Friday, July 11, 2003

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!

Sunday, July 06, 2003

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.

Saturday, July 05, 2003

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.

Friday, July 04, 2003

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.

Thursday, July 03, 2003

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 ;-)

Wednesday, July 02, 2003

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.

Tuesday, July 01, 2003

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!