Jakarta Lucene 1.3 released

Jakarta Lucene 1.3 has just been released on December 26th.
It is a high-performance, full-featured text search engine written entirely in Java. It is a technology suitable for nearly any application that requires full-text search, especially cross-platform.

Greg Wilkins: Servlets must DIE! Slowly!!

Greg Wilkins has has written an interesting article named Servlets must DIE! Slowly!! concerning servlets and "contentlets".

I don't agree in all terms but I think he has some valid points.

TimeCore - Freeware Timetracking Software

TimeCore is an award winning time tracking tool combining an elegant and intuitive interface with an industrial strength recording engine.
For people who need to track their time but find existing solutions overly complex or too lightweight, TimeCore Solo is free, delivering full round-trip functionality without any restrictions.

This is really one of the most usable time tracking software which allows great flexibility, is open (plain text and Excel export) and is easy to use - and this all for free!

Linux 2.6.0

Some hours ago Linus Torvalds released the long awaited Linux 2.6.0.
As always with an unspectacular mail.
Download Linux 2.6.0 from your nearest mirror.

JAMon - Java Application Monitor

The Java Application Monitor (JAMon) is a free, simple, high performance, thread safe, Java API that allows developers to easily monitor production applications. JAMon can be used to determine application performance bottlenecks, user/application interactions, and application scalability. JAMon gathers summary statistics such as hits, execution times (total, average, minimum, maximum, standard deviation), and simultaneous application requests. JAMon statistics are displayed in the clickable JAMon Report.

To use JAMon you simply plugin the jar file and:

import com.jamonapi.*;
...
Monitor mon=MonitorFactory.start("myFirstMonitor");
...Code Being Timed...
mon.stop();


XQuark - open source information integration components based on XML and XQuery

The XQuark project consists of open source information integration components based on XML and XQuery.
Found through Sylvain Wallez on the Cocoon Developers Mailinglist.

Almost Free Text

Almost Free Text is a document preparation system. It is mostly free form meaning that there is little intrusive markup. AFT source documents look a lot like plain old ASCII text.
AFT has a few rules for structuring your document and these rules have more to do with formatting your text rather than embedding commands.
Right now, AFT produces pretty good (weblint-able) HTML, XHTML, LaTeX, lout and RTF. It can, in fact, be coerced into producing all types of output (e.g. roll-your-own XML). All that needs to be done is to edit a rule file. You can even customize your own HTML rule files for specialized output.

Bossa - Lightweight Java Workflow Engine

Bossa is a workflow engine written in Java. The engine is very fast and lightweight, uses a very expressive Petri net notation to define workflows, does not require a RDBMS and is very simple to use and to integrate with java applications.

Web Design and Usability Guidelines

* Research-Based Web Design & Usability Guidelines
* 3-click-rule
* The Myth of the 7 +/- 2 Rule
* The Magical Number Seven
* Articles about User Interface Engineering

Skype - P2P telephony

My brother, Matthias, just told me about Skype which is an excellent (and free!) software, which allows you to do free phone calls through the internet - all over the world.
I tried it out and was really surprised about the good quality and easy handling.
What can I say more, the slogan "P2P telephony that just works" is definitely right.
Here are some features of Skype:
* Free unlimited worldwide phone calls to other Skype users
* Superior sound quality - better than your regular phone
* Works with all firewall, NAT and routers ? nothing to configure!
* Friends list shows you when your Skype friends are online and ready to talk or chat
* Super-simple and easy to use
* Your calls are encrypted "end-to-end" for superior privacy
* Based on cutting edge peer-to-peer technology developed by the creators of Kazaa and Joltid

JAG - Java Application Generator

JAG (Java Application Generator) is an application that creates complete, working J2EE applications. It is intended to alleviate much of the repetitive work involved in creating such applications, while providing a means of quality assurance that the applications created will be of consistent quality.
There are also some screenshots of JAG available.

Eclipse 3.0M5 released

Eclipse 3.0M3 has been released with a big number of new and noteworthy features.

J2EE 1.4 Final Released

J2EE 1.4 Final has been released recently. There is also a J2EE 1.4 Developer Release SDK available for download.

JSCalendar - DHTML Calendar Widget

JSCalendar is a really cool DHTML calendar widget with many features and works on a big number of browsers.

AskIgor - Automated Debugging Service

AskIgor - Automated Debugging Service allows you to find bugs in Linux executables by uploading it and specify the arguments by which the program fails and when it doesn't fail.
Igor tells you where the problem is ...

Ballmer/Gates in The Matrix

I've seldom seen something funny like that from Microsoft:
* Comdex 2003 Bill Gates Keynote - The Matrix
I didn't know that Microsoft has so much sense of humor!

Cocoon Day 2003

I just return from the Cocoon Day 2003 here in Vienna.
It was the first bigger official Cocoon-centric one-day workshop of this kind. It was organized - and very well to be mentioned - mainly by Reinhard Pötz and Alexander Schatten. The event gave a really great overview of the Cocoon basics, some advanced infos and best practices and not to forget many practical use cases.

Perhaps many don't even know, that many (if not all) of the speakers - which were coming from Austria, Swiss and Germany - were not paid for this.
So many thanks to them!

I'm looking forward for more such great events in Austria!

Interesting W3C News

The latest Weekly Newsletter from W3C I got today has many interesting news for you:

W3C Recommendations:
* Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Second Edition)

Last Calls Working Drafts:
* XQuery 1.0
* XSLT 2.0
* XPath 2.0
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Data Model
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Functions and Operators
* XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Formal Semantics
* XSLT 2.0 and XQuery 1.0 Serialization
* XML Query (XQuery) Requirements
* XML Query Use Cases
* XML Inclusions (XInclude) Version 1.0

Working Drafts:
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 1: Core Language
* Web Services Description Language (WSDL) Version 2.0 Part 2: Message Patterns
* SOAP Optimized Serialization Use Cases and Requirements
* Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) 1.2

Notes:
* Units in MathML
* Structured Types in MathML 2.0
* Bound Variables in MathML

Software:
* Amaya 8.2 Editor/Browser Released

NOVA | The Elegant Universe | PBS

I just found this slashdot article about The Elegant Universe of the NOVA program.
There are many resources including the whole 3 hour video viewable online.
I definitely have to take some time to view it.

Internet Mapping Projects

* Internet Mapping Project
* The OPTE Project
The last one seems to be really promising since the resulting code will be distributed freely and it claims to scan the whole internet within only one day.

Liberty Alliance: Phase 2 Finalized

Liberty Alliance has finalized the Phase 2 Specifications and Privacy Guidelines for Federated Identity.

CVSreport

CVSreport produces text or enhanced HTML activity reports from a local or remote CVS repository. It can be used to extract activity information from any time span, or to automatically generate reports and store/send them on commit events.

Java Source Code Formatter

* Jalopy
* Checkstyle

Authoring Techniques for Device Independence (W3C Working Draft)

The W3C Device Independence Activity Group has published the first public Working Draft of the Authoring Techniques for Device Independence.
This document provides a summary of several techniques and best practices that Web site authors and solution providers may employ when creating and delivering content to a diverse set of access mechanisms.

CruiseControl

CruiseControl is a framework for a continuous build process. It includes, but is not limited to, plugins for email notification, Ant, and various source control tools. A web interface is provided to view the details of the current and previous builds.
There is also a very interesting article about continuous integration mentioned.
Here are some more related tools:
* CruiseControl.NET
* Dashboard - CruiseControl plugin for IntelliJ and Eclipse
* CruiseControl wiki

Guido's blogging again

Nice to see that Guido has found some time again to write for his weblog after a two-month break during August/Semptember.
I read some interesting news about Microsoft patents there:
* "Believe it or not, Microsoft got a US patent for Cookies. The patent has already been requested in December 1996."
* "Microsoft got a US patent on activity monitoring in IM networks."
I hope that it will not come this far with software patents in europe ...

