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February 29, 2004

Opening Portals

Carsten joins the new Apache Portals PMC. The new top-level project Portals@Apache aims to bring together all the ongoing Apache work in this exciting area. As the creator of the Cocoon portal framework, Carsten is more than qualified. Congratulations.

Posted by Matthew at 06:34 PM | Comments (1)

February 28, 2004

Small world

Michael Pietroforte left some interesting links on my RSS post - thanks Michael! Via Michael's weblog I found the weblog of Wolfgang Sommergut, someone who I know from my article writing stints for Computerwoche. Small world.

Posted by Matthew at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)

Running update

I'm still on track for my planned marathon in September. Meanwhile I will be running a half-marathon at Easter here in Paderborn. This seems to be the thing to do (i.e. a half-marathon in the Spring and a marathon in the Autumn). The weekend is now taken up by one long slow run (I'm currently at around 1 1/2 hours) and during the week I run twice according to a plan I took out of a running magazine. I also want to thank those who have already donated to the run. If you're reading this via RSS you'll need to check out the web-version to find the "donate" button :).

Posted by Matthew at 06:57 PM | Comments (2)

RSS on German news sites - Fehlanzeige

Another article on the rise in popularity of RSS. A popularity that seems to have gone mostly unnoticed here in Germany. At least the main news sites I read - Focus and Spiegel - show no sign of offering RSS feeds in the near future. What's the problem guys? You mean your mucho-expensive CMS can't generate RSS feeds? Or haven't you figured out what RSS is yet?

Update: Duh, a mere few minutes after posting, Scott points me to the Spiegel feed. It's well hidden though.

Posted by Matthew at 06:45 PM | Comments (2)

February 27, 2004

Now you see them...

Interesting: I took a look at one of the main German news sites Spiegel-Online this morning and the right-hand column contained Google-Ads. That was new. Now they're gone again. Unfortunately I didn't take a screenshot.

Update: Thanks for the pointer - yes I meant Spiegel.de - although maybe I should have kept the .com link :-)

Posted by Matthew at 02:43 PM | Comments (1)

February 26, 2004

RoboKid?

Sylvain ponders on RoboKid. Make sure you blog the X-Rays Sylvain! Anyway I hope surgery is not needed and everything heals well.

Posted by Matthew at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)

February 25, 2004

Compare the Search

This visual tool allows you to compare the search results from Google and Yahoo. Pretty cool.

Posted by Matthew at 10:09 PM | Comments (1)

Programmable Fun

Reading about how kids are using their mobiles to cheat at school (via Erik) lead me to search for a picture of the first programmable calculator I had - and here it is. The Sharp EL5813. I remember having one of the first in the class (together with Frank) back in the early 80's and those were the days when the teachers didn't realize where the advantage of having a programmable calculator was (even if mine only had 30 programmable steps). Until we finished the maths exams in half the time it took everyone else. After that they would demand that we delete any programs we may have entered into the calculators before the exam started.

Posted by Matthew at 09:35 PM | Comments (1)

It's confirmed

It's official folks, RoboWife will return home next Wednesday after 14 weeks away mending the knee. Of course this means that the good times are coming to an end that my time playing Mr Mom is drawing to a close (thankfully) - but hopefully some of the experience will stick. Having to look after my kids in this intensive fashion for the past 3 months has certainly allowed me to take some reality-checks on what sort of stuff is important and what isn't. And to paraphrase what I wrote back in November: It's was an interesting experience. For all of us. Thanks also for all the good wishes from out there in blog-land. Much appreciated.

Posted by Matthew at 09:05 PM | Comments (3)

The coming RSS revolution

On Forbes. I like the title - but aren't they a little behind the times? I mean the "coming" RSS revolution?

Posted by Matthew at 08:57 PM | Comments (0)

February 24, 2004

Presenting Cocoon

Steven is preparing for his Cocoon talk and Carsten and I will be talking about Cocoon to an interested customer for the next 3 days as well. Meanwhile, the JAX2004 schedule is up where we will also be talking about our favorite Open Source project - amongst other things.

Posted by Matthew at 09:26 PM | Comments (1)

February 23, 2004

Cocoon goes kiwi

Television New Zealand is going with Cocoon to build the new version of their nzoom portal. Who were they using before Cocoon? Vignette.

