RasterWeb!

Ok, it’s still a bit early, but as I’ve used Amazon more in the last month than I probably have in all of 2004, I thought I’d point you to my Amazon Wish List which I have painstakenly updated over the last few days, since, you know, I’ve got a birthday coming up in June, and you might want to start shopping early.

Keep in mind that if your birthday is anytime after mine, this can really help in attaining a better gift from me. Besides, any gifts you purchase for me may be tax deductable!

(Editor’s Note: Purchases may also not be tax deductable. We don’t know where he came up with that crazy idea…)

Oops! I meant “More on Databases” of course…

As I’ve mentioned, I deal a lot with database design done by morons, or at least people who somehow didn’t know what they were doing (not that I’m a database genius) but even the little things can bother me. I mean, if you’ve got a table named foo_header and it’s got 40+ fields, and another table named foo_detail and it’s got just 10 fields, doesn’t something seem wrong?

Where I come from, headers usually contain less data than the actual details of something. Maybe it’s just me…

We know that some folks can’t play well with others, but isn’t it refreshing to see that when smart people build things, they can work well with what other smart people build? (No, I’m not talking about myself here!)

Over at Upcoming.org they added a bunch of nice API’s recently, and there’s some news about how they are being used. Those Robot Co-op guys (who are behind 43 Things) detail it nicely in the aptly titled Building web services that play nicely with other web services.

This is where we see web services getting really interesting. When the web services start playing nicely with one another, you can begin to string them all together and build things that are greater than the sum of their parts.

It’s like that whole “do one thing, and do it really well” philosophy.

As for Upcoming.org integration, even our cohort over at Cambridge Lions has events listed, and our very own ocono.com is doing it too…

Is there no end to the web-interop madness? I hope not…

I should have a HandyTone 486 ATA sometime in the next week, which coincides well with the fact that I have a new phone number. In fact, I’ve got two new phone numbers, one is a SIP number, and the other is a virtual number, which means if you dial it, it’ll ring my SIP number…

So I hereby join the VoIP revolution. Not the Skype revolution mind you, as I really don’t wish to get locked into a single vendor with a proprietary format. I’ve got enough of that in my computing life already, thank you. I also didn’t want to join the Vonage $XX per month with locked hardware revolution, which might be fine for most people, but I’m a freak (and cheap) so it doesn’t work for me.

I’ll report back here on how things work using the HandyTone, my existing phones, and service through SIPphone.

Oh, if you’d like my new phone number(s), get in touch.