I went to Market Mall tonight to kill some time with Evan - they have an excellent play area, and Jugo Juice nearby...

We came in through the Toys R Us entrance to avoid construction, and as we were walking through the mall, I noticed a kiosk with a G4 iMac as a POS terminal. Took a closer look, and the kiosk was a new "iPod Store" - provided by local Mac dealer My Mac Dealer. They had EVERYTHING there - iPods (20GB 3G for $100 less than I paid 3 months ago...), several iPod Mini in stock (or at least the boxes), and all kinds of accessories. It was pretty cool to see this stuff kept in stock (as opposed to the traditional gamble-if-it's-in-or-place-a-6-week-order-and-wait process.

I've just published updated Javadocs for the APOLLO frameworks (and the Pitchboard application that drives Fusion).

It's a start - we'll be fleshing out the documentation as we move along (that's one of the things on my plate, so I'll be spending some quality time working on documentation over the coming months).

The classes will be updated/cleaned/trimmed over the next little while, but this will give a starting point for grokking the guts of APOLLO.

Damn you BoingBoing! Must... Have... This...

Cool technique for using your iPod as essentially an IR modem (convert sound to IR beam to control your TV/DVD/whatever). Very geeky. Looks like it requires a PocketPC as part of the process, though...

The little IR doohicky costs $25US

This is an old Builder.com article (from May 2003), but goes into the guts of how to use XML in Flash. Might come in handy for Pachyderm...

On a side note, wtf is up with builder.com? They have a redundant .com in their address (builder.com.com - I assume that means they're part of CNet, famous for "news.com.com"), and the URL scheme they use is a huge PITA to type in (I had it open on one machine, and needed to get it to the other... Took way too long, and some apparent numerical dyslexia kept getting in my way. Doh.

I just uploaded new source files for the JavaEOXMLSupport framework on the woxmlsupport project on Sourceforge.net.

It's got support for accessing and editing XML data in documents via KeyValueCoding (although I've found a bug - it doesn't like creating elements that don't exist, so it's literally an editor at the moment).

I also uploaded source for a test application (xmldbTester), which uses both JavaEOXMLSupport and JavaXStreamDBAdaptor frameworks. You'll need your own XStreamDB database at the moment (free for educational users), but it works fine.

I just installed a local copy of the W3C HTML Validator tool on my laptop, thanks to the instructions provided by Apple. That was one heck of a process. Time in CVS checking stuff out, time in CPAN, time compiling stuff, finking stuff. All told, it took about an hour and a half (partially due to my slow internet connection at home at the moment).

Really appreciating the checkbox simplicity of the stuff that ships with MacOSX ;-) - I wonder if they'll ship the validator on Tiger Server?

Just made a major breakthrough in enabling editing of XML via the JavaEOXMLSupport framework. Turns out I was outsmarting myself again - trying to do too much work, instead of just letting go and letting WebObjects do what it does best. Once I did that, it was a 5 line addition of code (after skipping comments) to enable this. I'll need to do some more testing, but it's looking good. When it's actually working, I'll publish the changes to the SourceForge site.

I'm playing around with the CSS for this weblog, trying to make it a little easier to read, and less retina-wretching. I've taken design cues from HappyCog and others, but will be tweaking/changing at will for a while...

Haven't implemented the new design site-wide yet (writeback pages still use the old icky design), but I like it better than the old one, so I'll probably make the full switch.

I also dumped the sidebar. It was just a lot of superfluous info crap that wasn't needed. I moved the meat of the sidebar into separate pages, accessible by the nav links at the top of each page. Search is available in the top banner on all pages as well.

Saw a link to E4X yesterday, but nobody seemed to know what E4X really was, only that they had a very PR-ish PR.

Sean Corfield, over at An Architect's View, has provided some more info. Basically E4X provides a more complete DOM, with methods to read, create, and query an XML document (including an XQuery implementation).

Also, it appears that E4X has grown from BEA's scripting extensions, so it's not a brand new thing - that's good, in that it's been in the wild for a while, rather than being restricted to the lab.

Just came across this link from a quasi-spam mailing by a java magazine. The article they sent was fluff, but gave a brief overview of SAML. This sounds like it might be useful for APOLLO, so I'm bookmarking it here.

It sounds like a way of dealing with federated identity, and the concepts of "user types" or "roles" - things that are becoming more important in APOLLO as it gets fleshed out.

Holy crap. I was just looking for something completely unrelated to this, but a random neuron got fired, and led me to this page, featuring 8 of Cory Doctorow's books in iPod Notes format.

That's too freaking cool! I've downloaded them, and will start reading through them (starting with Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom) during the daily commute...

UPDATE: Well, ok... that's kinda interesting. After the iPod loaded all 500-odd pages of Notes for the books I downloaded to it, I'm really seeing the limitations of the iPod for this kind of thing. I'll have to go in an rename some of the books so I can read the titles in the menu. And, after scrolling through the first 5 pages of Down and Out, I finally got the the end of the quotes, FAQ, and Creative Commons license... Doh. Might have to add a "Start the book already" link on page 1 of each book. Also, looks like there's no way to bookmark where you are... Or, to quickly get back to the menu without going back through all of the pages you've read. oy.

So, the news of the new 4G iPods has been leaked rather publicly via MSNBC/Newsweek. Ars Technica is saying it's a huge improvement (they've updated their article on AT - the first release of it was so full of incorrect information I was very surprised to see it on Ars!)

My reaction to the new scroll wheel is something like "uh, I prefer the separate buttons, thank you very much." The combined scroll-wheel-button thingy was created for the iPod Mini, which doesn't have the real estate available for dedicated buttons. Makes sense there, not so much on the Full iPod.