brainscat.com

A pure Java implementation of me was released this Friday on Android. Thanks to Jamie Rytlewski for pointing this out.

Well, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the fact that iTunes now supports multimedia annotation and playback of audio files. On one hand, it’s great to see excellent support for this kind of feature in a prime-time application. On the other hand they’ve gone and implemented something which is pretty much in the same space as the w3 spec, SMIL (Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language). Why re-invent the wheel? Initial signs point to market protection of iTunes, AAC, iPods, and Garageband software. While this new format isn’t proprietary, it seems like big companies like Apple or MS are supporting alternative niche “open” formats, to create market protection. Sure it’s open, but did they really need to make another competing format? In this case, Apple just gave the middle finger to all current SMIL supporting media players.

If it weren’t bad enough that they created a competing format, they only allow the spec to work with their proprietary format, AAC. The Voxmedia Wiki, the most comprehensive source for how to implement AAC multimedia markup, states that Garageband/Podcast Chapter Tool is only compatible with AAC files. Apple’s decision to only support this markup in their player for AAC files fucking sucks. I’m really, really mad about this. I see no reason why the annotations can’t be applied to other file formats, as it should be the player’s job to associate the timestamp in the XML file with the position of audio playback.

Maybe I don’t get this. I hope I don’t, and if I don’t, someone please set me straight. But from where I’m sitting, this new development is a mixed blessing. It’s too bad that the functionality that podcasters have been desiring is caught up in this GarageBand/iTunes/AAC quasi-open format bullshit.

Found by way of Scoble.
Update: It looks like Simon is a bit miffed too.

Go get your fix.

Upgrade Firefox to 1.0.4.

There’s an unofficial patch floating around for MySQL 5 that may get merged in, that’ll bring in XPath support. Looks like your select query will have to use a function called ExtractValue.

From Alexander Barkov’s slides where xml is the column name of the xml data we’re looking to index…

select ExtractValue(xml, '/section/title') from t1;

There’s a dense argument going on right now over whether or not software will be patentable in Europe. Not being the most politically educated person on the block, I found this recent overview, rebuttal, and re-rebuttal about the value of software patents quite enlightening.

It irks me that WordPress 1.5 has nofollow plainly implemented in comments instead of providing an option to leave links as-is. Thankfully, Kim wrote the DoFollow WordPress plugin that makes sure every comment link is nofollow free. Lets just say, I believe in punishing spammers, rather than punishing legitimate commentors because of the spammers.

Looks like I don’t have to shave my beard.

Not exactly breaking news, but Wordpress 1.5 is out. Michigan State’s spring break is next week, so I’ll have some extra free time. If this site isn’t upgraded by 12:00 AM EST on March 14th, I’ll shave my beard.

I’ve temporarily turned on comment moderation. Either SpamKarma is broken, turned off, or suddenly inffective. A bunch of bestiality and incest spam has gotten through the filters in the past few days, so I’m locking things down.

Update: Oops, it looks like I deleted a bunch of comments by accident. Doh.

Zend Studio is my IDE of choice for PHP. It is super stable, has great background checking, remote debugging, and it runs great on OS X to boot. One of the reasons I pushed for the full version at work and not just the personal edition was because of cvs integration. Some of my coworkers are hesitant to access a command line so a cvs client in the IDE is a Good Thing.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Zend, you can browse your entire filesystem in a pane, or you can arrange files as you see fit in a project pane. Nothing new here, most IDEs give you that kind of flexibility.

The frustrating part, which I’ve been working up to, is that you can not use cvs commands on files that aren’t in a project. This isn’t intuitive at all, and even right after you use Zend to check out a module, the menu options to perform cvs commands on the recently checked out files are greyed out. You have to then take all those files you just checked out and add them to a project before Zend’s siloed cvs will work on them… Took me a while to find that out.

Previously, my frustrated rant against the lackluster product evangelism by Sun and Apple went off with little to no effect. So, yesterday, I shot off an email to Mary Smaragdis, connected Sun employee extrodinaire. In the span of a few hours, I was able to contact somone in the Sun organization, and receive a meaningful response. This wasn’t tech support or any other front line channel, this was someone who works in the department I was having qualms with. Her quick response reaffirms to me that no other model could have gotten my questions answered faster or better, and no amount of PR can make up for this kind of experience. Blogging is a Good Thing.

