I’m far behind in sorting out my pictures, but here are two good ones. First, my wife and my son Lohan:

This is my youngest son, Louka:

I’m the luckiest man in the world!

Eliotte nails WS-* web services. There has been constant attempts from WS-* web service proponents to claim that there was one big tool shed and that people could pick their favorite type of web services. The hidden message is that there are various options, that WS-* might be best for serious work whereas REST web services are better for the little guy. In other words, WS-* didn’t fail, we just have different solutions to different problems. It is not so.

WS-* is North Korea and REST is South Korea. While REST will go on to become an economic powerhouse with steadily increasing standards of living for all its citizens, WS-* is doomed to sixty years of starvation, poverty, tyranny, and defections until it eventually collapses from its own fundamental inadequacies and is absorbed into the more sensible policies of its neighbor to the South.

The analogy isn’t as silly as it sounds either. North Korean/Soviet style “communism” fails because it believes massive central planning works better than the individual decisions of millions of economic actors. WS-* fails because it believes massive central planning works better than the individual decisions of millions of web sites.

So there you go. Please be a WS-* advocate if you want, but you are applying nice ideas that will never work no matter what. There is no truce, you are just lost souls.

I was looking for a piece of software to help me sftp to my office machine, with a nice drag-and-drop GUI. I found fetch. These folks did a fine job at designing a nice GUI. They sell it for $25 a piece.

Nothing wrong with that. Except that I am not going to pay $25. And I will not use their software.

Why?

Because I might use such a specialized piece of software a few times a year. How many people FTP files all day in 2007? If you have to do so, you probably have deeper problems.

I have stopped buying software, with a few small exceptions, a long time ago. Essentially, the only software I am willing to pay for, is software I use every (work) day. Or games. But I don’t really buy games these days, something to do with having a family and a research career.

There must be also no free alternative that can compare. But with the flurry of nice Web 2.0 applications and free software applications, this is increasingly a small niche. There must also be no vendor lock-in: I dislike growing a dependency toward a vendor.

Meanwhile, publishing software as open source and making money off it is not getting any easier.

How are people going to make money selling software products then?

They are not. This is a dying industry.

You need to sell services, just like lawyers, teachers, and doctors do. And that’s what most programmers do, one way or another.

Wait! Don’t I buy books, DVDs and other non-software products? I do, but most of what I buy comes from China these days. It has been mass produced by underpaid workers. DVDs and books are maybe an exception, but the number of writers who can make a living off their books is small. Very small.

Ok. I’ve had it. Either the spambots pass the Turing test and have achieved strong AI, or there is an army (a very large one) of folks paid to spam blogs.

Anyone who has posted a comment on my blog in the last few months knows it requires at least one full second, preferably two or three, to pass my captcha. Currently, you have to be able to do arithmetic with roman numerals. Not exactly Ph.D. worthy, but still a bit of a challenge. For all sorts of reasons, including accessibility, I have given up on image-based captchas. My captchas are customized and modified regularly, and usually involve that you read a piece of text and translate it into an arithmetic problem. Some human beings have complained that they had to give up posting a comment because the problem was too hard. If you took a snapshot of my system, you could easily build a computer program to pass my captchas, but because I change them all the time, and because they only appear on my low-traffic site, I figure that nobody would ever bother trying.

Well, I still get about 3 spam comments per day. No matter what. There is a spam-free delay of a week or so after I change drastically the captcha, but spam quickly resumes.

Ok, it could be that a spambot was programmed to beat the general type of captchas I use. Still, it is pretty impressive the way I get spammed with such efficiency.

The fact that I am nearly convinced that I deal with human beings, tell you that if I, in fact, have to deal with machines, these machines pass a Turing test with flying colors.

I am now waiting to see how long it will take for the spambots to learn roman numerals. If they do so in less than a week, I will seriously worry about my safety.