Apple has posted a wrapup of Mac OS X-related announcements from NAMM, a "bi-annual musical markets convention" in LA. Looks like some cool stuff going on.

"I am the BlogTracker TrackerPane. I OWN you."

Dave linked to my comment about IDL in non-typed scripting environments, which is cool. I know I've gotten 50 or so hits from it. The link is appreciated - flow is nice. But I'd also like to know what Dave thinks of my idea, since it's relevant to his work and that of others in the scripting community.

I think sometimes we bloggers get on a roll, linking and blurbing, and it's easy to link to something in a very neutral "here it is, I have no opinion" manner. This is not a knock on Dave at all, it's something I do a good bit, and have seen many others do.

Maybe we need to take stock, and put a little more effort to make sure the "personal" shows up in our "personal web sites".

David P. Reed is discussing some fundemental questions about the process of dividing up the radio spectrum to provide "non-interference" between electromagnetic devices.

As is often the case, this great quote applies simultanously to technology and human behavior:

And the basic question of the limits on "spectrum capacity", as a scientific question, is slowly developing answers - surprising ones. It turns out that network cooperation increases capacity.

Dave is making a point on Scripting News regarding IDL (or in this case WSDL) for Frontier, and other non-typed scripting languages. His point is that he cannot generate at runtime the WSDL directly from the code, as can C# or Java developers - b/c their runtimes have information about the types and numbers of parameters to a call.

This means having to handcode the WSDL for a web service in these environments, which can be a PITA if your service is at all large.

I have an idea though. One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example.

In Frontier, scripts are outlines. Frontier already has a rich set of functionality dealing with rendering outlines into other formats, esp. HTML. You can use #directives in your outlines, which get translated into information in the symbol table when rendering the outline (or any other datatype for that matter).

So, I would propose a simple set of #directives that can be inserted into a script outline above the actual script code, as a commented block. That block can be grabbed and processed to generate whatever idl format is desired.

This is just an idea, someone with more Frontier experience could come up with a better design. I also know that Perl has Perldoc and POD (inline support for manpages), so including this information in perl scripts in a long tradition in that community.

Also, at least someone is working on WSDL support in Python (which has an easily introspected runtime). "Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file."

So, I think that lack of explicitly typed data should not be the final reason not to support some sort of IDL for web services. There may be other, better reasons, but I have not seen them yet.

Techno-Weenie has a proposal for a Common XML-RPC API for Weblogs. While I tend to think of such things as a good idea, in this case I think the API is too specific to Blogger and Manila - the two largest blog hosting services.

I've been working on something fun for RadioConversant. ;-)

Todd Gureckis has a cool photography-based weblog, including comments on each photo. Very cool. Also check out his well-designed main site here.

I like finding new ways that people are branching the weblog concept.

I've started working on some enhancements to Radio Conversant.

Unfortunately, due to the recent discovery of an AIM exploit, our firewall admin has closed off AIM. Smart move, except that the exploit is specific to the Windows version of the AOL Instant Messenger client - not clones, and not on non-Windows machines. I, on the other hand, use Adium on Mac OS X.

Therefore, for now, if you need to get ahold of me you can use email.

Unfortunately, due to the recent discovery of an AIM exploit, our firewall admin has closed off AIM. Smart move, except that the exploit is specific to the Windows version of the AOL Instant Messenger client - not clones, and not on non-Windows machines. I, on the other hand, use Adium on Mac OS X.

I just saw on Conversant's support site that Conversant is not tied directly to Frontier's object database for storing data. Instead, Macrobyte has written a database access layer and driver architecture to abstract that away from the groupware app itself.

Of Radio Conversant. Please stand by.

I have a quandry: Jodi and I have been invited to a friends house for dinner tonight with a bunch of other people (many of whom I'm thinking we will not know). I think it might be fun to go, but I don't do extended social engagements as well as Jodi does. I'm more inclined to go bouldering at my favorite rock house. What to do?

Through an interesting twist of link I ended up on the old Script Meridian website today. For old times sake I trawled throught DOODADS, and came across what is probably the last Frontier script I ever released. Load Regexed Images would let you give it a regex to apply to a folder of images, and load any image that matched the regex into Frontier's object database. I was hacking Frontier a lot back then - 8/7/1998. (Background)

Via more like this, a good explanation of why HTML clicked for me, and later on, for Jodi. "In WordPerfect you could "reveal codes" and fix things that weren't quite right. "

Quick Note: I fixed the "replies" info on weblog posts, so it now includes direct replies to the post, and their replies.

Overheard at work today: "There is no way in hell I'm touching [that] code."

You'll enjoy this. Quicktime, 2 mb.

NetStruxr has put out a new release of their excellent WebObjects 4.5 frameworks.