Month: 2002/12
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2002 December 31
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Making a brane snapshot, re: PersonalWebProxy
Following in Russell Beattie's outliner brain dump footsteps, I revised my PersonalWebProxy page with cut-and-paste from my own outline in the works. It's far, far from complete, especially in the planning department, but I figure it could be worth poking at just to check out the developing direction. Having trouble getting to Russell Beattie's blog at the moment, so a link will have to wait. [ ... 66 words ... ]
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2002 December 30
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Motivation toward making proxy whatsits
Continuing along with the PersonalWebProxy meme, Russell Beattie writes:I have a lot of trouble with motivation on something like this. I get excited then I flip out because of how much something like this could entail and I find other stuff to do for a while to calm down. This has been going on for months. ;-) Yeah, and then there's that. Seeing what people are wishing for out of this class of app, we could wish it into the outer reaches of tinkerer feasibility and then get fed up and go home. That's what I'd like to avoid, personally. I'm puttering around with a bit of a spec for myself today, laying out a limited wishlist drawn from mine and others' ponderings and rationing it out into chunks. There's no way anyone could handle creating the perfect proxy/agent for the next millennia without descending into insanity and obscurity some 1% into the process. But, if things can be worked out to where it's being cobbled together in a process of loosely structured madness, there just might be hope. The crucial thing is that it move forward in tinkerer-sized steps, remain understood and tested at each point, and do some reasonably useful new thing after each lurch in order to remain interesting. The process should give tinkerers a chance to spend just a little bit of their non-copious free time to come up with something clever and nifty. This is how the lazyweb works. Okay, before I start getting too pretentious here, I'd better get back to work. [ ... 427 words ... ]
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2002 December 29
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InCITEing the Spanish Inquisition
On the cite tag, Mark Pilgrim writes further: "All right, everybody just calm the fuck down. It?s only a tag. I didn?t expect the Spanish Inquisition." Don't I feel like a fan boy? :) Heh heh. And, oh! that INS tag! Must be something in the post-holiday egg nog. [ ... 50 words ... ]
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2002 December 28
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Universal personal proxies & agent companions
Russell Beattie writes: The idea in my mind is for a project that would be a universal personal proxy (UPP) that sits between you and the internet. It would be a web proxy, email filter, spam cop, a place for agents and schedule tasks to run and more. It would be responsible for both receiving and sending of information - as web pages, emails, web services requests, ftp file postings, etc. In the middle it would do analysis like for Spam or RSS autodiscovery, intelligent bookmark history, etc. ... This sort of app would be for people like myself who spend an innordinate amount of time on the internet. Precisely. Exactly. Even down to the combination of P2P and desktop-to-server mix he writes about. I think we're starting to ride a meme here. This is what I want from a PersonalWebProxy. I've been trying to think of a better name for this class of app - it's more than a literal web proxy. I want an agent and an assistant - something that sits shotgun with me while I putter around and can help me study what I do and see. I want something that can eventually do things in my name for me, if I allow it. I want basically all the things Russell wants, along with everything agents do for the characters in David Brin's Earth. So. How to do this? I think I need to spend some more time fleshing out a spec before I do much more in terms of putting gadgets together. Need to reign in the fantasy, lay out some feasible first revision features, and start. I want it all, but I want to start out with something hackable, useful, and inviting for collaboration. Still probably too early to be thinking about implementation language, but I have been experimenting and expect some of these things to become the base for my development. My ideas on choices have become less clear-cut now. When last I wrote about this topic, and languages, Donovan Preston left a comment enlightening me with regards to my Python/Twisted vs Java/Threads consideration. In fact, threads are available in the Python/Twisted environment as well. So, now I'm back to thinking about things like free library availability, environment maturity, possible collaborators, and my own comfort level in each. Bah. At this point, I think I know all I need to know about what various environment choices can do in order to come up with a set of features that can be reasonably implemented in either or any environment. Need to solidify this wishlist into a task list and design and get going. [ ... 730 words ... ]
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2002 December 27
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Pushing envelopes and mining the hills
