data formats

[via this post from Keith]: a Universal Binary Format

UBF is a language for transporting and describing complex data structures across a network. It has three components:

It seems to me that at this point XML has taken precedence over anything else to transport data across heterogeneous systems. Binary, if properly implemented, should be faster, but XML parsers are getting by the day. Systems like this, while interesting and quite possibly useful for some applications, probably won't be around for much longer. Just as virtual machines are slowly replacing native code (think Java, Perl, Python, C#...) binary data formats for inter-machine exchange will also be replaced in time by XML-based formats. Witness the move on Java to serialize object into XML for long term storage and transfer...

"localizing" Linux

From Salon: Flag of inconvenience:

Fearing the Taiwanese flag would irk China, Red Hat yanked it from its version of Linux -- and started an international geek uproar.

here we go again, part 2

The second part (first part link here) of the article Goliath crushes David

the new nirvana album

Just got the new Nirvana album, a compilation of some of their best songs (a few newly remixed, such as the excellent Pennyroyal Tea)and the new track You know you're right, the last song recorded by Kurt Cobain. Excellent.

what is a space?

I just updated the spaces FAQ, adding some answers that shed some light on the paradigm used by spaces to handle information. In particular, the question What is a space? is important.

The concept of a "space" is meant to be a generalization behind the idea of folders. Folders definitely have their uses, not least of which that they are predictable and stable. However, folders have no "intelligence," they don't help the user to perform tasks, they just sit there waiting for the users to organize their information. A space in spaces will be more proactive, automatically filing elements according to correlations between data. There is just too much information to "manage" otherwise. Programs should be working for their users, not the other way around. After all, what else are we going to do with all the spare cycles in those nifty gigahertz microprocessors? :-)

more comments on spaces

Some of the comments on spaces posted so far... from Anthony, Adina, nf0, Roland, Eric. Jay and Bill.