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Monday, August 26, 2002EAI Journal: The Web Services Scandal; How Data Semantics Have Been Overlooked in Integration Solutions.
"At best, the lessons we’ve learned from industry’s work with EDI have shown us that:
Posted to services, xml @ 9:15:27 AM ( comments)
Thursday, August 22, 2002Several books from O'Reilly that I'm going to buy.
Information Architecture for the World Wide Web 2ed. "We've updated the chapters on organization, labeling, navigation, and searching, and illustrated the interconnectedness of these systems in a new chapter on thesauri, controlled vocabularies, and metadata. And we've expanded the methodology chapters to include a more interdisciplinary collection of tools and techniques. We've complemented the top-down strategies of the first edition with bottom-up approaches that enable distributed, emergent solutions."
Mastering Regular Expressions 2ed. "If you don't use regular expressions yet, you will discover in this book a whole new world of mastery over your data. If you already use them, you'll appreciate this book's unprecedented detail and breadth of coverage."
Essential Blogging. "Written by leading bloggers, Essential Blogging includes practical advice and insider tips on the features, requirements, and limitations of applications such as Blogger, Radio Userland, Movable Type, and Blosxom. This book will get you up and blogging in no time." Posted to books @ 3:11:46 PM ( comments)
eRoom spruces up hosted collaboration offering. "NEXT WEEK COLLABORATION software provider eRoom plans to roll out an updated version of its hosted digital workplace offering, featuring integrated real-time communication tools and new business process capabilities." Posted to klogs @ 2:41:01 PM ( comments)
Is Real Estate Safe?. Are we in a housing bubble, and whether you own or rent, what should you do? [The Motley Fool] If you look at the prices here (Home prices changes in major U.S. markets, LA +17.7%) it seems like we are. Posted to finance @ 2:32:45 PM ( comments)
Dody Gunawinata has set up a Manila/Radio community for his organization: AIESEC. Nice. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] I like it too. Is it possible to do something like this (I mean the home page) for Radio Community Server? Posted to klogs @ 2:26:02 PM ( comments)
You cannot make people smarter. Curiouser and curiouser! quotes Mathemagenic:
And continues with his concerns: "My fear is that klogging will only thrive in organisations that are healthy, and that there may not be enough of them. Or, worse, that klogging will thrive as a control mechanism imposed by insecure and fearful management. I don't want to be a part of that." [Curiouser and curiouser!] Very good point. I don't that the former is something to be afraid of. It may work as a nice indicator of the health of the company ;).[from my PhD proposal] Learning is best described by the metaphor “you can lead horse to the water, but you cannot make it drinking”, or as Joseph Kessels says “you cannot make people smarter”. Even in the case of formal learning an organisation does not have control over employee’s brain and heart, so in order to benefit from employee learning, companies have to find the way to support and encourage it without full control. The author believes that the answer lies in supporting interplay between individual and organisational needs by relating and integrating employee-driven informal learning and organisation-driven formal learning.
Posted to klogs @ 2:23:01 PM ( comments)
Ray Ozzie: Architecture matters: The Rebirth of Public Discussion. "In traditional discussion, topics and their responses are contained and organized within a centralized database. The relationship between topics and responses is generally maintained in a manner specific to the nature of the database - that is, in newsgroups the messages might be related by Message-ID hyperlinks or crudely by title, in Notes they are related by the $REF hyperlink, and so on. Summary-level "views" are generated through database queries. And that has been the general architectural design pattern of public discussions for quite some time.
But blogs accomplish public discussion through a far different architectural design pattern. In the Well's terminology, taken to its extreme, you own your own words. If someone on a blog "posts a topic", others can respond, but generally do so in their own blogs, hyperlinked back to the topic's permalink. This goes on and on, back and forth. In essence, it's the same hyperlinking mechanism as the traditional discussion design pattern, except that the topics and responses are spread out all over the Web. And the reason that it "solves" the signal:noise problem is that nobody bothers to link to the "flamers" or "spammers", and thus they remain out of the loop, or form their own loops away from the mainstream discussion. A pure architectural solution to a nagging social issue that crops up online." Posted to klogs @ 10:57:09 AM ( comments)
Radio disappointments 3: Not sure what's going on here, but now I have a bunch of these messages in my event log: Can't create item "weblogsComData.changes." because "" is an illegal name. Does anybody have a clue? Posted @ 10:36:49 AM ( comments)
RadioFAQs: Radio on Intranet question.
"Question: I am considering buying Radio for our employees to support our 'company community'. I have been reading the documentation and I understand it is possible to configure Radio to upstream to a server of our choice, i.c. one that runs on our intranet. What I couldn't find were the requirements for such a private server.Does it need a copy of Radio too? Or Manila? Or both?
