FLOSS Foundations

Akonadi Clock

2008-08-28T09:51:44+00:00

While browsing through kde-look.org I found a cool idea for visualizing a daily agenda.

This reminds me of the Akonadi architecture diagram and I even have code (probably not up to date) for drawing this kind of diagrams. So I guess it would be doable without too much effort to implement a daily agenda viewer like this. Would be a fun project.

mykdavies

2008-08-28T07:54:38+00:00

This year’s winners of the ESUG Innovation Technology Awards were announced at the 16th Joint International Smalltalk Conference in Amsterdam last night. There were a record-breaking 21 entrants, with a great selection of innovative ideas and products. Voting was by all attendees of the conference, and the winners were:

1st prize - DrGeoII, Hilaire Fernandes’ development in Squeak Smalltalk of an application that allows students at primary or secondary level to create and interactively manipulate geometric figures within definable constraints, as featured on the Weekly Squeak recently (pdf description available here).

2nd prize - seaBreeze, an application from Georg Heeg eK which allows Seaside developers to work in an interactive environment to develop web content (pdf description available here).

3rd prize - iSqueak, a project from John M McIntosh, Grit Schuster and Michael Rueger, which allows Squeak to interact with multi-touch input devices such as the iPhone (pdf description available here).

The competition was sponsored by ABN Amro Bank, and the winners get prizes of €500, €300 and €200.

Following the ceremony, Georg Heeg announced that seaBreeze will be dual-licensed, with a free versions available under the MIT licence. The code will be made available once some finishing touches have been applied.

"The Top Ten Usability Problems In Mozilla" - Revisited

2008-08-27T10:41:46+00:00

Back in December 2001, kiwi UI designer "mpt" (Matthew Thomas) wrote a list of "the top ten usability problems in Mozilla" - i.e. the Mozilla Application Suite. It was endorsed by Dave Hyatt as summing up what's wrong "pretty nicely". He kept it updated until June 2002. The release of Firefox 3 seemed like a good moment to revisit his list to see which, if any, of the problems have been addressed in the past six years. mpt now lives in London and does UI work for Ubuntu, but was kind enough to provide up-to-date comments on the original and on my comments.

"The top ten usability problems in Mozilla" - revisited.

Firefox Summit Reflections

2008-08-26T23:27:02+00:00

Late in July we got together close to 400 extremely active Mozilla contributors for a face to face gathering known as the Firefox Plus Summit. This gathering was partly acknowledgment and celebration of our work so far, and mostly preparation for the future. The Summit has caused me to reflect on the future of Mozilla. In short, that future is bright.

The overriding reason for this is the strength and vibrancy of the Mozilla community. We’re growing, we’re effective and we’re expanding the types of activities that live within Mozilla. The Summit made this very clear.

There are other reasons as well. Mozilla combines the abstract goals of Internet openness, participation and decentralized decision-making with the concrete task of building great products. This combination is working. It attracts people to Mozilla, and it gives us a way of building products that reflects the Internet itself. The values of the project bring meaning and guide the way we do things. The software allows us to make those values tangible, and put their manifestations in the hands of millions of people.

Another important element is the financial resources Mozilla enjoys. We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income. We’re also learning more all the time about how to use Mozilla’s financial resources to help contributors through infrastructure, new programs, and new types of support from employees.

Finally, the quality of our technology, products and innovation also holds great promise. In the few weeks since the Summit we’ve already seen a new approach to vastly improving JavaScript performance, the launch of “Snowl,” the introduction of the browser concept series, developer releases for Thunderbird, and video moving into the browser via Firefox 3.1. There’s much more coming.

We have large challenges ahead of us, there’s no question of that. There are many ways in which Internet life could become closed, manipulated and decidedly unpleasant. And Mozilla itself is not perfect. Many improvements are possible in how we work and what we accomplish. To be effective we’ll need to do our best, and then do even better.

Our challenges are real, our opportunities are real, and our strength is real.

Put those together, and the future is bright.

SUSE Hackweek: Social Desktop

2008-08-26T15:30:40+00:00

This week is hackweek at SUSE and people are frantically hacking on all kind of stuff. Fun.

My project is the Social Desktop, which is the buzzwordy title for an implementation of the Open Collaboration Services API (see specification on freedesktop.org). Frank Karlitschek has joined the fun and is at the SUSE offices for hackweek, so server and client implementations go hand in hand. The idea is to bring the community to the desktop and take benefit of the fact that free software projects are not only about software but also about community. This can provide a lot of extra value for our users, especially as the desktop is the place where all the social web data from different sites comes together and the user is in full control of what happens to the data and how it is combined. For some more background have a look at Frank's Akademy keynote.

As a first result I have now implemented a client which accesses opendesktop.org through the Open Collaboraton Services API and makes its users available on the desktop. Next steps are searching for people and enabling communication.

For more info and progress updates have a look at my hackweek blog or the occasional tweet.

Twitter Problems

2008-08-26T10:21:45+00:00

I may be the last to notice this, but: Twitter - the web command line?

However, I can't try these things out because I've forgotten my twitter password. I ask for a password reset email but one never arrives. I've been trying for the past six weeks, so it's not just Twitter flakiness. My help ticket has gone unanswered.