Netcraft: November 2003 Web Server Survey

Netcraft: November 2003 Web Server Survey shows an interesting result: The Apache Webserver has reached yet again an all-time high of 68.60% of active sites.
It seems also that many large hosting companies which migrated to M$ IIS during 2001 and 2002 are regularly switching back to Apache which might indicate, that they failed with M$ IIS ...

KDE 3.2 Beta 1: Say Hello To Rudi

The KDE Project announced the release of KDE 3.2 Beta 1, codename "Rudi".
Many has been improved since 3.1 and I'll definitely give it a try!

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide 2.2 released

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide is an in-depth exploration of the art of shell scripting by Mendel Cooper.
One of the most comprehensive bash resources available, with many excellent examples!

JSR 168 Portlet Specification is final

JSR 168 Portlet Specification has been gone final.
This specification defines a set of APIs for Portal computing addressing the areas of aggregation, personalization, presentation and security to enable interoperability between Portlets and Portals,

Big Brother Award for "Herold Marketing CD"

They finally got what they deserved!
Seems like my nomination has been taken seriously ;-)

First Snowfall

Today the first snow began to fall here in Vienna.
Two hours ago it was not much - like we say in Austria "etwas flankeln", but now there's already a thin layer visible everywhere :-)

Metalog - the semantic web query/logical system

Metalog - the semantic web query/logical system: "Metalog is a next-generation reasoning system for the Semantic Web. Historically, Metalog has been the first system to introduce reasoning within the Semantic Web infrastructure, by adding the query/logical layer on top of RDF."

EU Publishes Open Source Migration Guidelines

The IDA Open Source Migration Guidelines provide practical and detailed recommendations on how to migrate to Open Source Software (OSS)-based office applications, calendaring, e-mail and other standard applications.
These guidelines have been designed to help public administrators decide whether a migration to OSS should be undertaken and describe, in broad technical terms, how such a migration could be carried out. They are based on practical experience of a limited number of publicly available case studies, and cover a wide range of management and technical concerns.

Linux Security Auditing Tool (LSAT)

The Linux Security Auditing Tool (LSAT) is a post install security auditor for Linux/Unix. It checks many system configurations and local network settings on the system for common security/config errors and for packages that are not needed.

Developing for the Sony Ericsson P800 on Linux

Edd Dumbill has an interesting article about Developing for the Sony Ericsson P800 on Linux.

Just4log

Just4log is a library to enhance dynamically the performance of various logging systems inside a java application. Dynamically because the sourcecode in java is not modified but rather the optimization occurs on the compiled ByteCode files.
It supports Log4J, Apache Commons Logging and JDK 1.4 Logging by post-processing something like this:

for(int i=0; i<500000; i++) {

    logger.debug(" remember this is a problem with this: " 

                 + someLongTaskToExecute());

    normalCodeToExecute();

}

into this:

for(int i=0; i<500000; i++) {

    if (logger.isDebugEnabled()) {

         logger.debug(" remember this is a problem with this: " 

                      + someLongTaskToExecute());

    }

    normalCodeToExecute();

}

This way it keeps the sourcecode clean from too much debugging-related statements, while don't have to pay the hidden cost of parameter construction.

Currently it provides an ant task to do the job.
In the future you can benefit from the following uses:
* A classloader implementation allows Just-In-Time optimization.
* A command line program allows optimization from normal scripts.
* Access via a GUI.

A really useful tool!

XForms 1.0 finished

XForms 1.0 is finally available as W3C Recommendation.
This XML-based client form technology will hopefully make form processing less painful and integrate well with XHTML.

DSPAM

DSPAM: "DSPAM (as in De-Spam) is an open-source, freely available anti-spam project. DSPAM effectively filters spam system-wide using advanced techniques combined with one or more of the supported algorithms (Bayesian, Alternative Bayesian, and Chi-Square are currently supported). A majority of users achieve filtering rates ranging from 99.55% - 99.9%, with some users reporting an actual 100% accuracy rate during long periods after initial learning. DSPAM is currently effective as both a server-side agent for UNIX email servers and a developer's library for mail clients, other anti-spam tools, and similar projects requiring drop-in spam filtering."

Clustered JDBC

C-JDBC is a database cluster middleware that allows any Java application (standalone application, servlet or EJB container, ...) to transparently access a cluster of databases through JDBC. You do not have to modify client applications, application servers or database server software. You just have to ensure that all database accesses are performed through JDBC.

Mozilla 1.5 released

Mozilla 1.5 has just been released.
It has again many new features and claims to have improved performance, stability standards support and Web compatibility.

iCalendar/vCalendar standards

I had to search quite a while to find the official locations of both standards.
Here they are:
* iCalendar
* vCalendar

Perhaps the TUWIS++ system (information system of TU-Wien) will support downloading the time table in one (or both) of these formats. At least I suggested them to do so.
Well, let's see ...

Resources for URL Design

URL design is something which I'm very picky about and therefore I want to know what's the perfect URL.
Today I googled the web for the best resources I can find quickly.

Here are the results:
* User-Centered URL Design by Jesse James Garret (2002-09-24)
* Designing Web Usability (Chapter URL Design) by Jakob Nielsen (1999-12)
* URL Design on Keith Devens.com's Wiki
* URL-Design Links and News by Már Örlygsson
* URL syntax/usage/implementation run-down by john at illuminent
* Cool URI's - great resource collection by pixelcharmer
* More on URL design by Asterisk
* URL design by Phil Windley
* URL design of his weblog by Michael Himsolt
* Sensible URLs with PHP by Simon Willison
* Towards Next Generation URLs by port80 Software
* Organizing your Site by Joshua Allen
* Article URLs week (Day 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7) by Nathan Ashby-Kuhlman

I might update them if I find even more interesting resources but that's enough for today.
I want to go to bed now ;-)

HEROLD Marketing CD - The next Big Brother Award?

HEROLD, an austrian company providing telephone books printed, on CD and online, want's to sell a very questionable new product: The "Herold Marketing CD private".
It contains contact information (phone number, address) of more than 4 million people and additional marketing data of more than 2 million people.

Herold says on their website:
Die HEROLD Marketing CD private wird Name und Adresse von mehr als vier Millionen Privatpersonen in Österreich enthalten. Zu zwei Millionen Personen werden darüber hinaus marketingrelevante Zusatzinformationen zur Verfügung stehen, die auf statistischen Hochrechnungen basieren.

Für den Anwender werden nur Informationen zu Name und Adresse ersichtlich sein. Das heißt, man wird nach den tiefergehenden Daten selektieren können, sich diese aber nicht zu einzelnen Personen anzeigen lassen.

Sensible Daten wie Religionsbekenntnis, Krankheiten, Blutgruppe oder Bonität sind selbstverständlich nicht enthalten.

Das Datenmaterial wurde von der dm-plus Direktmarketing GmbH erhoben, die HEROLD die Einhaltung aller datenschutzrechtlichen Bestimmungen bei der Ermittlung der Daten bestätigt hat.

