Oliver Steele

Monday night, and it’s raining hard. Yahoo weather says the rain ended at noon. No, wait, it says it will end at midnight.

The Yahoo weather page has a strip of icons across the top, and a text description following that. The icon says AM Rain. The description extends it to midnight. Presumably the description was updated more recently.

I find it useful to look at the icon first. It indicates how accurate these predictions are. If the icon doesn’t tell you what’s happening right now, the prediction isn’t likely to tell you what will happen tomorrow.

Or, easements for WiFi.

I can use a wireless access point for one of two purposes. I can place it inside my (home or corporate) intranet and make it secure. Or I can place it outside my intranet, and broadcast its presence to WAR drivers. But I can’t do both.

[Actually, I can’t do the first, because WEP isn’t secure. But WPA will fix this problem, and it won’t fix the other one.]

I just discovered the weblog of Sarah Allen, a fellow Laszlo employee. Sarah came to us in March, most recently from Macromedia, where she was Director of Engineering
Multiuser Technologies. I am told that previously she had the best title I’ve heard: Director of Director.

These questions came up on a family drive last weekend:

• How many posts does a hundred-yard fence with one-yard beams have?

• What if the fence is circular?

• What if it’s a cross?

• What if it’s a figure eight?

The first question illustrates fencepost error. The second relates to the discovery of the benzene ring.

Dave Winer misses the point of the Semantic Web. Winer criticizes RDF as though it were an application, intended for direct interaction with users creating and searching content. RDF isn’t an application; it’s an operating system, on which applications can be built.
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Semantic Silos

“Proponents of The Semantic Web want to boil the ocean by getting people to change the way they write for the Web.”

One of the things we’re building at Laszlo is LZX, a language for Rich Internet Applications. (Some of the other things we’re building are the client, server, and compiler pieces necessary to make applications written in that language actually do anything.)

Language design is a process, and there’s process-specific knowledge about how to do it. Much of the knowledge is the same that’s needed to design an architecture, or an API; some of it is language-specific. Here are some of the principles I’ve found helpful in designing LZX:
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Know the Past

A domain-specific language is a language for dealing with a specific problem domain, such as students at a university or entries in a blog. DSL implementation has become so easy, and some of the domains have become so deep, that there’s now a market for subdomain-specific languages (SDSLs).
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I first met the folks at Laszlo Systems in December of 2000, when I was the CTO of AlphaMask. A decade earlier Laszlo’s founder David Temkin, my business parter Mike Reed, and I had all worked at Apple on technologies associated with the Newton. Mike and I were in San Francisco, and David invited us by to see Laszlo.

I’ve noticed that there’s two ways of giving directions to a location (say, when a driver pulls over to ask you how to get to a restaurant). Declarative directions specify where a location is relative to the current location; for example, “Two blocks ahead and across the street.” Procedural directions specify the steps that have to be taken to reach a location; for example, “Go straight three blocks, take a u-turn, go one block, and it’s the first building on your right.”
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