April 2005 Archives

I've been using Ecto as my main blog-editing application for a long time now.

I wasn't completely happy with the upgrade to version 2.x - the rich text editing seemed clumsy to me when I wanted control over the html, and it really bugged me that I needed to go all the way up to the menu to insert a link to the url from the clipboard - well, ok I know there's a cmd-U keyboard control for that, but who remembers that when they need it?

So even though I installed version 2.x on my Powerbook, I decided to stick with version 1.x on my iMac at work.

But I just installed the latest update, 2.3, on my laptop. It easily allows setting the default editing mode to html instead of rich text, and there's a little dropdown list at the bottom of the editing window that lets me get to inserting a link from the clipboard - that's enough to make me happy.

All of the new graphics look fresh and friendly. I think I'll upgrade my iMac tomorrow.

I thought yesterday's (Sunday April 24) Dilbert comic strip nailed it right on the head:

Wally: My accomplishment this month was opening a file that someone e-mailed.

Pointy-haired-boss: That took an entire month?

Go read the rest of it here.

Every so often someone sends me an email with an audio file attached (all strictly legal stuff, of course).

I've been using Thunderbird as my primary email client on my Macs (and on Windows too, for that matter), and I'm pretty happy with it.

But whenever I click on an audio attachment (usually .mp3) in Thunderbird the sound file opens up in Quicktime instead of in iTunes. I have iTunes set as the default application for Internet music playback (set within iTunes Preferences).

The Thunderbird Preferences Attachment panel has a section for how to handle File Types, with entries for DOC files (handle with Word) and PPT files (handle with PowerPoint), but I don't see any controls for adding new file types.

Anyone got any ideas?

One of the side benefits of my visit to OSAF yesterday was being able to take advantage of the fact that OSAF shares office space with the wonderful folks at the Creative Commons.

Just after the end of the meeting before I ran out of town, I popped downstairs to drop off a few Whispering Johnson CDs (all compositions and performances licensed under a CC license) and to thank them for doing wonderful work, making it easier for creators to share their creations under their own terms.

There was only one staffer there, and I didn't even get her name - but I hope they enjoy the music!

The other big news today at the Chandler update is that OSAF is planning to build a web-browser interface for Chandler functionality. This project is being called Scooby. The slides Mitch used to talk about it are here.

The idea is that instead of creating a separate version of the desktop Chandler app to support nomadic usage, users could get at calendaring and other Chandler items that reside on a Cosmo server from a browser.

The Scooby software would be something that runs on a web application server (in this case Tomcat) that talks to a Cosmo server on one side, and the web browser on the other.

This is still at a very early stage - I believe Mitch characterized it as "proto-molecular". Stay tuned for further developments..

Brian Moseley talked to us this morning about the work on designing a server for sharing calendaring and other items. This is a separate, but coordinated, project within OSAF. The server is called Cosmo.

Brian's presentation slides are here.

It's interesting to see OSAF move closer over time to a more server-oriented view of the world. Of course, those of us in the CSG have been trying to tell them all along that servers make a lot of sense :)

Why a sharing server? More than a file server but not a content management service - it's "content aware".

Cosmo is being built on the Java/J2EE platform, instead of in Python like Chandler.

They decided to use the Java Content Repository (JCR) as a base, rather than Slide. Apache's Jackrabbit is the reference implementation, incubating at Apache
- in pre-alpha
- provides core implementation of JCR interfaces.
- stateful repository server
- Analagous to JDBC but non-relational
- allows abstraction of content store from server, unlike Slide
- "Content repository API for Java"
- main query structure is xpath

They're using the Spring Framework for lots of functionality.

for security they're using Acegi Security Framework
- built on top of spring
- security of channel?
- where do we send user if unauthenticated logins come in?
- Authentication
- handles role-based authorization and ACL authorization
- secures both the web layer and the JCR repository

Web UI
- struts, jsp,
sitemesh for JSP view layout
- wraps business object components commonly used
tiles - struts subproject for JSP view composition

DAV: Jackrabbit jcr-server

Jacrabbit jcr server provides a simple WebDAV servlet
Cosmo extends jcr-server to:
- incorporate Spring for config and depndency
- secure access to the JCR repository via Acegi
- will implement CalDAV
- will ticket based access control

External Authentication
Mechanisms under consideration: LDAP, SQL, CAS, Shib, others?
Providing a simple Cosmo interface for external auth plugins
Cosmo user management API for synchronizing with external user databases.
There will be an interface for automatically synching accounts with external data sources e.g. with LDAP.

