Wednesday June 23, 2004
Wikis and SnipSnap in particular When I was introduced to wiki a little over a year ago, I immediately saw it as an enormous leap forward in time and cost savings for web publishing. A few years ago, I led the development of an online editor for the localization of content for the JavaOne conference website. In retrospect it could be defined as a narrowly scoped wiki.
SnipSnap is a very interesting collaboration suite incorperating both wiki and blog functionality implemented in Java. I've been using the SnipSnap software since I first learned about wiki. Recently, I promoted an investigation of its use as a bi-directional communication channel for Sun's customers and their account managers. When we evaluated SnipSnap's ability to serve hundreds of discrete members-only mini-sites on a few machines, we pushed it beyond its design point. We met with Matthias Jungel (Leo) while he was in California for OOPSLA and worked out an agreement to fund the development to scale SnipSnap for this use case. Today, Leo has announced the availability of the latest version which now satisfies our requirements.
I have installed and use 3 instances of SnipSnap on a daily basis.
- As a documentation wiki on my workstation.
- Intranet documentation where for example, a FAQ about blogs.sun.com is maintained by Sun's blogging community.
- My internet playground hoffie.com.
run.sh &
and you have a database backed wiki/blog server running! So, what are you waiting for? Go get it, you'll like it! (2004-06-23 10:34:25.0)
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Wednesday June 16, 2004
Modernizing my desktop This morning I upgraded the OS on my SunBlade 2000 from Solaris 9 to Solaris 10 build 58. The process went smoothly after I allowed it to do a fresh install instead of an upgrade. As a result of that choice, quite a few locally installed apps were missing, so I installed pkg-get from BlastWave. Wow was that a great recommendation. After a problem free install of pkg-get, I just issued this command:
pkg-get -i gaim
to get gaim (Aol Instant Messanger for Gnome) installed. If a new version of gaim becomes avialable, all I have to do is:
pkg-get -u gaim
I did have to make an alias in my .cshrc to get BlastWave's required LD_LIBRARY_PATH set:
alias gaim 'setenv LD_LIBRARY_PATH /opt/csw/lib;/opt/csw/bin/gaim'
pkg-get detects all the dependencies that are missing from your system, connects to the web to download them and installs them. It is a huge productivity enhancement. The list of available packages is impressive
I was also able to simply hot-swap a Logitech USB scroll wheel mouse for the Sun standard 3 button mouse and it worked without any tinkering thanks to built-in support in Solaris 10. Under Solaris 9 I had to install a driver and hack configs that I must have messed up badly since it only worked until I had hard crash (never try to open the case of your SunBlade 2000 while its running - a kill switch promtly cuts power to the system). After the crash, I had to remove the mouse driver to get my system to restart.
Well, I'm off to play with DTrace, the primary reason I upgraded to Solaris 10... (2004-06-16 11:07:29.0)
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