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FWIW, a sort-of prepackaged solution could be to go with Philip Greenspun's ACS, with an Oracle and AOLserver substrate.

I've got the ACS, AOLserver, and Oracle 8.0.5 running on a Thinkpad (P133) with 48mb RAM/2gig HDD, and it's usable for development. It would only host, probably, 10 users before it became too sluggish for end users, but we're talking a crummy P133 Thinkpad here...

The Upside: robust, ongoing development (see Philip's photo.net) from MIT educated brains. Any development of modules you might do can be used by other ACS users, and you get the "many eyes, shallow bugs" effect.

Also, the ADP programming model is very similar to PHP.

The Downside: you're pretty much restricted to Oracle and Tcl. Some people like Tcl, some don't. Oracle, in a production environment, really needs a 6-figure DBA.

It's worth looking at -- you can extend the toolkit to suit your needs, or if you have $$$, you can hire ArsDigita to do it for you and support you.

Zope is extensible in Python. The ACS is a large package of tcl code that accesses the AOLserver API (AOLserver is now also free as in speech). Both encourage a style of programming that is more maintainable than Perl. If you knew Perl already, I strongly doubt you'd have asked your question. That's actually a good thing -- the same things that make Perl great for simple one-shots make it tough for novices to maintain. Python (and to a lesser extent, tcl) is a great deal cleaner.

I didn't mention Java or Jserv -- there is a package called JetSpeed which the Java-Apache group has put out, but my initial reaction was that it was very slow. Don't take my word for it, though -- take a look and decide for yourself.

Don't be an idiot and lock yourself into Yet Another Uncaring Vendor. You can get support for Zope or the ACS direct from the developers (Digital Creations or ArsDigita respectively). If you choose to use mod_perl and postgres, you still can get professional support. With Lotus you can look forward to servers that don't write log files, proprietary APIs, flat file "databases", and other such niceties.

Don't buy into it.

If you want to have an improved SQL*PLUS command-line capability, with command history, file-completion, etc. try running SQL*PLUS from a shell within emacs.

No, really--it's quite simple, actually. You start up emacs, start a unix shell (by typing: M-x shell ) and from that shell run SQL*PLUS as you normally do.

[N.B. For emacs newbies: the "M" stands for "Meta" and usually maps to the ALT key, the "C" stands for the CTRL key--each of these is pressed together with a second key to do a command. So "M-x" means press the ALT and x keys together. Oh, and RET is the RETurn key]

Emacs has a bunch of commands that let will let you cycle backwards through previous commands (M-p), search backwards for a command with a given string in it(the usual backwards search, C-r and you can do regular expression searches the normal way too), edit the command, copy a command to the prompt without sending it, so you can edit it (C-c RET), etc. And you can get filename completion with the TAB key.

Read all about it here on this very helpful page put together by Bob Rogers to help people who used emacs for just about everything during the August '99 bootcamp that Ars Digita (i.e. Philip Greenspun and co.) ran:

http://bmerc-www.bu.edu/needle-doc/emacs/ .

If you know already know emacs, just click on the "running a shell mode in emacs" link in the table of contents (or click here). If you don't know emacs well, just start reading from the top of the page and then go down to the shell mode stuff. Either way, you might find his emacs cheat sheet useful too and some of the other links that he has.

___
DC

P.S. For the complete text (and photos) of Philip Greenspun's database-backed web-site book, which describes the philosophy and workings of the Ars Digita ACS toolkit (open-source), among other things, click here For info on the Ars Digita bootcamps, based on this book and the ACS toolkit it describes, click here.

If you want to have an improved SQL*PLUS command-line capability, with command history, file-completion, etc. try running SQL*PLUS from a shell within emacs.

No, really--it's quite simple, actually. You start up emacs, start a unix shell (by typing: M-x shell ) and from that shell run SQL*PLUS as you normally do.

[N.B. For emacs newbies: the "M" stands for "Meta" and usually maps to the ALT key, the "C" stands for the CTRL key--each of these is pressed together with a second key to do a command. So "M-x" means press the ALT and x keys together. Oh, and RET is the RETurn key]

Emacs has a bunch of commands that let will let you cycle backwards through previous commands (M-p), search backwards for a command with a given string in it(the usual backwards search, C-r and you can do regular expression searches the normal way too), edit the command, copy a command to the prompt without sending it, so you can edit it (C-c RET), etc. And you can get filename completion with the TAB key.

Read all about it here on this very helpful page put together by Bob Rogers to help people who used emacs for just about everything during the August '99 bootcamp that Ars Digita (i.e. Philip Greenspun and co.) ran:

http://bmerc-www.bu.edu/needle-doc/emacs/ .

