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Thursday Jun 29, 2006

New Atom draft plus new IE7 beta

Comments[3] by Dave in Blogging

Atom protocol draft 9 is out, but that's OK -- the last thing I did on RSS and Atom in Action was to update the Atom chapter in anticipation of draft 9. By the way, I just released Blogapps 1.0, the examples for the book, which includes a draft 9 client and server implementations. Try it out. Test it against Abdera. Make me release Blogapps 1.0.1 to fix the interop problems that you find. I dare you.

And IE7 beta 3 is out today too. I'll have to check it out when I get back to the USA next week. That might lead to Blogapps 1.0.2, 'cause I bet they've gone and changed the Feeds API again. So it goes.

Microsoft Flak Jacket 2007 (still in beta)

Comments[0] by Dave in Microsoft
Robert Burke: And it was kinda cool to be the Microsoft guy running Apache and PHP on his laptop :)
I'm sorry I missed that talk.

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Wednesday Jun 28, 2006

Roller talk at ApacheCon EU

Comments[1] by Dave in Blogging

I gave my talk this morning to a packed room of 40-50 people at ApacheCon EU. The talk is an updated and improved version of the talk I gave last year at ApacheCon US. It's designed to be a primer for system administrators considering using Roller and developers considering customizing or basic products on Roller. Here's what I covered:
  • Roller history: how Roller got started and how it got to where it is today at Sun, IBM, JRoller, Yale, NC State, etc.
  • Roller features: overview of Roller features, limitations and reasons for choosing Roller.
  • Roller community: discussion of Roller community, project processes (release cycle and proposals) and status of Apache incubation.
  • Roller internals - backend: overview of Roller business/persistence layer architecture, components used, XDoclet code-gen, POJOs and manager interfaces.
  • Roller internals - front-end: overview of Roller presentation layer including the Struts/JSP based editor UI and the Velocity-based blog/feed rendering engine.
  • Customizing Roller: brief overview of techniques for customizing Roller.
  • Roller futures: Overview of Roller 3.0 plans.
For those who couldn't make the talk, I've made my slides avalable in PDF format. Let me know if you have questions.

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Tuesday Jun 27, 2006

Made it to Dublin

Comments[2] by Dave in Roller

I made it to Dublin for ApacheCon EU but without my baggage thanks to weather-related delays. Missing luggage wouldn't have been much of a problem if I had dressed sensibly, but I chose to wear my traditional uniform of shorts and a t-shirt. Turns out, it's cold an rainy in Dublin. So now I'm dead-tired since I haven't slept in 24-hours, cold, wet and in search of a tooth brush and a comb so I can make myself presentable before my talk tomorrow morn. Hopefully the rest of the week and vacation next week will be better.

Also, as you can see in the sidebar of my, I've started to post some ApacheCon related photos to my Flickr account.

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Monday Jun 26, 2006

ApacheCon EU 2006 via Hitchhikr.com

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging

I just submitted ApacheCon EU 2006 to Dave Warlick's cool new Hitchhikr.com service, a conference aggregator that pulls together posts from Technorati and other services so that folks can "hitch-hike" to conferences via the web. Here's the ApacheCon EU landing page. So, if you're blogging about ApacheCon EU 2006, please use the tags , or so the hitchhikr's (and others) can tag along.

Friday Jun 23, 2006

Lightning break

Comments[0] by Dave in Roller
Nick Bradbury: when I'm coding away like a madman, I don't blog (or do much of anything else!)
That's what happens to me too. For me it's this -- do I blog about the blog software I'm developing or do I continue to code? If I blog about those cool new Roller 3.0 features I'm working on, perhaps I won't finish them in time to get them into Roller 3.0. Fortunately for my blog, a mega-thunderstorm just rolled in and it's bad enough that I've shutdown my w2100z, unplugged my UPS and moved out to the porch to catchup on email and blogs.

So regarding Nick's topic of coding like a cowboy I'll say this: it's a lot more fun to just start coding and sometimes it works best to lay-down some code up-front, but if you want to work with others you need at least a little process. On Roller, we've got a pretty light process. We require that folks write proposals for features they want to add and each must include a brief requirements statement and an outline of the design. But the purpose of a proposal isn't to carve the design in stone, it's to provoke discussions, reviews and arguments about the best way to do the work. So you can code like a cowboy, but you'd better coordinate with the other cowboys so you don't run the herd off of a cliff. You know, like the lazy-consensus cowboys of days gone by.