Derzeit prüft die Datenschutzkommission das CD-Projekt. "Wir von HEROLD begrüßen die kritische Betrachtung durch die offiziellen Datenschützer: Sie hilft uns, in einem gesellschaftspolitisch besonders heiklen Feld nicht nur rechtlich korrekt, sondern auch allen Betroffenen gegenüber verantwortungsbewusst vorzugehen", sagt Unternehmenssprecherin Margit Kaluza-Baumruker.

Die HEROLD Marketing CD private kann nur von Firmen erworben werden. Sie wird nicht im Fachhandel, sondern nur bei HEROLD direkt erhältlich sein. Vor Verwendung der CD muss beim HEROLD Kundenservice ein Zugangscode angefordert werden, wobei der Kunde natürlich von HEROLD erfasst wird. Die CD kann nur auf dem dafür registrierten PC verwendet werden. Der Kunde verpflichtet sich, dass er die Daten ausschließlich im Rahmen der gesetzlichen Vorschriften verwendet.

Although they claim that the "deeper data" (like family status, building type, estimated bying power, number of children, ...) can not be displayed about a certain person, I doubt, that the software can't be hacked (which has been proved many times). And the data must be on the CD - otherwise you couldn't do marketing relevant queries which would make the CD rather useless.

What can you do about it?
First you can fill out a form (available as PDF) on the Herold website, that you don't want your data to be removed from this product.
Second you can spread this information to everybody you know, to prevent them from being victims of unscrupulous marketing people abusing the data on the Herold CD.
Since I don't know when the first versions will be shipped I'd advise you to do this rather sooner than later.
It's your privacy!

But I'm very sceptic that the process of removing your data will be sufficient, because according to this information on the FAQ the deletion of an entry is done through a forced update of the marketing data, which I'm sure can be prevented too, once the data has been ckracked by dubious users of this CD.

You can also get you some more information:
* Datails
* FAQ
* Hotline

What will happen?
Even if Herold is allowed to sell the CD according to the privacy law (which is presently being investigated by the austrian privacy commission) they open the door for a broader abuse and generating spam with a higher quality, than has been common until now.
I think everybody knows that SPAM IS a problem (I'm getting more than 200 spam mails every week), which has to be stopped somehow. Unfortunately there are currently no practical solutions available and this CD really doesn't brings us one step further to the right direction.

I'd wish that Herold would not only think about how gain profit whith their data but also think about the consequences which will arise from possible abuses.
And I'm sure that abuses can't be prevented - history has proven that many times!
I fear the day when you can download a decrypted version of the Herold Marketing CD from the Internet ...

In this spirit I'd like to nominate "Herold" with their product "Herold Marketing CD private" for the next Austrian Big Brother Award.

Evolvica

Evolvica: "Evolvica is a Java Framework for evolutionary algorithms. It is the successor of eaLib, which has been developed at the Department of Electronic Circuits & Systems of the Technical University of Ilmenau, Germany from 2000 to 2002. The development on eaLib has been stopped and focuses now on Evolvica."
Noteworthy seems to be that it uses the Eclipse Platform.

Plattform Wissensmanagement - A semantic search engine

Plattform Wissensmanagement provides a semantic search engine (in german) for knowledge management.
It has a very interesting way of searching for knowledge.

OpenSource Whiteboard Systems

At the Cocoon GetTogether 2003 the attendants were using a whiteboard system (SubEthaEdit for Mac) to collaboratively take notes of the talks.
Bertrand suggested one more (Coccinella) on the Cocoon Developers Mailinglist for doing a virtual Hackathon on the first Friday every month (which BTW is an excellent idea suggested by David Crossley).

This made me have a closer look at these tools and provide a short list of OpenSource software I found.

Peer2Peer:
* SubEthaEdit (Mac, with screenshots)
* The Coccinella (Java, also Client/Server using a Jabber Server, with screenshots)
* Privaria (Windows, soon Linux, with screenshots)

Client/Server:
* Babylon Chat (Java, client and server with Demo)
* Drawboard (Java, client and server with screenshots)
* Tulka Whiteboard (Java, client and server with screenshots)
* CodeApplet (Java, client and server with SICS Demo)
* Volley (MacOS X, client and server)

uPortal

uPortal is a free, sharable portal under development by institutions of higher-education.

Apache Pluto

Apache Pluto is the Reference Implementation of the Java Portlet Specfication.

OpenOffice 1.1 released

OpenOffice 1.1 is available for download (also in german).
It has many new features.

JSDoc

With JSDoc you can use JavaDoc-like comments for JavaScript files.
Very handy, if you want to document you Cocoon Flowscripts.
Another solution:
* Mozilla jsdoc.js

News from the Cocoon Hackathon 2003

If you (like me) weren't able to attend the Cocoon Hackathon and GetTogether you are watching for all the information you can find online.
The best sources I found are the Cocoon Wiki and many blogs of attendants:
* Search for GT2003 in the CocoonWiki
* Bertrand
* Carsten
* Matthew
* Steven
* Sylvain
* Torsten

Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor

Cross-Browser Rich Text Editor allows to WYSIWYG-edit webpages with IE5.5+/Mozilla 1.3+.

Cocoon Hackathon 2003

If you wondered like me, why there was so less traffic on the Cocoon Developers Mailinglist then you might have found the reason too: Today is the Cocoon Hackathon 2003 and tomorrow the official Cocoon GetTogether in Ghent (Belgium).
Too bad, I can't be there, but the next time I will ... promised!

Apache Agora 1.2

Stefano announced the availability of Apache Agora 1.2 (Java Applet Version) on the Cocoon Developers Mailinglist.
It's also available for download as standalone application and has a nice User's Guide.

It's a really amazing to see this great visualization of community dynamics. If you're participating to some of the Apache Mailinglists (like I do for example on the Cocoon Developers Mailinglist), you'll find yourself and how you are related to others or to the community in common.

You have to check this out, really!

Downloads for Sony Ericsson P800

I just found the (german) site Palmtop Magazin which provide many downloads for the Sony Ericsson P800 smartphone.

Xen virtual machine monitor

Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. It is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

The performance impacts are quite impressive - almost as fast as running on the real machine!

Nice to see, that there's some more competition to VMWare, Plex86 and Bochs.

WfMOpen

WfMOpen is a J2EE based implementation of a workflow facility (workflow engine) as proposed by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) and the Object Management Group (OMG).

It's the first Open Source workflow engine I saw, which complies to the reference model of the WfMC... very interesting!

Software tweak boots Linux in under 200 ms

According to the article "Software tweak boots Linux in under 200 ms" on LinuxDevices.com the vendor FSMLabs has tweaked a version of Linux so that it can boot in less than 200ms (time measured from power on to startup of first application).
Now compare that to the time your Windows PC takes after power on ;-)

The Design Of The Google File System

I found an interesting paper on Slashdot which explains the design of the Google file system.

A new life begins ...

Now, that most people I meet all day IRL already know it, I think it's time to announce a very happy event in my wife's and my life:
We are expecting a baby!
The calculated due date is March 21st 2004.

There's also a weblog (in german) telling stories around this happy event.
You can already see many photos and some videos of presents and ultrasonic examination (also in 3D!).
Perhaps nobody noticed that I already added the link to the blogs I'm reading a long time ago ;-)

Stay tuned there for brand new stories there!

Maven 1.0 RC1 released

Maven (a Java project management and project comprehension tool) released the release candidate 1 of version 1.0. It seems like it's not far until the final one.
If you don't know Maven, take a look at the Maven features page.

SuSE Linux 9.0 on October 24th

This article on NewsForge writes about the announcement of the new SuSE Linux 9.0 which will be available on October 24th.
Of course I'll update my Linux PCs ;-)

NetOffice - Online Project Management

NetOffice - Online Project Management is written in PHP using a MySQL database and looks really interesting.

