Thursday, 1 August 2002

JIRA Featuritis Another Idea I Wish I'd Thought Of..... Radio Wishlist "Far be it from me to wish for anything more from Radio.  Okay, I admit I'm overindulged and spoiled.  Nevertheless, here is what I wish for.  I would like it if Radio came with a default "category" called "Radio Questions."  And as we all know, this implies a separate XML feed for that channel.  Then the folks at Userland (and the phalanx of developers who lurk in Radio Userland) could subscribe to that channel for some of the more intrepid users (i.e. Rick) and respond on a publicly available channel.  Thus you would have an XML channel with the latest hot tips and fixes for current Radio problems.  So, it would be sort of like an online demonstration of what a corporation could use Radio for: i.e. a robust, and inexpensive KM solution.  It sounds cool, but (as the guy in the commercial says), is it implementable?" [Ernie the Attorney] This is absolutely brilliant, and I hope the folks at Userland can find the time to set something like this up. I haven't read the discussion group in weeks because I can't keep up with it, and the mailing list is for developer stuff that sails so far over my head I can't read the logo on the ball. The more I think about this, the more I want to emulate it at SLS as we begin to implement an intranet and extranet. It will take me quite some time to get my member libraries to understand the value of a news aggregator, let alone use one, but a streaming FAQ with a targeted search engine for the archives makes a lot of sense. Thanks, Ernie! [The Shifted Librarian] Hey Mike, want an insane feature addition for Jira? Here's one. Especially once we get pub/sub via Jabber. 7:54:33 PM

Watch. Understand. Improve. Can log files help fix your IA?. The issue of using log files to assess the success of the information architecture and usability of a web site came up on a mailing list recently, and two great white papers were uncovered: Transaction-based web design (PDF) Assessing Web Site Usability through Server Log Files (PDF) [ia/ - news for information architects] I always love a good web design document. Especially one that attempts to close the loop between whats published and the people using it. I really wish that the Uni I attend would resort the pages such that the stuff everyone uses isn't at the bottom of three pages of scrollage. It's inane. 7:51:57 PM

SOAP & XML-RPC in Moz ADC: Using SOAP in Mozilla, and XML-RPC in Mozilla. Bing. Now if I just had time to play with XUL... [Ham Journalism] Mining referrers is very rewarding. (I can't read the links as I am on the train. But hopefully this answers the SOAP in Mozilla questions...) 7:39:05 PM

XWT XWT. Josh Points to XWT, the XML Windowing Toolkit. It lets you write remote applications -- applications that run on a server, yet can "project" their user interface onto any computer, anywhere on the Internet. It already speaks XML and uses XML-RPC and has a mail client already written, modifying it to interface with the XMT API (or, the SOAP version that will emerge from it) should not be too difficult and would get us a quick cross platform client. The only problem is that XWT is significantly slower than an app already on your computer, and, on my mac at least, it tends to just open blank windows from jar files that I can only kill from the command line. ew. [weblog.masukomi.org] XWT looks like it could be very sexy. The example mail webapp thingy works very well. Looks very XP'ish (don't know if thats good/bad/indifferent). Unfortunately the example widgets demo seems to be frying. I suspect that java 1.4 running through mozilla is just too much for the little blighter. Oh well. 4:33:03 PM

My email queue Looks a lot like this. 4:09:41 PM

Push To Test Posted on a jython ml I'm on was something about Push To Test, an open source web service testing framework written in java, with jython as the scripting language for the test-bots. Mike, is this the one you were testing, or another one? 4:08:48 PM

HP == Dead The New HP: In My Humble Opini. The New HP: In My Humble Opinion, As Dumb as a Sack of Dead Toads.  That's New. WASHINGTON--Hewlett Packard has found a new club to use to pound researchers who unearth flaws in the company's software: the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Invoking both the controversial 1998 DMCA and computer crime laws, HP has threatened to sue a team of researchers who publicized a vulnerability in the company's Tru64 Unix operating system. [The FuzzyBlog2: user blogs] They sure do bread 'em stupid. 12:40:27 PM

Java DB Axion. Spotted Axion today for the first time (thanks for mentioning it Jason!). I've always used Hypersonic or these days its new incarnation, HSqlDb, up to now. It turns out that Axion will be moving to Apache in a few weeks at db.apache.org so I think its time I tried it out... [james strachan's musings] In process 100% java database that supports order by. Great for embedding work. Much easier not to have to ask a client to install mysqldb or sapdb to run a desktop app. Cool. 12:11:57 PM

