Ugo Cei’s Weblog
Rich Bowen: “With 214 responses to the ApacheCon RFP, about half of them coming in the last week, we're gathering in NYC to select which ones will be in the show, as well as put together the schedule.”
Having submitted two proposals myself, it's going to be tough getting one or both through with 212 competitors. Oh well, at least it looks like we'll now soon.
Free Phone Calling To Your PC: Teleo Better Better Than SkypeIN - Robin Good's Latest News: “After Skype has recently made the headlines with its release of the SkypeIn service, which allows Skype users on any computer platform to receive phone calls from any standard telephone line, a new tool challenges this latest feature, with an impressive PC-based offering where, those who call you on your PC, do not need to pay for the call.”
I think this is wrong on various counts:
OK, I might be a bit overly suspicious here, but I've seen too many vaporware products touted as the next best thing since sliced bread not to be just a little wary.
I've just opened the Source.zone blog. It's basically a linkblog where I'll collect pointers to articles and blog posts about Open Source in general, not tied to any specific project or technology.
The look of it leaves much to be desired, but it's the best I could come up with given the limitations of the RSS 0.92 feed generated by Confluence. Just to name one, it does not include post dates, author or any other info besides permalink, title and description.
If you prefer to aggregate it, the RSS feed is here.
Carsten: “I'm currently working on a better integration of Spring into Cocoon. Currently, of course you already can use Spring by using the spring servlet (filter) to initialize the application context.”
While the technique Carsten mentions, of using the filter, is something I have already documented here, what he's coming up with is much cooler and will hopefully foster a better integration between Cocoon and Spring. Can't wait to start testing it.
Update: I’ve updated the link to the slides.
Recently, we responded to an RFP which called for an enterprise application with a Web interface, RDBMS, the usual stuff. Since we needed to compete on costs also and the necessary server hardware, OS, appserver and DBMS licences were to be included in the bid, I suggested that we keep the hardware costs low by colocating the application server and the DBMS on the same machine.
I explained that this configuration was actually better, in terms of performance, than having app server and DBMS phisycally separated. Turns out that we won the bid, but now the customer is complaining that this cannot possibly be true, and that we should be using two servers instead of one. I suspect they want us to provide them both without changing the price.
Anyway, since it was me that suggested that configuration, I am being asked (by tomorrow morning!) to provide documented justification for the claim that colocating application and database server is better for performance. I will have to dig a quote from Ted Neward's blog, since I got the idea from there. I think I can find something relevant from Martin Fowler too.
While I'm searching, if you, dear reader, have some pointers to share, please leave me a comment.
Cool! The latest Skype Beta for OS X (1.0.0.15) is out and it includes support for SkypeIn and Skype Voicemail!
I've just tested the voicemail feature and it rocks! Too bad I don't have customers in the USA, France or Hong Kong, but pretty soon I shall have colleagues in the UK, so I might buy a SkypeIn number there, or wait for number availability in Italy.
Tonight, at the Anarchists' Circle “Ponte della Ghisolfa” in Milan, there will be a meeting with Joi Ito. Or a speech. Or a wet t-shirt contest. It's hard to tell, since the webpage for the event does not say much.
Don't bother translating it to Italian, it's quite devoid of information about the real meat of the event. It also carefully avoids listing “venture capitalist” among Joi's qualifications, together with “manager, scholar, activist traveler and indefatigable speaker”. But you could expect that from an anarchists' circle, right?
What's more stupid is that Joi's name is misspelled (it's J-O-I, not J-O-Y), the URL of his website is similarly misspelled and it's not even a link. Hey, little revolutionaries, this is the Web, you know? It's made of links, try to use them, for chrissake.
Anyway, I'm thinking about going, but I cannot really make up my mind. What do you think?
(Via Bru.)
McBlog - place to eat real meat: Stop using confluence as Website CMS tool: “I am watching more and more open source projects backing their website completely on Atlassian Confluence. While this tool is a viable choice for Wikis and documentations, i find it horrable as a website. First of all, you look like so many other projects, because there is a common layout for Confluence. Then you have links that normal webusers dont need and are simply a waste of space.”
While this is certainly true for sites like OpenWFE and Blojsom, you can actually do better by using Confluence as a backend and exploiting its XML-RPC APIs to provide a rather different and altogether more pleasing frontend, like you can see here and here, for instance. The content of both sites is managed using Confluence.
But even if you use Confluence alone, it's not the worst thing you could do. You could be using Maven to generate your website. Now that sucks! 