ApacheTop: a resource utilization display tool for Apache

ApacheTop is a resource utilization display tool for Apache - similar to the 'top' command.
Really handy, if you want to know, what's going on with your apache.

DVD: Revolution OS

On Friday I got the long awaited DVD Revolution OS which is a very good documentation about Linux, Free Software and Open Source. There are interviews with many important people (e.g. Linus Torvalds, Richard Martin Stallman, Eric Raymond, Bruce Perens, and many more).
The second DVD contains additional interviews, "The Free Software Song" music video, a still image gallery, biagraphies, documents about free software and open source, ...
It's really worth the $22,49 I paid at Amazon and I'd encourage everybody to buy it too!
There's one drawback: I only can playback it in black/white on my DVD player, although it works on my notebook :-(

xCHM - the UNIX .chm viewer

xCHM is a useful viewer for .chm help files which are quite common in Windows systems.

Perl 5.8.1 released

Perl 5.8.1 has been released on September 26th.
Although I've never really wrote programs in Perl, it's something which is hidden in so many programs, that it's very likely that you've used it without knowing it ;-)

IBM releases WebSphere SDK for Web Services 5.1

IBM released WebSphere SDK for Web Services 5.1 on September 22nd with the following news (taken from TheServerSide):
* Conformance to the final version of the Web Services Interoperability Organization's Basic Profile 1.0.
* A supply chain sample, which conforms to the WS-I Basic Profile 1.0.
* A greater level of compatibility with IBM's WebSphere Studio line of products.
* Support for split Web Services Description Language (WSDL) documents.
* A new WSDL2Client Tool, to create client-side only components for a Web service.
* Improved installation using InstallShield Multiplatform version 5.0

UNO protects Open Source Software

The World Summit on the Information Society on September 15th in Geneva has decided to incorporate the protection of Open Source Software into the UNO declaration of the Information Society. There have been hard discussions mainly by countries trying to protect their commercial from competition.
It's a great success for the Open Source movement. Credit to the Free Software Foundation and other parties who have been involved to make this happen!

KDE 3.2 Alpha 2 and KOffice 1.3 Beta 4 Released

On September 25th the KDE team has been very busy in getting out two pre-releases of their greatest products:
* Second KDE 3.2 Alpha Codename "Tereza" and
* KOffice 1.3 Beta 4
I can't await the final release of KDE 3.2 since it has so many new features, which make your Linux desktop the most productive ever. Most noteworthy are the new PIM features, like the Konsolekalender, Kolab and Kontact, as well as the fabulous Konqueror.

SAMBA 3.0 released

SAMBA 3.0 has been finally released with a huge number of new features which are too many to be mentionend here. Most noteworthy seems to be the support of Active Directory.

Catching up with the latest news on the net

Maybe you've noticed that there were no entries for 10 days because I've been very busy. But this week end I've finally got some time to relax and I try to catch up with the latest news on the net ...

OXF - The XML Platform (and Cocoon alternative?)

Today Ricardo Rocha found an interesting comparison of the comercial product OXF with Cocoon.
It seems to provide some more features like Cocoon.
Stefano already commented on it in November 2002 and said, that their architecture would not scale. Game over.
Perhaps at least it might push Cocoon a bit forward. A little competition never hurts.

The Cocoon Wiki has a page with similar servers to Cocoon.

Banner against Software Patents

I just added a banner on top of the sidebar to remind you of the dangers of software patents in europe.
Thanks to Antonio Gallardo, who pointed to the anti-software-patents-banner-page on the Cocoon developers mailing list.

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide

Advanced Bash-Scripting Guide is a great resource for writing bash scripts. You can find many examples there for nearly every aspect of the bash you can imagine.
Very valuable!

New Bon Jovi Album: "This Left Feels Right"

Quoting the announcement of the new album album "This Left Feels Right" from Bon Jovi:

BON JOVI are set to release THIS LEFT FEELS RIGHT on NOVEMBER 4, 2003. Co-produced by PAT LEONARD, JON BON JOVI and RICHIE SAMBORA, THIS LEFT FEELS RIGHT is a showcase of the band's greatest hits, each completely reworked from an acoustic base with new arrangements and various styles. (In addition to the Bon Jovi hits, which include "Born To Be My Baby," "Keep The Faith," "It's My Life" and "Wanted Dead or Alive," the band has included two new songs, "Last Man Standing" and "Thief of Hearts".) THIS LEFT FEELS RIGHT is not the band performing their most popular songs with two acoustic guitars. Each song has been broken down to its core elements, re-discovered and re-crafted, constructing an album that takes the songs you thought you knew in a whole new direction.

"We went into the studio thinking we were making an acoustic record," says Jon Bon Jovi. "We had a definite idea of the record we were going to make. But once we began experimenting with the songs and trying out new ideas we created a very different, unique album. We made a complete left turn and took the project down a different road. "

The band joined forces with veteran producer PAT LEONARD (Madonna, Rod Stewart, Elton John) and began the process of choosing which of the many hits the team would rework. Large rock anthems became jazzy riffs. Songs sung aloud to crowds of 80,000 morphed into intimate serenades. Tempos and instrumentations, phrasings and arrangements have been revamped and each track is as if it were a brand new song. The long hours in the studio have been some of the most creative and productive the band have ever experienced.

"I am having the most fun I've ever had working on this album," elates Richie Sambora. "I'm so excited - I literally cannot wait to get into the studio everyday and get to work."

I'm very enthusiastic about this new album, since Bon Jovi is the only band I grow up with and still "Keep the Faith" ;-).
The accoustic version of "Livin' on a Prayer" has always been a milestone of music performance history and I'm looking forward to hear the new versions of great old songs.

Definitely a must-have, if you ask me!

GNOME Storage

GNOME Storage: "Storage is an exciting project to replace the traditional filesystem with a new document store. Storage is part of a larger design for a new desktop environment, more details on that to come. The current implementation offers natural language access, network transparency, and a number of other features."

I already read about such new kinds of filemanagement some time ago.
I'd wish that KDE and Gnome join forces in that area like they did with the Free Desktop Project!

XMLUnit

XMLUnit is a JUnit extension which allows to compare XML documents which can sometimes vary in their representation though they are semantically identical.

JSR-000173 Streaming API for XML - Proposed Final Draft

It seems that there's a new parsing model for XML data coming along. It's called Streaming API for XML (short StAX) and can be viewed at
"JSR-000173 Streaming API for XML - Proposed Final Draft".
Here is an interesting article comparing DOM, SAX and StAX:
* Parsing XML Evviciently

I wonder if this will have some positive effects on Cocoon?

JOTM - Java Open Transaction Manager

JOTM is an open source distributed transaction manager implemented in Java and licensed under the LGPL.

overLIB - JavaScript Tooltips

overLIB is a JavaScript library created to enhance websites with small popup information boxes (tooltips) to help visitors around your website. It will provide the user with information about what will happen before they click on a link as well as navigational help. Not to mention that it looks cool.

Here are some more insteresting links:
* overLIB features
* Some cool Extensions to overLIB

JavaScript Calendar Popup

The JavaScript Calendar Popup is a great tool which allows a much better usability at entering dates. It has many features and is pretty much customizable.
Here is another variant using overLIB:
* http://javascript.internet.com/calendars/date-picker.html
I found them through this thread at the cocoon developer mailinglist.

Subversion release 0.28

Subversion 0.28 has been released and there is an interesting article with the title "Subversion release 0.28 - the better CVS - also for Eclipse, Emacs, Tortoise and more" from Christoph C. Cemper.

