e martë korrik 27, 2004

Rina Muller is dead on sunday, at 64 years old. The DNA, Alsace's main newspaper, announces: "la mort d'une grande dame" (death of a great lady). A great lady indeed.

She was my mother's best friend, they went together to school and knew each other since 50 years.

I knew her since I was born, and considered her daughter Marie-Lorraine like a sister.
We didn't meet very often in the past few years due to our busy lives, but it was always a pleasure. She's one of the close friends who came to visit us in California when we lived there.

One fun anectdote I remember from her: during her trip in Silicon Valley, she organized an alsacian dinner in Portola Valley, in the house of Marion, a friend of Marie-Lorraine. She had succeeded in finding Munster cheese in San Francisco.
This is the most stinky cheese I know: we once had some trouble with our neighbors because we were trying to mature some fresh munster on our balcony.
I would never had guessed there was a legal way to import it in the US!

Rina was a talented business woman, CEO of Schutzenberger, the last independent brewery in Alsace. Over the years she had succeeded in gaining respect in this very male dominated environment. The Alsacian equivalent of Carly Fiorina, to use an analogy that my readership will understand.

Here's a picture I took of her in april, when she joined the whole family for a dinner in Paris.

I'm sad, my parents are very sad. I think it's the first friend of their generation to whom funerals I attend.

Good luck Marie-Lorraine!

e premte korrik 16, 2004

Alexis Moussine-Pouchkine is a colleague of mine, from Sun France, where he's a "Java Web Services Architect". A very sharp guy.

He's talking a lot to the computer press in France, and I've told him since a while that a weblog would be a good complement to that. He started his weblog yesterday, Bistro.
Welcome to the bloggin world Alexis, great title!
Try it, I'm sure he'll be interesting to read.

One thing that Alexis will do is blog in french. I haven't started doing that, although I think about it since more than a year, because I mostly talk about tech, and my audience reads english. But I maybe should for more personal posts. In the meanwhile I try to pepper my posts with good sounding french words. Here, the word "fichtre" from this post's title, is an old word meaning "wow!" or something like that (better translation welcome).

e mërkurë korrik 14, 2004

Today, or more accurately last night was 14th of July, Bastille day in France, where we celebrate the end of monarchy and the birth of the republic, through the destruction by the people of the symbolic Bastille prison in Paris.

Traditionnally there are some fireworks in Paris, by the Eiffel tower. Here's a shot of tonight's fireworks seen from my balcony, at the 7th floor of a 21 story building.

One thing that struck me while watching the fireworks from a high vantage point, and far enough, compared to being under them in the crowd at Trocadero, is that these mighty fireworks, which from the ground seem to fill the sky with their vivid colors, actually never go higher than two third of the heigh of the Eiffel tower.

Sometimes it's good to step away in order to see things in perspective, and discover the big picture.

e hënë korrik 05, 2004

Edited further in the Roller UI.

Last month my faithful Treo 180 died, from a predictible death by a hip fracture... sorry by a fracture of the flip top hinge (these models were doomed at birth). Since my wife is pregnant, due in 2 months, I want her to be able to reach me all the time, so I shopped for a new phone.

I've Read Russel's Notebook a bit, bought a few magazines and did some quick research to determine that the so called smartphones are not yet for me. Not smart enough, and for serious use I need a keyboard. It must be a generation issue: I must be part of the last generation who don't have developped the ability to type with 10 digits keyboards:-)

So I went for a Treo 600, which had the advantage of being ready to use with my accumulated agenda and contacts from the past 8 years that I've used Palm devices.

I've used the Treo 180 only as a phone/PDA, sending a few SMSes buth that's it. With the Treo 600 I decided to start playing with the online capabilities of the device. I already tried 2 mail clients but none of them handles IMAP over SSL with my self signed cert powered personal IMAP server. I need to do more search and debug on that.

Then I shopped for a blogging client: my colleague Matt Ingenthron has posted in the internal bloggers mailing list that he has tested mo:blog successfully, so I gave it a try too.

The first 2 lines of this post have been posted from my Treo 600 phone: it works really well.

However I tried the fancy feature which lets you post pictures taken with the Treo's built in camera, using the MetaWeblog API call newMediaObject I suppose... and it failed: my son Simon's picture has not been uploaded to the server.

I did not sniff the http traffic (it goes from my phone operator to blogs.sun.com, I need to test this with my own server, whenever i have time to set it up).

But a quick look at Roller source told me I don't need to go further:

In package org.roller.presentation.xmlrpc

public class MetaWeblogAPIHandler extends BloggerAPIHandler
...
    public Object newMediaObject(String blogid, String userid, String password, 
                                 Object struct) throws Exception
    {
        mLogger.info("newMediaObject() Called =[ UNSUPPORTED ]=====");
        mLogger.info("     BlogId: " + blogid);
        mLogger.info("     UserId: " + userid);
        mLogger.info("   Password: " + password);

        throw new XmlRpcException(UNSUPPORTED_EXCEPTION, 
                                  UNSUPPORTED_EXCEPTION_MSG);
    }

I hope the Atom posting API becomes more widespread, on client and servers, because the mishmash of APIs that are used right now make it too difficult for client developers to create clients which work with every servers. Even with the NetNewsWire client I use to post to this Roller powered weblog I have some trouble sometimes.

Until that happens I may give a try to completing the MetaWeblog API implementation for Roller: after all that's not very complicated, there is a directory for resources for each user already, so it's just a matter of Base64 decoding the bits and creating the file with the name specified in the struct.

In Open source Java libraries for Weblogs, Wikis, and Newsfeeds Dave Johnson (Roller creator) wonders:

One question that crossed my mind: should Rome include a blogging client library? Posting, updating, and deleting posts via the XML-RPC based Blogger API or the REST-based Atom API is not exactly easy to do. Wouldn't it be nice to have a client library with an easy-to-use set of interfaces for this.

Rome is the open source java library that Alejandro, Elaine and I have started a month ago to unify Syndication feed parsing in java. I think a posting API to abstract out the various protocols is a good idea as a Rome subproject: we're busy preparing our 0.3 release for now, with unit tests and various subprojects that got started by our new developers, but Dave, feel free to get a Rome subproject started on that.

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