Inspirational Technology

Still thinking about Blosxom

I'm still thinking about converting this site to running on a Blosxom derivative, in particular on Pyblosxom. I spent a fair amount of time over the last week getting everything working in a test setup and I've worked everything out, except I'm worried about the performance of it. Even running on my dual 1.25Ghz Powermac there's a noticeable delay when viewing a page. This concerns me as the server this site runs on is only a dual 266Mhz Pentium II. I haven't tested it on this machine yet. This really shouldn't be a major problem as this site doesn't get all that much traffic and the network is kind of slow anyway, but CGI scripts always bug me. This is the one good thing about MovableType, it's slow to post, but that's because it creates static pages for everything.

The Perl version of Blosxom can also be used to generate static pages, the Python version can't.

So far I've written four plugins for Pybosxom to make it as compatible with the current site as possible. I had to add RSS 1.0 support, Textile formatting support and a post body summarize function. Along with these I also created a new plugin that tracks referrers and hit counts on a per post basis. That one was more my experimenting with Berkeley DB XML then anything, but it's very useful.

Anyway, now I'm stuck trying to decide whether to go with Pyblosxom, go with the original Perl Blosxom or to punt on the whole thing and just stick with MovableType.

Google Calculator

Google has a calculator. You just type an expression in the search field and it gives you the results. First thought ... how useless. Second thought, does it work from the search box in Safari, yes of course. Third thought, how very useful, it's actually faster then firing up calculator and clicking on the buttons (don't know why I always click instead of type the numbers, stupid me). Google: web services that actually work.

Weblog Link Series

Shelley Powers has published an excellent series of articles about linking in Weblogs.

• Part 1 -- The Impermanence of Permalinks
• Part 2 -- Re-weaving the Broken Web
• Part 3 -- Architectural Changes for Friendly Permalinking
• Part 4 -- Sweeping out the webs

Since I'm thinking about making a move with this site, Part 2 was particularly interesting. In my case though, I fortunately have the luxury of just leaving everything in place. The only thing that bugs me a little about that is that I'll need to keep a working MovableType system running to handle comments and such. I'd prefer to just be able to shut it down.

Rendezvous Implementation for Windows and Linux

Rendezvous is something I really wish Microsoft would include in Windows, until they do there's Howl. It looks like it's a fairly simple C API and works on both Windows and Linux. Pointer from Hack the Planet

LDAP Replication

Here's a tip, if you're setting up multi-master replication with iPlanet directory server and have the servers connected by 100mb ethernet or greater don't follow the iPlanet recommendation that says to use an LDIF export to initialize the consumers. The last time I did this, I followed that recommendation and ended up wasting several hours while importing the LDIF into the consumer only to have replication fail because of replica id inconsistencies. Use online initialization. Even over SSL it took something like five minutes to initialize the consumer, compared to about 3 hours using LDIF. The bonus of course being that Replication actually worked after it was done.

iTunes Playlist to Blog

While messing around today I wrote a little Python script to post an iTunes playlist to a Metaweblog API enabled blog (like MovableType). I'm toying with the idea of using it to auto-post a top 25 list of songs once per week or something. The script is available here.

Here's what the top 25 looks like for this week. This is from an iTunes smart playlist that shows the top 25 most played songs that have been added to my library in the last month. iTunes smart playlists are an absolutely great feature that I hope shows up in other places in Mac OS X, like oh maybe in the Finder as a smart list of files.

Artist	Song	Album	Play Count
Metallica	Frantic	St. Anger	12
Massive Attack	Antistar	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Butterfly Caught	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Everywhen	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Future Proof	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Name Taken	100th Window	11
Massive Attack	Hymn Of The Big Wheel (Origin	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	11
Metallica	Dirty Window	St. Anger	11
Metallica	My World	St. Anger	11
Annie Lennox	A Thousand Beautiful Things	Bare	10
Annie Lennox	Bitter Pill	Bare	10
Annie Lennox	Erased	Bare	10
Evanescence	Bring Me To Life (Feat. Paul	Fallen	10
Massive Attack	Prayer For England	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Small Time Shot Away	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Special Cases	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	What Your Soul Sings	100th Window	10
Massive Attack	Any Love (Larry Heard Mix)	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Massive Attack	Home Of The Whale	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Massive Attack	Hymn Of The Big Wheel (Nellee	Hymn Of The Big Wheel	10
Annie Lennox	Honestly	Bare	9
Annie Lennox	Loneliness	Bare	9
Annie Lennox	Oh God (Prayer)	Bare	9
Evanescence	Everybody`s Fool	Fallen	9
Evanescence	Going Under	Fallen	9

What's funny is that I have a tremendous breadth of musical interest, but you sure wouldn't know it from this list. I bought a number of more popular albums a couple weeks ago which skews the results away from the more eclectic mix I usually get from eMusic.

Currently Playing "Marquis Cha-Cha" by "The Fall" from the album "Palace Of Swords Reversed", a little more eclectic bit from eMusic.

Echo Project

Anyone who's interested in blogging tools may want to pay attention to the Echo project. From the site "The EchoProject is an initative to develop a common syntax for syndication, archiving and an editing API". It's an effort to consolidate all the RSS, Blogger API, MetaWebLog API, whatever mess into something more manageable.

Tim Bray is wondering if it's going to go off the rails. In my original comment on this, I expressed the same concern. It's the second system syndrome, developers just can't resist it.

If nothing else Echo is an interesting experiment in community oriented specification.

Time for Forward Motion

As previously noted, weblog protocols are stuck in a rut. We want to work together and solve the problems, but political battles keep getting in the way. It’s time to put our differences aside and solve the problem.

I support the weblog format roadmap. Let’s start fresh, work together, and get the job done.

I hope you’ll join me and announce your support for the roadmap from your weblog. If we get enough people behind this, maybe we can see some forward motion in RSS again.

[Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]

This is something I tend to agree with. The current set of tools has gotten too fragmented and difficult to work with. If a new effort can actually keep things simple and not fall into the second system syndrome it could be a good thing over the long run.

This could be the year for UDDI

This could be the year for UDDI
[InfoWorld]

Hah, hah, yeah right.... UDDI is dead, dead I tell you. Taking an already overly complex, useless specification and making it even more complex just isn't going to solve the problem.

Introducing SharpReader

Luke Hutteman: handles all RSS versions, modules like dublin core,
content:encoding, xhtml:body, etc. ... RSS Auto-discovery ... and last
but not least, for items that include the full html description,
sharpreader lets you expand a headline to view links and responses
to/from other posts in other feeds. This allows you to read posts in
context, and will show related posts together. [via Phil Ringnalda] I
really like the related posts feature. [Sam Ruby]

This actually looks pretty interesting. I've been reading a lot of .Net blogs lately and the community there seems to be picking up quite a bit. In particular there are a large number of Microsoft employees blogging now. Something I wish Apple would encourage more of.

Webservices Switch

"Web services are like a super bus" The CapeScience guys do a switch. [Simon Fell]

Pretty funny, well it is if you're a geek.