Moving on… Mary said she’d bring up my concerns to others in the office and gave me some links that might help. While these are interesting, they can’t possibly compete with a discussion led by a few people “in the know” who are good at summarizing products and new technologies.

• java.sun.com
• java.net
• research.sun.com
• Calvin Austin — J2SE
• Chris Melissinos — Java Gaming
• James Todd — JXTA
• John Clingan — Solaris

Now, if only someone at Apple were easy to reach… Then again, the fact that their organization isn’t transparent at all means I can’t get ahold of anyone and that they just don’t get it.

Today is one of those days I can’t get ideas out fast enough and it’s very frustrating. It all started with the idea of me setting up a work blog internally. The things I’d like to use it for are as follows.

1. Give project updates as things progress.
2. Clip interesting posts from other blogs to my work blog.
3. Code review with peers.
4. Share experience and tips as I find them.

So, I talked with my friend Ryan about the best interface for clipping from a blog and having a tool grab the pertinent RSS area. Turns out we want the following process to appear to users who want to linkblog.

1. Right click a permalink for a blog.
2. Click “clip this”.
3. Full contents of the article (taken from rss item block) are credited and syndicated in new blog.

We didn’t care if this behavior was in an aggregator like Bloglines, or a plugin to Firefox that posted the necessary information to WordPress. We didn’t care if the tool created a feed somewhere that a WordPress plugin could read, or if it spoke directly with WordPress. What I wanted is a tool to automatically clip a post and make the clip go live on my site.

Inspired, I downloaded another cvs copy of WordPress and started to hack on this. But in the midst of that, I started thinking about how co-workers were going to use the internal blog, and I realized they should be able to read the blog from anywhere. Okay, so I want a private blog that’s accessable anywhere… riight. The only practical, scalable solution for this is to use a VPN. Okay, no biggie, we need a VPN anyways at work. People connect to VPN, they can read the dev-blog and get RSS now.

But shit, I don’t get RSS, Bloglines gets it for me, and there’s no chance in hell of them getting into my VPN. The whole point of putting it on an intranet is so Bloglines and other people can’t read it. >_<

How do I fix this? Install Bloglines behind the VPN so it can access the site and serve me my feeds over a secure connection. But I can’t install Bloglines, I don’t own it.

So, Mark Fletcher, I know you’ve been concerned with a revenue model for Bloglines. If you’re reading this, please, take heed. Either offer a separate Bloglines installation to my employer for a reasonable price, or open source the Bloglines engine. Bloglines has overcome the performance problems I’ve complained about before and I’ve come to love your service because of the user interface. I hope that you see that your unique value, to me, is in your interface, not your centralized service. For the most part, AmphetaDesk does the same centralized aggregator deal, but its interface is terrible. You’re kicking ass when it comes to centralized aggregator user interface.

Even if your strategy for Bloglines is as a portal, as you imply in your recent writings, there’s no reason licensing of your engine can’t provide supplemental revenue. Google does it, I don’t see why you can’t. Allowing custom installations is valuable to the enterprise market with VPNs, it’s valuable to anyone who can’t use your service because it belongs to you alone. Better yet, make the engine extendable, let me customize it. Create great hooks for a plugin system. Open source Bloglines, and sell dual-licenses like MySQL. Give discounts to educational institutions. Really add to the Bloglines web-service, give us way more options than we have now. I don’t care how I get to customize it, as long as I can for a reasonable cost.

You see, as it stands, your centralized hosting hurts me. I know it allows users to get feed suggestions and search feeds for topics, but I’d really be interested in hearing how many users actually are using that functionality. My guess is few, though I may be wrong.

Bloglines is a great aggregator and there are many things I’d like to modify and tweak but I just can’t. Take the clipping solution I’d like above. This would be so simple if when bloglines clipped a post, it offered to keep the original rss item block instead of a link back to Bloglines. If your clipping feature built a custom rss of my clips, I could easily use it and syndicate the “best of” my blogroll. Alas, you probably won’t implement this feature in a timeframe reasonable to me, but if I could could somehow extend your system… well, then the sky would be the limit.

Tim Bray recently wrote an easy to understand summary of the possible directions development on multi-core processors is heading.

Tim Bray outlines developing for multi-core processors, and where the techniques for such development are heading. It’s a simple overview that’s useful to developers unfamiliar with that territory.

Some days, I just can’t write, and things don’t make sense. Hopefully the new version of this news is more easily understood.

Found a great online regular expression testing page.