e mërkurë qershor 29, 2005

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

I have left Sun on monday, so I cannot blog on blogs.sun.com anymore. You can find my new blog P@ Log at http://blog.chanezon.com/. The new feed is at http://blog.chanezon.com/xml/rss/feed.xml.

For my new blog I use a new blogging engine called Typo. It is much less fully featured than Roller, which powers blogs.sun.com, but it is a promising server written in Ruby On Rails, a framework I've been playing with a lot lately, and it makes it very easy to play with the engine and add features to it, such as the Ajax Hierarchical Category and Calendar browser I created last month.

Happy blogging to the Sun bloggers: I was very happily surprised at the explosive adoption of blogs at Sun, and the overall quality of the blogs.

Sun Blogmasters, good luck to you: it was a pleasure working with you and a really fun experience. Dave, you can freeze my account now.

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

I'll give a talk with Dave Johnson and Kevin Burton at JavaOne on thursday: beyond blogging. See Dave's announcement. Too bad Alejandro Abdelnur, our fourth speaker, won't be there. This is the result of my January proposal to make a common presentation of the various syndication projects in java.

Cross posting this to http://blogs.sun.com/pat and my new blog http://blog.chanezon.com

Parting haiku

Netscape, let a thousand protocols bloom
AOL, pick the fruits of the boom
iPlanet, autumn rains loom
Sun, shines amid winter gloom
Time to find my way home, like Poldy Bloom!

My career as a code snippet

A little pseudocode snippet to summarize what I've been doing these past 8 years (full details in my resume :-) I have lived through it, but haven't compiled it!

package com.sun.hr.career; 

import com.netscape.server.*;
import com.aol.portal.*;
import com.iplanet.marketmaker.portal.*;
import com.sun.portal.*;
import com.sun.syndication.*;
import com.sun.hr.exceptions.*;

public class PatCareerAtSun {
    public static void main(String [ ] args)
    {
        //consulting Netscape France
        AppServer.importTo(FRANCE).sell();
        //AOL MyNetscape Portal Mountain View
        MyNetscape.get().manage();
        //Sun/iPlanet Market Maker
        MarketPlace iMM = new MarketPlace();
        //Sun Portal France
        Portal.getVersions().next();
        //Sun ROME open source project
        SyndFeedInput input = new SyndFeedInput();
        SyndFeed feed = input.build(new XmlReader("http://blog.chanezon.com/xml/rss/feed.xml"));
        throw new ResignException("let's try something else");
    }
}

I left Sun on monday after 5 years. But among merger and acquisitions I've stayed in the same entity (enterprise servers) for the past 8 years: Netscape, AOL, iPlanet, Sun, doing Portals, eCommerce and Enterprise Servers, so it's a big good bye!

I mosly enjoyed my time at Sun. The things I really liked at Sun are:

• Good people: it was a pleasure and a learning experience to work with so many bright engineers from all over the world. I made many friends at Sun over the years and will keep fond memories from my time here.
• Passionate people: Sun people are passionate about what they do, and very opinionated. This very often brought on us some laughs from the analysts, or the rest of the industry. But in the technology business we're in, I think it is a valuable quality.
• Cool technologies: even if recently I've played a lot with Ruby, Java is still pretty cool in my book (AOP, annotations,...) and the most suitable language and environments for many type of projects. And the Sun Labs people churn out regularly some cool new stuff: Fortress (scientific computing language), Barcelona (multi process VM), Looking Glass (3D Desktop)
• Interesting problems to solve: scalability, maintainability, huge code base, dependencies management, public API definition and deprecation, platform andf app server issues... At Sun I learnt to program in the large and take into account all aspects of the software lifecycle.
• Excellent remote working policy: among the many software companies I've talked with, Sun is ahead of the pack with its remote working policies and infrastructure. I've been working from home in France since 4 years, designing products that were implemented in the US or India, and it worked really well.
• Great recent focus on open source: OpenOffice, NetBeans, OpenSolaris, Sun is putting the lines of code where its mouth is. I did my share with ROME.
• Best corporate bloggers in the world: thanks Jonathan for giving the impulse from the top for blogs.sun.com. Participating to its birth was one of my most fun job at Sun.