Although I did begin my days on the web by pouring over the HTML and HTTP specs back in 1994, I soon abandoned that effort and learned how to make web pages by example like most webmonkeys and hacks came to learn it. I wasn't ready, back then, to read a document like the HTML spec. But now, Mark Pilgrim makes me want to give it another serious shot, having leveraged the CITE tag in his weblog writing to pull a view of his entries by cited source. He's good at sneaking in smarty-pants things like that - you probably never knew he was doing it, you think it's wonderful when later revealed later, and then you wish you'd done more homework. Maybe "you" is just me. :) You think he plans these things in advance? I want the Mark Pligrim syllabus. Of course, the problem with the way so many webmonkeys learned to apply some semblance of web standards was the web browser. If it showed up nicely in the browser, it was Good. If ugly, it was Bad. If invisible or without apparent effect, it was Ignored. And this mindset worked great for the busy page builder up till 4:30am trying to cobble together the latest brochureware site. But now, after all the rushing around and recontextualization of business, it seems we're in the Winter season around here on the Internet. Not so much new feverish development going on, but a lot of reexamination and introspection - and actual reading of specs. And some really nifty things are going on, like the "rediscovery" of things that were there from the start but not too many people were careful enough to pick up on them at the ass crack of dawn while trying to launch another blight on the web. (No I'm not bitter about those days at all - no wait, yes I am. :) ) So, anyway, Mark Pilgrim wrote: "Let?s try pushing the envelope of what HTML is actually designed to do, before we get all hot and bothered trying to replace it, mmmkay?" I really like his point. Now that we're done rushing around trying to solve the insane demands of the moment, or trying to "add value" for the stockholders, maybe we can do more mining into what's already out there that we all trampled and stampeded past in the early years. Or, rather, maybe I'm a "we" of few or one here, since obviously some people have already started mining the hills for neglected gems. [ ... 423 words ... ]
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AmphetaDesk-fed blogroll now cluttering my sidebar
It's not incredibly complicated, but it's something I just hadn't gotten to until now: My AmphetaDesk subscriptions are now the source for my blogroll. I noticed the opml2html script that Jeremy Zawodny wrote, snagged it, and set up a quick cronjob to run the script and upload the HTML every few hours. It's ugly right now, but maybe it will finally make finish that new design. [ ... 167 words ... ]
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2002 December 26
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There is no perfect software design
Chris Winters threw me a link to my recent ramble on completely planned perfection versus workable organic imperfection in software design. After citing a very good perspective on software as gardening from The Pragmatic Programmer, he writes:As I've mentioned before there are a number of software development practices moving toward a more humane process. And I think the ideas underpinning worse-is-better play a big part in this. The major one in my mind is this hypothesis: there is no such thing as a perfect software design. Have you ever seen or heard of one? What design hasn't been modified over time due to changing needs or conditions? Good points. Still trying to find the middle ground between clean design and fecund dirt. There's no perfect design I've ever run into in my time so far, and I don't expect to. But, what I have learned, is that where there is no design at all, you have disaster. So I guess the main thing I've learned so far is that this guilty love of a dirty yet elegant hack while giving myself a "tsk-tsk" with a hope to design it more fully next time is useless. There will be no time that I've participated in a design that ends up being marvelously perfect. But what I'm trying to feel toward is how to get the balance right between clean and dirt, given skill levels and team sizes and project complexity. [ ... 239 words ... ]
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2002 December 23
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PersonalWebProxy as personal Google and Wayback machine
Matt Griffith proposes a virtual project: Jog. For the most part, what he wants is what I want from my PersonalWebProxy, and more. The big difference in the writing, though, is that Matt writes from features and what he wants, where I'm already describing things in terms of implementation. That is, I started talking about "proxy" where he's talking about "my personal Google and Wayback machine". I think looking at it that way makes a more compelling case for this thing being generally useful, rather than just some nerdy toy. Another way I'm looking at this PersonalWebProxy is as an assistant in a sidecar attached to my browser. I want this assistant to watch me, learn, and pipe up from time to time with suggestions. I also want to be able to ask questions and to remind me of things I vaguely remember. Eventually, I'd like this assistant to be able to drive for me from time to time, doing some info hunter-gatherer work for me while I do other things. I'm still working on this thing. So far I've got a proxy in Python and a simple-minded plugin framework. Two plugins so far: one is a cookie jar separated from any browser - that is, cookies are managed in the proxy, not in the browser; the other is a little thing based on Mark Pilgrim's rssfinder.py that quietly seeks out and gathers RSS links from every text/* resource I view. It seems to be standing up fairly well. My next steps are something along these lines: Should I continue in Python? To do so means delving deeper into Twisted, using their web app framework for the management UI and staying within their event-driven paradigm in lieu of threading. The reason I first chose Python is because I wanted something that was quickly and easily hackable and fun to contribute plugins for. Does this still apply, if things are deep in the Twisted mindset which is not quite straightforward? On the other hand, I took a peek at Jetty in Java, which also comes with a simple and hackable HTTP proxy implementation. I could easily cobble together in Java what I have in Python using this. I would also say that I could easily make it compatible with whatever plugins were written for the Python version, using Jython, but there's also a paradigmatic difference were I to go with Java: Threads in lieu of event-driven design. Maybe I'm thinking too much about this and should just keep doing what I'm doing. I'm trying to think and second guess a lot about what anyone who might care to play with this thing would actually care about. As for myself, I seem to be having fun with things as is. [ ... 1391 words ... ]
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2002 December 22
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On joining the FSF: The first actually useful membership card?
