Blogging Roller

I've known about this Google buys Pyra thing since Saturday night, but it seems like everybody I know is forwarding me articles about it from MSNBC, CNN Money, and other mainstream news sources. These people are blogmuggles, they don't read my weblog and don't have their own weblogs, but they can clearly see that Google buying Pyra makes this The Year That Punk Broke for blogging. Damn, that was 12 years ago. Anyhow... I'm gonna go with that analogy. I'm hoping that Rollerville is going to be the next Seattle and Roller is going to be the next Superchunk, but I'm not holding my breath.

I upgraded the Roller main branch (and this site) to Struts 1.1b3, Castor 0.9.4.3, Xerces 2.3, and Ant 1.5.1. I'll pop in Struts 1.1 RC1 when it arrives. I think we are pretty close to a Roller 0.9.7 release. Lance has finished replacing all of the old Roller "macros" with VelociMacros (don't worry, we'll keep the old macros around for a while) and we only have a couple of open issues left to go. I do want to do a little work on the comments feature before we release. Lance did a great job on comments, but I want to polish it up a little before it goes out.

Looks like we might be in for <a href= "http://www.nbc17.com/news/1978469/detail.html">another terrible and deadly ice storm here in North Carolina. We are expecting below freezing temperatures and heavy rain from 3PM to 9PM today.

As you can see, I've returned to mismanaging my time (i.e. blogging). I've finished the 2nd drafts of my Wrox Professional JSP chapters. The reviewers seemed to like my 1st drafts, especially the Performance and Debugging chapter, but that did not stop them from making hundreds of comments and thus burning two perfectly good weekends.

Speaking of Wrox, I picked up JBoss 3.0 Deployment and Administration Handbook by Meeraj Kunnumpurath the other day. I like the new small and concise handbook format. You don't need a wheel-barrow to move it around the office like most Wrox books. The book appears to be perfect for somebody, like me, who already knows J2EE and just needs to understand how to configure and deploy to JBoss.

<a href= "http://www.evhead.com/archives/2003_02_01_archive_default.asp#104537225413624191">Holy crap is right. <a href= "http://weblog.siliconvalley.com/column/dangillmor/archives/000802.shtml#000802">Dan Gillmore speculates that Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL will also be buying or building their own weblogging systems. Congratulations to Evan Williams and Pyra team. Five people supporting 1.1 million webloggers? Amazing.

That's what <a href= "http://joi.ito.com/archives/2003/02/15/my_position_on_warblogging.html#004088">Joi Ito says and I have a hard time disagreeing, but I sure as hell don't know what to do. I listened to the U.N. deliberations in full yesterday and found myself agreeing with just about everything that was said by the French, the Brits, the Russians, and the U.S. That is how messed up I am.

I've been reading warbloggers, peacebloggers, <a href= "http://pages.prodigy.net/thomasn528/blog/2003_02_09_newsarcv.html#89055906">peacebloggers turned warbloggers, the liberal media, the Moonie press, and even <a href= "http://www.boosman.com/blog/2003_02_01_blogarchive.html#90313256">pseudo-bloggers ;-) My mind is a muddled mess. I'm glad I'm not the one making the decisions, but I sure do wish we had somebody other than Shrub, Jr. with the final word.

All this B.S. about France being ungrateful is just plain silly. As Russell points out, we'd be driving on the left and drinking warm beer if not for France.

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/resources/roller/oilwar-sm.jpg" alt="collage of Simulations Publications, Inc. OIL WAR game">

The above image is not a political commentary, it is a collage that I created of a wargame that I played as a kid, Oil War: a "game of hypothetical warfare in the Middle Eastern Oil states" by Simulations Publications, Inc.

I'm not posting this week because I'm busy managing my time.

Ted Neward reviews The Middleware Company's recent <a href= "http://www.theserverside.com/resources/article.jsp?l=TMCBestPractices">J2EE best practices document. He agrees with almost all of the practices and goes into detail on the three that he dislikes.

Patrick Peak offers an excellent and detailed introduction to Tiles, the Struts document assemby framework, on his new blog.

