e premte prill 01, 2005

37 already: time's flying! Hopefully javascript's there to help me count the candles:-)

I'll continue paraphrasing Issa as in my 35 years old Birthday Haiku

spring is coming
I'm thirty seven -
still there in front of my grey computer

In the meantime I gained one wonderful kid, a few wrinkles around the eyes, and switched from a Dell laptop to an Apple Powerbook.

Let's see what kind of haiku I can cook up next year: I'll try Basho for inspiration.

e mërkurë shkurt 23, 2005

Thought leaders or out of touch with the masses: "

(Via Don Park's Daily Habit.)

Food for thought.

Hilarious!

Jon Stewart on bloggers: "Jon Stewart offers his own spin on the blogging phenomenon."

(Via CNET News.com - Front Door.)

The details are in my post to the ROME dev mailing list: it seems like mod_security, as configured at the TextDrive ISP refuses http get with a user-agent containing the string "java"!

How how should java people interpret that?
I guess as a compliment: if mod_security forbids java in the user-agent, it means that even spammers and rogue spiders ended up dumping Perl for their nasty http business to use java instead: java everywhere;-)

After Ivan Ristic's knowledgeable comment, I changed the title of this post, from mod_security does not like java user-agents to TextDrive hosting does not like java user-agentsto better reflect the fact that it's TextDrive's configuration of mod_security that is at fault and not mod_security in itself (I had assumed mod_security's default configuration was the culprit). Sorry for the wrong title Ivan: I've read many excellent things about mod_security:-)

e enjte shkurt 10, 2005

Through Russel Beattie, Tagsurf: Tagged Hyperforum I tried Tagsurf, a new app leveraging tagging, bookmarklets and RSS in an interesting way. It's the product of a confrontational chat session between Russel Beattie and Anthony Eden. I'm not surprised the combination worked so well: I've always considered Russ as a fantastic product manager, who needs a perfect geek like Anthony to make his ideas real, like the Andreesen-Bina combo who made Mosaic.

Tagsurf allows you to comment on links using a simple bookmarklet. The link you comment about is considered a tag, and you can add tags to your post. Then the aggregated posts for a tag (which can be a link) are displayed either in html or as a RSS feed. Very smart. Here's an example for Russel's post which led me there.

I recorded my first impressions about the site by using it to comment on Russel's post, so I won't repeat it here, just follow the link.

I discovered that 20 minutes ago and I still don't understand all the implications and potential issues with this system, but I feel that familiar vertigo that takes you when confronted with a very elegant, generic and powerful architecture. A few times when I felt that in the past were when I discovered legos, lisp, http and jini. The comparison may seem overblown, but since one year everyone plays with tagging, applying it to various applications, and I think Russ and Anthony hit a sweet spot here!

What I'm going to do when I post this entry is to tag my comment with the url of this entry, and tag Russ's post with it as well. These operations could be performed automatically by your weblog server when you post an item: determine item link, extract all links in post, tag all links in tagsurf with the item link. Trackback does that already, using a different protocol, so you just have to add the tagsurf api part before your trackback handler.

The W3C Annotea project never got a wide adoption, even if there is a Mozilla plugin took off since 2001: I have a hunch that this small app has a chance of helping annotating become a mainstream habit. To the W3C's credit, Tagsurf benefits from the rising blog and syndication tide.

More comments when I have played with the app a bit more.

e martë shkurt 08, 2005

Found the press release while egosurfing:-)

He's the second french trader I know (and I know only 3) who goes to London: Londons seems to be for bankers what Silicon Valley is for geeks.

Congratulations Alain, and good luck for your new job!

e martë shkurt 01, 2005

I heard about Feedpod today and think it is a very clever idea: it is a Text-To-Speech RSS/ATOM Newsfeed reader. I don't care too much about the client side. James Gosling had added Text-To-Speech to his JNN client side aggregator many months ago but after experiencing it for a few hours it was only an annoying feature. What makes this project interesting is on the server side: "You can use FeedPod on your site to offer a PodCast of your blog". I haven't tried it yet but this is a killer feature!

In addition to enhancing the accessibility of your feed, it may be a great way to broaden your "readership"... or should I say audience?. When more people will pick up the habit of listening to podcasts while commuting, using an iPod, or soon their cell phone having an audio version of your feed available is a good idea.

Mark Woodman created a cool Powered by ROME badge. After the T-shirt, the badge was sorely missing;-)

It took only 3 days before we had a first site using it: Robert "kebernet" Cooper in his excellent Feedpod java.net project.