Mark Pilgrim writes: "I am now a card-carrying associate member of the Free Software Foundation. Software is free, but lawyers are expensive." And from the FSF membership page:You will receive a personalized, bootable, business-card-sized GNU/Linux distribution as your membership card. This GNU/Linux distribution is based on LNX-BBC. New cards will be sent to renewing members every year if and only if there is a new major release of LNX-BBC. So, not only can you give a little something back to a project from which most of us have benefitted from - you'll also get a membership card that's as useful in and of itself as carrying a swiss army knife, and as far as I know, it won't get confiscated from you at the airport. (Oh, and this entry is a test of the NetNewsWire Pro Beta weblog editor. This is only a test.) [ ... 178 words ... ]
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2002 December 21
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MovableType LDAP integration
This week, at work, I cobbled together a hack for MovableType that hooks it up with an LDAP server for author accounts: MovableTypeLDAPAuthors. This is an early, early, early release of the thing, and is likely to do very nasty things for all that I know. But, I wanted to share, and it seems to be working for the proof of concept at work (that is, MT weblogs on our intranet for every employee). Hopefully soon it'll be approved, and I'll be looking into a commercial use license for MovableType. You know, for all the praise I've read about MovableType, something I've really not seen much attention toward is the code itself. I mean, yeah this thing is great, and it's so simple to install and use by even non-techies. But, under the hood, there're some nice things going on - like a very decent object persistence approach; templating for pretty strict code/presentation separation; a workable servlet-like app structure with facilities for localization and a dispatch-table approach to executing web app methods. There are some spots that are a bit too if/else-ful for my taste, like the CMS' edit_object() method, but hey, it works. In other words, MovableType isn't just a cobbled together tangle of code that happens to produce weblogs. I've seen piles of well-used code on the web before that all seem to do what they advertise, but present a nightmare under the hood. (cough Matt Wright's famous scripts cough) No, MovableType looks like the result of experience, and I feel biased, because it demonstrates a lot of the same perl web app design patterns I've been employing and advocating for years now. So, my LDAP hack was a bit of enjoyable fun, instead of a chore. Along the lines of what I'd written last week about perfection versus good enough, I think MovableType is a good example. It's something I could have written, but didn't write and didn't release and didn't support and didn't make lots of people happy along the way. All the did-nots are the important bit. It's why I have two projects dead (Iaijutsu and Iaido) after a few years' effort, and MovableType is a gigantic success today. So, these are the kind of lessons that are an important part of what this weblog is about for me. [ ... 608 words ... ]
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2002 December 18
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On the road to a PersonalWebProxy
In case anyone's been wondering, I've not slipped back into oblivion. I've been a little busier at work again, but nowhere near a death march pace. And, in the free time I've been clearing up for tinkering, I've been working semi-obsessively on the aforementioned PersonalWebProxy idea. I dove back into Python, started soaking in the Twisted framework, and just about have an operable-but-ugly first attempt at a basic HTTP proxy with plug-in filters. Thinking that I need to knock it around some more to work out some kinks, and then bang up some initial useful filters. But I want to get something packaged up and offered for ridicule within the next week or so. Not sure if anyone else is or will be as enthusiastic about this little toy as I am, but I think I'll be able to do some nifty things with it. [ ... 181 words ... ]
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2002 December 14
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Think of everything but the obvious first
