Month: November 2002

Jeremy Allaire:

Today, Macromedia launched Macromedia Contribute, a powerful new desktop application that aims to unleash web publishing for everyone, while providing control to web professionals ultimately responsible for websites and applications.

What amazes me more is that Macromedia was able to take Drumbeat 2000, a painful to use development environment, and turn it on to something useful (Dreamweaver UltraDev).

I just took a peek at the overview video, and Contribute looks pretty slick.  Browse -> Edit -> Publish.  It seems like a good combination of Manilla, Mozilla, and FrontPage.  I haven’t viewed source yet on what it produces, but it looks like the overview relied on tables.

Brian Graf:

As of today, I am finally allowed to talk publically about what I have been working on for the past six months. Here is the press release and an early article.

In all fairness, I had really very little to do with this. Most of my contributions were related to getting Dotfuscator translated into all of the languages that Visual Studio ships in. We turned over our first feature complete version three weeks after I was hired, so most of my stuff won’t be seen until a future version.

Congratulations to everyone at PreEmptive Solutions for a job well done.

Congrats!

There’s an interesting article going on over at Kuro5hin on current RSS problems and possible solutions:

RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is a web content syndication format based on XML 1.0. In the current implementation it’s a very capable format used to aggregate content from multiple news sources. The problem with this format is that the architecture on which it is deployed hasn’t changed in a while and places too much load onto the infrastructure. (e.g. Joel’s RSS problem)

In this article I try to point out different approaches to solve these problems and make RSS more suited to be used on mobile devices which are not always-on.

Charles Miller chimed in with all kinds of goodies including mod_gzip, NNTP advantages/disadvantages, server-level caching, and the Jabber possibilites.

I have managed to implement about 3/4 of the AggregatorAPI methods via XML-RPC in C#.  I don’t really know C#.  I have a book by Peter Drayton and others called C# essentials.  That and my Java/C++/Visual Studio experience is all that I’m drawing upon.  The testing app is quite ugly, but you’ll note that I can subscribe, unsubscribe, get stats on the last aggregator run, and get info for a specific feed.  I have to figure a few things out before I can implement the last few methods.

As soon as I can implement and test the other methods, I’ll release the C# source under a license that is compatable with the XML-RPC library, hopefully something BSD-style.  This might save other developers with implementation, they can just roll with it.  I should have some free time tomorrow to work on it.

I still have not had time to write up my experiences thus far.  One thing I will note: there’s a HUGE difference between http://127.0.0.1/RPC2 and http://127.0.0.1:5335/RPC2.  I smacked myself for that one.

Here’s a little teaser for you.  In addition to some schoolwork this afternoon, I also wrote up a quick proof of concept client for Radio’s XML-RPC based AggregatorAPI.  After frustration (I’ll tell you later), I ended up using Visual Studio .NET and Cook Computing’s XML-RPC library.

I hope to turn this proof of concept micro-app into something potentially useful.  I’d also like to share some of my experiences with writing and debugging XML-RPC apps, and writing for Radio, but that will have to come a little later.  For now you’ll just have to wonder.

Expect to see a recount of my experiences later this evening.

The BBC reports that parents are freaking out about America’s Army: Operations.

A computer game devised by the US Army has come under fire from parents anxious that it glorifies violence.

The army hopes that the game, America’s Army, will help it to attract the tens of thousands of young people it needs to join its ranks each year.

The game allows players to go through a virtual army enlistment and basic training.

More controversially, they then go on to more advanced training, including marksmanship.

The shooting part of the game is so realistic, the computer screen even moves in time to the digital soldiers’ heavy breathing.

Yes.  The game is realistic.  Actually, it’s probably the best and most realistic first person shooter that I have played, and I’ve played a lot of them.  I’m not a parent so I can’t see things from the same perspective.  I do know however that I’ve been playing first person shooters since the 386 days, and computer games in general since I was a little kid, and I’m not out shooting people on the streets.

Computer games, TV violence, movie violence, and other external factors are easy scapegoats when something goes wrong.  I’m not convinced that they are the root of the problem.

Russell Beattie shares his experiences with developing for really expensive cel phones.  He touches on SDK shortcomings, J2ME headaches, and some cool stuff too.  It’s definately worth a read even if you’re not considering developing for the platform.

Alan Cooper imparts 14 principles of polite applications.  I’ll read it in depth in the morning, but right now #4:

Polite Software Has Common Sense.

