Month: November 2002

Xaraya

I tested the new smartphones last night. I had to check into this site, of course, and it rendered not bad at all. I’m inclined to do a simpler, one column layout without the sidebars if I ever decide to buy one of those. I still think their GUI sucks ass (its based on tiny buttons with illogical function mapping). I’d much rather have a phone with a touch screen, but they are very bulky. So I guess I will skip this generation of mobiles. The picture is almost original size. It’s highly alarming that every mobile device is demoed with sports scores. Who gives a fuck about sports scores?


2002-11-05: Xaraya is now public. Initial reactions are very positive. I’m glad we didn’t do any forums, because forums attract scum. In other news I did an interview with internet intern, a german mass market internet rag (some 400k circulation). I talked about the reasons behind Xaraya and why Xaraya will succeed where other php cms will fail:

  • skilled developers
  • a real architecture
  • no incompetent advocates

The article should be up in 2 weeks.
2002-11-09: I opened a whoopass can’o’worms when I outlined my plans to implement workflow for Xaraya early next year. I want to start very simple (actually the work would be done for a client project) because I knew from preparing the web services talks that workflows are a very complex topic. Gary suggested I look into wfmc which is the industry standard for workflows. Very nice, but I guess implementing it would keep me busy for a year. Workflows might be a topic for oscom too. Both wyona and zope already implement some support for xml-defined workflows.
2002-11-28: I created my first WSDL file today, with the help of some tools. I’m pretty sure my WSDL is invalid. Scripting languages with their weak type systems and WSDL don’t exactly mix well. I hope to eventually enable web services to call into the APIs that Xaraya offers. At this stage, it is merely a nice idea, but I’m slowly making progress.
2003-01-25: I took the plunge, and am now running a current Xaraya snapshot again. Lots of new toys to play with 🙂

Yeah I know I have been slow with updates, but a) live has been hectic b) Xaraya is not yet very convenient for blogging.

On the bright side, comments should now be fully functional, with a nice tree view.
2003-02-12: Another one joins the MT love. Marcel is a buddy from the Xaraya PMC, and the 2 of us should really be using our own dogfood, but alas it is not there yet re: blogging comfort. One day soon, though.
2003-02-12: Xaraya Usability Recommendations is probably one of the more extensive studies about usability in the open source field. And we are not even at 1.0 yet. Kudos to Doug and Drew for this fine doc. If we follow through with this one, good things are in store for the web layman.
2003-02-21: This feed validates as RSS. I took the plunge, and fixed the RSS feed for Xaraya. Unlike postnuke, Xaraya will ship with a rich feed that makes use of the 2.0 format. We now also have SOAP support. Mike pushed a changeset that enables to call Xaraya API methods over SOAP. Here is the relevant part from the WSDL.
<wsdl:arrayType=”xsd:string[]” />
<xsd:complexType name=”wsModAPIFuncRequest”>
<xsd:sequence>
<xsd:element name=”module” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”func” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”type” type=”xsd:string” />
<xsd:element name=”args” type=”xsd:xsdl:myelement0″ />
</xsd:sequence>
</xsd:complexType>

2003-02-27: Aye, Kevin, we will work extra hard on usability.

The PN user registration process is plain silly. It is one of the things that I was hoping to see the last of in eventually moving to Xaraya. I have a suggestion for anyone working on the end-user (non-admin) aspects of the core modules. Pretend that the typical user is my mother who gets very flustered when web site processes aren’t as easy and straightforward as possible. And Mom cries when she gets flustered. Please folks … don’t make my Mom cry.

2003-04-21: congrats team.

It is my pleasure to announce the first Beta Release of Xaraya (.900). This release is the culmination of nearly a year’s worth of hard work and undying dedication to creating. All of the developers on the project have devoted many hours to reach where we are today. The first Beta release for Xaraya is intended to capture a baseline of what needs to be accomplished before the final release. This is merely another step in the long journey that began with PHP Nuke, and then PostNuke for many of us.

2003-06-25: My friend John Cox is being interviewed about Xaraya:

With the articles system combined with the dynamic data system (both written by Michel), a webmaster no longer has to wait for developers to dream up new modules. All a webmaster has to do is dream up what they want to display, and from there it’s just a matter of adding 2 templates into the system and creating a new publication type to gather the data.

I just installed Xaraya again after neglecting it for a while, and I must say, very impressive. Time to mop up the nuke market with their silly systems.
2003-06-30: Looks like everyone and his dog is converging on XML pipeline processors these days. With more powerful XSLT editors, maybe the time for these technologies to appeal to a more mainstream audience has come.

