The universal client

The game of Web services is played by passing around XML documents. Office 2003 will be the superior technology for writing/editing (InfoPath) and analyzing (Excel) such documents, but in many cases users will be searching, viewing, tweaking, approving, and routing. It's a huge win if we can use Web standards to do these things in a lightweight, cross-browser, cross-platform way. We've waited so long for this moment to come. AOL, please don't screw it up. If you don't get why this matters, turn Mozilla over to an organization that does. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

a different kind of universal client

I posted this item in an odd way. As the screenshot shows, I'm running the Windows version of Radio UserLand on Mac OS X, by way of Connectix Microsoft Virtual PC. I don't enjoy these hall-of-mirrors effects for their own sake anymore. There's actually a reason for this crazy setup. I discovered a while ago that my standard procedure for cloning Radio from my desktop to my ThinkPad -- xcopy t:\radio\. c:\radio\. /s -- wasn't going to work for Mac OS X. There are scads of hardcoded paths scattered throughout the various .root files. (Phil Windley's generalization of my retitling script barely scratches the surface, as it turns out.) If there's a reliable fixup script, I'd like to hear about it. Meanwhile, it's a chance to put Virtual PC to the test. When it comes to universal clients, There's More Than One Way To Do It. Well, here goes...

...heh, I'll be damned (sorry, SurfControl) darned, it worked. Sure does suck drain the battery, though.

Former URL: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/2003/06/14.html#a723