Mark Nottingham thinks that using WebDAV and a client cache in front of the WebDAV server could solve some of the offline/synchronization problems posed by mobile computers. He notes that the problems that arise in this approach have to do with versioning and items changing underneath. I think that if you combine the client cache with something like Subversion, which is already based on WebDAV and DeltaV, you might have an interesting solution. The problem of resources changing behind your back when you also have changes is what Subversion is all about. So "all we have to do" is build an offline aware client side cache for Subversion...

The ServerSide's interview with Gregor Kiczales had an interesting tidbit tucked into it: a presentation by Ivar Jacobsen that shows how use cases have cross cutting concerns and are thereby amenable to AOP. This is good because the AOP people need to show cases beyond the systems level crosscutting concerns. Jacobsen's presentation is a good step in that direction.

So here I am linking Robert X. Cringely, who has proposed a wild but interesting scheme to change the game in the music business. I'm not entirely sure that it would work, but it's good to see "lateral solutions" for some of the issues facing us today. I wonder if there's an analog of this for software.

Matthew Thomas posts about various weblog tools and their permalinks. He points out all sorts of "cruft" in the various permalinks.

I was trying to get to something like this for my pyblosxom blog, but it didn't work quite right. So you'll see that my permalinks are in YYYY/MM/DD#NN format, where NN is a number identifying a post. But the #NN part is bad, and I'm probably going to change that at some point.

Nick Lothian tracked back with his checkin of the latest version of Classifier4J. This is definitely worth looking into for Java projects. libots is still interesting because it's in C and could be wrapped for Python or Ruby.

Nick also has a cool hover trick for the background of the blog entry that your mouse is over.