Posted by Matthew at 08:06 PM | Comments (0)

Fosdem

Due to RoboWife being allowed home for a weekend, I didn't go to Fosdem although it had been on my agenda. Seems like another Open Source event that's gaining popularity. DJ was there and has a write-up on Tim O'Reilly's keynote.

Posted by Matthew at 01:48 PM | Comments (0)

February 21, 2004

Winter in Canada

I chatted to Steve a couple of evenings ago while his part of the world was being rocked by a Winter storm. Check out his pictures. Hey - so that's what snow looks like. This part of the world is experiencing very mild Winters lately with only a couple of days (!) of snow during the season.

Posted by Matthew at 01:01 PM | Comments (0)

February 20, 2004

Advance notice

It's fun to time how long it takes news that I read in the blogosphere spread to more traditional IT news sites like Heise. Given that they have to translate most of the news from English into German I suppose 24 hours isn't that bad (ahem). But at least a day seems about right for news I read today on Heise concerning the "Pepsi Apple iTunes store hack" and "JBoss Group gets $10 million in funding". Come on guys - that's way to long!

Posted by Matthew at 05:41 PM | Comments (0)

February 19, 2004

$10 million for JBoss

JBoss Group has secured $10 million in outside financing (via Erik). This quote from the article caught my eye:

"We see tremendous opportunity for JBoss to disrupt the current market," Skok said in a statement. He said that open-source software is growing in appeal among corporations because it is cost-effective.

Another sign that the current Open Source emphasis is switching from Linux to "middleware".

Posted by Matthew at 09:02 PM | Comments (0)

Altweiber

Today is the first day of the long German carnival weekend. Although not a public holiday, many people take a vacation from today until next Wednesday to join in the fun. And in fact if you happen to be in the main carnival cities of Cologne, Mainz or Düsseldorf, then most of the shops will be closed Monday (Rose Monday) anyway. Lots of people dress up in funny costumes and parade through the cities throwing sweets (candy) or small gifts to the onlookers. Everyone is very full of the spirit (meaning exactly that). Overheard in shop this morning: "Hildegard - where are the blinking devils horns?". You either love it or you hate it


Posted by Matthew at 12:54 PM | Comments (0)

February 18, 2004

Out of business

Dean quits.

Posted by Matthew at 07:10 PM | Comments (0)

RSS business

In the same vein as the previous post, Jeffrey Nolan blogs a VCs views from Demo. Well worth a read and a comment.

- I was surprised to hear very little in the way of new applications being enabled within the enterprise via blogs and RSS. How about product development collaboration, portals, event monitoring?

I've been writing about RSS inside the enterprise and for business data use for a while now. I too find it surprising that we haven't seen more RSS enabled products or new developments appear by now but hold on...

...Most of the enterprises I deal with in my day job still haven't really "gotten" the weblog. Now this I find really surprising. How many commercial sites do you visit that have a weblog? How many of those companies probably have weblogs on the inside? Even though RSS isn't just about weblogs, it's sure using them to piggyback its popularity.

So we need to take a step back from our self-indulgent "weblogs are everywhere" thinking - because they're not. We need to work out what we can do to change this - better weblog prodcts, more integration with enterprise applications, enterprise weblog consulting etc. Once weblogs are more commonplace inside corporations, then RSS will follow.

Posted by Matthew at 02:59 PM | Comments (2)

Weblog business

Reading Scoble's report on meeting Russ at Demo, and there's an interesting statement in there on the difficulties of making a business out of weblogging: One knock against weblogging and potential businesses that are being built around weblogs is "they are technically easy to reproduce."

I assume he's not talking about weblog-software but weblog-writing, because I certainly think there is a business to be made by developing innovative weblog-software. I'm sure SixApart or WaveMarket think that too.

But making a business out of weblog-writing is certainly a different story. Even if you come up with the killer subject about which to write - it is certainly easy for someone to just put up another weblog that copies yours. And if they have more of a name or get more link-love - then you loose.

Posted by Matthew at 08:24 AM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2004

WebDAV Flying

While I relax at home (yeah right), my trusty colleagues release a tool for administrating WebDAV servers - the WebDAVPilot. The tool is a plugin for Eclipse and allows you to do lots of cool things with your WebDAV server. More here. And it's free! Hey wait a minute....

Posted by Matthew at 08:44 PM | Comments (0)

February 16, 2004

They're only human

Kuro5hin has a readable write-up of the leaked Win2k source. Somehow comforting to read the comments that Microsoft programmers put into their own code. (via Frank).

