The Goldfish Chronicles

As the committers@ mailing list doesn’t seem to be flowing email, thought I’d blog this

CVS will be shutdown on Thursday, 2nd February 2006. Early afternoon GMT.

This will comprise of:

* CVS root removed from ViewCVS
* Public CVS modules being rsync'd from /www/archive.apache.org/cvs/
* Private CVS modules being placed in /home/apmail/private-cvs/
* Both directories being read-only.
* README.txt's in both directories showing the CVS->SVN mapping

Which should just leave the various websites that still point to their old CVS
modules to fix (*prod*).

I’ve not been paying that much attention to the Web 2.0 articles, blogs and general conversations. On the programming side it’s appeared to be a philosophy that the AJAX design style has found a partner in, so mostly when I have seen it, it’s been in the context of going AJAX. However, summary articles like Dion Hinchcliffe’s are the perfect thing for those of us not riding the leading edge on this one.

It provides a list of the best Web 2.0 software, and I decided to take a gander. As I read down the list I started to notice something; none of these seem like pieces of software that I can download and install on my web server. Not even if I paid, I suspect. Hmm, methinks, this Web 2.0 isn’t just a “Dump the OS apps for your browser” pattern, it appears to be a subscription pattern too. Increasingly life is about subscription patterns, maybe because products are just not viable anymore, or maybe because there’s so much more money in a subscription and so everyone heads that way.

So, realising that I am apparantly oblivious of Web 2.0, I went hunting for a definition. Tim O’Reilly’s article appears like it’s the definitive guide. Credit to Dion, it was 3 clicks from his site and the first 3 clicks I took.

The first part of Tim’s summary diagram is: “The Web as Platform”. So I am getting the general picture; good to know. The next part: “You control your own data”. Okay, well that’s not fitting with the subscription model in my mind; subscription models seem to tend towards lock-in, and I definitely don’t control the data if it’s not on my own servers. Number three is: “Services not packaged software”. Okay, well this is saying subscriptions again. It continues with things that largely in my mind equate to ‘being open’ and ‘encouraging community’; but it’s still a subscription model that I don’t get to control the data for.

So where are the open-source Web 2.0 products that I can install and offer as services to the family?

—-

Addendum: To explain the title; Cable companies, phone companies have turned the word ’subscription model’ into a curse in my mind. Lots of money for very little value - however owning the local lines means they get local monopolies. The Web 2.0’s don’t get to own the local lines, but they do get to own the local lines for my data (ie the server it’s on). Would be interesting to look at each one of Dion’s services in each category and see if I can migrate between them easily.

Addendum 2: The O’Reilly article is actually a direct link from Dion’s blog.

I went to the Cincinatti Java User Group meeting last night. James Carman introduced us to the wonders of EJB 3.0; except for Entity Beans which are next month. At one point everybody listed their favourite open source libraries; here’s the list:

• HTTPClient
• TachyonJ - Jakarta Commons Collections like API
• Commons
• DOS!
• XFire - binding, xml, webservices
• Hamilton County Public Library
• Tiddlywiggly - Javascript wiki
• Myfaces
• groovy
• dwr
• commons - collections
• cygwin
• JUnit
• wxWidgets
• RoR
• Syringe
• Findbugs
• Maven

When I was younger, Sunday afternoons (well some of them) were spent with music on in the living room while a roast dinner was cooked. Yesterday I installed the latest Twonkyvision (3.0 - much improved configuration UI) on our mp3 server and today saw me get off my arse and cook a dinner.

The twonkyvision install means we can now play any of our music through the TV (must get an amp one of these days) - so Nathan got some Pink Floyd, a few Who tracks and then some Billy Bragg. Given his current taste in music (Bruce Springsteen, Black Crows, Muppets), I had hopes that he might like the Who, but alas he didn’t take notice of the random few tracks I played. Time to release the secret weapon, I thought, Pinball Wizard. Lo and behold, off he went doing his 1 year old dance thing.

Dinner today was a roasted pork tenderloin, with roast potatoes, boiled peas, fried apple garnish and a brown mustard gravy. I was making things up a bit, so hit my usual state of “everything’s screwed up” with 5 minutes or so to go. Then it all came together and a picture perfect meal was created. Potatoes need a little work, but were still pretty good. Nathan was a fan, happily eating all of it.

Important mentions are:

• Apple garnish. Take 3 apples, peel and core them. Slice them so you have 15 or so apple rings. Fry in butter (10 minutes maybe?) and sprinkle with cinnamon halfway through. It’s something from a Delia Smith cookbook, with the exception of the cinnamon.
• The “aha” moment of wondering how to handle the peas being done and needing the boiling water drained off, and the gravy needing 1.5 cups of boiling water.