Dave Johnson submitted our joint proposal to JavaOne yesterday: I hope it will be accepted. With Kevin, Dave, Alejandro and I presenting all you can do with feeds in java, using ROME and Feedparser, I think it will be one of the hottest sessions this year!

It seems the collaboration between our projects may begin at the feed network API level. Kevin Burton and Nick Lothian started an interesting thread in java-syndication about this. It seems like our libraries may have many complementary features. I posted a few thoughts of my own about the whole RFC 3229 delta encoding vs new http headers discussion today. I think we should support all these methods, and give developers some control over what they want to use. This will require some good documentation.

I'm confident we'll achieve some form of convergence in this area before JavaOne.

Making CAPTCHAs Even Harder With 3-D Models provides a new interesting approach to generating CAPTCHAs ("Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart"), leveraging human's ability to evaluate a 3D scene from a 2D representation. I hope Marc-Antoine Garrigue will implement that method soon in his wonderful JCaptcha library. Dave Johnson has integrated Marc-Antoine's JCaptcha based Roller comment authenticator plugin in Roller 1.0 RC2. It is not deployed on blogs.sun.com yet, but I have good hopes it will be.

e hënë janar 31, 2005

Cool, Danny Ayers discovered our little java-syndication group and wrote a thoughtful blog entry with a proposal for something that we want to solve: Syndication model convergence and RDF.

2 weeks ago Alejandro and I (from ROME) went to San Francisco to have lunch with Kevin Burton and Brad Neuberg from Feedparser and discussed potential areas of collaboration, and our joint submission at JavaOne. One of the ideas that came up (from Brad if I remember) was to build ROME-like beans on top of a Feedparser-like event driven API. We also agreed that the first thing we could collaborate on was on specifications for the mapping. After lunch I suggested that we could eventually move the mapping logic (in ROME terms, how you map a format specific WireFeed to an abstract SyndFeed) to a declarative representation, so that instead of having written specs we could generate code. But I didn't elaborate much more: I was not sure it would be necessary if we build one parser on top of the other. Most of the logic would migrate in feedparser, to generate the Synd level event, and ROME would just listen to these events to build beans.

What I had in the back of my mind when suggesting that was linked to my recent dabbings in Ruby. A quick look at the Ruby Application Archive showed 3 syndication libraries:

• ruby-rss, antique, from 2001, probably only good for RSS 0.91
• rerss, last updated in 2003, good for RSS 1.0 and 2.0.
• rss, last updated in december, this seems to be the live one. It handlles RSS 1.0, 0.9x/2.0 with validation (or non validation), but not sure about generation, no Atom, and not sure about the object model.

I had not started thinking about which format to use for this description, but Henry Story's work on mapping Atom to OWL (continuing the work Danny had started) leapt to my mind (he presented it at the october 21st ossgtp in Paris). Danny fills in the blanks in his post! I wanted to spend a bit more time looking at alternative formats and tools for this description (RelaxNG, XMLSchema?) before starting on that, but this application seems to me like an excellent real world use case of RDF/OWL.

e enjte janar 27, 2005

Like all java geeks I've been learning Ruby recently: it's always refreshing to learn new ways of thinking about things. In Ruby the main way to think about programming is in terms of iterators and blocks.

A few references for my friend Erwan:

• Programming Ruby aka the Pickaxe, by our friends the pragmatic programmers. Dense, terse, fun, as all their books. It's the classic for Ruby. I had a similar pleasure reading it as when I read Programming Perl many years ago (except that I never finished Programming Perl, and very quickly did not have any occasion anymore to practice what I had learnt). Start with the Pickaxe.
• Ruby homepage: the Ruby official homepage, Ruby Application Archive, to search for Gems, and RubyForge listing Ruby projects.
• Rolling with Ruby on Rails at O'Reilly, by Curt Hibbs, from last week: a very windowish tutorial (pages of screenshots to explain what would be done with a few commandlines on a Unix system) but it explains very clearly the basics of the Rails Ruby webapp MVC framework (I guess O'Reilly's target audience is changing these days:-).
• JRuby: a ruby interpreter in java. Get the best of both worlds, Ruby for the higher level logic, and all the power of your favorite java libraries. Or embed Ruby in your favorite app server. They released a 0.8 version 4 days ago, with full support for Ruby 1.8.x grammar.
• Thanks to James Britt for pointing out in a comment the very good rubydoc weblog, a blog about new Ruby documentation.

I have a few pet project ideas that I want to do in Ruby: let's see how pleasurable it is to code with!