I'm looking forward at Subversion becoming mainstream for open source projects!

A Compact Syntax for W3C XML Schema

The article A Compact Syntax for W3C XML Schema on XML.com by Erik Wilde presents an interesting alternative to the verbose W3C XML Schema while preserving the same semantic.
Here's an example from the article to give you an idea:

W3C Schema fragment:

<xs:element name="complexContent" id="complexContent">

  <xs:complexType>

    <xs:complexContent>

      <xs:extension base="xs:annotated">

        <xs:choice>

          <xs:element name="restriction" type="xs:complexRestrictionType"/>



          <xs:element name="extension" type="xs:extensionType"/>

        </xs:choice>

        <xs:attribute name="mixed" type="xs:boolean"/>

      </xs:extension>

    </xs:complexContent>

  </xs:complexType>

</xs:element>

XSCS (XML Schema Compact Syntax):

element complexContent extends xs:annotated {

  ( restriction { xs:complexRestrictionType } | extension { xs:extensionType } )

    attribute \mixed { xs:boolean } }

That's definitely less verbose although I don't know if I like the curly bracket and the backslash that much ;-)

BONITA - A Cooperative Workflow System

BONITA is a flexible cooperative workflow system, compliant to WfMC specifications, based on the workflow model proposed by the ECOO Team, which incorporates the anticipation of activities as a more flexible mechanism of workflow execution.
The system provides:
* A comprehensive set of integrated graphical tools for performing different kind of actions such as process conception, definition, instanciation, control of processes, and interaction with the users and external applications.
* 100% browser-based environment with Web Services integration that uses SOAP and XML Data binding technologies in order to encapsulate existing workflow business methods and publish them as a J2EE-based web services.
* A Third Generation Worflow engine based in the activity anticipation model. This flexibility allows a considerable increase of speed in the design and development phases of cooperative applications.

OWL - Web Ontology Language Candidate Recommendation

The OWL Web Ontology Language Candidate Recommendation of the W3C has been released on August 18th.
It is designed for use by applications that need to process the content of information instead of just presenting information to humans. OWL facilitates greater machine interpretability of Web content than that supported by XML, RDF, and RDF Schema (RDF-S) by providing additional vocabulary along with a formal semantics. OWL has three increasingly-expressive sublanguages: OWL Lite, OWL DL, and OWL Full.

Java DocTree

Java DocTree is a comprehensive index to the JavaDoc from 56 Java projects. It links to 1521 packages and 20054 classes from a single page which saves you having hundreds of bookmarks for every Java project you use. Click on the package names below to drill down to the required JavaDoc.

Weblog temporary closed: Online Demonstration Against Software Patents

This weblog will be temporarily closed from August 25th until after August 27th due to an online demonstration against software patents.

Here is some further information on why this is such a big problem and what you can do to help:
* http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/index.en.html
* http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html
* http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html

Sign the EuroLinux Petition against Software Patents!

If you want the net to stay a free platform take it as serious as many others do!

Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design

Microsoft Windows: Insecure by Design says an article of the Washington Post.

AOP with JavaScript

This article shows you how you can use AOP with JavaScript.
Found through this posting.

Reading a new book: Practical RDF

I started to read the new O'Reilly book "Practical RDF" by Shelly Powers.
It has about 330 pages and shows you the practical side of RDF.
I'm not a very fast reader, since I only read such books when I've got some time on the week ends or on holidays. Today I got to page 6 then I had to jump into the pool because of the hot weather ;-)

Talking about standardization

I had an interesting talk about standardization with my father-in-law Leopold Lasselsberger, who holds some important offices concerning biogenous fuels and wood combustion systems.
He encouraged me to take a closer look at the standardization efforts done by such consortiums like W3C, Oasis, IETF and others.
Let's see where this leads me to ...

LDAPd - Java LDAP Server

LDAPd is a Java-based pure Java LDAP v3 protocol compliant server. It's architecture is based on Matt Welsh's Staged Event Driven Architecture (SEDA).
The first version is available as Avalon Poenix application.

cuckooo - OpenOffice.org nested in KDE

cuckooo is a KDE Part, which allows running OpenOffice.org in a Konqueror window.

Current features:
* Shows (read-only) all document formats supported by OpenOffice.org.
* Can be embedded as a Part in Konqueror.
* Can run as a standalone application.

Really cool stuff!

Go and checkout the screenshots, which demonstrate viewing MS Word, MS Excel and MS Powerpoint files inline within Konqueror :-)

KnowledgeTree - OpenSource Document Management

KnowledgeTree (TM) is an Open Source document management system. The product provides a content repository, workflow and routing of content, content publication, content metrics definition and analysis.

SAMBA 3.0.0rc1

Samba 3.0.0rc1 has been released.
It has many improvements and goes a big step forward in NT 4.0 compatibility. Additionally it supports many features of Windows 2000/XP/2003.

b+m Generator FrameWork

The b+m Generator FrameWork is now available as Open Source. It features sphisticated MDA/D support and allows great flexibility in customizing it for your tasks. There's also an eclipse plugin!

Apache Cocoon 2.1 Finally Released

Let's have a party!
Apache Cocoon version 2.1 has been finally released after a very long development time.
This release makes a big step from an XML publishing framework to a componentized XML-based web application development framework.
Congratulations to Carsten and his helpers for doing this great release!

DocMan - DocBook Toolchain Manager

DocMan is a DocBook Conversion Toolchain Manager, a program that allows you to easily convert DocBook into a number of output formats.
I found this one on Lars Trieloff's Weblog and is written by himself. There are very promising DocMan screenshots. I definitely have to check this out!

IsaViz 2.0 Released

IsaViz is a verry impressive RDF visualization tool from W3C. It features now GSS (Graph Stylesheets) to render RDF graphs.
I think this is one of the most important visualization tools for RDF. Definitely worth a look!

AndroMDA - MDA Code Generation Framework

AndroMDA (pronounced: andromeda) is an open source code generation framework that follows the model driven architecture (MDA) paradigm. It takes a UML model from a CASE-tool and generates classes and deployable components (J2EE or other), specific for your application architecture.

RSSOwl - Newsreader

RSSOwl is a freeware newsreader for RSS written in Java using SWT as fast graphic libary.
If you're interested look at this screenshot.

SourceForge Utilities

SourceForge Utilities is a collection of open-source code which makes it easy for project administrators and release technicians to work with SourceForge without having to manually navigate its website and project tools. It currently provides a Java interface to the SourceForge file release system, with more features planned down the road.
You can easily integrate these tools into your Ant build to automatically release files to SourceForge.

LDAP Schema Resources

Yesterday I looked around the net to learn about LDAP schemas and found those nifty tools and resources:
* LDAP Schema Viewer
* LDAP verstehen (in german)
* LDAP Schema (University of Florida)
* List of LDAP related RFCs
* LDAP Linux HOWTO
Really helpful, if you want to learn LDAP!

Gmane - Mail To News And Back Again

Gmane is a very nice mailing list archive with many features. One I really like is the threaded view to easily follow discussions!

oreilly.com: Practical RDF

O'Reilly published a new book: Practical RDF.
It explains RDF from the ground up, providing real-world examples and descriptions of how the technology is being used in applications like Mozilla, FOAF, and Chandler, as well as infrastructure you can use to build your own applications.

(I already reserved my copy at amazon.com ;-)

Linux / WinXP Usability Study

relevantive AG has done a Linux Usability Study by comparing the Linux desktop KDE with WindowsXP.
Linux/KDE is not very far behind WinXP!
It is very well written and shows you where the usability problems lie. The report is written in german. An english version will be available soon.
The report is available under a certain Open Content license.

