Wednesday, October 02, 2002

XPath Tutorial. I haven't actually used XPath in a project yet, so I was only somewhat familiar with it. I just saw this great XPath tutorial while checking out the JXPath project on Jakarta. It's very nice - quick and simple. No fluff, just the facts. The site, W3Schools.com, also has a bunch of other tutorials available for all types of XML and Web technologies. Good resource. Very nice for a busy developer. -Russ P.S. The site even has a good sense of humor. [Russell Beattie Notebook] 7:53:14 AM    comment []

Quickie thoughts and links.. Hi! Welcome to October! Here's some quickie thoughts for the evening. All in one big long post so I don't have to battle with my FTP client for bandwidth. I wish there was a more condensed version of Redhat. With just the cool stuff and not all the extras. A one CD distrib. I know, I know, everyone has a different idea of what cool is, but 3 CDs is a lot to download. It's going to take me two days to get it all down if I'm lucky! At least Redhat has a clue and the size of the .isos are under 650meg... Mandrake made me go out and find 700+ size CDs to burn their distrib. I'm going to be happy returning to Redhat, actually. I tried out Mandrake and I liked it, but after Scott's vicious attack and some other stuff I've read I think it'll be better to use "the standard". Actually, my first Linux install was my server running Redhat 6.1... It never gave me any trouble and was up for over two years without coming down on it's own (flaky California power is another thing...). There's really no reason to switch and this version of Redhat seems to be getting praise. We'll see... According to Dave's blog, Roller is on the list of competitors to Skribe, another Java journaling app with an dot-com business model (MiniBlog didn't make the cut it seems...) Sounds fine to me, but don't these guys REALIZE you can't use that quote from Jobs until you actually deliver your product? Sheesh. Amateurs. Dave was thinking their business model might be what I need: Hey Russell, this might be the ticket! Pull an all-nighter, add premium categories to MiniBlog, and fund your trip to Esther Dyson's big-blowout in Berlin. "Want to know how I feel about lawyers? Just enter your credit card number and hit the submit button." Nice. It'd be kinda neat if someone wanted to pay me to blog... but I'm not sure I'd like the pressure. I used to be a journalist in a long-past life. deadlines and me never meshed well (as you can tell from my coding deadlines...). It requires a discipline I never had. Actually, I was just thinking about adding another feature to MiniBlog today: I have this running todo list that I'm always mailing to myself from my email account from work. It'd be nice that after I log into my weblog, my picture would be replaced by a blog-owner-only todo list and calendar. All private, but it'd be a nice organization tool for me. But no new features for MiniBlog until I get off my ass on my other projects. Procrastination has gripped me and isn't letting go, so I've got to be firm. Hey, Ugo and his wife have lost 3kgs in the past couple weeks on the Atkins! Yeah! And fell less hungry too! Woohoo! Did I tell you or what? It really works. Did I ever mention Chris Kelly? He's an expat blogger in Sofia, Bulgaria! He sent me kind words about my blog and some advice on Linux stuff... He's been trying to download Mandrake 9.0 without much success due to the rain. Oof. I can't imagine what the telecom infrastructure is like there. Another expat-blogger, Kief, is no longer an expat blogger!! Kief's working in London now! Woah! What happened? He was in Turkey and then *poof* he's now hanging out in England marveling at all the bandwidth at his new job... Kief is an American with a British wife, so I'm not sure if being the U.K. counts as being "expat" or not. I think you get 1/2 expat points for being in another country that speaks your own language. There are still cultural differences, but it's not like you need to memorize 16 verb tenses to talk to your wife about your day at work. Kief thoughts on being back in London: ...living in London is like going to college, drinking beer is a constant, with frequent nights of getting shitfaced. Brits buy pints of beer in rounds, so if you don't keep up with their pace and aren't careful your pints will queue up. It may take me a while to get back up to speed. Yep, that reminds me of hanging out with Irish expats back in San Francisco. There'd always be 2 or 3 (literally) full pints in front of me at all times. Man what is it about the people on those islands? I guess if I had to live in that climate I'd be an alcoholic too... Speaking of bad climates... Madrid had 3 days of good weather, but that's it from now until May. Cold, grey and wet from here on in. I've GOT to find an excuse to live somewhere else. Ana's talking about 3 bedrooms in the North part of Madrid (where we were taking a pleasant walk on Sunday) and that's starting to frighten me. I wonder what Kief feels like being back in an English speaking country again. It must be so odd. I've been here since April 2000... it's a long time. (For the story about why I'm in Spain, check out my About Me page. I'm starting to wonder if I'll ever be go back home again and be happy. -Russ 46% down.... [Russell Beattie Notebook] 7:51:09 AM    comment []

