Bill points to a new posting on the CocoonWiki which shows you how to create a CMS using Cocoon and WebDAV without writing a line of Java code.
All changes are done within configuration.
Snownews is a text-based RSS aggregator for Linux.
I know this would be perfect for my friend Manoj who balks at anything gooey.
Diego has written a simple web service which takes a search query, uses the Google API for the results and then creates a RSS feed. Talk about useful!
James is working on a new language for the JVM, Groovy. Having used and love Jython, I think this could be really useful.
Alek asks this question after reading some of Chris Brumme's posts about the CLR in .Net.
There are packed with technical architecture and information. Why can't there be posts like this about the JVM or the Java language itself?
Chris Winters posts a comparison between Perl and Java in regards to unpacking a Zip archive. The Perl library allows for very straightforward use while unfortunately the Java one does not.
While I'm not a Perl guru, I do see the same sorts of things with Python and Java. I find this especially when I want to parse strings or read things from a file. You'd think that some ease-of-use changes would have made it into the language by now.
Jeremy has released Megg and it looks really cool.
It's a Velocity-powered project creation tool. This is something which I always scream for whenever I start a project yet I've never actually done anything about it.
In case you need it, today is Holiday Inn's Towel Amnest Day.
Personally, I'm waiting for Radisson's...err.. maybe I shouldn't have typed that...
John Robb put together an interesting list of attributes which he feels any Weblog / P2P hybrid needs to have.
I think I'll have more on this soon.
Wired has an article about MIT's Open CourseWare and who is using it. The CourseWare has some interesting classes to take and more will be coming in the next few months.
I'm thinking about looking into the Distributed Computer Systems class.
JSch is a Java implementation of SSH2. This allows you to communicate via SSH in your code.
Looks quite cool.
Wired has an interview with Neal Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon and other books. Quicksilver is coming out very, very soon!
The heroes in your books are often hackers. Did you see the roots of that mentality in Newton and his contemporaries in the Royal Society?
Yeah. Something happened where a bunch of these people found each other, and they just seemed to do everything within 20 or 30 years. They did it all. It must have been a remarkable time to be alive. If you have a scientific or hackerish personality, I can't imagine anything better than being there for one of those Royal Society meetings.Newton is such an enigmatic figure. Richard S. Westfall, his biographer, wrote that only another Newton could really hope to understand him.
He was so far in front of everyone else at the time that they didn't quite know what to make of him. Even today, professional mathematicians are still in awe of things he did. It was a losing proposition for me to pretend that I could get inside his head, so I didn't try.
Ranchero has released the latest version of NetNewsWire. Looks like there is a ton of new stuff including the use of WebKit. Awesome, Brent!
It seems Sun has put together a parser and JSP taglib for RSS. Unfortunately, they didn't include any docs with the download.
Luckily, using javap is easy so you can see the basic flow of how to use the library.
It looks like there is a one day XML conference in a couple of weeks here in SoCal. It only costs $25 but the technical track seems to have some quality presentations. I might just have to check this out.
I watched the Manchester United - Newcastle United match this morning. Very good one with plenty of action and questions. It's amazing how seemingly negative situations can spur a team on to play much better. It happened last week with Arsenal when Sol Campbell got a red card. After that, they played much more aggressive and eventually won the match.
The same happened today with Man. Utd when Sir Alex was dismissed for abusing the fourth referee after a non-call. Even though Newcastle scored shortly after, Man Utd began to take control of the possessions and then in the second half really turned the pressure on, scoring twice.
CNN/Money interviews John Carmack and get some good quotes:
"To simplify a game, you have to not listen to your customers," he said. "They know your product and really know what they want to add to it. ... It's always easy to convince someone that adding something is a good idea. Saying 'less is more' just doesn't go over well."I'm kind of at the top of my field [in gaming]," he said. "When I started reading about aerospace, I realized there was an incredible level of things to learn. ... There's this mytholigization of aerospace that it's the hardest thing you can do. That's just not true. In terms of actual difficulty, it's not that hard. Aerospace is plumbing with the volume turned up."
According to ESPNSoccernet, the match of the week will be tomorrow's Manchester United vs. Newcastle. It is also the early morning match on FoxSports World so I have Tivo all set to tape it.
