Blogging Roller

If you've been following my tweets you know that I accepted a new job yesterday. What I didn't reveal was my new employer. Before the end of this month I'll be joining IBM/Rational and working as a Web 2.0 Architect. I'm not sure how much I can say about what I'll be working on, so I won't be blogging too much about work until I figure that out. I think I can safely say this: I'm thrilled about this new job and the folks that I'll be working with. In the near term, it looks like my workmates will be @pmuellr and @BillHiggins and I'll be learning a lot about Jazz.

I feel very fortunate to have found such an excellent position a fairly tough job market and I'm more than ready to start working on new things. Thanks to everybody who helped out by recommending me, blogging about me, offering encouragement and taking the time to interview with me.

• Charlie Rose - A conversation with Marc Andreessen
  Great interview covering social networking and internet tech in general


• Fred Stutzman: How Facebook Should Address User Rights
  "If Facebook were a country, it would more accurately resemble North Korea or China than the United States."


• The Angry Drunk: Scoble Just Doesn't Get It
  "Social Networking is not Marketing; but the inability to grasp that fact is the defining characteristic of the New Media Douchebag"


• Eclipse Plugin Central: plugins resource center and marketplace
  "OSDE is the Eclipse Plug-in for developing OpenSocial applications"


• Engadget: Texas Instruments and Wind River do up Android right
  "what basically amounts to the ultimate Android device"


• InfoWorld: Mozilla backs move to decriminalize iPhone jailbreaking
  "Consumers should be entitled to use any software program they choose"


• Engadget: Android Market allows returns, but not sexy stuff
  "Google maintains the right to forcefully remove an app from your device whenever it feels like it"

Aaron Swartz: As chaunceyt pointed out, the new stimulus bill's implementation instructions require that each government agency report the money it gives out in RSS:

For each of the near term reporting requirements (major communications, formula block grant allocations, weekly reports) agencies are required to provide a feed (preferred: Atom 1.0, acceptable: RSS) of the information so that content can be delivered via subscription.

Pretty amazing to see a government so tech-savvy.

Uncle Sam should contact Manning, who, I'm pretty sure, has stacks of RSS and Atom In Action available for a very good price.

We've got a date and a venue for BarCamp RDU 2009, so mark your calendars:

BarCamp RDU 2009 - August 8 at Red Hat headquarters in Raleigh, NC

More information and registration coming soon...

I started a new blog on this site to explore what's possible with Google Friend Connect (GFC). It's called the G Friend Connect blog. I've added the GFC Members Gadget and I replaced Roller's built-in comment macro with the GFC Wall Gadget. In theory, if you have a Google, Yahoo or Open ID account, you should be able to login via a gadget, make friends with other site members and leave comments. If you have a minute or two, try it out. Join the site and leave a comment. That will give me (and you) a better idea of how things work.

So far I'm not particularly impressed with the Wall Gadget as a comments replacement. Here is an example. It doesn't support rich-text editing, no HTML is allowed, the comment area is too small and there's no preview button. Maybe that's why it's called a Wall Gadget rather than a Comments Gadget. Or maybe I'm just not doing it right.

NCSU and IW3C2 Sign Agreement: It’s official! North Carolina State University and the International World Wide Web Steering Committee (IW3C2) based in Geneva, Switzerland, have reached agreement to host the 19th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2010) at the new Raleigh Convention Center on April 26-30, 2010. The general conference chairs are Michael Rappa, director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics at North Carolina State University, and Paul Jones, director of iBiblio.org at the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill.

From the Roller project blog:

Ganesh Mathrubootham has been doing great work on the Media Blogging for Roller project and helping out in other ways in Roller development and support. So in January we nominated and voted him in as Roller's newest committer. Welcome Ganesh, we're very happy to have you on the team.

I've really enjoyed working with Ganesh and his project partner Tanuja over the past six months, so this is great news. I'll tell you a bit more about the Media Blogging for Roller project in one of my next blog posts.