If you're bloggin' you ain't workin'. And that's me right now... so I'm going to get to it. The in-laws are up in the city for a bit and they just left. The kid's on his new schedule, so he's in the crib (we're listening to him talk to himself as he falls asleep right now on the monitor). Thoughts: If you're looking for some icons, there's the "standard" Java icons. and then there's the amazing Gnome ones by Jakub Steiner. Kick-ass. Please god, someone post to Simpleface.org besides me. There's a nice Swing tutorial on Sun's site. I wish I could learn better via a web page, but I think it's just practice as always. Eventually I'll learn how to learn online. Until then, I just ordered The Weblogic Server Bible from Amazon.co.uk in preparation for my new job. I saw a decent review of it on Slashdot (without many negative thoughts in the comments) so I decided to get it to help me grok Weblogic. There are three states of understanding for me: Bewilderment, Familiarity and Groked. The last being total understanding... it's from a book somewhere that I never read, but I like the term. Man, Raible (who's Matt to no one except his mother it seems) has a nice bandwidth. I only was able to download Redhat 8.0 disc 1 last night. I was thinking MAYBE it'd be done before I went to bed which is why I started it early, but nope. So that's why I'm not starting downloading tonight until just before I go to bed. Disc 2 tonight and Disc 3 on Wednesday evening... I'll be ready to play with Redhat by next weekend. :-) (Maybe Jeremy's mirror will help a bit... ) Is it just me, or is Charles preaching to the choir? I love OrionServer. It kicks ass... but no one I've ever applied with has said to me that it was a good thing I knew about it. Right now JBoss doesn't pay the bills. It'll be a while yet before it does. Jeff's talking to me, I can tell: My biggest problem is that it is all talk. No code makes for a very dead open source project. I learned this the hard way with FreeBuilder. All I did on that project flap my trap. If I had instead focused on code, there might have been a much different outcome. Worst case, I would have much better Swing Java skills. Damn, alright! Alright... I'm getting off my ass RIGHT NOW. Hot code coming your way (which is where the title of this post came from. I'm typing as fast as I possibly can to get back to coding). Here's a good example of just that. Henri just published his personal code library - very nice. I downloaded another Java blogger's personal library the other day too. Who's was it? Now I can't find it... urgh! It had a Splash-screen I thought was useful... Is anyone paying attention to O'Reilly's Mac Conference? Seems like lots of good stuff... wish I was 1) There 2) A Mac owner. (Oh, hey... it looks like Jeremy is blogging it. Rock on! Hey, speaking of O'Reilly - the new Safari was launched and it's as good as their email said it was going to be. I'm psyched... going to use it a lot more now. Greg's wondering why I dislike Canadians. Because they suck? (I'm sure I've ranted before about Canadians and other English speakers on this blog before... you can do a search on it. No reason to rant again until I'm really into it). Hey! I like Greg's yet-to-arrive new computer... I want one! But how much? I couldn't find any prices on that site... Kief says he's still an expat. Yeah. Right. Pah! (Oh, and his wife is from Turkey! I was assuming a bit too much from one of his posts... Sorry Kief!) Jabber's got a new website and logo... hmmm. All these "J" references are going to mess me up. (via Raible). Niel's got another PersonalBlog user! Yeah! I've been meaning to help Niel out getting his source code onto SoureForge. It's a PITA... you have to get SSH set up with your CVS and on Windows, that can be a challenge. Ugh. Whew. Done. Like 1/2 hour... could've been worse. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 7:49:56 AM    comment []

