TMBG podcast

They Might Be Giants first podcast is available. Here's the TMBG podcast feed.


10,000 users

Congrats to Matt Schmidt, Rick Ross and the JRoller.com community, which now numbers 10,000 users -- "the largest Java server on the net." Hopefully, they'll be moving to Roller 2.X soon so they can benefit from group blogging and the comment management features coming in 2.1.


The Aquarium: Roller-powered group blog on Glassfish



Glassfish logo
Here's to Eduardo, Carla and Rich who recently launched The Aquarium, the first Roller-powered group blog that I've seen in the wild. They'll be blogging the growing Glassfish community and, I hope, providing us with some feedback to help us improve the Roller group blogging experience.

Catching up with the APP

Joe Gregorio's latest XML.com article is Catching Up with the Atom Publishing Protocol a nice concise summary of the current state of the Atom Publishing Protocol.

Don't worry about Ruby

Cedric Beust: dynamic languages are not making fast progress in developer mindshare
I wonder when that was published. The evidence from Tim O'Reilly seems to contradict such a claim. Tim says Python book sales are up 20% and Ruby are up 1552%. Quote found via James Robertson.

Years ago

Twenty-five years ago on this day John Lennon was killed. I still remember hearing the news and, I'm not ashamed to say, thinking about it still brings tears to my eyes. On a much happier note, nine years ago on this day my first son Alexander Broering Johnson was born.

Atom/RSS backlash?

Stowe Boyd, who I met at the BlogOn conference in NYC, has an interesting post about feed readers, how they just don't work for him and some cool feature ideas for those who develop feed readers. I suspect his experiences are pretty common. I've had a very hard time convincing my tech savvy friends and family to use an Atom/RSS reader. I think people get into a comfortable routine for web readering, to use Boyd's word, and that's where they want to stay. In my case, I'm addicted to my reader software. You'll have to pry NetNewsWire out of my cold dead hands. Via Scoble.

Postscript: The RsstRoom Reader might change Stowe's opinion of feed readers


Raleigh/Cary bloggers meetup tonight

Tonight's the night to meet-up at Cafe Cyclo. As usual: Josh has the details.

Roller at the launch

Linda Skrocki: Another cool thing about the [Network Computing launch] event in NYC is the Blogs Engineering team was asked to participate. So, if you're there, stop by the OpenSource pods. Allen, blogs.sun.com/Roller Engineer, will be there (probably in a suit...someone please snap a picture) to answer your blogs/Roller questions and will demo some of the new Roller stuff recently released.

Big day for Sun

The name Quarterly Network Computing Launch makes it sound a bit routine, boring even, but this is a big BIG day for Sun. Here's what Schwartz wrote on his blog about the new Sun Fire T2000 and T1000 servers being launched today:

Jonathan Schwartz: A computer that runs five times faster than Dell and HP's fastest Xeon systems. A computer that's one quarter the size. That runs Solaris, and will run Linux and *BSD (and even Windows isn't out of the question). Based on a 9.6 Ghz 8-core Niagara chip available in volume, and compatible with the $120 billion dollar SPARC installed base. A computer that runs the internet like it was purpose built for search, for voice over IP, for video streams and web services and database transactions.

CDH 80

Sam Whitmore: This is the last Closet Deadhead podcast. We weren’t shut down. In light of the Archive.org debacle, we simply sense that it’s time to go. Thank you for all your support, and stay in touch at www.closetdeadhead.com.
How very sad. Ten years after Jerry passed, Dead fans like Sam (and I) mourn another loss.

Here's to the Java Posse

I've been listening to the Java Posse podcast from the get-go and, assuming you're a Java head, it's a great show. So, I was just as pleased as punch to hear them mention the Roller 2.0 release on the Friday show and say some nice words about blogs.sun.com. Thanks guys.

Open source is not a crime -- yet!