Making Money With Your Blog: Amazon Ads - Robin Good's Latest News: “Vishal has just released a first public free version of his Amazon Ads web-based service allowing anyone with a site, to easily integrate the latest deals, offers and products from a selectable number of Amazon product categories.
“
Nice idea, but doing it for free? Assuming it takes off, who will pay for the service costs? Donations? Not likely. In order to survive, Vishal will be forced to charge for the service, maybe by shaving some cents from each click, which might prove to be difficult since Amazon does not have a CPC model like AdSense.
In short, where's the business model? Anyway, I might give it a try, while it lasts.
These days, I'm reading Gerald M. Weinberg's The Secrets of Consulting. Basically, I ordered it when I was seriously thinking about becoming a free-lance consultant, but even if this won't probably happen anytime soon, there are still lots of gems in this little red book.
One of those is “The Third Law of Marketing”:
Spend at least one day at week getting exposure.
In 1985, when the book was written, there were no blogs, not even the Web. But today, for a consultant or a professional, what better way too get exposure than keeping a blog?
Keep this in mind next time you feel you're wasting too much time blogging (which of course entails reading lots of other blogs). If you're not spending at least one day per week doing it, you aren't doing it enough.
Handling usability concerns such as the back button, and bookmarking: “One of the issues with offering Rich Internet Applications on the web, is that many technologies ignore the browser.
You can have a great UI, but what if you user has gone through and filled out a large form, and then hits on the back button? Will they get taken out of the application and be scrambling to work their way back?”
Just this morning I posted an entry about usability and XMLHttpRequest. Now I've found this other resource dedicated to all things Ajax and on the top of the page an entry dealing with usability. Must be the topic of the day!
As XMLHttpRequest is rapidly gaining popularity as an effective tool for building highly interactive, dynamic Web UIs, care must be taken in ensuring that Web applications remain usable (and accessible, I might add). While plenty of resources exist on making usable — and accessible — traditional HTML forms, very little has been written on the subject of usable XMLHttpRequest-based UIs. So it's with great pleasure that today I discovered (via Patrick) the following two-article series by Thomas Baekdal:
XMLHttpRequest Usability Guidelines | Baekdal.com: “XMLHttpRequest is becoming more and more popular, and many people are currently exploring what we could do with it. Unfortunately this also causes people to reinvent old and forgotten usability problems.”
Usable XMLHttpRequest in Practice | Baekdal.com: “Two weeks ago I highlighted the most important usability issues with XMLHttpRequest. This week we are going a step closer to see how you can mix the two - including a practical example, just for the fun of it.”
Be sure to read his advice and in particular the following one:
Do not over-use it:
With every new approach, there is a normal tendency to over-use it. But don't. Always consider if XMLHttpRequest is relevant for the user. Is it just noise that breaks the users flow, or does it really accelerate their workflow.
Push Button Paradise: “If you find this blog useful, have read something useful or interesting here, or are merely entertained by my ramblings, drop in a link from your own weblog/web site/blogroll. Thanks!”
I know Micah from his involvement in the Cocoon community. He is an XForms expert, author (XForms Essentials, O'Reilly) and advocate and a very nice guy to deal with. If you need XForms and general XML consulting, take note that Micah is available.
Now that I've done the requisite amount of whoring will you please reciprocate? Your blog's home page has a Google PR of 6 and an inbound link to mine would do me quite good ;).
Ted Leung on the air: “In my opinion, AOL has given AIM users a reason to leave their system in droves.”
I'm not so sure. How many users has AIM? How many of them will consider this to be annoying enough to switch to a different IM platform?
Not many, in my opinion. Most people don't consider being vulnerable to spyware, viruses and other malware and to be annoyed by popup ads reason enough to switch from IE to a better browser. They will eiher think that they have nothing to hide or that what they write is not that interesting enough for AOL to appropriate it.
That's the way dictatorships work, actually. Dictators will pass laws limiting freedom of expression or other freedoms, and most people will think that this doesn't touch them. Then they will start sending people to the gas chambers or to the Gulags and still people will think there's nothing to be worried about.
Disclaimer: I'm not equating AOL with Hitler ;).
If you are caught speeding on the highway by this car, don't even think about outrunning it: it's a Lamborghini that can do 310km/h!
Actually, as they explained to me, it's more frequently used for the quick transportation of organs for transplants.
Saturday morning I happened upon this nice display of new and old highway patrol cars in a local square. Since I had my camera with me I took a few shots and later uploaded them to Flickr. You can see them in this photoset.