You may remember that my dad, Charles Johnson, was working on a book that explains the science behind photography, from "quantum mechanics to physiology and art appreciation." He's finished now and while he negotiates with publishers he is making a limited number of copies available on CD, mostly to his photographer friends.

The book is beautifully illustrated with color photographs, diagrams and lots of equations. Yes, I said equations; you'll need to brush up on your physics and calculus to really appreciate the entire work. I really enjoyed the first couple of chapters and the later chapter on appreciation of art in photography, but I have to admit, I haven't read the whole thing.

I'll try again when I have the printed edition

You can download a detailed table of contents via his blog photophys.com. He'll also be making selected chapters available there to get feedback; the first is How to get really high magnifications.

The day before the layoff axe fell at Sun, I blogged about my upcoming Shindig for Blogs and Wikis talk at ApacheCon EU in March. Since then, I've been working almost non-stop on finding a new gig and have had little time to work on my presentation. That's not good, because I have fairly ambitious plans for this talk. I'll explain.

I want to be able to show how to add social features including OpenSocial support to a blog server and a wiki server by using plain old Shindig and then Project SocialSite. I'm targeting Roller and JSPWiki because they're the blog and wiki source code bases that I know best right now and they're both Apache efforts, but the same techniques should work with other systems like Wordpress or Drupal. If I have time I might be able to demo those too (but I wouldn't count on it).

I'm not sure how far I can go with plain old Shindig because, like most blog and wiki servers, neither Roller nor JSPWiki has detailed profile data, social relationships or activities. I should be able to get Google Gadgets working via Shindig, but OpenSocial Gadgets will take a lot more thought and effort.

I'm much more confident in the Project SocialSite approach. SocialSite provides for storage of detailed profile information, groups, activities and app data as well as the necessary UI. I'm confident enough that I'm going to deploy it on this site. So, stay tuned. I hope to have something to show by the end of next week.

Oh, and by the way. Today is the last day to register for ApacheCon EU with the early-bird discount. So sign-up already!

I just signed up for the NC State University FOSS Fair 2009 on Monday, Feb. 2. I'm pretty excited that there's a GRASS GIS session on the list; that's where I got my start with open source software sometime in the previous century (GRASS was public domain back then, not GPL as it is today).

The first Triangle Tweetup of the year is tomorrow at the stylin' Glenwood South facilities of Edge Office. There's a site now with an interesting speaker line-up and people tweeting about it (and food).

Count me in!

Update: Reminder the #triangletweetup is a food drive too, bring some nonperishables, info: http://tinyurl.com/6vn3ct via @ginnyskal #givingback

Even when you're mentally prepared for a layoff and you know it's probably for the best, its still a life-changing shock when it happens, a loss. It's hard not to feel fear, anger, sadness, self-recrimination and all those stages that fellow RIFee David Van Couvering blogged about. I still cycle through those, but not as frenetically as before.

I got over the sadness and fear part pretty quickly thanks to my tweeple, the very supportive network of friends, colleagues, former coworkers, etc. that's grown around my blog, my work at Sun, my involvement at Apache Software Foundation and my social network accounts like Twitter. I got the word out on Twitter first and word spread quickly. I posted to my blog and some very kind friends, Tim Bray, Ted Leung and Robert Donkin helped spread the word on their blogs and said some very nice things about me in the process. Within hours a flood of supportive tweets, emails and calls come rolling in, including about a dozen real live job leads.

So, thanks folks. I really appreciate the help. I'll keep you posted.

It was over four years ago when I discovered that Sun was using my software, Roller, to power blogs.sun.com. I was thrilled to go to work for the company back in 2004 and what an awesome cast of characters I've gotten to work with over the years. I really enjoyed the folks I worked with on the blogs.sun.com team, the open source folks and most recently, the Glassfish team -- some of the most talented and nicest folks I've ever worked with. It's been a great four and a half years but all good things must come to an end and today is the day.

