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I think the problem right now is software not hardware. When the PowerPC was replacing the Motorola 68K, people were saying that it had the potential for making a quantum leap in the way people worked (and played) with their computer. Stuff that was impossible because it would be slow. Instead of small quantitative changes (wow! this menu takes 1.3 sconds to show instead of 1.6 seconds) there now can be qualitative changes. New interface paradigms. Theming, ha, thats wasted cycles, we're going to change the WIMP metaphor. We'd have audio interaction with the computer, whats a menu? As Much as I like bashing Microsoft, Microsoft Bob and the Bastard Child From Hell Clippy are some of the few variations from the WIMP metaphor that we've seen. The main reason they failed was that Microsoft didn't have them get out of the user's way. But another reason why is not enough processing power. Not only did you get interrupted, but for stupid advice. Wasn't worth the trade off.

When System 7 came out [my opinion is Apple did a great job of getting System 7 out and working on the PowerPCs at the same time] they announced their roadmap for the future. There were three OS teams, blue, pink, and red. Blue actually was the System 7 team, if you open the System & kernel, you can find strings about the Blue Meanies, the System 7 team. Pink was the near term really cool stuff, a new OS that they were supposed to do with IBM, and formed a company called Taligent. Was supposed to be a brand new OS, Object Oriented design. Based on the Document, not the Application. A large part of this was called OpenDoc. They shipped parts of it, but never a real whole. The best part they actually shipped was CyberDog, but gradually all of this went away. Some say the reason it failed is lack of computing power. There were other reasons - new programming paradigm, hard to get developers on board. Instability in one part can lead to bad interactions in another part as well. But it took up a lot of RAM and a lot of horsepower, too much for a 60Mhz PPC601. I'd love to see what they had thought for for Red, that was their super long term whiz-bang stuff.

So where are the new interfaces? Instead of wondering why folks are pushing faster boxes, wonder why we're still using the WIMP metaphor over 23 years after the introduction of the Xerox Star? The base comp had 384KB RAM, smaller than L1 cache on some chips. But anyone who was familiar with a Xerox Star and plop them in front of a Windows box, and they'd probably recgnize it all.

Then again, you don't have to buy a 3GHz Pentim 4 if you want. If it doesn't fit your fancy, then don't Luckily enough we still have options, Athlon, and to a lesser extent, VIA C3s are alternatives.

At Boston Public Library, Carolyn Coulter is a good person
for a discussion about how to improve the set up there...
[ http://www.bpl.org/general/management.htm ]
Carolyn Coulter
Applications Manager
Systems Office
617-859-2233
ccoulter@bpl.org

Frank Altieri
Assistant Systems Officer
Systems Office
617-859-2023
faltieri@bpl.org

James Frazier
Network and Server Manager
Systems Office
617-859-2022
jfrazier@bpl.org

John Pelose
Coordinator Special Services and Locations
Systems Office
617-859-2021
jpelose@bpl.org

Michael Tsigelman
Assistant Supervisor of Computer Services
Systems Office
617-859-2399
mtsigelman@bpl.org

Cynthia Phillips
Technology Implementation and Training Officer
Community Library Services Office
617-859-2377
[ http://www.bpl.org/general/management.htm ]

Weblog guide to problematical library use
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories

When I looked at it, PHP had different interfaces to different databases, which meant that the code for the mySQL DB was different than the code for Oracle. That's crazy (it may have changed). This presents a large burden should you ever decided to change your database.

Or, you could just use something like ADOdb.

The Flash player 6 for linux is available here:

http://www.macromedia.com/software/flashplayer/spe cial/beta

And, the full file format spec is now available too which is rather cool:

http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/2002/10/25.html#a 318

Our Boston Public Library departments censor their very own documents like curatorial reports and consultants' studies reporting on collections for the purpose of long range development. BPLers have been for the most part adamant in violating the spirit of state FOI freedom of information and sunshine open meeting principles of intellectual freedom. BPL President Bernie Margolis delegated Assistant Director Ruth Kowal to provide accessibility but instead of removing red tape hurtles, additional punishing fees are extorted.