Today I interviewed a candidate for a junior developer position and tried to apply some of the techniques from Joel's The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing. After the candidate did not fare well on most programming questions, I tried to establish if he had at least some basic problem solving skills, so I posed a typical impossible question. I asked to compute the weight of a statue of Minerva that is one of the best known monuments of our town, the one you can see in the picture at right. It's a large bronze statue that could easily weight a few tons.
It goes without saying that the candidate completely flunked the test. He undoubtedly belong to the second category of candidates described by Joel:
Not-so-smart candidates will get flustered and upset. They will just stare at you like you landed from Mars. You have to coach them. 'Well, if you were building a new city the size of Los Angeles, how many gas stations would you put in it?' You can give them little hints. 'How long does it take to fill up a tank of gas?' Still, with not-smart candidates, you will have to drag them along while they sit there stupidly and wait for you to rescue them. These people are not problem solvers and we don't want them working for us.
No amount of coaching and dragging could save him. So, if you are that candidate and are reading this (possible, since a smart candidate would certainly have googled for my name, but you? ) I'm sorry that you have to learn it here, but you've been rejected.
It sure needs more work, but I've decided to bite the bullet and go live with the new Source.zone website. I hope that this announcement will generate some traffic and maybe uncover some bugs.
The new website is nothing more than a simpleminded proxy made with Apache Cocoon that queries a Confluence wiki in the backend using XML-RPC and dresses it up in nice colors. You can still get at the wiki using wiki.sourcezone.info as a hostname. If traffic starts building up I will need to implement some form of caching, but for now this will do, as the proxy and the wiki are running on the same machine.
Feature-wise, the current version of Source.zone is nothing more than a wiki with a pretty frontend. Planned features like reviews, ratings, comments, blogs and other collaborative, social tools will come in the next months. Stay tuned!
What is Source.zone?
If you are a developer looking for an Open Source library, framework or toolkit which might help you with your current project, there is probably something out there that fits your needs, if only you could find it.
Sure, there are some places like Freshmeat or SourceForge, that list a large number of products. The problem is that sometimes it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, to see which projects are alive rather than dormant or dead; which ones have a diverse, thriving community behind and which ones are basically one-man-jobs; which ones grew from real needs and which ones are simply abandonware products that some company decided to opensource rather than bury at the end of their lives.
The problem is that it's currently hard to find the correct project that suits your needs. But really that's only because someone hasn't come up with the Amazon type storefront and built that in front of the repositories, so you can search and find the project you may need. And even if the project is run by someone on a remote island on his own - who cares - it might be exactly what you were looking for to build that particular solution someone really needs.
Source.zone's aim is to create a storefront for access to Open Source projects. The storefront will have the same level of participation that users give back to Amazon or iTunes by providing their personal feedback in form of reviews, ratings, comments, developers who liked this project also liked this other one.
Our intended audience is developers and we focus on infrastructure software: libraries, toolkits, frameworks and environments that can help a developer build applications quickly, reusing robust, tested and widely used components.
Di Vino & Cibo (”of Wine and Food”) is the title of an Italian-language blog that me and my pal Stefano have just started.
As the title implies, its main theme will be, of course, wine and food, but we plan to throw in some posts about other tasty issues. Actually, my second post there is about beer. But hey, it's a blog, so we might also post some kitten pictures now and then … just joking ;).
Skype Voice Mail & SkypeIn Rates: “Skype slips into their website help section a new knowledge base which unofficially reveals their pricing strategy for voicemail and SkypeIn.”
Initially, SkypeIn numbers will be available in a selection of top US cities and states, 0870 numbers in France, 0207 numbers for the City of London in the UK and 819 numbers in Hong Kong.
Also, Skype VoiceMail Beta is available for Windows only, which probably means I'll have to wait a little while before testing it.
(Via Skype Journal.)
XtremeMac - AirPlay FM Transmitter for iPod shuffle: “AirPlay is the first FM Transmitter for iPod shuffle. Allowing iPod shuffle users to play audio wirelessly from their iPod shuffle through any FM radio, AirPlay is perfect for use in automobiles, especially those without a cassette player or auxiliary input jack. AirPlay for iPod shuffle is powered by the attached cigarette lighter adapter and also acts as a charger for iPod shuffle.”
Neat! At $49.95 it’s a bit pricey, but it looks much cooler than a cassette adaptor. I’m wondering if I will enter the wonderful world of podcasting with something like this. Well, at the moment my daily commute is too short for serious podcasting, but this might change soon.
(Via Michele)