Today's revelation while tinkering with my PersonalWebProxy: Decompressed content is larger than compressed content. See, I was decompressing gzipped content streams in the proxy in order to fiddle with the content before it got to the browser, but then I noticed that browsers kept only displaying part of the content. I remove the in-proxy decompression, things are fine. Put it back in, things get cut short. I poke for a few hours at various bits and parts, to no avail. Then, finally I remember... "Hey, you know, I think browsers pay attention to that Content-Length header. And hey, you know... decompressed content is larger than compressed content." Bingo. Problem solved by keeping the Content-Length header updated with the length of modified content. This makes me feel very dumb, because it's not like I haven't written a handful or two both of HTTP clients and servers. And I've written code that uses the Content-Length header, over and over again. I'd've thought this would be something I'd remember more quickly. More often than I'd like to admit, remembering simple and obvious things like the above are what unlock problems that I'd been banging my head against. The last revelation of this nature I had while frustrated at a project at work was: "Not all months are 31 days." And before that, "Not all days in a year are 24 hours long, due daylight savings time." Trying to think of more, but I thought I'd share. Maybe I'll start a wiki topic for sage bits of the ObviousInHindsight. [ ... 430 words ... ]
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2002 December 13
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THe LazyWeb delivers?
Okay... This really is the LazyWeb. I barely mention writing some sort of RDF-based Tinderbox-a-like, and I see a link to Ideagraph on the #rdfig scratchpad . [ ... 98 words ... ]
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Stupid enough to buy an "eBook"
Is it just me, or is it pretty damn ironic that Mac OS X: The Complete Reference is available in Acrobat eBook Reader format, yet the Acrobat eBook Reader is not available for MacOSX? Yes, I'm bitter. And stupid. While I didn't buy the MacOSX reference, I did buy a book in eBook Reader format. Dumb, dumb, dumb. Can't read it now. Bastards. And no returns on eBooks. Crooks! Mental note: Next time remember to buy books whose only compatibilty requirements are sight and literacy. Unless I decide to learn braille or go for audio books, that is. [ ... 142 words ... ]
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Designing for recombinant growth with the lazyweb
I hadn't had a bon mot for it until yesterday, but I've been thinking about the concept of recombinant growth for awhile now and how it intersects with the LazyWeb / blogosphere. In particular, I've been thinking about design. I'm of two minds. As a perfectionist, I want sparkling gorgeous gems of elegance. It feels so good to be playing with something polished that so obviously has been imbued with immense thought. But, as a realist and a guy trying to make a living, I also appreciate adhoc rusty tools that still turn a screw. The thing might fall down in some cases, but otherwise it's a pretty steady companion. Looking at it another way, though, many of those otherwise sparkling gems won't let me use them as a hammer the same way I misuse the screwdriver on occasion. And oftimes, they don't have any control panels to open so I can reroute EPS conduits and exploit leaky abstractions. And then, there's the problem domain: on what classes of nails is this hammer indented for use? In one case, a particular hammer shines, in another, it leaves thumbs throbbing. I see infernos of flamewars start over principle, predictions of falling skies and doom doom doom. (It's not maintainable! It won't scale! It'll be the end of the web!) And then I see mischievous wizards and cantankerous veterans pull out a much-abused old standby and knock it out of the park. (Only the feeble-minded need strong types! Goto considered harmful - to you, maybe!) And then, sometimes, when you're in the realm of recombinant growth and the lazyweb, what initially looks like a jumble of wrinkled paper takes one more origami fold and turns into a perfectly formed swan. It gets confusing sometimes. So anyway, this all leads up to my questions as a naive, wannabe computer scientist: By what processes of design do we best facilitate recombinant growth? How deeply and to what level of detail? How dirty should it be, how unspecified or left with holes or shrugs? (Plants need dirt to grow.) How meticulously clean should it be? (We don't want to attract any bugs.) How much should be chalked up to bootstrapping, and how much should be wrangled and hogtied into perfect working order? I doubt that it there's a single fully valid answer to all this. But, I'm always interested in any of the answers I find anyway. [ ... 403 words ... ]
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A lesson in promoting recombinant growth by refusing to reinvent wheels
