It gives me great pleasure to read in
Dragos Novac's blog about the recent 'Top Coder' competition results, I've always thought it was a superb site and would attract some real talent - what I'm pleased to hear is that Romania is kicking arse and doing rather well it appears - confirming my existing knowledge and experience of their expertise, excerpt below:
The final of the Top Coder competition was held last weekend in USA. Three Romanians made it to 2 out of the 3 finals. Adrian Carca and Mihai Pasca (both from and presently living in Bistrita, Romania) were on the 4th and respectively 6th place on the designers contest while Bogdan Stanescu (from Romania but currently living in Rockville, MD) was the 11th on the algorithm final. Congrats! The algorithms final was won a Polish guy residing in US, the designers one by an American and the developers by a Chinese.
"Navman Emerging Company of the Year Award was taken by
AfterMail of Auckland."
Well done! Great to see your work being appreciated at home.
aftermail
I think this chap is very committed to reaching a wider audience and so be it!
The Rise of Open-Source Politics
by MICAH L. SIFRY
"Whether you're a Democrat in mourning or a Republican in glee, the results from election day should not obscure an important shift in America's civic life. New tools and practices born on the Internet have reached critical mass, enabling ordinary people to participate in processes that used to be closed to them. It may seem like cold comfort for Kerry supporters now, but the truth is that voters don't have to rely on elected or self-appointed leaders to chart the way forward anymore. The era of top-down politics--where campaigns, institutions and journalism were cloistered communities powered by hard-to-amass capital--is over. Something wilder, more engaging and infinitely more satisfying to individual participants is arising alongside the old order. "
Contd.
While keeping tabs on the J2EE/.NET debate with a recent discussion by 'Programming Legends' here:
I found this post in the discussion thread of interest and thought I'd link to it here:
XML-over-http is the way
This is like the Nth time I'll make the same point, but since there was so much SOAP chatter on this thread I couldn't resist. Here goes:
SOAP is to XML what EJB is to Java. A heavy handed, over applied behemoth. SOAP is usurping the "web service" definition. SOAP is supposed to make systems interoperable, but in *every* deployment, or contemplated deployment I have seen, where interoperability was crucial, SOAP had the effect of reducing interoperability.
I'm right now seeing an organization (won't say which) on the verge of making a fateful commitment to SOAP, even though its own internal experiments showed that SOAP actually reduced the interoperability in contrast to XML-over-http.
A blind reliance on tools (Axis and .Net) combined with relentless "web service" marketing spin has the entire organization hypnotized.
In contrast, a simple, well-crafted XML schema combined with HTTP is the paragon of simplicity and interoperability. A custom XML schema can produce document instances with very high signal-to-noise ratios, but also excellent human readability.
SOAP is a red herring. XML schema + binding tools is the path of the righteous.