I know I definitely have an account and I know I'm using the right email address.

Anyone any ideas? What do I do?

Web 2.0 Expo Discount Code

2008-08-25T15:29:28+00:00

At the London community Firefox launch party in June, I met a lady whose job is promoting O'Reilly's Web 2.0 Expos.

The Europe Expo 2008 is from the 21st to 23rd October in Berlin, and she's been kind enough to offer a 35% discount to Mozilla community members. It's still not cheap - even with the Early Bird price and the discount, a conference-only ticket is €490 or £390 - but if you want to go, the code is webeu08gr3.

mykdavies

2008-08-25T07:10:00+00:00

Over fifty Smalltalk developers have spent the last two days working on a variety of Camp Smalltalk projects before this year’s ESUG Conference. A number of projects were based on Squeak:

The SqueakNOS team are working to get rid of the need to have an OS underlying the Squeak image. They have now got to the point where any image can run on their VM with minor changes. They can boot from USB memory, and are making progress on accessing SD memory cards.

The Amelia Project aims to use OpenCroquet to develop a three-dimensional multiuser collaborative virtual environment to help teachers organizing computer-mediated activities where children can collaborate, negotiate and make decisions regarding the spatial configuration of school spaces. Filipe Santos was able to work with other Squeak developers to move his work forward.

The MOOSE team worked on their collaborative research platform for Software Analysis and Information Visualisation, and were able to make significant progress with migrating their FAMIX2 meta-model to Squeak using Fame.

Hilaire Fernandes and Michael Reuger began exploring how to integrate DrGeoII, a tool for interacting with geometric figures, into the Sophie multimedia authoring environment.

Giovanni Corriga worked on the code for the KomHttpServer, and delivered a number of bug-fixes.

Lukas Renggli and Philippe Marschall were able to fix a number of bugs in Magritte, and add new functionality to Pier, as well as releasing a new maintenance version of Seaside.

How to access a REST web service?

2008-08-24T22:22:15+00:00

When thinking about how to implement a client for the Open Collaboration Services API which Frank presented at this year's Akademy keynote I came across the question of how to generally access a REST web service on a client.

As REST provides a simple way to access services by using the standard HTTP mechanism for which plenty of frameworks exist, there are a lot of ad-hoc implementation for a specific service, but is there a generic solution which encapsulates all the small annoyances you run into when doing it by hand? I would particularly be interested in a solution in the context of C++ and KDE. Does anyone have a suggestion or any pointers, preferably to existing code?

One generic solution is ActiveResource which is part of Ruby on Rails. This is nice because it encapsulates not only the HTTP transfer, but also the mapping of XML documents to native model objects. Ruby as dynamic language makes this very easy and makes it possible to provide an elegant API by creating object methods on the fly based on the content of the exchanged data. In C++ this is much harder. ActiveResource also has the drawback that it by default makes some assumptions about how the REST API is structured, so it works best with standard web services implemented in Rails, but for services which don't follow the Rails conventions it becomes a bit harder.

Of the custom implementations I also wrote one as part of FATE, the SUSE feature tracking system. It's pretty fancy with full read and write access, offline mode and an advanced caching scheme for optimal performance even over slower connections. But it's still custom and adapting it to other service APIs would be quite some work, especially with the model classes.

The Kode projects includes an approach to accessing SOAP based web services in a generic way. It contains kwsdl_compiler which generates code from a WSDL description to access the corresponding web service. As WSDL 2.0 supports REST style web services, it might be an option to extend it to also cover native KDE interfaces for REST web services. But somehow I'm hesitant to even think about this as WSDL really is a beast.

As pretty much every web site that takes a bit of proud in being relevant implements a REST API to access its data and functionality, be it Google, Amazon, eBay, Facebook or Twitter, there are numerous implementation which use some low-level HTTP way of accessing these APIs. This is fine, but looking at some of these implementations shows that this still needs quite some code. I really would like to have something where the developer doesn't have to think about how to access the service, HTTP and object translations at all.

So what's the best way to access a REST based web service from KDE? Ideas and suggestions are very welcome.

Speedplugging

2008-08-22T12:08:40+00:00

A problem: at events like the Firefox Summit, there is so much going on that it's not possible to get to even a fifth of it. And if you have a particular focus (e.g. Thunderbird, or QA) it's hard therefore to get a view of what else is going on across the project. Secondly, it's hard to know what a session is going to be like from a written description.

An observation: there has been a rise in "speed presenting" - lightning talks are now well established, and we have Pecha Kucha (20 slides, 20 seconds each), and Conference Speed Dating.

An idea: At events like the Firefox Summit, why not have a "speedplugging" session first thing each morning, with no conflicting sessions, where every presenter for that day gets (plugging-session-length / number-of-sessions-that-day) minutes to both plug and summarise their presentation? The day with the most sessions at the Summit was Thursday, with 41 - which would be 1.5 minutes each in a 1 hour speedplugging session. Tuesday only had 20 sessions, so you could either speedplug for 1.5 minutes in 30 minutes, or give everyone twice as long that day.

