| Larkware |
| We get up early so that you don't have to. |
By Mike Gunderloy
Friday, March 14, 2003So, fence contractor #1 isn't interested. But he's passed my name to fence contractor #2, who's coming over today. We'll see. Anyone want to trade project management work for putting up fences? Didn't think so. Oh well, back to the Web.
- A couple of weblogs have reported that Wrox is going under. Although at the moment this has to be classed as "credible rumor," it really doesn't surprise me, on two fronts. First, it seems to me that Wrox's strategy for the past year or so has been mainly "throw a lot of stuff at the wall and see what sticks." Add in their tendency towards books with a dozen first-time authors (which means lower total advances per book, I suspect) and you've got a publisher in decline. The second factor is that the entire computer book industry is still in a world of hurt. Sales are, so far as I know, down across the board. I know of two other computer book publishers who seem to be fairly serious trouble. I think this is all secondary fallout from the dot-com crash, of course; eventually the training and book budgets dry up, and we're still headed down that slope. While I still have enough work to keep me busy at the moment, I can't help but worry about all those ex-Wrox authors competing for the limited pot of publisher dollars. Of course, some of this is just a long-overdue shakeout in an industry that puts two dozen books out on every application as soon as it's released. With all the writing and editorial talent I know of that's underemployed or unemployed, I'm tempted to start my own press. But that way lies madness (not to mention bankruptcy).
- As winter leaves and the office heats up (hey, you try living in a space with 15 computers and one window), I'm starting to worry about the CPU temperatures in my main computer. What I really want is to be able to graph what's going on so I can watch for alarming trends. That led me to Hardware Sensors Monitor, which captures all the relevant information and can save it to a CSV file. Appears to fit the bill precisely, so I'll test it for a while and see if I want to register.
- I've got WinAmp loaded on my PC, but I never use any of its features and its non-standard UI drives me bonkers. Foobar2000 just plays music. Its UI consists of a window with a list of tracks in a readable font and some standard menus. I think I'll switch.
- So according to news.com, PeopleSoft is the latest company to announce IM integration for their products. This is starting to remind me of those days when all the activity was "Hey, we're going to be the Amazon of pet food/toys/plumbing supplies/toothbrushes!" Why would any sensible company want to tie their IM to a particular application? The whole point is to communicate easily with people, and for that you want something as pervasive and interoperable as SMTP-based e-mail. In a year or two, we'll see most of these application-specific IM integrations dry up and blow away, and the few big players will be carrying the business IM traffic as well as the personal IM traffic.
- Feedster is the RSS search engine formerly known as Roogle. Neatest feature: after you perform a search, you can subscribe to an RSS feed that will send you daily updates on that search. I wonder whether they can possibly keep up with the traffic that this could generate.
- Further evidence that Microsoft isn't just one monolithic company: their bCentral web-hosting service doesn't support ASP.NET. Insert remark about right and left hands here.
- Remoting.Corba integrates .NET remoting with CORBA systems. For some reason I find this very scary. (via Don Box)
- Aspose has a bunch of interesting-looking .NET components including charting, licensing, and spreadsheet bits. Their latest release is a PDF generator.
Mike Gunderloy is the lead developer for Larkware and author of numerous books and articles on programming topics.