Our cities' public libraries should involve greater public participation in long range planning beginning with ensuring access to whatever legitimately public documentation there is on the very same institution.

See also
Weblog guide to problematical Boston Public Library use
Updates
http://zork.net/~dsaklad
Contents
http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLogs.com/ stories

Guide to problematical Boston Public Library use
Contents
href="http://GuideToProblematicalLibraryUse.WebLog s.com/stories
Updates
http://zork.net/~dsaklad

Programming theory covers everything from theories of computation to software engineering. Assuming your more interested in the former than the later I suggest looking at the programming language theory weblog Lambda the Ultimate.

• eatonweb portal :: the original weblog directory
  
• Blogging Ecosystem
  
• DayPop
  
• o r g a n i c a
  
• Kamat Blog Portal
  
• Jewish Blogs
  
• Weblogs.Com: Recently Changed Weblogs
  
• blogs4God (corrected link)
  

A few blogs try to go the informative rant. My blog tries that and stays the course on one, and only one topic.

I take other blogs with a grain of salt. Some I read for other professional/user perspective (such as Doc Searls or the venerable Dan Gillmor. I enjoy the casual thoughts from Meg, a cofounder of the Blogger blogsite, and, just for kicks and grins, read sites with attitude like Up Yours, which chronicles the happiness of a lovely mom in a twisted little world.

The real problem with blogs isn't blogs itself. That's like blaming the gun for the shooting of a person. The problem is that most people can't string a simple sentence together, which makes reading some sites a pain.

On the up side, people who can't write may find blogging to be theraputic--if they can stand the mail flames.

I personally like how I plug my own blog with my sig, like so:

Why would I care to read your stupid rantings? Why would I care to get my daily news from someone with as much authority on the 'news' as myself? Are we so in need of entertainment that our ravenous hunger for material has necessitated the development of individual publishing?

But do you have the time to find all the news on every subject you're interested in? I know I don't (busy posting here!). For example, I'm interested in Google, but I don't have time to find all the news on Google (not Google News), so I visit the Google Weblog and find the news there. Same thing for PHP, I can visit php.com and zend.com but I don't really have time to visit all of the other sites, so I visit PHP Everywhere.

Could I find most of the news they do? Sure. Is the news all theirs? No, most of them are full of links to other news sources. But, since so they're interested in this news topc, over time, they can become "experts" on it themselves.

> Things that are more likely to change are things where non-equality comparisons are less likely.

And why non-equality comparisons should be special?

> For example, with CustomerID, you almost never use greater-than or less-than.

Which comparison operator are mostly used is immaterial. The real thing is the domain itself. For example, CustomerID cannot be compared, say, to SaleID. They are different domains. Now, if you map any of this domains to a specific language data type, and you want this language to use dynamic typing, your call. But do not let your language do meaningless cross-domain comparisons.

> Perhaps we should make a distinction between "street relational" and "pure relational".

No, we should make a distinction between relational and non-relational, SQL being non-relational. But if you want, you can call it quasi-relational. But it is not relational, simply because relations are sets, while SQL tables are bags. And bags, by definition, are not sets and do not behave as such.

> Until/if the industry starts to back pure relational, I am not going to assume/wait for it to happen, and try to work with what we have now WRT "relational".

So you only will used something good if everyone does? BTW you do not have to wait, unless you want it free. Go Alphora Dataphor.

> I am all for overhauling SQL.

SQL must be thrown away, not overhauled. It is too inconsistent, illogical and idiosyncratic for overhauling.

> I have kicked around new syntax and structure for such. It tends to resemble functional programming in many ways.

If you do not want to do the right thing and go relational, at least do not wast your efforts by duplication. Go SchemeQL.

This review, and this one, and this one all seemed to like it. But more importantly, Kip Thorne said when he saw Alda in Los Angeles that it was like spending some time with Feynman once again.

