TaoSpace

Have you seen this man?

Last seen: Long time ago
Last known activity: Preparing for some OU test
Last known whereabouts: Cologne, Germany.

This man is missing, presumed lost in the blogosphere!
If you have seen this man, please contact TaoSpace. He may be blabbering incoherently about business and something called "blogging". This is normal, do not be alarmed.

Do not however believe him when he says his schedule is too busy. This is known to be an elaborate ruse he uses to confuse people! Professional help might be needed to persuade him to show his face in the real world once more...

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Update: The man in question has reported himself to the proper authorities, who are currently slowly exposing him to reality again.

Potentially good news

If you have followed the demo of JotSpot with Jon Udell, you might have noticed they refer to a thing called Prevayler. I'd never heard of it, but it looks interesting. Basically it is a way to persist Java objects by keeping them all in RAM (read their skeptical FAQ!).

Besides this thing being interesting in itself it also means that the back-end to JotSpot is very likely to be Java. Now I really can't wait for the stand-alone edition!

A very late, very short, iTMS review

The iTunes Music Store finally opened in the Netherlands aswell this week (or was it last week?). Of course I had to try it. One snag: I'm in Denmark and apparently iTMS checks your IP address to determine your location. Denmark doesn't seem to have a music store yet so I was locked out.

I managed to get in after registering with iTMS and "switching country", after which it tries to log in again and it again complains about your location. Then you have to log in again, accept the fine print, set up your account etc. Although I did have any real problem I can imagine someone less adept with this stuff might. Then again, the chances of someone like that trying to download music from the dutch store when they are in some other country might be slim. I'm quite sure that this part would be fine if I was in my own country.

Once I did get in the rest was totally hassle free. Search music, click buy and watch the songs download at a tremendous rate. OK the latter of course is largely due to the (probably totally insane) network bandwidth at my current location, but of course iTMS will need to send stuff out at a pretty healthy clip too.

What can I say? Apart from the sign-up issue the thing works as advertised and I really couldn't imagine stuff being any easier. Now only if only they would greatly expand their stocks of unknown, independent, electronica...

Update: OK, this sucks. Just checking the Electronica department on iTMS the albums displayed (in big banners all over the page etc.) are pathetic. Not because they are bad, but mainly because they are OLD. Sounds from the Thievery HiFi for instance is mentioned THREE times on the page, one being a large banner at the top. The album (though very good) was released in 1998. Most other albums are less aged but still far from recent. Sorry Apple, this really needs to improve and I don't care if Steve-o is more of guitar man.

Stunned...

Could it really be happening? Is the industry really breaking out of its lethargy?
I don't know, but two announcements made this week got my heart beating just that little bit faster, just like in the good old days! Here they are:

• iPod Photo: Sure there are other photo viewers/MP3 players out there, but as many reviewers have noted time and again: the iPod is simply better. If Apple can keep up this tradition with the iPod Photo they will have a winner on their hands! I'll definately be buying one as soon as I have saved enough beads. Some things there might have been overlooked in the deluge of media around this thing: You can store both the full resolution versions of your images, as well as scaled down versions optimized for the iPod's display (to save space), and you can connect the iPod Photo directly to a TV to show the images there. Very neat indeed.
• Sony PSP: It is finally going to happen. Sony will release the Playstation Portable in Japan on December 12th. Cost: $195. This is excellent! Sure, it is yet another device capable of playing MP3s and viewing photos (as well as video, WIFI, and - hopefully - kick-ass games!) but it just looks neat and could become a totally new class of device. And at this price point it might actually be worth every penny!

OK, the new Treo looks nice, but I'm not really that interested in it to be honest. Maybe Oliver will buy one, so I can play with it to see what it is all about.

Anyway, good stuff!

The perfect Wiki

Scot Hacker posted about his quest for the perfect Wiki yesterday. All sounds too familiar.

Ever since I tried JotSpot (which is very nice indeed) and found out that it is hosted-service-only I've been looking for a replacement. Due to my background I decided not to go for anything built in Perl or PHP but to look for one in Java.

Several rather decent alternatives popped up but the choice quickly narrowed down to XWiki and SnipSnap. Funnily enough they both use the same parsing engine, called Radeox, but there are very different in their approaches.

Both support using database backends for storage (MySQL, Oracle etc.) and both have a feature-list a mile long. Both also seems to be well designed and componentized, which makes tracing problems a lot easier.

The main difference however seems to be the approach to Wikis in general. XWiki is the "traditionalist" here, with WikiWords and even a TWiki plugins compatibility layer. SnipSnap seems to take a different approach. The developers "don't like" WikiWords and have their own linking syntax. Actually they have their own syntax for just about anything (not that there is one single standard for formatting). They also include their own application server as standard, although drop-in-and-go WAR-files are available to run with Tomcat also.

SnipSnap has a complete installer built in. No messing about. Just run run.sh and connect to localhost in your browser and off you go. A friendly wizard helps you to get started. It even provides sensible defaults and configuration "sets" tailored to specific uses, including security settings etc. Very nice.

Another thing that is different is that most of the configuration files (including the CSS!) are accessible from within the Wiki. This makes a lot of things easier.

XWiki on the other hand requires you to import a database to get started and then kind of drops you into the ocean. Compared to SnipSnap it seems to rely more heavily hacking files outside of its environment. This isn't really a problem of course, just another way of approach the issue.

XWiki also seems to be more integrated with the "Java-sphere": it can use Groovy (If you are a Perl/Python/Ruby-type person and ever felt like doing Java, but it seemed to hard or annoying, try Groovy!) and Velocity, does XML/RPC, uses Hibernate to store its data etc.

SnipSnap however is simply more polished all around.

