Dave's Handsome Radio Blog!

Fri, 28 Dec 2001 23:47:43 GMT

http://frontier.userland.com/stories/storyReader$9255

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 14:51:02 GMT

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 14:49:38 GMT

Ouch. "NOTICE: Blogger has had a security breach. It appears no permanent damage has been done, but as a precaution, we advise you change your FTP password if you had it stored on Blogger. We should be back up and running later today. Sorry for the inconvenience. Crackers have not respect for vacation time, it seems."

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 14:30:38 GMT

Lesson in keeping your mind focused on the problem. This morning I noted some serious breakage. I reported that I posted an item to my weblog, expected it to appear on the public site, but it did not appear. I checked if there was an archive page for today but it was not there. The weblog functionality appeared to be totally broken. I was led to this problem because a file I created manually had not upstreamed. But then I noticed that after restarting Radio it had upstreamed. I went back and read my bug report carefully and spotted the problem. I had clicked on Post but had never Published. When I did so the changes upstreamed. This time it was just confusion on a user's part, not breakage in the software. A reminder to show extra compassion for confused users.

Wed, 26 Dec 2001 14:01:17 GMT

testing 1-2-3 -- 1. 2.

Sun, 23 Dec 2001 15:07:05 GMT

Hey I just searched for weblogs on Google, and weblogs.com is #1. And it's also on the first page for weblog.

Sun, 23 Dec 2001 13:25:52 GMT

General notes on Prefs panels.. The first time you refer to the product use its full name: Radio UserLand. You may refer to it as Radio after that. Avoid judgmental statements. "Radio will normally publish your weblog.." -- No. There's nothing abnormal about switching a pref. Hunt for a better word. Normal is judgmental. Tech writing must be neutral. Further it only feels normal in Dec 2001. For all we know it may be normal next year for people to have five buttons on their home page. We can't predict the future. Whenever possible I try to put new prefs panels at the end of their sections, so as not to break links in the mail list archives. THis was one of those cases when it should have been at the end. It's an advanced pref, controlling the UI, not for newbies. It wouldn't hurt anything if it were the last item in the list. Use an active voice -- get on the user's side asap. Explain the feature from the user's pov, not the developer's. There's a real tendency for developers to explain why it works the way it works, as opposed to saying "you should do this if." Adopting this attitude makes for better designed software too, in addition to users who feel like we're on their side.

Sat, 22 Dec 2001 19:39:04 GMT

Brent Simmons: "I'm 200, You're 200." ";->"

Fri, 21 Dec 2001 13:32:12 GMT

Meryl Evans: "Oh the weather outside is frightful. But the monitor is so delightful. And since we've no place to jog. Let Us Blog! Let Us Blog! Let Us Blog!"

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:40:55 GMT

Scot Hacker reviews Mac OS X.

Thu, 20 Dec 2001 14:39:23 GMT

There's so much good news these days. Here's an article on Perl.Com that explains how to program Microsoft's Active Directory through XML-RPC, and avoid the locked trunks and have fun and support interop. Wow. Things are really sorting themselves out nicely. Thanks!

Wed, 19 Dec 2001 18:30:59 GMT

Stop the presses! Thanks to Daily Python-URL for digging up this article about XML-RPC on IBM DeveloperWorks. What a great story. He starts off saying in every way imaginable what a piece of expletive it is. Then proceeds to say that this is the highest praise possible. Right on. It's true. We make shitty software. With bugs.

Wed, 19 Dec 2001 13:48:12 GMT

I reactivated the Macintosh RSS feed. It's viewable in HTML on the 2WW site.

Wed, 19 Dec 2001 13:44:46 GMT

How I edited the awards outline. "First, I opened up the outliner and created a file called awards.opml."

Wed, 19 Dec 2001 13:38:57 GMT

Opera for Macintosh: "The legendary speed of the Opera Web browser is now available on the Macintosh in two flavors: PPC and Carbon. Opera for Mac is not only fast, but flexible and easy to use, with a bright clean interface implemented according to the Apple Design Guidelines."

Tue, 18 Dec 2001 17:33:05 GMT

Contemplating a couple of changes. John says that after he's finished editing a post, the browser should come back to an empty form. The reasoning is that it's hard to figure out how to get an empty editing box after editing. I'm going to do a little experiment to see how I feel about this. OK, I'm editing this post now.

