Monkinetic Weblog

Heh. Megnut says goodbye to Windows and ASP, and "Hellooooooooooo, Aqua!". Muahahahaha...

Announcing Conversant 1.0b1.

For the last few months, Macrobyte has been working on readying Conversant, their internet groupware application, for release as a 'shrinkwrapped' product. Today marks the first release of Conversant 1.0b1 to Frontier and Radio Userland developers.

Looks like Macromedia has got their whole lineup out in the new MX form now. I know Dreamweaver now runs on OS X (that link also has all the other areas that were improved in MX).

Brad points to this cutie - the Cubik is the world's smallest megapixel digital camera. Neat!

Note to Dave - Mark may have said he does not like outliners; however, he DOES understand the power of an outliner:

I like to edit Python code in an IDE (or in Emacs in python-mode), which autoindents for me and allows me to "fold" code blocks (collapse an outline node) that I'm not currently using. He's already got what you're offering him in Radio's outliner (the one Frontier programmers all love)- but without the ability to easily edit that same script in some other text editor.

More from Cam at SXSW:

1:52 PM: Doc asks the audience how many have political opinions that are left of center. Most of the audience raises their hands. He then asks how many people are afraid to talk about it on their weblogs.

From SXSW, Cam reports:

1:38 PM: The weblogger community will route around hate speech and bigotry online. I wonder if that's true. We've seen the Google effect when webloggers start linking to something. Someone spouts some bile - can the weblog community resist linking it? That's my idea of routing around it. If we link it, it is soon rising in Google's ranks, the internet equivalent of a PR victory. So yes, maybe we can route around it, but I'm not certain.

John Robb wants a P2P photo app:

Sharing photos is still too hard. I can send photos via e-mail or post a couple to the Web, but I can't easily share whole albums with friends and family. What I want is a desktop content management system that lets me organize my photos into albums using a browser interface. I then would like to share these albums with friends and family using P2P.

Mark Pilgrim has posted an Accessibility statement for his site.

Well, I am officially IM-less at work for the foreseeable future (and probably slightly beyond that). Our network guys are very security conscious and I don't fault them for it. The AIM protocol has been closed on the firewall.

So, I'm back to email, which in true internet fashion, seems so... slow. ;-)

In the evenings from home, however, I'll be on AIM, and probably #p2p-hackers as well. monkinetic or redmonk.

I had dinner recently with Wes Felter while he was in Phoenix, and we got to talking about peer-to-peer technologies. It's been rattling around in my head ever since. Yesterday I was emailing with Wes and he suggested getting on #p2p-hackers on irc.openprojects.net.

I finally found an irc client for Mac OS X (Snak) and got on. While there I ran into Aaron Swartz, who in turn pointed me to the work he's doing in distributed information spaces (based on RDF-style tuples) in the Plex. Mmmmm, distributed RDF.

Dave writes: "We're going to make Web services work for Web developers. That means getting rid of arcane stuff that makes sense only to C programmers. "

Well, I understand where Dave is coming from, but I have to argue that without C and its practitioners of arcana, the "web" in "web services" would not exist. The xml parser in Frontier's web services support would be 100 times slower. Google - don't tell me that's not a web service! ;-) - would not exist.

Dave, you're not being fair to people who use those languages. I totally appreciate what you're doing in the scripting world. Seeing web services brought to the masses through your involvement in XML-RPC is a huge deal. We all talk about web services being about inclusive: don't lock out or insult those developers who choose to use .NET or whatever.

I mean, who cares that there are six extra lines in that script? How many lines is a common web service? 5? 100? 1000? If a developer wants to write those 6 lines (which are probably generated for him) why can't he? Is it just because it offends your aesthetic?

Dave points to my coffee cup radioFeedIcon. It was really easy to do with Conversant's Resources. I just put \radioFeedIcon\ in my template or message.

Conversant offers a LOT of options when it comes to outputting your content. Any page can have it's MIME type set, and templates (cf 1, 2) can be anything, including HTML, XML, I even tried RTF once. (No go on that one. ;-))

In the case of my RSS feed, the feed is a WeblogViewPage. The WeblogViewPage lets me create any number of ways to deliver my weblog content, in the past I've seen RSS, Avantgo, and OPML versions of Conversant weblogs using this technique.

Oh, and Dave, it's Steve, please. ;-)

Dave is making a point on Scripting News regarding IDL (or in this case WSDL) for Frontier, and other non-typed scripting languages. His point is that he cannot generate at runtime the WSDL directly from the code, as can C# or Java developers - b/c their runtimes have information about the types and numbers of parameters to a call.

This means having to handcode the WSDL for a web service in these environments, which can be a PITA if your service is at all large.

I have an idea though. One way to get around this would be to implement a meta-data header for these environments similar to javadoc. I'll use Frontier as an example.

In Frontier, scripts are outlines. Frontier already has a rich set of functionality dealing with rendering outlines into other formats, esp. HTML. You can use #directives in your outlines, which get translated into information in the symbol table when rendering the outline (or any other datatype for that matter).

So, I would propose a simple set of #directives that can be inserted into a script outline above the actual script code, as a commented block. That block can be grabbed and processed to generate whatever idl format is desired.

This is just an idea, someone with more Frontier experience could come up with a better design. I also know that Perl has Perldoc and POD (inline support for manpages), so including this information in perl scripts in a long tradition in that community.

Also, at least someone is working on WSDL support in Python (which has an easily introspected runtime). "Therefore I am planning to write a WSDL generator that will examine our exposed methods and write out a valid WSDL file."

So, I think that lack of explicitly typed data should not be the final reason not to support some sort of IDL for web services. There may be other, better reasons, but I have not seen them yet.

David P. Reed is discussing some fundemental questions about the process of dividing up the radio spectrum to provide "non-interference" between electromagnetic devices.

As is often the case, this great quote applies simultanously to technology and human behavior:

And the basic question of the limits on "spectrum capacity", as a scientific question, is slowly developing answers - surprising ones. It turns out that network cooperation increases capacity.

On another topic, Dori says "The answer seems to be in Apple support document #14449, [...] No direct link from here, unfortunately, because [...] WebObjects sucks."

Hehe. I've got the #2 link on Google for "obj-c xml-rpc", and the first one that actually is about the Objective-C language. Coooool.

Dave writes: "AaronLand is updating. Bravo! I added him to the rotation for my WeblogsComHelper app so his updates will show up on the weblogs.com home page."

Dave says: "Work without coffee? My brain says no."