OK, so maybe this is not exactly
the greatest video clip ever. but sure it's given me quite a few good laughs.
(Via The Jason Calacanis Weblog.)
Archive for February, 2005
If you've been trying to post a comment on this weblogs in the last hours, you couldn't because, after having enabled the SCode plugin for blojsom, I forgot to add one very important extra option to the Tomcat configuration:
-Djava.awt.headless=true
Without this option, Java will try to connect to the X server to do whatever it needs to do in order to generate an image. And since I stopped X before going home yesterday, the result is that the CAPTCHA image was not being generated.
I should have known better. I't about the twelfth time that I trip upon this gotcha.
I've just written, with the help of one of my coworkers, a couple of small Cocoon components whose purpose in life is to suck in pages from a Confluence wiki via XML-RPC, turn the HTML into well-formed XHTML and spit it out. Putting an XSL-T transformation in front of it allows one to build a Cocoon webapp that uses Confluence as a backend repository, or a small CMS if you dare to call it such. Wiki content can be thus styled at leisure, aggregated with other data sources or manipulated in any way that you like, all without touching Confluence's Velocity-based templates (yick!).
The idea is to start putting a new face to Source.zone and pave the way for adding other features. If I find some time, I'd like to tinker a bit with JavaBB, for example. A forum could be useful. The original Confluence GUI will still be used for editing content in the backend.
Of course, the new face will need to be pretty. Nobody wants to browse web pages that suck. So I need to spend some time this week-end thinking about the best design, which entails a lot of “view-sourcing” around, of course. Suggestions are welcome.
I will also need to find a new logo. Since I have a nephew who is studying design, I think a bit of “nephew art” might be the final result.
Would someone please hit Mr. Gosling on the head with a cluestick?
These businesses are more hype than reality. If they don’t have a [longer term] economic model…they are going to have a really hard time.
(Source: Computerworld)
You’re bound to expect such trite remarks from the likes of Gates and Ballmer, not from a bearded, t-shirt wearing (and hurling) geek.
Maybe we should his ask ponytailed COO what’s the economic model behind the opensourcing of Solaris 10.
Or why another of the executives at his company has “Open Source Diva” written as a qualification on her business card.
To be honest, there’s always the possibility that Computerworld simply took some quotes out of context and stuffed words in his mouth. You know, journalists are not above those tactics, at times.
(via Bruce)
Update: I am pretty sure that Sun does have an economic model for Solaris 10 and I hope the very best for them, seriously.
What I am at odds with is statements like These businesses [MySQL, JBoss, and Red Hat] are more hype than reality.
And I have to admit I was put off by the title of the article. I had to look up to chide in a dictionary (To scold mildly so as to correct or improve; reprimand: chided the boy for his sloppiness.
) since English is not my mother tongue just to be sure. But, of course, the title is not James’ fault.
User Stories Applied : For Agile Software Development (Addison-Wesley Signature Series)
by Mike Cohn
Writing user stories is one of the twelve practices of the XP software development methodology. User stories summarily describe features of the software that must be developed, from the point of view of the user. This means that no implementation detail is present on stories.
As with all the XP practices, the emphasis is on traveling light, producing only those artifacts that are absolutely necessary. Thus, user stories contain a brief description of the feature as a reminder, to the developers and to the customer, that sometime in the future they will need to meet and flesh out the details. This is in contrast to techniques like use cases, which might seem similar but are much more formal and rich.
User stories also play a fundamental role in the planning game, one of the other XP practices. During the planning game, the development team and the customer together discuss the stories, the developers estimate the time necessary to implement each story, in terms of story points and the customer prioritizes them. During the next iteration, developers will implement those stories that the customer deemed more urgent, up to a number whose total sum of points does not exceed the estimated team velocity.
All of this is explained in a couple of the XP series books, namely Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change and Planning Extreme Programming You'd better have already read at least the former of those before picking up Mike Cohn's book.
User Stories Applied does a good job explaining in detail what user stories are, what goes into them —and what doesn't —, how they should be estimated and what to do with them after the stories have been implemented.
There's a lot of good sense advice in this book, which might induce someone to think that user stories and all other XP practices are just a bunch of generic suggestions that you might apply or not, as you wish. That's certainly not true, as XP is a methodology whose effectiveness lies in the combined action of all the practices when they are taken to the limit. This takes determination and discipline and, in my experience, it's just too easy to fall into the habit of following only some of them, say when you're not under deadline pressure, and still pretend that you're an XP shop.
