techno.blog("Dion")

Here we have some thoughts on what we want in an RSS tool.

I think people run through the following evolution as they work with RSS feeds (and it gets worse as time goes on, as more and more interesting feeds come out):

1. News: I want to read my various sites in a different fashion (subscribe to the BBC, CNN, etc)
2. Buddy: I want to read what my buddies are saying
3. Groups: I keep finding groups of people talking topics that I am interested in, so I keep adding people to my watch lists
4. Holy cow, I have 125 feeds, and hence get hundreds of entries to plow through on a daily basis. How can I deal with this?

It is a tough problem. We JUST went through this with the web itself. As more sites entered the ether, it became harder and harder to find what we really wanted, and to filter that information. When blogs came about we were watching early adopters and could follow the trend setters. Now everyone and their mother has a blog.

It will be interesting to see the new tools that come out to help us. More metadata, better searching, more intelligent filtering, etc. If they solve it for RSS, they will solve it for many other things.

I am still happy using NewGator and getting feeds filtered into my email, but as my feed list grows, it becomes more and more unmanageable!

Cedric has put together the simple API of Velocity, with the power of the Groovy language. The result is a new templating solution called Canvas.

I have actually been thinking about this exact problem, and think Cedric is on the right track. I think there will be a great trend to using Java + Groovy on projects, as there is a time and a place for each of them. Since they play so nice together it works perfectly.

On the templating site itself, I do have a pet peeve.

I don’t like the JSP-style syntax:

<% groovy code %>

I would prefer something more Velocity based…. and allowing simple:

Welcome $user.name

If the two were combined then you could have the best of both worlds.

I also hope that there could be an option: “don’t preserve newline at the end of tags” which would stop the following code:

Hi
<% do x %>
<% do y %>
There

from producing:

Hi

There

It just drives me nuts :)

Well done Cedric!

Have you ever realised the power of being there? It can be such a simple thing… to be somewhere for someone. Maybe you show up for some sporting event, and your nephew sees you in the crowd, supporting them. Or maybe you go visit some family that you haven’t been too in awhile, even though you don’t really feel like it.

If I look back at moments in my life, I realise that the simple ability of making the effort to be somewhere can mean so much, and doesn’t always take that much!

I was reminded of this “power” over the weekend. My brother made if over to my neck of the country on his way to a business trip. He has a sore back at the moment, and it would have been easy to either: a) cancel his trip, or b) get in and out for his trip. However he made that extra effort, and we got to have a really nice time just hanging out together.

Thanks to everyone who has made that little effort for me in the past, and I hope I will do the same for you.

Cheers,

Dion

I had the pleasure of listening to a panel on the 50th anniversary of Brown versus Board of Education, at the Harvard Grad School of Education. The talk discussed what Brown did for the US, and how it has been erroded away so today we celebrate Brown… but don’t really have it.

After the talk I was with a bunch of educators talking about many issues. We got to talking about how “No Child Left Behind” is giving us kids that are taught to the test. One of my best teachers in grammar school (in the UK) was someone who taught us to think, rather than to memorize facts. We need to get to that level… let’s teach our kids how to think, and the rest will come.

This is the point where the thought came into my head that:

“Hmm…. teaching the kids to think is like training a code generator. From that initial training it can then be given different input and different solutions will come out”.

Of course this analogy is totally flawed… but I can’t believe that I am such a geek that these thoughts popped into my head :/

I just read a piece on the “Google way”. There were two interesting items that come out of this discussion:

1) Google Philosophy:

- Work on things that matter, affect everyone in the world
- Solve problems with algorithms if possible
- Hire bright people and give them lots of freedom
- Don

Airlan Alan San Juan has a new entry Why does TSS keep stabbing J2EE in the back?.

He recently posted on a similar subject which I wrote about too.

This recent post has two real points:

- Getting an email on the new TSS.NET site

I am sorry that you were offended to get this email. I do understand where you are coming from, but we have a LOT of community members who WERE interested in getting this news. There are a lot of developers who are interested in enterprise Java AND other technologies. I personally think it is wise to keep a watch on technologies such as TSS.NET as we can take any good innovations, and learn from any bad ones! Even so, it is your right to totally ignore this, and I apologise.

