Month: 2002/03
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2002 March 27
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Instant outlining comes to RadioUserLand
Look at what Dave has done to me! My Radio weblog is sitting over here if you want to tune me in, and an explanation of the madness is over here.3/27/02; 1:25:43 AM by LMO This is pretty swanky. Swanky indeed. Instant messaging meets outlining. It seems that it's not quite there yet, but I understand that's not what this beta is about. But as a beta, this is a swanky mind bomb indeed. Especially if, as Dave says, we start to see who's watching whom in outliner land. This is what I want for all the weblogs. Hot hot hot. Now maybe I can get off my butt and work on Arboretum some more and get it in on this action. From what Dave's saying, anyone who can speak OPML (and I assume maybe XML-RPC and maybe Jabber) can play.3/27/02; 1:37:05 AM by LMO Of course, one other thing: Why didn't I pay attention to Frontier and UserLand sooner? :) This is what I've been trying to make with Perl, ?MySQL and friends for years now.3/27/02; 1:57:32 AM by LMO I really should be in bed by now, but I'm subscribing to outlines like a madman: Dave Winer, Scott Loftness, John Robb, Laurence Lee, Jake Savin, David Brown, masukomi, David Davies, and Jeremy Bowers I'm also thinking that there's some kind of unholy symmetry between me @ decafbad.com, my obsession with coffee, Dave @ userland.com, his affinity for coffee-- and of course, insomnia stemming from the fact that what you're doing at the moment is so much more fun than sleep. [ ... 263 words ... ]
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2002 March 26
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XmlRpcFilteringPipes are alive in RadioUserLand
So.. What have I been working on? Well, XmlRpcFilteringPipes via RUPipeFilters in RadioUserLand. I'm soaking in it right now. So far, the text I'm writing will be piped through my local RadioUserLand instance, with filters on the built-in glossary and macro system. After that, I send my content out for a trip through the DecafbadWiki to pick up a few links from there.For example, these should be some wiki links: BootToTheHead, ?EnlightenedSelfinterest, WebChanges, WebIndexThis should be the time via the statement clock.now(): 3/26/02; 5:46:22 PMThis should be a link to something truly evil from the bowels of my RadioUserLand glossary: Dancing HamstersI've got the whole shebang working in RadioUserLand right now. The only thing keeping me back from a release is building a friendly-ish web interface on managing pipelines. Maybe I should say screw it to that for now and just release it. It's useful right now, and managing pipelines is a matter of editing the preferences database, which is a breeze for early adopters. There are even convenience methods to do it with. And in-the-moment usage of the system is easy: select your text, copy it into the clipboard, bring up Radio's tray or dock menu, pick Pipefilters->Apply Pipeline to Clipboard, and away you go.Maybe I'll do this tonight. I think it's incredibly useful, and odds are someone else will too. Update @ 2:14am: Ooh, Dave linked to me. He called me weird. This makes me blush. If you're looking for the goods of which I speak, try coming back in about 8-10 hours. I've gotten sucked into playing with Dave's Instant Outlining bomb drop and have forgotten about packaging and uploading my own. Funny how I'd just posted a message to the radio-dev mailing list, jokingly demanding his goods. I go to dinner with my girlfriend, come back to find that he came through with it. I'm going to bed now, the alarm clock rings too soon. [ ... 320 words ... ]
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Perceptible interface + laziness threshold = weblog silence
Haven't managed to keep blogging here much, though I have been quite busy. Need to think how to make this space more interesting. Part of what has been holding me back is the interface. I'm used to the style of LiveJournal, where I have a little ubiquitous client that I pop open, jot some notes as fast as I can type, and hit "Post". Here, with Movable Type, things seem a little more sluggish and raises the posting threshold just vaguely above my laziness factor. But I can't quite get why. I have a bookmarklet that seems just as easy to use as the LJ client. I also have the Blogger API on MT to use, should I want to use one of those clients. Hmm. I'm also holding out a bit for the tools I've been working on to tie my writing to my wiki. Rather than merge the wiki and the weblog, I'm working on putting the wiki into my textarea. Holding out is what kept me from putting this site up for years, though. I need to start blogging in the moment, and keep it flowing. Even if no one's really listening yet. The other thing is that I'm messing with this division between this space an my LiveJournal. One's personal and the other is... not personal? This space at 0xDECAFBAD is just as personal to me, only it's less interesting to my normal group of friends over on LiveJournal. Seems like there needs to be a bit of a division, but maybe not the gulf between two entire sites' worth of distance. Seems like I need a categorized UBERblog where all of my weblogging goes, with specialized feeds branched off from it. Seems to me that this is where Radio UserLand could come in, but I need some more tools to make it happen. You see, although I want an uber-blog with categories, I don't want to leave my "legacy" LiveJournal, so I'd like to turn it into a mirror of a category, maybe with abbreviated notices of postings in other categories. Seems like I need to get a category-to-metaBlogger API tool working in Radio, along with a metaBlogger-to-LJ bridge working. Until then, I just need to keep making a point to babble in here. It's not as if I don't have things to say from moment to moment. [ ... 394 words ... ]
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2002 March 17
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XML-RPC + Wiki + SVG = Nifty?