If you know already know emacs, just click on the "running a shell mode in emacs" link in the table of contents (or click here). If you don't know emacs well, just start reading from the top of the page and then go down to the shell mode stuff. Either way, you might find his emacs cheat sheet useful too and some of the other links that he has.

___
DC

P.S. For the complete text (and photos) of Philip Greenspun's database-backed web-site book, which describes the philosophy and workings of the Ars Digita ACS toolkit (open-source), among other things, click here For info on the Ars Digita bootcamps, based on this book and the ACS toolkit it describes, click here.

This is known for a while. I rip off some lengthy snippet from photo.net, which illustrate the potential of cookies quiet well. Read the really interesting full text here (somewhat down the page).

Magic cookies mean the end of privacy on the Internet.
Suppose that three publishers cooperate and agree to serve all of their banner ads from http://noprivacy.com. When Joe User visits search-engine.com and types in "acne cream", the page comes back with an IMG referencing noprivacy.com.
Joe's browser will automatically visit noprivacy.com and ask for "the GIF for SE9734".
If this is Joe's first time using any of these three cooperating services, noprivacy.com will issue a Set-Cookie header to Joe's browser.
Meanwhile, search-engine.com sends a message to noprivacy.com saying "SE9734 was a request for acne cream pages." The "acne cream" string gets stored in noprivacy.com's database along with "browser_id 7586."
When Joe visits bigmagazine.com, he is forced to register and give his name, e-mail address, Snail mail address, and credit card number. There are no ads in bigmagazine.com. They have too much integrity for that. So they include in their pages an IMG referencing a blank GIF at noprivacy.com. Joe's browser requests "the blank GIF for BM17377" and, because it is talking to noprivacy.com, the site that issued the Set-Cookie header, the browser includes a cookie header saying "I'm browser_id 7586."
When all is said and done, the noprivacy.com folks know Joe User's name, his interests, and the fact that he has downloaded 6 spanking JPEGs from kiddieporn.com.

The biggest job I have as an implementor of EC software is convincing the clients that the hard part of electronic commerce is not the web site or the technology that runs it.

The hard part of setting up an electronic business is all the infrastructure stuff that has to go on in the background (ie. Shipping/Warehousing, Order Tracking, Customer Service, Credit Card Fraud investigations, Sales Tax accounting and payment (which can be a nightmare). Putting up a web site that displays your catalog of products, allows people to order from that catalog and takes and processes their credit card info is comparitively easy. Also, most commercial "EC" software solutions do none of the backend processes. They hook into what you already have (your accounting software does have public api's/views right?) with custom code (written by the vendor's $$$ consultants) and they are far from free (sometimes into $ millions).

OK, now to the free, open source E-commerce software running on a free, open source web server. First, read the article at http://photo.net/wtr/thebook/ecommerce. html. This provides far more detail than I have time to write here and is the best reading I could recommend to someone considering purchasing commercial EC software. Second you can get the software (it's all source code, it's in TCL) at http://arsdigita.com/free-tools/shoppe. html. Third, you can see the software in action on an ancient solaris box at http://mitpress.mit.edu.

I learned most of the stuff that Philip espouses the hard way. He is certainly not humble but I would have killed for that kind of info 18 months ago when I busted my toe on each and every stumbling block associated with online commerce!

Oh, and it all runs on Linux as well.

Read the book at http://photo.net/wtr/thebook and then get the ArsDigita Community System from http://software.arsdigita.com. It's based on AOLserver and Oracle and includes an ecommerce module plus other modules that let you manage various parts of your business online.

Check out Zope from Digital Creations. Its a completely Open Source eCommerce development kit. I'm not affiliated with DC in any way, but I have been using Zope for the past few weeks and I can tell you that it totally rocks. Its one of the most impressive pieces of technology I've ever seen. And yes, DC will be happy to sell you varying levels of consulting service and support.

You may also want to check out ArsDigita, a relatively open source toolkit based on an Oracle backend and AOLserver frontend. ArsDigita is an excellent company run Phillip Greenspun. They'll also be quite happy to take your money for hand holding and whatever else you need.

Finally, before you jump onto the eCommerce bandwagon, check out Web Tools Review, an excellent site run by Greenspun et al.

Its interesting that you claim to have read Hardrive. Did you happen to notice this little snippet from page 38:

At one point Maestretti [physics teacher at Lakeside prep school] tried to encourage Gates to use his hands as well as his intellect. As a project, Maestretti asked him to assemble a Radio Shack electronics kit, in order to force him to build something correctly and make it work.

