Blog Posts

Small Pieces Loosely Joined

I just realized something… Of the 3 weblogs we had set up for the “Small Pieces Loosely Joined” session at NMC2004, only the “Centralists” weblog is still alive… Hmmm…

Trying Wordpress

I know, I know… I said I wasn’t planning on switching any time soon… What can I say? I was reading through the Wordpress site, looking at the docs, etc… and thought it looked very compelling. Kinda like MovableType done out in the open.

Anyway… I really liked the layout and functionality of my Blosxom weblog, so I’ll be slowly migrating this Wordpress site to match that.

Sorry for any inconvenience with the move. Google will catch up in a couple days…

How to migrate posts from Blosxom to Wordpress

I’m not planning on leaving Blosxom any time soon, but if I was to switch (again), I’d move to Wordpress. It’s getting to be a great package, with solid plans and active development.

Assuming I ever decide to switch, there is a HOWTO describing how to get posts from Blosxom (individual .txt files in folders) into Wordpress (MySQL). It involves a custom Blosxom flavour that spits out a standard MovableType export file, which can be read by Wordpress (and many other weblog packages, actually).

FSU Signs Deal With Apple

Wow. Now I just need to transfer down to Florida State University, and I can get myself a free copy of iTunes, along with the option to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store for just $0.99 per track!

What an amazing stroke of contractual genius on the part of FSU, making these otherwise unavailable tools available for their students. Oh. Wait a minute… Looks like Apple must have signed similar deals with The Rest Of The World, because I just found both iTunes (whoah - even with a download link) and the iTMS available for the rest of us as well! Looks like I won’t have to sell the house and pack up the family to move to Florida after all…

iLingo: Language Translator for iPod

Wow. This looks awesome. iLingo Language translation application. It comes with something like 450 phrases in a bunch of languages, and uses the iPod Notes feature to provide a handy translator. It even somehow links to audio versions of phrases. Could be handy if walking in a foreign country, and really need to pronounce “Please, sir, where may I find a toilet?” in a hurry…

One Week With OmniWeb 5

I said I’d write up my thoughts on spending one week with OmniWeb 5. Before starting, here’s the Coles Notes version: I bought the upgrade license, and have switched to using OmniWeb 5 (almost) 100% (see below for reasons why it’s not at a full 100% yet). Here goes:

Things I love about OmniWeb 5

• The tab implementation freaking ROCKS. - almost exactly what I mocked up in January 2003, with the added bonus of page thumbnails… And the thumbnails are absolutely amazing and gorgeous. Can glance at 10 thumbnails and see exactly where I need to go next… And, it shows the status of pages loading in the background (shows a green checkmark on pages when they’ve finished loading)
• Saving the workspace as you work - so if you quit, or the browser crashes, all tabs are restored right where you left off the next time you launch (even remembering scroll position).
• Textarea form elements on web pages have this cool widget where you can get a larger sheet for more effective text entry - with an “Import from File” button. Awesome if you fill out a lot of forms (like, say while developing a web app…)
• Site Preferences - override application prefs on a per-site basis
• View: View in Source Editor! You can edit the HTML for a page in a source editor, and REDISPLAY THE EDITS LIVE, without having access to the page’s server. Awesome for debugging stuff.
• Ad blocking is awesome. And it’s highly customizable, too. Be gone, annoying flashing banner ads! Related to this is the ability to control animation of GIFs on a page - I’ve got mine set to allow animation for no more than 20 seconds.
• URL Shortcuts. You can add shortcuts for any URL, and as an added bonus, you can add parameters for pages that accept them (like search engines, etc…). Slashdot is just “slash” now. No waiting for autocomplete… I worked up a shortcut that allows me to search CAREO from the navigation bar (like Alan’s shiny new MLX Firefox plugin)
• Regular expressions in the Find utility. Holy crap! Not that I’m a RegEx expert or anything, but any app that cares enough to put that kind of functionality at my fingertips deserves some serious kudos.
• The “Page Info” panel. Every bit of detail of every single part of a page is available in a report. Files grouped by type (images, style sheets, scripts, frames, etc…) with full stats (file size, last modified date, expiry date of cache…). And, the ability to display each individual item, or save it separately, or view the source for it. Wow. Awesome for debugging websites…

Things I’m Ambivalent About

• RSS implementation. Thought I’d love it. Thought it would be the greatest thing since sliced bread. But it’s just nowhere near NetNewsWire, only showing titles of items in a feed, and not tracking read/unread state.
• Bookmarks. Maybe I just haven’t given it enough time, but it doesn’t seem dramatically better than Safari’s bookmark implementation (and has a wrinkle that you can’t drag a page’s URL proxy from the address bar into the in-browser-window bookmarks display - you get the bookmarks:/ URL instead. There’s a workaround, but that’s not the point…
• Shared Bookmarks - not really useful unless everyone on your LAN is using OmniWeb 5 - I’m the only one I’m aware of here…
• Multiple Workspaces - thought I’d really use these, but opening bookmark folders in tabs within the current default workspace works better for me.
• Bookmarks syncing - I’ve been a huge fan of this with Safari, so it’s not groundbreaking, but it’s great to know it’s there.

