Monkinetic Weblog

Dave writes: "We're going to make Web services work for Web developers. That means getting rid of arcane stuff that makes sense only to C programmers. "

Well, I understand where Dave is coming from, but I have to argue that without C and its practitioners of arcana, the "web" in "web services" would not exist. The xml parser in Frontier's web services support would be 100 times slower. Google - don't tell me that's not a web service! ;-) - would not exist.

Dave, you're not being fair to people who use those languages. I totally appreciate what you're doing in the scripting world. Seeing web services brought to the masses through your involvement in XML-RPC is a huge deal. We all talk about web services being about inclusive: don't lock out or insult those developers who choose to use .NET or whatever.

I mean, who cares that there are six extra lines in that script? How many lines is a common web service? 5? 100? 1000? If a developer wants to write those 6 lines (which are probably generated for him) why can't he? Is it just because it offends your aesthetic?

My buddy Hans has an RSS feed now on his site. Check him out - he's updating more these days, and thinks before posting.

I'm trying to figure out how to direct output from a shell script to another file - from within the script. I've tried

[cmd] > filePath

but it doesn't seem to work. Can any kind reader with unix shell scripting experience help out?

Coool. Adam Gaffin, columnist and blogger at Network World Fusion picks up my link to the Applescript-saves-the-iMac story. Links rule.

CVS question: when doing a checkout for the purpose of building a project on a testing platform, is it preferred to do a checkout, and ignore the CVS files that come along, or an explicit export to get only the source?

I think for testing purposed (we'll run this a lot more than deployment) checkout will work - I'd rather not have to be limited to a particular tag or date, I only want the most recent. But I'm open to solutions to this problem.

Your Blue Room has an awesome, if somewhat technical, article about the visual production of U2's Elevation tour.

Jodi and I saw the show in DC at the Metro center, and I can vividly recall each effect discussed in the article. As all good shows go, I didn't think much about the lighting during the show, but am amazed now to see what goes into it all.[via u2log - congrats on the bloggie!]