If you want to see what those Roller-dev proposals look like, take a look at the three we're doing for Roller 3.0: New "Atlas" front-page, New URL structure and New Atlas Macros/Models. And if you want to learn more about Roller features, architecture, project status and future plans, then attend my talk next week at ApacheCon EU next week in Dublin.

The storm has passed by now. Back to work.

Wednesday Jun 21, 2006

Listen to Roumen

Comments[0] by Dave in Java

OMG! Roumen Strobl is taking the tech evangelist blog/caster deal to a whole new level. I think it's pretty clear now that Skerret and Scoble don't hold a candle to Strobl.

Hire Joe

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging

Joe Gregorio is looking for a new job. I bet he'll quickly find one, better than the last. For the sake of the annual RTPBloggers lunch, I hope it's here in the Triangle.

Tuesday Jun 20, 2006

Raleigh bloggers meetup tonight 6:30pm at Cafe Cyclo

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging


Cafe Cyclo sign
For more info, see the wiki.

Monday Jun 19, 2006

WCF RSS Toolkit

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging
WCF RSS Toolkit tutorial: The WCF RSS Toolkit is a Windows Communication Foundation-based framework for generating RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 content feeds. Using this toolkit, developers can easily expose a service as an RSS or Atom feed. The toolkit supports exposing a service as an RSS 2.0 feed, Atom 1.0 feed and SOAP endpoint simultaneously. The toolkit can also be extended to support other wire formats.
The announcement is here. We held up the book (yes, this is shameless plug day on Blogging Roller) to cover the Windows RSS platform and now this, the server side of equation. Don't tell Manning about it or my summer will be ruined.

According to Dare, the toolkit could be used to build WebDAV or an Atom protocol implementation, so it's all about REST. But wait, it supports SOAP too.

Like the IBM press release in my previous post, I can't figure this one out. The download includes a small amount of C# code but no docs, not even a README, and no indication of the license. Is it just a one-off proof-of-concept, an official WCF API or what? And what does this effort have to do with the server-side feed syndication platform that Niall is supposed to be building for Microsoft.

Enterprise mashup server

Comments[2] by Dave in Blogging
IBM press release: Rod Smith, IBM's vice president of emerging Internet technologies, declared that the technologies underpinning blogs, wikis and innovative sites like Google Maps and Wikipedia on the Web will transform the way productivity applications are developed...

...IBM's Enterprise Mashup blends external information and web services (e.g., news feeds, weather reports, maps, traffic conditions and more) with enterprise content and services, instantly "mashing" them together to create a fast, flexible and affordable application for specific business needs. Mashup, derived from the hip-hop practice of mixing song samples, are a website or applications that combine content from more than one source into an integrated user application using open technologies like Ajax, PHP and syndicated feeds (RSS or ATOM).
Nice to see IBM paying homage to blogs, wikis and feeds: the web 2.0 building blocks, but the press release is a bit nebulous. It's hard to tell if Smith is discussing an actual product, a "mashup server" as James Govenor put it, consulting services or just making reference to various IBM Web 2.0™ initiatives. If it is a server, I wonder if it's the effort that spawned the Abdera project.

Saturday Jun 17, 2006

Panzer Blitz

Comments[0] by Dave in General
Panzer Blitz

Alex and I made the jump from Steve Jackson mini-games to our first full-blown wargame tonight with my old copy of Panzer Blitz.

Friday Jun 16, 2006

Blogapps 1.0 next week

Comments[1] by Dave in Blogging

We've been putting the final touches on RSS and Atom in Action this week and now I've actually got some dates for you: e-book release July 3 and print-book release on July 21. Hard to believe, but this time we're done for real.

This weekend, I've got to package up the examples. So you can expect the final Blogapps 1.0 release some time next week. Atom protocol fans will be happy to hear that the Atom Blogapps server and client implementations have been updated to support Atom protocol draft 8 + the new PaceMediaEntries5 proposal, which appears to have strong consensus.

