Archive for October, 2005

Steve’s brown trousers

Published by ugo on October 13, 2005 in apple and fun. 0 Comments

nojeans.jpgWe all know Apple products have the best design in all of the consumer electronics and computer industry. But yesterday’s event introducing the video iPod and the new iMacs left us shocked and very disappointed.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW): “Look at the picture to the right. Steve is not wearing blue jeans! Those are pants, for the love of Pete…and they’re brown!”

You mean: Brown pants with a black turtleneck? Did Steve wake up yesterday morning and, without even opening his eyes, put on the first two things that he could find in his drawers? What will be next? A pink iPod with a red clickwheel? Someone please give the the guy a lesson on dress color matching. ;-)

I consider myself lucky…

Published by ugo on October 12, 2005 in personal. 0 Comments

… that my plane from Amsterdam was delayed by just two hours. I could have traveled by train and found myself in the same situation as Carsten.

Dave Winer doesn’t like OpenDocument

Published by ugo on October 12, 2005 in miscellaneous. 0 Comments

Dave Winer: “After years of maintaining absolute control over user’s data in Microsoft Office, the new version promises to give total control to the user, and creates a path for developers to siphon users from Microsoft to new or specialized products. One would think that this would spawn an explosion of new products designed to please Office users but that’s not what’s happening. A group of large technology companies is proposing a competing set of formats, and has formed an alliance to confuse the market, and at least double the work of any developer who might want to support their products (with almost no installed base) alongside Microsoft’s (with a monopolistic dominant installed base). “

Yeah, right. Since Microsoft has a dominant installed base (illegally acquired or not), let’s just give up any hope of defining a format that is really open and unencumbered by ambiguous licensing terms and patents. Doing so would just be “confusing the market”. Bah!

According to Wikipedia, however:

All of this is in contrast with the competing “Microsoft Office Open XML” developed by Microsoft. Microsoft has released their format royalty-free, but with additional conditions not imposed by OpenDocument. Independent analysts have stated that Microsoft’s licensing requirements will prevent many competitors from ever implementing Microsoft’s format. The extent of this incompatibility is the source of significant controversy between Microsoft and other parties. The text below attempts to capture these differences, since they are often one of the reasons people consider using OpenDocument.

One is left wondering whether Dave’s opinion isn’t at least a little influenced by his dislike of Tim Bray, who is very supportive of OpenDocument. And of Atom.

Gmail weirdness

Published by ugo on October 12, 2005 in miscellaneous. 1 Comment

I just noticed that in the last hour or so, almost all mails that I send via Gmail’s SMTP service don’t get delivered to their original recipients but end up in my Gmail inbox instead. What’s stranger is that those are visible only on the Web and not via POP. I’m doing various tests to see if I can understand what’s happening.

Get ready for ApacheCon US 2005!

Published by ugo on October 10, 2005 in apache and cocoon. 2 Comments

ApacheCon US 2005 logoWe just finished recovering from the Cocoon GetTogether and a new event is alreaddy approaching. From December 10 to December 14, 2005, San Diego will host ApacheCon US 2005. It’s nice that they moved from Las Vegas, but a more eastward location would be great for us Europeans. Orlando maybe? Let’s hope for next year.

Anyway, the distance shouldn’t discourage any of you from attending. As always, a great time is guaranteed to all. This year, moreover, I will be doing a tutorial on Advanced Cocoon: Flowscript and Forms. We need a minimum number of people to sign up for it, so don’t be shy and sign up now!

A word of caution. My friend and colleague Gianugo will hold his Taming Apache Cocoon tutorial on the morning of the same day, Sunday December 11th. Don’t be confused by the apparent overlap in the subjects covered. We are working together to ensure that people attending both tutorials won’t hear any repetitions, but will instead be presented with a linear progression of concepts. Of course it’s entirely possible that you want to follow the morning tutorial only, to get your feet wet before diving deeply into Cocoon later. Or that you are already familiar with the basic concepts and only want to hear about the latest developments. The choice is yours!

CocoonGT wrapup

Published by ugo on October 8, 2005 in cocoon. 1 Comment

Amsterdam dock at sunsetJust a few words on this year’s annual Cocoon GetTogether, which ended yesterday. As always, great fun was had by everyone and it was great to meet once again with the usual folks and get to know someone else for the first time. Sadly, I could stop in Amsterdam just one night, so I hadn’t much time to talk with everyone I wanted to.

Kudos to Arjé and Steven for brilliantly taking care of the organization!

As for the matters that were discussed most at the hackathon and at the conference, pretty much everyone agrees that what emerged was a strong drive towards greater simplicity for our beloved framework. And almost everyone agrees that this simplification can be obtained without compromising the huge investment that many people and companies have done on Cocoon in the past.

Personally, as I wrote before, I am not so convinced, but I heartily applaud all efforts towards this elusive goal. I too have made a huge investment on this platform and will have to maintain and enhance projects that use it, possibly for a long time, and I’m not going to jump on the RoR bandwagon soon.

Photos here. Slides and podcasts from the presentations here.