Things I’m Not a Great Fan Of

• Out of date WebCore. Doesn’t work with GMail (that’s the one thing I keep Safari running on a second machine for…)
• The “Save Window Size” command works great for single-display systems, but if I have a window on my secondary display while at work (on an external monitor plugged into my TiBook), and set the window to prefer that screen by “Saving Window Size” on it, then when I go home (without the external monitor), the window tries to open on the external monitor anyway. I can grab the edge of the title bar and drag it back on to the only screen, but it’s a huge pain. It would be cool if the app was smart enough to realize the number of screens, and relative position thereof while saving size…
• The Navigation Bar. Separate Stop and Reload buttons are redundant - and waste space on the nav bar. I can only do one or the other, never both… Also, I really miss Safari’s progress-bar-under-location-field display. It’s just so handy to be able to know that a page is about half loading by seeing a blue bar in my peripheral vision - without having to look up from what I’m reading, and without having to open an Activity Viewer. It’s nice to have the Activity Viewer, but it shouldn’t be the primary way to display page status.
• No way to export my bookmarks. It will import them fine. Great. Now what? It will read my Safari bookmarks (but not write to them). I’ve been using Safari Bookmark Exporter to export my Safari bookmarks to every browser on my system. Can’t do that anymore, since bookmarks will be going into my OmniWeb bookmarks file, which is in a different format…

Anyway, I’m sure it’s far from a complete list, in each of the 3 categories. Bottom line is, I love OmniWeb 5, and plan to be a long time user.

Best Anti-Bush Protest Sign. Evar!

Thanks to BoingBoing for the link to this awesome RNC protest sign.

I’m not too aware of the American political landscape, but are Democrats just that much geekier than Republicans? There’s yet another reason to give Kerry the vote (you know, aside from the whole rigged-2000-election thing and the lying-to-go-to-war thing…) ;-)

DirectorWeb is 10 years old!!

The DirectorWeb website is 10 years old! Holy cow. Time flies. I used to spend a LOT of time on this site, using their Direct-L listserv archive/search utility, back when I was doing ~100% Director stuff. Alan did an awesome job on DirectorWeb, so much so that I considered it essential to doing Director development. I still remember many of the regulars (WTHMO - Warren (the Howdy Man Oleshko), Zav, Zac, John Dowdell, Warren The Audi Man (from Integration.qc.ca, IIRC) and many more…) Direct-L searches for “howdy” show that WTHMO must still be active ;-) I appear to have been dropped from the online archives, or perhaps more accurately, the archive doesn’t go back far enough to include me ;-)

OmniWeb 5 Update

It’s only been a day, but I’m really liking OmniWeb 5. I had one crash, but other than that it’s been flawless.

The extra features are great (edit HTML then refresh the browser window - on any website!). Love the thumbnail tab view. Love the speed and ad-blocking. Hate the lack of Safari’s cool progress bar. Hate the separate Reload and Stop buttons. Hate that GMail doesn’t work in it… I did pay my upgrade fee for OW5 already, though ;-)

JavaEOXMLSupport is now working!

I finally got a version of the JavaEOXMLSupport.framework working to the level that it could actually be used in a project. The previous version was usable for read-only cases, but was pretty useless for editing/writing XML.

I had to rethink the strategy a bit. The previous strategy treated every Element in a document as an individual EO. That works conceptually, because it’s easy to model (you can model the XML schema in EOModeler, and use that, in theory - King even wrote a tool to generate an EOModel from a schema!) It’s harder to implement this, however, because individual EOs are somewhat separated from the DOM - they don’t know where they are within the DOM, etc… Also, in this model, it was very hard to add new elements to an existing document. Say a document didn’t have a keyword when it was pulled from the database. This strategy makes it difficult to add a classification.keyword.string if there isn’t one already… (how do you add an element into a DOM tree when you don’t know where you are in that tree?)

Trying a switch to OmniWeb5 for a week

Prior to Safari, I was a die-hard OmniWeb 4 (then 4.5) user. I really liked OmniWeb, but Safari was much better (IMHO) at things like bookmark management.

I’ve been following OmniWeb’s development, and really like some of the new stuff (using WebKit means pages render correctly, the new tab implementation looks pretty sweet, workspaces should be useful, RSS feeds(?) …).

So, I’m going to try using OmniWeb 5 for a week, and see how it works in the field. I’ve switched my default browser to it so apps like NetNewsWire open it automatically. (btw, the tab thumbnails are awesome for opening stuff from NNW!). I’ll post again in a week with some thoughts…

XML Retrieval and Processing Comparison

I’m clearing my whiteboard, and need the space this was occupying, so I’m dumping it here for future reference. The following table compares the time it takes to retrieve XML from various sources (XML databases and the like) as well as to perform various types of processing (nothing, save as file, convert to DOM…). This table was very useful when we were coming up with our current XML storage strategy.