There must be no messing with laptops and screen resolutions and Mac video adapter dongles, so either you have no slides - just stand up and talk - or you get to submit e.g. a maximum of three slides to a moderator who combines them all into one presentation (vital for speed) and runs it from their laptop, responding to cries of "Next!".

It would make it more likely that people would go to the most appropriate sessions, and give everyone at least a taste of what's going on across the project even if they are spending all their time in e.g. the Thunderbird room because that's their main focus.

What do people think? Would this be useful?

mykdavies

2008-08-22T08:00:46+00:00

A team of students from UTN (National Technological University in Argentina) co-ordinated by Estaban Lorenzano has just announced the first beta release of SqueakDBX, a package to allow Squeak to access OpenDBX functionality, so allowing users to perform relational database operations (DDL, DML and SQL) through a truly open source library. OpenDBX can interact with major database engines such as Oracle and MSSQL besides open source databases such as Postgresql and MySQL. SqueakDBX can also integrate with GLORP.

From the release notes, the key features for this release are:

Tested on 3.10 and Pharo.
Support for Linux and OSX.
- Proved on windows (through MinGW), but some changes in OpenDBX are still needed (next version will have full compatibility).
Tested on PostgreSQL, MySQL and Oracle.
- MS SQL Server, Firebird, Interbase, SQLite, SQLite3 and Sybase tests will be available as soon as possible.
Transactional management.
Automatic conversion of resultset columns (a String) into squeak types.
- Large objects (clob, blob, arrays, and so on) are not yet supported.
Special OpenDBX options: multi-statments, compression, paged results.
Automated database connection release on garbage collection (although manual disconnection is recommended)
Error handling

Some benchmark testing has been carried out, and the performance of the drivers appears to be comparable with native drivers.

The team are very keen to get feedback, bug reports, experiences on different platforms etc, and welcome any contributions. Sources can be download from SqueakSource (it requires FFI installed). Full documentation, installation and getting started instructions can be found at the SqueakDBX wiki page.

This project has been selected as part of ESUG SummerTalk 2008.

Don’t Wait For The Movie!

2008-08-21T18:21:30+00:00

In case you hadn’t noticed, I like to write. In fact, it’s pretty much all I do, whether professionally or recreationally. So when Kevin Smith and Remko Tronçon said they were interested in writing a book about XMPP, I was intrigued. And when the folks at O’Reilly said they were interested too, I was doubly intrigued. So Kevin, Remko, and I have committed to writing XMPP: The Definitive Guide for O’Reilly, and we’re now hard at work. Expect to see it published sometime in 2009. And remember: don’t wait for the movie!

BMO Reorg Phase 2

2008-08-21T15:24:38+00:00

Having returned from holiday, I am instigating a period of discussion about what further changes might usefully be made to bugzilla.mozilla.org's product and component hierarchy. I expect this set of changes to be far less extensive than the first set.

A wiki page tracks all the currently-suggested ideas. If your idea isn't on there, please comment in mozilla.dev.planning to start discussion of it. Please let me know of any bugs filed on things to change which have not made it on there either.

Concrete proposals are everything - don't expect your idea to make it on to the wiki page unless you make one.

Two Ways To Become a Beta Tester

2008-08-21T10:57:50+00:00

A contrast in approaches:

The IE team says "If you wish to be a part of making IE better by contributing great bug reports then please email us at IESO@microsoft.com and tell us a little about yourself including why you’d be a great beta tester."

The Mozilla team says "Our community is made up of a few different types of people... which ones do you want to be a part of? ... Anyone can help us test!"

(Emphasis mine.)

mykdavies

2008-08-20T09:23:15+00:00

Hilaire Fernandes has announced that he has created over 50 screencasts illustrating the capabilities of DrGeoII. DrGeoII allows students at primary or secondary level to create and interactively manipulate geometric figures within definable constraints.

It is written using Morphic in Squeak Smalltalk, and can be embedded and mixed with existing Morph elements of the Squeak environment on the OLPC XO to produce some very impressive-looking activities to help students learn about mathematics and physics. The DrGeo wiki has lots of useful advice on how to get the best from the application.

Development of Dr. Geo II was partly sponsored by TOP, the Taiwan Open Source Project, with funding from the Taiwan Ministry of Economy, and by ESUG to promote the Smalltalk language.

Sun using Drupal

2008-08-20T07:47:16+00:00

Sun Microsystems recently launched another cool Drupal site: Sun Learning Exchange. The site enables Sun employees to easily publish rich media training content such as videos, podcasts, and documents to be accessed by all Sun employees and customers. Media can be rated, sorted, and tagged by site members and is automatically transcoded and hosted on LimeWire. The site was built with the help of our friends at Chapter Three. Sweet!

Mark Surman: New Mozilla Foundation Executive Director

2008-08-18T19:00:53+00:00

I’m thrilled to announce that Mark Surman is joining the Mozilla Foundation as our new Executive Director. Mark joins us after a long period of getting to know — and being known by — Mozilla contributors. This includes many, many hours of discussions with Mozilla contributors, Mozilla Foundation Board members and search committee members, an Air Mozilla broadcast, extensive discussions with current Mozilla Foundation personnel, and more hours getting to know Mozilla at the Firefox Plus Summit. It’s a rare candidate who can transit such a prolonged and open process. Many thanks to everyone who participated.

