One quick tip for those trying to code SOAP services using VB. On Office 2007 and newer, you'll need to use the MSSOAP30.DLL library which means changing the new object call from:
CreateObject("MSSOAP.SOAPClient")to:
CreateObject("MSOSOAP.SOAPClient30")Because this returns an IXMLDOMSelection object, you also no longer need to specify the .childnodes member. So the general purpose script now looks like this:
Dim xmlDoc, SOAPClient, siteRoot siteRoot = "http://sharepoint"
If you're ever thinking of moving beyond SQL and the relational database world, this carsonified.com article is well worth your time.
It covers most of the major players, including Hadoop, CouchDB and Sesame.
The two most useful things I've found about my Rhino wrapper Askari are:
Recently, I came across a nice example which allowed me to exploit both benefits. I wanted to be able to extract data from a series of web pages, but which unfortunately were being presented in HTML format rather than XHTMl.
I keep losing my references to all these great articles about how the world has changed as a result of the Internet and the rise of digital distribution.
This is a link dump so I don't forget the two best ones (yet) again:
Clay Shirky - Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
The Grand Unified Theory on the Economics of Free
Hmm -- this is really interesting.
Ten days ago, Facebook open-sourced the Tornado web server.
Written in Python, this is an open-source version of the implementation of the FriendFeed realtime API. Tornado is designed to handle large number of simultaneous connections and to easily allow the implementation of REST-style interfaces using GET or POST.
Dude, Bernie Madoff stole FIFTY BILLION DOLLARS. In a PONZI SCHEME. Which is the criminal equivalent of convincing people you are going to fly to the moon in a refridgerator box. The single, unpleasant truth is that most people, particularly criminals, are NOT complex. They are shallow, greedy sons of bitches to whom we attribute genius planning or complex motivations in order to preserve a false sense of order in our universe.
-- John Rogers
With the release of Firefox 3.5, all major browsers now support a version of @font-face font embedding.
The odd man out (surprise surprise!) is Internet Explorer, which only supports the EOT format, as compared to Gecko and WebKit-based browsers that support TTF and OTF formats.
However, this is not the big barrier remaining. It is fairly trivial to convert TTF to EOT. The bigger problem is that most fonts are not licensed to use on the web -- even free ones.
Well, I've just learnt more about fonts than I ever really wanted to.
The issue was that the Australian Standard for legibility on a computer screen specifies certain minimum heights, but "height" for a font can mean many different things. For example:
The EU's antitrust ruling against Intel is making lots of waves in the blogosphere at the moment.
Nigel Dessau from AMD has made a series of thoughtful posts on the issue.
This list of 14 project management applications is worth a look, if only because it provides a number of very different options for interaction, rather than the countless cookie-cutter versions of task lists that exist.
