Blogging Roller

ConvergeSouth is an unconference-style event focusing on blogs, podcasts and online creativity in Greenboro, NC. I attended the first one last year and I'd love to return, but on October 14, I'll still be in Austin, TX. I'm taking a couple of days off after ApacheCon there. But you oughta go. Here's the registration link. The Scobles are going to be there.

• Pacific Gas & Electric rebates for Sun servers
  "Replace an older server with [a CoolThreads server] and you'll get a rebate of $700-$1000 from PG&E"
• Yes, we are really going to open source the JDK
  "don’t be shy about letting us know what you think"
• MSDN Library now free
  Free IDEs and now free MSDN? What's next, OSS Windows?
• A Little Surprise For Israeli Readers Using Windows
  Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadenijad now has his very own blog....
• Introducing Windows Live Writer
  "desktop application that makes it easier to compose compelling blog posts"

• Mac OS X Leopard dev goodies
  New features, which include an RSS/Atom parser, generator and feed store
• Ted Neward » The Vietnam of Computer Science
  "analysis of Object/Relational Mapping--and its relationship to the Second South Indochina War"
• netzooid » Woodstox 3.0 Release
  Dan: "a StAX implementation and undoubtedly the best XML parser around"
• Paul Querna » Rails is insecure
  Paul: "I am glad I am not responsible for any important websites powered by Rails" 
• Daniel Spiewak » SWT running on Swing
  Christopher Deckers has implemented 72% of SWT using Swing 
• Mark Woodman » Hacking Feeds: Malware Javascript in RSS and Atom
  "potential vulnerabilities in web-based RSS readers"
  
• Mark Woodman » Hacking RSS: The Threat is Real
  Mark is making his malicious RSS test scripts available to the community
• James Snell » Attack Delivery TestSuite
  James has expanded the Holderness suite to 1397 tests for Atom 1.0
• Sam Ruby » Attack Delivery TestSuite
  Sam will commit James Holderness' 85 tests to the Universal Feed Parser
  

My TriNUG talk seemed to go really well tonight. I didn't see anybody sleeping and nobody threw any sharp things at me. I added some extra slides of interest to .NET developers, but I was still finished with time enough for a short Atom protocol demonstration using curl as client and Roller as server. The slides (in PDF format) are here: TriNUG-Aug2006-BeyondBlogging.pdf.

Just a reminder. I'll be speaking at the Triangle .NET User Group tomorrow night and giving essentially the same presentation that I gave at the Triangle XML conference last (plus corrections suggested by Sam Ruby and a couple more slides about .NET feed tools).

• Elias Torres on SPARQL
  A podcast overview of the Semantic Web, RDF and SPARQL
• Apple Warns Conference Attendees on Blogging
  "Suing bloggers and posting 'talk to the hand' style notices are not the way to go."
• Open source won't doom traditional enterprise software
  
• Open source vs. traditional enterprise software, part II
  
• DTrace rides the Leopard
  Jim's round up of posts about DTrace in Mac OS/X
• Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life - Niall Kennedy Leaving Microsoft
  Some of what Niall wrote "is inaccurate and based on speculation"
• Leaving Microsoft
  Niall: "I didn't want to sit around doing little to nothing"

RSS and Atom in Action forum: The latest version of is Blogapps 1.0.1, which was released August 6, 2006 (today) to make the examples compatible with the latest version of the Windows RSS Platform (i.e. the one that shipped last week with IE7 beta 3). Also in 1.0.1 are some fixes to the Blogapps servers' Atom protocol implementation.

I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again now that the book is out. I'm going to be hosting, supporting and maintaining the examples for RSS and Atom in Action as Blogapps -- an open source project at Java.NET.

The book has arrived.



Get your copy today!

Mihai Parparita has published an interesting list of the top 50 extension namespaces used in RSS and Atom feeds. I'm pleasantly surprised to see XHTML in the #2 spot. The top 5 are Dublin Core, XHTML, Blogger.com Atom API extensions, Blogger.com Atom draft extensions and the Content Module (via Dave Winer).

The Southeast VC blog has a good summary of local tech news sites, recruiters, networking opportunities and actual companies that are currently hiring here in the Raleigh-Durham Research Triangle Park (RTP) area. He didn't mention Microsoft, which has around 100 employees (most working on Team System) -- last I heard they're hiring.

I won't have time to check out IE7 beta 3 and the final Feeds API until this weekend, but I'm happy to see that Microsoft addressed my number one complaint, which was:

Support feed and item ids. The item.id property does not reflect the RSS <guid> or Atom <id> of the item/entry in the original feed. Plus, it's an integer -- not the right type for a URN. If you want to get the actual feed or item/entry id you have to parse the XML. Make it easy to get the real id if there is one.

And in Walter vonKoch's list, you can see that they fixed the problem:

5. Added FeedItem.Guid to reflect xml element <atom:id> or <guid>

7.3 Renamed Feed.Id to Feed.LocalId

7.4 Renamed FeedItem.Id to FeedItem.LocalId

In doing that they broke some code in my book (I'll fix the examples download this weekend), but I can't really complain about that.

Plus, check out Walter on MSDN TV talking about the RSS in IE7.

Gilad Bracha: "It has come to our attention that some people want to program in things other than Java"

For details, check the Raleigh bloggers wiki.