Another little train of thought, whose conclusion will probably be obvious to anyone: I wonder how hard it would be for me to make a little personal idea processor like Eastgate Tinderbox using RDF? Very likely much harder than it was for its author to create the original - I'm by no means smarter than Mark Bernstein, and he's got years on me in developing tools like Tinderbox. So why would I even consider rolling my own in this case? Certainly not the price - for a tool like that, the price is a steal. No, I think it's because I don't have full access to hack the thing, and it has a few itchy spots for me. At least, that's the way it looked when I last tried a demo on MacOSX. I wish I could fix them, and rolling my own is the best way I know for that. And besides, I'm in a real RDF love fest lately. But... Is it really so bad as it is? Bad enough to try to play catch up with what someone else has already devoted so much to? Nope. Bad idea. Best to promote recombinant growth, and rephrase the question: I wonder how long it would take me to get used to the tool's quirks as I percieve them, make suggestions to the author, and then use the extraordinary hackability already present in the tool to get it soaking in RDF? This is a lesson that's taken me awhile to resign to learn, so I figured this would be a good exercise to document it. And to think, I once spent a year or two trying to re-implement Zope, by myself, mostly in quiet, and with not much to show in the end. [ ... 443 words ... ]
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2002 December 12
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Standards based replacement for Exchange scheduling?
Mental note: Look into Jical, Java iCal Group Scheduler, as part of an Exchange replacement when the current server comes tumbling down when they try to upgrade it. Yeah, I know, it'll most likely be just fine. But I can dream. [ ... 42 words ... ]
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Working on an RDF-based task tracking proof of concept
So I'm singing the RDF praises at work today. I've gone through creating a very small proof-of-concept task tracking vocabulary in RDF. Initially, it covers things such as clients, projects, tasks, workers, time card entries. So far, I just have a vocabulary in RDFS and a sample load of data - both built by hand - but thanks to the BrownSauce RDF browser, I've been able to show off some nifty things. I know I've linked to that project two days in a row now, but I think it was seeing things through that browser that finally turned the last tumbler in my mental lock on RDF. As a demo to co-workers, just clicking through the linked resources, I can show who's managing what projects, who's been assigned what tasks, what a given person has worked on, etc. And I just keep drilling through links showing one view of relations after another. It's fun. Someone said it looks like how they breeze through data on fake computers in TV shows. Eventually what we want to do, if this proves to be useful, is expand this thing from just task tracking to slurp down more and more knowledge from around the organization and form a semantic intranet. And, I think it can do it. I just started getting Jena stashing statements into a MySQL database, so my next steps are to start actually working up an application around the data. So far so good. I hope I'm not insane to be thinking this is easy. Waiting for the enthusiasm to calm down so I can realistically take account of what warts are to be found in the current state of RDF art. [ ... 380 words ... ]
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2002 December 11
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FOAF and LiveJournal user info pages
Along with tweaking my RSS template today, I've been tweaking my FOAF file after perusing the FOAF vocabulary again and having spied on the FOAF files belonging to some of the bloggers in my neighborhood. Trying not to fall prey to simple cut-and-paste copying, and trying to keep in mind the underlying RDF model as I push things around. I've been browsing things with BrownSauce, but I have to keep reminding myself not to fall for the "looks okay in the browser, must be okay" fallacies that plague the entire HTML universe. Just because it seems to render in ?BrownSauce doesn't mean it's okay, and just because it might not look okay doesn't mean that it isn't. Must learn the model and the vocabulary. Repeat this 100 times. Whew. Anyway, the more that I look at it, the more that I'm thinking that FOAF is the perfect LiveJournalFriendsReplacement format. I can't believe I hadn't seen this before and gone completely gonzo over FOAF already. I think I'm grasping RDF and the FOAF vocabulary, so I don't think it would be a herculean task to build something similar to the user info editing pages over at LiveJournal, and to build a FOAF display page like my user info page on LiveJournal. Perfect. In fact, I wonder if I might not be able to work out a conversion between the two, maybe create a supplemental vocabulary to supply details that LiveJournal does yet FOAF doesn't. (ie. bio, IM accounts, birthday, blogrolls, etc.) More study to come... [ ... 335 words ... ]
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RDFifying my old RSS template...
