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Should you buy software from a web-storefront-only operation?

By on December 4, 2007 in Home Page, JavaScript, Technology

A client had a demo web site developed by someone else and they were really excited about the interactivity. It was a very rich client application, with drag-and-drop and sizers and interactive widgets. The client wanted my team to use the same platform, which they thought was something-Dot-Net. Once we were finally able to chase down the developer, it turned out to be a commercial Javascript library. We looked up the vendor, and it is a curious site.

They have an online store, one of those generic things with box-shots of a product that’s download only (there must be an add-on for Photoshop or GIMP to make these fake boxes, don’t you think?), an “About Us” page that has the usual mission-statement-ish stuff, but no “Who We Are” or where they are, a “Customer Support” page that lets you submit a ticket online, no history, no searching. The only contacts are email addresses (generic, “marketing,” “legal,” “info” not “bobsmith@example.com”) and an 800-number I have no doubt is an answering service. There’s no online forum. It looks like no one’s home.

Searching about them in Google, there’s their web site, of course. There are a couple of mentions about XSS (cross-site scripting) and a few other exploits posted to the usual security sites, a good sign that someone is actually using the code. A couple of echos of their press releases. And… nothing. No user communities, either a forum on their web site or an ad-hoc third party set of posts. No additional information. No one posting anything, anywhere from @example.com. This is pretty strange.

So, what’s the deal? My best guess is that this is an off-shore operation without any US representation nor tech support, perhaps even no ability to provide support in English. Between a proprietary license and questionable support, I’ve recommended we do some more research and see if some of the open source or openly-available Javascript libraries can fulfill the client’s needs.

Popup panels on mouseover using only CSS

By on December 3, 2007 in CSS, Technology

I found this elegant little hack the other day while browsing for something completely different. I see that the code has made the rounds, and appears on sites like xmpp.com and ietf.org, but the credits seem only to lead to other marketing sites harvesting page views and hosting ads. A sample is available at http://www.phlapjaxs.com/demo.html and consists of a span tag defined as absolutely positioned and block-display, which in turn is inside an anchor tag set to position: relative. That means the block will “pop” at the location of the anchor and can display whatever text (or images or other content) is within the span. Spiffy!

Ivan Krstić, First OLPC deployment: now it’s real.

By on December 2, 2007 in Linux, OpenSource, Technology

Ivan Krstić blogs First OLPC deployment: now it’s real.: “This week, Uruguay became the first-ever real, non-pilot deployment site of OLPC XO laptops. And I was there to hand out the first one.” Very cool! Uruguay is due to deploy ninetu thousand and Peru just signed up for a quarter of a million of them. The pundits can say what they want, but the experience in the field will be far more educational than the prognostications. Looking forward to the results.

On The Media talks with WSJournalist about the One Laptop Per Child

By on December 2, 2007 in LAMP, Linux, OpenSource, Python, Technology

On NHPR this morning, the On The Media show had an episode on the One Laptop Per Child program. Here’s what they say on their web site:

In 2005 computer scientist Nicholas Negroponte announced his bold plan to build a laptop that costs $100 and deliver it to the world’s 150 million poorest schoolchildren in just 4 years. But the Wall Street Journal’s Steve Stecklow says competition from companies like Intel and Microsoft seems to have put that goal out of reach.

I’d be disappointed if the OLPC itself doesn’t succeed, but in some senses, it already has, spurring innovation (real innovation, not marketing slogans) in the low-power rugged laptop-form-factor marketplace. OLPC is radically innovative hardware where many of the other version one-oh products are the same old stuff in a smaller case. OLPC has screen that works in full sunlight and uses little to no power as an eBook. It has a mesh-based network capability that will allow ad-hoc networks over great distances in field conditions. Every aspect of the design was considered. These are elegantly engineered machines. The software is as innovative as the hardware, with a simplified UI that allows and encourages exploration and collaboration. I’ve contributed to the project, and I encourage you to do so.

Updating WordPress again: permalinks

By on November 30, 2007 in Technology

This morning, I updated the blog to use permalinks (the long URLs that should permanently link to a post) to change the format from http://www.tedroche.com/blog/?p=1234 to a newer format that includes the date and a bit of the post title, like: http://www.tedroche.com/blog/2007/11/22/recommendations-for-foss-podcatcher/. This lets you see both the date of the post and title in the link, and it also is more digestable by the search engines. Rather than seeing one page named blog/ with a parameter of P that changes all the time, the search engines now see that there are twenty-eight hundred pages in that directory, each with its own name. We’ll see if it makes any difference…

Joi Ito’s Three years with ICANN

By on November 28, 2007 in Technology

Joi Ito has a lot of history in developing and supporting and running commercial businesses leading during the internet boom and, like many of us, suspected that “it was all ICANN’s fault,” and that they should get out of the way. Unlike most of us, Joi had the opportunity to do something about it, as a member of ICANN and in his post Three years with ICANN, he learns that change might not be as simple nor easy as many of us think:

With all of its tumultuous history and bumps and warts, ICANN, in my opinion, is the best way that we can manage names and numbers on the Internet and any new thing to try to do what it does would be less fair and probably wouldn’t work.

Thanks for trying, Joi, and thanks for letting us know.

Recommendations for FOSS podcatcher?

