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.

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