I know if QED opened within 200 miles of me, I'd go see it. Alda has done great work and Feynman's life was amazing.

Is there a good example why/how something like Mono/DotGNU helps using libraries written in/used from other programming languages?

How does one for example mix and match a program written in C# which uses the iconv C library and the Qt C++ library while using the Guile library to give the user a scheme scripting extension to the program.

I looked at the IK.VM.NET a DotNet Java implementation using GNU Classpath. You will see that there is a lot of work needed to make for example Java Exceptions work correctly with C# exceptions (Java exceptions are mostly checked, C# exceptions are never checked at compile time). And even simpler things as mixing the basic Sting classes or the IO library seem like it is non-trivial.

And C# and Java are really very much like each other. What about mixing more "exotic" languages like Logo and Scheme with Prolog or even basic C?

The DotNet runtime seems to support multiple language on top of it but it is not clear how that helps adapting libraries to multiple languages. It seems to me that you still have to write wrappers around every library to make it work with the way for example Strings, Dictonaries or other standard datastructures are represented/used in the different languages. It seems to me that mixing multiple languages will always be a challenge when programming.

history of weblogs

What the hell is a weblog? (personal definition)

a more general definition

the reality is, blogging is a form of publishing, not unlike the internet.

While it's not a part of PHP core yet, I suggest you check out ADODB. I've used it and find it just as easy as DBI. I've not used perl in a while but don't you still have to declare what db you're using? You would still have to CPAN the mysql support to DBI.

Quite honestly if uniformity in accessing a database is that important, shouldn't you be using ODBC?

Geocities appears to be completely blocked.

The Chinese government doesn't like Playboy or sex.com - hmm, do we see a correlation between repressive government and antisexual morals there? Nah, couldn't be.

I have no idea why they censor {Insert Something Funny}, an obscure weblog, an anti-tobacco group, the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, Columbia Earthscape, or Columbia University.

Google is on their shitlist. No surprise given its cache and large index. The Wayback Machine isn't - I'd expect that to change in the long term. Anonymizer is accessible as well.

Peek-A-Booty and Freenet are not accessible, of course. It appears that all SourceForge sites are blocked (unless the testing engine is slashdotted and not working properly, but other sites are reported as accessible). I presume this might be because Freenet is hosted at SourceForge.

i have been following Tara Sue for about a week now. Ed Cone, an opinion writer for the North Carolina News and Record introduced her to the online world last Friday and has been mentioning her on an almost daily basis.

Dave Winer and others bloggers who have been writing for some time now about the need to find a challenger against Howard Coble quickly linked with support. Tara Sue has become an online ray of hope for many.

To prepare for the Fall, there is a story of rebel coding in Finland. What happened to make Mr. Torvalds seek refugee status in India? And what version of the YQ terminal do you want in your head?

I just had to write a poem titled iSwitch to iMac.

Here is a short review of Matlab 6.5 Review

http://radio.weblogs.com/0107789/stories/2002/05/2 8/isTomcatCrap.html

From my experience, Tomcat 4.x is faster than Apache and JServ.

Don't know how it compares to other servers (at least, from experience I don't), for example IIS, Resin, JRun etc.

Tomcat 3.x WAS very slow - for example, who had to combine Apache and Tomcat to get anything reasonable - using Tomcat for JSP and servlets, and Apache for static pages. This was in itself a bit of a nightmare. Tomcat 4 is miles better.

Comparing JRun to Tomcat for performance, see here.

Compared to Orion and Resin, Tomcat also lost comprehensively. The arguments raged for a while over performance (for example)- but not many about whether it "did what it said on the tin".

A more serious point here is that your bosses care more about the name and image than the quality. I'd think about trying to convince them that this is Not A Good Idea. For someone who IS using Tomcat in production, just do a google search; you'll get quite a few, for example.

