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!!!
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:
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.
Here’s to you, Mr. 2.4 kernel tree maintainer…
CNet/Jim Hu reports that Yahoo is decreasing its six core departments to five:
The new major divisions are search and marketplace, media and sales, consumer services, network services, and enterprise solutions.
Amazon is hiring a former Yahoo chief scientist to make their darn good algorithms even better:
Udi Manber, who will also become a vice president at the online retailer, worked at Yahoo for four years and previously taught computer science at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Arizona. Manber, who has focused on search technology and algorithms, is the author of “Introduction to Algorithms–A Creative Approach.”
At a software development conference in Seattle, Gates will detail improvements planned for its Visual C++ tool, which is included in its Visual Studio.Net bundle. Microsoft on Thursday disclosed planned revisions for its Visual C# tool, also included in the Visual Studio.Net.
Here’s an interesting open source project that might prove useful to some people. The project is called Blogrouter. Here’s a description:
Blogrouter is a Perl-based mail script for receiving email messages and inserting them into a Blogger or similar Weblog. Image attachments are automatically incorporated into the Weblog text. Blogrouter can be installed as a programmatic mail recipient or invoked from procmail, and supports multiple users.
This might be an over-engineered way to automate blogging, create a metaweblog from various other weblog sources, or do other stuff that I haven’t thought of. This is definately an interesting project, and one that I will do my best to keep an eye on.
Juha Haataja asked how easy applying the new theme was. Here’s what I had to say:
The transition went pretty well. I had also tweaked my old theme, adding links and blogrolls down the side. I saved my home page template so that I could keep these tweaks.
The next step was to turn upstreaming off in Radio. I didn’t want things to go live until they were ready. I had to remove every reference of Veranda and Garamond from the movable type CSS file after applying the theme. I’m an Airal guy. It’s clean.
After removing a few things like smaller fonts on links and adding a new section on the sidebar with my blogroll, I turned on upstreaming.
I opened Radio, and ran Tools -> Publish -> Entire website. A good backup of your www folder should be done beforehand.
Overall I’m pleased with the result. It didn’t take a whole lot of time and was definately worth it.
Weblog Redesign
I’ve been sick and tired of the radio theme that I had been using for quite some time. It had too many graphics and did not focus on the important part: the content. I’ve switched over to one of Radio’s movable type themes. It’s CSS (not tables like before), much lighter weight, and will be easy to customize. Right now font sizes are a little hardcoded, but I’ll hopefully get things relative pretty soon. Drop me an email and let me know if you find any bugs or if you have any comments.
Another reason that I was not happy with the old design is that my blogroll went down the left side. With this design, it goes down the right with more room and less clutter. Google was also choking on the blogroll sometimes, which doesn’t make things good for indexing. At this point, Google should get through all the content before it starts digesting the (massive) blogroll.
Like I said, there are a few things that still need to be ironed out, but this way users can focus on content and not get distracted by pictures and stuff. A good quarter of my hits come from RSS anyway, so many of you might not notice.
I eventually would like to get a homebrew CSS template together, but for now, this makes me much happier than with my previous theme.
Andres Aguiar open-sources his WSDL2Java wrapper/plugin for eclipse. His demo at the Web Services DevCon (East) was awesome. That’s one more thing you can do easily in Eclipse:
This plugin was developed to provide a quick way to import Axis Java SOAP stubs into a Eclipse project. I just needed it for the DeKlarit demo I did in WebServices DevCon East, so don’t expect new improvements for this tool. I submitted it to axis-dev@xml.apache.org, so perhaps it’s included in the Axis codebase sometime.
Way to go, Andres.
Access Radio’s Aggregator via XML-RPC
There it is, unleashed on the world. There are some really useful functions in there, I love it. I’ll have to play with it a little later, right now I have to coax my win2k server with a crippled registry (I think) into behaving.
Unfortunately, I could probably whip up a test app in VB.NET in about a minute and a half if it were a SOAP+WSDL interface. I should probably be able to do the same with XML-RPC, but I can’t.
*sigh*
Blogback Loop
Diego Doval responds:
Matt wants to see Weblog Sync enabled in spaces. All I can say is… Soon! 🙂
Sweet.
And yes, I did read the EULA to make sure that I could post a screenshot. I think that’s the first EULA in a long time that was readable (length, language). I know it’ll change, but…
I’m not allowed to tell, but I’m running something that Russ mentioned earlier right now.
