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October 29, 2004

New and noteworthy

Ok, so what did happen while I was away. Actually not much (as was to be expected). Apple introduced iPodPhoto (wow, expensive) and Russell turned down a job interview at Google.

Posted by Matthew at 10:32 AM

Walkers Rockz

I've always been a crisps fan - and it shows :-). Anyway, Walkers never cease to amaze me with new flavors. While in the UK, I savored all I could find, including such interesting tastes as: "Pan grilled sausage and sage" (they're not even listed on the website). The packet had a blurb that reads something like "a warm Winter sensation", yes right. Actually they don't taste as bad as they sound.

Posted by Matthew at 10:26 AM

Back again

After a little over a week's vacation in the UK, I'm back again to a rainy Autumn day in central Germany. I had a great - if not short - time back savoring lots of things I remember from being small. Not only food. A nice evening out with David and Andrew which seemed to go faster the more beer we had..hmm... And for I think the first time I left my laptop at home, something the family didn't believe at first. But I did. So there you go. Now to catch up on all the earth-shaking stuff that has happened in the past week. I bet.

Posted by Matthew at 10:11 AM

October 20, 2004

Up up and away

Vacation starts today with a day of "getting ready". Tomorrow morning, I'll be winging my way over the channel and be in Norfolk in time for tea with the family. Back next Friday - so don't go away :-).

Posted by Matthew at 04:54 PM

Podcasting...

..who needs it? I'm sorry but I just don't get it. I mean isn't it just an easier way of downloading audio files to your MP3 player? So? Where's the beef? Just because everyone can now become a broadcaster - doesn't mean everyone will want to listen to you - does it. Bah humbug.

Posted by Matthew at 11:34 AM

Wikis - the road ahead

Jon Udell on "The Wiki Way". As he notes, Wikis still have some distance to travel before becoming mainstream. Companies like Socialtext are however already pushing the Wiki idea into corporations and I'm starting to hear corporate employees go "we could use a Wiki for that", which shows the growing acceptance.

Moving Social Software into the enterprise is so similar to how we started evangelizing Open Source to corporations 4 years ago. It's the "little people" you need to convince and once they start using this form of free flowing collaboration it will percolate up the enterprise stack.

Posted by Matthew at 11:28 AM

October 19, 2004

Are you afraid to blog?

Scoble on the (corporate) fear of weblogging.

Posted by Matthew at 10:31 AM

October 18, 2004

This is not a love-song II

Today I received an email concerning my gripe with Eventim-Music. The email states at the end in German that burning audio CDs with your purchased tracks is not possible on the Mac, because the Mac doesn't support the needed DRM. However nowhere on the website does it say that (not even today, I checked). Go figure.

Posted by Matthew at 06:02 PM

Pubs in North Norfolk

Thanks to Jim for supplying various links for my quest to find a pub in North Norfolk.

Posted by Matthew at 01:46 PM

October 16, 2004

Happy Birthday Christopher

Christopher is 10 today. Happy Birthday! Doesn't time fly. While Christopher is in the UK on vacation with the rest of the family, I am putting his computer (a birthday present) together. I remember getting my first computer (a VIC 20) when I was 13 - or was it 14?

Posted by Matthew at 08:45 PM

October 15, 2004

Off they go (nearly)

Just readying the family for their trip over to the UK tonight. I will be following over next week. Hopefully I will manage to hook up with David and Andrew for a couple of beers while over there. Any suggestions for good pubs in the North Norfolk area?

Posted by Matthew at 07:20 PM

October 14, 2004

Google Desktop Search

Get it while it's hot. Only for Windows.

Posted by Matthew at 05:45 PM

Beautiful G(h)ent

Just in case you were wondering what's so special about the town that hosts the Cocoon GetTogether, Michael's photo should be enough of an answer.

Posted by Matthew at 04:02 PM

Cocoon article in Javamagazin

The current printed issue of Javamagazin contains another article on Cocoon by Carsten and moi. This time we did an overview of the current Cocoon version and will be highlighting certain subjects in the upcoming issues. Also, I am author of the month (I guess they ran out of alternatives).