Oh yeah, both are multilingual: SnipSnap is of german origin as it comes from the Fraunhofer instute (Yes, the MP3 guys) and XWiki seems to be of french descent. No I haven't tried chinese URLs.

Did I make a choice yet? Almost. I was about to go for SnipSnap, for its Mac-like way of doing things, but XWiki's list of features definately needs me to have a second, closer, look.

Will any of these become the MT of the Wiki World? Possibly.

If SnipSnap sorts out its Macro/plugin issues (no flames please, it really should be easier!) and adds more features (Forms support? WYSIWYG editing?) it might go far. It certainly wins on the friendly default interface it provides as well as the easy install.

XWiki should bribe Dave Shea to come up with a better default theme and matching templates. Developers should realize that saying "If you want something better, just edit XYZ-file and ABC-template etc." just doesn't cut it for most people. If it doesn't look kick-ass, most people will assume it probably isn't. In case of XWiki they'd be wrong, but they'll never know. Unfortunately the chances of Dave reading this and soliciting this bribe are slim...

In the end the best scenario would be if JotSpot would sell its software like MT does. I'd buy it if it was similarly priced to MT. Certainly not more. $99 would be excellent. In the end the singularity of vision behind it will take it places other Wiki tools might never reach.

Then again I wouldn't be surprise if JotSpot turns out to be a huge jumble of Spaghetti-alla-Perl. But then again, so is MT...

Update: Just a chat with XWiki's developer. He clarified a few things for me, so here we go:

• If XWiki is less polished, it is mainly due to time constraints. The whole thing is currently being built by one guy. Contributors are very welcome indeed.
  
• Just like JotSpot and SnipSnap XWiki is a business project.
  
• WikiWords aren't really supported as yet. You actually have put the link between [ ]'s. (I really need to look at it more!)
  
• A new theme is in the works.
  
• The Radeox engine (in case that wasn't clear) is actually a component of SnipSnap. In that sense the two projects share the same parser code. All whole structure of XWiki however is completely different, which is why XWiki can do structured stuff like forms etc.
  

Hopefully I'll have some time over the next couple of week to dig in to it. I'll post some more about it after that.

JotSpot

Lately I've been playing around with JotSpot, which is currently in beta. As Oliver previously reported it is a super-charged Wiki, offered as a hosted service.

Now I must admit that Wiki's are a thing that have largely passed me by. I knew what they were, but never really used one. Using JotSpot for little while however, makes me wonder why.
The concepts are delightfully simple (I think I've ranted about simplicity quite a number of times already) and work really well. Of course most of the concepts in JotSpot have been done elsewhere before. Since I have had very little exposure to Wikis I don't know which ones exactly, but the package put together by JotSpot is very impressive indeed.

The interface takes a large cue from GMail which is a good thing and features like built in XSLT support, scripting and external data objects (like up-to-date search results from Amazon or Google embedded in a page) will kick ass.

Unfortunately JotSpot is only available as a hosted service, which in my case is a damn shame. I now wish I had a locally installed version of it, to replace the blogging tool my current project is using for the documentation. All the same though, good job JotSpot!

The beta program will apparently run for the next few month. Beta-users get a discount if they subscribe when the service goes live. It can't hurt therefore to request an account and give it a whirl.

What?!?

How on earth is possible? How the hell can this country presume to be able to hold fair elections in far away places when they can't even run their own properly?

It seems this stuff is getting worse every day.

Rendez-vouhou!

Although my current project has me abroad for long stretches of time, keeps throwing curveballs etc. one thing is great about it: We've been using all sorts of new tech for the first time in my company.

For instance we've been using Blojsom to write and publish the documentation, I've been using the Terminal Services client for the Mac (which I never knew was this good!) to use all sorts of funky windows apps (Terminal Service I hate to say beats the pants off of VNC) and now we've implemented Rendez-Vous support for our integration components.

Basically these are a bunch of Java processes started by a Process Controller application. This thing just used to be a commandline tool but one of the guys implemented a small webserver for it, so it can show the outside world what it is doing. Since we have several we needed to have a webpage with a bunch of iframes, showing each instance status.

This was very annoying as everytime there was a change, like a new instance running somewhere or servers changing IP addresses etc. you would have to edit the HTML to reflect that. We even had an issue where we got tons of errors on the server-side (the place these integration components connect to) and we couldn't work out why. There shouldn't have been anything running against it.
Only after a long time did I find out that there was an old instance running somewhere that everyone had forgotten about.

So now each Process Controllers broadcasts its presence via Rendez-vous (we're actually using the open source JMDNS stuff) and a server-side process dynamically creates a page that includes the status info for each of them. Very neat indeed.

And the best part was that to implement it took only some 20 lines of code and basically started working right off the bat. If you think you might have some use for it, go for it. There is no reason not to.

Was ist den das?

Maybe I've been spoiled by cosmopolitan people like Oliver, but I thought most young germans spoke english these days. Unfortunately this turns out not to be the case. When I tried to book tickets for Blue Man today I had to call the german ticket-hotline multiple times because of all sorts of problems.

None of the people I got on the phone spoke english. Well...there was one, but that was only after her colleague passed her the phone, asking her to deal with the strange english person. I guess she was the only one that could. Unfortunately I had to call again and finally completed the booking by stretching my german skills to the breaking-point. I *THINK* I now have tickets for Blue Man, but I'm not at all sure.

OK, I shouldn't be drawing conclusions based on this little debacle, but still:
Another illusion down the drain.

Photokina

I know some of you are waiting for some kind of report on Photokina. Unfortunately I never went, as work kept me in Copenhagen longer then expected. Grmbl...

All the same though, a colleague of mine went there so perhaps there will be some second-hand material later.