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 ...