Thursday, 8 May 2003

DENIM - An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design

DENIM - An Informal Tool For Early Stage Web Site and UI Design.

One of the features is/will be "Components allow designers to create widgets and reuse them in their designs.". I can just hear the UI meetings now, "Dude, no, the other squiggly box!" "Wait, could you post in the small mumble text instead of the large mumble text?" "Geeeez Ted, this looked a lot different in the mockup."
Posted by at 9:34 AM in java ... just java

Wednesday, 7 May 2003

Re: double posting comments on weblogs

In this post, the basic message is, "Provide a mechanism to detect duplicate comments so that duplicate comments are not added to the blog." We do this in blojsom by taking an MD5 of the author and comment text. This gives us our internal comment ID. If the comment "ID" exists, we don't write the comment. This also applies to our processing of trackbacks as well to prevent duplicate trackback submission.
Posted by at 1:58 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Azure - a weblog client for your phone

Yes, yes it's true folks. Azure - a weblog client for your phone. Very interesting although it looks like it only supports MovableType XML-RPC. No Blogger or MetaWeblog ... yet. DAMN!

Besides, I don't have a cool phone that I could try this out on like Inspector Gadget Beotch does.
Posted by at 9:45 AM in java ... just java

Tuesday, 6 May 2003

You're In Control (Urine Control)

Only at MIT folks ... only at MIT. You can find the nitty gritty at the YIC page.
The You?re In Control system uses computation to enhance the act of urination. Sensors in the back of a urinal detect the position of a stream of urine, enabling people to play interactive games on a screen mounted above the urinal.
How long can you actually pee for?
Posted by at 1:44 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Googling for "Java Internationalization"

My co-author and I are still "proud fathers" of our baby, "Java Internationalization".

I haven't googled to find people discussing our book in awhile. Andy just sent me a link to a course, CSCI 305 - Software for Global Use, at the University of Mississippi that is using our book as its "textbook". Sweet. Go Ole Miss!

On a side note, I still have yet to see the infamous poodles cover in real life. The poodles ... they mock me from afar!
Posted by at 1:33 PM in Internationalization

Monday, 5 May 2003

Re: Ultimate Weblogging System, Outlined and blojsom

I'd be remiss if I did not comment on the Ultimate Weblogging System outline that was posted on Friday. So, here goes my annotated list with relation to blojsom. Let's see how we score.