Pourquoi Google s'interesse a Java et Mozilla ? is a very good analysis of the recent Google hiring moves for java and Mozilla engineers. It's in french, but Google is your friend and here's how they would translate it (thanks to the anonymous commenter who posted this link).

Ludovic expresses in very clear terms what I was thinking since a while. Ludo and I were at Netscape together, when the strategy was to make the OS irrelevant by having the browser be the platform for most applications. I guess Netscape was too early in this game, but Google has much more chances to make it work now.

The only point I would add to Ludo's analysis is that I think Google will add java on the client as well, in order to be able to add functionalities to their apps on the fly. If you've ever tried creating an app in Mozilla, you know that all the deep functionality is written in C code, wrapped in XPCOM bindings and accessed from the UI code through javascript. So if you want to add serious services to Mozilla you need to deploy new C libraries with an XPCOM binding. I think Adam Bosworth is going to implement the client side caching/synchronization framework he was talking about when at BEA in their Firefox based browser, but that they will probably add a VM in there, with java-XPCOM bindings (does someone remember the now defunct blackwood project, maybe Google is going to finish the work:-) that will let them provision jars with new functionalities from the network. Then the UI will be written in XUL-javascript. This would be an ironic revival of fortune for java on the client: java on the client, but not for the UI stuff:-)

These are just educated guesses and may prove completely wrong. We'll see. But if you think about it, this was the architecture that Kevin Burton, now chief architect and founder at Rojo, had chosen 2 years ago for his well named Desktop news aggregator NewsMonster.

e martë janar 25, 2005

Today Sun started the open sourcing of Solaris by releasing the source code for DTrace. I'm a java guy, with a little experience in C and C++, but not familiar at all with UNIX kernel engineering, so I guess this code will be way off my head. But I decided to download it and take a quick look at it.

The OpenSolaris site has a neat simple design, with a list of blogs on the right, but no RSS feed yet. I hope they'll add that soon.

The download is quick, and I was very happily surprised that you don't have any form to fill out, or email/password to remember to get to it: click on the link and download.

The code?

find . -name '*.c' | xargs wc
...
 82678  272892 2111307 total

and

find . -name '*.[c|h]' | xargs wc
...
   91380  322081 2468438 total

So it's 82 kloc (Kilo Lines Of Code) of C code, plus 9 kloc of headers. I guess I need to finish Diomidis Spinellis' excellent Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective which sits in my pile since a while before even starting looking at it!

For all you C people: happy code reading.

Todd Fast explains HOWTO: Adding Technorati Cosmos Links to a Roller Blog. A good entry, but since he is not aware of all the possibilities offered by velocity macros in Roller templates he has to use javascript to encode the url of the post, which makes including these links more complicated than it should be.

Roller macros are extremely well documented at http://www.rollerweblogger.org/velocidocs/index.html, but I could not find any documentation for the $utilities package (or whatever they name it in velocity). The best way to discover what you can do in velocity macros inside of the Roller context is to read the code from roller macro packages (in the documentation the code is included at the end, which is very convenient). The only problem with Roller velocity templates is that you cannot use many of the excellent velocity tools, since they are not installed in Roller. I tried installing one of these on my own Roller server and found out that you can't do it without modifying Roller code because Roller populates the velocity context in some java code in a different way than the standard velocity servlet.

In order to encode a url you can use the $utilities.encode function in your template. $utilities has a set of useful functions that are used by the Roller templates tehmselves. If you are curious for more, get the Roller code and find all .vm files: they are worth a read if you plan to do more than boilerplates templates. roller.vm is a good read.

So I would replace Todd's instructions by this code:

#set ($permalink = "$absBaseURL$entry.permaLink")
#set ($encodedpermalink = $utilities.encode($permalink))
<a href='http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=&url=${encodedpermalink}'>
<img align='top' style='border:0px' alt='Technorati cosmos' src='${absBaseURL}/resources/${userName}/cosmos.gif'/></a>

For those interested in James Todd's MyJxta experimentations, I also have similar code in my template, coupled with a servlet on my server to autogenerate a jnlp file for MyJxta starting a chat room for each item in your blog.

#set ($jxtadescription = $utilities.encode("Chat room for ${entry.title}"))
#set ($jnlplink = "http://blogs.chanezon.com/roller.jnlp?name=${userName}&id=${encodedpermalink}&description=${jxtadescription}")
<a href="$jnlplink">Chat about this entry</a>

Feel free to experiment with it, but I will describe this further when it will work as advertised.

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