I got the chance to play with debugging a running WebObjects app today, with the added fun of having a roomful of 20 users of the app taking turns to mention “did you know that [X|Y|Z] isn’t working?”
Long story short, if you need to get the status of threads of a running WebObjects app, jdb provides some great tools. I have only scratched the surface of it, thanks entirely to the great intro document by Andrew Lindesay. (Andrew recently moved his website to .Mac from some New Zealand host, so I’m linking to help throw some Google Juice his way so others can find his article)
Had a really good first day of meetings. We had a quick lunch on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt, overlooking the awesome skyline of San Francisco. Then we got into the recap of the last 2 years, and touched base.
Then, we packed into a bunch of cars, and headed over to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. What a cool museum! We headed straight for the Education Tower, with a spectacular view of The City - from an angle I’d never seen before.
This morning before the meeting started, I took a quick sprinting shopping spree through Macy’s and then to the Apple Store. Played with the new video iPods. Oh my f#cking god. How can they make something so obviously incredible? I must have one. Oh, yeah. Cash…
Where was I going with this? Oh, yeah. I also picked up a Belkin TuneTalk microphone for my iPod. Maybe Evan will give it to me for Christmas. Plugged it into my iPod and it pops up immediately with the “Record Now” screen. Cool. So, I record some sample stuff, and it doesn’t sound like crap. Actually, it sounds completely decent. With some massaging in Audacity or GarageBand, it might even sound good. I can even leave the iPod on my belt, with the microphone in place, and record myself talking while standing and walking around. Kind of like I do when I present something to a group. Hmmmm… Might have to experiment with recording my next presentation… It also seems like a pretty handy podcasting recording setup as well.
This is the one where I rant/vent about my flight down. I’m blogging this from 30,000’ for therapeutic reasons… It wasn’t a bad trip down at all, and I’m seriously not complaining about being sent to San Francisco for a couple of days of meetings, but man some people are just ignorant enough to deserve a full-fledged ranting…
OK. I wake up at 3:20am - alarm’s set for 4 - and realize with a shudder that it’s only 2:20am Pacific time, but I can’t sleep the morning I have to fly anywhere. Get ready, sneak into Evan’s room to say goodbye while he sleeps, and then head downstairs to catch the cab at 5am. I arrive at the airport at about 5:20. Through checkin in about 5 minutes, then into the lineup for US Customs. It’s moving smoothly, and I’m through in about 20 minutes. I head for the lineup for the security check, and notice people starting to shove. They’re trying to follow the flight crews through the expedited lines, and they’re trying to shove their way through the remaining lines.
I’m heading down to San Franshisky for a couple of days to take part in the Pachyderm Project Year 2 Wrap-Up meetings/training/gathering at SFMOMA. I’ll be sitting in meetings during the day, trying to take a photo or two of the area in between, and working on some projects with deadlines this week during the remaining hours. Should be interesting. I’ll likely be blogging during the event, and will post what I can to Flickr.
I grabbed a copy of Joomla the other day, to play around with another option for a CMS to use for projects at the Learning Commons. Some early thoughts:
The admin UI seems very well done - but man, is there a lot of stuff in there. Not sure I’d want to unleash that interface on a novice user, or even a casual Office warrior. I’m sure it makes more sense as you get used to it, but it’s even more jarring than Drupal, and much more complicated than WordPress (likely necessarily so, since it does so much more than WordPress, but seems like it should be on par with Drupal).
Seems like a very odd definition of “Open Source” in the Joomla community. Likely some historical context to make it meaningful, but of the several Joomla community sites that I’ve visited for modules and templates, they all seem to require logins to download stuff, and several require paid subscriptions - some quite steep - just to get access to something that I thought was GPL. Bizarre…
The content publishing process seems much more complicated than Drupal or WordPress. How do you determine which chunks of content make it to the front page, in what location? The admin interface provides a lot of bells and doodads to control that, but it’s not immediately obvious how to control the flow of content.
It’s got a really nice level of granularity for permissions. Admins, publishers, editors, managers, writers, etc… All with their own sets of restrictions. People with access to the admin UI can publish content immediately, while “lesser” users need to have stuff approved before it shows up.