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 23:14:08 GMT

The new feature is now complete. I'm testing it right now. If all goes well this will appear in a folder on my local area network in addition to the community server. Praise Murphy!

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 22:32:00 GMT

Adding a new type of callback, one that's called when the text of a page is rendered as it is upstreamed. If this works it will allow you to capture the rendered text as it flows upstream, so it can be archived locally, or whatever else you like.

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 18:08:47 GMT

Red Hat is using XML-RPC in a strategic way. That's cool.

Mon, 17 Dec 2001 15:42:54 GMT

This is a test to see if Last Updated appears at the top of DHRB.

Sun, 16 Dec 2001 14:21:18 GMT

New Radio 7.1 feature this morning. "As you post items to your weblog, Radio automatically links, through the calendar, to the other days of the month. This works great for the past, but Radio has no way of linking to daily archives that are in the future. It's a tricky little corner, but the problem is neatly solved by building the pages for the month once a night, that way, for example, the calendar on the page for the third can correctly link to the fourteenth."

Sun, 16 Dec 2001 11:37:02 GMT

Cliff Baeseman: "Well the weather here in Central Wisconsin has been sucking for the last few days. So what else could I do but churn up about 4000 lines of code to create a new VB XML-RPC client that well frankly does not suck."

Sat, 15 Dec 2001 17:08:56 GMT

New tutorial: Going crazy with macros.

Sat, 15 Dec 2001 14:29:21 GMT

Maarten Koopmans: Rugby 4.4exp with XML-RPC.

Sat, 15 Dec 2001 14:20:55 GMT

Scripting News: Radio 7.1 to ship in early January 2002. Pricing under $100. Available for all flavors of Windows and Macintosh OS.

Sat, 15 Dec 2001 01:29:22 GMT

I didn't feel like writing docs this evening, so I added a feature to Radio 7.1, it's been on the list for a long time. It allows you to have the contents of your weblog archived in XML in a folder you designate. Every hour it synchs up the folder with the contents of your blog. Another form of backup, and a way to use Radio to author content that flows out through more and more channels.

Sat, 15 Dec 2001 00:59:30 GMT

This is an emergency test post. Hurry up!

Fri, 14 Dec 2001 22:55:20 GMT

According to Jake, you should now see a Last Updated string at the top of my blog home page.

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 01:51:10 GMT

Interesting. When I simulated the blog post in the debugger, all three files were touched and all three upstreamed. This suggests it's a timing or synchronization issue. Something is being touched, but the upstreamer is not tuning in.

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 01:45:36 GMT

Jake, Lawrence: Progress on the missing archive page on the laptop -- it's not being touched. It doesn't show up in the upstream scan. It appears to not be an upstreaming problem. Looking into it now.

Thu, 13 Dec 2001 00:53:22 GMT

Radio 7.1's CMS is new in a lot of ways. It's a CMS where the content lives in the file system. Yes, it all flows through the object database on its way onto the public Internet, but that's invisible to the user. (Not to developers, of course.) People who were around in the early CMS days, Frontier 4.2.3, will recognize the new CMS as the continuation of the BBSite suite, which gave BBEdit users a modest CMS in the file system. The difference is a few years. In those years our understanding of content management increased, and (don't overlook this) Moore's Law has been raging, and things that were formerly unthinkable are now fast.

One of the big benefits of doing it all in the file system is that users have total choice of tools. Everything from Notepad to Dreamweaver, you name it, as long as it can produce a text file, an HTML file or an OPML file, we can deal with it. It's been interesting to watch the debate over file extensions rage in Mac-land. We've drunk the Kool Aid. The extensions route the files through the rendering process. Lots of cross-platform cross-tools connections, achieved entirely through architecture, not brute force. It's a clean CMS that people who program in PHP and ASP will instantly grok.

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 23:39:49 GMT

I need something lite to do -- so I want to find out why Weblogs.Com pings are not showing up on the Events page. Maybe it's quite simple. There doesn't appear to be any code that does it. Still searching. I checked every call to radio.log.add in builtins.radio, and there's nothing there. OK, it's easy to fix the bug. I'll write the code.

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 23:11:26 GMT

Today I documented the driver architecture for upstreaming in Radio UserLand 7.1. Ken Dow got his driver working today too, so the doc had a developer review. I think this doc is done.