In other fixtures this weekend, Arsenal takes on Middlesbrough on Sunday and Bolton goes against Blackburn tomorrow.
Interesting article giving some examples of using Jena with RDF.
CAKE is a networking protocol in which all messages are addressed to a public key, and are signed by the source public key. Public key identifiers are treated like IP addresses. They represent the destination or source of any particular message.
Here's the Python code which beings to implement this.
Of course, not everyone likes cake.
Diego continues his impressive posts about the anti-customer attitude that Microsoft is seemingly showing right now. Whenever I hear things like this:
According to Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall, "Security issues that could be posed (on older versions) require us to force an upgrade." He declined to detail the security issue, saying disclosure would "put customers at undue risk."
my Spider-senses start tingling.
Sam Gentile has started an OS X blog, detailing his various experiences with the Mac and with working with Rotor.
Here's a day with Rotor and then some thoughts on how to use Rotor to understand .Net.
I run OS X and Linux exclusively. I have not run Windows in over 5 years yet the past two days have been just as tough on my email as others. To me, that's just wrong. Diego is just as fed up as I am.
I can only hope that this begins to take a toll on Microsoft because no matter how much Scoble touts Longhorn and the PDC, that's still years away and these types of problems are going anywhere.
Security might be Job 1 at Microsoft but when an install of XP gets infected within 10 minutes, there are still serious issues.
I finished Cryptonomicona last week and since I'm heading up to SF tomorrow, I needed some new books. I'm becoming more interested in the code breaking of the Allies during WW2 so I picked up Battle of Wits which hopefully gives some interesting details.
I also picked up The Mathematics of Ciphers: Number Theory and RSA Cryptography. I view this as some light reading for the plane. Yes, that's a joke.
I wrote a simple utility class last night which, given a url, goes and sees if there is the <link> tag which points to the RSS file. I needed this because I was trying to utilize FOAF files to create a meta-aggregator. The idea came from Chumpologica but I wanted to do the same in Java.
The basic flow is with one FOAF file go thru all of the people the person knows, see if they have a weblog and then see if that weblog has a RSS feed. I haven't done more than yet but so far it's working out pretty well.
Here's the RssChecker source code. Like I said, it's really simple but it does the job.
I watched Arsenal defeat Everton 2-1 this morning. It was a good match though it did take Arsenal about 15 minutes to take control and play good soccer/football. Manchester United shut out Bolton 4-0 to start their EPL play.
The 2003/4 English Premiership season begins in a few hours. This is the first year for me to try and follow the action. Luckily, FoxSports World and Tivo are going to help with that.
I pity the fool who would add this to an Ant file. Ugh!
It's just a build, people. You don't need to be entertained.
The Invisible IRC Project looks kind of cool. It seemingly provides anonymous and secure IRC communication. From the looks of it, you have to use a proxy IIP IRC server so that you don't know where the actual server is nor does the actual server know who you are. Interesting...
It seems that the great OS X app, Hydra has some legal issues with the name. So now, the site uses '#####' instead of Hydra.
Boing Boing gives some great advice on how to speed up OS X's Mail.app. I've been wondering about the same problem for a bit. Once I followed the instructions, things have been much, much better.
Basically, you just need to rebuild your Address Book and then the sending of mail becomes an instant process again as oppsed to multiple seconds.
A relatively short list of gotcha's for both the newbie and fairly experienced Python programmer.
It seems that a government report has come out advocating the creation of smart stamps which would allow tracking of any piece of mail.
I know that if this ever saw the light of day, I would start using email almost exclusively as my communication to others.
Continuing with my post about personal responsibility when it comes to professional growth, I read Cedric's post about staying sharp. He gives his book list which is one thing more people did. Of course I need to put one together as well but that's beside the point.
I've always been interested in what people are reading or have read. I generally will make my way to someone's bookshelf when I see it in their house or office.
Russ reminds everyone about the Java Almanac site. What a great resource!
Tons of example code and you can browse or search by package.
While I sat in the Oakland Airport Friday night, waiting for my 7:30pm flight home (which didn't end up leaving until 9:30), I decided to work a bit with the OpenIM Jabber Server. It's written in Java and seems to have plenty of places to extend functionality for inclusion into another app. It was easy to get up and running so I thought I'd use Smack to write simple test code and make sure everything works well together.