A very special thanks go to Frank Hecker, who has served as our Executive Director since 2006. Frank has been a huge champion of extending Mozilla’s reach beyond our current scope, of using Mozilla DNA and values to do so, and of expanding the open web through programs like the accessibility initiative that he has implemented. We’re very fortunate that Frank will remain with the Mozilla Foundation and will continue to champion these and other projects central to the Mozilla identity.

Mark is wrapping up his work with the Shuttleworth Foundation and will join us officially on September 22. He’ll be thinking about Mozilla — you can find his thoughts at his blog. But Mark probably won’t be very active in the online Mozilla world for much of late August and September when he’s traveling with only limited time and access. Look for more in late September and October.

mykdavies

2008-08-15T11:52:02+00:00

Colin Putney has announced the release of Monticello 2.0, a ground-up rewrite, using a new, more flexible and more performant versioning engine. Monticello is a distributed optimistic concurrent versioning system for Squeak code written by Avi Bryant and Colin Putney with contributions from many members of the Squeak community.

The new version has a number of changes that Colin believes address problems uncovered while developing and using the first version. The new release manages versioning at a finer level: individual program elements - classes, methods, instance variables, etc. This means that Monticello 2 can be used to version arbitrary snippets of code. These might correspond to packages, change sets, or any other method a programmer chooses to separate “interesting” code from the rest of the image.

According to the discussion that followed the announcement, the new code also manages updates more quickly and with less network and disc traffic, is more extensible, and has better separation of core and UI elements (which will ease porting to other Smalltalks).

Older versions of the code are available on SqueakMap and SqueakSource, as well as the wiresong site, but in his email Colin says that the latest version should always be available at http://www.wiresong.ca/static/releases/Monticello-current.zip (I assume that requires a manual download and file-in - please let me know in the comments if there’s an easier way to do this). The zip file also has step-by-step instructions on how to use the (very different) user interface.

EA using Drupal for Battlefield Heroes

2008-08-15T11:23:11+00:00

Computer and video game developer Electronic Arts (EA) is using Drupal for their upcoming shooter game called Battlefield Heroes. I'm not big on games, but their trailer looks fun so maybe I'll give it a try. It sounds like, for a change, I wouldn't repeatedly get killed by a ultra-skilled 15 years old ...

According to the trailer, they have big plans for their website. They want to use it to host a long-running territorial conflict meta-game. Curious to learn if that will be built in Drupal too.

Maemo profile changes and community council

2008-08-14T16:37:55+00:00

A couple of major things are happening around Maemo just before my holidays (oooh, scary) - first is that we recently rolled out some improvements to Maemo profiles - there are many new fields, including IM and IRC usernames, and the possibility to enter multiple email addresses for karma, and in general we prettied things up.

One new field is the company that people work for - and this is particularly useful in the newly spruced up profile ranking page - previously this page listed only usernames and karma, it now includes company and real name, allowing you to see at a glance where contributions are coming from. Of course, for this to be really useful, now that the fields are there, we need more people to fill them in

The second big thing is the inaugural Maemo community council election. The entire Maemo community will be electing 5 people from among the most active community participants to represent the community’s interests to Nokia, and to co-ordinate community initiatives.

Nominations are open now - anyone with over 100 karma points can nominate themselves by sending a mail with their name, company affiliation and motivations for running to maemo-community@maemo.org before 23:59 UTC on the 2nd of September. The full list of eligible candidates is in the wiki.

First birthday Axl

2008-08-14T08:35:58+00:00

Exactly one year after he took his first breath, he got his first laptop ...

DrupalCon sponsorship effects

2008-08-13T10:04:55+00:00

In two weeks, 500 Drupalistas will come together in Szeged Hungary for this year's European DrupalCon. It will be the first Drupal conference in Central Europe. While that is a bit of an experiment, I'm excited by it as we get to preach and listen to new and different users. What is not to like about that?

Even if you can't attend or if you are not doing business in Central Europe, you should still sponsor. Why?

There is no denying that many Open Source conferences work by a different set of rules than traditional conferences. DrupalCon is one of them. Your sponsorship makes it possible for 500 people to get together, to get aligned, to plan, and to get actual work done. It directly enables them to add to Drupal's success. Furthermore, by setting them up for success, you're indirectly enabling tens of thousands of people world-wide. Everyone, including you, will benefit from the network effects. It would be short-sighted to only think of sponsoring DrupalCon as a means to generate direct sales leads for your business, wouldn't it? You should sponsor because you want to invest in Drupal's continued international growth and success, regardless of where you have setup shop.

Thanks to all the DrupalCon Szeged sponsors that get this!

mykdavies

2008-08-13T07:46:13+00:00

Avi Bryant alerted the Seaside mailing list to some exciting news: Cmsbox is one of the ten winners of this year’s useit.com 10 Best Application UIs of 2008, a competition intended to identify the 10 best-designed application user interfaces each year.

