Category: Web Services

Here’s an idea that I had earlier this afternoon while playing real life frogger in traffic.  (Aside: I’ve had similar productive thoughts in similar situations, I’m not sure why.)  I was pondering the easiest and best possible way to go about putting a gallery of images online.

Yeah, it’s been done a million times, but I haven’t seen a solution that seems to work for me.  I shy away from Gallery and other similar dynamic overkill projects after seeing a few sites get hijacked.  I liked Russ’ Scrapbook, but it’s still too much work for me (I’m lazy).

So, I guess I’m proposing that it would be really cool to have a blosxom-like photo gallery.  I have a feeling that this could be accomplished with a blosxom 2.0 plugin, though I haven’t looked into it enough to see if it would elegantly work or not.

One thing I’m worried about is violating the blosxom zen.  A blosxom module should be fairly standalone, easy to install, without heavy dependencies and stuff like that.  I just don’t know how much native image support there is in Perl.  Most of the image manipulation stuff I have used in the past have just been wrappers around standalone programs that a user might not have in a hosted environment.

I’d really like to just plop some fullsize jpegs in a folder and have an index with thumbnails generated on the fly without me having to do anything.  Something like that sounds like it could be a resource hog.  Maybe the plugin/program could save or cache a copy of the thumbnail, that would make most of the CPU intensive stuff only happen once.  That’d be cool.

I just wanted to get these thoughts down before they trickled out of my head.  If someone else ends up tackling this before I get around to it, cool.  Otherwise I’ll try to work on it in my ‘copious spare time’ and let you know how things go.  If someone else has already done this, let me know and I’ll point to it.

Someone should hire Les Orchard.

The J2ME Wireless Toolkit 2.0 seems to have taken a lot of headaches out of J2ME development.  I messed around with the Wireless Toolkit 1.x a few months ago, but didn’t get much further than the basic demo.

I really like that I don’t have to drop to the command line in order to build or deploy.  I don’t have to write a jad in a text editor, it’s generated for me.  All of the basic properties are easily accessable.

Of course, if I were working on a project in a production situation, I would probably use Antenna, a collection of ant tasks for Ant 1.5.x that allows you to build, preverify, create JADs, and do all the other stuff that all the cool kids are doing.  It’s released under the LGPL.

I’ll definately have to look into this.

Brent has released a new version of his Cocoa XML-RPC implementation.  It’s BSD’d open source.  If you are using XML-RPC on the OSX platform, you should probably look at Brent’s code over Apple’s WebServicesCore:

At this writing (7 March 2003) the implementation of XML-RPC in Apple’s WebServicesCore has a crashing bug. Whenever a method response contains an empty element, there’s a crash.

Scott Johnson is the man.  He has put together Roogle, which indexes RSS feeds and makes them searchable.

Very cool indeed.  I’d also like to nominate Scott for disclaimer of the year:

This page is not sponsored by Google, affiliated with Google and will probably get me in trouble.

Via InfoWorld:

Good Guy Hacker Adrian Lamo got ahold of us a few weeks ago to let us know of a few security holes he found. We checked through the logs and none of them appear to have been used before Adrian found them. We have fixed the security issues and Blogger is better for it. Adrian rocks for not only finding the problem but also for letting us know about them so other people won’t be affected. Thank you, Adrian.

Dave Winer:

World of Ends is a Cluetrainish manifesto by Searls and Weinberger. Of course what they write is right. The Internet is not complex and it resists being made complex.

That reminds me, I’ve managed to loose my copy of Cluetrain before I had a chance to read it.  It’s probably buried somewhere.  Either that, or I left it in Boston.

How can this be applied to the web services universe?

Rogers Cadenhead:

I’m writing this post using FM RadioStation, a new Windows application that provides a different user interface for Radio UserLand (screen shot). It can be used to publish a weblog, read RSS news feeds, and browse the Web (using a built-in version of Internet Explorer 6).

I saw the announcement pass by radio-dev either early this morning or late last night, the two seem a little blurred.  It looks like this puppy has a lot of potential.  A few people have had various problems with it, but remember, it’s a preview release.

System requirements:

Requires IE 6 being installed and seems to like systems with more than 128 MB RAM.

Well of course, we all like systems with more than 128MB of RAM.  It sounds a little bulky, but look at all those tabs!  Cool.

Local radio station WTOP reports that sons of Osama Bin Laden have been captured in Pakistan.

I’m really only posting it here because I wasn’t able to find any news reports on the net yet.

