Blogging Roller

With a new Solaris box on the way (more about that later), I'm saying good bye to Windows, at least on my desk. I'll have three UNIX variants close at hand: Mac OS X on my Powerbook, Debian Linux on an old AMD Athlon box sitting under my desk, and soon Solaris 9 on my main development box. I grew up on SunOS and Linux, but it's been a while since I last used Solaris or, really, any form of UNIX on a full time daily basis and now is as good a time as any to learn up on it (as we say here in Raleigh).

At Borders, I took a close look at Solaris Boot Camp, but ended up going back to the old stand-by Essential System Administration which is now in 3rd edition and weights in at 1149 pages - what a brick. I had a copy once before and it is truly a great book. It includes details on everything from startup/shutdown to configuring and building kernels. It covers all of today's major UNIX variants including AIX, FreeBSD, HPUX, Linux (Redhat and Suse), and Solaris (8 and 9) - but not, sigh, Mac OS X.

It has been a very long time since the last Roller release. We've got some pretty solid code running on JRoller.com and it is time to get it out there so we can resume main-line Roller development. I'm going to wrap up some security related enhancements, fix as many bugs as I can this week, update the user/install documentation, and shoot for a Roller 0.9.9.5 release some time next week. I have updated the JIRA roadmap to reflect this new plan. I'm not sure I'm going to get all of those fixes in, so feel free to pitch in, but I'm definitely going for secure logins (ROL-476), encrypted passwords (ROL-331), and some form of comment authentication (ROL-477).

Unlike the majority of the Java Server Faces (JSF) detractors, Rick Hightower has actually done some project work with JSF. He says "JSF good!"

I fell for another one of those cute little Apple gadgets yesterday, an Airport Express. I bought it primarily to extend the range of my existing wireless network, but I also bought the cable pack so that I can use the Express to pipe music from iTunes to my stereo.

I had assumed that the "extend the range of my Airport wireless network" feature would work with Linksys WRT54G Wireless-G Broadband router right out of the box, but I was wrong. I hate it when that happens, but after much cursing and gnashing of teeth I found an answer. I found an Airport Express review on Arstechnica that indicated that the WRT54G would work, as long as I upgraded to a hacked open source version of the router firmware and learned how to us WDS (wireless distribution system). Then I found the open source firmware, had a bad run-in with some poorly written instructions, and then finally found a set of instructions that worked for me. For future reference, here are the details:

First, I downloaded and installed the Sveasoft Satori v4.0 WRT54G firmware on my router. Next I followed the instructions below (found in the foruns at http://www.xlr8yourmac.com):

• Plug in, reset (push button with paperclip for >5 seconds), and attach the Airport Express (AX) to an Ethernet port on my (Linksys) WRT54G.
• Run Airport Admin Utility (AAU) - make sure it's the latest version - installed from the CD that came with the AX. My WRT54G gave the AX an IP address (it's set to use DHCP). The default AX password is "public" (no quotes).
• From Safari, go to 192.168.1.1 and log into the WRT54G (default login is blank, and password is "admin"), and display the channel (11), SSID, wireless MAC address (which differs by one hex digit from the LAN and WAN MAC addresses), in the format: 00:0c:41:5f:19:6e. I'm using WEP 128, so I copy the WEP key, too.
  
• Then, in AAU:
  Airport (tab) - select Create a Wireless Network, enter the SSID (from the WRT54G) as the Network Name, set the channel to match (channel 11). Click Security and enter "$" followed by my WEP key. Enter it again in the Verify box.
  
• Next click on Internet (tab) - select Connect Using Airport (WDS), type in the wireless MAC address from the WRT54G, and then check Allow Wireless Clients. (I want to allow them but have not yet tested this.)
  
• Click Network (tab) - and uncheck Distribute IP Addresses.
  
• Click the WDS (tab) - and check Enable This Base Station as WDS, and select Remote Base Station. Check Allow Wireless Clients. Again, confirm that the MAC address is filled in with the wireless MAC address of the WRT54G.
  
• Click Music (tab) - and check Enable Airtunes on this Base Station. Give a name to the location where the AX will be deployed (near my home theater room), like "Home Theater."
  
• Now click on Update to load this configuration into the AX.
  The Ethernet cable from the WRT54G port is then disconnected, and I unplug the AX, move it near my destination (room with home theater/stereo, 70 feet away and upstairs). After a minute, the AX resets and light stays green. This is good!

I don't expect Russell Beattie to be unemployed for long. So potential employers and venture capitalists, you'd better catch him if you can.

Janne Jalkanen: This is by the way the reason why I think that Atom should be considered primarily as a content-delivery channel, and not a "standard for publishing weblogs". People know how bad I am at predicting, but my guess is that measured by volume, in two years most content transported through syndication standards (like RSS and Atom) will be non-weblog. While blogging is important, it cannot match the sheer volume of corporate-created content services. There's money to be made in syndication - go get it, folks!

You don't have to wait for Roller to add a comments newsfeed, you can do it yourself through the Roller UI just by hacking templates, as illustrated by Richard Osbaldeston who has put together a page template that shows comment. I think Lance and Euxx have shown how to do this before, but Richard's comments feed is an extended RSS 2.0 feed and it also includes trackback:ping, wfw:comment, and slash:comments elements from the corresponding modules. Most excellent.

Richard also wonders aloud about contributing his work to Roller, or at least to the Roller Wiki. Unfortunately, I had to shut down public access to the Roller Wiki due to Wiki vandals/spammers. However, if you have something to contribute please let me know and I'll set you up with a login.

So far, my first week has been an absolute blast. I've barely had time to catch my breath and, as you can see, no time to blog. I have a little free time tonight, so I'll give you an update.