The URL structure is pretty much semantically meaningless. URLs take the form of /content/view/14/2/ - and that’s with the “search engine friendly” option turned on - it’s even worse without that. There’s a spot for a “Title Alias” - but it doesn’t seem to get used as the Post Slug does in WordPress, or the Path does in Drupal. Maybe there’s another bit to twiddle for that to kick in…
The pervasive rich text editor / WYSIWYG dealie is pretty nice.
Joomla feels like a robust, mature CMS. Things like content checkin/checkout, staledating, moderation, etc. appear to be done quite nicely.
What’s up with Joomla’s RSS Feeds feature? It’s borked. Right now, it just gives a list of feeds, and you have to click on each one to get a list of items. It should give a merged list of items, ala Drupal or FeedOnFeeds or SuprGlu or etc…
Installing templates and modules - hasn’t worked for me so far. Not sure what the exact process is. Doesn’t seem to work if you just drop files into the templates or modules directories. The provided Upload/Install feature fails for me, too. I’m sure it works, but I haven’t tripped over the piece of documentation describing the installation process.
I’ll have more thoughts over the next few days - I’m setting up an instance for a demo on Friday. Right now, Drupal feels more “fluid” but Joomla feels more “newspaper-ish”. If that makes sense.
Just installing Mambo for a demo of various CMS options to the team tomorrow. The Mambo 4.5.2.3 installer borked while creating a table, choking on a missing default value for “rating_sum”.
Easy fix. Line 221 of mambo/installation/sql/mambo.sql is dealing with setting up the content_rating table. Modify the sql thusly:
`rating_sum` int(11) unsigned NOT NULL default '0',
Aside from that silly sql bug, the Mambo installer is pretty slick. I’ll likely blog my early thoughts of it as a CMS, after I’ve played with it for awhile…
I wanted to update my Archives page to display the total tag count, but didn’t see a built-in method in Ultimate Tag Warrior to do that. So, here’s the recipe I followed - mimicking how the other methods are set up, in case the changes get rolled into the main distro…
In ultimate-tag-warrior.php:
function UTW_ShowUniqueTagCount() {
global $utw;
echo $utw->GetUniqueTagCount();
}
In ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php:
function GetUniqueTagCount() {
global $wpdb, $tabletags;
$sql = "select count(*) from $tabletags";
return $wpdb->get_var($sql);
}
And, in K2’s page-archives.php (or anywhere you want the count to show up):
This morning, I saw that James Farmers’ Edublogs serviceis being banned in Australia. Censored. Blocked. Verboten. It irked me, and has been bugging me all day. Now, Brian just posted about it, and I realize I need to publicly demonstrate some form of outrage at this. It’s not enough to quietly grumble, or to simply comment on James’ blog post.
Censorship is inherently evil. The goal of censorship, by definition, is to prevent access to, or dissemination of information. Some might say it is a necessary evil, but I’d respond that it’s a very slippery slope, and that it’s far too easy to slide down past a point of no return.
I got a new TruePower battery for my 2.5 year old 3G iPod last week. It took a grand total of 20 minutes to install, and after charging the battery, my iPod is performing better than it did the day I bought it.
I’ve gone entire work-days (including commute to/from the office) with about a third of the battery life left. It never went that long when the iPod was new. I no longer have to worry about my battery recharge cycle (don’t forget to charge it when you get into the office, or it will be dead when you go home. don’t forget to leave it in the dock all night at home, or it will be dead in the morning. etc… very liberating).
I get occasional emails asking me about what plugins I use to run this blog. I don’t mind answering them coughAlecahem but having an up-to-date colophon might be helpful, too.
I just copied the table from the WordPress plugin manager, trimmed out the “Action” column, and pasted it into the colophon for this blog. I’ve noticed that some plugins provide incorrect or incomplete URLs to the plugin description/download page. I’ll find/fix the links when I get a chance. And no, I’m not turning the colophon into a wiki ;-)
I gave a presentation/workshop this morning introducing 20 folks to wiki. “Collaborative Publishing with Wiki”. The session went really well, I think, and there have already been edits by some attendees on the U of C wiki (and perhaps on Wikipedia as well).
Here’s an interactive Quicktime version of the presentation. I didn’t record audio - I really need to record the full session. If you view it, imagine me talking about stuff, and making things really interesting and clear. It’s another modified-Lessigian-style presentation, so no bullet points, and some of the slides may not make too much sense without me talking. If a slide looks odd, imagine something interesting or pithy, and click the mouse to go to the next one…
