If you've been working in the software industry, you've probably seen zillions of good new product ideas quashed by some executive who asks, “what if Microsoft enters this space and makes all the profits go away?” More… [Joel on Software]

Are “web services” the way of the future? Well, based on past experience with proclamations from BigCo's about such things, you'd have to say no. Why do they make such simple things so damned complicated. The other day I looked at a conference whose keynote premise was that WSDL and UDDI were just the beginning… Continue reading Scripting News

Woodie's Office Watch: “Office XP doesn't have any to-die-for features that I can discern, and it certainly isn't any more stable than Office 2000.” [Scripting News]

By the way, whenever usability experts point to Microsoft Office products as an “example” of horrendous usability, they are usually being disingenuous and just pandering to the crowd. In my opinion they're just attacking the products with the biggest market share because most of their listeners will have experience with some Microsoft UI problem. The… Continue reading Joel on Software

Salon.com Technology | Geek house. Patrick Deutsch has turned an average Vallejo, Calif., condominium into a 21st century Taj Mahal. Using motion sensors, infrared transmitters, cameras and dozens of other products that communicate with each other via a protocol known as “X-10,” he's created a hip bachelor pad that's extremely, well, sensitive. [Privacy Digest]

Bray: The web moves too slowly. XML co-editor Tim Bray declared that the web moves too slowly – it's becoming boring and it's time to get XML in front of people. [xmlhack]

Rendering Effective Route Maps: Improving Usability Through Generalization | “Route maps, which depict a path from one location to another, have emerged as one of the most popular applications on the Web. Current computer-generated route maps, however, are often very difficult to use. In this paper we present a set of cartographic generalization techniques specifically… Continue reading Rendering Effective Route Maps

FEED Magazine: David Gelernter's New Desktop. Users can browse this stream of cards or search by keyword, topic, or file type. Scopeware is an elegant alternative to the current desktop, an interface that, in Gelernter's view, is still mired in a bygone era when megabytes were scarce and CPUs lethargic. [Tomalak's Realm]

LinuxWorld: Python: The one-size-fits-all programming language “I don't mean to rekindle the Python versus Java wars that raged a few years back. Each language has its place. Neither is perfect for every need, although Python is closer than Java to being a one-size-fits-all language. But I happen to be as big a fan of Java… Continue reading Python: The one-size-fits-all programming language

O'Reilly: Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags “Most years, I have to slave over new tutorials. But this one almost wrote itself once I found the right examples. I'd start with someone's 71-line Perl program, and go over it line by line. Each time I came to a line that was unnecessary, I'd take… Continue reading Perl Program Repair Shop and Red Flags