Very cool looking app, using Rails. Also, some future features..
Can't wait to check this out tonight!
Alexis looks at the current state of many p2p apps and sees problems:
With the amount of engineering effort that goes into p2p space, you would think that we’d have some kind of consolidation happening with respect to networking architecture of such systems. Still, it hasn’t really happened in a big way so far. Many teams are still pretty much cooking up their own protocols and debugging their own relay-based or UDP NAT traversals. Topology independent networking still remains an area of one-off craftsmanship. We’ll see what happens in a few years...
Danny points to what could be del.icio.us for academics:
CiteULike is a free service to help academics to share, store, and organise academic papers that they are reading. When you see a paper on the web that interests you, you can click one button and have it added to your personal library. CiteULike automatically extracts the citation details, so there's no need to type them in yourself.
I know it's been passed around but this piece on the tech-support generation really is a good one going into the holidays.
Of course, the reality is that any member knows that it's not just the holidays when the support calls come in. It's definitely a year-round job.
Jason over at Signal vs. Noise talks about how Krispy Kreme has become a dud lately and it's more than just Atkins.
I think that's a big part of it. By putting their prepackaged donuts in supermarkets, airports, and convenience stores, they've really hurt their brand. They're unable to control the experience anymore. Anyone who's been to a KK store knows the magic is in the hot donut. But, when they are prepackaged and left to sit on a supermarket display they just lose their luster. And that definitely hurts their brand. The "DAMN these are good donuts" response turns to "Umm, I remember these being better." And that's not the response you want.
Joe at BitWorking has posted his slides from a recent presentation of the Atom Publishing Protocol. Good reading there.
It also is done using the S5 system.
It's not often that you see the top two movies over a weekend but I did. National Treasure on Friday by myself and then I took the kids to see SpongeBob yesterday. I enjoyed both quite a bit.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible.
T. E. Lawrence
Leonardo is personal wiki/blog written in Python. It's written by James Tauber and is the code that runs his site. Looks very interesting.
Interesting collection of links and thoughts about how sports teams could use wireless access and applications to enhance a fan's time at an event. The thing I like the most is the talk of keeping these free.
A little poetry to start off your day:
a Ruby program before I even notice is already done
The rest of Robert's post is also a must-read. He echoes some of my own thoughts about Ruby.
Let's see, Apple has an app which helps you create music. There is a web site with the same name which helps indie artists so of course it makes sense that Microsoft would cut a deal with the site.
It seems like a missed chance for Apple.
SEDA is:
an acronym for staged event-driven architecture, and decomposes a complex, event-driven application into a set of stages connected by queues.
I'm not sure where I found this blog but Amy's Robot looks to be a good one. I've subscribed to the syndication feed.
Here's where the cool robot comes from.
Laurent posts about keeping a running logbook of the various activities he is doing. I think this is a great idea and one which I've thought about before but never actually did.
I thought that perhaps it would be a good web app to run locally or some other central location so I could access it at any time. I still might do that but I did think that doing the physical writing down of my activities would help cement them in my brain. Perhaps a mixture of both could be done.
Joe Gregorio over at BitWorking gives the path he followed to find out about C10K.
This is a great example of how great the Web can be. Reading an article, looking at the library used. Then continuing until you have research papers and informative web sites.
Interesting that CBS apologizes for cutting into a television show.
Obviously, I'd be very bummed if I didn't know the outcome of the final 5 minutes of a show like CSI: New York but I would think that something could have been done.
I realize that Arafat had been at death's door for almost a week but still it is news and major news since whoever follows him will have incredible influence on the stability of the Middle East.
Slashdot posted a cool site for Christmas gifts, No More Socks!. Lots of awesome stuff but I definitely think the Room Defender is the best.
I could totally use this at work. People are always at my desk, interrupting for generally no reason. A few hits from the Room Defender and that would stop. The only problem would be how to store it at night since it would obviously be a target of some in-house pranks.
Bruce Schneier, security guru, breaks down the issues with electronic voting and gives some good advice to what we should demand from the machines.
Computer security experts are unanimous on what to do. (Some voting experts disagree, but I think we’re all much better off listening to the computer security experts. The problems here are with the computer, not with the fact that the computer is being used in a voting application.) And they have two recommendations:1. DRE machines must have a voter-verifiable paper audit trails (sometimes called a voter-verified paper ballot). This is a paper ballot printed out by the voting machine, which the voter is allowed to look at and verify. He doesn’t take it home with him. Either he looks at it on the machine behind a glass screen, or he takes the paper and puts it into a ballot box. The point of this is twofold. One, it allows the voter to confirm that his vote was recorded in the manner he intended. And two, it provides the mechanism for a recount if there are problems with the machine.
2. Software used on DRE machines must be open to public scrutiny. This also has two functions. One, it allows any interested party to examine the software and find bugs, which can then be corrected. This public analysis improves security. And two, it increases public confidence in the voting process. If the software is public, no one can insinuate that the voting system has unfairness built into the code. (Companies that make these machines regularly argue that they need to keep their software secret for security reasons. Don’t believe them. In this instance, secrecy has nothing to do with security.)
Jon Udell has a very interesting idea in how to use del.icio.us when working on an article.
Here's the protocol I envision:For a story on TOPIC, I'm collecting links at del.icio.us/judell/TOPIC. To monitor that evolving collection, subscribe to del.icio.us/rss/judell/TOPIC. If you would like to suggest links I've missed, please post them to del.icio.us/YOURNAME/TOPIC. I guarantee that I'll monitor the aggregation of contributed links at del.icio.us/rss/tag/TOPIC. I don't guarantee a response to follow-up email requests. If I judge an item you've posted to be significant, however, you'll see it show up at del.icio.us/judell/TOPIC.
I am very curious to see how this might work out. Using del.icio.us for this just seems cool.
Sean weighs in on Trails and the resulting discussion on The Server Side. It would seem that a language like Ruby would be a natural progression for someone writing in Java but maybe that's just me and my curiousity talking. I've yet to find anyone here at work really interested in digging into something new.
Though I have been sending this presentation around, An Introduction to Ruby for Java Programmers.
I think I've blogged about this before but Justin announced the release of AntFlow, a system automation tool based on Ant.
AntFlow builds upon Apache Ant to provide a new approach to simplifying system automation that uses pipelines of hot folders chained together to perform a given task. Using XML, AntFlow associates an automated task, such as data transfer, encryption, or XML processing with a directory on the local system. Whenever a file is copied or written into the hot folder, the associated task is executed and the file is moved to the next hot folder in the pipeline for further processing.
Here's a way I could use this today if I tried. Like a good build guru, our build process is completely scripted. I can pretty much press a button and end up with a WAR file with our application in it. This is done on a build box and we have two QA boxes and a staging box which need to be updated when the time comes. The updating part is really what isn't updated, mainly because I haven't written something to watch for the completion of the WAR file transfer from build box to server.
With AntFlow, I could set the transfer destination as the hot folder and then have my task.xml handle the rest of the installation process which is scripted. This is obviously a very simple idea but would save me time each day and that's all you can ask for when talking about a workflow system.