Unfortunately, I was never able to do anything more than a simple connection. It seems that both the client and the server had problems creating a user so there isn't anything that can be done yet. Hopefully, I'll have some more time to dig into the code.
Over in .Net-land, Microsoft's upcoming PDC conference is getting lots of attention. Scoble is doing a great job of hyping up the conference daily and other blogs are joining in the chorus. The biggest stumbling block for many is the price. It seems the conference is going to be a few grand and many blogs are complaining about it.
Doug Reilly has a great post in response to this whining. Basically, it boils down to the fact that you are individually responsible for your career and if you feel the PDC is the place for you, then YOU have to find a way to get there.
Sam Gentile follows-up with more on the need for personal responsibility for professional growth.
Make a plan where you want to be in a year, 5 years, etc. and what it will take to get there. Then work on it. Write code, write articles, blog, whatever.
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Sorry for the inconsistent updates the last week or so. I've moved into another group at work and I've been spending my time working on the new stuff while still helping out with my old stuff. That definitely can keep you busy.
In July, I had my 3-year anniversary with CollabNet and I felt ready for a change. Many things have been automated to the point of not really needing an everyday watcher so luckily, an opportunity presented itself.
I'll be going up to SF a bit more for the next little bit but I think I'll survive. Hopefully you will too.
Most people who know me know of my love for the Chicago Cubs. I went to my first game at Wrigley Field when I was 6-months-old and I haven't looked back. When I went to school in Chicago, I was in heaven since I could jump on the El and be at the stadium within 15 minutes.
ESPN has been doing a tour of the ballparks, giving each a rating based on a variety of factors. I've been waiting for them to get to Wrigley and they finally have. I was happy to see Wrigley be close to the top though I do think it is a bit unfair to compare the relatively brand-new PacBell Park with legend that is the Friendly Confines.
Here are some choice quotes from the article:
"Respect Wrigley," the stadium signs command. And I do, because I know what the stadium does to people. Watching a game here is sure to leave you with a grin so big and goofy that you'll look like Harry Caray after seven beers.
The El is the way to go. It's cheap, convenient and drops you off right outside the stadium. And best of all, you can't get a DWI riding on the El.
And -- best of all -- the ushers who get paid to watch games at Wrigley Field. No wonder they're so old -- why would you retire from a job like this?It sure beats sitting in a cubicle between Michael Bolton and Samir at Initec.
As for the last one, I agree with my buddy that a writer gets instant cred when giving an Office Space shout-out.
I somehow have to find a way to get back there this year.
In preparation for Quicksilver and the fact that I'll be up in the Bay this week, I've decided to re-read Cryptonomicon again. I read it over Christmas last year and I'm curious if I'll gain anything new from it after reading much more about cryptography since then.
Yesterday, as we came back from visiting my sister-in-law, we got caught in some traffic on the 91. Generally, a Saturday afternoon doesn't have that much traffic so I figured there was an accident. As I transitioned to the 605, I remembered that the MLS All-Star Game was happening and sure enough, most of the traffic was from folks coming out of the Home Depot Center.
As far as the game goes, the MLS All-Stars defeated Chivas De Guadalajara. Bill has another take on the game especially in regards to the number of San Jose EarthQuakes on the team. He also is getting ready for the EPL by playing in a fantasy league.
Yesterday, Cathy and I were forced to remember the worst day of our lives. I realize that is such a cliche but I'll stand by the fact that having your 10-month-old get hit in the eye with a golf ball was the worst day of my life. Honestly, it's something I think about everyday but generally I don't get asked questions about it. Questions coming from all different angles, trying to get me to say something which would indicate a failure of me as a parent.
I was reading an essay by Jonathan Franzen about his father's struggle with Alzheimer's and he mentioned how the more times you remember something, the deeper it gets burned into your brain so then you'll be able to remember it again and again.
That seems fine for great memories, things like the birth of your children, your wedding day or anything else which brings a smile to your face. But what about the bad memories that you can't help thinking about? I wish there was a way that allowed me to undo all that burning so that March 16, 2002 wasn't always so fresh in my mind.