Cmsbox is a powerful and flexible Content Management System (CMS) which allows users to create, edit and arrange content directly on the web site. It was built by Swiss company netstyle.ch using Squeak Smalltalk, Seaside and Scriptaculous.

In describing the award, which is the latest in a string of awards won by Cmsbox, Jakob Neilsen wrote that Cmsbox made it “particularly easy for direct users to create highly usable designs [...] They have demonstrated that just one extra line of controls is all that is required to turn a website into a Web authoring environment. [...] There are no modes to switch between, no edit windows to keep track of; it is immediately clear to users what effect their actions will have on the final layout because they are always working within that final layout”.

Where Is All The Jabber Spam?

2008-08-11T13:56:20+00:00

Over on the JUser discussion list, someone asked why there’s less spam on the Jabber network than there is on the email network. I answered as follows:

I’ll have to write a paper about this sometime, but here are some points
to consider:

In XMPP, the sender’s address is not asserted by the sender’s client but instead is stamped by the sender’s server. So a client can’t fake the “from” address. (Naturally if you run the server you could fake addresses at your domain, so as the admin of jabber.org I could send messages from any address at jabber.org — but I can’t fake messages from other domains, see #2.)

In XMPP, servers check each other’s identities, either through a DNS-based “dialback” protocol (RFC 3920 / XEP-0220) or real server certificates. So if I run a server at jabber.org I can’t send messages putatively “from” microsoft.com or whitehouse.gov or whatever. (Also we don’t have multi-hop routing, so modifications to the addresses can’t happen between the sending server and receiving server.)

So far, server dialback has been sufficient to prevent most address spoofing on the network, but we have a certificate authority in place (visit https://www.xmpp.net/ for details) and we could fairly easily upgrade the network to certificate-based authentication between servers if needed.

XMPP is pure XML, and attackers can’t easily attach malware like scripts and viruses to Jabber messages. This helps us avoid the unholy alliance between virus writers and spammers that has occurred on the email network.

A great deal of email spam (or spam+malware) is directed against a single platform: Outlook running on Windows. In the XMPP world we have a much more diverse software ecosystem.

In IM systems, people are accustomed to sharing presence / adding someone to their buddy list. There’s less of a culture of “I must be able to accept messages from anyone in the world” as in email. You can say this is good or bad, but that’s how it is — so if someone bothers you, you can delete them from your friend list or block them at the server side (see RFC 3921 / XEP-0016) or the client side.

All XMPP server codebases have rate limiting in place to prevent a single client from sending a large number of messages (especially a large number of large messages) in a short period of time.

Although we have not seen very much one-to-one spam on the Jabber network (our biggest problem so far is abusive behavior in groupchat rooms), we are actively planning for the arrival of spam and have designed some spam-fighting measures such as challenge-response (CAPTCHA) forms to join groupchat rooms or add someone to your contact list — see XEP-0158.

IM systems have traditionally been quite fragmented (and in many ways still are — as witness ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Skype, etc.) so there isn’t the expectation that you’ll necessarily be able to send a message to any random person on the Internet. This probably makes IM less appealing to spammers than email is. (Remember, spam is a matter of economics, and there may simply not be enough money to be made via IM.)

XMPP is not perfect. Spam is possible on our network, but it’s not very easy. By design, spam is harder on the XMPP network than it is on the SMTP network, and if spam does start to occur more widely we will design and deploy even better spam-fighting tools (or, for instance, tighten up or turn off in-band registration, which is user-friendly but also makes it possible to create lots of accounts at multiple servers).

However, XMPP does not need to be perfect. You don’t need to be the fastest antelope in the herd to avoid being eaten by the lion, you just need to be faster than the slow antelope who get caught.

Peter

UPDATE: A lively discussion has ensued on the list — you can participate even without joining the list by visiting JabberForum.org. I’ve also received a number of private messages about the topic, so I may post about it again soon. :)

mykdavies

2008-08-11T09:50:03+00:00

Ken Causey has added a very useful video to the Squeak Smalltalk group at vimeo.com, in which he demonstrates the entire process of creating and submitting a bug/fix or enhancement for Squeak. Along the way he also explains how to track down simple bugs, how to manage changesets, and how to navigate your way around the Mantis bug tracking system.

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

2008-08-11T09:34:10+00:00

Just married

2008-08-10T18:57:20+00:00

I've been working with Gábor Hojtsy for almost 5 years. First as a contributor to Drupal, next as my Drupal 6 co-maintainer, and more recently as a co-worker at Acquia. Yesterday, Gábor got married with Zsuzsi, so needless to say, a number of us traveled to Hungary to attend his wedding.

Drupal boys. From left to right: Kristof Van Tomme (DrupalCon Szeged organizer), me, Zsuzsi, Gábor and Kieran Lal (Drupal Association and Acquia).

More pictures are available in my photo gallery.

It was really wonderful to witness and take part in their wedding. We had a great meal and party on the river banks of the beautiful Danube. Congratulations and may you continue to love one another forever!

What About BoB?

