Michael Fioritto: devNotes

Mon, 19 Jan 2004 16:22:18 GMT

Template files for web projects. e-consultancy has published a set of template files for web projects, including the following: Contract for Web Services Web Project Plan Usability (various) Site Map Functional Specification Technical Specification Content Plan Privacy Policy User Agreement Wireframes Style Guide Maintenance and... [Column Two]

Tue, 13 Jan 2004 21:18:44 GMT

I need to investigate tying Blosxom and Emacs Wiki together. File system as database...

Fri, 09 Jan 2004 19:32:51 GMT

rawdog. rawdog is an RSS Aggregator Without Delusions Of Grandeur. Written in Python, it uses Mark Pilgrim's feed parser. It runs from cron, collects articles from a number of feeds, and generates a static HTML page listing the newest articles in date order. It supports per-feed customizable update times, and uses ETags, Last-Modified, and gzip compression to minimize network bandwidth usage.... [Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Mon, 22 Dec 2003 17:11:13 GMT

XML for the rest of us.

"The relational database is designed to serve up rows and columns," said BEA's Adam Bosworth in his keynote talk. "But our model of the world is documents. It's 'Tell me everything I want to know about this person or this clinical trial.' And those things are not flat, they're complex. Now we have the way to get not only the hospital records and prescriptions but also the doctor's write-ups."

The doctors and bankers will get that, just as the highway patrolmen already do. XML documents, flowing through XML plumbing, can now deliver very real and tangible benefits. For the publishing geeks who started it all, it's a moment to savor. [Full story at InfoWorld.com]

By the way, Adam Bosworth said a great many other interesting things in his XML 2003 talk. For those of you not inclined to watch this QuickTime clip -- and in particular for the search crawlers -- I would like to enter the following quote into the public record. ... [Jon's Radio]

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 14:46:37 GMT

Building a vision of design success. Christina Wodtke has written an article on the importance of building a vision when redesigning a site. To quote: A common view of vision is that it's something handed down by a leader to the troops. When a redesign goes... [Column Two]

Sun, 14 Dec 2003 14:40:24 GMT

ui widget site. Christina Wodtke, author of the Information Architecture book I use in my web classes, has a new weblog called Widgetopia. In it, she’s collecting and annotating examples of UI components—ratings stars, download menus, date entry forms, etc. Very nice resource for use in teaching HCI topics.... [mamamusings]

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 17:37:07 GMT

Shadow Illuminator: From Robotics to Photography -- and to Howard.

Vladimir Brajovic is a robotics researcher at Carnegie Mellon University. His goal is to give a better vision sense to robots. But in an unexpected side-effect, he developed a smart system to automatically enhance underexposed photos. The result, the Shadow Illuminator, is quite convincing.

Shadow Illuminator examines the content of a photograph, estimates the illumination conditions and then brightens shadows. It also enhances details within the shadow. You can upload your pictures on the free website and see how they can be enhanced.

This overview contains more details, references and an example of a picture before and after automatic processing.

I tried the service with a photograph of Howard taken by BusinessWeek back in August.

Here is an original picture scanned from the magazine (Credit: BusinessWeek).

Now, you can see how Shadow Illuminator enhanced Howard's photo (Credit: BusinessWeek and Shadow Illuminator™).

What do you think of the result?

[Smart Mobs]

Wed, 10 Dec 2003 15:40:16 GMT

My experience with Total Choice Hosting.

Last month, I asked for help in evaluating a new webhost. I was paying $25/month to Verio for what I felt was sub-par service. Thanks to several recommendations in the comments (and in a few private e-mails), I ended up going with TotalChoiceHosting.

First off, the price: $4/month, with a free month if you pre-pay for a year. Just like that, I’d reduced my yearly hosting costs by nearly 90% — to just $44. For a year of hosting.

But it’s not just about price: by moving to TCH, I increased my disk space (from 250 megs to 300 megs), increased my bandwidth allowance, and most importantly, picked up mySQL support and PHP support. At TCH, I was able to convert Movable Type to a mySQL back-end, resulting in performance improvements of (I’m guessing here) 50-70%.

(As a result of the PHP and mySQL support, I’ve also started installing some other applications, which I’ll discuss here shortly.)

And there’s more: TCH includes unlimited mailing lists as part of your $4/month. TCH uses MailMan, a superb open-source mailing list application which includes web-based admin and web-based archives.

TCH also gave me superior control over my domain. TCH uses cPanel, a web-based front end to server administration. In addition to easy administration, it adds the ability to run cron jobs which can automate the periodic execution of programs without any personal intervention.

As if all of this weren’t enough, TCH also includes (at no additional charge) SpamAssassin — which lets me run server-side spam filtering on all e-mail coming into rklau.com. End result? 98% of all spam destined for my mailbox gets caught at the server and stored in a server-based folder that I can then use IMAP to access when I want to periodically review spam to ensure there are no false positives.

