Great. I just buy a license for Shrook because I didn’t like some of the things missing from NetNewsWire Pro. Now, Ranchero Software released a public beta of NNW 2.0 and the thing rocks!
It’s got the flag-and-archive posts feature I liked from Shrook. It’s got the smart folders I liked from Shrook (and iTunes, etc…) and a bunch of other stuff. I just re-imported my 247-strong blogroll into it, and will be trying it out for a while. It’s MUCH more responsive than Shrook… That may be reason enough to change. NNW 2 doesn’t have the “distributed checking” feature that Shrook has, but that actually failed or got in the way as often as it helped (but when it works, it’s pretty cool…)
Just checked my GMail account – 176 spam messages neatly sorted and out of the way. Went through them all, and not a single false positive. Wow. Score one for the G-Men (and women)!
During our latest Pachyderm development sessions, that pesky EOModeler-deletes-the-.svn-directory issue reared it’s ugly head. I was using the workaround (rename the “good” eomodel file, checkout a new one, move the .svn from the new copy to the “good” copy, nuke the new one, rename the “good” one back to the proper filename), and I accidentally deleted the “good” model file – blowing away a couple hours of carefully saved work. Doh.
King to the rescue! He just whipped up the EOModeler SVN Patch Application Enhancer to prevent the nuking of the .svn directory within the .eomodeld directory.
If you use WebObjects and Subversion, grab a copy of this patch! It will save you time, grief, and grey hair.
UPDATE: King just sent me a URL to another project that does the same fix-EOModeler thing… This one was created waaaay back in February 2003. Doh.
UPDATE 2: Another way may have been to use the rmm utility that moves things to the Trash instead of nuking them instantly… I’ve installed rmm, and will try to be using it instead of a forced recursive sudo root rm command. Sure, it’s like having training wheels, but also like having a safety net 
I just put together an updated installer for APOLLO’s supporting frameworks and resources. PackageMaker on MacOSX makes it so brain-dead simple to create really powerful installers. Gotta love that. And, it’s free (included with the Developer tools).
This version of the installer includes the Pachyderm PXFoundation and PXPublisher frameworks. (Less than subtle hint about project relationships in there somewhere… )
The installer itself isn’t public yet (just for the developers on the project for now – makes it easier to get a new dev. box up to speed without having to manually compile a raftload of frameworks first).
I just got out of a meeting where we were preparing for another meeting (ick) which will involve discussing various web sites (design, structure, content…). Initially, Gord was using a Thinkpad with IE (ick again), which was barfing on pages, and being a general PITA to present from.
So, I grabbed my VGA adapter, plugged in the TiBook, and created a new workspace in OmniWeb 5. I added all of the URLs we were talking about as tabs (complete with handy thumbnail previews), and then we just cycled through the tabs. It was the slickest website review session I’ve seen. Just create a new OmniWeb Workspace for the client, set it to save automatically, and BOOM, you’ve got a handy dandy “live website presentation tool”. Very cool.
I could have done this with Safari, or Firefox, or some such, but the visual polish provided by the tab thumbnails was a huge benefit. Thanks, OmniGroup!
September 20, 2004 · 1 comment
in Uncategorized
When I implemented an experimental Wiki integration with CAREO, I imagined it would be simplest to just tie a Wiki page to each URL, on demand. By extension, that model could have provided a Wiki page for every URL on the internet.
Wikalong does this for all pages in Firefox – promising to become a public, shared margin for the internet.
I’m not a Firefox user (partial to OmniWeb 5 or Safari) but this sounds very cool. Kind of like a Wikipedia for the web…
UPDATE: Just installed Firefox 1.0, and the Wikalong sidebar. That’s freaking AWESOME! I think it’s probably got some serious room for vandalism – had flashbacks of ThirdVoice – the IE plugin that let you leave notes on pages for others to see. First thing that happened with that one was the defacing of Microsoft’s website – only visible via the plugin. This seems more benign – notes are only in the sidebar, not mingled with page content. This could have some excellent implications for teaching/learning with online stuff… Mods of the Wikalong plugin to use a private or institutional wiki for courses etc… Going to have to look into that…
I’ve left (early) from the Pachyderm development session. King and Josh kept going, and we’re going to be unbelievably close to a working Pachyderm Presentation Authoring application. The work is shifting to the user interface, so changes will become visible.