The traditional web is still too slow on breaking news.

Update: I’m going to leave this here, but it looks like so far, the US is not confirming this story.

Erik pointed out a good overview of IBM’s Wireless Toolkit.

To take this to its logical conclusion, Nokia’s Developer Forum points to kXML-RPC, a J2ME XML-RPC implementation which looks really lightweight.  Of course, you could always use kSOAP if you really wanted to.

Brain: Pinky, are you pondering what I’m pondering?
Pinky: Uh, I think so, but how are we going to fit a SOAP stack AND a monkey in a cel phone?

Speaking of burnout, I might have to remove the AP feeds.  I’m suffering from information overload.

Here’s your next-gen aggregator: an aggregator that automatically trawls your RSS feeds and generates a ‘front page’ ala news.google.com.  You can drill down into sections, but the content that you are going to be most interested in will be ‘above the fold.’

The aggregator might goof a little in the beginning.  After you’ve trained it, it’ll be able to sniff out content that you are interested in better than you can.  I’ll bet that every once in awhile it will give you a list of new sources that you might want to keep track of.  Or perhaps, it will add those sources, a few at a time, and remove them if you don’t seem interested.

The revolution will be aggregated.

InfoWorld confirms:

“I think we’re suffering from standards burnout,” and Suttor.

What next then?

“In the future, the Web is going to escape the browser, and I think that’s going to be a very good thing,” Suttor said.

Are more planes falling out of the sky than before, or am I just more aware of them now?

Current RSS feed count: 244.

If a tree falls in the woods and a weblogger is nearby, I’ll probably hear about it.

Dave “Tabbed” Hyatt:

I’ve seen a lot of comments in various Mac forums where people have claimed that “Dave Hyatt said he doesn’t like tabbed browsing!” or “Dave Hyatt hates tabbed browsing!”. I find these posts perplexing, because I never said any such thing, and of course the opposite is true. I love tabbed browsing. I implemented tabbrowser in the Mozilla trunk. I implemented tabbed browsing in Chimera. I implemented the version used in Phoenix. Given how many times I’ve implemented it, I’m amazed that people would think that I am not a tabbed browsing devotee.

Cool trivia.  Check out the rest of the post to see UI decisions for tabbed browsing.

John Burkhardt:

I can’t say it any better than Paresh.  I wish all who were let go yesterday the very best.  I’m experiencing a bit of survivor’s guilt today.  Behind the headlines we have to remember that there are real people and families, hopes and dreams.  If anyone is looking to hire some of the best and brightest folks in the business, be on the look out for resumes with Groove Networks on them.

This is exactly what I was trying to express yesterday.  Thanks, John.

WiFi News:

I believe we can call today the day the dike broke. Why the UK suddenly went from a few hundred installed and a few thousand committed to tens of thousands in the works and several thousand up in the next months is anyone’s guess. There goes that tipping point.

Doug Kaye points this out:

Don Box: Too Many Specs. The co-inventor of SOAP (now a Microsoft engineer) had harsh words this week for vendors contributing to the plethora of web-services specifications, and advised developers to read less of them and get on with writing applications.

Yes.  I agree 100%.  The WS-* specs seem to make things more confusing, more complicated, work against each other, and generally muck things up.  I’ll bet that they don’t actually solve the problems that they set out to solve for most people.

Jenny, the awesome Shifted Librarian:

We’ve decided that Andy Rhinehart is channeling my RSS feed. On his way in to work this morning at our favorite Spartanburg newspaper, he thought up a way to syndicate Associated Press headlines. So put your hands together for the Spartanburg Herald-Journal’s AP National and AP World RSS feeds!

Yes!  Subscribed, subscribed.

It’d be really nice if we could get this information straight from the AP though.  I mean we are all independent reporters.

MacSlash:

Apple has introduced an updated Power Mac. The relevant specs: dual G4/1.42, upgraded DDR 333 RAM, and FireWire 800, with pricing between $1499 and $3799. From the site: “The new Power Mac G4 combines rock solid engineering reflective of the full-throttle Xserve architecture with new technologies for massively enhanced output and connectivity. And it’s a digital media powerhouse that delivers tremendous value across the line, with dual processor performance starting at just $1999”

Gizmodo:

Wait a second. So Sony Ericsson’s widely anticipated P800 smartphone is about to go on sale in Bulgaria, but it’s still weeks away from being available in the US?

That’s messed up.  I protest.  I’d settle for a Nokia 7650 or something similar though.  Something?  Anything?