Wedding and wonderful honeymoon

Yes, we finally married!

Originally Maria and I were afraid from this step as we both hate big celebrations. Nevertheless it was the most beautiful day in our life.
To some part that was due to the fact that we didn't want to have a traditional wedding. Instead we wanted to have it the way it fits best to us. I'm sure we hadn't got so much positive feedback afterwards if we followed every hint about how we should do it ;-)

Now some more infos:
We married on July 19th (the 25th birthday of Maria) at the registry office in Wieselburg (15:00) and afterwards (with some drinks and photos in between) at the church in Neumarkt (17:00).
Theb we had some time to talk to friends, relatives and neighbors while having a drink and something to eat.
After that we drove to the Mostlandhof, where we had an excellent dinner. This restaurant is located on a hill where you can overlook beautiful parts of the Erlauftal. The weather was excellent and we could enjoy a really beautiful sunset.

At about 24:00 we were taken to a quite new Hotel in Amstetten, called Exel, where we spent our wedding night.
On monday at 02:15 early in the morning a bus catched us and brought us to Venice (Venedig for german speakers ;-). There we got onto the ship Costa Classica where we had a wonderful one-week cruise: Venice - Bari - Katakolon/Olympia - Santorin - Mykonos - Rhodos - Dubrovnik (Croacia) - Venice.

I never imagined that our wedding could be so beautiful.
Here I'd like to say thanks again to the parents and grandparents of Maria for making us such a big present with the Hotel and the cruise.

Hard week, no entries

This week was really hectic because bad things always happen just at that time, where you have other important things to do.
Somehow we managed most of the problems (surprisingly fast unlike originally expected) and therefore our 3-day advanced Cocoon training held by Guido Casper could take place without major interrupts. It completes the training of some weeks ago held by Matthew Langham, where he taught us the foundations of XML and Cocoon.

After these three days I have the feeling that Cocoon is like a big surprise box where you can take out presents as many you like and everytime you think now it must be empty someone else pulls a new present out of it.

Guido really did a great job at teaching us the Cocoon internals and different form frameworks without taking too much influence on our decisions and staying objective about the pros and cons.

I'm looking forward to work with you on our project and bringing it to a great success!

Happy Birthday Grandpa!

My grandpa turned 69 today and my grandma will be 70 on the 24th of June.

He always told me that computers are something that he'll not understand anymore.
Now he uses computers to write letters with Word, do calculations with Excel and compose music with Sibelius.

Some time ago he told me, that computers are ok, but he's too old to understand the internet...
Guess what!
Now he uses Google to search for information, writes emails and wants to do telebanking with his 56k modem.
I'm sure it won't take long 'til he has a highspeed internet connection.

He's really an interesting person who has many interests and is in many ways like me. He always want's to know what's behind it and doesn't hesitate to put much energy into findig out himself.

Time to marry

Christian Haul announced on the cocoon developer mailinglist that he'll marry his girlfirend today.

These were his words:
Hi team.
I will be offline 'till ~12th (and largely have been for some days already)
due to some happy event in my life: I'm going to marry my girl friend tomorrow!

Chris.

Many people congratulated him, and I thought it was time, to "out" myself too. I did so while sending my congratulations to Chris.

Here are some more details about our wedding:
Maria and me live together for 6 and two-third years now and we will marry on July 19th in Neurmarkt/Ybbs (Lower Austria, Austria, Europe, Earth ;-). This date is not chosen by accident, because it's the 25th birthday of Maria and we decided it while enjoying a wellness weekend at Therme Geinberg in end of May 2002.

Those of you who've read my FOAF profile (viewable with FOAF Explorer) perhaps noticed that I've already silently included our wedding event some time ago.

Tomcat Clustering Models and Implementations

The OSCOM session about "Tomcat Clustering Models and Implementations" on July 9th by Jason Brittain looks very interesting. Unfortunately I can't be there.
But the little information on the session description page was enough for me to recognize the possibilities you have for clustering tomcat. Very nice, if you just want to have a brief overview about the possibilities.

JBoss 4 Developer Release 2

The JBoss Group has released JBoss 4 Developer Release 2.

This is a list of recent changes:
* JBossDO: JDO for transperent persistence for POJOs. First iteration from the hard work of Alex Loubyansky.
* JMS rewrite: First iteration from Nathan with help from Bela Ban and Adrian Brock. P2P serverless topics by way of reliable multicast.
* AOP XDoclet integration: Great work from Andy Godwin. JSR-175/C# metatags right now in JBoss 4!
* Expand AOP Pointcuts: Per method, field, constructor as well as Caller pointcuts.
* AOP Performance Improvements: Framework speed up by factor of 6.

It's really amazing what the AOP framework aims to solve. Let's hope, that it holds what it promises. But what's going to happen with all the J2EE standardization? Will all the extensions that JBoss brings you lead to incompatibility or will it merely drive the J2EE standardization process. In the later case would not then JBoss define the state of the art and all other application servers try to do the same?

I'd be really interesting in your thoughts on this topic, unfortunately I have no comment functionality on my weblog. But there are enough places where you can post your JBoss comments (The Serverside).

RSSCreator.class.php - bitfolge.de

RSSCreator.class.php is a PHP-based class to create RSS-feeds for the versions 0.91, 1.0 and 2.0.

Perhaps I should use this one instead of the old hand-written RSS-feed creator of our website at work.

Weblog of Lars Trieloff

Lars Trieloff has mentioned some interesting links (1, 2) on his weblog:
* A german tutorial about DocBook
* ArgoFMC, a plugin for ArgoUML, enabling you to draw FMC diagrams. It is heavily based on a tool named ArgoPNO.
* Apache Modeling Portal

He also sent me a mail with a link the following tool to do manual trackback pings (see posting from yesterday):
* Simpletracks

Thanks again, Lars!
This makes manual trackback pings much easier ;-)

How to do manual trackback pings

I'm just figuring out how to use trackback.
Unfortunately blogger, the weblog provider I'm using, does not support trackback (neither direction). So I want to ping other weblogs 'by hand' and therefore I have to learn how to do that.

I've found these resources so far:
* TrackBack Explanation (Movable Type)
* TrackBack Development (Movable Type)
* Movable Type User Manual: Trackback
* How Trackback Works
* The Next Generation of TrackBack: A Proposal

The first manual try of the first article failed although I got a successful response.
The second try with the second article succeeded but - stupid as I am - I've chosen the wrong article to ping.
But the third try with the third article was finally perfect ;-)

As you see, doing trackback 'by hand' is really possible but is really painful and error-prone. If you have a blogging tool which automatically supports trackback, please continue using it. You didn't miss anything ;-)

BTW, does anybody know, how it's possible to - at least - ping trackbacks on other weblogs based on your blogger-based weblog?
Help is very much appreciated!

Knowledge Sharing vs. Knowledge Hoarding

There is a very interesting article on thought?horizon which explains how knowledge management can be successful and more important that you get much more in return, if you share your knowledge instead of hoarding it.

I totally agree about this!

FoaF/RDF/RSS Tools

MFD Consult has some nice Online Tools available.

1. FOAF-related:
* sha1ify
* Add New Friend
* Topic Finder
* FoaF Explorer

2. RDF-related:
* Weather Information as RDF/XML
* RDFS Explorer

3. RSS-related:
* Syndication Subscription Service

I've already mentioned the FoaF Explorer some time ago.
All of these are really interesting tools if you want to learn how the technologies around the Semantic Web are working.