To say I’m happy with my transition to TCH would be an understatement.

By rick@rklau.com (Rick Klau). [tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]

Wed, 05 Nov 2003 15:21:38 GMT

Personal service-oriented architecture.

There's an important lesson here I hope desktop applications will learn, courtesy of the emerging paradigm of SOA (service-oriented architecture). In the realm of SOA, events are represented in an open XML format and flow through a transparent pipeline that's open to inspection and subject to intermediation...

Ironically, the graphical desktop popularized the event-driven model that's being writ large in the Web services network. Now we need to come full circle. Local event streams need to be open in the same ways as network event streams are and for the same reasons. [InfoWorld: Strategic Developer: October 31, 2003]

When I mentioned Apple's Knowledge Navigator video in a blog posting recently, it attracted an unusual amount of attention. Clearly many people long for the kind of human/computer interaction so clearly imagined in that video. This week's InfoWorld column asks the question: How can today's technologies deliver some of the kinds of intelligent assistance that we crave? My conclusion was that the principles of service-oriented architecture can apply on the desktop as well as in the cloud. If local applications exchange XML messages with one another, as well as with the services cloud, then the same techniques of observation and intermediation can apply in both realms. ... [Jon Udell: InfoWorld]

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 18:12:07 GMT

MailBucket: an email-to-RSS gateway. Back in March, I mentioned that Tom Dyson is working on XPath bindings for PostgreSQL. Today he wrote to announce something completely different: an email-to-RSS gateway called MailBucket. It couldn't be simpler to use. Moments ago I sent an email to clever@mailbucket.org. Almost immediately, I was able to subscribe to http://www.mailbucket.org/clever.xml, which is also rendered here. ... [Jon's Radio]

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 18:06:27 GMT

Leo Creates grabrss.pl. "If your pages are static, you're not sunk as long as you have access to some form of CGI to run server-side code. I've created an example Perl script, grabrss.pl, that runs as a CGI that will transform an RSS feed into an HTML bullet list. As an alternative to using XSLT, grabrss uses only an XML parser and pulls apart the component fields we might care about and pushes out the HTML as a series of jscript "document.writeln" statements."... [Lockergnome's RSS Resource]

Fri, 26 Sep 2003 17:30:45 GMT

RSS for Python

Wed, 17 Sep 2003 16:34:03 GMT

phpFreaks: An Intro to Graphing in PHP. If you've been looking for a good way to create a graph for your application (disk space, usage summaries, etc) for your customers, but don't want to hassle with learning all of the GD functionality needed, you just might be in luck. One of the finest PHP graphic classes out there, JPGraph is easy to find, and phpFreaks.com has a new introduction to get you started. [PHPDeveloper.org]

Thu, 04 Sep 2003 18:03:51 GMT

Writing Software.

ONLamp.com offers 5 lessons open-source developers should learn from Extreme Programming:

1. Test, Test, Test
2. Practice Simplicity
3. Refactor, Don't Rewrite
4. Release Frequently
5. Be the Customer, When Appropriate

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Sat, 30 Aug 2003 15:43:26 GMT

Analyzing card sort results with a spreadsheet template. Joe Lamantia has written an article on analyzing card sort results with a spreadsheet. To quote: This article explains how to quickly derive easily-read, quantitative results from a card-sort activity by entering data into a spreadsheet template that is adaptable... [Column Two]

Fri, 29 Aug 2003 16:01:41 GMT

Screen Scraping for RSS.

Phil Windley points to a post by Bill Humphries: "He's using curl to get the page, tidy to clean up the HTML, and an XSL program to convert the result into RSS. Because the example he's using is making good use of CSS, he can use XPATH to easily grab the right nodes in the HTML doc. Very different from the PERL screen scapers we were writing 4 years ago." It would be good to do this for all the Indian newspapers - none that I know has its own RSS feed.

[E M E R G I C . o r g]

Thu, 28 Aug 2003 15:06:26 GMT

DevArticles: You Oughta Be Makin' Pictures. Image galleries are one of the most popular kinds of sites out there on the internet today. Even Apple got into the act by providing a gallery in their .Mac accounts. Now, thanks to DevArticles, you can roll your own with PHP and GD quickly and easily. [PHPDeveloper.org]

Thu, 21 Aug 2003 21:56:38 GMT

Test-driven development. Programmer and author Dave Johnson shared an anecdote on his weblog last year about what happened when his 5-year-old son walked up behind him while he was coding. "He saw the JUnit green bar on the screen," Johnson reports, "and said 'Dad, you did good.'" There's more to this touching father-and-son moment than meets the eye. The idea that software development can proceed by tackling a sequence of small tasks -- the successful completion of which is evident even to a child -- is fueling a groundswell of interest in the so-called "xUnit" testing frameworks (see sidebar) and in a companion work style called "test first" or "test driven." [Full story at InfoWorld.com.] ... [Jon Udell: InfoWorld]

Sat, 16 Aug 2003 02:17:40 GMT

Adjusting to P-time.