Wed, 12 Dec 2001 17:33:53 GMT

Back to work on the World Wide Web, circa 2001.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 23:59:44 GMT

Error deleting files on linux3.userland.com: "We haven't written tcp.ftp.delete yet."

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 19:22:20 GMT

Steven Vore: "Should we assume that 'Dave's Handsome Radio Blog' is being created with Radio 7.1? It's a great advertisement, in itself, for the whole KM/developer group notes/blogging throughout the day deal. I'm using Radio 7.0 to create outlines of a (huge) collection of web apps I've inherited, partially in an attempt to keep my sanity while I try to wrap my arms around all this 'shtuff' I've been given and partially in hopes that the next person to join the team won't have the same troubles. DHRB has pushed my 'hey, what if I did that' button and I'm seeing the whole project-documentation picture change before my eyes. Mind bomb." DW: "Yes, this is a Radio 7.1 blog."

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 15:36:55 GMT

Puzzle. Watch system.temp.radio.stats.agentsTicks while the thread is running. The number for upstreamChangedFiles sometimes updates three times in each pass. I've stepped through radio.thread.script in the debugger to try to understand how this can happen, but it makes no sense to me. It often does it three times. This pisses me off because it triples the cost since it clearly is scanning three times! No, I've gotta figure out why it's doing this.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 14:33:04 GMT

radio.thread.script can be smarter about going to sleep. If it sees that there's work queued up for it to do, it can just loop around to the top and do another pass. An example of this is the writing of directory.opml. The need to do this is detected by the upstreamer, and it adds an item to system.temp.radio.recentlyChangedFolders, which will be picked up by radio.thread.agents.saveChangedDirectories. There may be other ways for the thread to see that it has more work to do and not go to sleep at all. How I'll do this. A new global, system.temp.radio.misc.flThreadSleeps, set on each pass in radio.thread.script, it can be turned off by any code that runs in an agent. This keeps the dirty details out of radio.thread.script.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 14:29:56 GMT

After it writes out the files, immediately kick the thread in the butt. Wake up! Go to work. No bitches with one hand on the hip and a pinky in the corner of the mouth. You have work to do dear thread. No lollygagging allowed. 1.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 13:52:57 GMT

Next change. Trick the upstreamer into doing "index" first. The goal is to make it more likely that when you click on Home on the DWHP that it will already be updated. If index is moved to the front of the list, that becomes more likely. Why should it wait for the other two files? It shouldn't. Testing. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Tue, 11 Dec 2001 13:27:10 GMT

OK, back to upstreaming school. The foundation is laid. All upstreaming goes through a single bottleneck. Now to get clever about waking the bottleneck up.

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 19:30:41 GMT

Turning on the World Wide Web. Ten years ago, Paul Kunz wrote and posted the first American Web page at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The subsequent chain of events turned the Web into a staple of everyday life.

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 17:20:38 GMT

Earlier in the day yesterday I fixed a simple problem, at 7:43:57 AM. Checked it in.
Went to work on RSS and the cloud.
Took a break.
In the evening I rolled up my sleeves to do the long-postponed work of stream-izing the upstreamer, so that it could upload five files in one shot instead of doing five separate upstreams. To begin the work I used WebEdit to check it out, thinking I was protected. I was not.
I finished the work around 10PM or so, went offline.
At 12:15AM, my copy of Radio updated. It got the version of radio.upstream.uploadChangedFiles that I had checked in earlier in the day on Sunday.

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 13:31:46 GMT

It's much worse than it appears! ";->" 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Mon, 10 Dec 2001 01:43:09 GMT

Well my overhaul worked. Tomorrow first thing I clean it up and release it. It's a lot faster and cleaner, and yet still very flexible. It works here. My mind is fried now. Started programming at 5AM. Only stopped for lunch and a walk. How many hours is that? No matter. This is how you ship. Always has been, always will. "curly"

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 22:20:38 GMT

Doing another overhaul of upstreaming. It keeps getting deeper, but simpler. A good sign. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 16:45:59 GMT

I just fixed a bug. We have two places where RSS is generated, for the home page and for each of the categories. It was generating <cloud> elements for the categories, not for the home page. Now it generates them for both. That's what I'm testing with this post.