Posted by Matthew at 09:24 PM | Comments (0)

Hot at Demo

Some more interesting stuff coming out of the Demo conference: Six Apart announces moblogging tools for their TypePad site and also for upcoming versions of Movable Type. Doc has more on what's hot at Demo.

Posted by Matthew at 07:05 PM | Comments (0)

Predictions revisited

In late 2002, I wrote this prediction that Microsoft would eventually release a Linux version of the Office product. So I was wrong - or was I? Today, Heise (German) is reporting rumors that IBM and Microsoft are working together to ready a version of Office for Linux. I still think this will eventually happen as it makes absolute sense for Microsoft to offer a version of Office of Linux (just as they are doing for OS X).

In fact in the future we will have to get used to the fact that traditional operating system companies such as Microsoft and Apple offer products for other systems than their own. Apple already offers iTunes for Windows and no doubt will soon be offering other products in the i-range on Microsoft's operating system.

Posted by Matthew at 04:06 PM | Comments (0)

Location Based Blogging

Wavemarket introduces location based blogging. Congratulations Russ and the rest of the team.

Posted by Matthew at 08:43 AM | Comments (0)

February 14, 2004

Glancing

Diego points to Matt Webb's presentation on "Glancing" at ETCon. Interesting stuff and comments. Although I now use IM stuff like iChat and IRC more - there is a level of intrusion that I don't like. There will be times when I just plain forget to change my availability status on iChat to "away" or better "leave me alone" - and so if one of those windows pops up the distraction starts. Many people are polite asking "do you have some time" or similar - which is fine - but even though I may just be scraping the kids off the wall - I still feel pressured to answer and not leave the person hanging. The incorporation of "glancing" (or similar) into iChat would therefore seem like something I would need. Sociable Software.

Posted by Matthew at 03:17 PM | Comments (1)

Worthless money?

If someone has so much money that he can buy anything he wants - isn't any additional money worthless?- Christopher (9).

Posted by Matthew at 10:13 AM | Comments (0)

February 11, 2004

Cocoon article in iX

The upcoming issue of iX, a German IT monthly has an article on Cocoon 2.1 by Reinhard Pötz, one of the Austrian Cocoon "gurus".

Posted by Matthew at 11:16 AM | Comments (0)

Mobile server applications with Cocoon

Now while you may have thought that the Mobitopians are somewhat gadget fixated, that's not the case. Some of us also build the "other side" using Open Source frameworks such as Apache Cocoon. This short article looks at the problems facing mobile operators and shows how the XML application platform is being used to solve them.

Mobile operators have two main things (well perhaps three) to worry about when designing and building their server-application:

Now that's the simple view. Of course they also need to integrate payment solutions, location based information, personalize what you see on your device and maintain some sort of statistic about who did what when and and and. But we'll keep to the simple stuff for the moment.

In the last few days there have been quite a few articles (such as here) on how more and more devices now support XHTML (or XHTML-MP) and how that format needs to be published out to new devices. But what you may forget is that there are still plenty of devices out there that also need to be supported - and they are all different in some way

As an example, in Germany, a mobile operator currently needs to support around 60 (sixty) different devices in total. (Anyone thinking mobile solutions are easy - go back and read that sentence again).

One way of doing that is to make sure your data flows through the application in a common format (say some XML variant) and is then be published out in the format the individual device needs.

So, if you have your data in say an XML markup, then it makes sense to use XSL Stylesheets to generate the output the device requires, based on a mapping on the server. Solutions built on Cocoon are able to recognize the device and choose the stylesheet accordingly. You do however still need to code the stylesheet yourself - but that can be done in hierarchial fashion so each specific device stylesheet really only contains the device stuff.

As shown in the above picture, Cocoon is a Java application (actually it is a servlet). Cocoon already comes with Jetty embedded in the distribution - or you can run it in any other servlet container.

Cocoon allows you to build your application functionality based on "component pipelines". Each component pipeline can be thought of as a function (i.e "get page weather") with the result of the pipeline being the actual format returned to the device (say an XHTML representation of the weather information). In order to build the pipeline you plug together available components and use an XSL stylesheet to format out your data. There are components already in Cocoon that will recognize the device for you and allow you to integrate data from external systems (such as news feeds etc.). This is especially easy if the external system returns some XML variant. Cocoon is an XML platform so all the data that "flows" through Cocoon has to be in XML. However there are also components in Cocoon that will allow you to plug in non-XML data storage (such as databases). If your system is not available, then you can develop and drop in your own component. New components can be added without having to recompile Cocoon, as all the pipeline and component definitions take place in an XML file, called the Sitemap.