I would have liked more real-life stories in this book, in order to spice it up a little. As it is, everything that is there sounds highly reasonable (at least to me) but it wouldn't convince anyone who is skeptic of XP's supposed benefits. The example at the end of the book sounds contrived and hollow.
On the other hand, if you have been already convinced by Kent Beck's white book and want to start adopting XP, I can heartily recommend Mike Cohn's book. Recommended!.
An interesting quote from Bill to complement my previous Green Bar post:
Another way is to write tests as you develop, in particular to use the act of passing tests to drive development of code. It's often easier to stay productive when you have something concrete to aim at, which is exactly what a test provides.
Nicely put!
This leads to the question: what if I could write programs for the Web that were 'structured' in the programming sense of that word? The result would be Web programs that were more natural to write and easy to read. You'd no longer have to maintain the state of your program outside the language and the data could be kept in variables, where it belongs. The answer is: you can.
Of course you can. This has been possible in Cocoon since a few years ago!
Other continuation-capable web frameworks include Rife and Seaside.
I inaugurate the newly added Skepticism category of this weblog with a post about the Global Consciousness Project and its Black Box:
According to a growing band of top scientists, this box has quite extraordinary powers. It is, they claim, the 'eye' of a machine that appears capable of peering into the future and predicting major world events.
Those who know me well would undoubtedly characterize me as a rationalist skeptic and a die-hard reductionist. And as such, I should probably conclude that the Global Consciousness Project only reveals human foolishness.
Nonetheless, I have a nagging feeling that this Black Box merits more thourough investigation that a simple shrug-off. If — and it's a big if — there's something real here, it has probably to do with some sort of quantum effect.
Since I read Roger Penrose's The Emperor's New Mind, I have been convinced that the human mind cannot be reduced to a mechanical process, to say nothing of a Turing machine — and so much for AI. So, if quantum mechanics are at work in the black box's random number generator, which is certainly possible, we might have established a connection, if not an explanation.
It's a tenuous connection, at best, and more experiments will need to be carried out to ascertain whether there's even a phenomenon to be studied, or if it's only self-deception at work. But, for once, I am keeping an open mind.
Being a rather satisfied NetNewsWire beta tester, I certainly appreciate its embedded browsing mode.
But there's one feature I wish it had. When I find an interesting news item or blog post, I want it to be preserved and not fade away when it is superseded by newer items. In this case, I usually post it to del.icio.us. For that, I have to open the link in an external browser and use a nifty bookmarklet that I found somewhere (I'd point to the URL, but I cannot find it anymore).
Wouldn't it be great if I could post to del.icio.us from inside NetNewsWire? Maybe there's a script out there that awaits to be found.
Update: Brent suggested to use this script. Thanks.
Excuse the cheap word game abusing the title of a classic 70's album, but I just came upon the Description of a Project — DOAP specification (via Steve).
Could be a useful addition to Source.zone, couldn't it? Well, before I start implementing something, I'd like to know if the thing is alive and kicking,in other words actually used by someone. For a start, I subscribed to the mailing list to investigate.
Matthew already commented on Stefano's latest post to the Cocoon developer list and I don't have that much to add to Matthew's observations. I tried to do something about Cocoon's complexity some time ago, and not much came out of it, so I let it fall beneath the horizon.
Anyway, I offered a small suggestion in the way of overcoming one of the troubles Stefano mentions:
Scripting spoiled me so much (and my life habits changed too with my new job) that my attention span in coding is very much reduced: spending hours without seeing anything solidifying will very likely force me to
leave it unfinished and uncommitted… then the next day something else
comes along… and when I go back to it I forgot where I was (or the
codebase would have already changed!) and I have to start over again!!!
I can't count how many times that happened!
When I think about implementing real blocks, I think about the *weeks*
of not having anything visible and I never even start!! even if it might
honestly just take a few days!
I simply suggested using the Green Bar as a cure for this particular illness. What do you think?
So it looks like there will be a new major Internet Explorer version soon. As a web developer I'm all for it, if it finally brings real support for Internet standards like XHTML, CSS, DOM, etc. Not, on the other hand, if it's just meant to match Firefox and Safari's features like tabbed-browsing, popup-blocking, etc..