The C's: Communication, Coordination and Collaboration (and Commodity). Dave nailed it yesterday with these thoughts: Anyway, this made me start thinking about weblogging software as a commodity. If it is a commodity that means you can't really make money selling weblogging software. You might be able to make money selling weblogging related services as weblogger.com does, or you might be able to make your existing software more valuable by adding weblogging features to it. Seems to me that weblogging features would make sense in an HTML editor/publisher, portal software, or even an e-Commerce suite. I wonder what other categories of software would benefit from weblogging features. I thought it was a good thought yesterday, and then I noticed today on Jeroen's weblog that there's already a "BloggerTool" ready for Groove. (However, it's Blogger specific right now using only that API which is sort of how I found it... I'm supposed to be working!). So it's already happening... Dave is totally right. However, I think it's just for the clients. The front end is definitely going to get commoditized, but the Knowledge management back-end of blogging is just starting. People are going to start realizing what a valuable tool weblogging is and start to develop server-side applications that take advantage of its unique characteristics. Right now everyone is just storing the information - the posts - and displaying them by date. And look how useful Weblogs are. There's SOOOO much more to do than that. I look at weblogging as the first step to organizing the information around you. It all goes back to the Lotus Notes mantra I learned when I first started consulting: Communication, Coordination and Collaboration. Weblogs are touching a few of those items, but has so much more potential. Look at this article on Microsoft's Intranet: 3,100,000+ pages Content created by and for over 50,000 employees who work in 74 countries 8,000+ separate intranet sites That's incredible. Microsoft, being the techy-centered company it is, is showing us what the future is going to bring now that technologies like weblogging are making it so much more easy for regular-joes to publish information online. But now you have to find and use that information that you're publishing! And that's where the innovations are going to happen - and it'll almost definitely be on the server side. Just my thoughts... -Russ A little later... Of course... all these thoughts are five years or more out of date. Ray Ozzie is reflecting on 5 years at Groove and has published the original thoughts about what the company would do as well as comments on the future: Although centralized contextual collaboration has been yielding value for many years and continues to mature (congrats) and merge into the application server market, dynamic "desktop collaboration" empirically shows all the signs of a new and substantial growth market, as business units return to basics in terms of understanding how use technology to make their extant interpersonal work practices more productive, and as IT continues to struggle with supporting dynamic interpersonal work in the hostile and unsecure environment that Internet eMail has become. That original doc is quite the mind-meal... It'll take me several days to digest it all. Cool stuff. It amazes me how much of an Ozzie disciple I am... I mean, he's basically saying exactly opposite of what I just wrote above, but I still totally dig his vibe. [Russell Beattie Notebook] 7:49:16 AM    comment []

Baby Got Back. One for PingBack. I agree with Ray.  I don't want pingback, trackback, or refererback.  I get enough feedback with comments, spam free e-mail, and links to IM.  If I wanted to host a discussion group, that is what I would have instead of a weblog.  [John Robb's Radio Weblog] » Quite frankly I do more than scan my referrer lists "once in a while" as Ray puts it.  I am always scanning them, looking for the breadcrumbs of someone or something interesting that has passed by.  Always on the lookout for that connection that could have value for me or my business.   I get as much spam as anyone, but I'll put up with a future of pingbots right now if it means I make the connections that helps my business to succeed.  Just like I put up with spam to use email today.  I can't afford to pull up the draw bridge. PingBack may not be good for John, Ray, and others on the path well trodden.  But I think there are lots of people like myself who see things differently.  I want to know when someone is talking about what I am talking about and especially when they are talking about something I've written. I don't know all the answers to the path I'm on, it's only through shared dialogue and the connections that I am making that I have a hope of moving forward.  I see PingBack as a valuable way of making those extra connections that I need, of closing the loops, and getting the feedback.   If Ray & John don't want to come to that party that's fine, but I hope that, their not turning up, doesn't mean that there isn't a party at all. To put it another way my blog isn't the government emergency broadcast system, it's The Frasier Crane show. So go ahead and ping me. I'm listening. [Curiouser and curiouser!] I want: true aggregation of my referrers over time. (right now I use perl to hit the radio page every night at about 2:45 eastern time.) with timestamps. Notification of comments (got that through the Radio Comment Feeds! thingie I set up yesterday.) notification of linkbacks and cross posts. This is of course imposible except within the blogosphere. The only solution I can think of is to scan referrers for forward links. Yeesh, that would work. A whole lot of other stuff I'm working on, which prevents me from talking about it just yet ;-) (Did someone say "Interest Engine"? No. Nobody did. Tee hee.) [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 7:46:32 AM    comment []

Teamwork Myths. The 8 Most Common Myths About Teamwork. are debunked here. My summary: Responsibility is individual, not diffuse. Teambuilding is a bottom-up process. Motivation counts more than skills. People must love the goal, not necessarily one another. Self-interest is good. Getting the job done and treating one another humanely are not antagonistic. Teambuilding happens in the course of work. Keep the plans under scrutiny throughout. [Seb's Open Research] More great stuff via Seb. This is a pretty good read. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 7:22:12 AM    comment []

Duct-tapers. Duct-tapers -- suspension and bondage fetish goes mainstream. Duct-tapers are mainstream bondage fetishists who tape each other up to walls and ceilings "just to see if it will hold." Pervs. Link Discuss (Thanks Steve!) [Boing Boing Blog] err... uhm... uh... right. Ok. I, uh... oh nevermind. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 7:19:26 AM    comment []