Still working on my RdfNotes and learning RDF. I hadn't realized it, but my RSS feed was still being produced from a vaguely constructed v0.91 template, so I decided to update it to a v1.0 template for MovableType I found via Bill Kearney. I also got a little brave with the RDF and decided to start tweaking, stealing a few extra metadata elements from Eric Vitiello Jr.'s RSS feed such as a pointer to my FOAF file. If I'm lucky, everything validates and I can start poking at my own metadata with RDF tools. Update: Yay, according to the RSS Validator, my RSS template passes: [ ... 106 words ... ]
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Personal Web Proxy, Part the Second
Well, it's not earth shattering, but after some research and some more feature brainstorming, I've gotten a start on a PersonalWebProxy. At the moment, it's not much code and is transparent except for the fact that it transforms every appearance of "0xDECAFBAD" on pages into "0x31337D00D". What's exciting to me though, is that I tossed it together with an hour's hacking in Python, using the Twisted framework. So, starting work in a language and framework both mostly new to me is fun. Also, it's interesting to work in the event-driven style again, even though I still think I still want threads (see: Blog:000090). If I go to threads, I think I'd swap over to Java. I was tempted to start the thing in Perl, since I already know my way around the language, and I already know my way around POE, a major event-driven framework in that scene. But, I've been programming in perl almost to the exclusion of other languages for a little over 10 years now, not counting some excursions into Java or assignments for college classes. I think it's time to expand, and force my brane wider. I've touched on this topic before, but it's been ages since I had any energy to devote to this place and its projects. At least I didn't go completely apeshit and start this in Lisp or ?Scheme. :) Though I'd still like to make myself an assignment using one of those two, I'd like a few collaborators on this project at some point. I figure Python would be more hackable for this at present. [ ... 265 words ... ]
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2002 December 10
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MoBlog with WAPBlog
Speaking of BlogWalking and ?MoBlogging, I just noticed via following a referring link that Matt Croydon has thrown together and released a proof-of-concept WAP-based blog client app. Swanky. Check it out. I want to do the same thing, but using kinder-gentler-HTML templates for my Treo. My previous phone, a Touchpoint, supported WAP and thus WAP interested me for a year or so and I have a few private hacks laying around (ie. controlling X10-enabled house lights from my phone, trying to set up recording times on my half-working Linux PVR). But, being a fickle geek, WAP no longer interests me since my current phone supports richer things. [ ... 108 words ... ]
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2002 December 09
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Personal Web Proxies
Okay, now that I'm healthy, my girlfriend is healthy, my job is healthy, and my iBook is back to being healthy - I might just get a chance to sneak some time in for my Projects again. At the moment, I'm considering building a PersonalWebProxy. I've been playing with them and thinking about them off and on for years now. You can see a short list of them that I've poked at in the PersonalWebProxy wiki topic - you're welcome to add to the list if you know of more. In particular, the WBI project at IBM got me initially hooked on things. I really thought it was nifty how they edited HTML on the fly to weave in the WBI UI and add indicators on links in the page. And the idea of storing a history of one's web browsing in a local cache, available for review and later search, has always seemed incredibly attractive. Lately, I've been thinking of a few more things that might be useful in a personal web proxy: Marking pages to be periodically checked for change notification. A browsing "shopping cart", in which to collect pages now for later browsing. Auto-harvest RSS, FOAF, and whatever other associated page metadata that might be useful now or later. Maybe suggest subscribing to the site after a few visits. Use a ubiquitous rating mechanism, machine learning, and maybe some off-peak spidering to have new content of interest suggested. Publish and share browsing patterns, generate "Friends who viewed this page today also viewed this today..." Generate RSS feeds for all notification features And then, of course, there are things that I've seen already in other projects: * Rich browsing history Collaborative annotation Ad filtering & pop-up blocking Content summarization I'm thinking it would be nice to put together something like WBI and its modular API, maybe in Python, and make this thing super friendly to quick hacking. Could be some fun. What do you think? [ ... 881 words ... ]
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The prodigal iBook has returned
