Blogging Roller

Fred Stutzman: Most of us are not internet celebrities, but the social software we use assumes we are (or want to be). It's time to rethink this, to build closets and spaces for whispering into social software.

As usual, great insights from Fred. Read the whole thing.

Here's a concept that I've been using to help me both in my blog writing and to filter all the incoming feeds, tweets, photo sharing and social bookmarking items that come in via my feed reader: my A list. It's not made up of famous folks and big blog names like Scoble or Winer or Arrington. My A list is made up of people that I know or work with and that I believe are following me in some way, reading my blog, subscribing to my tweets or working with me on a project. I've got a folder in my feed reader and my A list is always the one I read first. Sometimes I don't get much farther than than before hitting the mark all read button. And when I do blog, that folder helps remind my of who I'm writing for. "A" stands for audience.

• cgwalters - A software tsunami
  "OpenJDK is finally changing that. Now, you can write a library using Java, it can be sensibly integrated with Free operating systems"
• Countdown for IBM Project Zero | Reg Developer
  "bringing the feedback typical of an open source project without any of the obligations to give the resulting technology back to the community."
• Soviet-era JCP needs change, concedes top commissar | Reg Developer
  Patrick Curran has reached a firm conclusion on his organization: "We have to change," he said. "No more smoke-filled rooms."
• Glynn Foster: Why Our Governance Doesn’t Work
  "There’s no substitute to JFDI - or improving our governance model so that it doesn’t get in the way of suitably motivated people who want to contribute."


• Skype Journal: Skype and the Social Network Stack
  "We need a new stack to sort out social media's plumbing"
• An Open Letter to American Express ~ Chris Pirillo
  "You know, for all the buzz that FaceBook gets… I get far more value out of Twitter."
• buddypress - Google Code
  "suite of plugins that will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform"


• App Platform Strategies Blog: Looking for SOA success stories
  "SOA is not working in most organizations"
• OLPC News: Negroponte Says XP on XO in 60 Days
  "the end of a dream".
• Atlassian Dev Blog - Maven in our development process. Part 4.
  "Maven users need training."

<img src="http://rollerweblogger.org/roller/resource/blognetbeans61.png" align="right" hspace="10px" alt="netbeans logo" /> It's not a new runtime or a component model or some bastardized chunk of code yanked from the guts of the wombeast, it's just Netbeans 6.1 beta, the latest revision of a good solid and Jolt award winning IDE.

So I'm here telling you to download it, install it, try it out and blog about it because the Netbeans team really wants and, in fact, needs your feedback. Plus, you could even win some money.

I can't win since I'm a Sun employee, but I downloaded 6.1-beta today and started using it for development. I put it through its paces with some heavy refactoring work without single crash, a stack-trace or any of the usual things a beta brings. Of course, YMMV. I did see a weird-ass anomaly in the Mac OS X activity monitor.

I asked for Google Summer of Code (GSOC) ideas for Roller a couple of days ago. Below are links to the proposals I thought were good enough to volunteer as possible mentor for and to submit. The deadline is tomorrow, so you've still got time to suggest additions to the list.

• Roller OpenID: Open ID support for Roller blog server, for user accounts and comments
• Roller Mobile: Mobile interface for Roller blog server
• Roller Activities: Simple Social Networking for Roller blog server, Twitter-like activities
• Roller Abdera: Abdera-based AtomPub implementation for Roller blog server
• AtomPub Export: AtomPub Export for Roller blog server, export all!
• Roller Shindig: Google Gadget support in Roller blog server themes via Shindig
• Roller Photo Gallery: Better photo and file upload features in Roller blog server

Here's the full list of Apache GSOC proposals.

Henry Yandel: I continue to grapple with the concept of how to treat users of Open Source projects. Should you be cruel, or kind?

It sounds like a dumb question - rude hackers who rip users apart for daring to ask a question in a not perfect way are just arseholes who need to get off their high horse. Right?

I’m not convinced. And I’m someone who usually over worries about being polite. Mostly because the voice inside my head is, I suspect, the kind of stormtrooper who after the Death Star blows up for the second time, will be found out of uniform at the Rebel party selling little burgers of ‘forest meat - mind the blaster marks on the fur’. Read more...

Insightful and fun post from Apache board member Henri Yandell. Worth a read for folks trying to grow an open source community of contributors.

As you can tell from the links below, I've been goofing around with the Twitter API and JavaFX. The Twitter API looks pretty nice and very easy to use. JavaFX looks cool to this old Swing geek, but I'm a little surprised at the state of the docs and the absence of apps. I expected more after the hyped-up launch last year. Oh, well. The Netbeans plugin is pretty nice. I'll stick with it and maybe I'll be able to squeeze a Twitter Client or at least a Java.net or O'Reilly article out of my late night JavaFX noodlings.

• Twitter API docs
  Documentation for the Twitter API
• org.json Java API docs
  Easy to use JSON library for Java
• Sven Drieling, "JavaFX -- Beispiele"
  Nice set of JavaFX examples, even if you don't know German
• Introduction to JavaFX Script
  Nice introduction to JavaFX in the German version of O'Reilly
• openjfx: downloads
  JavaFX documentation, tutorials downloads, demos, Netbeans plugins, etc.
• Jim Weaver's JavaFX blog
  Jim Weaver is the author of the Apress JavaFX book
• JavaFX Script Language Reference
  Reference for the scripting language, seems kinda spotty, w/lots of TODOs
• F3 Classes
  JavaFX class docs, out of date but I've found them useful

Daffodils
Originally uploaded by snoopdave

It's still a little chilly around here, but the flowers and trees are starting to bloom.