Cosmo 0.2 planned for release with Chandler 0.6. Won't include external authentication, but will include:
- Account self-management
- ticket-based security
- iCal interop
- CalDAV interop

John Gruber does a brilliant job on his Daring Fireball blog of translating Adobe's marketing speak in their press release answering questions about the acquisition of Macromedia.

This line particularly rang true to me, where he describes PDF and Flash as

the two leading technologies that irritate people when they’re used in lieu of regular web pages.

I feel exactly that way.

And while we're at it, how about people who make me open a Word attachment just to read a few lines of plain text?

Ryan Barrett, who works at Google, writes that he's got a newly nicely formatted of his gmail vs. pine article available.

The bottom line?

I ended up using it for five weeks, and while I eventually switched back to Pine, I liked Gmail a lot more than I expected. It made me question lots of things I took for granted, and showed me that there's plenty of innovation left in email clients. I'm currently writing patches for Pine to implement the features I miss most from Gmail.

I'm in San Francisco today for an update on Chandler being given for CSG members, who've invested a bunch of money into the development for Chandler. I'll be blogging it during the day.

I've been meaning to write something about the very auspicious release of Chandler 0.5, but was waiting to get a bit more experience with it before saying anything.

Chandler 0.5 is meant to be show working core functionality of calendar and email, the ability to integrate those things in a single repository, and the ability to share repository items over WebDAV. It is not meant to have any sort of good-looking UI, nor to be bulletproof - as Mitch says in his blog:

PLEASE NOTE IT'S NOT READY FOR REGULAR USE YET. NOT READY YET. NOT. (Am I afraid of this point being missed?)

So far I've managed to read email on an IMAP server, send email (both using encrypted authentication), and imported ICAL format calendar data exported from Oracle Calendar, after munging it the same way I have to for import into Apple's iCal product.

I have not yet shared my repository items succesfully, but that seems to be a problem with the WebDAV server I have an account on.

All in all, this is great progress, and I congratulate Mitch, Lisa, Pieter, Chao, Brian, Katie, and the rest of the OSAF crew!

I've been receiving a steady stream of totally distasteful trackback spam for the last couple of days. So I've now totally disabled trackbacks on ths blog. Too bad - another nice, useful, network feature ruined by avarice. Hey, I've got an idea - why don't we go back to the old days and disallow commercial use of the network? Well, one can always dream...

And then I was cooking dinner this evening when the phone rang, and a male with a strong southern cracker sort of accent says:

"Hello, is this Oren?"

"yes."

"This is the Internet guy."

"What Internet guy?"

"The Internet guy...the reason I'm callin' is, we see you've been on your computer...we've got just what you wanted - you can make lots of money at home in your spare time."

"Take me off your damned list and don't you ever call here again."

Sheesh.

I've been saying for years that the music business is splitting into two almost mutually exclusive camps - one where corporate entities are grooming superstars for the mass market (think Britney, Christina, Justin, etc) and the rest of the world, where all the interesting music is being made and listened to by people who really like music.

Now Kevin Kelly notes in his very cool Long Tail blog that the mass market will actually shrink to become less important over time. An astounding fact he brings up:

By my count only ten of the top 100 best-selling albums were released in the last decade, and only four of those were in the last five years.

Wow!

And John Pareles notes here in the NY Times that major record labels have almost entirely lost interest in non-maintream music made outside the United States and the UK.

With the Internet, CD's manufactured abroad are a few clicks away at large retailers or dedicated specialists like the Latin-music experts at descarga.com. Digital distribution brings the music even closer. World music has its own clearinghouse for downloads at calabashmusic.com, where it's easy to stock an iPod with music from Uzbekistan or Curaçao or just read up on them. Subscription services like Rhapsody and eMusic have a surprising amount of international offerings.

And the Smithsonian Institution has just gone online with the ethnographic answer to iTunes: smithsonianglobalsound.org, with museum-quality annotation and royalties paid to musicians. Information and recommendations are also available at sites like worldmusiccentral.org and afropop.org.

I wonder if the RIAA has sued anybody who's file sharing Celia Cruz and Salif Keita?

I've been meaning to post something about the suits filed this week by the RIAA against users of the i2hub file sharing software, which they managed to publicize as "RIAA sues Internet2".

