I've been unhappy with the rendering situation in Wordup!, mainly
because of the lack of flexibility, so I'll be looking into some of
these. I've previously looked at WebIt!, so that's the early
favorite. I would also like to separate myself from the cgi library
that ships with PLT, it's really rudimentary, supporting GET and
POST only, and assuming that you'll be posting only
application/x-www-form-urlencoded. I've found a pretty nice CGI
library, but it'd be nice to have one as part of an overall
framework.
I guess I have a fairly tech-oriented blogroll, but I didn't
hear about yesterday's bombings in Spain, which would have occurred
while I was asleep Thursday morning, until I was driving home
yesterday evening. I just haven't seen much about it in weblogs,
even less than I saw on the bombings in the Philippines that killed
about asmany people as the Madrid bombings. In some ways the Madrid
bombing is more shocking, being so well coordinated. Do people just
not care anymore, or have we lost the desire to comment on these
things? I hear the original suspicion went to the ETA, but now al
Qaeda has claimed responsibility and the ETA denied involvement, so
it's sounding more like retribution for Iraq. A friend pointed out
that besides being 2 1/2 years to the day after 9/11, March 11,
2004 was 912 days after September 11, 2001, and would have been 911
days if 2004 wasn't a leap year. Simply noting that fact makes me
feel like I'm somehow validating this sick act.
I just read that Mc Donalds is
deploying a for-pay WiFi service to selected locations, following
Starbucks' lead. I remember reading an interview with a Panera
Bread exec about their decision to provide free WiFi in their
stores. The interviewer asked what the ROI was on the WiFi and the
exec countered, "What's the ROI on the restroom". I think that's
pretty apt. 30 years ago, you had to spend a dime to relieve
yourself in a lot of eating establishments (I can remember doing
that a few times as a kid), but I can't remember the last time I
saw a pay toilet. I'll bet WiFi is the same, though I hope I won't
be retired by the time it happens.
I'm actually fairly luddite with respect to cell phones, but
lately Matt Croydon
has been posting some items that make me more interested in getting
a decent cell phone that I can hack on. My problem is that I can't
justify spending any real money on it, I still go for the phone
that's free after rebate, and it'll be years before those have any
features that Matt's talking about (it'll probably be years before
some of those cool phones work on AT&T, fer Pete's sake). Hmm,
maybe I need to start dropping hints for my birthday...
James Robertson and
Avi Bryant pointed me at
Brian Marick's take on
Defending Text Files, taking exception mainly to Brian's view
that support for strings and regexes correlate to the overall
popularity of a language (in fairness, Brian's tacitly endorsing
someone else's view). This is a great example of how
language design affects programmer thinking. Scheme has SRFI 13
& 14, which is really nice in some ways, but there's still some
big ommissions from SRFI 13, such as built in search and replace. I
don't think that regex is the end-all of text processing (ref the
famous jwz "2 problems" quote), but it is incredibly powerful. Perl
tends towards "regex-oriented programming" the same way Java tends
towards object-oriented programming. But Perl would tend to fail to
the extent that your world isn't regex parseable, the way Java
tends to fail to the extent that your world can't be modeled as
objects. The inverse is that your language will succeed to the
extent that it can accomodate different world views. I know, I
know, I'm begging the question.