I finally got my Cox.Net connection back up tonight!! I am SOOOOOO happy! Muahahahahaha.... <evil genius hand-wringing/>

Whew. Big thread on Hack The Planet - over here, tangentially inspired by my post here about IDL. David McCusker has a great line:

If the interface doesn't support the ability to go on, and encourage you to code for failures, then it's just as fragile as a synchronous interface.

Have to read this thread a few times to get it all.

Been following Arboretum, a Cocoa-based outliner. Not much to seee right now, but DeusX and I have been trading edits on the idea whiteboard.

Hmm. thanks to my referers, I have found that I have the #3 and #4 hits for RSS Sources on Google. Cooool. I guess I should update that soon.

This weblog is really cool. Mark is really open about his dealing with addiction, and recently about the grief of losing someone he loved. Hard stuff, but heartening to read.

In the midst of all this, today is my two-year anniversary of sobriety. Two years from today could be yours.

Thanks Mark.

I finally got the referer thing from here working over here. I love referer logs... ;-)

I hate surfing around on the zippy internet, then flipping back to the web application I'm writing, and firing up that puppy, and realizing it's slow as dog-crap, and knowing it's my app.

That sucks.

From Wired: A high-schooler has created a glove that translates sign-language finger-spelling into text on a digital device via a wireless connection. That is awesome, and a real example of technology bettering the lives of the handicapped.

'Hello."

Jim and Cheryl (well, mostly Cheryl ;-)) deliver, via "swift and tidy C-Section", and 10 lb, 8 oz baby boy! Congratulations! Dave points out that the infant (name TBA) shares the birthday of the Macintosh. Lucky kid. ;-)

This is so cool. qu.st LIFTworks has a service for Mac OS X that lets you select text in any native OS X app and hit cmd-shift-g to search Google for the selected text.

If you're a Mac user, or curious about the legendary "1984" ad for the introduction of the Macintosh, check out the history here. (That 60 second SuperBowl ad cost Apple $800k, almost as much as the ad itself - $900k.)

The ad almost didn't run, the board of directors hated it and almost fired Chiat/Day (the famous ad agency that was doing Apple marketing then and created the ad), and Steve Wozniak almost put up half the $800k himself just to make sure it ran. Wild.

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

Jim is "urgently in need of work". If you need an awesome coder, a great mentor, or all-around great guy in your company, check him out.

Be aware - Jim needs to work remotely, and he's by far the one I would bet one if I could hire a teleworker. He's motivated, creative, and productive.

Charles Wiltgen, (former?) Quicktime product manager, offers this .NET primer for Mac users. Why .NET is going to affect us, and why it can be a Good Thing(tm).

It's a good read, very basic, and he makes some very good points. I'll have to finish the article before passing judgement, but read it for yourself and see what you think.

Best line: It's the end of Windows as we know it, and I feel fine.

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](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/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](http://monkinetic.blog/tag/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.

Check this out. "The iMac's owner managed to access his stolen machine remotely, wrote a script to set the AOL client to dial his home number, which gave him a caller ID trace." [via AccordionGuy]

Jodi talks about the new house we just signed a contract on (woo-hoo!), and laments the lack of information on the site for our previous house. Sorry folks, that's the way it happens sometimes.

Seriously - as Jodi asays, we'll try and get some pics up somewhere of the old place, and of the new place once we're moving in. It's a great place, and we got a good deal on it.

For future reference, I've archived the post about non-typed languages and IDL here.

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.