  • Forward compatibility
    • Use whichever license will minimize lock-in, architecture rot, and development effort required in the long term.We use the BSD license. That's open and flexible enough IMHO.
    • Work with at least one Free database (e.g. mySQL).blojsom uses the filesystem, but in blojsom 1.8, we introduced the BlojsomFetcher interface, so in theory, you could write a DatabaseFetcher to fetch categories and entries from a database.
    • In case of emergencies, allow entries to be exported to XML. Well, most ISPs do nightly backup of your directory. Would 'tar cvf' work for you? /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif
    • Use entirely non-crufty URIs. Chris Nokleberg over at sixlegs.com has written a servlet filter to take URLs of the form (http://sixlegs.com/blog/java/cglib-keyfactory.html) and turn them into what is required by blojsom. So, this could be further extended to support some of the requirements below. Alhough, let me comment on them individually if need be.
      • Give individual entries URIs (permalinks) of the form http://base/2003/05/02/oneMeaningfulWordFromTheTitle.
        • No irrelevant system-specific cruft (e.g. mt-static/, msgReader$, or weblog.cgi). Use or extend the servlet filter above.
        • No ? characters, so all entries get indexed by search engines. Use or extend the servlet filter above.
        • No irrelevant filetype-specific cruft (e.g. .html, .php, or .xml). Use or extend the servlet filter above. This would also assume that blojsom supported only one file extension, when in reality, you can have .txt, .html, or any extension mapped as your blog entries. They could be .blog for all we care.
        • Every entry is on its own page, not just an internal anchor on a daily/weekly archive (which makes search engines and statistics tools less useful).Yeah, it can be done. See this link
        • Net effect: Even with a stupidly worded inbound link (e.g. “I came across this/images/emoticons/mozilla_wink.gif, a reader can tell a lot about an entry (host, date, and hint at subject) from glancing at its URI.
      • Give daily archives URIs of the form http://base/2003/05/02/. We've got calendar filtering.
      • Give monthly archives URIs of the form http://base/2003/05/. We've got calendar filtering.
      • Give yearly archives URIs of the form http://base/2003/. We've got calendar filtering.
      • Give category archives URIs of the form http://base/name-of-category/2003/05/, etc. We've got category and calendar filtering. Again, if you want the URIs as above would jsut require use or extension of Chris' servlet filter.
      • Theory: URL as UI, Cool URIs don’t change.
      • Practice: Making clean URLs with Apache and PHP.
  • Metadata
    • Each entry has a title, a category string, contents, time posted (auto-generated), and one or more objects (e.g. images). We support category meta-data and blog entry meta-data. The Semantic weblogging guys are using the blog entry meta-data to store semantic information while someone like Starving Java Programmer is using category meta-data to give different colors to entries that appear on the main index page.
    • Invite (but do not require) the author to provide a summary for any item longer than n words, for use in mobile editions and RSS feeds. "We've got the See More ... plugin" so this is quasi-automatic.
    • Categories are faceted. I may categorize an entry by subject, by current location (integrating with GPS devices), by mood, and so on. Once I checkin the last of the category meta-data code, you'll be able to do things like primary category for an entry as well as related categories if you wanted.
    • Each category facet can be hierarchical. (For example, an “interface design” subject category could be subdivided into “desktop application design”, “Web design”, “appliance design”, and “signage and artifact design”.) blojsom gets categories from the filesystem which is hierarchical.
    • Invite (but do not require) an author to subdivide a category whenever it collects more than n entries (rather than forcing them to be architecture astronauts specifying all their categories at the beginning). @see above post on category meta-data.
    • An entry may have multiple values for each category facet. (For example, one post might be about both CSS specifications and buggy Web browsers.)
    • Why does all this need to scale so deeply? Because when you’ve been keeping a Weblog for twenty or thirty years, and you can’t remember any semi-unique words you used in a particular entry, finding it will be horribly difficult, and you’ll need all the semantic help you can get.Did I mention that blojsom is being used to demonstrate semantic blogging?
  • Syndication
    • Provide an RSS feed for the Weblog as a whole. Yep, we gotz dat shiznitz yo. I'd also point folks at the flavor-based default category mapping which talks about blojsom's ability to aggregate any subset of your blog categories for a particular flavor type.
    • Provide an RSS feed for any category.
      • Because of the faceting, category feeds will need to be dynamically generated, but they should still send correct caching responses.And we gotz dis
    • Automatically ping Weblogs.com. I'd probably add this into one of the many XML-RPC clients like ChronicleLite. But, in short, it could be done. Damn, it's also an RFE! /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif Damn, why didn't I think about this before, but this could be automatic via plugin using the blog entry meta-data. Basically, one of the meta-data items could be has-weblogs-ping which could be 0 or 1, true or false, whatever. The plugin would periodically troll your blog-home and look for new entries that do not have an indicator that weblogs.com has been pinged with that entry. Ahhhhh, the beauty of blog entry meta-data!
    • Automatically convert Slashdotted entries to static pages, and switch back to dynamic generation once the traffic subsides. Well, I guess I need to write that CachingFetcher /images/emoticons/mozilla_wink.gif
    • Integrate support for Creative Commons licenses. I guess I don't see that as impacting the useful of the blog tool. Hell, I'll provide the icons for people to choose an icon to license their blog content under a CCL.
  • Management
    • Web interface. Well, I guess. But blojsom is so simple as people who have switched have mentioned. Download the WAR file and configure 3 properties (blog-home, blog-url, and blog-base-url.) Christ, if you're running it locally, you don't even need to configure blog-url and blog-base-url. I guess this is because I want blojsom to be as simple and straightforward as possible. I don't really think I need a web interface to do all the necessary configuration. But then, I see it's utility in certain environments and situations.
    • Native LinuxSTEP interface. Yeah, huh?
    • Accept entries from software on any other platform or device, using the metaWeblog API. Let's see, we've got support for the Blogger API, MetaWeblog API, blojsim (blogging via IM), Audblog (audio blogging via Blogger API).
    • Accept entries sent by e-mail. Yeah, it could be done via plugin or as a separate extension
    • Make it easy to send entries from a mobile phone (e.g. by replicating the features of Textile). Mark blogs from his SideKick using blojsim! So, we've got pagers. It should be straightforward to do this via phone via blojsim or when I write the Mail2Blog extension.
  • Backward compatibility
    • Import entries from Blogger, Radio, Manila, Movable Type, etc. A new blojsom user has already written a Roller to blojsom conversion tool which takes all your entries from a Roller database and re-creates the blog using the blojsom filesystem way.
    • Keep URIs the same for legacy entries, while still allowing control over their appearance. Need to think more on this. My gut instinct is that it could be done.
Posted by at 4:03 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

blojsom hits 1000 downloads

I just wanted to extend a "thank you" to all the folks who have downloaded and are using blojsom.