"Answer: If you have an FTP server, you can get Radio to upstream to it but you would still need to connect to the UserLand server first. Instead, you can setup a copy of Radio or Frontier to run a Radio Community Server. You can create a turnkey installation of Radio with your own categories, themes and initial news feeds list and without connecting to a server ourside of your intranet. Note about another setup option for using Radio/Manila inside your intranet: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/klogs/message/296"
I wish it was THAT easy. I've spend some time poking around and it doesn't work for me (maybe Lawrence knows how to make it work). Here is why. To make a turnkey installation work you need to create defaultCloud.xml BEFORE you launch the Radio the very first time. Unfortunately I don't know how to put there my own themes, categories and news feeds without starting the Radio. I've tried to copy my templates, but Radio overwrites them during the first launch. Posted @ 8:15:31 AM ( comments)
Some other questions/issues that I have with Radio Userland and Radio Community Server in addition to those of others:
Sometimes I'm getting errors from the Radio's webserver (running RCS). Is there a log file to see what's going on?
Is it possible to update the home page of my Community Server so that it will not show "Access Denied" (so much for the community server)? If you go to the http://radio.xmlstoragesystem.com/ you should get the similar message.
Recently updated weblogs page (/rcsPublic/) always returns "The high-water mark is 0 ..., The low-water mark is 0". Why is that?
RCS admin page (/rcsAdmin/) returns [Macro error: Can't evaluate the expression because the name "pageHeader" hasn't been defined.] How can I fix that?
How can I configure community server to return stat pages and home page the same way Salon's community server (http://www.salon.com/blogs/) does it?
Is it possible to include with RCS the simple documentation package, similar to one that blogs.salon.com provides?
How can I change configuration parameters with simple script? If you do the installation on the intranet you usually want to change *many* default settings. You also want to update multiple links that point to Userland's servers (try to view the page on your RCS without specifying the proxy server).
Would it be possible to include a file upload tool in the package? myPictures does a good job in doing it, but it works only for image files. I've fixed it to work with any files and I would like to also make a path that it generates configurable (for example, I don't want to have dates in my path).
Summary: I'd love to have Radio Community Server on our Intranet (in fact, we DO have this server), but it requires some tweaking that most of the people may not be able to do. Posted @ 8:09:21 AM ( comments)
Radio disappointments 2: Seems like I can post at least something. Still keep getting "Can't upstream ..." in my event log:
| Upstream | Can't upstream because "Poorly formed XML text, string constant is improperly formatted. (At character #87.)" | 7:45:05 AM | 36.683 |
| Upstream | 3 files: index.html, 22.html, rss.xml. |
Posted @ 8:08:40 AM ( comments)
Radio disapointments: Trying to make a new post I keep getting "Can't upstream because "Poorly formed XML text, string constant is improperly formatted. (At character #87.)" message. How can I debug it? Where is the XML message? Posted @ 7:43:27 AM ( comments)
Wednesday, August 14, 2002Jon Udell: Road to managed code. "What .Net will do for the server family, sooner rather than later, is present a consistent set of interfaces to programmers. These interfaces will live in managed space as part of the .Net Framework and will enable any .Net language to control the servers. [...] the server products will become a set of components that can be scripted using .Net languages. This arrangement will enable developers to extend individual servers more productively, and it will be a huge win when -- as is typical -- they yoke different servers together in complex solutions." Interesting. Managed code is one of the key concepts of .NET Framework. Posted to architecture, services @ 9:40:48 AM ( comments)
Tuesday, August 13, 2002Blunt Force Trauma: Managing Local and Remote URLs in Radio. "I don't know anything about writing macros for Frontier so how would I create an ifLocal macro? For my reference mainly, as I don't fully understand the fix but I most definitely understand the problem -- it's bitten me a couple of times already." Shouldn't be difficult. Code of the macros was posted already:
on ifLocal (url1="/", url2=radio.macros.weblogUrl()) {
if radioResponder.flSameMachine {return (url1)} else {return (url2)}
} Create file ifLocal.txt in Macros folder of Radio, copy this code there and you're done. Now you can use iflocal() in your templates. Posted to klogs @ 9:23:22 PM ( comments)
Technography: Meeting Checklist. Intelligence of your meeting system. 23 smart and not-so-smart things people do. Posted to klogs @ 6:34:10 PM ( comments)
Sunday, August 11, 2002Jim and James (of HotOrNot fame) have added blogs to their ratings (btw, is this blog hot or not? ;)). There are some funny parody sites, like Am I President or not, Am I Annoying or not, and even AMI BIOS or not. I wonder what site will be next? Hint, IdiotOrNot.com is still available as well as DoYouKnowMeOrNot.com and CanYouReadThisOrNot.com. Posted to fun @ 7:18:18 PM ( comments)