- PetStore

Notice that the title is “keep stabbing J2EE in the back”. The Petstore situation was awhile ago now wasn’t it? What about some of the GOOD things we try to do for the enterprise java community? Was this one thing SO bad that we ignore everything else? Also, although you are correct that The Middleware Company owns TheServerSide.com, people at TSS itself were NOT part of the benchmark in anyway. It is like complaining about Taco Bell because you are mad at Pepsi.

Again, I apologise that you are offended by these things, but hope that you will also not close your eyes to the hard work that we have, and continue to put into the community. We have made mistakes, and will probably make some in the future too… noone is perfect.

Cheers,

Dion

Mike Spille has come out of the closet. No, nothing to do with gay marriages… he is a Perlaphobe.

I suffer from the same disease. My symptoms are slightly different though. There was a period of my life where I was an addict. I had jumped from the gates of C/C++ and was drinking the perl juice for a couple of years. I joined the cult of CPAN where people shared their wares, and a quick search would find the code you needed. I wrote JAPH scripts. I was caught hanging out with Tom Christiansen and Randall Schwartz. I remember raising money for Randall’s lawyers.

Although I got out of this world, I still miss it. I have reasons to work with perl from time to time. Yup, perl is involved in the running of TheServerSide (there are only a few PURELY “one language” applications out there: we use Java, perl, sh, cmd, sql, xml/xsl, …) and there is something “fun” about hacking in it again. I can just get so much done in a short time.

This is why I am excited about Groovy. I enjoy Ruby and Python… but have only had a few projects where I have had a chance to use them. With Groovy I can use the nice new syntax, but have access to all of the java libraries!

Are you using velocity and ignore the log files that it produces? They seem to grow pretty darn quickly.

I recently added the following code to setup velocity before it is used:

Velocity.setProperty(RuntimeConstants.FILE_RESOURCE_LOADER_PATH, insert default directory for your templates);
Velocity.setProperty(RuntimeConstants.RUNTIME_LOG, insert the location of the log);
Velocity.setProperty(RuntimeConstants.RUNTIME_LOG_LOGSYSTEM_CLASS,
DEBUG ? “org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.SimpleLog4JLogSystem”
: “org.apache.velocity.runtime.log.NullLogSystem“);

Now unless in debug mode the logs aren’t in the way.

After complaining about the weblogic config mess that we had compared to some of the other servers, I got an amazing response on this blog.

Firstly, thanks a lot to Dave Landers & Mark Griffith of BEA, Mike Cico, and Vinny Carpenter.

We have ended up with a very simple solution:

- Our source control has the following files in it:

boot.properties
config.xml.TYPE (a version for the different types of config)
DefaultAuthenticatorInit.ldift
SerializedSystemIni.dat

- Our build system enables us to build a new config based on this “fresh” info via “ant install-server-config”. It checks its own environment to know which version of the config.xml to copy over.

- Build the application: ant deploy

- startWebLogic: With one trusty start command the server is off to the races and running the app

That is it! Basically the same system that we have for other servers. It is nice to know that you really only need a few files (and not all of the lines in the config.xml either… we went through and brought that down to a small amount)

There are definitely other ways to skin this cat, but this did the trick nicely. Some other important options though (based on feedback):

- Silent Install: http://edocs.bea.com/platform/docs81/install/silent.html
- WL Ant Tasks: http://edocs.bea.com/wls/docs81/admin_ref/ant_tasks.html
- conf2admin tool that takes your config.xml and builds a script that can rebuild it: (http://ftpna2.bea.com/pub/downloads/conf2admin.zip

Cheers all,

Dion

I was just listening to BBC Five Live radio, and Martin Freeman (who plays Tim in the best comedy for a long time, The Office) was on talking about his new role as Arthur Dent on the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy movie.

I know that things slowed down when Douglas Adams sadly passed away. It is great to show that the ball keeps moving and I can’t wait to see the final movie. With today’s technology we will finally be able to see something realistic ;)

If you haven’t heard/watched the office then you owe it to yourself to search it out. In the US you will have to head to BBC America to check it out. Or you can wait until next years comedy season and watch a poor version for the US market. No doubt it will be as crud as the US version of “Coupling”. *sigh*