A blog looking at business communication, knowledge management, scripting tools, OS technology news and other things of interest to mobile tech workers. As I find interesting news this will also contain pointers to thoughts related to configuration managment, change management and general software development.
Here is a new version of my archives that now includes all the posts ... which is a good thing for an archive ;-). It still needs to be sorted properly but its a good start. I've found it helpful to find things that my search wasn't able to find. I'll post a howto here shortly.
Next to safety, security, reasonable bed and desk, hbo ... you must have high speed internet. Now there's one more hotel chain that I can stay in. So far I have the best luck in Marriott Courtyards ... which so far have been offering high speed internet for free lately. Now you can dd LaQuinta.
I've been reading up on what bookmarklets are all about. The above is an article that got me started.
In my quest to further extend my tools to understand and talk to my blogging tool of choice (PyDS) I have written a bookmarklet that posts the current page in IE into PyDS and fills out the source, url and title to match.
Let me know if someone out there has already done this. In case not, here it is:
PyDSBlogThis
Drag and drop the link into your favourites. If you have some text selected in the browser when you click on the PyDSBlogThis link it will quote it in the Source part of the post window. It doesn't look like I can have it quoted automatically in the Text input box of the post, which is too bad since that is really what I wanted to do.
I've tested this with IE 6 and know that it doesn't work with netscape browsers (the bit that gets the selected text has to use a different method in netscape/mozilla).
Here is a great idea ... collect your comments on other blogs, web pages, whatever into your own blog. Love it ... and its a bookmarklet. Wonderful. I am going to try to get this to talk to PyDS. Shouldn't be too hard based on how easy it was to get SharpReader to post to PyDS via the BlogThis plugin. Great idea. I always prefer a quick hack when I can get it!
This is really cool. A bookmarklet that expands the links in a web out to be footnotes which reference the webpages linked to ... so you can see them. Love it.
Slow TWiki Performance on RH 8.0 - Caused by SessionPlugin - And Wrong Time on Client
I've run into a snag using TWiki for an intranet site. We're using a stock install of the latest stable TWiki code on a RedHat 8.0 server. It seems to suffer from intermittant performance problems. Page views are snappy but page saves and attachment uploads can sometimes take 10 minutes to complete ... if they ever complete, even for pages that are trivially small.
Attachment performance seems to be completely unrelated to attachment size or type. So far, I have found some pointers: SaveForever and UsingPerl58OnRedHat8. I am running this on a RedHat 8 server which has apparently caused this behaviour before. The fustrating thing is that there apparently aren't any solutions to the behaviour.
I'll post more on this as I work through the issue. Please point me to any information that I may have missed.
Problem solved!! I ran an Ethereal network capture and noticed that I was getting a 401 Authentication Required error. So, on a whim I disabled the SessionPlugin.pm and voila ... no more weird delays. Further network captures showed the error message was gone as well.
Also discovered that if the client PC had its time set so that it was behind the server ... that attachments and edits might never complete ... Fixing the time to match made things work again ... Very strange.
Luke Huttenman has released SharpReader 0.9.3.2 and it is fantastic. I can't say enough about this RSS Aggregator. First it took me about 5 minutes to set it up to post to PyDS ... amazing. To do that I used the BlogThisUrl plugin. I created in a plugin directory under the SharpReader install directory and unzip the plugin there. Then I modified the BlogThisUrl.template to contain the following:
That should be all on one line. Thats it. Now when you rick click on a post in SharpReader, you have a BlogThis option which preloads all the correct into into PyDS, the link, title, source and text! Its beautiful.
Now there is a great deal in SharpReader to commend it, but the main thing it gives me is the ability to post from a single aggregator to multiple blogs maintained by PyDS ... because it posts to which ever PyDS instance I happen to be running at the moment.
I have now managed to consolicate all my aggregator feeds into one place and am extremely pleased. Not to mention that it is extremely fast, incredible at organizing feeds, understands opml, built in filtering (textual and by time), technorati look up, built in feedster query ... and the list goes on.
Part II of the Ward Cunningham Wiki interview. Among other things, the interview discusses Wiki culture from the Xtreme Programming angle. Specifically Ward talks about his fundamental belief that "Collective code ownership is good".
In the months before I made wiki, we had been having an argument. I think Kent Beck and I were on one side. People who had a lot of faith in the prevailing dogma of software engineering were on the other side. We said, "Collective code ownership is good." They said, "That's ridiculous. You'll never get responsibility. You'll never get quality if you don't have responsibility. And the only way you'll get responsibility is ownership. You have to pin the bugs back on somebody if you want them to ever rise above producing bugs." And I said, "Well that's wrong."
The decisions I made designing wiki were very much inspired by my desire to create a model for the collaborative process I thought should happen in large code bases.
I think there are some differences between the wiki way and collective code ownership a la XP. One of the ones I have experienced is that refactoring pages on a Wiki feels different than having my code refactored. In a way, having someone take the time to read my entries in a wiki and refactor them feels like a compliment ... moreso than having someone refactor my code. Maybe my brain's wiring is different, but seeing my contribution to a Wiki grow and evolve is an increedibly gratifying experience. I haven't had that experience as frequently in a code refactoring scenario.
I've been doing this blog since sometime in September .. and the posts are starting to pile up ... I see that alot of folks using blogger and MT etc implement these nice archives ... and reading through the docs in PyDS ... I see no mention of archives.
But it occurs to me that perhaps the calendar function really is an archive ... since my blog only shows a certain number of past entries ... All I need to do is create a link to the calendar month for the archive I want people to access. Has anyone else done this? I am going down the right path or a blind alley?
Interesting thinking over at Knowledge Jolt with Jack. He is solving the personal information management with a really neat tool: PersonalBrain. Just did the flash walkthrough and it looks really cool. Sort of a really suped up mind mapping / PIM merge. This is sort of what I get with using a Wiki for Personal Information Management, but they make it look really cool. Quoting Jack:
It is perfect timing for me to be having this conversation with David Buchan about using PersonalBrain with a blog aggregator. Now that I have left my job to home, I need to rejigger the way I use my personal information management tools. Ive already switched to a combined mail-tasks-calendar-notes system at home, which also conveniently talks to my PDA.
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