I've been swept up in the latest round of Sun layoffs. Sun has decided to disinvest in Project SocialSite and as of today I'm free and available for employment. Though I do feel some urgency due to the bad economy, Sun's layoff package is pretty good and so I have some time to figure out what comes next and no need to make hasty decisions. Whatever I end up doing, I'll be blogging it here.

Oh, and about Apache Roller and Project SocialSite? I'm not ready to give up just yet. I'll be using a little of my time to do some mentoring and to move forward plans for Roller 5.0 this spring. And I see real value in the Project SocialSite "social-enable existing web sites" concept and I'm considering ways to move that forward as well, with or without Sun. I'm still giving my talk Shindig for Blogs & Wikis in March 2009 and, actually, I'm pretty happy I have some time right now to focus on those demos and slides.

The other day I got the happy news that my one of my proposed sessions was accepted for ApacheCon EU. ApacheCon and Amsterdam are definitely among my favorite places to be, so I'm thrilled. You ought to go too; here's the information on the conference, which will include training, the hackathon and a BarCamp.

My session is titled Shindig for Blogs and Wikis. I'll cover different approaches to adding social features to blogs and wikis and I'll zoom-in on OpenSocial related options Shindig and Project SocialSite. Here's the abstract, with some formatting that is missing from the ApacheCon site:

Blogs, wikis and feeds helped to make the web more social by making it easy for folks to read, write and have conversations on the web; and now social networking technologies are making the web and even more social.

In this session you'll learn about OpenSocial, a new standard for interacting with social networking data via Web Service and via JavaScript Gadgets that can be embedded into social networking sites. You'll learn about Apache Shindig (incubating), which is the reference implementation of OpenSocial, and how it can be used to add support for social networking and gadgets to existing web applications and specifically Apache Roller and Apache JSPWiki. The session will cover:

• Quick introduction to OpenSocial and Shindig
• Overview of products/services that leverage OpenSocial
• Benefits of social networking in blogs and wikis
• How to support Google Gadgets in Roller and JSPWiki via Shindig
• How to enable social features in Roller and JSPWiki via Shindig
• How to add comprensive social graph support to Roller and JSPWiki via SocialSite
• How to create an OpenSocial Applications that access Roller and JSPWiki

I'm already working on the demos and slides for this as it's going to be quite a bit of work. Fortunately, I'll be able to recycle some of the material in some other upcoming gigs.

I'm always happy to see Google talking about Project SocialSite in their OpenSocial presentations and pitches. We need all the help we can get with getting the word out.

Now, Rajdeep Dua of Google Developer Relations has put together a 25 page presentation on Project SocialSite Architecture with data model diagrams, UML and lots of detail. Good stuff. I posted some comments and corrections to the Shindig-dev mailing list

That's the view from my desk this morning. We woke up to snow in Raleigh for the first time in years. Here, even the threat of snow is enough to cancel school across the whole state, so the kids are ecstatic and outside perfecting their snowball combat skills. I'm trying to focus on getting back to work after a long weekend. With the momentous inauguration today and other (less positive) changes coming later in the week, that's gonna require some serious amounts of caffeine and determination.

Here's the announcement from the Roller project blog:

It's been over a year since our last Roller release and we've fixed a couple dozen bugs in that time including an XSS vulnerability reported recently by Secunia.com. Now those fixes are available as an official Roller release, 4.0.1

• Bugs fixed are listed in the JIRA Issue Tracker Release Notes page.
• Updated files and docs are available via the Apache download mirror network.

This is a bug-fix only release with no new features.

Wondering what's next for Roller? I'm going to push for a Roller 5.0 release in Spring 2009, as we've got good stuff in the trunk and more on the way, but I'm going to need your help to get there. More about that later.

In case you were itching to comment about the new Fauxcoly theme or Eclectic Roller hacks, comments now work again. I had broken them in my quest for XHTML validation.