"I can remember when he brought it to me, telling me, 'Okay, now I've satisfied my project.' And of course solder was dripping all over the back..." Needless to say, it didn't work."
-- Hard Drive, page 38

More interesting tidbits:

According to Hard Drive, however, Bill Gates and Paul Allen didn't have enough time to get their BASIC interpreter working for the MITS Altair 8080. Paul Allen did the hard work of making an 8080 emulator for Harvard's PDP-10 mainframe computer.

Gates and Allen were then able to enlist fellow Harvard student Monte Davidoff to implement the floating point arithmetic portions of the language. A search for "Davidoff" on www.microsoft.com came up with zero hits (January 11, 1998).

After the demo, someone still had to go down to Albuquerque, New Mexico to (a) convince MITS to buy the code, and then (b) make the prototype into a usable system. Gates stayed at Harvard to play poker with his rich buddies while Paul Allen spent months in a motel room in Albuquerque. Microsoft came into existence because Allen successfully managed both the business and technology, earning him... a minority stake in the company.

What follows is my own take:

I'm not saying Slashdot doesn't perpetuate its own line of FUD every now and then, but there's no way you can seriously compare Slashdot FUD and Microsoft FUD. Slashdot is a community of people who interact with each other and reason things out collectively. Slashdot makes no attempt at changing the public. Its a community forum. MS is a monolithic organization that spends billions of dollars each year manipulating the public. There's an enormous difference between a bunch of people talking in a forum where others can refute and explore ideas and a behemoth that has so much money and influence that it can drown out any public voices it doesn't care for. Thats why MS FUD (their oldest product) is so deadly. There's no way anyone but Sun and Oracle can afford to buy enough exposure to counter their ridiculous claims.

Finally, I really don't care if BG is a typical nerd or geek or whatever. I don't care about his childhood. The reason is that regardless of much of a geek he is, I'm still going to hold him to the same standards of social responsibility as any other CEO.

Check out http://photo.net/wtr/using-the-acs.html for details.

Overall, I thought it was worthwhile. Philip is an excellent speaker and provided a good "big-picture" overview of database backed web sites - and some examples of using AOLserver for serious development.

But remember, this is only a one-day class. There's only so much that can be covered, and since the audience is made up of people with varying levels of experience, he doesn't spend too much time with source code (but there is enough to see what's going on).

If you want a good one-day intro, this is it. If you want depth, read his book.

Linuxworld.com had a good article by Philip about AOLserver - and why you might want to consider it if you are at all concerned about scalability. It's Open-Source and AOL is using it right now to serve 28,000 hits per second.

Phil is having several free sessions :

Next dates: New York, NY, October 2 and 3. Cambridge, MA, October 23. Register
I was wondering of anyone has ever been to one...

If so was it a waste of time or time well spent..

I am thinking of going... both for web data but also just to meet him...
I have been a fan of his site for several years...
I am a amature photographer and find the information on photo.net to be both informative and entertaining and would like to meet the guy who thought it all up.

Thanks

Phil is having several free sessions :

Next dates: New York, NY, October 2 and 3. Cambridge, MA, October 23. Register
I was wondering of anyone has ever been to one...

If so was it a waste of time or time well spent..

I am thinking of going... both for web data but also just to meet him...
I have been a fan of his site for several years...
I am a amature photographer and find the information on photo.net to be both informative and entertaining and would like to meet the guy who thought it all up.

Thanks

"Amazon.com has a market capitalization of $5.75 billion (August 10, 1998). They built their site with compiled C CGI scripts connecting to a relational database. You could not pick a tool with a less convenient development cycle. You could not pick a tool with lower performance (forking CGI then opening a connection to the RDBMS). They worked around the slow development cycle by hiring very talented programmers. They worked around the inefficiencies of CGI by purchasing massive Unix boxes ten times larger than necessary. Wasteful? Sure. But insignificant compared to the value of the company that they built by focusing on the application and not fighting bugs in some award-winning Web connectivity tool programmed by idiots and tested by no one."

This isn't an 'all of it' solution, but examine what Philip Greenspun has done with photo.net. Especially look at the Images chapter of his guide to web publishing and the source code.

Basically he's written a bunch tcl scripts to do his indexing/searching for him. The results are impressive and clean, dunno about the implementation.

-matt

This isn't an 'all of it' solution, but examine what Philip Greenspun has done with photo.net. Especially look at the Images chapter of his guide to web publishing and the source code.

Basically he's written a bunch tcl scripts to do his indexing/searching for him. The results are impressive and clean, dunno about the implementation.

-matt

This isn't an 'all of it' solution, but examine what Philip Greenspun has done with photo.net. Especially look at the Images chapter of his guide to web publishing and the source code.