I'll be speaking on RSS and Atom next week (Wednesday August 9th) at the Triangle .NET user group. I'll cover RSS and Atom feed formats, the Windows/IE7 RSS Platform and the Atom protocol. Details are on the Tri-NUG website.

Tags: topic:[RSS], topic:[Atom], topic:[IE7], topic:[.NET]

Here's the abstract of the talk I gave this morning at Tri-XML 2006:

Beyond blogging: Atom format and protocol. Like XML-RPC and SOAP before, feeds and publishing protocols were born in the blogopshere and quickly moved beyond blogging. Nowadays, web service providers are using RSS/Atom feeds and REST-based publishing protocols as lightweight alternatives to SOAP. And developers are finding new ways to combine web services from different sites into new applications, known as "mash-ups" in the lingo of Web 2.0. If you'd like to do the same, then attend this talk to learn about the new IETF Atom feed format (RFC-4287) and the soon-to-be-finalized Atom protocol, which together form a strong foundation for REST-based web services development.

Here's a rough outline of the talk:

• Introduction
• Beyond blogging
• Blogs hit the hit time
• The web is bloggy
• Atom as an alternative to WS-*
  
• Understanding feeds
• Birth of RSS
• RSS 1.0: the RDF fork
• The simple fork and RSS 2.0
  
• Atom: the standard
• Parsing feeds
• Fetching and parsing feeds
• Universal Feed Parser
• ROME utilities
• Windows RSS platform
• Serving feeds
• Approaches for generating and serving feeds
  
• Feed autodiscovery
• Styled feeds
  
• Atom protocol
• Compared to MetaWeblog
• REST based approach
• Introspection
• Collections
• Extending Atom
• Atom protocol in action
  
• Getting a service doc
• Getting collections
• Posting an entry
• Posting an image
• Demo: interacting with an Atom server via command-line
  

And here are the slides: TriXML2006-BeyondBlogging.pdf

Tags: topic:[Atom Publishing Protocol], topic:[Atom], topic:[APP], topic:[RSS], topic:[feeds]

I'm glad to hear that Socialtext Open is now the first "commercial open source" wiki and I'm interested to see how the Socialtext move plays out. I do wonder why they choose MPL instead of CDDL, which is basically MPL plus bug fixes (see the summary of changes).

Tags: topic:[CDDL], topic:[Open Source], topic:[wiki]

That's the title of Joe Gregorio's latest article on XML.com, which shows how to implement most of the Atom protocol (draft #8) in Python. No matter what language you program in, the article is an excellent introduction to the protocol.

Tags: topic:[Atom Publishing Protocol], topic:[Atom], topic:[APP]

Joe Gregorio mentioned in his BarCampRDU session that Microsoft Word 2007 will be able to blog via the Atom Publishing Protocol (APP). Not sure how I missed this news back in may when Tim Bray blogged it, but I did. I need to tune-up my Technorati searches.

And speaking of Tim and the APP, Tim's talking APP at OSCON this week. He's going to talk about APP as universal web glue and maybe even doing some demos that involve Roller and my work-in-progress APP implementation.

And by the way, I've made a number of small fixes to Roller's APP implementation this week and I'm considering doing a Blogapps server 1.0.1 release these weekend -- just in time for the book, which ships on August 1st.

Tags: topic:[BarCampRDU], topic:[OSCON], topic:[APP], topic:[Atom], topic:[Atom protocol]

Congrats and thanks to the organizers, volunteers, Red Hat and other sponsors for making BarCampRDU a great success. I really enjoyed it. In case you have no idea what a "barcamp" is here's the deal. According to the BarCamp wiki, a BarCamp is "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment."

The event started around 9AM Saturday morning with a quick introduction from conference organizer Fred Stutzman. Everybody who wanted to propose a session lined up at the front of the room and gave a 30 second pitch for their idea. Most of the proposals were technical like "linux systems admin" or "atom publishing protocol," but there were some non-technical ideas too. For example there was a session on "how to juggle" and one on "how to dance with girls" (not sure how that turned out, given the M/F ratio).

After the session pitches, the session leaders claimed spots on the schedule, which was a 10-foot by 15-foot sheet of paper taped to the wall. Next attendees voted for sessions by putting tick marks on the schedule using magic markers. Based on the votes and conversations between session leaders, some sessions were combined and some were moved to smaller or larger meeting rooms -- all right on the spot. It was amazing how well that worked and how quickly we were able to arrive at a schedule and by 10AM we were all attending sessions.

The sessions themselves were not so unconventional. They were definitely more interactive than the usual tech-conference format, but generally followed the normal speaker/audience model. I'm not complaining. I enjoyed the sessions, learned a lot and heard a lot of interesting stories. I attended sessions on open source business and it's ability to innovate (Tarus Balog and ), RESTful Notification Architecture (Seairth Jacobs), social networks (Fred Stutzman) and the Atom publishing protocol (Joe Gregorio).

That's all I have time for tonight. If you want more info, Fred Stutzman has a great round-up of the blog and news coverage (and check it out -- I was mentioned in the News & Observer article) plus some guidelines for running your own BarCamp. I hope we'll do another one this year -- I'd like to help out next time around.

Tags: topic:[BarCampRDU]

BarCamp RDU is here! I'm getting excited and getting reading to drive over to Durham for the pre-event party tonight. Tomorrow's line-up looks awesome and Atom protocol is on the agenda thanks to Joe Gregorio.