"In conclusion, yes - in my book Tomcat is crap. I haven't actually really touched on the problems with Tomcat here (other than it has bad performance and bad developer productivity) and I apologise for that. Perhaps I'll get to them another day. For now, consider the other alternatives until Tomcat improves (which I hope - but doubt - it will)."

Your just missing it. :) I missed them a lot too before I found them.

ADODB for PHP is a good abstraction layer (some people think it is too bloated and the code is ugly, of course those people haven't written their own or anything)

The PearDB
functions are very useful as well.

I've heard that the phpBB DB layer is very good but I haven't looked at it myself or tried to use it in other programs.

Personally, I haven't found anything in PHP to be short-sighted. I've programmed ASP, JSP, and even some Perl and I've found PHP to be the best all around language for server side web scripting.

MySQL, ehhhh....my opinion is they should change their slogan to "MySQL - Hey, it's better than using a flat file!" :) (which is not meant to denegrate all of the volunteers that have put in a lot of hard work creating MySQL, for simple web sites and applications I don't think it can be beat. But Oracle, IBM, and MS don't have anything to fear from it)

Directly related, from Doc's blog the day after:

If you want to get an sense of how deeply the hand of Hollywood penetrates the skull-socks of their congressional puppets, dig the letter sent to Tom Poe by one of his state's senators. I've emphasized the relevant parts:

Dear Mr. Poe:

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the intellectual property rights and the public domain. I appreciate hearing from you.

I understand your concerns about ensuring that. This issue is very controversial because Congress must protect intellectual property rights while still allowing ordinary Internet users to have access to public domain content. I appreciate hearing your suggestion for a tag system. I am carefully reviewing a number of proposals to address this issue, and as I do so, I will keep your views in mind.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. For more information about my work for Nevada, my role in the United States Senate Leadership, or to subscribe to regular e-mail updates on the issues that interest you, please visit my Web site at http://reid.senate.gov. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

My best wishes to you.

Sincerely,
HARRY REID
United States Senator

On Thursday evening I shared this with Phil Windley, the CIO and blogger-in-chief of the State of Utah, and in the discussion that followed it became clear to us both exactly what kind of plans guys like Reid have in mind for the Net's natives: Indian reservations.

Like Hollywood, these guys see the Net as a distro system for industry-controlled intellectual property, and the public domain as a small preserve off to the side somewhere. Thank you for giving us this fine land with all the free building material. Now go off someplace where you can hunt and gather stuff that has no commercial value. And bury your dead while you're at it. They're starting to stink.

...

[Later...] I've been told that the very same letter quoted above has been going out from the offices of other elected officials. If that's the case, it's even creepier. Does anybody know? Is this thing just Sen. Reid's boilerplate, or is a much more massive cut & paste job?

Directly related, from Doc's blog the day after:

If you want to get an sense of how deeply the hand of Hollywood penetrates the skull-socks of their congressional puppets, dig the letter sent to Tom Poe by one of his state's senators. I've emphasized the relevant parts:

Dear Mr. Poe:

Thank you for contacting me to express your concerns about the intellectual property rights and the public domain. I appreciate hearing from you.

I understand your concerns about ensuring that. This issue is very controversial because Congress must protect intellectual property rights while still allowing ordinary Internet users to have access to public domain content. I appreciate hearing your suggestion for a tag system. I am carefully reviewing a number of proposals to address this issue, and as I do so, I will keep your views in mind.

Again, thank you for taking the time to share your thoughts with me. For more information about my work for Nevada, my role in the United States Senate Leadership, or to subscribe to regular e-mail updates on the issues that interest you, please visit my Web site at http://reid.senate.gov. I look forward to hearing from you in the near future.

My best wishes to you.

Sincerely,
HARRY REID
United States Senator

On Thursday evening I shared this with Phil Windley, the CIO and blogger-in-chief of the State of Utah, and in the discussion that followed it became clear to us both exactly what kind of plans guys like Reid have in mind for the Net's natives: Indian reservations.