New Morphon XML/CSS-Editors available for free

Morphon Technologies has made available Morphon XML-Editor 3.1 and Morphon CSS-Editor 1.3.6 available for free today.
Both are written in Java and run therefore on a wide range of systems.

I'm just downloading it but it's damn slow. Perhaps their server wasn't prepaired for the load after giving it away for free ;-)
I'll tell you more, when I was able to try it out!

Update:
I could now have a look at it and have to say, that it's really worth a try!
It uses an CSS-based WYSIWYG editor to edit your XML files.
I've tried it out with docbook and it really looks great!

WinSCP - SFTP and SCP client for Windows

I was just looking for an SFTP/SCP GUI client for Windows and found this neat freeware tool:
* WinSCP
If you know and like putty, than you'll like this one too.
I can really recommend it!

Metadata for your Blog!

I found some interesting meta tags on Eric Vitiello's site called Perceive Designs which allows you to put even more semantic information to your weblog. Examples are some geographic information, dmoz IDs and autodiscovery of blogroll OPML files.
I've included them into my weblog, so have a look at the quite growing header of the HTML source, if you're interested.

Here are some useful links, which helped me to include the right meta tags:
* Metadata Help on Syndic8
* TGN - The Getty Thesarus
* DMOZ - the Open Directory
* GeoTags - GeoTags
* List of Meta Tag values at Bauser.com

I'd encourage everyone to put all this valuable information into their own websites. That's the foundation to build tools which make use of this information!

Some cool FOAF viewers

Here are some online FOAF viewers I've found with an example link to view my FOAF profile:
* FoaF Explorer (my FOAF profile with FOAF Explorer) lets you explore a given FOAF file. Has a nice interface, which also shows you the photo, if you have set one in the FOAF file ;-)
* FOAF Web View (my FOAF profile with FOAF Web View) has a spider to which you can add your FOAF file. Then you can navigate through the network of who knows who. - Quite interesting!
* FOAFNaut can generate SVG images from a network of people who know each other.
* FOAFBot is a bot which you can ask some questions about persons and he gives you the answers.

Somehow I get pretty addicted to the possibilities, the RDF-based technology gives to you ;-)

RSS News Readers

Matthew has recommended the RSS news reader NetNewsWire with a three-paned-interface for Mac OS X on his weblog.

Unfortunately I don't have a Mac, but want to use something similar under Linux or Windows I did a query on google.
That's what I found:
* This list of RSS Readers (RSS Info) is from Blogspace.com

These are the one's I liked most:
* amphetaDesk is (open source, cross platform)
* Beaver (.Net)
* clever cactus (Java)

These are online services:
* Meerkat
* NewsIsFree
* RSS News Reader

Other Utils:
* RSS to Email Aggregator

Sun Releases JDK 1.4.2

You can download it from Sun's download page and have a look at the release notes.
This release has new features, performance improvements, and over 2400 bug fixes. Some of these include: Class.forName() has been sped up, Itanium support, many hotspot improvements, NTLN auth for windows, AES encryption support in SunJCE, new Swing look and feels, startup time improvements, and many more.

Does somebody know, if it has some (hopefully positive) impacts on Cocoon?

SOAP 1.2 now a W3C Recommendation!

According to the W3C News SOAP 1.2 now a W3C Recommendation!

It consists of the following documents:
* SOAP Version 1.2 Primer
* SOAP Version 1.2 Messaging Framework
* SOAP Version 1.2 Adjuncts
* SOAP Version 1.2 Assertions and Test Collection

Further info:
* Press Release
* Testimonials
* Changes and Benefits
* FAQ
* W3C Web Services Home Page

Cool Blog Tools

Chris Pirillo has put together some Cool Blog Tools.

Here are some of them:
* Blog Comparison Table lets you compare many different blogs with their features
* BlogMatcher lets you search for weblogs that match the same interests

New Cocoon Portal Engine

Just played a bit with the new Cocoon Portal, which will be in version 2.1 and have to say, that I'm really amazed!

I did not see much of it yet, but what I saw I liked a lot: I integrated my weblog into the portal and discovered, that you can control the coplets in every way you like.
E.g. you can set up content syndication with a life feed of a weblog, can control if you want to buffer the content and can even give an error URI, if the life newsfeed is not available.
Integration of my weblog including learning the portal and creating an XSL stylesheet for it was done within one hour!

I believe this will make our work so much easier ;-)

Google Toolbar 2.0 beta with BlogThis!

The newest version of the Google Toolbar for MS Internet Explorer has some new features (Popup Blocker, AutoFill, BlogThis for Blogger - you know, that Blogger has been bought by Google, no?).
I wonder what's happening to the Internet Explorer, after MS decided to not distribute future versions without an operating system anymore and leaving the development of such common things like popup blocking to search engine providers like Google? hmmm...
Honestly I don't really care, since I'm quite happy using Mozilla, Konqueror and Opera. IE sees my desktop only if I have to and I can assure you, that's not often ;-)

Report of the Cocoon Stamtisch

It was really a nice evening yesterday which started at 20:00 and took until 00:40 for the toughest ones (Reinhard, Manfred and me ;-)
It's really amazing, how such events help to realize that people often develop the same things at work which you're going to do.
Perhaps we'll join our effords on certain areas in the future.

Matthew had to get off a bit earlier to be well rested, because he should do some Cocoon training for us today and tomorrow ;-)
I can't tell you that I am well rested :-(

I can't await the next Cocoon Stammtisch and perhaps some other Cocoon events will take place in the near future in Vienna, but I don't want to spread vapor now.
So stay tuned!

Cocoon Stammtisch in Vienna

Today I'll go to the Cocoon Stammtisch in the Centimeter I (Vienna).
According to the mailing list, there well be about 15 persons.
Matthew Langham, who will do a Cocoon training for us the next two days, is coming too.
This is my first Cocoon community meeting, so I'm a bit excited ;-)

Completely BlogRolled Sidebar!

Thanks to the excellent support of BlogRolling I even can manage the complete sidebar (yes, even my buttons! - except the weblog archives of course) within BlogRoll. No need to fiddle with HTML code anymore! Now I can add new links with just a mouseclick while surfing the web :-).
It has some more features (like making liks available in RSS, OPML, for PHP or via JavaScript), which I'll investigate in the future.

Now BlogRolling!

All links on the sidebar (except the buttons, since I don't know if it's possible) are now maintained via BlogRoll.
This allows me to maintain the links much easier and gives me the possibility to show you some backlinks ;-)

Heavy Storm

10 minutes ago a really heavy storm suddenly arrived here in Vienna. I had to close all windows to prevent some damage. Like you know it from the movies, I saw a deracinated bush and many other things crossing the place in front of our house 8-[.

Enriching my Weblog

Erik C. Thauvin (The Truth is Out There) inspired me to enrich my weblog with the following thingies:
* Add a FOAF RDF description of me including a button for it
* Add BlogChalk Metadata including a button and the BlogChalk text on the bottom
* Make it kown as Java Weblog and add button for it
* Added a suitable Creative Commons license

Blog Buttons

I found some very interesting resources in the web regarding uniform style buttons for weblogs.
Here are they in the order of navigational discovery:
* Nifty Icons
* Archive of blog buttons
* MetaFilter blog button announcement
* Jeremy Hedley is the author of these buttons
* And here's a button maker to create one yourself
I didn't look for them without a reason.
Now you can enjoy these buttons on my weblog :-)
If you want to use them yourself, I've put together two ZIP-files of 256 blog buttons as GIFs as PNGs.
Additionally I've added my BlogChalk.