Now all this pipeline and XSL stuff may make you think that Cocoon is slow, and indeed that's one of the first questions put to us when we suggest that Cocoon may be the right choice. However, performance is not a problem, due to the fact that Cocoon has an extensive caching system and indeed performance figures (actually done by a mobile operator) are quite impressive.

Cocoon offers more than just the basic publishing functionality. It includes a portal framework (that already supports JSR-168), server side flow control using scripting, a framework for forms input and validation and much more.

And best of all - it doesn't cost a penny and is available in source form. Now, the learning curve is steep at the beginning with lots of new stuff to learn. But anyone who has built and deployed a mobile application on Cocoon will tell you that it's worth it. Anyone interested in building mobile applications with it will find plenty of additional information on the website, in the mailing-lists and on the wiki.

In Europe several mobile operators are already using Cocoon for their mobile offerings and more and more operators and information providers are showing increasing interest in the XML platform. So chances are that if you're surfing the mobile portals in the region, there's Cocoon in there somewhere.

Posted by Matthew at 09:34 AM | Comments (0)

February 10, 2004

Technorati at ETech

Scoble has written up Dave Sifry's talk on Technorati. Interesting statistics (11-12 thousand new blogs per day) and blog usage (scraping blogs to find what's hot on Amazon) there for sure.

Harvesting the data to be found in weblogs is where the money is.

Posted by Matthew at 08:59 PM | Comments (0)

Chicken & Cashew Curry (aka "8 Kids Curry")

Now, I could be hanging out in a bar in San Diego with Russ and the others...but instead I decided to stay here and do the family thing. So today there are 8 (eight) kids here and while they seem to be occupied I made a curry. Nothing special but here is the recipe for your enjoyment and/or adaptation:

Chicken & Cashew Curry

Fry the following spices in 2 tbsp of oil: 4 tsp curry powder (your call), 1/2 tsp tumeric (curcuma), 1/4 tsp cumin, 1 tsp ancho chili powder. Add sliced chicken breasts (3), 1 medium onion and 4 cloves garlic (all chopped). Salt to taste. Stir fry until chicken is coated with the spices. Add 1 glass red wine, 2 cups water and 2 cups coconut milk. Simmer for about 10 minutes. Add 100 grams of Cashew nuts. Simmer for about another 20 minutes adding more water/wine/coconut milk as needed (desired).

That's it. Simple and easy to change stuff around as needed. Don't eat it fresh! Curry tastes best when reheated. Enjoy.

Update: I was just able to make sure the kids didn't eat my share as well :)

Posted by Matthew at 04:54 PM | Comments (1)

February 09, 2004

Go with the flow

Carsten is doing some cool stuff with the Cocoon portal and flow.

Posted by Matthew at 07:43 PM | Comments (0)

Eclipse interview

Steve has posted a write-up of his interview with John Weigand, Eclipse Project Lead, and Skip McGaughey, the present chairman of Eclipse.

Posted by Matthew at 04:30 PM | Comments (0)

ETech commences

ETech gets underway today and already the infamous Mobitopians are in their element. Russ and Matt have pics up from yesterday. I'm going to be slightly jealous I think.

Posted by Matthew at 12:59 PM | Comments (0)

February 07, 2004

GPS Running

My impressions on the 2 GPS running devices I own.

Posted by Matthew at 07:04 PM | Comments (0)

February 06, 2004

Stefan's Birthday!

I don't normally mention peoples birthday here - but today I decided to make an exception. Happy Birthday Stefan!

Posted by Matthew at 03:07 PM | Comments (1)

Selling music by the pound

Frank thinks that GarageBand may soon have an "Export to iTunes music store" option. Hopefully I can then enter how much I want to charge for my great music :).

Posted by Matthew at 07:17 AM | Comments (0)

February 05, 2004

Gedankenspiel

Musing on weblogs, social software, linking, friends and stuff - here's one for you to think about:

Within a certain network of the people who read this weblog and the weblogs I read, we link to each other and comment on posts we find interesting and in particular when we respect (agree or disagree) with that person's view on a certain subject. We also link to people we sympathize with. The power of the weblog is that I can post my opinion, views and stories quickly and easily.