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 16:06:26 GMT

I'm always trawling for Michegas, but today I'm looking more aggressively than usual. Scoble says he has the #1 link on Google for Carly Fiorina. Not according to the Google I use. Maybe he's using some other Google? Google. Google. Google. Google. Google. Say it fast. ";->"

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 15:37:40 GMT

We're now up to four subscribers to the Michegas channel, but unfortunately two of them are behind firewalls and will not get updates. There's a pref setting for this in Radio, but I guess some people aren't setting it, or don't know if they're behind a firewall. No matter, the community server will try once and give up. 25 hours from now the user will get another chance. This is how you make systems like this scale, Murphy-willing.

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 15:28:53 GMT

Running an experiment today. The Michegas channel just got its second subscriber. Hummin and rollin.

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 14:45:01 GMT

I am breathing my own fumes again! I just subscribed to this RSS feed. Of course this item is itself in this feed. Heh. Hope someone's copy of Radio doesn't lose its mind. Now the question is, will I receive notification that it changed? Rube Goldberg would love this shit.

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 14:37:01 GMT

Adam Curry's mind is going amok about email.

Sun, 09 Dec 2001 11:15:05 GMT

I've started my 2001 awards list. It's coming together nicely. I expect to spend a few more days and then announce the nominees. Now there are nine categories. I'm sure there will be some arguments about who's in which category. Oh la. I'm having fun with it. Questions. When should we open voting? How long should the voting stay open? And if you didn't get nominated in 2001, there's always 2002.

Sat, 08 Dec 2001 12:57:38 GMT

The text on the setupRadio page refers to things I don't know about. What is radio.weblogs.com? It doesn't explain the community server I am being asked to join. If we did a little selling here, we wouldn't get the question "Do I have to join this?" -- instead they would see it as a necessary part of the $xx they just spent (or are about to).

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 16:40:07 GMT

Test post. 1.2.3.4.5.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 16:08:39 GMT

Now I spotted another problem. The renderer had so much work to do that it took longer than 10 seconds, and the upstreamer started upstreaming files, that were then accumulated in recentlyWrittenWwwFiles. It's not clear that all of them upstreamed and recentlyWrittenWwwFiles is not empty now. (I'm running with recentlyWrittenWwwFiles open all the time so I can watch it.) I suspect that we need a semaphore to keep the main upstreamer from doing anything while a publish is pending.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 13:56:35 GMT

Hello.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 13:54:54 GMT

This is another test.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 13:53:21 GMT

Another test post.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 13:51:04 GMT

Jrobb reports a problem. When you post a new item, he wants an empty text box. If this were happening it would mean serious breakage. I don't think this is actually what he's seeing. This test will verify. 1.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 00:33:02 GMT

This is a test.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 00:30:37 GMT

I'd bet $10 that I fixed the problem reported by Andy Fragen. Now Murphy-willing, once again, after you hit Post to Weblog, if you click on Events, you'll see the Upstream there. In other words the updates will be live before you can look to see if they got there. Keep your fingers crossed.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 00:22:56 GMT

3. I want to get Jeff Cheney posting again. He hit the 5MB limit. It's good that the limit works! Now I need a mechanism to give one user more space because he's a friend, this will make it possible to give people more space for more money.

Fri, 07 Dec 2001 00:02:49 GMT

1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890 1234567890

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 23:56:05 GMT

I found a major error in radio.upstream.uploadRecentlyTouchedFiles. The callback scripts would always error, they were expecting a list of file paths, but we were passing a list containing a list of filepaths. The error is in this line: try {nomad^ ({f})}. Note the extra set of curly braces. I believe that when I fix this, weblogs.com notification will work again. If you see Dave's Handsome Radio Blog on www.weblogs.com, you'll know it worked. Keep your fingers crossed. ";->"

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 22:12:02 GMT

Something appears to be broken. How much time before it appears in the cloud? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 22:10:57 GMT

I'm testing the upstreaming code to see if it's broken or not.

Thu, 06 Dec 2001 17:56:41 GMT

This is a test post to see if new upstreaming code is completely broken. 1.

Tue, 04 Dec 2001 00:56:49 GMT

test post.

Sun, 02 Dec 2001 12:50:48 GMT

A test post to see if directory.opml is upstreamed when I update my blog. (Note to Jake -- no.)

Sat, 01 Dec 2001 19:08:18 GMT

this is a test post. 1.