000307.html

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Tue, 07 Mar 2000 13:00:00 GMT
Jon Udell at Byte - The Future Of The Programmable Browser: the main topic of this article is XUL, the new Extensible User-Interface Language (pronounced "Zool"), but what I found interesting was a pointer on page 3 to Halfbrain.com, a company that provides BrainMatter, a spreadsheeet written in Dynamic HTML. It currently only works in IE 4 or 5 on Windows, but they're working on Netscape and Mac browsers. There are functions for retrieving stock prices and getting exchange rates. They store your files on their site, secured by standard web encryption, I guess. I'm using it over a T1 at the office, so I don't know how much of a start-up delay there will be on a modem, but it's a few seconds here. They also have a large library of sample spreadsheets. There's a free service and a "premium" service, though I couldn't find anywhere a description of what more you get or how much you pay. Excel in a browser. Amazing! [script]

J.D. Tucille at About.com - Tear up that census form: "I'm looking right now at an official, mis-addressed notice from the Census Bureau telling me that my census form will arrive next week. It's stained with coffee grounds since I tossed it in the garbage first off, then had to fish it out to write this column. The official census form will be stained too, since, like the initial letter, it's destined for a resting place beneath chicken bones and empty beer bottles. And that's all it deserves." I haven't yet gotten a letter. I don't plan to trash it, but I will tell them how many people live in my house and nothing else. J.D. says about this, "To my taste, even that's giving up too much. I see no evidence that the existing political system is so responsive that the shuffling of a few politicos among the states will improve my life. Frankly, I'd rather throw a monkeywrench into the gears than pretend that I believe in the creaky machinery." Unfortunately, my wife is a Democrat, so she may fill out the thing when I'm not looking. [market]

Peter Orvetti at Liberzine - Tale of a teen-age communist: how college in Amherst turned a near-communist into a libertarian. [market]

Patricia Neill at LewRockwell.com - Anarchism: What Is This Word Our Rulers Hate?: "Anarchy: [Gr. anarchia, lack of ruler or government, from anarchos, without chief or ruler, an private; and archos ruler.] Private rule. Formal government is uneccessary. That is, we rule ourselves. Each and every one of us, as adults, are capable of doing so. This is, after all, what we mean by adult. Without direction or laws from any outside source, except our Creator... As for me, I willingly submit to the laws of Nature and of Nature's God, but by God, I have an anarchistic heart. Let those who purport to be my rulers hear this." Me too, more and more each day. [market]

Yahoo - Agilent Technologies Unveils Breakthrough Optical Switching Technology: It uses the same technology as inkjet printers. This would be the holy grail of light-pipe communications, but I'm a little worried about the mechanical nature of their solution. "Commercial prototypes of the Agilent Photonic Switching Platform will be available by the end of 2000." [/.]

I saw a reference to the Oxford English Dictionary, so I checked out their web site again to see if it's available yet. It may be, but it costs $550/year to subscribe. The CD-ROM version is $395. Drat.

Kate at OSOpinion - The Jeff Bezos vs. Tim O'Reilly debate: OSOpinion's take on the Amazon boycott (Kate supports it, but with somewhat unusual reasoning). [lt]

Declan McCullagh at Wired - DVD Wars: Defense Rallies: some of the lawyers defending plaintiffs in the DeCSS lawsuits are proposing that the cases be dismissed. [lt]

Timothy Dyck at PC Week - Fight UCITA: It grants far too much power to vendors [lt]

" Jad is a Java decompiler, i.e. program that reads one or more Java class files and converts them into Java source files which can be compiled again. Jad is a 100% pure C++ program and it generally works several times faster than decompilers written in Java. Jad doesn't use the Java runtime for its functioning, therefore no special setup is required (like changes to the CLASSPATH variable)." Source is not available, but he provides binaries for Windows and lots of unixes (Linux on PPC is NOT one of them, !@#$%^&). I tried both Jad, the command line tool, and FrontEnd, a GUI front-end for Jad, on my Windows machine. Works like a charm. [meat]

Elliotte Rusty Harold - The Pelicans Come Back to Lousiana: a break from his Cafe au Lait mainstay, Rusty does a pictorial essay of his vacation back home in New Orleans. [cafe]

Add comment Edit post Add post