Yesterday’s article in Wired about genetically modified mice with superior aerobic exercise capacity sparked a thought from Elise today – could a naturally occuring virus have a similar effect? The link between viruses and some disorders, such as the relationship between HPV and cervical cancer in women, is well established. I suppose it’s also possible that a virus could have a beneficial effect, though such a thing would be rarer than a detrimental effect. I’d expect an essentially random change caused by a virus to have more of a chance disrupting a human system than enhancing it.

In his blog entry explaining “Why I resigned from JDJ (epesh.blog-city.com)“, Joe describes some of the issues he had with JDJ management. I must say that my recent experience as an author didn’t leave me begging for more, and I was thinking of writing to Joe to explain why I was going to take my next article idea elsewhere when I found his resignation. I’m sorry to see him go but I sympathize with his situation.
Since this was my first time writing for a print publication, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. The revision process went smoothly once the staff found my submission, which had evidently been misplaced after the earlier resignation of editor Jason Bell. The one thing that really got under my skin was what happened after my article was published. I understood from the start that there would be no cash compensation for my work, and while that wasn’t my ideal arrangement I accepted it. After the issue went out, the only contact I had from the magazine staff was an offer for reprints at a “heavily discounted” rate but with a “free” PDF version of my article that I could post or distribute. The minimum quantity for reprints was far beyond any need I could imagine, but I was interested in the PDF so I asked them to quote a price. The quote was in the middle hundreds of dollars, which I found outrageous. That was it – no “thanks,” no “we look forward to your next proposal,” just trying to extract revenue from one of the people who made that issue possible.
That pretty much decided it for me – in my limited interaction with Joe I had judged him a right guy and looked forward to working with him again, but the magazine needs to improve the way it treats its authors. Until I see some evidence of that, I’ll take my work elsewhere.
http://epesh.blog-city.com/read/trackback/645152.htm

I finally downloaded an RSS aggregator today; I was just spending too much time cruising tech websites trying to keep up with news. I must say that I’ve really been missing out. The one I picked, JNN, probably isn’t best-of-breed but it’s charming in a slightly broken way. Having all of the articles from a bunch of websites available in a single view is really a time-saver.
Now that I’m aggregating XML feeds, I find myself back in standards hell – evidently there are no fewer than three formats for content feeds – RSS, RDF and Atom. If you count all the various 0.9x iterations of RSS, there are even more. I’m not sure how many of these JNN supports at the moment, but it evidently doesn’t like pdabuzz.com’s RSS 2.0 feed.
As Tannenbaum wrote in his classic Computer Networks book (which I have yet to read):

The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. And if you really don’t like all the standards you just have to wait another year until the one arises you are looking for.

That was true back in 1988 when Tannenbaum wrote it, and it’s true today. I haven’t had a chance to sort out the advantages and disadvantages of each kind of feed yet, so I can’t comment on which I think is better. I don’t think any of them are going to go away anytime soon, so I probably don’t need to hurry with that evaluation.

My article titled “Harness the Power of Javadoc” has been published in the May 2004 issue (Volume 9, #5) of Java Developer’s Journal. The direct link should work, but in case it doesn’t you may need to drill in through the archives, since it’s not exactly front-page material.

An older book review on Ted Neward’s blog reminded me to hold forth on the subject of database tuning. Any application that has a relational database at its heart requires performance tuning. The development team needs to either hire or cultivate the skills required to extract the most out of the database, skills that go far beyond the basic select/insert/update/delete statement that most OO programmers know. This skillset is just as important as the analysis and “regular” programming skills that are obvious requirements for the team. For some reason we software folk tend to minimize the importance of database knowledge, at our obvious peril.

Continue reading →

Update May 2007: This entry is out-of-date, for current info, please go here.
Over the last several weeks I’ve noticed that yet another web ad delivery mode has crept into some of the technology websites I read (such as 2cpu). The sites in question have certain words in the text of an article printed in constrating colors with double underlines. Hovering the mouse pointer over the words brings up tool-tip-type ads for products related to the underlined word. At first I thought maybe my browser was doing it of its own accord, but that turned out not to be the case.

Continue reading →