Basically he's written a bunch tcl scripts to do his indexing/searching for him. The results are impressive and clean, dunno about the implementation.

-matt

True, I have a slow connection. Funny, though, how other sites like Yahoo or photo.net have snappy performance on the same Internet connection.. :-)

Please see Jacob Nielsen's The Need for Speed. As the Internet grows, the mean bandwidth per user decreases. Most new users are using modems, not T-1s. Web sites should design for the common case and minimize response time.

Beware. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Here's something I wrote late one night after a few years of grad school:

Not everything about grad school is bad. You can work any 70 hours per week that you want. If you just want to waste time and never graduate, and you find the right adviser, you don't even have to work at all. And the people you meet are generally smart, unusual, and fun. But for me grad school is fun just like playing Tetris all night is fun. In the morning you realize that it was sort of enjoyable, but it didn't get you anywhere and it left you very very tired.

Keep in mind that I'm not a CS grad student. I'm a semiconductor engineer in EE, where IMHO a Ph.D. makes a lot more sense than it does in CS.

To get a Comp Sci perspective one might ask Philip Greenspun, MIT Ph.D. [emphasis mine]:

A lot depends on how much you value being surrounded by interesting people thinking about interesting things. You can make more money selling tires but you have to think about tires all day. Tires are arguably much less interesting than reading Shakespeare. This explains why people go to English Lit. grad school. The difficulty I think a lot of folks have these days is that many companies are working on problems that are at least as interesting as those in academic engineering departments.

It is tough to talk about academic CS in general when you're at one of the top three schools (MIT, Stanford, or CMU). We have lots of people who are more creative and interesting than those in even the best companies. However, because academic CS is sort of a moribund field, as soon as you get down to the second-tier schools you're mostly dealing with people who lack the intelligence and creativity to get a good job in industry. This is death.

So the bottom line for me is that if you can get into an absolutely first-rank school in a field that fascinates you, go for it. Otherwise, look at it as training for a bureaucracy that would make the Prussian civil service look imaginative.

-- Philip Greenspun, October 28, 1998

If you do go to grad school in CS, stop with the M.S.. There are only two good reasons to get a Ph.D.:

1. You want to become a professor, and are willing to sacrifice a decade of your life in the attempt, despite the fact that the odds of finding an academic position are terrible.
   
   
2. You are already in industry, and have found a specific job or salary that you want, but the hiring managers demand a Ph.D.
   In my field, there are many jobs like this. In CS, I'm not so sure. Bill Gates does just fine with his high school diploma.

I went to grad school because I had fuzzy dreams of being a professor, and because I was intrigued by "the challenge". I was nuts. Now I can only wonder what I might have done if I had gotten some hard-edged advice in time.

-- Mike

P.S. Cornell has a great CS school. Look me up if you come here. With my luck, I'll probably still be writing my thesis.

Beware. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Here's something I wrote late one night after a few years of grad school:

Not everything about grad school is bad. You can work any 70 hours per week that you want. If you just want to waste time and never graduate, and you find the right adviser, you don't even have to work at all. And the people you meet are generally smart, unusual, and fun. But for me grad school is fun just like playing Tetris all night is fun. In the morning you realize that it was sort of enjoyable, but it didn't get you anywhere and it left you very very tired.

Keep in mind that I'm not a CS grad student. I'm a semiconductor engineer in EE, where IMHO a Ph.D. makes a lot more sense than it does in CS.

To get a Comp Sci perspective one might ask Philip Greenspun, MIT Ph.D. [emphasis mine]:

A lot depends on how much you value being surrounded by interesting people thinking about interesting things. You can make more money selling tires but you have to think about tires all day. Tires are arguably much less interesting than reading Shakespeare. This explains why people go to English Lit. grad school. The difficulty I think a lot of folks have these days is that many companies are working on problems that are at least as interesting as those in academic engineering departments.

It is tough to talk about academic CS in general when you're at one of the top three schools (MIT, Stanford, or CMU). We have lots of people who are more creative and interesting than those in even the best companies. However, because academic CS is sort of a moribund field, as soon as you get down to the second-tier schools you're mostly dealing with people who lack the intelligence and creativity to get a good job in industry. This is death.

So the bottom line for me is that if you can get into an absolutely first-rank school in a field that fascinates you, go for it. Otherwise, look at it as training for a bureaucracy that would make the Prussian civil service look imaginative.

-- Philip Greenspun, October 28, 1998

If you do go to grad school in CS, stop with the M.S.. There are only two good reasons to get a Ph.D.:

1. You want to become a professor, and are willing to sacrifice a decade of your life in the attempt, despite the fact that the odds of finding an academic position are terrible.
   