But I got caught up in moving the blog over to MySQL, and in the meantime, Ed Felten has put it much better than I would've.

Another unique aspect of i2hub is that it could only be used, supposedly, by people at univerisities that belong to the Internet2 consortium, which includes more than 200 schools. The i2hub website pitches it as a service just "by students, for students". Some have characterized i2hub as a private filesharing network. That may be true in a formal sense, as not everybody could get onto i2hub. But the potential membership was so large that i2hub was, for all intents and purposes, a public system. We don't know exactly how the RIAA or its agents got access to i2hub to gather the information behind the suits, but it's not at all surprising that they were able to do so. If students thought that they couldn't get caught if they shared files on i2hub, they were sadly mistaken.

Ever since I got back from Vietnam last month the weather here in Seattle has been mostly cool (in the mid 40's F) and rainy, which has felt strange given that most of the winter was unusually warm and dry.

I'm trying to ride my bike to work most days, and have realized that I actually have a shortage of warm bike-appropriate clothing.

So I ordered some of these oh-so-stylish Black Australian Wooly Tights from Rivendell Bikes and I now believe everything Rivendell says about wearing wool instead of synthetic bike clothing - these are fantastic - they keep me warm but not overheated, even when I'm working hard.

I'm now going to by more wool clothes from Rivendell... maybe if I buy cold weather cycling clothes that will make the sun come out and the temperatures warm up.

Last week our Vietnam Ride Blog suffered a corrupt database while I was adding some entries. I'm not sure how it happened, but there doesn't seem to be any graceful way to recover from it aside from exporting all the entries, re-installing Movable Type, and importing all the entries again.

In the meantime, we can't update that blog at all, which is a drag, as there's lots going on.

That's one of the downsides of using Movable Type with a Berkeley database for storage.

So, now having been made suitably nervous about Berkeley db I decided to upgrade this weblog to use MySQL for its back end storage.

Our support folks here at the UW (which happens to be the group I direct, he says proudly) have done a bang-up job of documenting how to use MySQL on our central unix servers.

I followed the documentation, and then used the Movable Type documentation on how to upgrade from Berkeley DB to MySQL.

All went mostly smoothly, though it took some hunting through the MT documentation to learn that I needed to add DBSocket and DBPort entries to the MySQL configuration section of mt.cfg. And I needed some help from our web guru Adam to understand that in my mt.cfg file I needed to specify ovid.u.washington.edu as the DBHost instead of localhost.

So if you're looking at this post, it's a sign that all went well and this blog is now running on MySQL.

Is that cool, or what?

Between lots of other things I've been working on updating the org charts for my part of the world here in Computing & Communications.

For years I've done org charts using Visio. I've been using Visio since it first came out. The early releases of Visio were small, fast, easy to use, and reliable. Over the years, since Microsoft acquired the product, it's had more and more features layered on to it, and it's become (for my purposes at least) far harder to use and far less reliable. Why is this story so familiar with Microsoft applications? The original version of Word for Windows was one of my favorite pieces of software ever - now I can rarely fire up Word except to read .doc files that come attached to emails.

As an interesting aside, Jeremy Jaech, UW alum and one of the co-founders of Visio, is now working on a social calendaring effort called Trumba.

The other day I fired up Visio on my WinXP box and worked away at the charts for a couple of hours. When I went to save, Visio crashed - poof - all my work, up in smoke.

After spending a couple of days resolutely ignoring the problem, I decided yesterday to think about alternatives.

I went online and bought a copy of OmniGraffle 3 for Mac OS X (I bought the professional version).

After spending a couple of hours I now have updated versions of my org charts (pending a couple of edits to get the latest job titles), and I'm sold on OmniGraffle. It's easy to use, the features all seem to work as you think they ought to (or at least as I think they ought to), and it hasn't crashed on me yet. I am particularly taken with the way centering lines just appear as you drag objects around to try and align them with other objects on the page - brilliant!

The current version of OmniGraffle has a Visio XML import/export feature - I haven't tried that yet, but it might encourage people to try OG.

A really fine product from an even more local company - they're even on this side of the lake!

And for creating the web links between the layers of the organization, I used the nice Taco freeware html editor, which makes a breeze of creating image maps!

Hard on the heels of the What Classic Movie Are You personality test I blogged last week, Paul and Ara send along this test of What Dog Are You test available from this page. It's got a very clever UI.

I turned out to be a Gronlandshund (Greenland Dog) as pictured below - not bad!