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Sunday, July 07, 2002

Fixing Broken HTML in Radio News Aggregator

I found this thread in the RUDG this morning. It looks like it may fix some odd rendering Radio does in the Aggregator.

Secure Printing From an IT Perspective

Very little attention has been paid to the idea of security in print streams. PDF and PostScript files for books and other printed matter are routinely passed over the open Internet. Some WAN providers like WAMnet provide encryption via their proprietary networks, but far more material is transferred openly.

While not about graphic arts printing specifically, this post on Slashdot shows the issues of security are beginning to surface in areas outside the print industry, which means yet one more thing printers are going to have to address.

Slashdot | "Ask Slashdot" - Secure Printing?

RiverWolf asks: "As a Systems Administrator (a.k.a. 'paranoid security freak') I spend much of my time tightening down systems, loading patches, and just generally making sure no one does what they're not supposed too. While tools like ssh have become a staple for file transfer and terminal sessions, I recently began looking at all the little print servers we have throughout my offices and wondered "hmm, can those things be sniffed?". Until now, my focus for printing has always been 'just get it working', but if someone can sniff the print jobs (like payroll and other confidential information) as they go across the network, then it doesn't matter how locked down eveything else is. Is there a standard for secure (encrypted transmission) network printing, or does anyone know of a way to do this? I found this document that deals with it in a round about fashion, but with dozens of printers spread throughout multiple locations, I don't see it as an option." [Privacy Digest]


RAVEing Congressional Lunatics

Wow, just when I thought the CBDTPA was the dumbest thing I'd ever seen. This bill has sponsors from both sides of the aisle. Makes you want to opt out of the political system, doesn't it?

RAVE Act: RIP Live Electronic Music. The RAVE Act, whose acronym stands for "Reducing Americans' Vunerability to Ecstacy", would fine people or companies that organize or host events "featuring loud, pounding dance music" up to $2,000,000, and allows promoters to be jailed for up to 20 years, without requiring officials to prove that any of the attendees actually possessed drugs. This law not only is a danger to civil liberties, but also would effectively eliminate live electronic music in the US, given the enormous risks now associated with it.
[kuro5hin.org] [Ye Olde Phart]

Usability Design

For reference -- intranet/KM/usability

Extreme Usability.

Here is a case study about applying a usability methodology to a short, iterative, design project:
Applying usability techniques to deadline-driven projects (found via Column Two).

This piece gives some good questions to ask when starting a project.

Check out the flow-chart. How many boxes in the chart did you hit during the last design project you worked on? [High Context]


More from Mower on liveTopics

I'll have to try this to see where it's going -- a little difficult to visualize. But I can see how the abiltiy to quickly cross-reference topics along project, business function, or interest lines could improve usability.

liveTopics progress.

Only a week after I had hoped to release version 1.0 of liveTopics and I'm nearly there.

I've had a lot of good feedback from uber-testers Marc Barrot and Jack Mancilla.  This thing should be pretty well shaken out when it arrives.

The basic functionality is now all in place. You can successfully add topics to posts, have them displayed with the post and traverse the weblog using the Topic Table of Contents (TTOC).

The TTOC, for example Curiouser and curiouser! shows every topic defined in the weblog.  For each topic it lists the weblog posts associated with that topic, in chronological order.  Each of these postings in turn lists the other topics associated with that particular posting.  The end result is a very easy way to traverse the weblog following threads of thought.

Things that are in the pipeline just past v1.0:

  • Exporting topic information in your RSS stream.
  • Clever aggregators will be able to use this topic information to rank & prioritize postings in your news view.
  • Topic Mining
  • Quickly and easily add topic information to archive postings
  • Sharing topics
  • Your topics will be published as XTM topic maps.
  • Subscript to other users topic rolls and be able to use their topics as well

Please let me know of any other ideas you would like to see implemented. [Curiouser and curiouser!]


Fragen for Fewer Tags

A new Fragen script for testing.

Eliminating those damn multiple paragraph tags. I guess it's time to announce my solution to the problem of Radio inserting multiple paragraph tags into the rendered HTML.

My solution is a script called pLessFix. It's available at my Public Scripts.

What it does.

Once the script is installed it needs to be run. Running the script copies the builtin upstreaming scripts for both ftp and xmlStorageSystem into the user.radio.drivers.upstream folder where they are then modified. The modification searches for instances of multiple paragraph tags and replaces them with a single paragraph tag.

It does not change anything in your Radio.root. If you wish to uninstall the changes simply delete the tables from user.radio.drivers.upstream or you can uncomment the bundle in the script that says uninstall.

I hope others find this helpful. Let me know. [Surgical Diversions]


More IM/KM/intranet Pointers from Matt Mower

Another IM/KM/intranet pointer from Matt Mower. For futher investigation.