Posted by Matthew at 10:16 AM

Cocoon based XBRL portal

It is unfortunately not that often a Cocoon portal peeks out over the firewall. This solution at Deutsche Börse (German stock exchange) was built to showcase the new XML format for balance sheets XBRL.

Posted by Matthew at 08:33 AM

October 13, 2004

GetTogether roundup

After driving through Belgium, Holland and part of Germany I arrived home this evening and am now "recovering" after the Cocoon GetTogether. Steven has written an excellent overview of the event. I think my main "love" is the fact that people from 17 countries (seventeen!!!) can congregate in a single room and talk peacefully about a subject they love. And I can be there and meet and chat to them all (makes you wish you had learned a lot more languages in school by the way). A special hi to Antonio who came all the way from Nicaragua!

Posted by Matthew at 09:12 PM

October 12, 2004

From across the pond

Although he couldn't be at the GetTogether, we had Stefano on the big screen for the closing session. Hooked up from Boston via iChat. A nice end to a great day.

Posted by Matthew at 05:54 PM

Cocoon success stories

One of the most interesting sessions this morning was the "impress your boss" session, arranged by Gianugo. He got 11 different high-profile users of Cocoon to talk about what they are doing and why they chose the platform.

Posted by Matthew at 01:11 PM

Cocoon GetTogether

Good morning from Gent, where the Cocoon GetTogether will be starting in a few minutes. 134 registrations from 17 countries mean that this is the largest yet. The Hackathon yesterday was a good mix of bug hunting and ad-hoc discussions on topics such as Cocoon Forms, a new blocks concept for a more flexible Cocoon kernel and Cocoon documentation. The day was rounded off with some great spare ribs (as always) and more interesting Cocoon chat.

First talk of the morning is Bertrand describing what you "need" to know when writing an application with Cocoon. Using a project as an example he is detailing the different skills you need and which parts of Cocoon you should be looking at. His talk is here. Next up is Nico Verwer speaking about Test-driven development with Cocoon. The third session is Sylvain talking about the advanced uses of the forms framework in Cocoon. After his talk there are quite a few questions which show that the forms framework is something that interests a lot of people.

Posted by Matthew at 09:14 AM

October 11, 2004

Open Source service companies

I'm slowly losing track of the new Open Source service companies that have appeared over the past weeks. SpikeSource is the newest one I've seen. Amongst the founders is Kim Polese who you may remember from Marimba fame. SourceLabs is another entrant into this market.

Posted by Matthew at 11:48 AM

Cocoon Hackathon

The Cocoon GetTogether in Gent started off this morning with the Hackathon. I've taken some early pictures and uploaded them to my Flickr account. Tagged with "cocoongt2004". One of the things happening here today will be bug-fixing. Basically all the open bugs in Cocoon have been printed out and people can grab them, fix them and then the corrections will be checked in.

Posted by Matthew at 09:11 AM

October 10, 2004

Gent bound

In a few hours, Carsten and I will be heading over to Gent for the Cocoon GetTogether, which starts tomorrow. We'll have a demo version of the Cocoon portal tools framework with us. Basically the idea is to provide an easy way for people to add their own tools (written using Cocoon Flow and Forms) to the portal.

Posted by Matthew at 08:52 AM

October 09, 2004

This is not a love-song: Eventim.music

Today, I was searching for a particular song on the net. The only place I could find it was over on the German pay-for music download service - Eventim.music. Used to buying my songs from the Apple iTunes store I was actually looking forward to comparing the two. At first everything seemed fine. You need to register, set up your payment (for which you need to register again). After getting over those hurdles, you can download the special My-Playlist program you need to actually purchase the music.

There is a version for Mac OS X, so things were looking good. I downloaded the program, started it and proceeded to purchase a couple of songs at 0.99 Euros each. After a couple of tries I actually also got the program to download the music and then I went to burn the tracks to a CD.