Earlier I wrote about P-time. I'm now trying to see if I can create a work style around it. I am getting up at 5-6am, sitting in my living room with all of my IM buddy lists, IRC and mail tracking the presence of as many people as possible. I have iTunes and iChat Streaming Icon on and have applescripts letting people on iChat and IRC know what I'm listening to. I track UTC in my head and try to remember what time zone it is in the various countries and watch people wake up, go to eat, go to bed. I've started giving people my vonage phone number. I've started adding more people to LinkedIn and IM, trying to make contact with people I've lost touch with. Then, I sit around, chatting on IRC, reading email, blogging, until I see someone I need to talk to or a text conversation gets interesting enough to make a phone call, do a iChatAV video chat with or even rally a conference call around on the free conference call system, freeconference.com.

I am letting my thoughts wander, immersing myself in this spew of contextual information. It's a different mode, but it's very interestingly real time and multi-modal. I'm now trying to figure out whether I should have P-time days and M-time days, or split the day into different modes...

By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]

Sat, 09 Aug 2003 16:34:07 GMT

Jon Udell: "There is an ongoing controversy in the XML world about the use of a feature called namespaces." [Scripting News]

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 15:46:59 GMT

mt courseware update. I’m chugging along on the MT as courseware. It’s forcing me to brush off my rusty SQL skills, learn more about MT plugins, and really think about organization of information. All good things. I struggled for a while with the calendars, because I wanted them to link not to a specific entry (which is the default in the provided templates), but rather to a daily archive. That way all important entries for a given day—due dates, class topics/readings, in-class exercises—would be displayed together on that date. I finally found the solution on Sillybean’s blog, in a post entitled “Various tricks... [mamamusings]

Wed, 06 Aug 2003 15:14:20 GMT

Got some time? Check out ELL's social software reading list. [Steven's Notebook]

Fri, 25 Jul 2003 17:23:10 GMT

Cheap Backup.

I do fairly regular backups from my server to tape, but I normally carry around most of my documents on my laptop as well. Copying them to the server is a pain, since many of them havn't changed and the Windows GUI doesn't have an easy way to copy just the updated ones (and please don't suggest the briefcase, I never have been happy with that). So here's what I do use, that old favorite - XCOPY

myBackup.bat

c: cd "\documents and settings"vore"My Documents" net use y: \myserver.at.the.officemyShare c: xcopy .*.* Y:docs /exclude:exclude.txt /y /d /s pause

/y keeps me from being bothered with any prompts
/d means 'newer files only'
/s has it traverse subdirectories
/exclude has xcopy read a file, in my case called exclude.txt. That file has lines that keep this job from copying any music (why oh why is "My Music" inside the "My Documents" folder?) or pictures.

exclude.txt

.mp3 .wav .wma

Open a command prompt (Start->Run->CMD) and type XCOPY /? to see all the options.

[Steven's Notebook]

Tue, 22 Jul 2003 18:41:13 GMT

Thoughts on micro-content, metadata and trends.

My investors, my readers and a variety of other people keep trying to get me to explain what I'm interested and why I'm interested in it. Here's a first shot at this. Thanks to Steph, Kevin Marks and others on #joiito for a first pass edit. I've put it on the wiki as well so we can continue to work on this.

Context instead of content

Attention is moving from commercially produced content to dynamic or contextual content. An example of this is the shift of Japanese youth spending from CD purchasing to karaoke to cell phone messaging. CDs let you passively consume content produced by companies. Karaoke is more interactive - you are part of the content. With Cell phone messaging, the customer creates the content. From a copyright viewpoint, CDs are strongly protected. Karaoke is less protected and usually licensed in bulk, and messaging has very few copyright issues. With 20 million camera phones in Japan alone, text messaging is adding photo sharing, making conversations look more and more like content publishing. Small morsels of content, created by users and shared is called micro-content, as opposed to expensive commercially produced and protected content.

Networked consumer electronics devices will make PCs less relevant

With each new wave of computing devices, from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs to game consoles to consumer electronics devices, there is a huge increase in volume causing a dramatic decrease in cost. The users and application developers also shift to these new platforms for better performance and smaller sizes. We still have mainframes and mini-computers but they are less relevant. PCs will become less relevant as the number of consumer electronics devices with networking features increases. Eventually digital cameras, phones, TVs, PVRs and other devices will all be connected to the Internet. People will be publishing, sharing, viewing and hearing content from the Internet without having a PC. They will be as irrelevant to consumers as mainframes.

