Bye bye, so long ... (moving weblog)
I managed to import all my Radio content into a fresh installment of Movable Type, and will be doing my blogging from there from now on. Expect some tweaking and moving around in the next few weeks. Sorry, Dave, but your stuff wasn't stable enough, and I already waste time enough on blogging, let alone trying to debug my blog tool. It has been a fun ride, though, but Movable Type seems to be a bit more robust to me. Of course, I'll miss the news aggregator, but I'll find some way around. 115 blogs migrated, 15 second regeneration ...

All, please redirect your browsers/aggregators to http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/, feeds being available at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/index.rss (0.91) and http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/index.rdf (1.0), and also 2.0 once I got time to diveintomark.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

11:54:19 PM    comment []  

Escapism: migrating Radio to Movable Type
I'm trying to escape from the strangulation (and instability) of Radio Userland and move to Movable Type. Even better yet, I plan on migrating the content, too. My new installation of MT is already awaiting content at its new and cool URL, but unfortunately, most of the migration scripts and tools I found so far aren't really working - in particular with titles, which I have painstakenly added to most, if not all of my Radio blogs. Does anyone know of a script that preserves titles while migrating? Or does know a bit more about Python than me?
Update: I was looking in the wrong place - this did the trick :-)

10:02:08 PM    comment []  

Perception is reality, a visual proof
Look at this picture from Stefano's image gallery. Thanks for bringing this to my attention, Andy!

3:27:22 PM    comment []  

Lounging on 1/Jan 2003
A lazy day. The boys are exploring the excellent Boowa & Kwala site, babydaughter is fast asleep upstairs, and we are trying to recover from our light hangover - too much wine yesterday evening...

Happy New Year!

2:55:16 PM    comment []  

TagSoup and the Academic Free License
John Cowan posted the first public release of TagSoup, a SAX HTML parser which corrects messy markup along the way. Apart from the actual implementation (I might as well use Andy's NekoHTML instead), John went at much length to pick a license for his open source project. He is using the Academic Free License, which has some special patent-aware clause in it:

Mutual Termination for Patent Action. This License shall terminate automatically and You may no longer exercise any of the rights granted to You by this License if You file a lawsuit in any court alleging that any OSI Certified open source software that is licensed under any license containing this "Mutual Termination for Patent Action" clause infringes any patent claims that are essential to use that software.

Now that's a mean, but fine thing to add to a license - I assume this is an example of patent pooling.
2:16:41 PM    comment []  

POI year in review
A nice read by ACO liver - it's good to see he's actually making some money on POI. We are using it in xReporter.
11:44:51 AM    comment []  

Fun datasource
If you are looking for a dataset and don't want to get stuck with boring Northwind, why not venture into using the IMDB back-end? - Thanks to manero.org
2:48:27 PM    comment []  

Silence
Expect not seeing many open source community or project related remarks here anymore for the time to come. I have some work to be done, and I'd rather focus on that, rather than burning out / being burned on OSS contributions. Of course, the obvious quickyblog to the cool projects I encounter will still be there. But I quit mailing and blogging for some time. I have been trying too hard to do The Right Thing in the past few months, and now I'm gonna focus on Getting some Things Done. Luckily, I'm not the only one. As much as our perspectives can be different, and as many times as our opinions have been clashing, I feel our reasons for this sudden winter-blue-ness are quite similar. To me, it is the necessity to be consistently political correct which is burning me out at an ever accelerating rate. Or beter yet: the kind of remarks you get when not obeying the many unwritten or hidden laws of community-based open source development. But then again, due to this burn-out, I myself may have been posting such remarks lately, for which I'm sorry. I'm on a sabatical until I regained some cluefullness.
1:58:58 PM    comment []  

New blogs
Ken Coar. Ken, since this seems to be your own brewing, an RSS feed might be a useful thing to hack on. Erica, Andy's wife.

8:52:26 AM    comment []  

CVSView and JRCS
Cool things for our developer's cockpit wet dream: CVSView, a ViewCVS-like Cocoon generator. It uses JRCS, a Java library for working with RCS archives, which has been donated to Jakarta Commons a while ago - yet another under-publicized gem. I wonder if Sylvain has based his Cocoon CVS Source component on JRCS.
9:49:20 PM    comment []  

AntiPatterns
Note to self(): reading material for the wee hours. Some of them have hilarious names: how about the CargoCult anti-pattern?

8:03:22 PM    comment []  

Wikis can look good
I messed around with the new Templates feature of JSPWiki on wiki.cocoondev.org, using the Forrest skin as an example. Wikis can look nice :-)

3:51:02 PM    comment []  

Froogle
Froogle, the new Google project, apparently doesn't want good-mannered XML as an input format. Sad.

11:03:32 PM    comment []  

Moving Wikis
In order to quit alpha bitching and start doing something useful, I'm moving the CocoDocoWiki (admittedly a corny name) to its new home. In the mean time, I'm also upgrading JSPWiki to a beta 2.0 version, which is doing fine apparently. Next on my todo is redressing its bland default look&feel, I might as well try to mimick the default Forrest skin. While its new home might not be as fast as the old one, we are now paying someone for uptime, which gives me some peace of heart.
Pier now also hosts an official (Perl-based) ApacheWiki on nagoya, but moving 250 pages, and going through an obnoxious WikiML2WikiML transformation seems overkill just to achieve political correctness. Besides, I really dig our leftbar navigation, and haven't found many Wikis offering such a thing.
1:43:51 PM    comment []  

Andy shaves

I shave my head when it gets long enough to require brushing. [from Hacking Log 2.0]

My wife uses a hair trimmer on me. 4 mm, and 2 mm for the sides. Quite some connection, eh?

10:02:29 PM    comment []  

Stuffed
Pfew. Three Christmas dinners in a row. 'Thanks' to my recent immobility, the family members agreed to come over (even bringing the prepared dishes with them) and celebrate Christmas at our place. Which means we had dinner with the kids on Christmas Eve (a first timer, and the kids (nearly 6 years, 4.5 years and 7 months) much enjoyed it), on Christmas day my family came over, and today we finished with my wife's family. Suffice to say I feel quite stuffed, and I can only hope to regain mobility within some weeks and try and catch up some swimming again in order to live up to the doctor's expectation and loose some weight to minimize the risk for new back issues.
The two boys are leaving for a couple days of grandparent fun, so hopefully I'll find some time to tackle my todo list before the next festive avalanche.
2:46:11 PM    comment []  

Quicky
Something that was dropped by my buggy Radio installation: Production-Quality XSL-FO by Eliot Kimber aka the late Dr. Macro.

10:05:16 AM    comment []  

Switching
I'm seriously considering switching these days. I'm not particularly annoyed with Radio, but still I have some issues with regards to its stability. I'm doubting between Movable Type, Roller or SnipSnap and some others. Since the God of Blogging apparently uses blosxom, and it offers neat things such as blog-by-mail extensions, I might as well go for that one, too. PyBlosxom, a Python port of blosxom, offers an XMLRPC interface - something I appreciate. And MT does trackback, something I miss in Radio.
10:03:10 AM    comment []