Now let's suppose I were to write that I was having an affair or I had beaten up my wife or children today. Would you link to that? Would you comment? Or just ignore the post? Think about it.

Posted by Matthew at 07:36 PM | Comments (8)

Whose language is it anyway

I took the kids to lunch at McDonalds today - where I saw an advert for "Chickensalat" - one word. Now I've ranted before about how the Germans are slowly killing their own language - but Chickensalat. Come on. Joining an English and German word like that has to take the prize for language abuse 2004.

Update:The website calls it "Chicken Salat" - notice the difference!

Posted by Matthew at 03:07 PM | Comments (1)

Weblogs article out

The new printed issue of LinuxEnterprise (German) has an article on Weblogs and Wikis by yours truly. Turn to page 41 for the scoop.

Posted by Matthew at 11:49 AM | Comments (0)

An introduction to FOAF

Leigh Dodds writes an introduction to the Friend-of-a-Friend (FOAF) project. The project is a community driven effort to define a format for expressing relationships between people.

Posted by Matthew at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)

February 04, 2004

I'm going to be a pop star!

After a few minutes playing with GarageBand, I came up with this short - but oh so funky - riff (240 KB, MP3). Call me, Quincy.

Posted by Matthew at 10:24 PM | Comments (1)

Friendship networks

There are lots of ongoing discussions about the need or non-need for social sites like Orkut at the moment. But what we tend to forget is that it's not the software that makes the Internet a social place - it's actually the net itself. The applications we layer on top of the net are only providing additional ways of actually connecting up to people.

First it was email and newsgroups - sent via UUCP from machine to machine. Even back then we were able to "socialize", to meet up with people and make friends. Then the Web gave us a new layer on top of an already functioning social network. The Web provided a new unique layer, enabled us to exchange pictures and other media about ourselves easily. IRC, AIM, Weblogs, Wikis and now the emerging social software sites are all just additional layers - and more will follow.

If you've been here for as long as I have, then no doubt your Orkut network is large and full of people you call friends. But how did you meet all those people? Through the net (or in person). Not through the social software site. It takes more than a link on Orkut to call someone your friend. Diego has a thoughtful post on that.

The net has allowed me to meet and communicate with people I would never have had the chance to meet without it. People who live on different continents, people who I can exchange ideas with, laugh, joke and cry with and who generally enrich my life. Some of them I have even met in real life and many of them I know I could depend on if needed.

Friends.

Posted by Matthew at 09:20 PM | Comments (0)

Schambach leaves Intershop

The founder of Intershop, Stephan Schambach, leaves the company but remains a shareholder. (via Heise, German)

Posted by Matthew at 08:08 PM | Comments (0)

Eclipse: Quality Plugins

Werner points to a new book on writing Eclipse plugins.

Posted by Matthew at 08:08 AM | Comments (0)

February 03, 2004

German hip-hop for the rest of you

First off, I don't like hip-hop music - in general. I guess I'm just too old really. But that being said, there is some hip-hop music I really like. If you're "out there" and wondering what German hip-hop can sound like then I urge you to grab a copy of the MTV unplugged album from Die Fantastischen Vier. Recorded in a large cave together with guitarists, flutists, two background singers and an ensemble of string players the album is well worth listening to. Even if you don't speak German.

Posted by Matthew at 08:15 AM | Comments (0)

February 02, 2004

No ETCon for me

So, after some days of deliberation I've decided to cancel going to ETCon next week. It will be a great shame not to be there (and especially not being able to meet the #mobitopians who will be there). On the other hand I figured that it really isn't that important and family stuff goes first - especially while RoboWife is still out of action. So there you go. Next time.

Posted by Matthew at 09:42 PM | Comments (1)

February 01, 2004

Powerbook scare

Less than a week away from heading towards ETCon and I nearly thought I'd have to go without my Powerbook. Since this morning the PB crashed on me 3 times - something it's never done before. And then this evening after rebooting it failed to recognize the Airport card. After some hectic thoughts like "how can I get a new card before Friday", I removed the battery to see if the card was loose...and it was. So I fixed the card and now all seems to be sweet. I'm still unsure how the card can actually work itself loose like that...any ideas?

Posted by Matthew at 09:37 PM | Comments (0)