   
2. You are already in industry, and have found a specific job or salary that you want, but the hiring managers demand a Ph.D.
   In my field, there are many jobs like this. In CS, I'm not so sure. Bill Gates does just fine with his high school diploma.

I went to grad school because I had fuzzy dreams of being a professor, and because I was intrigued by "the challenge". I was nuts. Now I can only wonder what I might have done if I had gotten some hard-edged advice in time.

-- Mike

P.S. Cornell has a great CS school. Look me up if you come here. With my luck, I'll probably still be writing my thesis.

Here's an alternative viewpoint on the merits of graduate school for computer science. I think it's very telling.

I think this is a great idea. It would seem to solve a lot of the problems that people have with the LDP-- being out of date, being unhelpful because of the wide variety of distros, etc.-- because those problems would be naturally addressed as people used and then discovered the shortcomings or ommissions of a particular piece of documentation. There's a good description of the value of such a reader-correctable process here about halfway down the page.

"My housemates and I decided to have a hacking party. We do this every month or so. Since we have a network of PCs running Unix at home, it is easy to get lots of people programming together. We couldn't decide what to build so I said `Well, we all like science fiction novels. So let's build a system where we type in the names of the books that we like and a rating. Then the system can grind over the database and figure out what books to suggest.'"

And?

"It took us the whole afternoon, but we got it to the point where it would notice that I liked Books A, B, and C but hadn't read Book D, which other people who liked A, B, and C had liked. So that was suggested for me. We also got it to notice if you and I had opposite tastes and suppress your recommendations."

This was back in 1994. Anne and her friends had, in one afternoon, completed virtually the entire annual research agenda of at least two MIT professors (neither in my department, I'm relieved to note).

by Philip Greenspun, Chapter 9 of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing

(... And if you all had any sense you quit reading this slashdot crap until you'd finished reading this book. It's all available on-line, but it's definitely worth buying a hardcopy of it.)

Anyway, as for Firefly... everyone I know thought it was ridiculous. They played with it in the same way people play with bablefish, just to laugh at how stupid the results were. Microsoft bought it? Cool... I hope they buy lots of other useless companies. They shut it down? Too bad, it would be better if they wasted more money on it. Maybe passport will help burn some of their cash.

That's absurd! That is what you use transactions for -- ensuring concurrency and atomicity among updates. MySQL is barely a relational database, and you could do almost as well using serialized hashtable objects in your choice of programming languages. :-)

I have never really seen any speed problems with postgresql -- I built a web-based groupware and e-mail application for a liberal arts college and based it on postgresql; at any given time, the db has tens of thousands of rows (maintaining user preferences, info about postponed messages, addressbooks, and myriad other things in the email app alone), and performance is comparable to if not better than an Oracle namespace of similar magnitude on the development server at my current job doing db development for a major pharmaceuticals company.

The moral of the story: if you're backing a web site, your bottleneck is most likely not going to be the DB, unless you're opening the DBMS with every page you serve (i.e. use a connection pool OR ELSE). You're more likely to be network-I/O-bound most of the time, and a "lightning fast" DBMS won't help that at all. However, if you're writing an application that requires that more than one person access/update the data simultaneously, you'll want transactions, or else you can deal with the mangled db.

Good luck. I'd suggest you read Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing for more info on why this is important. You should also check out Mr. Greenspun's clever ArsDigita Community System -- it does almost everything that a web/db application needs to do, and it caches db connections.

For an amusing take on the dating scene, see The Game (but don't take it too seriously).

here is a review of NAS, subtitled "Why the Netscape Application Server (Kiva) Sucks".

I loved the book, especially for quotes like this:

Well... it is probably true that MIT isn't dying to hire me this week.

I don't know about the rest of you, but I wish I could say stuff like that with a straight face. To learn more from the master, spend a few hours at his web site. I highly recommend the section on narcissism. And, it goes without saying, the author would recommend it, too...

There's considerable picture loss, but nowhere near as much as going from 35 mm to digital. Probably the best photo site on the net, Philip Greenspun's photo.net says that there's about 56% as much information in an APS film as in a 35 mm. He also says that for printing snapshot type photos or maybe even 8x10 you're doing ok. If you're satisfied with the results then you made an excellent purchase (this goes for anything, including digital cameras or computers or operating systems or...)

Philip Greenspun's photo.net has some good articles on photography. It seems that the APS film has about half the area of 35mm, so you are looking at a loss of approximately half the resolution. The cost of the camera does not have anything to do with the loss of resolution. What the cost does impact, however, is the quality of the picture. Generally speaking, one cannot control things like shutter speed, fstop and exact focusing with a cheap camera. However, one generally needs to be a reasonably good photographer to use such things, and most people in the market for cheap cameras are not.

