False Positives

• With Accordion Magic, Will Shaver has taken Stickman Labs’s accordion sections and added the ability to close panels, and code to keep contents hidden while page loads. Outstanding!!!
• Common Prototype mistakes and how to avoid them : Here’s another list of things that tend to confuse (me) unexperienced “prototypers”
• DatePicker using Prototype and Scriptaculous - Not Bad! Code and instructions for a datepicker widget using Prototype and Scriptaculous librairies.

- Prototype scriptaculous

• Software Developers Guide to Managing Your Boss - one of the single most important things to your career is your ability to manage your boss. The relationship you have with your boss is critical to your success, and how far you will go at the company you’re at.

- management career

• Canada’s Hot Start-Ups - According to the latest issue of Red Herrring, which features a cover story on the Canadian tech scene, the 10 hottest start-ups are

- Canada Startup

• How Not to Die (if you are a Startup) - Paul Graham eassy : If you can just avoid dying, you get rich. Startups rarely die in mid keystroke. So keep typing! Distraction is fatal to startups. Oh, yeah. Don’t give up.

- Startup paul graham

• Think Before You Code - Or Think in Code? (Yea, I know it’s not a either or). So much Deep Thinking to do before you start coding?

- Code development Startup

• IDC picks 10 best Canadian firms to watch for - 10 emerging Canadian software companies

- 2007 Software management Canada

• Simply Albert: Canada is Screwed: Why We Need to Support Canadian Youth in Tech - Albert makes some good points about “Why” and “How” to Support Canadian Youth in Tech.

- Canada education Startup

• University of Toronto Releases ePresence v4: Open Source Webconferencing - ePresence Interactive Media, developed by the University of Toronto’s Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI) for the past seven years, is a Webcasting, conferencing and rich media publishing tool that just launched version 4.0. Plus, you canshare prese

- Toronto opensource comunication education

• kaourantin.net: What just happened to video on the web? - Flash Player 9 Update 3 Beta 2, codenamed Moviestar, which will support H.264 standard video as well as High Efficiency AAC (HE-AAC) (and Quicktime .Mov) !!

- web video Flash co h.264 codecs flv

• Leila Boujnane in PA Top 50! - PrintAction’s 6th-annual list of Canada’s 50 Most Influential People in Graphic Communications. Congratulations!!

- graphics Canada Toronto demoCamp

• Sam Ruby: Long Bets - # REST # Hadoop # Erlang/OTP # Jabber # Microformats

- development future Software web

Share This

• A Behind-The-Scenes Look At How DRM Becomes Law - Cory Doctorow looks at the back room dealing that allowed entertainment companies and electronics companies to craft public policy on digital rights management.

• aideRSS.com - What’s next in RSS - (via the excellent Canadian StartupNorth blog) To help cut down on the noise coming in through your aggregator, the AideRSS guys have come up with what they are calling PostRank a combination of how many links, mentions and conversations there are about a particular post.

I did I bit of hacking last year on my feed list trying to figure out a way to see significance in the list (3 feed items pointed at X and/or 4 feed items used this word or tag ). Display it as a weighted tag cloud, and then I wounder if you could then use a Bayesian type filter to show a subset of words/tags I’m most interested in . Never did anything with it, but this kind of a personal technorati trend watch would be very useful for anyone more than a handful of feeds.

Share This

I had need to get some data from Amazon Web Services, and in particular their Alexa Top Sites web service which provides access to lists of web sites ordered by Alexa Traffic Rank.

And, happily, they had a Query Example in Ruby! (as well as Java, Perl, PHP, and C#)

It is a bit unclear about where to get the country code’s although I see that you can do a query to get the list using ResponseGroup=ListCountries ( I just cheated and used Alexa site to get the country code I wanted) pasted in the access key and double secret code key and fired it off…

Only it didn’t seem to work! WTF! the error said “The URI http://awis.amazonaws.com/onca/xml is not valid” but but i didn’t change that!!! Carefully reading, and remembering to breathe, the doc’s I noticed that it refereed to the base uri as being “http://ats.amazonaws.com” rather that what was in line 27 of the topsites.rb file : “http://awis.amazonaws.com/onca/xml” , so I tried that and it worked! I guess they changed some stuff and have not updated the sample code? sloppy!

The next issue was that the query only produces a max count of 100 and I wanted thousands! (The Alexa site already shows the top 100 by country.)

I quickly wrote up some ruby code to figure out my start count and generate a filename for each increment which was passed to a modified aws topsite query (changed to write to a file name rather than standard output i.e. the console), and many xml files later I’m done. (now to import the mess! - which proved to be easy to do in excel 2003)

def loopcount(nol)
begincount = 1
incr = 100
for x in 0..nol
start = begincount + (x * incr )
filename = “c://aws/aww_ts_” + x.to_s + “.xml”
QueryAWS_topSite(start, incr, filename)
end

Maybe I will mess with it some more to create one giant xml file (return the xml object and parse out the elements I want before writing to one file?) and otherwise more elegant, but for now it is “good enough”. and geeky fun too!