At the heart of the great mass that is the Apache Software Foundation, there lies an old mechanism, the binary vote (I have no clue what the official term would be). Yes/No, thumbs down/up, black/white token. And now…. +1/-1. It’s on t-shirts, mugs but thankfully not thongs.

It’s interesting that it’s not a firm binary. Yes/No is a simple answer to a closed question. +1/-1’s intepretation is dependant on the community conversation in which it is being used. This leads to the important philosophical discussions of our day:

* Does +1 imply that you are showing simple favour to the subject, or that you are prepared to get involved and help tem out?
* Does -1 imply a veto or simply a muttering under the breath?
* What do +0 and -0 mean, and is there any point in them?
* Is the person who said +1 or -1 a voter of consequence - ie: is their vote binding?
* Are summary executions for people using +1000 allowed?

Number 4 is of interest. A little bit of time goes into checking whether the vote is binding (a PMC member), because binding votes represent an oversight path to the ASF as a whole and not just the tiny subcommunity sharing the conversation. It’s really just fakery though, a binding vote is one which is listened to. On the +1 side there’s a bit of bookkeeping to ensure there were enough +1s to state oversight, but an officially non-binding -1 is just as binding as an officially binding one; if people listen to it.

After a fair period of laissez faire +1s; there definitely seems to be an undercurrent that says:

* If you say +1, I’m expecting you to help out.

I’m not sure it’s as much an undercurrent, but another good thing is to say -1 more often. -1 is not so much a veto of no, but an indication that something is wrong and it cannot continue until it is fixed. -1 should always be accompanied with a reason (which if overturned successfully should see your -1 become a +0).

Say -1 more, +1 less. If you want to show favour, use +0.

Pretty happy, first OSJava component to head to Apache.

My norobots-rfc implementation ‘Norbert’, has just been checked in as Jakarta HttpComponents Norobots-RFC (or some such name).

Continuum doesn’t work with Maven-1 multiprojects, so that’s given me impetus to migrate the GenJava component set over to maven-2. GenJava is a series of simple Commons-like utilities; which primarily exist as a personal feeder into Commons libraries and as a way to play with a Commons-like structure.

Lesson’s learned [many thanks to Brett for helping on IRC]:

• The extends tag is now a parent tag with a block of subtags. Check the bottom of the Maven-2 Getting Started guide out.
• There is an automatic default of ‘../’ when running mvn package in a subdirectory.
• Migrating is really easy when your subcomponent project.xmls are tiny.
• Mirrored repositories are something to learn about pronto; I couldn’t build a couple because ibiblio was refusing to answer.
• testResource’s seem to have changed. I used to load “/foo.xml” from the classpath, now I hve to load “foo.xml”.
• If you set the scm in the parent pom, the children will automatically append their artifactId.
• JUnit is no longer automatically a dependency. So time to specify it manually, and remember the scope tag.

That’s all that jumps to mind for the moment.

A while ago I bought new bookshelves for my computer book collection. Being the type of person I am, I looked at the large pile of books and immediately began to categorize, going back and forth until it felt right [ie: fit the shelves]. Thus I ended up with:

• 3 shelves of Java books
• A shelf of scripting books
• A shelf of Linux + Internet service books
• Half a shelf of database books, half a shelf of ‘other’ OS books
• An ‘others’ shelf, mostly filled with math books.
• And finally, a shelf of classic books.

I was quite surprised to later look at the shelf of classic books and see just how many Addison Wesley books were there, 11 AW, with 3 Prentice Hall [also owned by parent company Pearson]. Not bad for a shelf of 26 books, which by comparison contained just 3 O’Reilly’s (largely because O’Reilly book tended to fit the other categories).

So my surprise at seeing the domination of AW books at Bookpool’s Top Ten book list was prety brief. Eight of the top ten are from AW, with the other two being Microsoft Press. Three more of the next four are from AW, with O’Reilly’s camel book the odd one out.

This isn’t really suggesting that an AW book is likely to be better or worse than another; but it does seem to hint that there’s a very good chance that your favourite computing book was published by Addison Wesley.

It’s quite bizarre the effect the new powerbook has had on me. I’d thought that I was having trouble in the evenings spending time on code/admin stuff because I was tired from work, tired from fatherhood and tired from passing the age of 30 and feeling progressively less fit.

Seems I was just missing a Mac. I’ve played with Roller on Derby, setup Continuum at OSJava, migrated from Roller 0.9.9 to Roller 2.0.1 and finished a year long series of cvs2svn migrations at Apache. All while feeling like utter crap due to a family-wide heavy dose of the flu.

I need to remind myself of this in N years time when my wallet is telling me why I can’t upgrade my dog-slow laptop.