October 2004 Archives

Mac OS X DevCon 2004. The scene from the Westin in Santa Clara with the last out of Game 4.

After attending Scott Knaster's iPod Parlor Tricks, it occurred to me that a photo slideshow is not much different from a presentation. Perhaps the device could be used as a (ultra) portable presentation device?

Read iPod Photo as Portable Presentation Device? on my O'Reilly weblog.

I've made it out to the west coast to attend to O'Reilly Mac OS X DevCon (quite happy to be here and to present) and listening to the first keynote by Chris Bourdon on the new features of Tiger, Apple's next version of Mac OS X. I like what I'm seeing a lot, but one slide bothered me as being a bit uncharacteristically off. It said something like RSS support – RSS 0.9x, RSS1, RSS2 and Atom. I'm glad to see this support of course, but Atom is not RSS. Rather then pick one over the other, it seems to me the term syndication would be more accurate and encompassing while being a bit less geeky for normal folk.

I'll be presenting in just over a week at the O'Reilly Mac OS X Developers conference. My presentation is entitled Running Movable Type Locally. The official abstract posted on my session:

Movable Type is one of the most popular server-based tools for publishing weblogs, but do you know that it can used as a local Mac OS X publishing or knowledge management tool? With MT and Darwin's open source foundations you can. In this session Tim discusses some of the tips and techniques used to do it. Topics covered will range from usage patterns to technical know-how including installation, utilizing the MT API, and a review of helpful plugins and scripts. The session will conclude with some questions, answers and brainstorming.

The idea of this presentation came from the fact I do all of my initial development and testing locally on my Powerbook before moving it to a remote server. (I actually have 3 versions of MT currently running on my machine.) When initially setting my my environment I found a few posts on the topic, but I thought they could be better. While I could easily fill 45 minutes going over that installation step by step, even being so bold as to try doing it live in front of a studio audience, I thought the idea of running MT as a local productivity tool was far more interesting. After all, MT is making strides towards being a platform, why would should it be limited to servers?

• Do you use (or have tried running) MT in this local manner and if so how?
• What hurdle do you perceive to running MT in this manner? What is missing?
• How would you like to see this concept evolved?
• What specific topics would you like to see covered that is not mentioned in the abstract if you were attending?

Comments are open. Your thoughts are appreciated.

I'll be making any slides or notes I create available after the conference. (Watch this space for more.)

Lastly, if you will be at the conference, please attend my session! My slot is on the last day, last session. I keep telling myself they are saving the best for last, but I'm doing a poor job of convincing myself of that presently.

UPDATE: I tried to put comments into my layout here, but alas the code from the default templates is too much of a hairball to get working. Please use the old fashion way and email me.

Mike Doughty writes in a letter to The London Observer commenting on a review of Billy Graham's crusade (Of God and Greenbacks):

It's remarkable to me that What's The Matter With Kansas? is published in the UK as What'sThe Matter With America? It's maddening to us New Yorkers, not to mention people from Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago, and perhaps the most liberal city in the world, San Francisco, that while London is Britain, Paris is France, and Amsterdam is Holland, the United States is Springfield, Ohio.

Very true. For anyone who has not been to America, the views of the population varies greatly particularly based on geograpghy. Kansas is not America, but a slice that to a New Yorker is foreign and seemingly insane. The same can be said in reverse of a place like San Francisco if you're from Kansas City (KS or MO).

Another piece published in (presumably) the same edition as the Graham piece, Divided We Stand, captures this condition through a personal account of the authors family that is not uncharacteristic for most others as this election approaches.

One passage stuck out in the the Graham article as I read it summarizing Thomas Frank's accessment of the divide in his book What's the Matter With Kanasas? which was renamed What's The Matter With America? in the UK promping Doughty's letter.

Frank argues that of all the divides in America, the key one is between the perceived authenticity of tradition-minded red America and its godless liberal nemesis. 'While liberals commit endless acts of hubris, sucking down lattes, driving European cars, trying to reform the world, the humble people of the red states go about their unpretentious business, eating down-home foods, whistling while they work and knowing they are secure under the watch of George W Bush, a man they love as one of their own.'

To me this statement really defines the divide. I originally come from Pennsylvania, which is somewhat sheltered in most parts from any significant cultural influence, though not nearly as much so from Red America. In the short drive from NYC to PA where I'm from, the shift is clear and pretty dramatic. from this lack of diversity and the limited outside influence.

The article continues with what is the true irony that this sheltered simplistic view has created:

The great lie of this position, Frank argues, is that Bush has done more to undermine those traditional American values, by pandering to vast corporations, by slashing the tax burden of the rich, by rushing America to war, than almost any President in history. In this, though, Bush is convinced, he has God (and Billy Graham) on his side. Rarely has it been more straightforward for a rich man to feel eligible for a celestial upgrade than in Bush's America.

It's quite alarming. America is clearly coming to a crossroad with this approaching election that has me concerned and apprehensive for our future. Win or lose, I fear this will not be the end of the divide, but the beginning. I can only hope I'm wrong.

I do not claim to a be brilliant Perl programmer, but I try and I'm always will to listen to constructive criticism and alternate viewpoints. I try and do my part by releasing as much of my work into the public domain to give back to the community something I hope is useful in creating systems. It's more then most do and, while I don't expect any accolades or even a pat on the back, I do expect some degree of consideration and etiquette so I don't regret my decision.

