Blogging Roller

I post my status every Monday on our internal blog server and I'm going to start doing the same thing here. Except for the boring day-to-day operational stuff, most of my status is CC: World.

• Roller 1.1.2: I fixed serveral bugs in Roller's built-in (Lucene based) search engine last week. I got some tips from Matt Schmidt at Javalobby, who had done the same but in the Roller 1.0 branch. I hope to release 1.1.2 with those fixes this week; probably the last release from the 1.1 banch. David Lindsey helped with testing.
• Roller 1.2: since integrating Planet Roller and adding some UI unit-testing stuff, I've haven't been contributing much to 1.2, except for testing and deployment. Roller 1.2 is due out in mid-June, but it's already running a couple of sites (incuding this one).
• Roller 2.0: I've been trying to focus on work in the Roller 2.0 (the group blogging release), but daily fires and 1.X kept getting into the way of progress. Plus, I didn't want to create the 2.0 branch until I had UI unit testing stuff ready in CVS head. Last week, I started working on the database and persistent object changes.
• Roller@Apache: Apache has the Contributor License Agreements for all Roller commiters and the grant form, now we just need some karma. I hope we'll be moving into Subversion in the next week.
• RSS and Atom In Action: After completing all chapters, I went back and looked at Chapter 5 How to parse newsfeeds again. It was really bad and I ended up completely rewriting it over the Memorial Day weekend. Now I'm focused on implementing an Atom protocol client and server so I can wrap up Chapter 8.
• JavaOne 2005: I made travel arrangements for JavaOne. I'll be arriving Sunday before and leaving on Friday after. I'm also planning on being in Menlo Park for a Thursday afternoon blogs.sun.com users group meeting. My talk is at 12 noon, Thursday.

This site is now running Roller 1.2-dev (the latest from Roller's CVS HEAD), which includes Allen's cool new configuration system, Anil's new configurable ping feature and Anil's new topic tags plugin which makes it easy to add Technorati tags to any post, for example:

Tags: RollerWeblogger

Update: I'm not sure why Technorati is not picking up my tag. The tag looks to be properly formatted and I have "pinged" Technorati several times now (included a couple of manual pings).

• aigre-douce
  "Journal personnel pour usagers avertis" - powered by Roller
• FAR2000 blogs
  Free Architecture Report blogs - powered by Roller
• Battle for the Blogosphere
  Yahoo360 and MSN Spaces not "open, flexible platforms that tech-savvy users can extend"
• Geronimo nightlies
  Tom: "If you're ready to start playing with Geronimo, this is the version to download"
• GNOME with Java
  Developing GNOME Applications with Java and GNU gcc-java
• Dangerous Music
  Janne: "Is copyright still enabling innovation and creativity?"
• Bruce on Virtuas
  "I will be focused on Java application servers and databases"
• Matt on Virtuas
  Matt: "I will focus on my core expertise as the Spring and Web Frameworks Practice Leader"

I combined a couple of examples from the book to create Feed Poster, a program that checks a list of newsfeeds, composes a blog post listing the items from those newsfeeds posted in the last X days. You could use it, for example, to post a summary of your del.icio.us links at the end of each day. I considered using David Czarnecki's Java API for del.icio.us, which looks awesome, but I ended up using a simple newsfeed parser and blog client instead.

• Juan Cole on blog ads
  "Do I worry about blog advertising corrupting the medium? Not very much."
• Netscape breaks IE
  We're not done till IE won't run
• Pragmatic Rails
  Pragmatic guide to web development with Ruby on Rails (Dave Thomas, et al)
• Curry Winer split
  Dave Winer explains his bitter breakup with podcast wingman Adam Curry (in a 17 minute podcast)

To continue my little string of personal entries, I've got great news. The house that we bought when I worked for Rogue Wave in Charlotte, couldn't sell when we moved to Raleigh to work for HAHT in 1999 and have been renting-out ever since is finally under-contract (and for a reasonable price).

Leo and I spent the night at my parent's place in Chapel Hill last night and we all went to the Carborro farmer's market this morn in search of berries. I snapped this photo in Mom's garden with my new Treo.

