Blogging Roller

• InfoWorld 2008-07-07 Lab test: Climb aboard Ruby on Rails
  Interesting that the best rated Ruby-on-Rails IDE is the one that is free & opensource. Go Netbeans!
• ongoin · Atomic Monday
  "Herewith some evidence, for the general tech public, that Atompub is a big deal"
• InfoQ: AtomServer – The Power of Publishing for Data Distribution
  "a distributed, publish-subscribe service is a great way to address resiliency and loose coupling of subsystems"
• blog.reddit -- what's new on reddit: reddit goes open source
  "Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn't freely available is reddit itself"
• OAuth for Google Data APIs
  "we're proud to announce that all of the Google Data APIs support OAuth"
• Google Code Blog: Protocol Buffers released as Open Source
  "think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler"


• Daily Kos: Cars After The Age of Oil
  "We can switch to a new tech that is older and simpler than the Internal Combustion Engine - the electric horseless carriage was first created in 1830"
• Wired.com: Laugh at High Gas Prices With a 282-MPG VW
  "VW has approved a plan to build a limited number of One-Liters in 2010"
• SAS Solar Farm | New Raleigh, NC
  "Our local 500 pound software gorilla is building a five acre, one megawatt photovoltaic solar farm"

There will be a OpenSocial Summit: May 14th, at the Googleplex covering the new v0.8 spec changes and all sorts of other interesting things. Wish I could make it, but I'll be happily back home in the old north state. Hopefully, somebody from the SocialSite team will be able to attend.

I asked for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) ideas for Roller a couple of days ago. Below are links to the proposals I thought were good enough to volunteer as possible mentor for and to submit. The deadline is tomorrow, so you've still got time to suggest additions to the list.

• Roller OpenID: Open ID support for Roller blog server, for user accounts and comments
• Roller Mobile: Mobile interface for Roller blog server
• Roller Activities: Simple Social Networking for Roller blog server, Twitter-like activities
• Roller Abdera: Abdera-based AtomPub implementation for Roller blog server
• AtomPub Export: AtomPub Export for Roller blog server, export all!
• Roller Shindig: Google Gadget support in Roller blog server themes via Shindig
• Roller Photo Gallery: Better photo and file upload features in Roller blog server

Here's the full list of Apache GSOC proposals.

From the Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference, a sweet OpenSocial presentation with a nice overview of the emerging standard, status of the Apache Shindig project, details of the Hi5 implementation, some cute pictures of my buddy Pat Chanezon's kids and some very fine art (I think Pat forgot to credit the artist).

I was pretty impressed how quickly Google was able to help my brother out when his Gmail account apparently disappeared. That makes me feel a lot better about trusting Google to manage my precious data.

Another reason to trust in Google is that they make good stuff. I decided to try Google Reader for a couple of days. I figured I'd be back to NetNewsWire after a couple of days, but now I'm hooked and I'm not sure I'll ever go back. The only things I miss are hierarchical folders and smart-subscriptions, which I was using to subscribe to a search within my subscriptions, e.g. alert me when any of the feeds I'm reading mention "roller". I'd like to see better blog-search integration in Reader and features like FeedDemon's popular topics.

My brother's popular film blog FilmBabble, hosted on Google's Blogspot site, is now dead in the water and he cannot find any way to get help from Blogspot or Google. He's followed the help links to send support requests to both Google and Blogger.com last week, but Gmail tells him that his email address does not exist!

Could this be another case of mass email deletions at Gmail.com? Personally, I wouldn't trust Google to host my blog or my email; I only use Gmail for mailing lists that are archived elsewhere. Seems like my caution might be well justified.

So please help, Google folks. Please tell us: how do you get help from Google when your email address and therefore your Google identity is apparently deleted?

Update 1: apparently Dan filled out this help request form on Friday. I wonder what kind of turn around time they have for this type of issue. Guess we'll find out.

Update 2: Google responded today and restored Dan's account, after only two business days. I must say, that's pretty damn good for a free service. Still, the "that email address does not exist" message is pretty damn scary. It's pretty nerve wracking to get locked out of your blog.

I was playing around with the new flight simulator in Google Earth and flying over Raleigh when I noticed the extensive and very detailed set of 3D models for the NCSU campus. Here's an overview that shows the brickyard, D.H. Hill library and Harrelson Hall:

The details are pretty amazing, with signage and steps and hand-rails. Here's an example that shows the stairs on the side of Reynolds the old basketball coliseum:

The work was done by students competing in Google's Build Your Campus in 3D competition. Follow that link for a (tiny) video and you can also find a catalog of all the student's work on the Google Earth site.

Congrats to Mark Pilgrim on his new job at Google, where he'll be working on the "right" vision for the future of the web. I assume the "wrong" vision, in Mark's mind, comes from the W3C and specifically the W3C's semantic web activities. Mark's comment pointing to his earlier The Overton Window post seems to back that up. I think it's interesting that Mark will be working remotely; that's a rare thing at Google.

And congrats to Debian Linux co-founder Ian Murdock on his new job at Sun, where he'll be working on all things OpenSolaris and, I hope, helping to make it as easy and fun to use as Debian or even Ubuntu.

Ian Kallen: I'm not condemning AdSense per se, it's a great service and revitalized web advertising after the flame-out a few years ago. But black-hat SEO's have definitely cranked up the game over the last year or so and are putting the whole market at risk again. Google may not be particularly motivated to go out and find the abuse but they have to act against it when you bring it to their attention. Watch this video.

Andy Oliver: For all I know Google is search, email, maps and a large experiment where programmers who do cool things are bought, frozen and put in a crate after having all of their spinal fluid removed. Why spinal fluid? Well just like most of Google's betas it might be useful someday.

Jason Caplain, a VC here in Raleigh, posted a rumor about Google to open RTP office. The story also made the Raleigh paper. The News and Observer story Google Looks for Local Offices quotes Andy Beal, who speculates that Google may be considering aquisition of local startups ChannelAdvisor or Motricity. Or perhaps they just want to syphon off some talented but bored IBM and SAS employees.

Bravo to Google Talk for using Jabber an open standard for instant messaging. Seems to work fine with GAIM. I'm 'snoopdave' if you want to say hi and verify that I am indeed connected.

Joe Gregorio:

This is just like WinFS.

Except that it is shipping today.

And it just works.

And it doesn't require an upgrade to your operating system.

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