Remus

XML Namespaces

Please click here to help build a geographic map of the internet.

Excellent article on MSDN Columns, XML Namespaces and How They Affect XPath and XSLT by Dare Obasanjo.Also there is a shorter version on Slasdot with user comments.

May 31st, 2002

And the winner is …

"The First Annual Google Programming Contest, announced about 4 months ago has ended. The winner is Daniel Egnor, a former Microsoft employee. His project converted addresses found in documents to latitude-longitude coordinates and built a two-dimensional index of these coordinates, thereby allowing you to limit your query to a certain radius from a geographical location. Good for difficult questions like "Where is the nearest all-night pizza place that will deliver at this hour?". Unfortunately there is no mention whether this technology is on its way to the google labs yet. There are also details of 5 other excellent project submissions that didn't quite make it." [Slashdot]

It's worth checking out the honorable mentions to some great ideas (and code for sure).

May 31st, 2002

Server side MN8

So after finishing the first fully functional internal release of mn8 we considered that running mn8 on a web server side is also useful so we started to make a servlet which will run mn8 based scripts and concepts.

A couple of days should have been enough, still it’s not ready. When I started I tried to make an accurate picture of the steps involved in order to try to improve the estimated time.

The reasons are: a malfunction of the custom scheme based url’s when mn8 is run inside Tomcat and a synchronization problem as now multiple mn8 scripts can be run concomitantly inside the same Java instance.

The synchronization issue could have been foresaw but the Tomcat thing not.

So, what takes to make accurate project estimates, experience ?

May 18th, 2002

Cloning

Had a couple of thoughts on cloning this is a bit strange, as I don’t really pay attention to this particular field.

But think about it a bit. If you got a disease something incurable or genetic then you can be fixed. If you have vision problem or there is some lethal virus out here then they can fix you. Sure all this assuming that they can get all your memories and maybe your soul to.

I don’t know how you would think about this but I would definitely like if in time my vision gets bad (because I getting old) to get to a hospital put me on “slip” and wake up in a newly engineered body with perfect vision and some small genetic engineering to make me immune to the latest viruses.

This would mean improving the quality of life, I would get older just as normally I would, but probably I would die only when I considered I have done all I wanted and do it in a peaceful way.

It’s true nature invented evolution for this but why leave it all on nature? We have done this in all fields why not in genetic?

Yes it could be used to bad purposes but almost everything can think about atomic energy or explosives.

May 18th, 2002