Take this Blog and Shove It. I've had enough geek blogging. I've had enough news blogging. I've had enough political blogging. I've had QUITE enough blogging about blogging. And I have most certainly had enough "me too" and "can you believe that asshole" blogging. (Since they're really the same thing.) Understand that when I say "I've had enough" I mean exactly two things: I've read enough I've written enough It's poisoning my head. The problem is that I've become addicted to the aggregator. Between being a geek, and getting all my news online, syndication has become a very attractive way to stay in touch. But everything I've been aggregating comes in one giant soup and usually I'm not interested in most of it. I'm not going to go into too much detail about the aggregator I want, because I'm considering writing it. I had a great phone call this afternoon which reminded me of the possibilities of this medium. There are people out there doing real thinking, making real observations. There are connections worth making, and it's wrong, objectively wrong to distill it down to "generating fresh content." I don't care what people think. That's not important. What IS important is THAT they think and that their approach with regards to other thinkers is fundamentally an open one. Somewhere I lost sight, after however minor a fashion. So the winnowing has commenced. As of this writing my Radio aggregator rips 50 streams. The goal, and I expect it will be an incredibly easy one, is to get it down to 5, maybe 3. I'll continue to use NetNewsWire to rip the other 45, because that's really an application that makes a great ticker. The list I've got in my head is: Pascale Ernie and Seb From there I'm going to start looking around for other sites that are interesting by whatever nebulous standard of the moment I have. I've loved reading Jenny, Matt, Patrick, 0xDECAFBAD (who is that again?), Dan, AWG, kuro5hin and everybody else, and I'm sure I'll still catch the occasional article. But if it's not stretching my head, it doesn't belong. There's enough out there in the world that will stretch my head to go looking for it. "But your mind, like this teacup, is already full." [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 7:18:21 AM    comment []

Edge.org. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away... wait... it was this one. Damn, anyway... a young boy had his life changed by a book called "The Reality Club: Ways of Knowing". It bent his poor little head around a post and back. Well, ok... not back. But it was not so much the content of the book, a collection of reality subverting essays, that was so twisty but the concept behind it. From the website: The motto of the Club is "to arrive at the edge of the world's knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves." The Reality Club has morphed into Edge. It's the perfect example of what I've been looking for. [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty] 7:16:54 AM    comment []

Pierre Corneille. "To win without risk is to triumph without glory." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 7:15:41 AM    comment []

Kelly Barton. "Water is the most neglected nutrient in your diet but one of the most vital." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 7:15:19 AM    comment []

Julia Louise Woodruff. "Out of the strain of the Doing, / Into the peace of the Done." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 7:15:01 AM    comment []

Lyman Beecher. "Never chase a lie. Let it alone, and it will run itself to death." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 7:14:37 AM    comment []

Paul Theroux. "Travel is only glamorous in retrospect." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] 7:13:54 AM    comment []

posted by Shane at October 1 10:41 AM. "...the drug aroused female rodents 'so quickly they started mounting males.'" The new Viagra? Or Spanish Fly that works? Could lawsuits ensue? ("I only thought I consented--but he had somehow slipped me some Nasal Spray PT-141.") ...the company hopes to market PT-141 for humans in two or three years... [to] people with sexual problems... [MetaFilter] 7:12:32 AM    comment []

Ratings Geeks. I’m a geek—a software developer, a literature geek, a language geek, a history geek. Even a Star Trek geek. So when I use the word geek in the following I don’t mean it disparagingly. I’ve identified a sub-species of computer geek that I call the ratings geek. These are the folks who talk about directed graphs. These are the folks who make feature requests for NetNewsWire that have to do with automatically applying ratings to subscriptions. (Ratings based on things like how often does one follow a site’s links, how often does a site update, etc.) Ratings geeks have a better grasp of math than this college-dropout-literature-major does. The common thread to ratings geeks is that they want the computer to observe their behavior, and sometimes the behavior of other people too, and move things around accordingly. I’m going to have to learn more about this stuff, clearly—there are lots of ratings geeks out there, and they have some truly excellent ideas. But there’s one thing I’d like to remind ratings geeks of: most people are not ratings geeks. In fact, most computer geeks are not ratings geeks. So, what does that mean, in practical terms? Nothing in particular. I’m just saying it. Just that empathy is the essential quality in a software designer, and remembering that not even all geeks are the same is important. (I’m as guilty as anyone in sometimes forgetting that principle.) [inessential.com] 7:09:36 AM    comment []

Minor pet peeve. I’ve been seeing more and more that sites put up a list of newsreaders and aggregators when they link to their RSS feed. That’s totally cool. But lots of sites miss listing Straw, the desktop news aggregator for GNOME. Don’t forget about Straw. It’s cool. [inessential.com] 7:08:06 AM    comment []

New Gigs for Linux Wonder Boys. One explores remote areas by dune buggy in the dead of night. One climbs mountains. Another has become a circus ringmaster of sorts. They're the founding fathers of Linux, and here's what they're up to now. By Robert McMillan. [Wired News] 7:05:26 AM    comment []