Only, no menu entry to burn the CD. Nothing. Nada. So I checked the FAQ. Hmm...it reads as though this should be possible. And after all - what's the use of the whole thing if I can't burn music to CD. When you purchase the track it actually tells you what you are allowed to do (export as WMA - 5 times, burn to CD - 5 times etc.). And no mention that this isn't possible on a Mac.

It gets worse: Not only doesn't my program not allow me to burn a CD - it also doesn't let me export the music as a WMA file.

So I rang the hotline. At first the lady wanted just to take down my problem and pass that on to "service". After mentioning that I write articles :-) I was handed on to someone else. That person was helpful - although he didn't. In the end all he could say was that "it should work" and that he would have to contact service (on Monday) and find out where the problem was. Even though I told him I thought the problem was probably that "the functionality just isn't in there", he seemed positive that it should be.

So, now I'm waiting to hear back from them on Monday - in the meantime I suggest you avoid that service if you're a Mac user. Or you can point me to the solution.

Posted by Matthew at 02:49 PM

October 08, 2004

Baby Daisy

Congratulations Steven and the rest of Outerthought on the birth of baby Daisy. I'm sure there are some proud parents over there.

Posted by Matthew at 09:34 PM

October 06, 2004

JotSpot in the open

JotSpot went public today. Here is a businessweek report. I haven't been able to take that much a look at it in the past couple of weeks, but what I did see was a very interesting extension of the Wiki Way. This page sums it up nicely.

At first I was a bit startled when I logged into my beta account. I expected it to be "just" a hosted Wiki solution (something like Blogspot), but the additional functionality that is possible adds a lot more to just a simple Wiki. It will be interesting to see how people (and especially corporations) take to this idea. My personal feeling is that (especially over on this side of the pond) companies are only now grasping what a Wiki actually is. This will still take another year or so and therefore Jot may be slightly ahead of the curve. Also, my suspicion is that companies will be wary of "yet another application platform". They already have those. What they don't have - is the Wiki. Of course Jot offers that too.

I guess the problem that Jot recognized is that just being a Wiki hosting company is too easy to copy. So you need some USPs to be able to stand out amongst all the other Wiki hosting companies that are sure to arrive and adding application-type capabilities is certainly a USP at this point.

Posted by Matthew at 07:52 PM

Cocoon takes the silver medal!

A Cocoon based portal solution took 2nd place in the category "industry" at the recently held Open Source Best Practice Award in Stuttgart, Germany. With our help, the Raiffeisen Zentral Bank Austria (RZB) built an internal service framework using the Cocoon portal.

Posted by Matthew at 04:38 PM

Don't tell them it's Social Software

I've just completed an article on the corporate side of weblogs and wikis for LinuxEnterprise. So, my attention is grabbed by interesting articles like this one. Ross Mayfield from Socialtext and Mike Pusateri from Disney talked at the Web2.0 conference about the use of enterprise Social Software at Disney. Interesting points on how to get employees to adopt new technologies:

Posted by Matthew at 09:27 AM

October 05, 2004

Using JavaServerFaces in Cocoon

You can now port your JSF applications over to Cocoon.

Posted by Matthew at 05:46 PM

Outblogged

Evan Williams, one of the founders of Blogger, is moving on. I met Evan briefly while touring the Googleplex with Ovidiu last year.

Posted by Matthew at 08:26 AM

October 04, 2004

It's a century!

The total number of registered participants for the Cocoon GetTogether just crossed the 100 mark. Wow.

Posted by Matthew at 09:51 PM

October 03, 2004

Keeping you scared

After watching this, how can you not be?

Posted by Matthew at 10:23 AM

October 01, 2004

What am I doing?

Quite a few people have asked what I need a "box" for and the answer is simple: I'm not telling. Yet. Maybe it's something in the social software area or perhaps Open Source. Or both. We'll see. Anyway, if you're a VC and interested in chatting.... :-).

Posted by Matthew at 01:51 PM

Creative commons view on Flickr

Flickr offers a Creative Commons view on stored pictures. (via Lessig)

Posted by Matthew at 08:16 AM