2008-08-09T16:23:09+00:00

Jabber technologies have always been optimized for sending many small pieces of structured data, which we call XML stanzas. As a result we’ve struggled with ways to send binary data — even small bits of binary. Out of that need emerged XEP-0231, which I recently renamed “bits of binary” (a.k.a. “BoB”) because I like catchy spec titles (hey, it’s one of the things that keep me going). Folks like Ralph Meijer have had vague worries about the approach we’d taken in that spec, but we needed it for anti-spam CAPTCHA forms so we kind of brushed those aside because we need to fight spam, right?

Then over the last few weeks Pavel Šimerda raised some further concerns and, more productively, suggested solutions. So Pavel and I have been collaborating on revisions in a longish email thread, in a groupchat the other day, and in follow-up email thread. Pavel has been a pleasure to work with and it was fun to make such significant progress in such a short period of time.

Best of all, I think “BoB” is one of those building block technologies that we’ll be able to use for features like emoticons, thumbnails for file transfer, in-line images in messages and whiteboarding sessions, and yes those CAPTCHA forms for joining chatrooms or initiating presence subscriptions.

So here’s to BoB! :-)

Got Examples?

2008-08-09T04:35:20+00:00

I try to put a lot of examples in the protocol specs I write (as I like to say, “we put the example in example.com”). So when Jeff Williams of Gadgetworks recently noted on the jingle@xmpp.org discussion list that a number of the examples in the Jingle specs are not valid in accordance with the XML schemas (or even well-formed), I was chagrined but also intrigued. Off-list, Jeff and I have worked a bit on the Jingle examples and schemas, but he’s found it painful to manually extract all the examples from the specs for testing purposes. So late this afternoon I wrote a small XSLT to automatically extract all the examples from a XEP (wrapped by a <stream></stream> element) and write them to a file. I’ve run the transformation on all the XMPP extensions we’ve published so far, and the results are available at <http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/examples/>. I’m sure there are many errors to be found (e.g., I know some examples don’t parse because they include things like “[...]” in place of elided markup), but we’ll work to clean those up over time. Feel free to report any errors to me directly, or on the appropriate discussion list. Have fun!

OAuth over XMPP

2008-08-09T02:06:34+00:00

The results of the XMPP Summit a few weeks ago continue to leak out. I’ve been so busy with action items that I haven’t had time to blog about it all, but I did want to note that over the last few days we’ve worked out the remaining details about how to use OAuth to access protected resources over XMPP. Read all about it in the latest version of XEP-0235. Special thanks to Ralph Meijer and Blaine Cook for setting me straight about a number of issues on the social@xmpp.org discussion list.

PHP4 is dead ... or maybe not

2008-08-08T21:56:51+00:00

It is 08/08/08 today. The day they took PHP4 behind the barn and shot it through the head. The date of the official discontinuation of PHP4 -- even for security issues.

Unfortunately, as I predicted in April 2007, PHP4 is still more widely used than PHP5 is. According to the latest Nexen data, PHP5 has only a 33% install base after more than four years.

Drupal's success depends on that of PHP, and PHP5's slow adoption rate has certainly been annoying. Hopefully, we can all move forward together now. Drupal is ready for it.

If you still haven't upgraded to PHP5, today would be a good day.

Mollom t-shirts

2008-08-08T09:58:06+00:00

Ben and I printed some Mollom t-shirts and we're going to ship some to people that contributed a Mollom plugin or that took advantage of the Mollom API in new or clever ways.

We've just sent some t-shirts to Mattias (Wordpress plugin), Tijs (PHP5 class), Markus (Joomla extension), Jan (Ruby library), Andy (Python library), Wim (summer intern) and more. Let us know if you integrated Mollom in your favorite tool or service!

We also set aside some t-shirts for people that write the best Mollom reviews or otherwise help us spread the word in new, clever or interesting ways ...

Google insights on Drupal

2008-08-07T08:47:03+00:00

Recently, Google launched Google Insights. Like with Google Trends, you can just type in a search term to see search volume patterns over time, as well as the top related and rising searches. You’ll also have the ability to compare search volume trends across multiple search terms, categories (commonly referred to as verticals), geographic regions, or specific time ranges. Great for marketing people.

Below are some examples specific to Drupal ...

The numbers on the graph reflect how many searches have been done for a particular term, relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In China, Wordpress is winning hands down. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In my home country, Belgium, Drupal is almost as strong as Wordpress but not nearly as strong as Joomla. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by country. Google uses the term 'search volume index' for these heatmaps, meaning that they normalized the data by the total traffic from each respective region. In other words, just because two regions show the same percentage for a particular term doesn't mean that their absolute search volumes are the same. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

In the US, the west coast beats the east coast. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Regional Drupal interest by city. Based on 'search volume index'. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

The top search on Drupal -- great for marketing people. Breakout means that the search term has experienced a change in growth greater than 5000%. See Google Insights results for Drupal.

Testing Alfresco

2008-08-06T12:05:16+00:00

I’ve been evaluating Alfresco over the last day or two, and I’ve had some trouble getting started.

The main problem I’ve had is that there doesn’t seem to be any docs specifically for people trying out the 30 day hosted evaluation. All the docs I’ve seen have, at some stage, entries like “If you are unable to map your drive, contact your system administrator or refer to the topic Setting up the CIFS server in the Installation Guide”. There seems to be an underlying assumption I’m self-hosting.