So, I finally got my iBook into and out of the shop, and I'm back on the reinstallation road to recovery. Not only that, but I got a little bit extra - seems that since my model of iBook is no longer available, the repair tech found that he was required to replace my dying 9GB hard drive with a quieter 15GB drive. Not a gigantic improvement, but it ends up being just enough to be nifty and was free to boot. Also, I splurged a little bit before starting Christmas shopping, and replaced the 256MB of RAM with a 512MB module. The improvement from 384MB to 640MB under MacOSX was much more marked than I'd anticipated. I don't know what kept me so long. So, my desires for a new iBook or a glitzy ?TiBook are dampened for now, and my pocket book thanks me. And, if/when I decide to toss this thing up onto eBay, the extras couldn't hurt the value. Also, I imagine that my expectations of OS X will have set me up for amazement once I get to play with a machine that supports Quartz Extreme and has a more decent processor speed. [ ... 199 words ... ]
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Of arrogance, bluster, and this village idiot
Tonight, I was perplexed about a comment claiming to be from DaveWiner - though it could just as easily be from an impostor - on the final installment of my extended XmlRpc ramblings:Pretty arrogant if you ask me. What has LM Orchard contributed to the world? Add more value, less bluster and bullshit. I suppose I should have stopped while I was ahead, refraining from rambling on about my case study to begin with, let alone responding to this comment. But, nonetheless I was bothered tonight, and responded:Your comment confuses me. I've written that your work has helped me and given me food for thought - despite other disagreements I may have with you. And I've written that a tool of yours I've come to consider imperfect has, nonetheless, worked perfectly for me. These things remind me that I don't know it all and have much to learn and hash out. If this is bluster and bullshit, I certainly didn't intend it as such. As for my contributions and value - I'd like to think I'm doing something right in this field, given that I still have a well-paying job and a non-zero readership of my weblog. I was trying to give a compliment and a positive testimonial, while addressing some of the standard criticisms I'd seen before. And I wanted to back it up with my own experiences while tempering it with my admitted inexperience. But, after having had a decent dinner and a measure of time watching soap operas with my girlfriend on the couch, I've decided that this is what tweaks me about the comment: What's a weblog for, if it doesn't make room for arrogant bluster and bullshit? My assumption in writing here is that I know enough or can figure enough out to write things valuable to someone - or at least, if I'm wrong, I can still provide myself as a foil of ignorance to someone else's enlightenment. Attacking the process, or the village idiot himself, is not constructive. Hope that helps. Have a nice day. Please drive through. [ ... 784 words ... ]
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2002 December 08
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Moblogging versus BlogWalking
About the difference between BlogWalking and Moblogging, Bryce writes:Moblogging is about capturing the moment with multimedia. Moblogs exist in a seperate space from traditional weblogs, and that's where the disconnect with Blogwalking occurs. Blogwalking is about taking our weblogs with us. Originally, we'd written about BlogWalking as literally walking with your blog, publishing & management software and all installed on a mobile device. The spirit of it, in my mind, was mobile blogging. Then, I read about Moblogging and assume it's the same thing. But, Bryce points out an important distinction that I think I get now. BlogWalking is coming from one direction, trying to make the blog mobile. Moblogging comes from the other direction, trying to make the mobile blogged. I'd off-handedly wondered what it would be like as a BlogWalker, if I could add a camera, GPS device, temperature sensor, and other various things to a PDA loaded with blog software - I already have the blog, but I want to add multimedia to it. Well, Mobloggers already have multimedia devices, with voice and imaging and more to come - they want to capture that content in a blog. It's a subtle difference, but somewhat important, I think. And after experiences with my Treo, an admittedly underpowered device versus the Zaurus, I'm leaning toward Moblogging. Keep the blog software off the mobile device, but make the mobile device into a multimedia blogging terminal. I think Moblogging is really the spirit of what I want from BlogWalking. I'm hoping for a color HipTop after my Sprint PCS contract is up. The Treo has been nice to me, but it hasn't amazed me. Although the grass is always greener, the HipTop seem the more amazing device to me. [ ... 425 words ... ]
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2002 December 03
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XML-RPC case study redux, Part III: I'll shut up after this.