Like Hollywood, these guys see the Net as a distro system for industry-controlled intellectual property, and the public domain as a small preserve off to the side somewhere. Thank you for giving us this fine land with all the free building material. Now go off someplace where you can hunt and gather stuff that has no commercial value. And bury your dead while you're at it. They're starting to stink.

...

[Later...] I've been told that the very same letter quoted above has been going out from the offices of other elected officials. If that's the case, it's even creepier. Does anybody know? Is this thing just Sen. Reid's boilerplate, or is a much more massive cut & paste job?

Doc made a front row MD recording. I'll be putting it up eventually along w/ the rest my OSCON recordings. It will probably come across better than the transcript.

MacOSRumors predicted dual G4 laptops in 1999, and it ain't happened yet, and it probably won't. Funny that it's been actual YEARS that Mac users have been complaining about the speed difference with PCs and nothing's improved yet - what a faithful bunch.

But you're right, Apple is getting draconian recently. Very scary. I bought a Mac last year (a TiBook complete with grinding DVD and peeling paint special effects) specifically because Apple claimed they weren't like Microsoft, only to find that they may be long-lost twins, and the other Mac users I know are completely oblivious to it. Luckily I'm running a stripped down YellowDog 80% of the time. :-)

Apple needs to leave this 20th Century old school corporate BS behind and embrace the new way of business - listen to customers, create quality products, give freedom with your product, don't treat the customer like a criminal. They should elect Doc Searls to the Board of Directors. It honestly seems that most executives at most companies don't have a sweet clue. They really suffer from "us vs. them" syndrome when it comes to customer support.

Positive change like this just makes sense, but Apple was the creator of the modern tech bubble, and they will have a very hard time leaving it behind. The lure of easy money has a very strong appeal.

BlackBolt

Well, if you run a website, they're pretty useful for finding out how people are getting to your site, what they're searching for to get to it, seeing which big site is linking to you and sapping all your bandwidth, etc. etc. Those are just off the top of my head.

Of course, the main reason is that, without referer logs, you'd never have sites like Disturbing Search Requests.

fyi:
here are some notes from a recent flash conference on flash for the ps2:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/categories/flashF orward/2002/07/12.html#a196

I know what you mean, since I've picked up a lot of theory in similar ways over the years. Along those lines, Lambda the Ultimate is a good place to get pointers to a variety of current research. It's worth getting at least some of the theory closer to its source. Have you read SICP, for example? That was one of the books that got me back into theory after many years out of CS at university (the CS I did was pretty lame - mainly learnt Pascal, very little real CS theory).

If you're into that sort of thing, though, SICP is just a gateway drug. Lambda calculus, type inferencing, type theory in general, and much, much more follows, and pretty soon all the mainstream languages are looking pretty pale... It all does give some good criteria by which to compare languages, though, and helps avoid being limited in one's thinking by the language one happens to be using.

BTW, I agree about not teaching closures in Perl to newbies. Perl and Python both have enough hardcoded ways to do things that you don't need to rely on closures, except to be perverse. The more important concept for useful programming is higher-order functions, since they provide a capability that's directly useful in Perl (or any language), and closures can be introduced in that context.

You've probably come across this before, but here's a nice piece about ML's type system from a partly Perl perspective.

Yes, php has mysql functions but a good developer would use a db abstraction layer such as PEAR:DB or adoDB which is basicly what DBI provides perl. So there really is no difference in this respect.

Code might be more mature. Early versions of psql suffered a bit. MySQL has been looked at a lot, has a large install base, etc., so it's got more kinks worked out. Probably. YMMV.

I think the bugs have pretty much been ironed out (except perhaps for some truly obscure ones) in PostgreSQL. So I'm not sure that this advantage is really much of an advantage anymore, though it certainly once was.

Access control is more fine grained. I'm very used to MySQL's grant tables. You can get nearly the same thing in psql though.

Windows support. You need Cygwin for psql on Windows. This isn't a biggie for me, but might be important to some...