Be worried

Published by ugo on October 8, 2005 in miscellaneous. 0 Comments

New York Times: After Delay, U.S. Faces Line for Flu Drug. As concern about a flu pandemic sweeps official Washington, Congress and the Bush administration are considering spending billions to buy the influenza drug Tamiflu. But after months of delay, the United States will now have to wait in line to get the pills. Had the administration placed a large order just a few months ago, Roche, Tamiflu’s maker, could have delivered much of the supply by next year, according to sources close to the negotiations in both government and industry.

(Via Dan Gillmor)

I guess Bush thinks God will take care of this, somehow.

The Guardian: George Bush: ‘God told me to end the tyranny in Iraq’. George Bush has claimed he was on a mission from God when he launched the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, according to a senior Palestinian politician in an interview to be broadcast by the BBC later this month. One of the delegates, Nabil Shaath, who was Palestinian foreign minister at the time, said: “President Bush said to all of us: ‘I am driven with a mission from God’. God would tell me, ‘George go and fight these terrorists in Afghanistan’. And I did. And then God would tell me ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq’. And I did.” Mr Bush went on: “And now, again, I feel God’s words coming to me, ‘Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East’. And, by God, I’m gonna do it.”

(Via God is for Suckers!)

Be worried. Be very worried. I’d be ashamed too, if I were American. As an Italian, I’ll do my part feeling ashamed for a crook like Berlusconi.

Google Reader, disconnectedness and full feeds

Published by ugo on October 8, 2005 in google. 2 Comments

152004071-logo.pngThose devilish Googlers are releasing new products once a week. This time it’s Google Reader’s turn. Check it out if you’re the kind of person who uses web aggregators. As for me, apart from looking in awe at the usual display of Ajaxy techniques that we’ve come to expect from any new serious offering of web-based services, I don’t think I’ll be using it at all. I am really too comfortable with NetNewsWire to consider switching.

A web-based aggregator will never be able to compete with a desktop one as long as the latter can work in disconnected mode. Case in point: Yesterday, as I was stuck in Schiphol airport while my return plane was delayed once again because of the fucking bomb, or of the fog, or both, I could either fire up NetNewsWire and read the couple hundred or so items it had previously downloaded, or be robbed 6 Euros for every 30 minutes of WiFi connectivity if I wanted to stay online. And even if I had accepted that sort of thievery, still I wouldn’t have been able to continue reading while on the plane.

Unfortunately, the world still isn’t a perfect place, as many of those 200 items were just excerpts and I couldn’t visit the corresponding web page to continue reading in case I were interested, even if I wanted. This is one more reason while I am growing more and more annoyed by partial RSS feeds. If authors are doing this to force us readers to visit their website, they should consider that sometimes we just cannot.

I am listing here some of them, probably the most interesting but certainly the ones I miss more when I cannot read them. If enough of my readers click on these links, maybe the owners of the linked sites will notice the referral traffic and think about the issue some more.

ZD Open Source, Burningbird, Jon’s Radio, ongoing, Robert C. Martin, Otaku, The Fishbowl, ProBlogger, Zeldman.

Comparative Performance of XSLT Processors in Cocoon

Published by ugo on October 7, 2005 in cocoon. 0 Comments

I just finished listening to this talk here at the Cocoon GT and boy! How I wish I had been able to know about its conclusions earlier (in a nutshell: Xalan 2.4 sucks). I have a customer who has been having memory problems with a Cocoon application under load for some days. The least expensive and resolutive move, in retrospect, would have been upgrading Xalan to release 2.7: painless and probably definitive.

Actually, I had suspected problems with the XSLT processor for a while, but not trusting Xalan I had suggested replacing it with Saxon, which would have probably been less painless, as Saxon is much more strict than Xalan when it comes to not-so-kosher stylesheets.

In any case, this lesson should be useful for the future.

Amsterdam

Published by ugo on October 6, 2005 in cocoon. 2 Comments

Just made it to Amsterdam for the second day of the Cocoon GetTogether. My plane was delayed almost two hours, officially because of the fog, but some people here told me they found an old WW2 bomb while digging near Schiphol, so that maybe the real cause of the delay. Anyway, it really is foggy, so I couldn’t see much of the city yet.

More later.

Google on Sun hardware?

Published by ugo on October 5, 2005 in miscellaneous. 0 Comments

Rethinking about yesterday’s webcast, it occurred to me that maybe the idea of Google adopting Sun hardware is not so ludicrous after all. We all know that Google uses commodity hardware by the tens of thousands because it’s cheaper and because if one machine breaks, hundreds of others are available to take up its load.

But it’s possible that hardware prices do not make up the biggest slice of Google’s data centers operating expenses. Space is not cheap and power even less so, especially given the current oil prices. Keeping this in mind, wouldn’t a server that offers, according to Jonathan Schwartz,

  • 50% more performance
  • 63% less electricity consumption
  • 1/4 the physical size,
  • at 1/3 the price

than its competition, allow Google to more than offset the higher cost of a Galaxy server? One like the x4100 could also probably take the place of four or more Pentium servers and, with 64bit CPUs, be able to address much more data. Which must not be bad, considering the size of data Google is managing.