That said, I also own a relatively cheap APS camera, and it has more than met my needs. Once I get around to developing my own film (ah, but where does all the time go?), I may begin to think about investing funds in a good SLR.

Aside: I find that most people do not really care about the quality of the resulting picture. It could be a little fuzzy, a little underexposed, whatever, but if it has them in it, that's all that is needed for the family album. Sure, they will recognise and appreciate a "good" picture, but they cannot be bothered with the "cost" of learning how. I often fall into the same category.

Amitha.
--
Amitha Perera

He gave HP and AOLServer a ringing endorsement in his first book, and they paid him back by supplying him with his spiffy new hardware. They also bought a bunch of copies of his book to distribute to their employees.



All of this is described in an entirely above-board way in his books.



Now, I will admit to being a little puzzled at his hardware - by that donation, he upgraded his system from a desktop system that I think was about a SPARC 5 class straight to a four-processor, 4GB RAM, 200GB hard drive space monster You could run a good-sized corporation with that thing. I'm not sure how much it has accomplished - his pages were among the fastest on the net when he was running the old HP server, and - no big shock here - they remain some of the fastest pages on the net now.



Still, I'm sure it's nice to have. I just wonder how HP justified the magnitude of the donation when a much smaller machine would have done everything he'd ever need to do.



Finally, hefty hardware or no, I'd defend Phillip Greenspun to the death - he's a fantastic writer and you certainly can't accuse him of mamby-pamby corpspeak. We need more like him.



D
----

I built it on Debian and it works!

If AOLServer is half as good as Greenspun says, it will be serious competition indeed for Apache. With its GPL, people can rip out chunks of Apache wholesale and stick them in aolserver. A mod_perl interface would be my first suggestion.

Ok, some of you people really have got to get off of this Java app servers over everything else kick. Lots of clueless people seem to be implying "Well, some sites use lowly scripts to run their sites but we're special. We need JAVA for our super-duper, highly-scalable, object-oriented, five-tier, dynamic xml-parsed 'solution'." Grow up. Many of the most trafficked sites use Perl, PHP, Python, Tcl, and sometimes C. Is your site going to be more popular than any of these?:
www.deja.com
www.imdb.com
www.hotmail.com
www.yahoo.com
www.photo.net
www.digitalcity.com
www.villagevoice.com
www.metacrawler.com
slashdot.org

Telnet to port 80 on these sites or use Netcraft's "What's that server running?" feature to see what these guys are using if you don't believe me.

Don't believe the hype and marketing around application servers. They are for corporate IT departments who don't know better and want to appear sophisticated (and I say this because I work in said clueless environment). Don't believe your hack CS205 professor who pimps OO as the end-all be-all of programming. OO is nice but it's not a panacea for bad design. You can program just as brainlessly with Java as you can with Perl. And for those of you who bitch about Perl's syntax. What exactly is it about Perl that bug's you? Lack of typecasting? Gosh, "use strict;" is hard to type. Messy syntax? Yes, you can write ugly code with Perl but the same can be said for any language. Perl is just more lenient than most. I can't understand people who don't appreciate leniency in a language when you are trying to release a dynamic functional site in a couple of weeks. Sure, we'd all like to make pretty programs at work but sometimes we need them to get out there ASAP and with as little overhead as possible (those of you who can't appreciate this are still in school and haven't dealt with competitive deadlines or you just don't see what a competitive advantage being first and scalable on the web gives you).

Name one commercial app server that scales as well as the open-source combos. Kiva server was a complete piece of doo-doo. Oracle Application Server? Yeah, right, it was so good that Oracle stopped using it for their own site. Some will argue that app servers are necessary because they support transactions, failovers, etc. You can encapsulate most of this in the db without burdening your web developers. If you really need these features then you should consider looking at your design again and seeing if you can simplify it. In my opinion they are not necessary for 99% of the problems you'll run into.

For people who would like another opinion on why commercial app servers suck read this:
www.photo.net/wtr/application-ser vers.html

For those who'd like to read about one possible open-source solution (the same one that slashdot uses and my personal favorite):
perl.apache.org/stories/

Other good environments:
www.php.net
java.apache.org
www.aolserver.com
www.python.org

For those of you who push Java app servers over everything else: why don't you write down a list popular sites (your intranet or school projects don't count) which are using them and give examples of the hardware necessary to keep it going. I'm excited about the Apache Java project (look at above link) but everything else is just marketrdroid talk until there are results.

