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Wednesday, February 26, 2003 |
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Zoe's Aggregator... seems to not work through firewalls. I should have mentioned that earlier, but I forgot. It took me a while to realize that items from the aggregated feeds should actually be displayed in Zoe. When they were not showing up I did a little digging and found that the scans were all timing out. I can only assume that this is happening because Zoe is not routing the request through our firewall. I have not found anything that let's me configure Zoe to go through a firewall. If I am missing something, please drop me a note. 3:11:04 PM 
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Choosing My Next Job. Several interviews, a few offers, and lots of reflection later I have finally decided on where I am going to work next. The interviews were not too bad. [Well, one was pretty bad. I was interviewing for a .NET architect position and this guy kept pushing me to provide packet level details on TCP/IP - details I freely admitted knowing very little about.] Even making my decision proved to be less difficult than I expected. The hard part was calling the people I had to turn down. That is when I began to see some of the not-so-nice ramifications of this new internal IT consulting model we are pursuing.
Resumes, interviews, offers, rejections, polite turn-downs are all part of every developer's life now. How do you tell somebody whom you may need to work for in the future that you have accepted another position? The obvious implication is that you want to work somewhere else, perhaps for someone else. If you expect to stay with a company for any length of time, then you never want to burn any bridges. That is a very fine line to walk.
In a way, I took the easy way out. I am going off to a six-month assignment addressing server consolidation and some other Operations-type issues. It's an easy out because the assignment will arguably put me in a better position to help out those same people I had to turn down. That is exactly what I told them too, but it was still a difficult message to deliver. Most people took the news pretty well. One did not. More fallout from the new consulting model. 3:07:04 PM
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Zoe Indexes RSS Feeds. The latest release of Zoe now scans, and indexes, RSS feeds. I pointed it at my subscriptions file from Radio and Zoe consumed the whole thing without any problem. I would like to see a couple of minor issues cleared up with Zoe's implementation of aggregator features. First, I would really like to be able to adjust the frequency of scanning. For indexing purposes I would probably be fine with a scan that runs once every 12 hours (rather than the three minute default). That would also please the owners of heavily subscribed sites that are footing big bandwidth bills. I know Mark Pilgrim (and others) has been pretty vocal about this in the past. I would also like to exert more control over what sites Zoe indexes. I am sure Raphael has already thought of this and it will be supported in the near future. I just do not want to index every feed that I subscribe to. In fact, there are only a small number of feeds I would even want to bother indexing. Some have too low a SN ration for me. Others have a fine signal, but it is not content I am going to want to look for later. 2:47:09 PM
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Mark Pilgrim Angers Raphael... You don't have to read between too many lines to realize that Mark Pilgrim has blasted Raphael for his implementation of RSS scans. That, or Raphael took Mark's recent unwanted robots posting too offensively. 2:40:27 PM
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Too Many Aggregators On My Desktop. I now have too many news aggregators. I use Radio's aggregator to pick up news and to maintain my own weblog. I am trying out NewsGator, an Outlook plug-in that scans my newsfeeds (the same ones I watch in Radio). NewsGator is nifty because it makes it easy to scan news items and quickly weed out those I don't care about. Of course, it provides no mechanism for me to post items of interest to my Radio weblog. And then there is Zoe. The latest release of Zoe also provides an aggregator. This feature is handy because it allows me to index newsfeeds.
Having all of these aggregators presents a problem. My first concern is that I am pulling three newsfeeds rather than just one that gets shared by all three aggregators. That means the servers hosting those feeds are getting hit three times as often as is really necessary. It is actually worse than that. As I understand it Zoe is scanning every three minutes and cannot yet be configured to scan less frequently. My second concern is that each product independently manages a set of newsfeeds and does little to open up its services to the others (Radio being an exception if you are inclined to doing a bit of development work). It seems like there ought to be a better, more integrated way to:
For example, NewsGator has, for me, a decent interface for scanning and managing my newsfeeds. I would like it if the news items I deleted from there also got deleted from Radio. That way I could leave behind (in Radio) just those items I am interested in reposting or commenting on. It would also be nice if Zoe offered up its excellent indexing and search service as a full-fledged webservice accessible from Radio (or your aggregator of choice). 10:36:48 AM
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AIDS From a BBC article today “a 15-year-old boy living in Botswana has a 90% chance of dying of HIV/Aids during his lifetime, according to new analysis of World Health Organisation statistics”. While there may be little we can personally do to stop the problem, there is something we can do to help the unseen victims of AIDS.
One of the untold effects of the AIDS pandemic in Africa is the widows and orphans whom are left behind when their spouse, or parents, are lost to AIDS. Today there are over 14 million children who have lost their parents to AIDS. 14 million children with nobody to provide care for them. One Life Revolution, a partnership between World Vision and Youth Specialties, focuses on offering compassionate help for these, the hardest hit victims of AIDS. You can determine how you, and your friends, will help. It may be by providing money for blankets or healthcare, or perhaps providing funds to build a well so a community can have a plentiful and clean source of water. Maybe you would like to provide someone a start to gaining financial independence through farming. Check out One Life Revolution and then begin making a difference that matters. 10:18:44 AM
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