Monday started out with the standard new employee orientation meeting at the Santa Clara campus. I skipped out on the new employee lunch to head back up to Menlo Park to spend the afternoon in meetings talking about Roller enhancements, blogging, and some interesting open source issues. My new manager, Will Snow, and others have put together an extensive and well thought-out list of Roller enhancements that I hope to get into our JIRA instance as soon as possible. Some are duplicates of existing RFEs, but I'll sort that out. At the top of the list are, as you might expect, performance and stability. Moving to 0.9.9 will be a big help, but more work needs to be done. After we wrapped up the meetings, I headed down to Mountain View for a nice dinner at the Tied House with Tim Bray, Danese Cooper, Zak Greant, Simon Phipps, and Stefan Taxhet.

Tuesday was devoted to Sun's internal Open Source Summit which was just awesome. I really glad I started this week instead of next, because I would have hated to have missed the summit. Representatives from all of the open source projects around Sun were there to bring everybody up to date on status and future plans. On top of that, there were a bunch of interesting guest speakers like Doc Searls, James Duncan Davidson, Brian Belhendorf, Rael Dornfest, Zak Greant, and others. In the evening, I had a great time talking with Patrick Chanezon and Alejandro Abdelnur about Sun and Rome and politics and all sorts of vaguely related things.

Wednesday morning, we had yet another meeting to talk Roller and blogging, but this time, in front of a larger audience that included... gasp... James Gosling himself. I think I managed to keep my cool pretty well. Then Jonathan Schwartz stopped by to say hi and to tell some interesting stories about the impact of blogs on customers, employees, and analysts. How cool is that! (I'm not a name dropper, noooooo, not me.) Wednesday afternoon, we met to talk features and blogging technologies again. Sounds like a lot of meetings, doesn't it. Generally speaking, meetings suck, but I haven't had this much fun at work in years.

Tomorrow things should settle down a bit and I'll get a chance to get hooked up to the network, learn how to us the Sun web, and maybe even get started on some of those RFEs. Sorry about the lack of links in this entry, but it is well past my bedtime. I'll have to get to that tomorrow. G'gite.

Henri Yandell has joined the Roller project as a committer (welcome Henri!) and he appears to be pretty serious about contributing. He is setting aside a Roller day each week. Thankfully, he decided not to combine Friday pub-time with Roller development. Remember kids, don't drink and dev.

I've been converting some slides over to Open Office format using the "experimental" X11 build of Open Office 1.1.2 for the Mac. Like most X11 apps under Mac OS X, Open Office doesn't look quite right and is a little, shall we say, quirky. But, after using it for a while I can testify that it is stable and very snappy. The Powerpoint import is very nice too, much improved over 1.0.

How long will we have to wait for a true native app? The Open Office team is working towards native Quartz and Aqua versions for release in late 2005.

Sam Ruby: FeedMesh is a group working to establish a "peering network" for decentralized web(site|log) update notifications and content distribution

Bob Wyman's Atom Syntax mailing list post blogs.msdn.com: RSS consumes too much bandwidth kicked off a very interesting discussion on the Atom Syntax mailing list. All of the well known remedies have been discussed including conditional GET, ETags, and compression. The discussions wander off into other areas such as serving newsfeeds over XMPP, using SSFT, and other interesting ideas.

I won't be seeing this anymore.

After devastating Grenada as only a category 3, Ivan is now a rare category 5 hurricane and has its sights set on Jamaica. Evacuation is not an option for most of the 2.5 million residents. Let's hope Ivan loses strength, veers off course, and aims at some less populated area.

I'll be based in North Carolina, as I am now, but I'm going to be in the SF bay area for my first week at Sun. I'll be arriving on Sunday around 2PM, so I'll start off with some free time and I might have a night free later in the week. Any Rollers or bloggers want to get together for a geek dinner one night? I will be in Palo Alto, but I'll have a car and I know my way around, so I could make it as far as the city. If interested, drop me an email at dave.johnson@rollerweblogger.org.

I've ported a couple of Bryan Bell's free themes to Roller. I'm still tweaking them, but take a look: I'm hosting them temporarily at Brushed Metal and Movable Manilla. On his site, Bell says "I pretty much feel that the 'free' themes I created are public domain" and "I'd like to encourage anyone to port my themes to whatever platform they use. I do however ask for clear attribution to remain on the theme, and that you in-turn provide your derivative work to other users of your favored blogging tool." I think that means that we can distribute them with Roller as long as we keep the attribution.

Jeff Hoang explains how to deploy Roller on JBoss.

Our home improvement projects are finally complete including our new screened-in porch. Screens are a must here in Raleigh where swarming mosquitoes will literally eat you alive within minutes of your walking outside. We've been enjoying the bug free living for about a month now. Two big ceiling fans make it comfortable even in August.

After reading Chris and Rafe's posts about coping with a day without del.icio.us, I decided it was time to give it a try. I've tried a number of different ways to keep track of articles that I want to blog about, read at a later time, or just remember for future reference. Over the years I've tried keeping them in a browser bookmark folder, tracking them on a Voodoo pad page, and even saving them as draft blog entries but del.icio.us seems like a much better approach. You can find my del.icio.us link blog here.

Simon Brown has been posting a number of good recommendations for securiting Pebble, but which apply to just about any Java web app. If you are running a public Roller server you should at least implement recommendations #1 and #2.

• #1 Disable JSP compilation
• #2 Don't run your server as root
• #3 Use the Java security model

Additionally, for Roller site admins: if you are running Roller 0.9.8, make sure you are running with the latest security patch, see the Roller project blog for details. If you are running Roller 0.9.9 from CVS make sure you have updated your site since August 2, 2004.