My boss once said to me that if people will carry all waste they produce for at least one day it will be very educational experience for all of us. There are such people. From Burning Man F.A.Q: "Q. What about trash disposal? Will there be a dumpster for me to toss my trash into on the way out of Black Rock City? A. NO. Nein, negatory, absolutely not under any circumstances. Did we mention that we have NO trash disposal? You are responsible for removing all waste you bring into Black Rock City. This includes cigarette butts, boa feathers, pistachio shells and couches." For those who are interested: "Burning Man is an exercise in radical self-sufficiency. You have to bring all you need to survive, and then some. Some people bring only the basics; others bring everything including the kitchen sink." This year (2002) the dates are Monday, August 26th to Monday, September 2nd. Posted to fun @ 6:04:41 PM ( comments)
Jon Udell on Radio deployment descriptors. "I was reminded of: (1) how much non-default configuration I depend on, (2) how little I remembered having done that configuration, and (3) how hard it was to articulate, then transfer, that configuration." I'm glad I'm not the only one who struggles with custom configuration. I'm doing installations for my co-workers and would like to be able to set up proper configuration with minimal effort. The easiest way that I found is probably to use radioStartupCommands.txt file, which is executed at every startup. The problem is that weblogData.root (which is where the most preferences are stored) is not opened when radioStartupCommands.txt is executed, so I need to open the database myself in radioStartupCommands.txt. Any ideas on how to do that? Ideally I would like to have "Save configuration as" button that will create that file with ALL setting I currently have, so I can enable/disable some of them and update Radio configuration. One more Radio question: How to update templates without republishing the whole site? Posted to klogs @ 1:40:35 PM ( comments)
Saturday, August 10, 2002Chicago Fed: The growth of person-to-person electronic payments. "I offer three reasons why electronic payments have failed to capture the C2C market. First, technology limitations have hampered the adoption of electronic C2C payments. Second, most consumers find few problems with the use of cash and checks. Third, providers of electronic C2C payments face a large obstacle in implementing fees for these transactions." [Scott Loftesness] Very true. Third parties cannot provide the service for free (they have to pay their bills), and banks (who can provide the service for free) are hesitant to enter this market. There is probably one more reason, "chicken and egg problem". Checks are widespread, you can pay almost everywhere with checks. Any payment system implemented by third parties is limited in scope, so customers are reluctant to join. Case to the point. Why do we use so many checks? "We have identified several potential drivers of electronic payments, such as greater choice of payment instruments for consumers for different payment segments, greater non-face-to-face shopping opportunities, competition from non-bank payment providers, and a greater role by merchants to offer the low-cost payment alternatives. Anecdotal evidence suggests that U.S. consumers are slowly changing their payment habits, and we would expect this trend to continue." Posted to finance, payments @ 11:12:18 PM ( comments)
Friday, August 09, 2002IBM was quick to release implementation of BPEL4WS called BPWS4J the very same day specification was published (which is today, August 9). More info from one of the co-authors, Sanjiva Weerawarana: "BPWS4J consists of two parts: an engine and an editor. The BPWS4J Engine is an all-Java implementation of BPEL4WS that runs in a
servlet container. The BPWS4J Editor is an Eclipse plugin that can be used with Eclipse v2.0+ (http://www.eclipse.org/)." Posted to services, xml @ 4:15:25 PM ( comments)
As it turns out, Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS or WS-BPEL) represents the merging of WSFL and XLANG specs. Wow! Two other specs. WS-Coordination: Describes an extensible framework for providing protocols that coordinate the actions of distributed applications. WS-Transaction: Describes coordination types that are used with the extensible coordination framework described in WS-Coordination. Posted to services, xml @ 4:12:08 PM ( comments)
CNET: Tech giants back new Web services. "Microsoft, IBM and BEA Systems plan to announce new specifications Monday that the companies hope will help drive adoption of Web services. The first specification--called Business Process Execution Language for Web Services--is a programming language for defining how to combine Web services to accomplish a particular task. Web services are emerging methods of writing software that allows businesses to interact via the Internet. The second, WS-Coordination, describes how individual Web services within that task interact. A software programmer, for example, can stitch together Web services into a sequence of operations to accomplish a particular task. The third specification, called WS-Transaction, is used to ensure that transactions all complete successfully or fail as a group." I'm wondering what are the relationships between newly created BPEL4WS, and XLANG (Microsoft), WSFL/WSXL (IBM) and WSCL (HP) specs? Posted to services, xml @ 2:19:24 PM ( comments)
Updated 8/26/2002; 9:17:23 AM