Share This

Share This

For those who don’t have a blogging tool that auto-magically adds tag’s the process can seem a bit bewildering, especially when there is so much to do.

We have come a long way since Folksonomies on Slashdot, and since the Beta of Blogger.com looks to include tagging (making my Technorati and del.icio.us Tags added with GreaseMonkey for Blogger.com users obsolete) it is worth a review.

The trick was a convention to add a attribute to the “common” hyperlink markup code too something like <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">tech</a> . More details are on the MicroFormat Wiki under reltag, because the secret sauce is that rel=”tag”.

Remember that the url does not really matter! It could be del.icio.us, or technorati or YouTube, or even something internal to this site like Code.

The rel=”tag” is the microformat that tells any tag aware search engine that text in the anchour link is the tag lable. All tag aware search engines will eat the tagged links regardless of where its linking to. (see also Technorati’s help page on Tags)

Share This

Boing Boing’s tech godess Xeni Jardin interviews ex-Winamp-er Rob Lord on and about the preview release of the SongBird media player in Songbird, the “open source iTunes killer,” flies today. Lots of interesting stuff there.

Back in November I wrote about The Songbird Media Player, built with XUL, DRM free. and what make its different.

of course everyone going to be comparing it to the 800 pound gorilla “iTunes”

They have come a long way, after a few delays, but it is looking good.

The SongBird nest site is being Slashdot’ed but the Boing Boing article points to some mirrors for getting the download. I hope to post more obsevation and puns when I have a chance and/or more awake.

Update: The Songbird Nest is backup.

Update: The Nest has published a road map which is promising, althought the 0.3 looks like a big and agressive list.

The feedback from the developer forums has been good, interesting and should be useful. For example ErikStaats pitching in the start of a ITunes Playlist Reader. The only worrying issue raised is about support of Unicode & umlauts outside of menus, but its hard to see if this a “uh oh” or a “just not finished yet” problem.

One of the possible very big ideas of Songbird is the plug-in services aspect, that would make it very flexible and dynamic. One thing already asked about is SongBird.(ing) from remote locations, i.e. connecting securely to my mp3 collection over the internet, which is already there in one form via Streampad. very useful and cool. (and will drive the copyright extremists crazy - bonus!)

Share This

The Songbird Media Player is a desktop media player, built atop XULRunner platform (also used by Mozilla Foundation’s Firefox and Thunderbird), and will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Just like Firefox, it will be open to extensions!

A preview release is expected in December, but screenshots are now posted, which have a somewhat iTunes look & feelwith improvemnts to the annoyance of some (which has it own legal problems).

Songbird uses the VLC (Cory’s favorite media player) Mozilla plug-in that supports a vast number of audio and video codecs, although SongBird does not (yet) allow for video play, although possible.

Could be the best thing in DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) free media players since Winamp 2! It could also be the first widely known application from outside the Mozilla Foundation to build on XUL (XML User Interface Language).

Darren Barefoot thinks Winamp + FireFox = Songbird, and is looking to give it a spin, too.

Update: VLC Media Player 0.8.4 is out : many improvements including a new VLC cone, new Mac OS X wizard and extend controls dialogs, tree playlist skins2 support, HTTP interface CGI handling, linux binary codecs loader, UPnP and Bonjour service discovery, shoutcast stream forwarding, new languages …

Share This

Via Dave Winner’s Scripting News is the news that Microsoft has unveiled a new proposal called SSE, which stands for Simple Sharing Extensions for RSS and OPML.

What is it for? the bi-directional, asynchronous replication of Feeds (RSS) or outlines (OPML), enable loosely-cooperating apps. ….Interesting….just remember to look for what else is needed or missing (or proprioritary). Like security!

There is still a lot of work to do with the “one publisher and many subscribers” model of information in RSS and other microformats, but this seemd to be focus on a “many editors, many subscribers” model? (wikipeda anyone?)

Also, seeing “Optional Conflict Resolution Behavior” made me wonder if this is the standardization of Lotus Notes / Domino Replication. Here’s a article on on the nitty-gritty of replication from 1998 (R5, 2 version ago). Only time will tell. It should be “simply a matter of programing” for Domino to produce such a xml document. (Okay, shoot me now!)

First thoughts on “Why SSE” ? is to make easier ongoing intergrate applications that don’t share code or database’s, which might be within an orgraniztion (or between trusted companies).