Sheesh, have I rambled on forever about this or what? I think it could have all been summed up so much more concisely, as Paul Prescod did for me: "For the 20% that XML-RPC solves, by all means use it!" With my case in particular, his 20% is 80% of my problem domain. I guess the vehemence and volume of my reaction, which surprises me now looking back, stems from three things: First, I've gotten used to seeing statements along the lines of "XmlRpc and its ilk are complete and utter useless shite, will be the end of the web as we know it, and what kind of brane damage have you suffered to continue using it?" So, I fully expected to be smacked around for even vaguely hinting that I'd found, in my experience, that XmlRpc is extremely useful. But, to the contrary, I got a very nice and thoughtful response from Paul Prescod and the flames never rose. Second, on the level where my purist perfectionist self sits, I've bought into the "XmlRpc is shite" meme. So the fact that I do useful work with it from day to day introduces a bit of cognitive dissonance for me - how can it be complete shite if it's a money maker for me? I've got to justify this to myself somehow. Granted, there are warts in XmlRpc - but warts by what measure? A measure of ideal perfection, or a measure of real world experience? Well, what Paul gets across to me is that it's the latter, but my experience thus far is very much a small subset of the experiences of people who feel they need to go beyond XmlRpc. My experience with my problems is valid, and XmlRpc is useful. It's just that there's a larger domain for which XmlRpc falls down. This, I think is the key: XmlRpc is not complete shite. It works just great for the right problems, which happen to be mine. The question to which I don't have an answer is this: How many developers' problems fall into my kind of domain? Third and lastly, though I didn't get any flames for XmlRpc advocacy itself, I got a few private nastygrams flaming me for talking nice about DaveWiner's work after I'd talked not so nice about him some months ago. With regard to that, I have to say that I'm not on any particular crusade, other than for that which I find interesting. That said, I dislike many things Dave does and says. Though I'd rather not add fuel to fires, I might fail to resist on occasion - as noted above. However, I'm not the guy who's going to change his ways, he obviously doesn't feel a need to change, and I frequently don't have all the facts anyway. But I do like some of the guy's contributions to the world, so when occasion arises (as it did with XmlRpc), I'll say so. In any case, DaveWiner has given me much food for thought. [ ... 642 words ... ]
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2002 December 02
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Incomprehensible comment spam drifting in
This really confuses me. Seems that I've gotten 2 pieces of comment spam on one of my more visible blog entries (due to controversy) from back in September, More on the Monster Mash. The first one expresses confusion, then links to something about zip codes, and links again to something about business plans. The second one is apparently a strange flame at DaveWiner, then links to something about vehicle history reports. I'll likely delete these in a lil while, but it really confuses me. Do things like this really bring in financial results to the spammers? Random links in nonsensical comments and inappropriate flames? Do they really have some metrics on this, before & after spam revenue results? This, and other spam, is really seeming like superstition in pigeons, where various kinds of spam are tried and maybe money is made so more kinds of spam are tried until the oddest forms appear. I really do hope that, some day, the full fury of hell and recipients of spam scorned rain down on the heads of all those slimy bastards. [ ... 801 words ... ]
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Saved by a Thanksgiving food coma
You know you're an info freako and coding junkie when: Your trusty iBook - home to all of your projects in development, news aggregators, and blogging tools - goes into the shop for repairs, and all you're left with is a Treo 300 for convienient from-the-couch computing over the long Thanksgiving weekend. Most people would settle into a good book or maybe a James Bond marathon. Instead, being thankful for unlimited data access and at least having a screen at which to stare (albeit tiny), you install LispMe and a handful of editors and tutorials in a sudden, inspired effort to a) learn a new language (Scheme) and b) write a news aggregator and blogging tool for PalmOS as your first project. I mean, hey, LispMe has access to net sockets on PalmOS - XmlRpc and REST, here we come! Then, you go have Thanksgiving dinner, doze on your mother's couch in a food coma, dream about hordes of attacking parentheses (too much Scheme and NetHack), and all but forget about the whole thing. Watching the James Bond marathon isn't so bad after all. [ ... 185 words ... ]
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2002 December 01
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example.com is not porn - yay!
Noticed http://example.com linked to via the #rdfig weblog, and had this thought: Thank goodness that someone had thought to register that domain, or else my boss would have more likely than not been viewing porn after clicking on a link it in our last meeting. [ ... 169 words ... ]