New open standards for micro-content and metadata

The third important trend is the blossoming of open standards built for creating, publishing, syndicating and viewing/hearing micro-content. Open standards have been around for a long time, but the weblog community is making them popular. These open standards are currently being tested and developed primarily for PCs, but many of the standards could be used in consumer electronics devices, allowing smaller developers to write applications and web services for consumer electronics devices. This is very similar to the way in which TCP/IP allowed the developer community to write software for communications leapfrogging the large telecommunications companies. There are many standards for consumer electronics devices, but they are complex and mired in committees, rather like CCITT's x.25 standard that TCP/IP quickly replaced in many applications.

Multimedia

As broadband becomes cheaper and computing power increases, everything we're learning and building around text micro-content and metadata will be useful in dealing with multimedia micro-content and metadata. Because it is more difficult to extract meaning from images and audio, metadata about this content will become vital.

So what's going to happen?

Microsoft will continue to dominate the desktop, but it will become less relevant as consumer electronics companies embrace open standards and use Internet web services and applications to make consumer electronics devices rich with content. The content will be micro-content such as photos, audio clips, video, text, location information and presence information of friends. Digital rights management and copyright will become less relevant. Organizing your network of friends and your network of trust become more important, so that you publish to the people you wish to hear you and you are able to sort information which is relevant to you. These trust networks will require privacy and security as well as methods of managing and using the networks for a variety of applications.

As web services and metadata create a more and more decentralized and semantic web, searching will become more decentralized and contextual and less about html page scraping and one dimensional page rank.

In the future, you should always be able to see the status of your friends (if they choose to let you), create any kind of content you wish to share or communicate and publish it easily from any device. You should be able to find and view/hear any content you have access to, using your network of trust, location, keywords and timing to search for the information. The boundaries between email and web publishing will become blurred and you will be having conversations with the web.

Key Technologies:

Creating and managing identities while protecting privacy
Creating and managing networks of friends and trust
Searching metadata and creating context for metadata
Design and interface for publishing and viewing micro-content
Syndication standards and technologies
Network infrastructure to enable location and mobility
Technologies to move and share micro-content, especially as it grows larger
Web services that interact with micro-content and the physical world such as photo printing, purchasing of real world products, connecting people, etc.

The cutting edge:

Audio blogging (Audblog), mobile picture blogging with location information (Tokyo Tidbits), personal information and information about your friends in web pages (FOAF), machine readable copyright notices allowing micro-content aggregation and sharing (Creative Commons), Amazon book information and affiliate information embedded in blogging tools ( TypePad ), convergence of email and micro-content syndication (Newsgator), searching for micro-content based on context (Technorati)

By Joichi Ito jito@neoteny.com. [Joi Ito's Web]

Tue, 15 Jul 2003 17:01:48 GMT

Lawrence weather site in all CSS.

At work, we recently launched a new standalone weather site, 6newslawrence.com/weather. Photoshop guru and illustrator extraordinaire Dan Cox did the beautiful design work, including the Lawrence-skyline panorama that changes based on the weather forecast; I coded the site into HTML/CSS and did the backend.

It's proof (we hope) that relatively complex layouts are possible using CSS techniques that are well-supported right now. Aside from Netscape 4 (which, we decided, wasn't worth supporting), to my knowledge, it renders properly in modern versions of IE, Netscape, Mozilla/Firebird, Opera, Safari and Konqueror. Do let me know if you find rendering errors in your browser.

A few interesting things about the redesign:

We opted not to include an annoying upgrade-your-browser message for Netscape 4 and other browsers that cannot render the CSS properly. Rather, those browsers see the phrase "Low-tech edition" just under the site's main logo. Soon, that phrase will link to a page that explains what a low-tech edition is.
In order to meet Dan's requirement that the site be centered on the page, I made use of the IE 5-friendly CSS centering technique. I can't say enough about how many useful resources are devoted to CSS layout techniques. If the concept of an all-CSS layout sounds daunting, don't be scared; every problem you'll run into can be solved with a quick Google or css-discuss search.
In the spirit of separating content from presentation, all non-content images, such as the shadowed border, are declared as background images in the style sheet; they're not hard-coded images in the HTML markup. I used the background-image-to-replace-text technique explained by Douglas Bowman.
Putting aside all the content-vs.-presentation holy wars, I will say that, as the design matured, I found myself editing only the style sheet when we wanted to make a design tweak. Plain and simple, CSS made design changes easy. That's a powerful concept -- one that's been evangelized at CSS Zen Garden, where the CSS-based layout changes dramatically but HTML markup stays the same.
UPDATE, 10:40 p.m.: Forgot to mention this super-cool feature: The "current conditions" graphic not only changes based on the current weather, but on the time of day, as well. At night, it's a nighttime graphic. How does it know when night begins? Simple: I use the sun-and-moon rise and set data that we display on the site's front page anyway. So the graphic is accurate to the nearest minute.

[Holovaty.com]