Wednesday, June 04, 2003

Scrapping DocBook? http://www.xmlhack.com/read.php?item=1990 I've always thought DocBook was too much work for too little reward, and was disappointed with ACS/OpenACS chose it as their preferred format. There is so much resistence to getting developers to document their work, adding the DocBook DTD to the learning curve seems like a recipe for not getting any documentation written. There are projects that have had a lot of success with it, but I think they tend to be the ones with the critical mass that OpenACS lacks. Almost Free Text, Zope's StructuredDocuments, efText, and other variations on the Wiki Format theme seem like they're definitely the way to go for getting documentation written on small projects. The Tcl'ers wiki is a great example of how they scale from capturing and organizing tiny code snippets and discussion to more formal system documentation. Almost zero overhead, trivial to deploy.... and any editor or browser-textarea will suffice. 11:50:21 AM      comment []  trackback []

Everything you wanted to know about content management, you learned in grade school - Jon Udell Jon's OSCOM slides are here: http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/misc/oscom/intro.html 11:50:20 AM      comment []  trackback []

Advances in Win32 Remote Admin VNC is a remote computing solution that allows you to view a PC's desktop over the network. It was written at an AT&T research facility, open sourced, and then abandoned by it's founders. I use VNC all the time where I'd previously used PCAnywhere, because it's cross-platform, lightweight, has no licensing worries, has a no-install java applet version, and it's always been less crash-prone than PCAnywhere. Since being abandoned, VNC has been adopted and co-opted by several other open source projects which have continued to innovate with the code. I had a recent need to install VNC onsite at a client, so I went looking for the latest version. I had heard of the TightVNC project, a special version optimized for low-bandwidth connections, but when I went to grab it I found out about the UltraVNC project. UltraVNC has focused on implementing Windows-only remote control - they've added file transfer capabilities and a special kernel mode Video Hook Driver which sounds a lot like the Terminal Services implementation of remote desktop. Both VNC's can be accessed via a native client, or a special Java Applet served via an embedded web server (another one-up on TS and PCAnywhere). I was very excited about the file transfer ability, because I needed it to refresh code on a remote deployment server and it was the last thing I missed about VNC from my PCAnywhere days. I set it up and got it working, but then I found this URL: http://tech.erdelynet.com/cygwin-sshd.html I was restoring a database and had a few minutes, so I decided to see how hard it would be to install the cygwin sshd as described above. It took about 5 minutes to get up and running as a service on a box that already had Cygwin installed. So now I had scp to add to my deployment options, just like in the *nux world. I'm really impressed by how much progress these packages have made. 11:50:20 AM      comment []  trackback []