Cook Computing

ZDNet UK reports on some typical behaviour at the EU:

The EU Council is accused of 'last-minute manoeuvring' as it considers passing the EU software patent directive within an environment or fishery meeting

A controversial EU directive that opponents fear would allow software patenting within Europe could be passed without vote or debate before Christmas.

The EU Council had been expected to postpone a crucial decision on the the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive until the New Year.

But, according to a Council agenda, EU diplomats will decide on Tuesday and Wednesday whether the directive will be included as an 'A-item' in the upcoming Fishery or Environment Council meetings, which will allow it to be passed without discussion or a vote.

Nothing surprising here, its how the EU works, but it continues to shock me that the peoples of Europe are allowing their sovereignties and democracies to be handed over, slowly but surely, to a bunch of unaccountable and unelected bureaucrats in Brussels.

Andre Da Costa has a link to a News.com report on the latest WinFS news. What are a few years here and there when you see the project in a biblical timeframe:

"This isn't a relational database," he said. "This is a brand-new data model, and it satisfies a whole class of applications that frankly have been unsatisfied from a data model perspective since the beginning of history. We've been working on things like this for a long time." [Bob Muglia]

The Microsoft hype machine has disappeared up its own arse with Longhorn. Of the much publicized and grandiosely titled "Three Pillars of Longhorn", WinFS will not be ready, and Avalon and Indigo will be available for earlier versions of Windows. So what does Longhorn offer? I may have read explanations of why you need Longhorn to get the full capabilities of Avalon but they have not stuck in my mind. Don't get me wrong - I'm eagerly looking forward to working with Avalon and Indigo - its just that the hype seems to have got a bit out of hand this time.

Seen on Frans Bouma's blog, the news that WinFS has slipped yet again. Is WinFS just a huge blackhole project? Who is the Captain Ahad driving this project on?

I took delivery of a Loox 720 Pocket PC yesterday. I did the initial 12 hour charge overnight and having been playing with it this morning. I've never used a PDA before so lots of new things to be impressed with, not least the accuracy with which it can decipher my scrawled handwriting. I chose the Loox for several reasons, most important being the VGA screen and good WiFi/Bluetooth support.

The first major task will be to test the Compact Framework version of XML-RPC.NET. I first got this up and running in the Visual Studio Pocket PC emulator a few weeks ago but it turns out that code which runs in the emulator doesn't necessarily run on an actual device. Once this testing is complete I'll add the CF build to the distribution.

I noticed Brent Simmons posted on the The Virtues of XML-RPC a couple of weeks ago. Judging from the questions I get about the use of XML-RPC.NET there is a sizeable number of people using XML-RPC for business applications. And why not? The RPC model is straightforward and is how a lot of people think when designing an application. With XML-RPC you can get something up and running very quickly, using many different development environments to write your client and/or server.