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.

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;

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

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.

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.

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 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.

I hereby present to you, the Inaccessable Tablet PC Hardware catalog. Upon visiting I see…

“This site only supports Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.5 and above on Windows. Please visit Microsoft.com.”

It might as well say, “Give up now. You’re not wanted here.” But, I know that can’t possibly be the case, and I’m sure Microsoft would love more of Michigan State University’s dollars. Thankfully, I can look at the page at home, on my PC, but should I really have to? Wouldn’t Microsoft really want to make it as easy as possible for the greatest number of people to get excited about their products? I would think they’d cater especially to those who use a competing product. If any page should be accessable on Microsoft’s site, it should be those spaces where their new technologies are showcased.

Update: You can find the DotNetRocks themesong on their website.

Update 2: Oops, I thought it was episode 90, guess it was episode 91.

Combine Scoble’s evangelism with the great content that Channel 9 is providing and it’s easy to see why Microsoft technology is dominating the developer’s blogosphere. Channel 9 consistently pushes great content that showcases how easy it is to do specific cool new things with the Microsoft toolset whereas Scoble serves as an aggregating demigod. With two easy rss feeds, I get the best of what the MS blogosphere has to offer at any given moment.

Contrast this model with Apple. Almost everything technical is centered at the Apple Developer Connection which has only one RSS feed. Sure, Apple’s content is concise and relatively easy to keep tabs on but that’s only because of the paltry amount of content. Furthermore, the ADC model has no transperancy, no trust, and no conversation about their development. I wouldn’t know if Apple has something great down the pipe at all, and it’s extremely hard to get excited about their platform when their developer site is merely a feed containing code samples. It’s the conversation that gives Scoble and Channel 9 so much authenticity and Microsoft a higher degree of credibility. Conversely, everything on Apple’s site is sterile and restricted, and thus hardly engaging at all.

Sun’s relatively recent unveiling of Sun Blogs is a great step because the conversation is very real, but it’s deficient because it’s a free-for-all and impossible to digest. Tim Bray used to do a decent job of this with his Sunbeam posts, but that hasn’t been updated in forever. To be fair, it’s not Tim’s responsibility to provide the development face of Sun as Ongoing is his personal blog. Sun Bloggers has a signal to noise ratio that is extremely low and I wish they’d get their act together on this and create some mechanism for letting the cream rise to top. What does get passed around the community are things like Schwartz’s latest insights and sure, Schwartz has a great blog, but it’s about the business strategy of Sun. They need to focus part of their PR strategy on pushing the upcoming technologies that are going to persuade developers like myself to use their platform.

Right now, Sun and Apple need to get their act together and evangelize the technology that’s going to give their respective entities an attractive carrot to developers. I refuse to believe that they aren’t developing something that is revolutionary and can only chalk the silence of the blogosphere up to the fact that their public presence is so low. Please, reclaim part of the developer mindshare with great demos and engaging interviews. Let us know you have a pulse.