Good luck Claire!

Bittersweet news today. Claire: we're going to miss you at blogs.sun.com, so keep in touch and don't stop blogging. Check out Claire's new blog at clairegiordano.org. I hear she'll be working with Anil.

re: Criticism of PR out of line

Jim's right: "encourage them to participate and write their own blogs" is definitely a more helpful and consistent position with regard to PR people and blogs.

The problem is, PR wants it all. They don't want to blog along with all the other employees, they want to control your company's one corporate blog. Look at the GM Fastlane blog for example, it's run by a team of Marketing/PR people and a couple of outside blog consultants. Sure, the GM execs do some of the writing, but it's certainly not a blog in the blogs-as-authentic voice sense; it's an always on-message corporate newletter.

So, I have to agree with the Debbie Weil quote "don't let your PR department write your blogs" (in Does your company belong in the blogosphere?). Instead, encourage your employees blog freely and set them up with infrastructure to help them do that.

Mustang and web continuations

Cool! Mustang (Java SE 6) will have built-in continuations via the Rhino JavaScript engine. So my old JSPFlow code and it's much more successful child StrutsFlow should work right out of the box.


Good news for Struts and WebWork fans

The ServerSide reports that two popular Java web application frameworks, Struts and WebWork, are merging. Here's the Merger with Webwork proposal. That's really good news for Struts users (like me). We'll get the WebWork innovations (and maybe even a good upgrade path) and WebWork users will get a bigger/stronger community.


Ocadia

I ported another one Rebecca Wei's beautiful Wordpress themes to Roller, Ocadia You can see the results on Carl's blog. It was an easy port because the underlying HTML is almost identical to that in Almost Spring.

Comments are back, by the way.


Comments down

I've got a build of Roller 2.1-dev running on this site now and there's a small bug in the new comment moderation feature, which is preventing new comments. I hope to deploy a fix this weekend. Hold your tongue until then.

Porting Wordpress themes to Roller

It's really not that hard to do, but a couple of new Roller macros would make it a lot easier. After an hour or so, I ported Almost Spring to Roller. It's running on Otto's blog. I think I'm going to try a couple more.

I case you're wondering, most Wordpress themes are licensed under GPL. That means we can't include them in Roller (since Roller is Apache licensed), but somebody could offer a separately downloadable theme-pack.

One thing I noticed during this exercise is that Wordpress themes are dangerous. They're written in PHP, so you don't want Joe average user to edit them. As the Wordpress.com FAQ says templates are "untrusted code that we haven’t verified" so template editing and importing are banned. Contrast that with Roller, where templates are written in Velocity and are therefore safe for end-user customization.

Google searching the Triangle

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.


Roller 2.0 ships!

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Weekend project

Last weekend, I helped Alex finish his first model: a 1/48th scale replica of a Republic P-47D Thunderbolt fighter. Alex did everything except for the putty/sanding work and some of the finer painting. I spent a *lot* of time building models and painting miniatures when I was a kid. I entered hobby store contests and even convinced my parents to buy an air-compressor and an airbrush for me. It's cool to rediscover some of that fun with Alex.

Kit by Revell/Monogram.


Roller 2.0 ready for release

We've got the final build and the votes needed to release, so expect the Roller 2.0 release in the next couple of days.

Update: Thursday, Nov. 24, 2005 -- Happy thanksgiving!
   bash-3.00$ svn copy \
   https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/roller/trunk \
   https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/roller/tags/roller_2.0 \
   -m "Tagging Roller 2.0 release"

   Committed revision 348727.
   bash-3.00$

Why use Websphere WCE?

The weekend is over so I suppose I should blog something to move that awful underwear experiment post down of the page. So how about this. As Rich Sharples asks, why would anybody use Websphere Community Edition rather than Glassfish/Sun Java App Server? Know why? Leave him a comment.


The underwear experiment

Since this is a "professional" blog, I would never tell you the story of the underwear experiment, in which a little boy decides to test the limits of parental odor detection, fabric strength, and personal hygene by seeing how long he can go without changing his underwear. But I will say this, the experiment lasted two months.


Netbeans 5.0b2 first impressions

Lookin' good!

Netbeans 5.0b2 badge

I gave up on the first Netbeans 5.0 beta, it threw way too many weird exceptions and I just didn't have the time. Fortuately, the new beta2 release looks a lot better. I switched to beta2 on my Mac and tomorrow, I'll do the same on my Solaris x86 box. It's got all the refactorings I'd been using in Eclipse and the new CVS client is fantastic compared to the old one and only an interation (or two) away from matching the one in Eclipse.

The only significant shortcomings I've found are the lack of Subversion support and no global search-and-replace. Actually, Netbeans 5.0 does have Subversion support, but it's based on the crummy old "generic VCS" system and, what's worse, you can't use both the new CVS client and the Subversion client at the same time. That's pretty disappointing for those who have projects in both CVS and Subversion (like me). So Netbeans guys, want me to delete Eclipse from my hard-dive? You're almost there. Just add those two missing features.


ZFS blog carnival

The Zettabyte File System (ZFS) was released yesterday as part of OpenSolaris build 27 and to celebrate, the ZFS community is having a (one time?) blog carnival, hosted by Bryan Cantrill.

UPDATED: I had the wrong link to Bora's entry about blog carnivals.


Status, CC: world

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That's refreshing

I get the feeling a lot of people are clicking the refresh button today and seeing this message from Google Analytics:

Analytics has been successfully installed and data is being 
gathered now. Your first reports will be ready within twelve hours.

And it's not just us cheap bastards either, paying customers are also waiting. Sounds like somebody failed to plan.

I'm in ROME

ROME logo

YeeeHAI! I've been accepted as a committer on the ROME project, which is very convenient because I have a big ole chunk'o'code to commit for Atom 1.0 format support. After reviews and tweaks, Atom format 1.0 support should be available in ROME v0.8.


Today's links [November 14, 2005]

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