I think I need to look into SVG some more. It seems that these things might be interestingly combined:XmlRpcToWikiOPML to SVGTouchGraphWikiBrowserThe current graphical link browser above is a Java applet, but it seems that doing the same thing in SVG might be more interesting. One thing I don't know about SVG is, can one delay sending chunks of the graphic? That is, present a navigable map of the Wiki's pages and links, but not have to query and process the entire content of the wiki to send the SVG file. Just show the relevant parts on demand. Could be fun stuff there. [ ... 103 words ... ]
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2002 March 15
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See wiki links and pages unfolding before your eyes
Here's something I think could really benefit as an XmlRpcToWiki client: TouchGraph I have it running right now on my Windows machine, playing around with navigating MeatballWiki, seeing the linkage connections that up until now I'd only seen in my head. It's really great to see them layed out in front of me, and to see them shift and expand an explode as I traverse from node to node. This is cool tech. The XmlRpcToWiki connection comes in where this app uses some "low tech" methods. The XmlRpc interface explicitly defines getAllPages() and getPageLinks() methods that would be perfect for this app. [ ... 103 words ... ]
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2002 March 14
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Why I have a blog on the front page of 0xDECAFBAD
I know everyone else in the world has blogged and linked to these, but: John C Dvorak slammed and trivialized this. Sam Ruby explains why I've got a weblog on this front page, and what I eventually hope it does for me as I make this place worth visiting. [ ... 50 words ... ]
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Need to tweak up the volume
I need to get more active with the blog on this site. I've been kind of holding back due to lack of a few blogging tools I wanted to work within (ie. WeblogMulticaster for one, GroupWeblogWithRadioUserLand for another), but I really need to start making this place more worth visiting. So, if I can get my butt moving, I'll start babbling more into the Tech category and maybe create a few more categories. I'll also try giving access to the categories split out into their own RSS streams and maybe bring more of my personal spews over on http://deus-x.livejournal.com into the fold here. [ ... 104 words ... ]
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Move over BloggerAPI, now there's something meatier
Yay! Today DaveWiner gave a shout out for this: RFC: ?MetaWeblog API. It's exactly, precisely, what I wanted. Not perfect, but allowing arbitrary metadata, with a preference toward RSS attributes, is pretty much what I wanted. It's basically what I was going to try to do in a hackish workaround way with in-blog-entry directives processed by a WeblogMulticaster. Oh, and in other news, there's a quick and dirty implementation of the XmlRpcFilterService for Win32 in the wiki now. More work to do... (Oh again, the content of this entry is a test of the pipeline hardcoded into the Win32 service. Not perfect yet, but getting interesting at least.) [ ... 109 words ... ]
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2002 March 11
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DecafbadWiki is an OS X service on my iBook now
This was easier than I thought it would be: XmlRpcFilterService Basically, this is my first application of the XmlRpcFilteringPipe. On the MacOsX side of things, I implemented a quick standalone service using Marcus Muller's XMLRPC Obj-C framework. On the filter side of things at 0xDECAFBAD, I added the filter methods to my XmlRpcToWiki interface I have running on the DecafbadWiki. So, now there's a filter named 'wiki' on the DecafbadWiki that I call with the XmlRpcFilterService under MacOsX. The nutshell version of this is: I write something somewhere, select some of it, click "Appname -> Services -> XmlRpcFilterService -> Apply to Selection" in my menu (or use the hot key), and the selected text is filtered through my remote wiki to pick up links and filtering. In the context of a weblog entry, this means that what I write in the weblog is now bound to the wiki. Hell, I can even make my postings to message boards and replies to email pick up links to my wiki. Now that I think of this, I might want to have a selection of an alternate rendering for email, where the links appear at the end of the message as footnotes. Anyway, it still needs a bit of work to make it more generally useful. It needs some preference panes to change and construct the filter pipe, support multiple pipes, and I need to bundle the XmlRpc frameworks up in the app for easy installation (or switch to Apple's built-in XmlRpc API). But the point is, it took me all of 2 hours between server and client side work to get this working, and it's already useful for me. I'll see soon if the sudden population of links in all of my communication from my laptop annoys anyone. :) This is one solution for a WeblogWithWiki, but I still want to play around with making the WeblogMulticaster and enabling it to use XmlRpcFilteringPipes also. And, somewhere, this figures into RadioUserLand. [ ... 329 words ... ]
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2002 March 07
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In case you're all wondering
In case you're all wondering what I'm doing, I'm moving over to using Radio UserLand to manage my journal and weblogs. I got a tool called xManilaBloggerBridge which binds my Radio UserLand categories to sites that talk BloggerAPI, namely 0xDECAFBAD and my LiveJournal account (via Blogger-2-LiveJournal installed on my webserver). Sound convoluted? It is, and it's about to get even more convoluted. The end result, though, is that I can write from one spot and publish to many sites, and write some more neato things to automatically process my writing as it goes on its way. (Such as, automatically create links to my wiki, where I maintain pages on long running ideas.) I am a nerd. I'll try to keep the high nerdity on 0xDECAFBAD and not on my dreamspace. :) [ ... 132 words ... ]
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Trying out both technology and
Trying out both technology and personal categories now. [ ... 9 words ... ]
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Testing out technology channel.