So in spite of my best efforts to try and use CIFS or WebDAV to copy content, play with versioning, etc, I have no idea what to enter for server name, share & directory for a file share in Nautilus, and the links “View in CIFS” and “View in WebDAV” don’t work for me in Firefox.

I also downloaded AlfrescoEnterprise 2.2.0, which suffers from the typical problems I’ve seen most Java enterprise software suffer from - it doesn’t seem to work out of the box. I have a JDK installed, and OpenOffice, but the various install scripts fail at various points because @@ALFRESCO_DIR@@ hasn’t been replaced during installation, and once I’ve edited the scripts to handle that, one script (start_oo.sh) looks for an soffice binary in “~/Alfresco/openoffice.org2.1/program/”. So, not heard of “which” then.

End result of several hours of playing around is that Alfresco looks like a nice web application, but I’m not in a position to recommend it to Linux users because the client software doesn’t install properly, and I can’t figure out how to use the file shares in Nautilus.

Lazyweb, can you help me out, please?

PS. Why does Nautilus’s “Windows share” dialog have all 3 of server, share and folder? I’d really like to be able to follow docs for windows that talk about entering \\YourMachineName\alfresco\Users\YourSpaceName as the share (s/\\/\//g;s/^/smb:/), and let the client software work out which bits are the share, and which bits are folders. Idem for WebDAV.

Update: I thought I’d hit the motherlode when I chose ” Custom location” and put in dav://community.alfresco.com/alfresco/webdav/Trial%20Spaces/dneary%40free.fr and got asked a username and password - but Nautilus gave me an error: “Response invalid”. No idea what that response was, or any indication of how I can fix it, though.

mykdavies

2008-08-06T11:34:26+00:00

Lukas Renggli is looking for willing volunteers to complete work on a project that he has been working on. OB-Tools is a package that aims to build the remaining development tools on top of OmniBrowser. It currently includes working versions of the Inspector, Object Explorer, Debugger, Process Browser, File Browser, Transcript and Workspace. It’s already progressed to the point where Damien Cassou is planning to include it in his Squeak Developer Images. It’s also being used by Gwenael Casaccio in his Google Summer of Code project Squeak GTK.

Lukas asks: “I wonder if anybody would be willing to take over the effort? I don’t have much time to work on it and I think it would be a pity to let the code rot. The core is relatively stable, and there are only very few things missing compared to the original morphic tools. It would be cool to add tests similar to what we have for OB-Standard.”

SSL security & Firefox

2008-08-06T08:14:00+00:00

Federico: Completely agree. In fact, you’re now training people to go through a whole new “ignore security” conditioning - previously it was just “Add exception” or whatever. Now it’s “Next, Next, Add exception, Get certificate, Next”.

From that presentation you link to, this statistic stood out:

SecuritySpace survey found that 58% of all SSL certificates were invalid (expired, self-signed, unknown CA, incorrect domain, etc)

The presentation also said that “most people only see the valid certs from big sites, so this problem isn’t very visible,” which is the point that MoCo makes.

I discussed this with Gerv during OSCON, and his take on it was toweing the party line:

Your cert is expired? Fix it already
Your cert is from a different domain? Fix it already
You’re self-signing a cert instead of paying $10 a year for one signed by a CA? Spend the money!
If you’re running a volunteer site, and want a self-signed cert just to encrypt usernames & passwords, your visitors represent less than 1% of the internet population, sucks to be you!

(this is a paraphrasal of my memory of the conversation).

I may be an edge case, but I seem to run into an awful lot of sites where the absolute correct thing for me to do is “Add exception Next Get certificate Next Next”. Sucks to be me, I guess.

Axl in mid air

2008-08-04T22:30:14+00:00

Drupal.org status update

2008-08-04T12:03:45+00:00

Last night, I was up until after midnight studying the submitted bids for the Drupal.org redesign. This morning I continued my evaluation at 6:00am. Why? Because tonight the Drupal Association will select the design firm that will be responsible for a redesign of Drupal.org.

Originally launched in 2001, and last redesigned in 2005, we have outgrown the current Drupal.org website. Based on the results of last year's State of Drupal survey (Drupal.org wishlist), the Drupal Association has made the Drupal.org redesign one of its top priorities. The goal of the redesign to better serve the existing Drupal community, but also to better communicate Drupal's strengths and benefits for users that are new to Drupal. By improving the navigation, the design and the organization of the site, we hope to further expand Drupal's reach and to provide us better tools to communicate and collaborate.

Tiffany Farriss of Palantir, a Drupal shop in Chicago, did an excellent job leading the RFP process on behalf of the Drupal Association. She posted the RFP on drupal.org and reached out to world-class design firms, evaluated all bids based on 9 evaluation criteria, connected with some of the design firms by phone, reference checked portfolio clients, wrote a 7 page report for the Drupal Association, and more.