We're actually at 1,078 downloads, but 1000 was definitely a milestone for me. It's also encouraging in that blojsom was only released 3 months ago!
Posted by at 1:00 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

blojsom's Google Referer Highlighter plugin

Here's another one to chock up on the "We're closer to jumping the shark" list. Mark coded up the Google Referer Highlighting plugin to act in a similar way to the Google toolbar. The basic idea is to highlight the keywords in your blog if the referer is a Google search.

The closest I've come to a pr0n search that leads to my blog is if you Google for "livenudecats". Maybe I should strike that post? /images/emoticons/mozilla_wink.gif
Posted by at 11:29 AM in blojsom ... all blojsom

FindBugs - A Bug Pattern Detector for Java

Well, FindBugs is already proving to be useful with the blojsom codebase. Maybe you'll find it useful on your Java project.
Posted by at 10:41 AM in java ... just java

Thursday, 1 May 2003

blojsom and Audblog ... it's working!

Oh fsck yeah. Audblog finally worked! That is WAY too cool. You can find the post here. Mark also got it working but he's taken his post down.

Hey, Audblog folks ... drop me an e-mail so we can discuss you supporting blojsom /images/emoticons/mozilla_wink.gif Either that or leave a comment here. Great work you guys!

Maybe one of our new slogan's will be: "blojsom ... Cheaper than those 1-900 numbers!"

Posted by at 3:05 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Powered by audblogaudblog audio post"">Powered by audblogaudblog audio post

Posted by at 2:42 PM in My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult

Readying blojsom for Audblog

I was checking out MovableType's site the other day and noticed that Audblog can post to MovableType blogs. OK. But fux0r ... I want to post my one free audblog message to my blog which runs blojsom. Is all hope lost? Would I finally be able to post audio like, "You are in a maze of weblogs all alike. Think blojsom and get out!" I must prevail ... I MUST!

Would I use the audblog service? Maybe. I think it'd be fun to post to your blog on vacation so that people could get trip updates. Even in the 3rd world, you usually have access to a phone. Can you hear me now?

So, basically they're using RSD to discover the way to edit your blog. Fine, I added the rsd.xml file to my blog. Looking at the logs, it's able to get to the blog and then request the user information through the Blogger API's getUserInfo() method. DAMN! One of the simple ones we didn't support until like 5 mins. ago when Mark committed it to CVS.

Hopefully I'll have a successful post later on this afternoon.

Damn, just a thought here, but what would Prince have done had he kept his symbol, but still wanted to blog using Blogger? Oh well.

Update: OK, added getUserInfo() to the Blogger API. Now I can't login to Audblog. DAMNIT!

Posted by at 2:19 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Wednesday, 30 April 2003

blojsim ... blogging via instant messenger (IM)

I remember this morning that the "Best In Show" post from Sam Ruby mentioned, "The killer app for both P2P and Social Software is the same in both cases: IM." I started doing the math at that point:

1. blojsom is essentially social software.
2. blojsim has been around almost as long blojsom. It's an add-on that allows you to blog to blojsom via Jabber or AIM.
3. Mark isn't busy enough at work so why not throw this out there again, and see if people start some RFEs for it /images/emoticons/mozilla_wink.gif

1. + 2. + 3. = this blog entry. blojsim, you know you want to /images/emoticons/mozilla_laughing.gif
Posted by at 3:02 PM in blojsom ... all blojsom

Tuesday, 29 April 2003

Re: RSS formatting and specs

Blogs are great. Where else are you going to intelligently debate things like RSS formatting and specs?

"puppies and butterflies and kittens and cute stuff" aside, saying that we were RSS 0.91 compliant would've been wrong. So, I feel I was being technically honest in changing our RSS version to 0.92. However, I still don't see that RDF is much better in this regard for the following reason: for its various elements, a maximum length is given, but it's only a suggested maximum length. Unless I'm reading the specification wrong, which I don't believe I am, it's still only (Suggested) .
Posted by at 1:42 PM in java ... just java

Big pimping on b-l-o-j

Well, it looks like the PR machines are at work.

First Mark beats me to the punch with the announcement of blojsom 1.8. And I'm fine with that because Mark is my partner in crime. Then, the javasurfer.org announcement of blojsom 1.8 this AM was amusing because I found that via javablogs. Then there was the little bit of happy over at freshmeat.net announcing blojsom 1.8. Beyond that, the comp.lang.java.announce posting of blojsom 1.8's availability.

In summary, blojsom 1.8 is available.
Posted by at 9:24 AM in blojsom ... all blojsom
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