Google has recently cached the updated version of my weblog.  The googlebot is still choking on my blogroll.  Perhaps I should rename and relink miniXmlCoffeeMug.gif, or I might just get rid of the pictures completely.  Something like:

Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]
Site Title [rss]

I think I like that.  Over the weekend (Sunday) I’m going to be helping a friend with some Java, and I’m going to try to sink my teefus into the Radio Aggregator XML-RPC interface.  We shall see.

I’m also the 77th Matt on google.  We’ll see if this changes after the googlebot crawls my content and not just half my blogroll…

(Not so) mental note: take a look at Jetty.

David Watson has made the switch.

The Apache Axis team has done a fantastic job of putting together an excellent 1.0 release. And I’m especially thrilled that I can deploy easily on jetty without the weight of a full-blown J2EE server.

[via Sam Ruby]

Jerry Cooperstein at O’Reilly’s OnLamp talks about multithreading in the upcoming 2.6 kernel:

Recent advances in Linux’s threading implementation are expected to continue to ease migration from other Unix-like operating systems. These advancements have arrived with intense activity on two fronts. First, thread-handling improvements have greatly enhanced the kernel’s scalability even to thousands of threads. Second, there are now two fresh, competing implementations of the POSIX pthreads standard (NGPT and NPTL) set to replace the aging LinuxThreads library.

Slashdot covers an announcement of the Waypath Project:

Remember the recent slashdot story on NASA cancelling the moon hoax book? Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject? Launched today (in beta), the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. The Waypath Project’s Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what’s related to your original input. This is done all automatically.

The site documentation is interesting– what would you do if you were implementing a similar system?  I notice that they poll weblogs.com.  No need to manually add my weblog.  🙂

It’s being slashdotted, so be gentle.

Joe Walnes weighs in on the UI debate:

As sad as it sounds, when I’m designing a UI and I have to think about layout, shortcut keys, MDI/SDI, menu structure, skin, tab-order, input widgets, etc – more often than not, the Outlook-way is more desirable than the right-way.

It looks like Java 1.4_01 broke something for Russell Beattie:

ARRRGGH. Java 1.4.1_01 broke the scroll wheel in JOE. WHY??!? Frigin’ Sun, will you please get your head out of your collective asses?

Thank goodness it’s OSS so I can go in and see what the problem is… it’s probably trying to use an old scrollwheel workaround for 1.3 and ignoring 1.4’s support for it. But still. UGH!!!

Yes, it’s true:

Busy times. No time to blog in the past two weeks. We’re doing a major redesign of the newtelligence website, which will finally be fully dynamic, web service enabled and the new home for my blog. I’ve written a news aggregation service using all the good stuff in the .NET Framework and a bunch of ASP.NET controls for this.

A quick roundup of the Aggregator API:

• Aggregator API page at Userland
• First radio-dev thread about implementation, including how to update Radio to test
• Information on the API glue scripts
• New features/things chaging
• aggregator.getLastScanInfo (username, password) returns struct
• aggregator.getRecentItems (numberOfItems, username, password) returns struct
• aggregator.getItem (itemId, username, password) returns struct
• aggregator.deleteItem (itemId, username, password) returns boolean
• aggregator.deleteItems (itemIdArray, username, password) returns boolean

Mike Beam at O’Reillynet has part one of a multipart tutorial on adding Rendezvous into Cocoa apps.  Here’s the teaser:

As Cocoa developers, what do we need to know about Rendezvous? And how can we effectively use it in our applications? These are questions that I want to answer in today’s column.

Today is officially Fuzzy Friday.  I forgot my glasses at home.  I think growing up with a green phosphorescent screen on the family 8088 was detrimental to my eyesight…

Cinelerra is an audo and video compositing program much like Broadcast 2000 was before it was pulled due to nastygrams from lawyers.  From the description:

If you want to make movies, you want the compositing and editing that the big boys use, you want the efficiency of an embedded UNIX operating system combined with the power of a general purpose PC, or you just want to defy the establishment, the time has come to download Cinelerra.

Also of note are pointers to simpler video editing apps:

Cinelerra is not for consumer use. If ease of use, simplicity, and convenience are your thing, you should use Virtualdub, Kino, MJPEG tools or MainActor instead.

There is also linkage to the sourceforge project page.