A simple example: 2 applications which allow new “parts” to be added. They could be applications from a) 2 merged companies, b) an older legacy application and a newer application (I’ve seen parallel testing go on forever, but that another story), or 3) different departments (Sales and Manufactoing) or Regions (north america and europe) which -for other reasons - need to be different? Rather that say “new parts can only be added from app X”, this could allow for both to allowed to be used for entry. I must admit that it is hard to imagine reasonable scenarios for this to exist, which is not to say there are not of un-reasoning companies out there.

Will this approach (using the fexiblity of XML) really help the huge problem of integration? Maybe. This is still going to require a lot of working and planning, but it might help for ongoing and continuous intergation. Also, is MicroSoft looking at new way to sharing data to/from excel, a huge source of data in almost every company? Hmmm….Maybe…They do need a reason for users to upgrade, especially given the new competition in Open Office and open standard XML Office documents.

If anyone can make this work it’s Ray Ozzie. Mr Notes, and Mr Groove. Mike Arrington thinks “New companies will be built on the back of SSE“. I’ll add to this as time permits, and as I think and read more.

Russell Beattie shares his Thoughts: Everything New is Notes Again: In one way or another many of the principles of communication, synchronization and security that we’re seeing in Web 2.0 all harken back to functionality that was available in Lotus Notes over a decade ago.…and ..Regardless, this system is essentially creating a system for keeping track of field-level changes, and that’s pretty cool (and powerful).

Volker Weber is thinking similar things : Think Notes replication for RSS and OPML

also I should have directly inculded links to Ray Ozzie’s intro in his new blog, and the SSE faq

Via zdnet I see that Charlie Wood already has something in mind for SSE: RSS for lightweight Enterprise Application Integration (EAI).

Jon Udell’s Dueling simplicities and his The two-way data web (writen before SSE relased to the wild) is a good read going past more than just MS vs Google (or RSS and Atom) , he looks at a bigger picture and where this is going: bringing database-like capabilities to the web.

SSE is a proposed extension. It yet to be seen if any comes of this beyond “embrace, extend and extinguish”. There is already a SyncML (Synchronization Markup Language). So how is this different, better, or good enough? Note that MicroSoft also has a Simple List Extensions Specification (SLX), which is different and a little bit easier to understand, and first proposed in may(?) 2005, and last revised in august. SSE could be applied to SLX feeds, where there are multiple authors/editor or more versioning information is needed.

Share This

I was recently asked “Why XML, rather than a .CSV (Coma Separated Values) file”, and no one had an answer beyond “It’s what we do now”.

(After stalling for a few seconds) I answered “flexibility”.

When, in a CSV file, you add a new element, or changed the order even slightly, any application reading that file would have to be changed or it will fail. Using XML, when you introduce a new element for such and such a purpose, any existing applications (should) ignore that element and continue working on the data it knows about.

This will allow you to produce 1 file for multiple uses, as opposed to a different file for each use, and allow both gradual changes and re-use as needed. Since so much work starts as ad Hoc and temporary, but stay around for a long time (Zombie systems! just in time for halloween) , this is not a minor issue.

Tim Bray - co inventor of XML - talks about Why XML Doesn’t Suck and mentions other reasons including: Internationalization, Interoperability, and Longevity, which are additional kinds of flexibility (flexible People to People Communications, flexible Machine to Machine Communications, flexible Future usages), with some self documenting.

HOWTO Avoid Being Called a Bozo When Producing XML, is a great guide when writing your own XML documents, before you make the common mistakes, and cause all of us grief.

Share This

New release of my R5.x Lotus Notes RSS News Aggregator. Many new features and improvements. I’m finding it very usable, and useful. NNRv.3.zipWhat’s a RSS News Aggregator?

New Features include :

• An About Document
• Improved Notes UI (outline, pages, and frameset)
• includes a link to an action to process all active feeds.
• Moved RSS Feed processing to a Java library. first attempted using a Java library for new agents got dreaded “Can`t make static reference to method”. successful using Java library (july 23).
• Created a Agent for reading selected feeds only in the News Feed view. July 22 2003, agent now using Java Library.
• Reduce duplicate news entries. If a feed is run twice, rather than have 2 duplicate items either update the existing entry or do not create a new document. updating is preferred, in cause they edited the item, but initially just catch it and don’t save a new document for RSS 2.0 use guid field and channel title to do lookup. for other feed types use item title and channel title.
• Changed News views to show unread marks, so now I can quickly scan for new news items
• Parse DC:Date and PubDate fields into domino date field, (NewsItemDate). News views use this field or @Created if it’s not available. (or should I use a channel date?)
• Changed News views to sort on NewsItemDate descending, new view sorted by NewsItemDate first. even easy to scan for what’s new.

So what you think? email : ian@falsepositives.com

Update Dec 22 2003 : Here’s how to get to working with Lotus Notes R6.x

See More, Categories : Domino/RSS

Share This