Blogging Roller

Mark Pilgrim has made his wildly popular 30 days to more accessible weblog into an online book at diveintoaccessibility.org. What a great resource. I wish I had been following along and implemented his recommendations because now it's basically just a big to-do list for me and my site.

"is a library of useful classes that is used by Tea and the TeaServlet. Trove includes the Class File API, the Logging API and a set of utility classes." The HttpClient looks pretty useful.

It's nifty but not really that useful to me, and besides - noone goes to DMOZ Mike Cannon-Brookes

True, DMOZ does not store the right meta-data to make it into a truly useful open source Java directory. We need all open source Java projects to register themselves into something like SourceForge's Trove, but more Java oriented. And, I think you are right - few people go to DMOZ even though it is the directory that is built into Google.

That was fast. Is this blogging or instant messaging? Thanks for the heads-up on Anthony Eden, I'll email him as soon as my mail-server comes back up.

Something my grand-dad used to say was:

   Once upon a time a goose drank wine and a 
   monkey chewed tobacco on the street car line.

Thanks to the net, I now know that it was a jump-rope rhyme from around 1900. Big Daddy was born in 1911.

The Xulux (pronounced zoolooks) project is gathering steam. Its going to be an ASF licenced open source XUL framework. The aim is to simplify the development of rich/thick clients [by] using XUL to define more traditional, rich user interfaces. The XUL can then be transformed into HTML / DHTML / JavaScript for old HTML browsers such as IE while still supporting rich in XUL browsers such as Mozilla or Flash (thanks to ZULU). So the aim is to build a HTML, Swing and SWT clients for XUL as well as a server side framework for developing XUL applications. James Strachan on XULUX

Very cool. Time to learn XUL.

With those aussies bloggin' like madmen (and I mean that in the nicest way possible), I barely need to surf the web for myself anymore. Don't slow down guys.

O'Reilly has started up an Open Source Java Directory - this is something that is really needed in the J2EE world, but sadly it looks very poorly implemented. I've been saying this should exist for a while now. Freshmeat is just too non Java (apologies - FM is cool, but if you're just looking for Java stuff it's a pain in the ass). I tried to convince Floyd at The ServerSide to create a directory but was sadly rebuffed. I hope it improves. Mike Cannon-Brooks

Try the DMOZ Open Directory's Java category. DMOZ lists both open source and commercial products and lists the license of each (GNU, BSD-like, commercial, etc.). And Mike: last time I checked, Open Symphony projects were not listed there either.

I just saw Helen Thomas on CSPAN answering questions at a book reading. First of all, I had no idea that she writes a column these days. I figured she'd retire after five decades in the White House press corpse. rc3, emphasis is mine

Sillyness aside, read Rafe's Andrew Grove: Stigmatizing Business. It is right on the money.

Interesting list and somewhat interesting commentary, but overall very snotty. Also, the damn page doesn't work in Mozilla, so I had to fire up IE to learn the great wisdom that "all live albums suck." How about this wisdom: all articles that don't render properly in Mozilla suck.

I did not know that Bob Young had left RedHat to form a new company called Lulu. And, I have never heard of a 5-ring technology circus before. Lulu's tech circus concept was inspired by BASSmasters. I kid you not. I'm still waiting for a new company inspired by the BASS-o-MATIC concept. The first Tech Circus takes places here in Raleigh, September 27-29.

One thing I have learned from working on open source projects is that most people don't complain. Most people don't have time to write up an email note or a bug report when they notice a missing build script, or a broken image link in a user-guide. And furthermore, most people just give up when they try to build or use your software and recieve a error message.

As Mike Cannon-Brooks once told me, if you want people to use your software you've got to make things as easy as possible - drop dead simple. Little bugs in the build script or installer can be fatal. This is why complainers, the folks who really care enough to complain, are a wonderful thing. So if you like to bitch and whine about every little thing, here's to you.

Griffin can imagine, he said, a Japanese-style pullback from risk in the U.S., in which investors give up, banks refuse to lend and the economy languishes. He can imagine other countries, accustomed to the United States' role as the world's economic locomotive, not taking up the standard. He can imagine a crisis of capitalism of a 1930's order. CNN/Money

Pretty damn depressing.

Here is a shout-out to my bro Dan "CookieCo" Johnson. If you like the rock music, the brit-pop, the power-pop, Dylan, Replacements, and Costello you'll probably find his reviews useful and interesting.

I have not been able to spend a lot of time on Roller development recently, but I have gotten a couple of things done. I took a look at at alternative webapp and persistance frameworks and decided to stick with Struts and Castor for the time being.

Also, I implemented a simple backup mechanism for Roller. I started working with Axis (the next generation of Apache SOAP) and I was hoping to create a SOAP-based blog-backup interface for Roller. But I ended up just writing a Servlet that blasts out the current user's data in Roller's own (Castor-generated) XML format - no SOAP needed for that.

Right now, I'm working on bookmark import. I've got a start-page of favorite links and I want to import them into Roller. To do this, I wrote a little command-line program that parses an HTML page and then writes all links from that page to an OPML file (maybe I should have used XBEL, but OPML was easier). Now I need to get that data into Roller, perhaps by file-upload perhaps by SOAP.

Once I complete bookmark import, I'll probably polish-up Roller's bookmark management and display features and put out a 0.9.5 release. Perhaps I should throw in Radio import as well.

In this Java World article Tal Liron describes how to use VNC technology to create remote-terminals for your Java Swing, AWT, or command line app.

That Microsoft actually entrusted remote control technology to us idiots at home (Remember, Microsoft has to give us user support too!) represented a triumph for a 20-year-old model. With any computer acting both as host and terminal, all you need is an Internet connection to access any computer anywhere in the world.

How could I have missed it. Download it here.

Somewhat interesting thread on SCM systems over at Slashdot. This is one area where I would choose a commercial product over the best open source product. As I said before, Perforce rocks. Unfortunately, the Perforce Defect Tracking Integration (P4DTI) project only supports integration with TeamTrack and Bugzilla bug trackers.

When I heard that expression, I was not the only one thinking "how many of those thingies are there?" Mike has written up a listing of the Open Source Java umbrella projects and he calls it The Open Source J2EE Landscape. Nice. He hit all of the projects in my bookmark list plus Tigris. Oh, I just noticed: he forgot to mention the GPL-only Giant Java Tree.

Almost two years ago at XMLOne in San Jose, I publicly predicted that schema repositories were going to fail. Now I get to say, "I told you so." Microsoft's BizTalk is closing its doors one week from today. Elliote Rusty Harold, Cafe au Lait - July 12, 2002