Blogging Roller

Here's to a better year than last, peace, love, and understanding.

David Edmondson is doing some cool things with filtered feeds on Planet Sun, which uses the Python-based open source Planet software. He's using blog entry category meta-data to produce filtered feeds for Java, Linux, Netbeans, Security, and Solaris.

I'm doing what I can to help folks with Roller 1.0RC2 issues this week, but I'm not doing any substantial work on Roller. I'm using the Winter break to work full-time on Blogs, Wikis, and Feeds in Action, so the 1.0 release will have to wait until the new year. The good news is, although there are some bug reports rolling in (pun always intended), Roller 1.0 has been running very well at blogs.sun.com.

Bill Gates on blogs: "It's all about openness [...] People see them as a reflection of an open, communicative culture that isn't afraid to be self-critical"

As much as I hate to admit it, I'm addicted to Eclipse. I'm hooked on the auto-import and auto-fix stuff that automatically imports the classes I need, adds missing methods needed to implement interfaces, and declares missing variables, fields, and even classes. And I'm hooked on the CVS client that gives me a clear view of every single file I have modified in my workspace, every incoming change, and makes it easy to override-and-commit or override-and-update. Netbeans 4.0 has come a long, long way from the old 3.X series and Creator is just awesome for JSF, but 4.0 is still not good enough to pull me away from Eclipse. There, I said it.

Unfortunately, Eclipse for Solaris/X86 is linked to Motif which makes it nearly unusable so I end up using Netbeans for most of they day, only switching to Eclipse when I need to synchronize with CVS. I actually blew a Saturday afternoon trying to get Eclipse 3.1 to build on Solaris/X86 linked to GTK. I failed, but only because I ran out of time.

Jim Grizanzio, OpenSolaris Community Manager: "I spent nine painful years pitching messages in PR. But I'm out now, and I have a different perspective. Why must everything be a pitch to deliver a message no one believes? And why pitch bloggers? Why perpetuate the bad PR that the PR industry so richly deserves? Why not simply read blogs to understand the issues and the communities trying to interact with a company. And why not simply blog right along with those communities and join the conversation? In other words, skip the pitch."

Jim is commenting on Fortune Magazine's recent article Why There's No Escaping The Blog.

CNN is reporting that the death toll is now > 20,000 and the US is sending $4,000,000. That's not enough. You can help by contributing here: American Red Cross - Credit Card Contribution.

Update: Reuters reports the US is pledging $15,000,000.

I hope you and yours are having a nice winter holiday. We had a great Christmas here with way too many toys, wonderful food, and lots of family around. Transformers and Imaginex toys rule this house now. We didn't get a white christmas here, we never do, but tomorrow we may get 2 to 4 inches of snow. That's close enough for the kids.

A whole conference devoted to content syndication, it's IDG's Syndicate. (Via Doc Searles.)

I've been experienting with taking closeups with my new Canon Powershot S500 camera and with Flickr's MetaWeblog API support.

Thanks to Microsoft, I finally made the switch to Firefox on my Powerbook. I'm totally addicted to clicking links with the wheel-mouse button to open them in new tabs. Firefox does that by default on my platforms (Solaris x86, Linux, and Windows XP), but for some odd reason, on Mac you have to map the wheel button to be a "Control Click" rather than just a click. I couldn't do that until I downloaded the appropriate Microsoft Intellipoint mouse drivers.

And suddenly, *MAS is here. As we have done for the past couple of years, we took the kids to the dollar store so they could afford to buy presents for everybody.

At this moment, a dog named Isa appears to be more popular than Jonathan Schwartz, at least according to my... uh... I mean the Roller Hot Blogs hit counters.

I'm pleased to be the first to publicly welcome our newest contributor and committer Anil Gangolli to the Roller team. As I mentioned before, Anil has been doing great work helping Roller users, filing bugs, digging into the code, and offering excellent fixes. Welcome Anil and thanks again for your contributions.

This morning Andi and I attended the holiday program at the elementary school that my older boys Alex(8) and Linus(6) attend. We were quite proud parents as Alex got a "Going the Extra Mile" award for academic achievement. Nice to get out of the office/house. I need a break, but I'm not going to get it just yet. The week between XMAS and New Years is going to be devoted to writing.

I spent the rest of the morning responding to emails about the Roller 1.0 roll-out at blogs.sun.com. There were a number of glitches and some have been filed as bugs to be fixed for Roller 1.0. Some were caused by browser caching issues as we saw on JRoller earlier this year. There are lots of questions about themes and page templates. A number of folks are inspired by new release and are working up cool new themes. I'll have to point some of those out in later post. In the next couple of weeks, I hope to whip up some new themes myself and write a short tutorial for folks just getting started.

Since I had to delete an irritating comment today, I'll fill you in on my comment policy. If your comment irritates or offends me in any way whatsoever, I will take great joy in deleting it.

We made the cut-over to Roller 1.0 (actually 1.0RC2) at blogs.sun.com today. We had some minor glitches, but overall the upgrade went pretty smoothly after we flipped the switch and started directing traffic to the new server.

You know you're not having a good day in Java web application development land when you spend hours staring at Tomcat source code and end up deciding your best bet for solving the problem at hand is to download and compile a new HTTPD and mod_jk from source.

Is blogs.net for real or is it just a site devoted to blog spam? (It's not hard to tell that the site is running Roller.)

The full Roller 1.0RC2 announcement can be found on the Roller project blog. In addition to lots of bug fixes, we also added a new JCaptcha based comment authenticator. I've got it running on this site if you'd like to try it out.

JCaptcha integration was really easy because JCaptcha developer Marc-Antoine Garrigue did all the work. He implemented the Roller CommentAuthenticator interface and documented the integration process. Now all you have to do to enable CAPTCHA support in Roller is to uncomment a line in Roller's web.xml file. Thanks Marc-Antoine.

Roller 1.0 is very, very close, possibly only a day or two away. I'm still fighting a mysterious bug that is preventing Firefox 1.0 browsers from logging into my test server. We use Apache mod_rewrite to rewrite the blogs.sun.com URLS, so we can have http://blogs.sun.com/<username> redirect to http://blogs.sun.com/roller/page/<username>. For some reason, this prevents Firefox 1.0 from logging in (via standard Servlet Authentication). All other browsers work fine and if I turn off mod_rewrite Firefox 1.0 works too.

You haven't heard a peep from me this week because I've been under the gun to rewrite the first third of my book, which by the way is still without an official title, and to get Roller 1.0 up and running on blogs.sun.com

I delivered the one third rewrite this morning, which included some significant changes to the table of contents. Also, I talked to Manning about my blogging more details about the book, so that is what I'm going to do. I'll post the new TOC here as soon as I get a break from the blogs.sun.com work.

For those waiting for Roller 1.0: I will get something out this weekend even if it is just an RC2 release.