Chris Kelley's Weblog

Friday, October 25, 2002

Avalon Project - "The Avalon project is an effort to create, design, develop and maintain a common framework and set of components for applications written using the Java language." The Component Lifecycle bit is very interesting - links to OOP best practices, patterns, and other good stuff. Disciplined programming!
8:02:53 PM

Thursday, October 24, 2002

Article on Slashdot, Could CDRW Disks Replace Videotapes? kindled interest in building my own PVR. After scannning the Slashdot articles, here are some useful links:

MythTV.org - "Yes, I could have just bought a TiVo, but I wanted to have more than just a PVR -- I want a webbrowser built in, a mail client, maybe some games. Basically, I want the mythical convergence box that's been talked about for a few years now."
dvd::rip - "a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl."

8:29:57 PM

Wednesday, October 16, 2002

While checking out Allafrica.com's website, I noticed that it is powered by a perl-based open source content management system called XML::Comma. Content is created and stored as XML files, and then indexed by a relational database such as mysql. Nice approach that is quick and easy to maintain. And it's perl!
11:46:39 AM

This is a wonderful service - RSS modules of news feeds from AllAfrica.com. This is a pretty good news service - About AllAfrica.com: "posting over 700 stories daily in English and French and offering a diversity of multi-lingual streaming programming as well as a 400,000-article searchable archive (which includes the archive of Africa News Service dating from 1997)." They offer over 80 different feeds, also in French. Be sure to follow their RDF/RSS Headline Modules instructions to get the correct URL. For example, if you are interested in an RSS feed for news about Mali, the URL would be:

http://allafrica.com/tools/headlines/rdf/mali/headlines.rdf

or you could find the link from NewsIsFree, which massages the URL into several useful forms.
11:32:58 AM

Wednesday, October 09, 2002

During my travels in India, I have been amazed at the dominance of Microsoft. Nice to read that the government is putting some support behind Linux in India. And it makes sense to deploy this software in their local languages - Most of my Indian colleagues peak a minumum of three Indian languages, in addition to English. Now where's my Simputer?
12:37:49 PM

Tuesday, October 08, 2002

I am using the daily builds of Mozilla 1.2b - currently the 20020930 build. They have made tabbed browsing even better - you can easily close individual tabs and create new ones with a nifty icon. Because tabbed browsing is now baked (better) into Mozilla builds, I have not felt compelled to re-install MultiZilla, which deserves major props for creating the tabbed interface for Mozilla. I am now using Mozilla for 90% of my web browsing - I only use IE for compatability checks on web development projects and for one website - a financial website - that refuses to play with anything non IE. I'm pretty amazed at how easy it has been to get used to using Mozilla. The only thing I really miss now is Cntl+return in the location bar to add www. and .com to a website name, which IE does quite nicely.
10:20:33 PM