Leo's done surprisingly well this weekend, BTW. He didn't cry at all when we dropped his Mom and brothers off at the airport and he's hardly mentioned them at all since then. He has been very clingy and constantly wants to sit in my lap, so I think he is a little uneasy. On the way home from the airport, we stoppped by the RTPBloggers lunch at Crazy Fire (Leesville Rd.) and the lucky little dude got to meet Rafe Colburn, Scott Parkerson, Mark Pilgrim, Sam Ruby and Josh Staiger.

Fortunately for me, I was able to work my normal routine on Friday because he was in preschool during the morning and had a nice long nap in the afternoon. But, he and the 70F weather is going to make it difficult to finish the chapter 5 rewrites by Monday.

My boys Alex(8) and Linus(6) didn't know until this morning, but today they're about to take their first airplane ride. Their mom's taking them down to Orlando to see uncle Chris compete in the Florida Half-Ironman and spend a day at Universal Studios. I'm staying home with Leo(2). I told them the news this morning and Alex's response was classic Alex: "awww, I don't wanna to miss school for two whole days." Linus, who consistently plays Pig Will to Alex's Pig Won't, was ecstatic.

Search was broken in Roller 1.1, so we'll be releasing Roller 1.1.1 later today to fix that.

Update: the Roller 1.1.1 bits are available, see the Roller project blog.

As usual Josh has the details. Unfortunately, I'm not going to be able to make it tonight, but all a y'all IBM bloggers in the area, set free by your corporate masters, should definitely show up. Josh (an IBM'er) will want some company and Cyclo is a nice little place with outdoor seating, good coffee, smoothies and fine Vietnamese cuisine.

Andy Wismar is relieved that IBM finally has a blog policy. I can understand that.

I was a little disappointed in the news about IBM's new policy, but that's only because I was anticipating "the largest ever corporate blogging initiative." I shoulda known better than to believe a blog I'd never seen before. I'm not disappointed in the policy itself. I think it's basically sound. It's a little on the conservative side, but hey, what do you expect from IBM?

Sun's Tim Bray comments on some of the differences between Sun and IBM's policy.

Microsoft's Dare Obasanjo thinks IBM's new policy is a set-back for IBM bloggers.

I'm celebrating something of a milestone tonight: I've finished the first draft -- or "sloppy copy" as my eight year old calls it -- of RSS and Atom in Action. I've still got some serious work ahead, but the end is in sight. To celebrate, I'm going to bed before midnight.

Sun's Allen Gilliland has joined the Roller project. Allen is co-worker of mine on the Sun Web Platform Engineering (WPE) team. He designed, developed and contributed a sweet new metadata driven configuration system for Roller. After submitting codedrops for about a month, he was nominated and voted in last week. Welcome Allen!

A complete manuscript is less than a week away. Of course, I have some major revisions queued up and, as of today, a new draft of the Atom Publishing Protocol spec to contend with. On first read, the new Atom protocol spec looks good and I like the way introspection and collections work. It's going to take some work to update my Atom client and server implementations, but now's the time -- I need them both for chapter 8.

And note the new title and the new cover (in the sidebar): RSS and Atom in Action.

CNET thinks HP is going to beat Sun to podcasting. Not so fast! Bloggers at Sun have had podcasting infrastructure in place since early this year when Sun launched mediacast.sun.com, a place for Sun employees to share "media files of all types," and added support for RSS enclosures to Roller. Jonathan Schwartz's inaugural podcast was in March 2005.

Wouldn't it be awesome if you could just apt-get, pkg-get or emerge Java^TM on your favorite open source *nix platform? Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing for Java developers if Apache HTTPD came with built-in support for J2SE and J2EE? I think we just took a step in that direction.

Beware the Google Web Accelerator. It will wreak havoc on the web applications that you use (Roller included). Problem is, in most webapps HTTP GET changes things (even though it shouldn't). Read all about it on O'Reilly Radar. I don't understand this. Google employs a hell of a lot of very smart people. How did they let this one slip by?

Update: I just reviewed the Roller UI and found that, at least for deletes, we do the right thing. The pattern we follow is to use a delete link (which causes a GET), but that sends you to an "Are You Sure" page which uses a POST to do the actual delete -- so Roller is probably safe from the Google Web Accelerator.

Mark Pilgrim is soliciting co-editors for an Atom Implementation Guide.

James Robertson has done a great job writing up some of the presentations from the Business Development Institute's Blogging Goes Mainstream: Is Your Company Ready? mini-conference in NYC this week. He has created a special category bdiNYC which contains all of his posts on the topic.

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