The Desktop Fishbowl
tail -f /dev/mind > blog

Wednesday, 18 September 2002

Joel Spolsky's take on the cancelled Space Shuttle project is an interesting read, as always. I was going to post an anecdote of my own experiences replacing old systems, (CICS. COBOL. Die. Die.) with new (Entity EJBs. Die. Die.), but I'd probably be skirting too close to an NDA. Discretion is, after all, the better part of valour. 12:21:33 PM

I started wondering on Friday how many people respond to something I write, but I never see them because Userland wipe my referrer logs at 5pm AEST every day—If I don't check them while I'm still at work, I'll never see who's linking to me. They're stored on the server somewhere, I seem to recall, but I can't remember the URL. A good weblog post doesn't exist in a vacuum, it's either a contribution to an ongoing conversation or it's an attempt to initiate a new conversation. Even when a post is just a link to an article, there's an implicit “what do you guys think?” there. What I would love to see is an easy, efficient way to graph and follow these conversations. The web solution to this are services like blogdex or protocols like trackback, which graft relationships between blog entries onto the web pages. These are nice enough, but they require some work to follow, and the more a conversation branches, the more work it is for someone trying to follow it. My initial, really vague idea was this. Think of it in terms of Instant Messaging. You are a member of a cloud. When you post a blog entry it gets intercepted, and for each URL you have linked to in your post, you join a ‘channel’ devoted to that URL. The channel is notified of the contribution you have just made to the conversation about that URL. Thus, as the conversation progresses, each contributor can follow the activity in the channels. Close, but needs polish. Then, I suddenly realised. Wow, I've finally found an interesting application for Javaspaces. Create a Tuple Space. Every time you post a blog entry, you put it into the space, along with a bunch of linking objects that point to any other URL you referenced in your post. Clients could traverse the conversations in the space, ask for event notifications if a new reference is made to a post, et. al. Leasing would ensure the space culled conversations that nobody was referring to any more. I wish I wasn't so damn busy over the next few weeks... 12:02:12 PM

Hi Lonita! 10:50:43 AM

Over the weekend, I thought to myself, “Wow, the Java blogging guys have been really quiet lately, haven't heard a peep from them for days.” It wasn't until Monday I realised the reason for this was I had accidentally deleted the entire Java folder from NetNewsWire Lite, and not noticed. (Mike, an OPML version of the java.blogs list would make it much easier to import all of them into NetNewsWire at once.) Meanwhile, the blog.meetup is at the Zanzibar tonight. I'll be there, because it's only two blocks from my apartment, and if nobody turns up I'm sure I'll be able to get a game of pool anyway. Quote of the day, from Kevin Burton: Hacking Mozilla is like dating a beautiful but crazy woman. Sure she is hot, and sure the sex is great, but the constant attention she demands and the way she freaks out at a seemingly ordinary request just get old after a while. 8:21:26 AM