BlogAgent.

Russell Beattie has a new IM-based blog notifier called BlogAgent, written in Java and open source. [Scripting News

» Just started using BlogAgent.  The ability to see who else is watching pages you are watching is pretty cool. [Curiouser and curiouser!]


Info Tools Compendium

Information tools reference from Matt Mower.

Software for Information Professionals.

I'm on the look out for software that improves my lot as an information producer/consumer.  I came across this article by Peter Morville which talks about software for Information Architects.

He identifies the following categories of tool:

  • Automated Classification
  • Automated Category Generation
  • Search Engines
  • Thesaurus Management
  • Collaborative Filtering
  • Portal Solutions
  • Content Management
  • Analytics
  • Database Management
  • Information Architecture Productivity

(Note some of the tool urls are now dead. This article was written in 2001)

As an individual I'm more interested in personal solutions than enterprise solutions. This means that I like tools like Copernic Summarizer and Personal Brain which put me in the driving seat. But I hope to have my own servers soon so I'll be interested in bigger solutions too.

Do you have a tool that you swear by? [Curiouser and curiouser!]

More good pointers from Matt Mower.


Category ftp, QuickScript Fix, and Progress But No Solution

Update: This is fixed. It is very important to be sure your path and url elements match in the upstream.xml file.

I have restored the main upstream using Lawrence Lee's Quick Script suggestion noted here. I have a Private category now upstreaming to pwd-protected directory on my own web server at tfrazier.org. But the private category isn't quite right just yet. I still have some bugaboos in the page layout.

The posts, blogroll, macros, etc seem to be working fine. But the Theme elements aren't getting called as expected -- i.e. the blue borders along the top and left side of the page are missing from the Private category page.

I have manually copied the contents of my /www/images folder to the images folder on the ftp site. And I have manually copied the #template.txt and #homeTemplate.txt files into the Private category folder. And I have republished the site. But it just doesn't seem to catch on.

I'll see if Lawrence has an answer.


How Fast Are You

This little post from Patrick Blake's Ye Olde Phart caught my eye. I've always wanted a way to keep the telcos honest about my connection speed.

JD's Blog: New Media Musings Scrolll down to find out how to test your broadband connection speeds.
[Ye Olde Phart]

I Do Lots of Stupid Things So You Don't Have To

This is Jerry Pournelle's line, not mine. But it fits. So I think I'll adopt it anyway. I know just enough about computers to be really dangerous. Thank God they don't have sharp edges.

Incorrect URLs After Changing Upstream Locations

Lawrence Lee to the Rescue! Again. He should consider a career in tech support. ftp Munge is fixed because Lawrence very quickly pointed me to this quick script story that explains just how to fix the ftp muck-up I created while playing secret category publisher boy.

Hugh Madison should get get Sue into writing a Radio Blog. With the trouble I get in Sue would have non-stop mysteries to solve.

Update: I did find that I had to refresh my Navigator links in the Prefs. Even after running the Quick script and republishing the entire site my Home Page link in the Navigator Links was still pointing back to the ftp site. Refreshing the Navigator Links in the Prefs and republishing again seems to have fixed the problem.

Time to go build a bookcase...


Render Multiple RSS feeds on One Page

How can you display the headlines of another blog on your own blog page? Use the xml.rss.renderWithTemplate verb built into RU. No, I do'nt know what that means. But the guy who authored this page does. I don't know who he is, either. I'll figure it out later.

But I do know it would be cool to be able to display other RSS feeds, maybe news headlines, a project ticker from a k-log, etc. on a page.

Ok, so I didn't go to bed yet. But I saw this in the discussion group and wanted to catch it before it got away.


ftp Munge

Well, this just didn't work at all. Somehow a part of the image folder must have been deleted becasue the theme isn't right, even though it is displaying correctly on my Desktop Home Page.

A minor thing, the Cloud Link to my Home Page still reflects the errant url of the ftp site, not my Cloud Home Page. I can't seem to get it to reset.

Ok, I see (sort of) what happened here. In messing with the ftp stuff I incorrectly enabled the general ftp function from Prefs. This is the Big ftp function, the one you use if you want to move your whole weblog to another server.

That wasn't what I was supposed to do. I just wanted to send a single category to a separate server. But in changing the general ftp setting I must have reset the default paths Radio uses to generate its image links and macro settings. I can't get them to reset.

I have Radio upstreaming messages back to the Radio Community Server but it is still trying to pull things like images from paths on the ftp site -- that's why the page looks funny.

I posted a message to the discussion forum. Maybe someone can help me out. I'm going to bed.

Update: Instructions on how to fix this. Don't forget to refresh your Navigator Links in the Prefs after running the script and before re-publishing.


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