http://webmechs.com/webpress A pundit's guide to IT, Software Development, and the Web Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:54:21 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en URL at http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/big_00.html Since today's browser environment is rapidly becoming the equivalent of an OS, the innovations in Chrome seem to be ideas whose time has come.  One of the central ideas behind Chrome's architecture is to assign a different process (not thread) to each tab and the strip explains why.  ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2008/11/google-chromes-architecture-explained-in-comics/ This blog article by Dare Obasanjo purports to give an insider's view of how Microsoft might be a more desirable workplace environment than Google, in contrast to all the media portrayals about how working at Google is like being in a playground. In my own blog essay here, I would ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2008/07/google-vs-microsoft-whos-the-evil-empire-now/ The latest buzz around Solaris has whet my appetite for a Sun technology again. With the massive mind and market share that Linux - now virtually mainstream - enjoys, OpenSolaris' seemingly hopeless position as being #3 behind an already distant second placer (BSD) on the open source OS front ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2008/05/solaris-and-opensolaris-do-they-still-have-a-viable-future/ After having read about the "Da Vinci Machine", http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/01/31/davinci-machine_1.html http://openjdk.java.net/projects/mlvm/ it struck me that Sun/the Java people have finally seen the wisdom of supporting other languages (esp. dynamic ones) on the JVM and have decided to play catch up with the CLR. The closest CLR analog to the Da Vinci Machine would ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2008/04/javas-da-vinci-machine-and-other-platforms/ FPGAs or Field Programmable Gate Arrays are essentially programmable/reconfigurable hardware. A particular CPU architecture can be thought of as hardcoded whereas in contrast, FPGAs let you change the processor "architecture" any time you like. The trade-off is performance versus flexibility. While their gate configurations are reprogrammable, the different process utilized ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2008/01/fpga-supercomputing-an-alternative-paradigm/ Finally, we have a book that vindicates the desirability of a REST interface over AJAX and SOAP. http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2008/01/a_year_in_oreilly_books.html, I remember back when SOAP, UDDI and all the rest of the corporate web services stack was introduced, many people in the open source community saw it as an attempt to recapture the web, ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2008/01/restful-web-services/ David Mertz, in this Charming Python column, makes multimethods sound hopelessly complicated like he always manages to do in his own inimitable way (sorry, David). After coming across the enlightening wikipedia article on multimethods though, I have since discovered that the concept is really quite simple to understand. In a ... http://webmechs.com/webpress/2007/09/multimethods/