Monday, October 14, 2002

swear to god, that is a real live link. I don't have time to read it all, but damn is it funny! 11:01:20 AM

so, basically, we want to have a server somewhere that is aggregating our various RSS newsfeeds, and can display that list either to a nice desktop application for rish blogging, or to a smaller device for personal filtering. The server-side rss aggregators like Radio and Amphetidesk can do the server-side stuff, we just need to figure out how to display the list in various GUIs...? ?Now here's a neat idea Replicating news feeds... Does anyone know of a means by which I can get my radio rss feeds emailed to me, or externally replicated? Radio is installed at home, and I can post to it via email (like now) but I'm starting to rely on my news aggregation more and more, and it takes a good hour every evening to go through it. I've gotten so used to using server-side apps. that the restrictions of a thick client are something of a shock to the system. Roll on the day I can afford a personal CoLo server (or my own leased line)! [Pushing the envelope] I'd like something like this too. I'd like to replicate my news feed to my Zaurus in a HTML format that looks nice on a small screen, so I can surf my blog news on the way into the office. What'd be really cool if I could delete stuff I've read on my Zaurus and to sync it with my laptop, so I don't have to double-delete stuff when I've read it.[James Strachan] I don't know enough about RSS or the state of readers/aggregators out there now, but is this something that we could plan for the Roller RSS aggregator (we do plan on such a beast, don't we?) ? 10:41:03 AM

There have been lots of weblog posting lately concerning object persistence in Java. I probably don't fully understand what EJB is, but it always seemed to daunting to figure out. Roller Weblogger is building a table comparing all the various persistence mechanisms, which has helped me understand how all these various methods came about. After spending some time reviewing a few of the O/R technologies, I've become partial to Torque, because it is very straightforward in design and implementation. 10:17:36 AM

?RULES: Get two developers in front of the same machine and give one of them a red hat to wear and another a green hat. Mr Red's role is to write a small unit-test that fails. In doing so, he clearly expresses the proposed interface and intention of the new code. As soon as he's happy with his failing test, he slides the keyboard over to Mrs Green. Mrs Green's intention is to do just enough work to make the test pass at which point the keyboard is passed back over to Mr Red. Repeat cycle. I like it! 10:09:28 AM

RSS and its ilk are becoming the ultimate narrowcast technology. I choose exactly what I want to subscribe to, and each feed can be as broad or as narrow as I and/or the publisher wants it to be. One can still have "newsletters", but instead of emailing a newsletter to hundreds or thousands of people (push), hundreds or thousands of people can pull the newsletter when they peruse their newsfeeds. And I would definitely subscribe to advertising/marketing rss feeds, because I'm geeky that way. Advice For Newspapers That Want To Shift J-Log found a great new journalism blog called HypergeneMediaBlog. It explores the impact of new technologies on and their possible adaptions by media companies in much the same way I try to explore new technologies and libraries. Here are a couple of samples. [apple] Putting Ads into RSS Feeds "Why not turn your classified advertising into a helpful service, like an RSS feed? Let your customers customize the ads they want to see or simply offer more specific choices - (e.g. rss_used_foreign_cars_saab.xml, rss_apts_for_rent_zip_90210.xml). This would more than pay for the deployment and maintenance of free RSS news feeds, and perhaps leave some money left over for, ahem, profits. If news media don't do this soon, sites like Ebay and Monster are going to beat you to it." 9:34:56 AM

i'm bummed to discover that several posts were lost, or in fact, never posted, from my Internet Explorer "Comment on Site" applescript. I can't remember the sites I was commenting on (which is the whole point in logging it!) and now they're gone forever (or at least until I stumble upon them again). 9:29:42 AM

Interesting that IBM would describe its next CPU cuip, the PowerPC 970, explicitly aimed at Apple as a customer. Does IBM consider itself a competitor to Intel? 9:27:06 AM

Interesting idea. bullets are already marked by teh barrel they're shot from, but now they can "rifle" the barrel to produce more systematic etch marks on each bullet fired. 9:14:38 AM