Unfortunately, filtering software is only as good as the broad category definitions it uses, and the people employed to apply those definitions and categorize the Internet. No matter how "precise" the definitions are, it's not clear what is porn and what is not. Most professional filtering software companies don't even try. They'll have a category for web sites that are "related to sex" or that "show nudity or explicit speech". But there are lots of sites related to sex education that might fall into these categories, or famous literature, or other types of information. The filtering companies sometimes attempt to make exceptions (like sex ed sites) but the software can never be perfect because the decisions are so subjective. IMHO they are only truly useful for companies who wish to monitor Internet-related nonproductivity and they have no place in a public instititution such as a library.

But to be fair and democratic about it, I think individual communities should decide whether they want their libraries to be "filtered" if they feel it's necessary. Perhaps federal funds could even help libraries implement filters if the citizens want that. But it is bullsh** for the federal government to quietly usurp that decision-making power by withholding needed technology funds to communities with different values.

Is this porn?

What about this?

Should children be protected from this?

Sorry, no person, company or software can answer these questions. The "protect the children" legislative push is just political posturing to get votes from the seemingly uneducated masses.

An excellent technical (though not a very technical) book. Greenspun's interest lies in creating online communities that are useful and vibrant enough to survive for long periods of time. Greenspun understands that such utility doesn't arise from trivia such as micro-tweaked HTML or the latest hyped plug-in; instead, it comes from permitting people to connect in ways that aren't possible without the connectivity and information accumulation made possible by the Internet and by database software. I highly recommend this book, and its principles will probably guide my future plans for the MEMS Exchange site.

An online version of the book is available, and is definitely worth a browse; the photographs will look better in the printed version, though that probably isn't reason enough to buy the printed version. Reason enough to buy the book, though, is simply to encourage such an enlightened approach to Web design and to freeing a book's content.

It's refreshing to see a computer-related book that concentrates on technical opinions, instead of just how-to details. I skipped over the AOLserver code, since Zope would be my choice for an implementation environment (some of the Zope Portal Toolkit ideas seem inspired by Greenspun's book, in fact), but that doesn't materially affect the important ideas of the book, which relate to nurturing online communities. It's not platform-specific in that way; while Greenspun has his preferences for Tcl and Oracle, he repeatedly emphasizes that the specific tool used is of secondary importance.

In 1996, I set up links from my site to Amazon and Computer Literacy,
asking them to write referral fee checks payable to "Angell Memorial
Animal Hospital" (see
http://photo.net/photo/donationlist.html)

I established a memorial fund there after George died.
Donations ensure that pets owned by poor people get proper treatment
and provide funding for important veterinary research.

Although two of my dogs have died in Intensive Care at Angell, I feel
that it is the best run health care organization I've seen.
Coordination among specialists is much tighter than in a hospital for
humans and no money is spent on fancy advertising campaigns,
ego-boosting interior decoration, or finding clever new ways to get
more Medicare funds.

That's Philip for you.

In 1996, I set up links from my site to Amazon and Computer Literacy,
asking them to write referral fee checks payable to "Angell Memorial
Animal Hospital" (see
http://photo.net/photo/donationlist.html)

I established a memorial fund there after George died.
Donations ensure that pets owned by poor people get proper treatment
and provide funding for important veterinary research.

Although two of my dogs have died in Intensive Care at Angell, I feel
that it is the best run health care organization I've seen.
Coordination among specialists is much tighter than in a hospital for
humans and no money is spent on fancy advertising campaigns,
ego-boosting interior decoration, or finding clever new ways to get
more Medicare funds.

That's Philip for you.

In 1996, I set up links from my site to Amazon and Computer Literacy,
asking them to write referral fee checks payable to "Angell Memorial
Animal Hospital" (see
http://photo.net/photo/donationlist.html)

I established a memorial fund there after George died.
Donations ensure that pets owned by poor people get proper treatment
and provide funding for important veterinary research.

Although two of my dogs have died in Intensive Care at Angell, I feel
that it is the best run health care organization I've seen.
Coordination among specialists is much tighter than in a hospital for
humans and no money is spent on fancy advertising campaigns,
ego-boosting interior decoration, or finding clever new ways to get
more Medicare funds.

That's Philip for you.

This is definately the best book I have read -- anyone who didn't read it should run, not walk to Philip's site and take a look...

If you want to do serious Web Publishing you have no excuse not to read it (and also check out Jakob Nielsen's site). -Petru

I really liked this book too. I think people should buy it and read it, even if they don't agree with it all (I certainly didn't). Some nitpicking points : the reproduction was just a little disappointing on some pages (visible grain) although the color reproduction seemed great to me. I don't understand why it wasn't every bit as nicely printed as, say, Wired Magazine. There are some typos in some places (damn! should have made a list) and I think each reader will find her own section where she knows more than Phil and therefore the generalised recommendations seem a little too generic.