FOAF Resources

Here are some FOAF resources which I came across while adding FOAF value to my Weblog:
* FOAF
* Dublin Core
* Airports
* Contact
* WordNet
* Geo
* BIO: A vocabulary for biographical information
* FOAF Relations
* FOAF-a-matic - Generates a FOAF description of values you fill into a form
* FOAF Autocreation - Generates a full FOAF description from a personal FOAF file and an OPML blogroll
* Myers Briggs personality types test

RDF day @ freshmeat

Seems like yesterday was the RDF day at Freshmeat.net with 4 RDF-related posts on one day!
The first one I recogniced (Joseki) I've already mentioned below.
Here are the other ones:
* IsaViz is a visual authoring tool for RDF
* Jena is a semantic web toolkit
* sesame is an Open Source RDF Schema-based Repository and Querying facility.
It's really nice to see that the semantic web is going further every day!

Joseki

Joseki is a server for publishing RDF models on the web. Models have URLs and they can be accessed by query using HTTP GET. It is part of the Jena RDF toolkit and provides a coarse-grained web API that is based on extracting a subgraph from the published RDF. The extracted RDF can then be processed locally with the fine-grained API provided by Jena.

Sunday ice cream walk

My girlfriend, Maria, and I did again our loved walk from Volkstheater (where we get off from the line 49) to the ice cream parlor at Tuchlauben (if you speak japanese or just want to look at some photos you can have a look at this japanese page ;-) where you get the best nougat ice cream I know, passing by some beautiful buildings (Natur-/Kunsthistorisches Museum, Heldenplatz, Hofburg, St. Peter's Church) of Vienna.
If you ever come to Vienna in summer I really recommend to visit these places (among some others of course ;-)!

Blog Polishing

I just did some polishing on my weblog which is reflected by some new buttons at the bottom of the left sidebar.
The site is now valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and contains valid CSS2 which you can check yourself.
Additionally I've added buttons for the RSS feed of my weblog, a button for subscribing this weblog with the Radio Userland client, a GeoURL-Button where you can find blogs located near me and a button to my BlogShares account.

Enjoy!

The Silent Penguin

Matthew Langham announced, that he finally finished moving his weblog to a new site based on MovableType.

XMLStarlet Command Line XML Toolkit

XMLStarlet is a set of command line utilities which can be used to transform, query, validate, and edit XML documents and files using a simple set of shell commands in similar way it is done for plain text files using UNIX grep, sed, awk, diff, patch, join, etc commands.

ReadySET - Ready-to-use Software Engineering Templates

ReadySET is an open source project to produce and maintain a library of reusable software engineering document templates. These templates provide a ready starting point for the documents used in software development projects. Using good templates can help developers work more quickly, but they also help to prompt discussion and avoid oversights.

This is yet another interesting new project at Tigris.org, the excellent platform directed at collaborative software development.

Do you know an intermediate web page description language?

I'm searching for an XML language, which allows you to describe web pages/portals in a very high abstraction level.
I need it for transforming different data oriented XML schemas to an intermediate representation which is in turn transformed to the final ouput format (html, wml, pdf, ...).

Here are some requirements for the language I'm looking for:
* High level abstraction of portal elements (e.g. menu, ads, search field, logo, registration area, content area, forms, actions, ...)
* Presentation neutral description of content elements
* Embeding of different namespaces
* Prevent to write transformations from every data oriented language to every presentation format

Here's what I found so far:

Data oriented:
* News Industry Text Format (NITF)
* NewsML
* PRISM
* DocBook
* Cocoon/Forrest Document DTDs

Presentation oriented:
* (X)HTML
* XSL:FO (for PDF, ...)
* WML

Presentation independent:
The following only satisfy my needs partly:
* XHTML 2.0
* Forrest site.xml
* Forrest Book.xml
* ? (if you know some standards or drafts which fit in here please write an email to the address 'andreas dot hochsteger at oeamtc dot at').

It's really curious, that I could not find something similar, since I think it was quite common to transform data into an intermediate format and this intermediate format into the needed output format instead of transforming from every data format into every output format directly :-|

Code Generation Library

Code Generation Library is a powerful, high performance and quality Code Generation Library. It is used to extend JAVA classes and implements interfaces at runtime.
Sounds very interesting.
I found the link on the cocoon developer mailing list.

Persistent URLs

Persistent URL allows you to create persistent URLs by providing an intermediate resolution service.
I've seen using it for many XML namespaces (e.g. Doublin Core, RSS).

Modified Style

Did some finishing of the just chosen style with respect to spacings and font sizes.
I think I'll leave the standard color for a while until I get sick of it ;-)

New Style

I just noticed that the Blogger Pro software has been upgraded to a completely rewritten version with the code name Dano which provides some new features and will do so much mor in the future.
As a result I was able to change my old weblog style (which I never really liked that much ;-) to the style "Sand Dollar" which has been created by Jason Sutter.
Perhaps I'll do some customizations in the future (smaller fonts, other colors, ...) to fit my personal taste.
I hope you like the new style too!

Sapia Vlad - Open Source Validation Engine

Sapia Vlad is an Open Source validation framework. The rules can be specified by an XML syntax.
Perhaps that's something we can use at our project at work ;-)

IDE plugins for Subversion

It seems that support for Subversion in IDEs is gaining more interest and is becoming more and more usable.
I just found the following projects:
* Subclipse for Eclipse (at SourceForge)
* Svn4Eclipse for Eclipse (at Tigris)
* Svn-Up - pronounced: Seven-Up, for IDEA (at Tigris)
I can't await using the full power of Subversion for everything I'd need version controlling!

Aegis Software Configuration Management System

Aegis is a transaction-based software configuration management system. It provides a framework within which a team of developers may work on many changes to a program independently and Aegis coordinates integrating these changes back into the master source of the program, with as little disruption as possible.

I found this quite interesting project in the current issue of the german Linux Magazin.
It seems that it can use different RCS backend systems like CVS for example. An integration with Subversion would be the Perfect Solution (TM).
Let's see what the future's bringing us ...

xmlTRAM+: Using XML Technology to Manage Software Requirements and Architectures

This paper describes xmlTRAM+, which is another way using XML technology to manage software requirements and architectures.
I don't know, if there's something usable available - at least I didn't find anything.

Selected Software Engineering Books

Jason E. Robbins has a very good page with selected software engineering books.
They are grouped by the different stages of software engineering (requirements, configuration management, design, testing, ...) and provide a very good overview.
Check it out!

XML-based Software Requirements Specification

I just found this really useful project on Tigris.org: xmlbasedsrs.
Maybe that's what I've been looking for many months ...

Bon Jovi concert in Vienna, Austria

Yesterday I was at the Bon Jovi concert in Vienna, the best band on god's earth!
I took some poor pictures with my smartphone. I don't know yet, if they're worth it to publish here.
Nevertheless it was yet better than the one's I've seen before.
They started at 20:30 and played until 23:10, started with classics like Like "Livin' on a Prayer", "Wanted Dead or Alive" and moved on to the newer songs like "Joe", "Everyday", "Misunderstood", ...
I look forward to the next concert.

Free SyncML Implementations

Finally I found something to test the SyncML capabilities of my new Sony Ericsson P800 Smartphone ;-)
* http://sync4j.sourceforge.net/ (has JBoss support)
* Do you know some more? Mail me!
Let's see, if I find a better way to synchronize all the PIM applications I'm using (P800, Outlook, KOrganizer, KAdressbook, Mozilla, ...) both at home and at work.