I have no idea what sort of impact this would have on administration of each, or on performance for that matter. So I'll have to give the nod to MySQL on this one.

I can back up MySQL's DB files really easily, without the DB running if need be (did this once as an emergency backup and it saved my bacon).

You can do the same thing with PostgreSQL, I think, but I haven't actually tested this on a live database. You can lock all the tables in PostgreSQL if need be, and I'd think that as long as the database is running without fsync turned off it would work.

Lots of books, lots of code already written for MySQL. Although I suspect that psql will close that gap. But 8 times out of ten you see something from freshmeat written for MySQL.

This is definitely true! It's why I asked the question, because I'd like to see the same sort of support for PostgreSQL. If a ready-made application exists for MySQL that doesn't for PostgreSQL then that is certainly a compelling reason to use MySQL, provided that you don't also need the capabilities of PostgreSQL.

I'm personally more familiar with it... :-)

Yeah, I know what you mean. :-)

Anyway, there's a whole list of pros as well as cons over at MySQL's site. However, that list let out the most important thing to consider when choosing any technology: Is it the right tool for the job? Most of the time MySQL has been just fine for my needs.

And I completely agree with this, as long as you don't end up outgrowing the capabilities of what you're using. My experience shows, though, that this is a lot easier than you might think, which is why it's important to use a database-independent layer (like ADOdb) whenever possible, and to choose the most capable database engine that meets your needs.

And that's why I asked the question the way I did. I'm interested in knowing what compelling reasons exist for choosing MySQL over PostgreSQL. Sounds like the biggest one is the existence of some application for MySQL that already does what you want, but which doesn't exist for PostgreSQL.

For those who use MySQL or other database systems with PHP, I highly recommend using the ADOdb Database Library for PHP. It's feature-rich, robust, and has a smaller and smaller footprint with nearly every successive version. I use it all over the place, and it's very very handy. Sure, there are other abstraction libraries out there, but this one takes the cake, IMO. Check out all the supported database drivers!

For those who use MySQL or other database systems with PHP, I highly recommend using the ADOdb Database Library for PHP. It's feature-rich, robust, and has a smaller and smaller footprint with nearly every successive version. I use it all over the place, and it's very very handy. Sure, there are other abstraction libraries out there, but this one takes the cake, IMO. Check out all the supported database drivers!

Yeah, I know it's just a big list of links...

Apache and FW Performance Tips
Apache.org Performance Tuning
Apache Tuning Tips
Apache Tuning Directives
Tuning Your Apache Server
TUNING.txt
PHP-DEV: Database Connection Problems
PHP Everywhere: Tuning Apache and PHP for Speed
Tuning Apache Web Servers for Speed

and last, but not least, my favorite:

Web Server Tuning

I'd also recommend reading up on tuning the linux kernel.

-techwolf

I wish I had known about this site a couple weeks ago! I did some apache/php tuning for a client. This site has some good tips. And if you're planning on getting slashdotted, check here

Obviously, with titles like these, he must be an ignorant Microsoft toady. On the other hand, Thomas C Greene, who has never spoken with anybody involved with the project, knows everything about it and what it is really about.

For Thomas C. and everyone who is interested, there is an interview describing many technical aspects with the chief of Palladium development team at DigitalIdWorld.

How Palladium, or better its clone TCPA, can work with Linux and GPL you can read here .

Cheers, jl

Take a look at this history of Flash. Also consider that the Flash interface and featureset hasn't changed much between versions (Adobe's Livemotion and Swish both show how additional features could benefit a SWF authoring environment).

As regards the open source license, Macromedia has been hinting that they are bringing some of their new 'MX' server features that are already available in Cold Fusion MX to server environments like PHP and JSP. Perhaps some of this will be released under an open source license? Don't think for a miniute they are releasing the Flash Authoring environment as an Open Source app, that has to be one of their best selling products.