Power Tripping Master the Moment Coffee $1/cup, 8 cups/pot, 50 pots/day, 365 days/year: $146,000 Members 3.5+ million Lost Income from a Network Outage $1,000,000 per minute Having a System Administrator respond in a timely fashion Priceless [The Peanut Gallery] Back when I was a SysAdmin, people used to put up with a lot of shit from me. Especially when staff email was down. Joys of being a sysad. ;) 12:00:15 PM

Aardappel Intentional Programming Resources. LtU has recently had some pointers to papers related to Intentional Programming. One of them was by Lutz Roeder (author of Reflector for .NET) when he was a student. Since the Word file was missing I've converted the Postscript file to a PDF and posted it here. Lutz has several other presentations and papers on the same and related topics on his site. In particular, I enjoyed his discussion of alternate tree-based source code representations and accompanying visualization tools. The idea of ending the dominance of text as the canonical source code representation is interesting, and he makes some good points on the advantages of moving to an abstract syntax tree representation with an extensible meta-model. The Microsoft Research site on IP says "This page has expired" (what is the half-life of an idea, anyway?), but Omniscium has a pretty good Intentional Programming FAQ, and the most mainstream description of IP has to be chapter 11 in Generative Programming - Methods, Tools and Applications by Krzysztof Czarnecki and Ulrich Eisenecker. [Peter Drayton's Radio Weblog] Generative Programming is a good book. The chapter on Intentional Programming made me think long and hard about the possibility of a designing a language that was XML based, and then having an IP style front end to allow programming in a graphical style. Unfortunately such an editor has a lot of stuff to re-implement. You have to do intellisense style prompting. You have to replace versioning (combining cvs and xml-diff may be workable). Have a geek at Aardappel, a graphical programming language, based on the theory of tree re-writing, for a discussion of the pros and cons of graphical programming languages. The implementation is on top of java, released under the GPL. Done by the same guy that wrote the Cube thingey I posted a couple of days ago. I wish he would write a weblog. He is doing interesting stuff. :) 11:54:47 AM

Eclipse Jython A project idea to toy with: A Jython debugging environment inside Eclipse. Could be sexy. Heh 11:29:58 AM

Radio Bugs For some reason, on the first of the month, my Radio install is always buggier than usual. The previous post had a title. It got lost while posting. On trying to edit it in, radio barfs about some macro error, something about being unable to find #prefs.txt or something. But it is on the file system. [Macro error: The file "C:\Program Files\Radio UserLand\www\#prefs.txt" wasn't found.] To think I was trying to push Radio as a CMS for a customer of a previous employer just yesterday. I lose confidence in buggy software. I don't want to be 3/4 of the way through a project rollout and have the foundations of my work break on me. It makes me look incompetent. I don't like that. At all. I suppose thats a reason I don't like Microsoft. A large chunk of a true MCSE's knowledge base seems to consist of known bugs in various software releases, and the myriad of work arounds. OSS seems to be much more bug-averse. Bugger. [Later...] Looks like it is going to be a day of no titles, as on posting a new post, it's titles get lost too. As one of the people on last night's commedy debate, Fuckit. I was going to spend some time and learn Radio's programming language. I was going to learn how far I could push it. It is sexy, because of the in browser WYSIWYG editor thingey. But I can do that with Java. Either applets, or sun webstart. I can even have the webstart app talk SOAP to the RCS system. [Even Later...] It looks like it has decided to work now that I am in at work. What is up with that? 10:12:34 AM

Technical Interviewer Techniques I have been asked to interview someone for technical competence. I am at a bit of a loss of how to do it. My instant thought of the day is to cover knowledge bredth. An instant way of testing knowledge bredth is pulling out all the acronyms that apply to the target tech areas (java, perl, oracle). I don't personally like this tactic, as my real concern is, how much does this guy read? So, I suppose another tactic would be "What technical books/magazines/websites/weblogs have you read in the last 3 years, and what did you like and dislike about them?" Harking back to an earlier thread about geek bookshelves and propensity for reading. It's not so much what you know, but how quickly you learn, how willing you are to try out things. 10:06:48 AM

© Copyright 2002 Brett Morgan.

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