I think we'll be able to tell soon.
(Via Scoble.)
I wonder who has been responsible for what seems a standards massacre and a community suicide.
Standards aside, what about usability? I thought Jakob Nielsen was required reading for every wannabe web designer. So why do people still insist on using the same text color, weight, font and decorations for links as for text?
So, what about some Google-bombing like Repubblica.it sucks.
P.S.: Gianugo, your comment system is broken!
Yesterday was an unusual sunny and warm day for this time of the year, even if a bit windy, so we took a chance to go for this year's first bike ride.
If you're looking for a good, Open Source, content management system, you should definitely take a look at Daisy, whose latest release — 1.2 — has just been announced.
What's more interesting, however, is what is foreseen for the next version: furthermore, we expect to upgrade Daisy's internals to reflect the current state of the art in component containers and messaging frameworks
. Now, everybody has his own idea as to what constitutes the current state of the art in component containers and messaging frameworks, so what about letting us know some more, Steven?
Just a quick note to let you know that the eBay auction for the beblogging.com domain has five days left before time runs out. If you are interested in a PR6 domain, check it out.
Today I was trying to retrieve content from a Confluence instance via XML-RPC and fell hard upon encoding issues. Turns out Apache's XML-RPC library doesn't support UTF-8, which is what Confluence uses.
After a bit of googling around, I found Tom Bradford's alternative XML-RPC client library et voila, problem solved!
Thanks, Tom.
Thanks to Jim Jagielski for his contributions to Source.zone.
Thanks also to Sylvain Wallez for a small typo fixing … well, not so small for him since I mistyped the name of his company ;).
Now, this prompts me to ask for advice. Should we stroke the egos of frequent Source.zone contributors (hoping there will be more than one) by allowing them to put up a small bio page?
So, we are looking for a decent web application to manage our XP-like software development planning activities. We could, in theory, use scraps of papes or whiteboards. The problem is that we don't have enough walls here to hang whiteboards, only windows. And scrap of papers are not well accepted by our ISO 9000 certification team ;).
We used XPlanner for a while, but its development seems to be stuck. XPlanner is nice, since it is Open Source, Java and uses Hibernate, so we could hack it a bit to make it go forward. The problem is that it still uses Hibernate 1, while we are using version 2 for all our developments and version 3 is already in beta. Plus, it uses JSP (yick!) for the presentation.
There are other products out there, both Open Source and commercial. You can find lists here and here. Take care that most of the links on those pages are probably outdated.
From a cursory examination, commercial products are either cheap and too simple, or complex and pricey … or simple and pricey, not to mention the ones whose vendors don't even put a price on the website — I won't even go near the latter.
As for Open Source ones, well, you can't beat the price, but PHP, Perl or even nice languages like Python have to be ruled out, since we cannot afford to spend time learning a completely different language and programming environment. The point is, I would want to modify any product in order to add test results, integrate with JIRA and so on, and for this I need a familiar environment.
This probably means that we will have to build something from scratch. After all, the XP planning methodology is not exactly rocket science. The domain model is made up of projects, iterations, stories, tasks and developers. “Business” logic is straightforward. You just need a few forms and a handful of reports and you're set.
We discussed this option and it was obvious that we could do a nice Cocoon webapp, with Forms and Flowscript, with a bit of Spring and Hibernate thrown in for fun. That's the stuff we do day in day out, so I foresee no difficulty in doing that. I suggested that we release it as Open Source, which for once could show the management that doing Open Source work does not only mean installing Linux and Apache ;).
Another option that intrigues me, after having worked in Confluence for a few days, is doing a Confluence extension. As you can see, I'm really starting to dig Confluence.
Do you have any opinions? If you do, please leave a comment.
I've always been a Kubrick fan, but besides a few exceptional cases, his movies very seldom get to be broadcast on the Italian TV channels. If they do, it's at impossible times and with many commercials thrown into, which really sucks.
In particular, I've never been able to watch Dr. Strangelove from start to finish. So it's with great pleasure that I've learned that tomorrow's copy of L'espresso — an Italian weekly newspaper — will feature a DVD copy of Dr. Strangelove. Since they usually distribute a very small number of copies to each newsstand, you have to remember to ask for it early in the morning.