Update: Blogapps server v1.0-rc1 (37mb tar.gz) and Blogapps examples v1.0-rc1 (10mb tar.gz) are available for testing.

Thursday Jun 15, 2006

Alberto

Comments[1] by Dave in General


Backyard flooding w/swings

Tropical Storm Alberto dumped a lot of rain on us yesterday. Normally I don't worry about flooding, since I'm on a hill, but we had 4-5 inches of water flowing through the backyard for a couple of hours. I waded out and took a couple of photos for Andi since she's at the beach. Also, WRAL's has a nice slideshow of Alberto-hits-the-Triangle photos.

Tuesday Jun 13, 2006

Happy blog birthday to the OpenSolaris community

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging

And speaking product-oriented bloggers, the Open Solaris community is having a blog birthday party tomorrow to celebrate the first anniversary of the community launch. Hard to believe it's been a year. Check out the community metrics page to see how the community is doing.

End of "corporate" blogging?

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging

Business blogging superstar Robert Scoble is leaving Microsoft and that means it's time to warn folks again about those out-of-control bloggers, lament the loss of our last example of a productive business blogger and worry about the end of honest corporate blogging. Balderdash I say!

Are stars like Scoble of Microsoft or Schwartz of Sun the most important part of the corporate blogging value proposition? Stars speak to a broad audience and that's important, but the value of corporate blogging is that the "the people who are really doing the work tell the story to the world, directly" as Tim Bray wrote in his July 2005 piece on The New Public Relations. The thousands of employee bloggers and product-oriented bloggers that help build community around a company's products, services and initiatives are where the big value is -- especially for development platform companies like Microsoft and Sun.

Some good examples of product-oriented bloggers at Sun are The Aquarium, a group blog devoted to Java EE, Roumen Strobl, a Netbeans evangelist, and Tor Norbye of Java Creator and Java Posse podcast fame.

Thursday Jun 08, 2006

Speaking at Tri-XML

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging

I'll be speaking about Atom format and protocol at the Tri-XML 2006 conference in Raleigh on Saturday July 29, 2006. I won't even have to miss  a day of work. Here are the presentation summaries -- hope I won't get in trouble for using he phrase Web 2.0 in my  summary.

Wednesday Jun 07, 2006

User reviews and employee blogs in Sun's online store

Comments[0] by Dave in Sun
User reviews and ratings are now live in the Sun online store. You can review and rate products like the Sun Fire T2000. Cool stuff, very Web 2.0 and all that, but I've got an RFE [Read More]

Tuesday Jun 06, 2006

Raleigh bloggers meetup tonight at Cafe Cyclo

Comments[0] by Dave in Blogging

Cafe Cyclo sign

When: First and third Tuesdays of every month at 6:30PM
Where: Cafe Cyclo in Cameron Village (Map) 

   Cafe Cyclo
   2020 Cameron St
   Raleigh, NC 27605
   (919) 829-3773
Check the new Raleigh Bloggers Wiki for more details.

Monday Jun 05, 2006

Switch again?

Comments[7] by Dave in Open Source

I'm in the market for a new laptop and I've been thinking about doing the very same thing that Mark Pilgrim just did, switching from a Mac to a Linux laptop. I wasn't thinking about Freedom 0 so much as I was thinking about my lap and my wallet. I don't want to burn a hole in either one. I've read too many blog entries about Mac Books running too hot, too loud or not running at all. And all the while, I've been seeing rave reviews of Ubuntu everywhere I look.

I don't want to give up on Macs altogether. I like the multimedia stuff like iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto and GarageBand, but I don't necessarily need those on my laptop. I can buy a Mac Mini for that stuff. I use my laptop for work and everything I need for development would run just fine on Ubuntu or maybe even Solaris/x86 (see Sun's HCL and the one at Bolthole.com). What I need is speed, Java, Netbeans and sometimes Open Office (which I know will run better on Linux). Clearly I need to do some research. Are the Mac Books really too hot and flakey? Will be savings be significant? Will wifi and sleep-mode work as flawlessly on Linux as with Mac OS, what about Solaris? Will I be able to live without NetNewsWire?

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