Thank you all for these good years, and good luck!

Special thanks to Alejandro Abdelnur: it was really fun working with you!

GP@

e premte prill 22, 2005

I've been asked this question a few times: here's my roller blog settings in Marsedit

e hënë prill 18, 2005

e martë prill 12, 2005

Mark Woodman has been very active in the ROME project lately: with Amin he created the ROME Aqueduct subproject, to add a pluggable persistence layer to ROME (they already have a Prevayler implementation)

More recently he organized the ROME logo contest, in order to get a cool logo for the growing number of projects that are powered by ROME.

You can see the current submissions, and because ROME is all about syndication, we have a feed for the latest entries in the contest!

For now I really like Mark's elegant and essentially typographic entry, as well as Jerrold Maddox's minimalist ROME-XML using the very nice Trajan font type.

Robert Copper posted 2 fun variants of Sun's Duke, as a roman legionnaire, and an orator, but I think we'd have some problems with Sun lawyers in order to adopt these ones in an open source project:-)

So if you have any talent for vector graphics art, please enter the contest: we need a cool logo for our T-shirts, in order to replace the quick design I made a few months ago. A software project is never complete until you ship the right T-shirt!

It was not an april fool's joke: we shipped ROME 0.6 beta on april 1st. Alejandro has the details.

Many bug fixes and enhancements in this release.

e premte prill 08, 2005

Hurray! According to Will our virtual team won what is called at Sun the chairman's award (I don't know what it is exactly but it sounds good:-), for creating blogs.sun.com.

The mail I received mentioned Will Snow, Simon Phipps, Dave Johnson, John Hoffmann, Tim Bray, and myself.

I guess there must be money involved and you need to be currently employed by Sun to be part of it: because Danese Cooper with her constant evangelism for blogs, and Dave Edmondson who created the PlanetSun and PlanetSolaris aggregators would really deserve it as well.

I say virtual team because we're all from different organizations within Sun: Will and John from sun.com, Simon and Tim from CTO office, Danese from the evangelist group, Dave Edmondson from Solaris, myself from Portal, and Dave Johnson, who created the software that powers our blogs was from SAS before Will got him in. And it worked out really well: today, after a year in operation, blogs.sun.com is humming, growing both in audience and number and bloggers.

For Dave Edmundson and myself it was really a side project, what folks at Google call their 20% project...except that at Sun we don't have this formal notion of 20% project:-(

The few lessons I take out from this experience helping build blogs.sun.com:

• Dare speak up, however experienced and wise the other people in the room are supposed to be: at that initial meeting Tim Bray suggested to have all of us signup for Typepad. I was a user of MovableType at home, and a user of the Sun reimbursement process, and thought it would be a bad idea. I had installed a Roller instance internally, so I spoke up and suggested we used Roller, which was in java, well designed for hosting, and open source. Then Will spoke up and said "I manage sun.com and we can install it next week".
• Do first what you're passionate about: at that time I helped blogs.sun.com get started, and with Alejandro Abdelnur and Elaine Chien we were starting the ROME Rss and atOM utilitiEs (ROME) open source project. These were 2 "20% projects", with no recognition from my manager, and I put them first in my priorities. Looking back 1 year after this was the right thing to do: they're both thriving.
• Virtual teams work better than formal teams when they are bound by passion: what is true for individuals is true for teams as well. Passion about what the team is doing is what makes things tick and remove all obstacles that would be problems in virtual teams doing more mundane type of work.

We've had a blast building and growing this system: I'm glad that we get this kind of recognition for our work. Too bad Danese and Dave can't benefit from it as well.

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 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.

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