out there who do not know about this open source gem, and if you haven’t had a chance to check it out, watch this.

One of the best reasons to watch it, is that you learn what Lucene IS and ISN’T. I still find that people assume it is a web crawler, rather than a search API.