On the positive side, I love the authors photos, buy camera equipment based on his recommendations (Yashica T4-Super - Mmmm Carl Zeiss lens!) and I always try to imagine what cutting quips he would come up with when visiting my little vanity web site. The high-level recommendations are all spot-on even when some of the detail can be quibbled with (Phil is not necessarily up-to-date with Linux, FCAL disk arrays, Sun hardware etc) but this book is thought provoking! I personally now feel I have some clue about SQL and when I would need to use it, and that alone is worth the price. The best example of the quirky nature of Phil is that he has enough self-awareness to have pages devoted to his narcissism, which deflates any accusations of egomania, and yet he complains when people address him as Phil not Philip. Well perhaps he shouldn't be quite so proud of his email address which hasn't changed for 20 years (philg@mit.edu - perhaps that's a clue why they do it!).

To buy the book go to here and give Phil the click-through commision, you know he'll give some good cause web access with the proceeds (or perhaps buy a monster lens, either is fine with me!).

Chris Morgan

Funny thing: the guys at photo.net (check http://photo.net/wtr/ especially) seem to have come to the conclusion that the only thing worse than using Oracle behind a live web page is using anything else currently available. And they have some fairly big sites to show (like www.scorecard.org).

My experience is similar: get Oracle set up right and you can rest easy. But setting it up right is easier said than done.

Funny thing: the guys at photo.net (check http://photo.net/wtr/ especially) seem to have come to the conclusion that the only thing worse than using Oracle behind a live web page is using anything else currently available. And they have some fairly big sites to show (like www.scorecard.org).

My experience is similar: get Oracle set up right and you can rest easy. But setting it up right is easier said than done.

Listening to it now... about 19 minutes into the show, Philip Greenspun called in. He's written a book called 'Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing', available for free on the web at the previous link. This is probably the best text on creating high value community sites and web applications such as www.scorecard.org using open source software.

Listening to it now... about 19 minutes into the show, Philip Greenspun called in. He's written a book called 'Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing', available for free on the web at the previous link. This is probably the best text on creating high value community sites and web applications such as www.scorecard.org using open source software.

I've all but given up on 35mm. On the odd occasion that I need to shoot something I'm not willing to spend time moving in on I'll haul out the Nikon.

My snapshot camera these days is a 645, and I just got a Canham MQC 5x7. That's right, 35 *square inches* of film. Not to mention the fact tha the MQC is _engineered_.

If your film comes in a cassette you're probably playing with the wrong format ;) Anyway, you gotta love a hobby where Schiempflug is a real word.

As for B&W and the comment about DIY, I do my B&W film developing in PMK - an awesome developer. Still using Ilford Multigrade for the paper, but I'm eyeing alternatives. I do my own E6 as well, and I've done a few Ilfochromes (used to be called Cibachrome).

If you're interesed in a good photo site, http://www.photo.net/photo rules. HP/UX backed by Oracle and AOLServer with TCL/TK.

He has a similar idea (uses the Photoshop example too). Not that I think the idea doesn't have problems, but perhaps someone smarter than I could figure out how to get it to work.

Phillip Greenspun has an on-line SQL book that he's working on called "SQL For Web Nerds". It's a little hidden at his site - look for www.photo.net/sql.

It's not all new - he's pulled pieces from his other books, but it's got some useful stuff in it, and the price is right.

Phillip's new book - "Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" - has a fair amount of SQL within it. Phillip's book will be out anytime, but the entire text of the book is available on-line. Check out www.photo.net/wtr for this and other resources.

Phillip Greenspun has an on-line SQL book that he's working on called "SQL For Web Nerds". It's a little hidden at his site - look for www.photo.net/sql.

It's not all new - he's pulled pieces from his other books, but it's got some useful stuff in it, and the price is right.

Phillip's new book - "Phillip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing" - has a fair amount of SQL within it. Phillip's book will be out anytime, but the entire text of the book is available on-line. Check out www.photo.net/wtr for this and other resources.

In short, if your goal is only to work a tech job in the computer industry, then you are probably wasting your time and money going to college. As many have mentioned before, anyone with a modicum of intellegence and initiative can read the O'Reily books and support themselves nicely as a sysadmin.

College is worthwile only if you refuse to go about it passively. You must try to go to the best school you can. Then you've got to view the school as a vast array of resources that you are allowed to take advantage of. It really is a time to explore things that aren't necessarily related to you career goals.

Both of these reviewers seem to have been infected: none of their ideas are new or exciting or even insightful. Is the book in fact a literature virus?

If so, what are these two reviewers now going to use as a virus scanner? Terry Pratchett novels?