By my count that's how many Apache members work at Sun. I thought I had a complete count, but Nick Kew's recent post revealed a sixth (see the comments). Here's the list:

• Craig McClanahan
• Craig Russell
• Dave Johnson
• Jim Winstead
• Nick Kew
• Ted Leung

Know of any other Sun employees that are Apache members?

• snellspace.com: Contact!
  "So Google announced it?s Contacts API? based on Atompub of course"
• netzooid: Writing Your First AtomPub Service with Abdera
  "This shows the much simplified server code base in action, so beware - this requires the latest trunk/ code. 0.4.0 should be out soon though"
• Astoria: AtomPub support in the ADO.NET
  "We have been looking for the last few months at adding first-class support for AtomPub to Project Astoria"
• Marc Hadley's Blog: Authentication in Jersey
  "Actions on some resources require authentication and I need access to the name of the authenticated user in the resource method"
• The Aquarium: Jersey 0.6 released
  "the Jersey client API, enhanced JSON suport, and better integration of Jersey with IoC containers"
• Carrot2 - Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine
  "Carrot2 is an Open Source Search Results Clustering Engine. It can automatically organize (cluster) search results into thematic categorie"
• MySQL Forums: Partitioning
  The official discussion forum for those interested in or experimenting with MySQL Partitioning technology
• Partha's Blog: MySQL Table Partitioning
  Nice series of posts on table partitioning in MySQL 5.1
• Simon Phipps: The Adoption-Led Market
  "emerging approach which is rapidly spreading for smaller software projects and in my view is the future of all software acquisition"
• Will Acquia ruin Drupal? | Open Source | ZDNet.com
  "Acquia, a commercial version with all the bells and whistles, including venture capital partners, who’ve put in $7 million."
• JPost.com | BlogCentral
  Jerusalem Post is blogging with Roller!
• triangletweetup wiki
  Triangle Tweetup Attendance & information

In my last post, I explained the details of Roller cache configuration and I mentioned that Roller's caching system is pluggable but I didn't explain what that really buys you. Basically, what it means is that you can replace Roller's in-memory LRU caching mechanism with something else. In this blog entry, I'll explain how to do that.[Read More]

The Jerusalem Post is blogging with Apache Roller. (Belated) Congratulations to developer Odelya Glick and the rest of the JPost web team on the site launch.

[link]

From the Graphing Social Patterns 2008 conference, a sweet OpenSocial presentation with a nice overview of the emerging standard, status of the Apache Shindig project, details of the Hi5 implementation, some cute pictures of my buddy Pat Chanezon's kids and some very fine art (I think Pat forgot to credit the artist).

It's great to be welcoming new folks to Sun, especially when they're brilliant people like Ted Leung and Nick Kew, both of whom, by the way, are members of the Apache Software Foundation. I met Ted at ApacheCon US 2004 in Vegas and he answered all my questions about the implications of moving Roller to the ASF. And I met Nick at ApacheCon EU 2006 in Dublin and we chatted, over a couple of pints of Guiness, about the perils and pleasures of working from home and other things.

I'm also pretty damn pleased to be part of the MySQL welcoming committee, AKA the SunVisor program, and paired-up with Chuck Bell of MySQL. He's the author of Expert MySQL. I'll be answering his questions about Sun and, I hope, learning a thing or two about MySQL in the process.

Welcome to Sun guys!

Since the early days, Roller has included a pluggable caching system for blog pages and feeds. In Roller 2.1 (early 2006), Sun's Allen Gilliland rewrote the whole cache system and made it much more flexible and much easier to configure. But, apart from comments in the configuration file, we never provided any documentation for the cache system. In this post, I'll start to correct that. I'll explain the basics of how the cache works and how to configure it.[Read More]

• Shindig Architecture: Java Gadget Classes
  "an environment for serving gadgets, a run-time environment for the gadgets to operate in, and a gadget container (as well as OpenSocial support)."
• Ming the Mechanic: Open social networks
  "Social networks *should* be independent of any particular central website"
• blogs.sun.com heap and cache sizes
  "We can run BSC fine on a single machine (SunFire T2000) even when restarting everything from scratch, but we have a 3.6G jvm heap and 6G of additional memory allocated to memcached for caching"
• blogs.sun.com traffic
  "blogs.sun.com has over 1.6 million hits a day and runs on just 2 T2000 servers"
• Newsweek: Why Spore Is Taking So Long to Get Right, pt.1
  Can't wait to see this game
• [ogb-discuss] Roy Fielding resigns from OpenSolaris Gov. Board
  "Sun should move on, dissolve the charter that it currently ignores, and adopt the governing style of MySQL. That company doesn't pretend to let their community participate in decisions"
• ThoughtPark: when open source goes closed
  "what happens if more companies take their open-source product and develop them into closed-source offerings?"

I've been busy as can be, working on launching a new project at work, lots of presentations and not enough code. March seems to have snuck up behind me, spun me around and punched me right in the stomach. Not good. I need more time. Slides for my Advanced Roller talk are due today, ApacheCon EU is a little over a month away and JavaOne is right around the corner (more about that later). That's enough whining. Now, it's my duty to remind you that there's still plenty of time to register for ApacheCon EU in beautiful city of Amsterdam, so here goes:

Click here to register for ApacheCon EU 2008.

And in other news, the ApacheCon US 2008 Call For Papers is now open. This year ApacheCon US will be November 3-7 in New Orleans, Louisiana.