Tommy boy here demonstrates how you don't do that and loose the ear and respect of a developer with a post here to in the CPAN reviews section. (Kind of funny that this post comes from someone who can't get their own modules to test properly.) I replied:

Saw your comment in the CPAN reviews section and it was really inappropriate. If you have some suggestions for improving the module then I welcome your constructive criticism. However I have no time and respect for the opinion of those who flame my (free nonetheless) work in an open forum rather then addressing it with me personally or as a bug report via rt.cpan.org.

So here is a bit of advice for those of you using other's code – especially free of charge – to avoid situations like these.

• There is no need to be angry, snippy or snarky – be constructive in your criticism instead. Developers releasing their code to the public, particularly the open source kind, are good people by the nature that they'd give their work away to complete and virtually anonymous strangers.

• Address bugs with the developers or through some bug tracking system were they will be seen and handled. Spewing to a mailing list or public forum without giving a developer the benefit of the doubt is pointless to resolving the issue and contributes nothing to the community at large. It also burns bridges if the developer catches you.

• Don't take not getting your way personally. Fixing bugs is one thing. Suggesting features or changing the way things are done is another. I've been other side of making suggestions and even submitting patches to modules to get passed over. I've probably had as many graciously accepted too. While completely ignoring opinions and requests of others is a bad idea, ultimately it is their vision, time and effort to manage. Development in a public arena is a balancing act – options differ and sometimes come into direct conflict with each other. It comes down to the developer to decide where to take their time, effort and work and unfortunately that may not be where you had personally hoped.

MT-Feeds is a plugin for publishing syndication feed content into Movable Type templates and the next generation and completely re-written version of my most popular Movable Type plugin mt-rssfeed. Today I'm releasing MT-Feeds as a public beta.

This is a long time coming of course and I am deserving of criticism for taking so damn long. (Though not too much, please.) However when you are a consultant whose livelihood depends on paying work its hard to find the time to focus on such things. This plugin required a great deal of focus since syndication has become far more complex in the past 2 years.

I finally reached the point were I got frustrated with myself having this mostly finished piece of work sitting on my hard drive with few using it. It's here and I still have work to do. See the documentation for specifics. Also know that I am working on a proper business website and other formalities to support this work.

Here is what you need to know about this release.

• It's a beta. All warnings apply. Please read the documentation for the known bugs and shortcomings.

• This is a complete rewrite of mt-rssfeed and is not backwards compatable.

• -Currently it requires MT 3.1. I plan on invesigating how to support 3.0 again and perhaps 2.661. (I make no promises of 2.661 support, but will give it a try.) As of Beta 2, version 3.0D is supported. 2.661 will not be supported.

• Like its predecessor, MT-Feeds will be released under what I call the Classic MT license. Free for personal and non-profit use though a donation is request. Commercial use requires a paid license. There are limitations on the distribution and associated services you can provide with this work. mt-rssfeed was released under these terms though many overlooked it. Thanks to the handful of you who did!

• I've opened an announcement and discussion mailing list for the plugin. Users are encouraged to join them.

• Because of the growing complexity and sophistication of user's needs this plugin is a bit involved to install. I apologize for this, but given the functional requirements there was little I could do. In the future I hope to work on making this easier.

• Once released I'll be offering low cost installation services for this plugin in addition to investigating a zero-install service offering.

• New features include:
  • Atom syndication support.
  • Additional support and improved mapping of RSS tags including date tags with native MT formatting support.
  • Easier to configure. (I hope.)
  • Smarter faster caching of syndication feeds including HTTP ETag support.
  • Ability to refresh your subscriptions separately or in the background via cron.
  • Internalization of mt-list functionality.
  • OPML, CSV and plain-text support of subscriptions lists.
  • The ability to render the latest entries from a group of subscriptions.

• Read this post for more (though dated) detail if you are so inclined.

More to come. I hope the wait was worth it.

This plugin has been officially released under the name Feeds.App.

As announced here, I'm taking on the responsibility of tending to several plugins originally written and published by Adam Kalsey formerly of the Kalsey Group and now CTO of Pheedo.

When it comes to plugins, Adam has written most of my personal favorites (my own withstanding) that I use on my own site, so I'm honored to take the mantle of these useful widgets. I will now be maintaining:

• Word count
• NicknameLink
• SmartBody
• Related Entries
• Archive Date Header
• Double Space
• Technorati

I'll be getting them up onto my site shortly with a notice of the change in maintainers. Eventually I suppose I will convert them to PHP though I can't say when.

In related news, Adam has released an update to SimpleComments another great plugin I've used and admired that he has chosen to continue maintaining himself.

After some time in the wild, I am issuing a patch to both the XSearch and Plus packages included in the Six Apart plugin pack initially released with MT 3.1. I'm working with Six Apart to get the plugin pack code updated. Until then and for those who have installed these two packages, I'm making these fixes available now. Users are highly recommended to upgrade.

Download tar.gz
Download zip

This fixes a bug in the MT::Plus module that caused a significant drag on performance of searches that sometimes resulted in occcasion Perl errors. It also handled some exceptions that were generating annoying warning messages when mt-xsearch (XSearch plugin tags) were being used. Includes updated documentation to those packages including installation tips for Plucene and Plucene::Simple.

Installation of these patches is quite straight forward. After successfully installing both XSearch and Plus included in the Six Apart plugin pack, copy the included files into your MT CGI directory maintaining the same structure in the archive.

Lastly, If really want Plucene and Plus on your MT system, but can't or don't want to be bother with installation, contact me about my paid installation services: info@appnel.com

Last night I heard from my younger brother that they are parents (again) of a healthy baby girl. yippee! This means they've moved up on us 2 to 1, and given the girls a similar lead. We plan to even the score this April.