intertwingly

It’s just data

CouchDB @ ASF


ProposalDiscussionMarkMail

Update: Damien’s catchup

Ruby CI Efforts


Charles Oliver Nutter: It seems that so far having head be broken for many days is not generally a concern for the “most core” of core developers. But it makes it nearly impossible for others to get up and running if builds fail and tests don’t run green.

My experience matches Charles'.  And quite frankly it surprised me.

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Accumulators come to MT


Byrne Reese: Aggregating all of these activities I participate in across the Internet should be as seamless and as easy as it was for me to create them in the first place. And until now, nothing has been made available that collects and publishes this data for your personal blog.  But this plugin is not just about activity aggregation, it about control. Today, we released for Movable Type Open Source a plugin called Action Streams that allows users to input the various services they use

I agree that such an approach provides a greater level of control.  It is DataPortability.org in action.  Today.  Without requiring Data Providers to change anything, unless they don’t currently provide a feed.  Once that feed is available, Accumulators can take it from there, presenting, archiving, and mashing up the data at will.

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Acid3 to contain SVG


Erik Dahlström: A number of SVG tests have been added to the work-in-progress ACID3 test as a result of the competition (see tests 68 - 75).  So lets hope that ACID3 means that non-standard behavior will start to corrode away, resulting in a solid interoperable core of the web that, among other things, includes SVG.

Optional Elements Required


Anne van Kesteren: The problem here is that OpenID does not use a proper HTML parser (not even one that follows the HTML 4 specification). <head> et cetera are actually required

The spec isn’t as clear as it ought to be.

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Asymptotically Converging on Standards


Shelley Powers: Microsoft is asking us to declare our intentions, it’s only fair we ask the same of it. If Microsoft won’t meet us half-way–if the company releases IE8 without support for the HTML5 DOCTYPE or XHTML, and without at least some guarantee as to when we’ll see SVG in IE–then we’ll have our answer. It may not be the answer we want, but it will be the answer we need.

If Microsoft were to declare that the following were to be treated as equivalent, then a lot of the concerns expressed by the web community would go away

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SVG Shiv


Chris Wilson: I want to jam standards support into (this and future versions of) Internet Explorer. If a shiv is the only pragmatic tool I can use to do so, shouldn’t I be using it?

Sjoerd’s revelation can be applied to build on the prior work in this area.  The result is this page which is valid HTML5, displays natively on standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, Safari, and Opera; and will display the same image on existing IE browsers that happen to have the Silverlight plugin installed.

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Smooth Migration to XML::SAXParser's new Callbacks


libxml's XML::SAXParser has been changed in the Development Release to use callbacks.  If you want to code to the new interface yet continue to work with the released interface, the following can be added to your code: ...

Resurrecting Planet Mozilla


Reed Loden: For some reason, planet.m.o is not updating...

Apparently htmltmpl and NFS don’t get along.  Who knew?  Not wanting to get into the middle of that catfight, I wrote a script based on HTML5lib and REXML which converts index.html.tmpl to index.html.xslt.

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Another SVG Enabled Weblog


Ken Coar: If this is working correctly, there should be an SVG image on the right, it should appear in the feeds, and it should resize as you change the font size.

Down that path lies madness...

Sunsetting Quirks Mode


“Steve”: Are there any doctypes that do not require this new meta tag to render with the IE8 rendering engine?

Chris Wilson: @Steve - sure.  Any unknown (i.e. not widely deployed) DOCTYPE.  HTML5, for example.

And, with that, there is no longer any need for me to have to opt-in in order to opt-out of IE8’s new super deluxe bistro quirks mode.

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Managing Expectations


Robert O’Callahan: It seems clear that for now we have no market need for drastic multi-engine compatibility, and therefore there’s no need to even consider the pain it would cause.

Apparently, the clear difference between Mozilla and IE is in the expectations that they set.  Jeremy Keith analyzes what it could mean for IE users and IE itself.

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Best Standards Support


Chris Wilson: If you (the page developer) really want the best standards support IE8 can give, you can get it by inserting a simple <meta> element. Aaron gives more details on this in his article.

I’ve implemented the following in my .htaccess file:

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Vocabulary Test


A small little application that I originally wrote to help my kids now has found new life — teaching (what I gather to be Hungarian) students English.  Check out the right hand column on this page.

