Blogging Roller

I'm going to take a short trip to the sunny southern state of Florida next week to speak at a joint meeting of the Gainesville and Orlando Java User Groups. I'll be presenting an updated version of the presentation I gave to the Triangle JUG earlier this year. I added some slides on blogs.sun.com, I updated the Roller architecture section, and I moved the whole presentation from Evil Empire format to Open Office format. For more information, check the GatorJUG web site.

John Udell: The CAPTCHA game: "Any scheme that relies on perceptual or cognitive talents, in order to distinguish humans from robots, will necessarily discriminate against some population of humans. If you're using such an approach, accessibility dictates that you offer several alternatives."

Udell comes to the same conclusion that we did with Roller. You have to offer several alternatives. Roller 1.0 has a pluggable comment authentication mechanism so that the Roller administrator can decide how to authenticate comments. I don't think this is quite good enough. The administrator should not be the one making the choice. The person who is leaving the comment should be the one who chooses the authentication mechanism.

Tickets.com must really be in dire straits if they are laying off their best people. Good luck Kasia, but I don't think a smart developer with a popular blog is going to be out of work for very long.

I really don't like the way that chapter re-writes sneak up on you. You think that you're gonna make a little change here and a little change there, but you end up rewriting the whole ^$#%^%!* thing.