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Mike Loukides

Mike Loukides has been an editor at O'Reilly since 1990; according to Tim, he was the first person who was hired as an editor. He's edited books on just about every topic, but these days, his biggest interests are Java, Networking, and System Administration. He's been involved with Java since very close to the beginning--although he missed the first Java One, he was at the USENIX conference about six months earlier at which James Gosling first talked about Java to the public. Mike is also a serious pianist with a few recordings hidden online, an Amateur Radio operator who spends too much time writing logging software in Java, and an English PhD who's no longer up on high-tech critical theory.

 

mikel's blog

New Twist on Old Open Source

Posted by mikel on May 11, 2005 at 10:42 AM EDT

I just received some spam-mail from the IPv6 summit, titled "The Future of Military, Homeland Defense, and New Economic Opportunities Focus of New Internet Summit".

Granted, the good old US DOD started this whole 'Net thing, and I suppose I shouldn't rain on their parade. But as a lifelong pacifist, I found myself rather offended.

The Problem with Scripting

Posted by mikel on January 3, 2005 at 11:21 AM EST

A few days ago, I needed to write a program that was essentially a variant of the well-known UNIX diff.

ex post javaone

Posted by mikel on July 3, 2004 at 4:51 PM EDT

So, what was cool this year? The tiger on stage? I missed that. The keynotes that were more or less repeats of the previous year's keynotes? Unfortunately, I didn't miss those, though I wasn't quite as put off by them as some people were.

Death by UML-more

Posted by mikel on April 23, 2004 at 12:36 PM EDT

The Death By UML blog piqued my interest. I admit I didn't read the big ACM article.

Omnibus: BlogzOnBlogz

Posted by mikel on March 26, 2004 at 2:58 PM EST
First, I was amused to see James's Gosling's report that John Munsch was ticked off by James's JNN. Well, not that amused. I'll throw oil on the fire. About a month ago, I tried Munsch's HotSheet. OK, but not compelling; a few things didn't work right; things I subscribed to didn't stay subscribed; and so on.

JINI, Simplicity, and Web Services

Posted by mikel on March 9, 2004 at 2:56 PM EST
Yesterday, a friend pointed me at this article about the WS-DISCOVERY standard. Both of us viewed it with some dismay: it would be a depressing world, indeed, the promise of JINI were realized by a bunch of web services technologies that (as the article itself points out) are bloated, inefficient, and insecure.

Give us the stuff!

Posted by mikel on August 3, 2003 at 8:35 PM EDT

I was looking at the games site last night, and was surprised to find that only one game was shipped in a binary format and ready to play: bouldercat.

That really disappointed me. I just wanted to waste time--not join projects, download source files from CVS, spend some time figuring out why the build process won't work in my environment, and maybe end up with something playable.

Worst Enemies

Posted by mikel on July 25, 2003 at 4:01 PM EDT

Just read Clay Shirky's talk, A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy". It reminded me of something else I've read.

What Do You Want Me To Do?

Posted by mikel on June 26, 2003 at 2:50 PM EDT

This rather long ramble is something I've been getting around to writing for a long time.

Another Unfinished API: javax.comm

Posted by mikel on June 17, 2003 at 2:51 PM EDT

Jonathan Simon's weblog on the Sound API struck a nerve. I recently needed to use the javax.comm API to do serial communications with a ham radio. It's great stuff--it's easy to use, and I was writing code to control the radio within an hour or so.

But it also looked like the API hadn't been touched since JDK 1.1.7 or thereabouts.