Admittedly, this is just wild speculation on my part. I have no idea what is the TCO that Google is paying for its servers, nor what would be the cost of operating a Sun server instead. With energy prices continuously on the rise, though, I expect the former to rise significantly.

KLM Internet Check-In

Published by ugo on October 4, 2005 in personal. 2 Comments

Just like Andrew, I’m flying to Amsterdam via KLM, so I’d like to do this Internet Check-In stuff as well. Unfortunately, I’m flying thursday morning and Internet check-ins aren’t available until 30 hours before departure, so I’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see if my ticket is eligible. On the other hand, I don’t have a printer at home, so I’d have to ask my wife to print the boarding pass for me at the office. All in all, I’m not sure it’s worth it.

Update: I was able to check-in for my outbound MXP-AMS flight (and also to choose a nice seat, thanks to SeatGuru) but not for the trip back from Amsterdam. God knows!

Google + Sun == ?

Published by ugo on October 4, 2005 in web. 2 Comments

I’m currently tuned in to the McNealy-Schmidt webcast, waiting for it to begin. In a minute or so we’ll see what all the excitement’s about.

10:35 — There it goes … a bit more than a minute later ;).

10:44 — The real meat is just coming out now … McNealy talking about Java and the Google Toolbar. WTF?

10:46 — Google is going to become a Sun customer. Really?

10:48 — Andy Bechtolsheim coming onstage.

10:49 — Now it’s Eric’s turn to speak. He’s extolling the virtues of Java. I always thought that Google’s usage of Java was pretty marginal. (Lost most of his speech, as my daughter was requiring attention. At some time, also Jonathan Schwartz came onstage).

10:55 — Lava lamp? Is that the big innovation? ;) Time for questions from the audience. I have the sensation I lost most of the really important things that were announced … too much confusion here.

11:09 — Lost the rest of the webcast. I guess you cannot be 100% a geek when you have a family, but that’s alright.

Later: Apologies, but I haven’t done a very good job of transcripting the highlights of the webcast. If you want to know more, I suggest starting from here and downloading the webcast replay when it’s available. Of course, the whole blogosphere is probably abuzz now with comments and wild guesses. In my opinion, what we heard is much less than what most commentators expected: just a distribution deal, whereas many were speculating wildly about a possible web-based implementation of some OpenOffice features on the web, using Google’s infrastructure and programming skills. But maybe this is just the beginning of what we’ll see in the future.

Gobby

Published by ugo on October 3, 2005 in apple. 0 Comments

Gobby is a free, multi-platform text editor that, like SubEthaEdit, allows for collaborative document editing (as well as multi-user chat):

Sadly, it requires X11 to run on the Mac (since it uses GTK+), but seems to work in Gnome (Linux and BSD) and Windows environments.

As someone said, if it used the same protocol as SubEthaEdit (is it freely available?), we wouldn’t need a Mac version. At the moment, I’d rather use JotSpot Live.

(Via The Tao of Mac.)

Is Cocoon Obsolete?

Published by ugo on October 2, 2005 in cocoon. 0 Comments

Just when we’re about to gather and celebrate once again, our founding father Stefano drops this bombshell:

Stefano Mazzocchi, [RT] Is Cocoon Obsolete?: “But as a researcher, a scientist and one that likes to push the edge, I sense that cocoon is kinda ‘done’, not as in ‘finished, passe”, but more as in ‘been there, done that’.

Sure, lots of things to polish and little things to continue to improve, but I wonder if the action is somewhere else. “

The point here is that much of the action is moving from the server to smarter and richer web client platforms like Mozilla (and Ajax, I would add, if you can call that a platform):

I do that for my latest web sites and the more I learn how to driven the
client, the less I feel the need for advanced server frameworks. Is it
just me?

Is client side advancement making cocoon and all its machinery to
compensate for advanced web client obsolete and archaic?

For a long time, I’ve been convinced that Cocoon must do less, much less than what it currently does if it wants to thrive and survive. Now it tries to be everything to everyone: a web publishing framework, a web application framework, a portal framework and possibly a business integration platform. I don’t think you can do all of this and at the same time be simple, lightweight and easy.

Another issue I’ve been obsessed with for a long time is the fact that the weight of Cocoon’s internal machinery, combined with the desire to keep it backward compatible at all costs, is bound to drag down all the current efforts to make it more modular. Designing a new kernel that will allow all existing applications to run on it unmodified is a worthwhile task and using OSGi to build it is a great idea, but I’m afraid that by the time we get there, Stefano’s fear of obsolescence will have materialized.

I am confident that at present, for the type of applications we are doing, Cocoon is still the best choice, but at the same time I’m trying to look into the future. Until now, I concentrated myself on the server side of things, but it didn’t dawn on me that a new breed of client-side technologies and platforms might require a rethinking of the classical server-side paradigms.

Granted, this is not applicable to a lot of real-world scenarios and it might never be for a large segment of users (think mobile ones), but it is something that is worth spending a few neurons on.

Meanwhile, I am looking forward to attending Andrew’s talk on “Simplifying Cocoon”. Should be interesting.