That's the title of Cory Doctorow's opening keynote at ApacheCon 2005, which is now one week away. I'm starting to get excited. Last year was my first ApacheCon and it was probably the most enjoyable conference I've ever attended. Here are the sessions I'm most interested in this year:

  • MO07: Portals@Apache: Standards and the Portals Projects
  • MO08: Open Source for Business and Profit
  • MO18: State of the Web Services Union
  • MO19: Apache MyFaces - Open Source JavaServer Faces
  • MO20: Your Open Source Strategy Sucks!
  • MO21: Power Regular Expressions
  • MO23: AJAX in Apache MyFaces
  • MO24: Business Tips for the Open Source Consultant
  • TU16: Java-XML Binding Approaches at Apache
  • TU20: Struts 2006: An Embarrassment of Riches
  • TU24: Shale: The Next Struts?
  • WE14: Ruby for Java Developers
  • WE18: Cheap, Fast, and Good: You can have it all with Ruby on Rails
  • WE19: Achieving High Scalability in JBI with Apache JavaFlow

This year, I'm giving a talk. I'm speaking on day one, Monday Dec. 12 at 2PM. Here's the abstract:

Roller is the open source Java blog server that drives the popular blogs.sun.com, jroller.com and numerous other blog sites. Currently making its way through the Apache incubation process, Roller is built on a host of Apache technologies including Struts, Velocity, Lucene, Jakarta Commons, XML-RPC and more. This overview, a primer for Roller users and contributors, covers the Roller feature set, architecture, lessons learned, project status and future plans.

I'll be at the Sun booth in the 4PM break after my talk, so stop by and say hi.

Tags: topic:{technorati}[ApacheCon], topic:{technorati}[ApacheCon2005]


Walk the Line and a night out

For the first time since three-year-old Leo was born, Andi and I dumped *all* of the kids off with my parents (thanks Mom and Dad) in Chapel Hill and headed out to movie, dinner and a show. We saw Walk the Line, the Johnny Cash bio-pic. Ebert gave it the thumbs up, Rolling Stone says its Oscar material and we both loved it.

After the movie we were hoping to try Panang again, but we didn't have time for dinner. We had to meet Andi's brother and head back to Raleigh to see Carbon Leaf at the Lincoln Theater. Carbon Leaf put on an enjoyable show, but the music didn't really grab me, at least not enough to inspire any CD purchases. If I had to triangulate (using my out-of-date reference materal), I'd say they were Connells-style white-boy jam-pop, with celtic influences (penny whistle included) and Phish-like sing-along lyrics.

All and all, a very nice and kid-free night out.

Happy holidays everybody!

Personally, I love the fact that by saying "happy holidays" I can wish good people well and at the same time irritate the assholes of the world.


Today's links [December 02, 2005]

Red October: what's the big deal?

I hate to be a party pooper, but what's the big deal with the "Red October" announcement?

In case you haven't heard, Sun has made it's entire software stack free and is bundling it all under the name Solaris Enterprise System. Big chunks of it are open source and some pieces are not, but now everything is free. It includes everything: operating sytem, database server, identity server, messaging server, collaboration server, portal server, SunRay server software, C/C++ IDE, high-end Java/UML IDE, web-centric Java/JSF IDE, office productivity suite and more.

Why is that a big deal? Jonathan Schwartz has already told the world that all Sun software will eventually be open source. So free and open source is not news. In fact, what's the hold up! And if you want any form of support, you still have to pay for licenses (contrary to what The Register thinks). Nothing new about that.

So what's the big deal? Is this going to get more customers trying our software, buying services/support and our mighty servers? Are we doing something that Microsoft, IBM and others are afraid to do? Does Solaris Enterprise System beat the crap out of Red Hat Enterprise system? I'm just an engineer, not hooked into Sun marketing strategy and I'm speaking for myself (as always here) but I bet the answer to those questions is yes. That's the big deal.

Roller 2.1-dev

Roller 2.1 is still under development but it's essentially feature complete. I'm running the latest build on this site, so you may see some quirks.


JavaOne 2006 call for papers ends today

It's not too late to sneak one in. I just submitted one myself. Here's the link:
https://www28.cplan.com/cfp_2006J1/CFPLogin.jsp

Demokritos: Python Atom Store

James Tauber is working on an Atom protocol implementation written in Python, an Atom Store. An early alpha release is available on his blog.

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