Tonight, the Drupal Association's Board of Directors will meet and Tiffany will present a summary and analysis of the proposals with a recommendation. If all goes well, a vendor will be selected and we can kick of the next phase of the Drupal.org redesign. The winning design firm will be invited to present their (preliminary) plans at Drupalcon Szeged. Attending DrupalCon Szeged will allow them to interview Drupal.org users and to get additional insight in our community.

Hopefully, we can also start making rapid progress with the Drupal.org upgrade to Drupal 6. That upgrade is currently blocked by modules such as the project module, used to power the bug and patch tracking functionality on Drupal.org. As a community we need to step in to help fix that problem or the Drupal.org upgrade will soon be in the critical path of the Drupal.org redesign. Not good. Nothing should stand in the way of a Drupal.org upgrade at this point. (Yes, I made the mistake to release Drupal 6 before Drupal.org was upgraded.)

Once we upgraded Drupal.org to Drupal 6, we should also start work on the Drupal.org wishlist items that are not covered by the Drupal.org redesign. Personally, I'm really excited about the idea of having a new and improved Drupal.org. Hopefully enough people step up to help -- either by offering their technical skills or by donating money to the Drupal Association. Just help!

Mollom status update

2008-08-04T05:51:03+00:00

As you might have read, Wim Leers (long term Drupal contributor) is a summer intern at Mollom. After 6 months of public beta testing, and after having blocked more than 5 million spam messages for more than 2,500 users, we're getting ready to open our doors for business. While Ben and I continue to focus on the spam classifiers and the various Mollom plugins, Wim is helping us to get ready for launch by implementing a payment system and more.

More details about our pricing structure will follow shortly, but as promised, Mollom will remain freely available for both commercial and non-commercial use. The free version of Mollom will be limited in volume and features though. We want as many people to benefit from Mollom as possible so our goal is to make Mollom free for at least 95% of our install base. In other words, the free version of Mollom will go well beyond meeting the needs of the average site owner. Like so, we hope to make a significant contribution to fighting the spam problem online. More details shortly.

OSCON is People and…

2008-08-03T02:27:26+00:00

Steve O’Grady observes that OSCON is people. And, naturally, beer:

From left to right that’s Jack Erwin, Christopher Zorn, me, Justin Karneges (nearly invisible because of the glare), Ralph Meijer (with his trademark Hoegaarden), Joe Hildebrand, and SaraD (photo taken by Steve at Kells). Except I skipped the beer — I was sipping a fine Balvenie right around then, and having a long philosophical conversation with Chris and Justin about the meaning of Jabber and the future of Psi. :)

On Holiday

2008-08-02T11:43:15+00:00

I'm now on holiday until the 20th of August, so please don't expect a response to any mail before that. :-)

And if you are thinking of burgling my house, don't bother - a) I have six housemates, and b) the burglar who visited while I was on the West Coast already looked through my drawers and didn't find much of interest.

Table soccer

2008-08-01T19:41:32+00:00

Houffalize

2008-08-01T19:37:15+00:00

We just got back from a one week family vacation in Houffalize, a small town in the Belgian province of Luxembourg.

No e-mail, no RSS feeds, no eyeballing on Drupal discussions, and no way to stay in touch with work for one week. No e-life. It's great to be able to spend all your time with your family: we hiked, we walked, we swam and more. Pictures of our vacation are available in my Houffalize photo gallery.

Now I'm back, the mail/work backlog seems to be as bad as I expected it to be. I'll be easing back into work over the weekend, but it might take several more days before I get on top of things. Stay tuned!

mykdavies

2008-08-01T08:59:36+00:00

Janko Mivšek has announced that Swazoo 2.2 is ready for beta testing, with much improved upload (input streaming) performance as a main new feature. Swazoo is an open source, vendor agnostic, dialect neutral, highly performant Smalltalk web server with resource and web request resolution framework, born on a first Camp Smalltalk 2000 in San Diego. It is used as standalone web server for static content or for running web frameworks like Seaside and Aida/Web.

On Squeak it uploads 15 times faster than before, achieving 1.5MB/s throughput locally on a Linux 3.2GHz PC. On VisualWorks it is even more impressive: 30 times better, achieving 15MB/s throughput. This means only 20s for 300MB file upload. In both cases upload performance is about half of the download one due to additional MIME parsing needed.

Janko believes that in Swazoo we now have a Smalltalk web server with comparable performance to others in terms of upload performance, meaning that Swazoo is ready for demanding upload tasks like video uploading as well as video-serving (eg for screencasts) which has been possible for a while.

Currently running on Squeak, GNU Smalltalk, Gemstone, Dolphin and VisualWorks, Swazoo appears well on its way to meeting its goal, defined in a manifesto back in 2000: “to join forces and make a really good web server in Smalltalk, open source and for all Smalltalk dialects”.

Jingle Updates

2008-08-01T04:27:43+00:00

As posted on the jingle@xmpp.org discussion list, I’ve just published new versions of the three core specifications for negotiating multimedia sessions over XMPP: XEP-0166 (the Jingle core), XEP-0167 (the RTP sessions application type), and XEP-0176 (the ICE-UDP transport method). These modifications incorporate our consensus from the XMPP Summit last week and bring us a few steps closer to finalization of the Jingle technologies. Enjoy!