Blogging Roller

I convinced Andi that Alex(8) and Linus(7) are old enough for the Star Wars films. So, this past weekend we watched episides I, II and III. We started with Episode 1.1: The Phantom Edit, a fan-edited version of the film that includes much less Jar Jar than before. They boys thought they could have cut more; I kid you not. I thought the Phantom Edit was a little too fuzzy to enjoy. I guess that's because it was created from a VHS copy of the film.

I think the boys enjoyed Episode II: Attack of the Clones more than Episode I, but there was a little too much kissing. It's funny to see the kids cringe when Anakin and Padme get all mushy.

It was Andi's birthday on Sunday, so she took Alex and Linus to Episode III and I stayed home with the little Leo. They enjoyed it the most of the three, but Linus was a little disturbed when he saw what happened to Anakin. I don't think he was really traumatized, at least not as bad as he was on The Mummy (whatever you do, do NOT mention The Mummy to Linus).

I wonder what they're going to think of the original films. Will they see IV and V as the awesome classics that I know them to be, or dated and dull after the orgy of special effects they've just gone through in the prequels.

It's that time again.

• Roller 1.2: I spent most of last week working on Roller 1.2. Part of that work was for the OpenSolaris launch. We used Roller 1.2's built-in "planet" aggregator to create the OpenSolaris blog, aggregating together about 150 blogs into one big blog with it's own newsfeed. I had to write a little custom code to load the list of blogs, because the aggregator's UI doesn't have a bulk-load capability yet. Later in the week I spent a couple of days on <a href= "http://opensource.atlassian.com/projects/roller/secure/ReleaseNote.jspa?projectId=10000&styleName=Html&version=10151"> fixing bugs, Javadocs and Velocidocs.

• Roller 1.3: We've started to talk a bit about a Roller 1.3 release to incorporate some theme management changes. We need to make it easier to manage themes and apply changes globally to all user's themes, but still allow power-users to tweak their page templates. Allen has put together a rough proposal for better theme management.

• Roller 2.0: I spent a couple of days on Roller 2.0 last week, still working on the data model and the new many-to-many relationship between weblogs and users. The OpenSolaris and Roller 1.2 contininued to put me further behind schedule, but I'm still shooting for group blogging done in August.

• Roller@Apache: Starting today, we're using the Apache incubator mailing lists for the Roller-dev and Roller-user lists, but I still haven't updated the wiki with subscribe and unsubscribe info.

• RSS and Atom in Action: Since the chapters are out of my hands, at this point all I can do is watch the Atom Protocol list. Chapter one may be coming back from copy-edit today.

That's it for now. Again, I hope to spend the remainder of the week on Roller 2.0 'cause who knows how much I'll be able to get done duing JavaOne week. And, the week after that is summer vacation.