As Andy Oliver <a href= "http://www.freeroller.net/page/acoliver/20030210#dave_johnson_would_you_like">noted, comments are broken on this site and probably in the Roller CVS archive too. And Andy: I kid about the Wiki, but as far as I am concerned it is already a success (and JSP's don't suck and Redhat is open source).

This alleged Sun internal memo is making the rounds. According to the memo, engineers at Sun are not very happy with the large memory footprint and generally poor performance characteristics of the Solaris JRE. They want SPARC Java to be as light and nimble as SPARC Python. Who can argue with that?

Russell Beattie We need a license that says something like "I agree, by using this code, never to bug author with any questions, comments, thanks or support-related issues after TWO months of release date when said author has moved on to other more interesting things to work on."

Open source is not like a second unpaid job for me, as Russell suggested, because there is no real pressure for me to do anything. I could run off to the islands at any time and live off of coconut water and breadfruit if I wanted. Well, maybe not, but Roller is not the thing that is stopping me. Those questions, comments, thanks, and support issues are not irritants. They keep me interested. Still, I like Russell's OSS Prototype License idea. There is a place for that too.

Ok Andy. I opened up the Wiki for one and all as you demanded. It'll work fine, you said. You'll be doomed to failure with a closed Wiki, you said. You have not make any edits yourself, of course, but now this whip-crackin' <a href= "http://www.rollerweblogger.org/wiki/attach?page=Scott%2Findycomp_a.jpg">off-topic cowboy has made his way onto my site. What say you, open community boy?

A Slashdot reader recently dug up some details on the feature set of the upcoming Java 1.5 release including: Autoboxing, <a href= "http://jcp.org/aboutJava/communityprocess/jsr/tiger/enhanced-for.html">Enhanced-For-Loop, Enumerations and Static Imports. Back in August, Henry Yandell summarized the official and somewhat different Java 1.5 feature list from JSR-176 J2SE 1.5 (Tiger) Release Contents.

<a href= "http://www.joeygibson.com/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi/2003/02/07#tech/eclipse/M5Install">Joey Gibson explains how easy it is to upgrade from 2.1 M4 and points out the new and noteworthy features list. Don Park says "Eclipse will become the second most popular IDE behind Microsoft's Visual Studio." I said something similar a couple of months ago.

Thanks for the vote of confidence <a href= "http://www.dominicdasilva.com/index.do?date=20030207#152253">Dominic. I'll be working hard this weekend to live up to your expectations. One of my chapters just came back from review and I have my work cut out for me.

Dominic da Silva: After reading through the summary of Professional JSP 2.0, and knowing of some of the authors such as <a href= "http://www.raibledesigns.com/page/rd">Matt, <a href= "http://rollerweblogger.org/page/roller/">Dave, and <a href= "http://www.wrox.com/books/1861007701.htm">Sam Dalton and Dan Jepp, I expect this book to be a must have for any JSP developer out there. Having Struts, Tomcat and MySQL in there as well is a plus.

<a href= "http://www.deftone.com/blogzilla/archives/mozilla_coming_attractions.html">Blogzilla points out that Midas, a WYSIWYG HTML text edit control, is available in current Mozilla nightly builds.

Deigo Doval is digging into Open Office and it's programming interfaces and has discovered Open Office's own Universal Network Objects (UNO) component model. Components models like <a href= "http://developer.gnome.org/arch/component/bonobo.html">Bonobo, <a href= "http://msdn.microsoft.com/netframework/">Dot-Net's, <a href= "http://www.corba.org">CORBA, <a href= "http://www.mozilla.org/projects/xpcom/">XPCOM, and <a href= "http://www.microsoft.com/com/default.asp">COM, and <a href= "http://java.sun.com/products/javabeans/">JavaBeans are fascinating, and I really mean that, but how many of these friggin' universes do we really need? I understand that OpenOffice.org wants to support cross-language components, but couldn't they have started with CORBA as Bonobo does, XPCom as Mozilla does, or the Dot-Net model as Ximian does? I guess inventing your own component model is just way too much fun.

It is just amazing to me that so many people have from $10,000,000 to $30,000,000 in the bank somewhere, need my help to transfer that money to the USA, and are willing to pay me a 5% to 30% commission for my services.