By on November 22, 2007 in Home Page, Linux, OpenSource, Python, Technology

I listen to audiocasts (I don’t have a *pod, and don’t agree with the brand implications. Since I listen on my ThinkPad, they’re PadCasts for me. Let’s say “audiocast” or we could be really retro about it and refer to them as “audio recordings” since they’re neither cast nor podded.) while working out and go through quite a few. The Conversations Network has been a great source for these: IT Conversations in particular. Phil Windley’s Technometria is one I try to catch each weekly episode. Other features, like David Heinemeier Hansson’s keynote at the 2007 RailsConf or Tim’ O’Reilly’s keynote as OSCON are other favorites. There’s lots of other good stuff on Coversations Network, so much so that I’ve contributed to the network, a non-profit 501(c)(3) organization.

But there are other, far smaller operations. I met Peter Nikolaidis through the Dartmouth Lake Sunapee Linux User Group, and he does an audiocast called “Fresh Ubuntu” with a fellow from the west coast named Harlem, a man with a voice for radio. An interesting show with contributions from many others, too, focused on Ubuntu, but ranging over many of the topics involving Open Source.

I like to keep up with all of these audiocasts (and would welcome more recommendations from others!), but it involves manually visiting the web site, checking to figure out if I’ve heard the audiocast already, and downloading it. I’m looking for an automated way of doing this.

I was (and still am!) a regular subscriber to Dave Winer’s Scripting News, and listened to his first audio enclosure (imagine that!) in his RSS feed, accessible directly through the Radio Userland built in feed reader. Since then, I’ve changed hardware a few times, operating systems at least twice, and feed reader software more times than I can recall. I’m looking for an application I can run from my Linux desktop that will regularly check the RSS feeds put out by the audicasting sites and download the new audiocasts of interests. Bonus points if the software is under a FOSS license, +1 for efficient and frugal resource use, cool interfaces, etc.

One recommendation off the Conversations Network is labeled iPodder, but points to JuiceReceiver, which doesn’t “yet” have a Linux port, despite being written in Python. It seems like there are close relatives to this code in CastPodder and IcePodder, but it’s not clear to me which of any of these projects is alive, well and legitimate. It appears to me that IcePodder has roots in the others, with directories still named iPodder (likely renamed due to near trademark infringement of a well-known player?) and a CastPodder manual buried in the download, dated 2005. (Here’s a clue: IcePodder’s About page says “IcePodder is a podcatcher (RSS client) for Linux conceived as a replacement for CastPodder. ” So my guess is that iPodder begat JuiceReceiver begat CastPodder begat IcePodder. Whether or not I’m on the “right” branch is something that a little more research ought to bring to light. (Update: a little Googling confirms the theory, and it appears to be pretty amicable.)

IcePodder was an easy install: download, unpackage, review the README and INSTALL, review and run the install.sh script. Written in Python, using wxWidgets for UI, GPL. A little shaky in operation – I’ve crashed it once or twice, but I’m running the old “stable” release rather than the current code, so I should upgrade before passing judgement. The code needs some serious search-and-replace s/CastPodder/IcePodder/g but it looks pretty promising. Anyone else have recommendations?

UPDATE: gPodder also looks promising. Don’t let the version 0.10 fool you – apparantly, that’s the version after 0.9, according to the developers…

Retro-tagging a WordPress blog

By on November 18, 2007 in Home Page, LAMP, Linux, MySQL, OpenSource, PHP, Technology

I’ve got a WordPress blog with a couple thousand posts, upgraded several times, from a TWiki blog to a Radio Userland blog to WordPress and a couple of upgrades. And I’d like to add the new taggin features available in WordPress 2.3. Here’s what I’ve figured out from poking around: what used to be wp_category is now wp_terms and terms contains both categories and tags. The categories are hierarchical from a self-join using the group column to link back into the term’s term_id primary key. wp_terms in turn links into wp_term_taxonomy: that’s got a column named taxonomy that contains groups like ‘category’ and ‘link_tag’ and a parent column that self links into term_id, which I think is a duplication of what wp_terms is doing. There’s also a count field, meaning that we’re denormalizing the count of categories and tags, meaning if we hack at them, we’ll need to manually update this (see below). Finally, the posts are related to categories and tags using the table wp_term_relationships that’s a many-to-many link from the post’s primary key, object_id, to the term_taxonomy_id primary key of the wp_term_taxonomy table.

So, here’s the recipe to retrofit tags into some posts. I used phpMyAdmin as the web interface into the MySQL table that holds WordPress’ data. You can do the same via the mysql terminal interface or using other remote connectivity like ODBC or your choice of tools.

1. Create or update a tag in the wp_terms table. Note the term_id PK.
2. Insert the term_id and category of ‘post_tag’ into the wp_term_taxonomy table.
3. Create the linking records in wp_term_relationships with the following SQL. In this case, I’m tagging with “Ruby” any post that has “Ruby” in the title or post.

INSERT INTO wp_term_relationships
SELECT wpp.id object_id, `term_taxonomy_id`
FROM wp_posts wpp, `wp_term_taxonomy` wptt
JOIN wp_terms wpt ON wptt.term_id=wpt.term_id
WHERE wpt.name='Ruby'
AND wptt.taxonomy='post_tag'
AND (wpp.post_content LIKE '%Ruby%'
OR wpp.post_title LIKE '%Ruby%' )
ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE
wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id=
wp_term_relationships.term_taxonomy_id

(The ON DUPLICATE code is just a quick hack to tell MySQL to ignore it if you’ve already tagged some posts Ruby by hand.)

4. Hack away. When you’re all done, you’ll want to fix the count in the table with the code below:

UPDATE wp_term_taxonomy wptt
SET wptt.count=
(SELECT count(*)
FROM wp_term_relationships wptr
WHERE wptr.term_taxonomy_id = wptt.term_taxonomy_id
GROUP BY term_taxonomy_id)

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This work by Ted Roche is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.