We took some photos today, to document the ad-hoc Extreme Programming setup we adopted, and some of the results.
First, we have the “before” picture. The original Pachyderm 1.0 database schema we inherited:
Then, we have the ad-hoc Extreme Programming sessions:
and, the final database schema for Pachyderm 2.0:
The main foundation stuff that’s left is the entering of screen and component data, integration with APOLLO resource management, and the generation of the xml files to be read by the Pachyderm flash templates. I’m guessing King and Josh will have tackled a good chunk of this already. Next, we’ll be able to focus on the authoring UI almost exclusively.
Joshua Archer has been in the Learning Commons this week (up from the CSU Center for Distributed Learning at Sonoma State University. We’re working on the code that will drive Pachyderm 2.0, and it’s been a pretty intense week so far.
I’m feeling a bit out of my league, with King and Josh running with this stuff, and me panting about half a lap behind, struggling to keep up. Just like junior high school gym class all over again
Anyway, we’ve taken over the old computer lab in the Learning Commons, and have set up a pretty effective working area. It’s sort of like Extreme Programming, with 1 computer shared between the three of us, and supporting computers for each. My laptop was hooked up to a projector, and King plugged another monitor into the projector’s VGA out. This gave us 3 displays of the same screen (one about 10 feet wide for easy viewing). King also plugged a second keyboard/mouse combo into a spare USB port in the Powerbook, so he could take over as needed. King also had his Powerbook for searching docs, and Josh had his Thinkpad as well.
I’d always assumed I’d hate Extreme Programming. I thought it would suck, and that the programmers would be tripping over each other. Not the case (maybe just with this group?) – kind of a cool flow situation. Very slick, and amazingly efficient. 6 eyeballs on all of the code at all times.
Tuesday evening, we were still hacking away, but decided we should watch the final game of the World Cup of Hockey (Canada vs. Finland). So, we planned to string a coax cable into the lab to watch it on the projector. Coax cable wasn’t long enough. Doh. So, King hooked up our own QuickTime broadcast of the game from CBC over the LAN to Josh’s Thinkpad, which was then projected to the 10′ shared screen (and Julian tapped the feed as well, from his cube down the hall). Worked great (there’s a photo of this in my Flickr space), until Lawrie’s daughter decided to change the channel to the Muppets with 10 minutes left in the game. Doh.
SubEthaEdit would make some of this multi-screen collaboration possible at a distance (with Josh back at the CDL, and King and myself here in Calgary), but there isn’t the same chemistry involved without everyone in the same room.
The code that’s coming out of these sessions is freaking amazing. King’s mastery of the stuff that shouldn’t be possible, and Josh’s conceptual model of the whole system, are combining to make this some pretty sweet foundation code. The biggest change came last night, when we were winding up a 14-hour session after 9pm. We ended up trimming over half of the tables from the database. What was initially modeled on poster-sized paper produced on a large-format plotter, now fits comfortably (and more legibly) on 2 sheets of letter sized paper.
The other big thing that was developed was the implementation of a document model to represent Pachyderm presentations. We’ll be writing the authoring tools, and they won’t even have to know about databases. They’ll be creating documents, and adding/manipulating the content of these documents. Very very cool stuff.
Anyway, tomorrow’s the last day of this marathon hackathon. I sure hope I can keep up…
Distributed Categories sounds something like a cross between the “bag of keywords” approach I’ve mentioned, and the Shibboleth method of associating distributed content via a shared magic keyword (as used by Stephen Downes’ EduRSS Merlot feed aggregator).
Michael Feldstein has collected a list of folks talking about this stuff.