Doctrine of Minimum Necessary Disclosure


Ryan Tomayko Schemas can be useful when placed far enough up the stack. (i.e., don’t bake schema and language binding in at the protocol level.) Just because WSDL sucks doesn’t mean describing representations using some formal schema is a bad idea

The right question is not “schemas: yes or no?”.

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Star This


A few weeks back I wrote a simple personal application for sharing bookmarks with my wife.  Think of it as a decentralized del.icio.us / twitter combination that uses XMPP instead of SMS.  We’ve found it quite useful.  Perhaps others who are predisposed to host their own OpenID and personal IM server may too. ...

Atom as Registry / Repository


First, AtomPub replaces UDDI. Then it replaces JCR.  Then UDDI again.

Paradise Regained


Jacques Distler: In theory, the result of serializing a REXML tree is well-formed XML.

It is quite possible to produce a DOM that can’t be serialized into well-formed XML, but I do agree that if one parses a document without error, one should be confident that the document produced is well-formed.

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OSCON 2008


Allison Randall: The call for participation for the 2008 O’Reilly Open Source Convention is out. This year marks the 10th anniversary of OSCON, of the Open Source Initiative, of Mozilla, and of the term “Open Source”, so a huge celebration is in order. OSCON will be in Portland, Oregon again this year, one of the key Open Source hubs in North America. It will be co-located with the 2nd annual Ubuntu Live conference, which is also currently running a call for participation.

There are 16 tracks listed in this year’s CFP.  Last year, there were 13.  I’m encouraging Damien to submit a proposal on CouchDB.  I’m considering a talk or a tutorial on migrating to Ruby 1.9/2.0.  There’s plenty of areas in the ASF that merit proposals, particularly in the incubator (example: Shindig, which just started last month).

Exclusive Content


S. Somasegar: We have signed an agreement to partner with NBC Universal to build a Silverlight 2.0 based web broadcast of the 2008 Summer Olympic games.  This agreement also sets MSN as the official home of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  As a part of this, we will provide users with exclusive access to over 3000 hours of live and on-demand video content via Silverlight streaming.  This means that viewers can access every minute of every event.  Additionally, the amount of meta-data attached to each of the streams will be extensive and include links to player bios, medal counts, shortcuts to particular events (i.e. athlete x’s third long-jump attempt), maps of the Olympic facilities, pop-up overlays with real-time event alerts, headlines, video search capabilities, etc. 

Rake Contrib for 1.9


While Ruby 1.9 now includes rake, it does not include popular rake/contrib addons.  The solution to that turns out to be quite simple.  Package up just those files into a separate gem. ...

Builder on 1.9


Like with REXML, I ported XML Builder to run on Ruby version 1.9.  As there is likely to be an extended transition period between 1.8 and 2.0, the design goal was to build a single library that supports both.

Updated: Patch, Gem

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WORA


Jim Baker: The most important thing to know about Django on Jython is that we are almost there, and with clean code. End-to-end functionality is demonstrated by the admin tool running in full CRUD, along with a substantial number of unit tests and syncdb. But this has been achieved by so far requiring only 6 lines of code in changes to Django trunk.

As the decade comes to a close, it is interesting to see the promise of “Write Once, Run Anywhere” move from “write in Java, run anywhere there is a JVM” to “write in Python or Ruby, run anywhere there is C, a JVM, or .Net”.  While the latter VMs provide additional runtime libraries, the pressure to run high profile frameworks like Django and Rails ensure that there is a rather large set of common libraries implemented compatibly across the various implementations.

IBM += Dims


Davanum Srinivas: Many Many thanks to everyone who helped me with my job search! I’ll starting with IBM today. My Android days most probably come to an end though i may get to do a bit of Axis2 again.

IBM += Damien Katz


Damien Katz: I’ve accepted a permanent, full-time job with IBM. My primary duties are (drumroll....) CouchDB! So all the stuff I’ve been doing up until now for free I’ll be doing full time and be getting paid for it! Yee Haw!

I guess I can talk about this now.  :-)

Keeping On Your Toes


Bugs, here, there, there, there, and even over there. ...