Actually, I saw a far more hubaloo on the blogs than I did on Slashdot. And I'd hazard a guess that there were many more links (or readers, if you lean that way) to the original BoingBoing post than there were to the Slashdot story.

See here.

• Programming Language Research - Links maintained by a CMU student.
• Compilers.Net
• Lambda the Ultimate - I found this from Meerkat. While somewhat more esoteric than straight up parsing talk, I'm seeing it spawn alot of programming language discussion across blogs.

*Smirk*

sorry here is a link for convience Tuning Apache and PHP for Speed on Unix

Not so true. There are PHP libraries out there that exist to serve this purpose. Include the library, tell it which dB you are using and all the rest of the code is the same. Check out ADODB. To see it in action, check out PostNuke. I find it rather nice :-)

Not sure if these are the efforts you're referring to but they're available for some of the more widely used backends (MySQL, Postgres, DB2, ODBC).

Yes, there are arguments to be made against DB abstraction layers if you're using very specific features on one platform that might not be available on another (e.g. Postgres' foreign keys and subselects vs. Mysql's lack of them (er, last time I used MySQL anyway))

But if you're doing fairly run of the mill SQL stuff, check out the PEAR DB class or ADOdb. Either one implements a standard set of methods for interacting with databases regardless of the backend.

As someone who does database coding for PHP nearly everyday, I must say the ADO interface that can be found here has been a godsend. It makes it so easy to create database independent code with minimal overhead. Of course, this package is open source :)

Amen to that. I would add a plug for ADODB or something similar for database abstraction, which makes PHP a bit more like the Perl DBI (no more separate sets of calls for each database type).

Next, while MySQL is great for small projects (and fast), it really is just a port of SQL to dbm files, and not truly relational, so it isn't great for large projects. As you mentioned, Postgres or Oracle fill this niche quite nicely (I don't really like the Oracle model for data types, but that is my personal bias). I could be mistaken here as I haven't used it much, but isn't Jet the file format used for MS Access databases? Access never seemed very robust to me.

This isn't exactly related but then again maybe it is....Is it marketing or journalism?

It can be tough to decide how to define something. A blog is a blog is a blog. The material posted by kids about their lives might mean nothing to you but everything to that kid and his/her peers. If you don't like it, move along. Call it a journal or call it something else. Call it a blog, or not. Fine.

On the other hand, there are some "industrial strength" blogs out there. At a minimum, this is going mainstream, for better or worse. For example, there are blogs written by folks that are employed by Macromedia. Examples...

Mike Chambers (Flash MX):
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/

Vernon Viehe (ColdFusion MX):
http://vvmx.blogspot.com/

Matt Brown (Dreamweaver MX):
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106884/

And then there a blogs by the professional folks at MSNBC:

Eric Alterman: Altercation
Michael Moran: World Agenda
Cosmic Log: Alan Boyle's Diary
Chris Matthews: Hardball
Jan Herman: The Juice

This isn't exactly related but then again maybe it is....Is it marketing or journalism?

It can be tough to decide how to define something. A blog is a blog is a blog. The material posted by kids about their lives might mean nothing to you but everything to that kid and his/her peers. If you don't like it, move along. Call it a journal or call it something else. Call it a blog, or not. Fine.

On the other hand, there are some "industrial strength" blogs out there. At a minimum, this is going mainstream, for better or worse. For example, there are blogs written by folks that are employed by Macromedia. Examples...

Mike Chambers (Flash MX):
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106797/

Vernon Viehe (ColdFusion MX):
http://vvmx.blogspot.com/

Matt Brown (Dreamweaver MX):
http://radio.weblogs.com/0106884/

And then there a blogs by the professional folks at MSNBC:

Eric Alterman: Altercation
Michael Moran: World Agenda
Cosmic Log: Alan Boyle's Diary
Chris Matthews: Hardball
Jan Herman: The Juice

Having read SICP, I know that functional programming is for quiche eaters. If you are into this sort of thing, then you will love the Lambda the Ultimate blog.