Testing out technology channel. [ ... 5 words ... ]
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aaronland vs 0xDECAFBAD -- Link!
Okay, cheesy entry title. Anyway, MailToRSS got mentioned on aaronland. Imagine my surprise when I see my name and blurbage come up on someone else's weblog in my Radio feed. Yeah, yeah, happens every day. But I'm happy to get this stuff noticed and found useful. Thanks :) [ ... 49 words ... ]
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2002 March 06
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The mind bomb of XmlRpcFilteringPipes and a web command line
To steal a page from Dave, I think that this could be a potential mind bomb: The XmlRpcFilteringPipe. I know I'm not the only one who's thought of it. In the process of looking for "prior art" right now. (Okay, yeah, that sounds pretentious. I just wanted to have Mind Bombs on my site, too. :) ) [ ... 58 words ... ]
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Welcome RdFlowers, and wiki reg considered harmful?
Welcome RdFlowers! One quick thought about the wiki: Is the registration requirement preventing anyone from editing my pages? I mostly have it enabled to tag authorship and let contributors set their own options. Not that I have much in the way of contributors yet, but is this registration thing a major turn off? Or, it could just be that not too many people even know this site is here yet. :) [ ... 72 words ... ]
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2002 March 05
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XmlRpcToWiki interfaces updated and in synch with API
Spent a couple of hours updating the implementations of Main: XmlRpcToWiki. Now, the adaptors to XmlRpc for the three wiki engines (TWiki, ?UseModWiki, and MoinMoin) are mostly in synch, and feature complete as I can see for the moment. Time to do something useful with them. I think I might push the WeblogMulticaster up a bit in priority. It'd be nice to get weblog posts dipped into the wiki by my blogger tool. Okay, time for bed. [ ... 78 words ... ]
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2002 March 04
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From Slashcode to Radio UserLand?
Hmm. I've mused about replacing Movable Type with Slashcode and going in one direction on the web app dynamicity scale. What about replacing MT with RadioUserLand? Might think about that some more. One thing is that it'd probably doom any multi-denizen wistful thinking I have about 0xDECAFBAD since Radio UserLand is a one-person blogging machine. Or, I could just accept that MT does pretty much what I need. I just want to get this weblog included in on some of the tracking features Radio offers. Hmm. [ ... 87 words ... ]
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A new project idea for simulating LiveJournal's Friends
Oh yeah, and another new project idea: LiveJournalFriendsReplacementOne of the best features of LiveJournal are Friends. As a LiveJournal user, one may add other journals to one's list and see entries in those journals aggregated together in one spot, similar to what RadioUserLand does with RSS feeds. However, the Friends feature also allows you to see who has added you as a friend to their aggregation view. Furthermore, each Friend is a link to that person's journal and list of friends, allowing one to wander through and navigate the social network of watchers and watched. RadioUserLand , and weblogs in general, need something as slick and explicit as this. Referral logs are too ephemeral. This is away of explicitly informing each other "I am watching you, and this is who watches me." [ ... 133 words ... ]
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Project quickies
Some quickies:Welcome, MarkPaschal! I'm giving in and starting to hack on some ?UserTalk in RadioUserLand. Looking for some IMAP support for playing with MailToRSS. Not finding any yet, I'm toying with RepeaterProxy as my first foray into ?UserTalk so that I can use a companion DesktopWebAppServer behind Radio to enable Python web apps, such as components of Caffinate. Need to solve packaging issues once I decide to release and distribute this companion httpd. Also thinking that WeblogMulticaster might make a decent RadioUserLand Tool. Still have to get back to XmlRpcToWiki and get the three implementations I have in synch with the API spec. Right now they're diverging. Okay, back to work. [ ... 111 words ... ]