2003-07-02:

KAYWA
No anagrams found.
WYONA
AN YOW
NOWAY
NAY OW
ANY OW
YAW ON
YAW NO
WAY ON
WAY NO
XARAYA
A RAY AX
LENYA
LAY NE
LAY EN
AN LEY
AN ELY
AN LYE
ANY EL
NAY EL

2003-07-20: Xaraya goes new ways again. They now use phing, a php clone of ant, to maintain build files for the distribution. Very neat. The more standardization, the better. Apache Lenya is using ant more and more for various scripting tasks too. This nicely leverages the very good ant documentation and literature, and means you have to learn fewer concepts.
2003-08-02: Xaraya is now bitkeeper project #6 by number of change sets.
2003-11-04:

Trolling through the Bitkeeper tree on the site, looking at the change sets, the different names, the comments, it just sort of occurred to me this is beginning to look like a factory, chugging merrily along I’m noticing more and more people on the public mailing lists wanting to take the bk plunge. The collective consciousness has apparently reached a critical mass conclusion and internalized that this is the normal way of life around here. Quick rewind to 8 months ago, when most everyone (me especially) were still trying to figure out how to do a merge… You’ve come a long way, baby.Marc

I am very happy that we made the decision to establish sound processes, use bitkeeper instead of cvs, and aim for quality. It took longer than the usual crappy php project, but then again it is of much higher quality. We are now the number 3 user of bitkeeper, only surpassed by MySQL and the Linux kernel. Amazing.
2003-12-12: This post led to an avalanche. Wow, 19 months later, the repercussions are still working its way through the php cms community 🙂
2007-06-20: linux.com is now running on Xaraya, a CMS I co-founded

towards an amalgamation of culture

i think its somewhat funny to see how it is becoming fashionable to observe halloween, while at the same time carnival is not en vogue at all. if the retail industry had any say in the matter we would observe valentine’s day, thanksgiving, 4th of july, hanukkah, ramadan and 10s of other holidays too. maybe throw in spring break for good measure.

Blog networking

  1. professionals value knowledge. they have a lot of it to manage and track.
  2. their professional survival depends on name recognition. a blog can help provide visibility and recognition.
  3. they are used to writing; many of them can write well.
  4. professionals are geographically disparate. they need to nurture relationships with people that they seldom meet in person.
  5. they need to interlink in a person-to-person fashion.
  6. they already rely heavily on interpersonal trust and direct communication to determine what new stuff is worth looking at. such filtering is one of the central functions weblog communities excel at.
  7. for many, the best collaborations come about when they find someone who shares their values and goals. the personal output that is reflected in one’s weblog makes it much easier to check for such a match than work that is published through other channels.
  8. professionals recognize the value of serendipity. serendipity can come pretty quickly through weblogging.
  9. every professional must strive to be a knowledge hub in his niche, and an expert in related areas. a blog is a good medium for this, as it is a way of letting knowledge flow through you while adding your personal spin.
  10. professionals pride themselves on being independent thinkers. blogs epitomize independent thought.

thriving in the downturn

i saved over a 1000 franks annually by switching my insurance company. my new one has a philosophy of saving money wherever possible and fighting against the explosion of cost in healthcare. i like their stance very much, such as: “use generics whenever possible”, “pay annually to save recurring costs” etc. as people get more aware of the wasteful way of doing business of many companies, companies that save money for their customers will thrive. clueless companies like viseca that insist on spamming me with unwanted “customer magazines” in a helpless effort to build a brand (how 90s is that?) will get emails from me like this one:

ich möchte sie bitten, mir ihr “kundenmagazin” nicht mehr zuzustellen. sie werfen mit diesem magazin mein geld zum fenster hinaus. ihre aufgabe als firma ist es, meine transaktionen so kostengĂĽnstig wie möglich durchzufĂĽhren, und mir dies via internet seite anzuzeigen. jegliche andere korrespondenz ist nicht von interesse, besonders nicht im bemĂĽhen einen “brand” aufzubauen.

extinction or hypergrowth?

Picture the following scenario: Microsoft has created a weblog tool that is designed to run inside the firewall at a company. It’s browser-accessible from any 4.0 or higher web browser and doesn’t require Windows on the client. It leverages their strengths by integrating with Office, and there’s no per-user client access fee. Then imagine if this weblogging tool were deployed to millions of users, all before anyone in the weblog community took notice. That scenario is real.

anil dash thinks that microsoft is dipping a toe in the weblog market, and i have it confirmed that there are internal blogging tools at microsoft too. this could be a huge boost to the weblog ecosystem, or it could kill it. the current infrastructure does not scale to 10s of millions of authors with ease, and the culture that has formed around weblogs even less. as with other geek toys before, blogs will have to be made ready for newbies, and will lose much of their chic in the process. the efficiency improvements for society will outweigh these downsides (which are only gripes of the elite, anyway)

thanks google

google came to my rescue yesterday when i scrambled to access information about the exam i had today. due to a screw up on my part i had been locked out of my apartment, and hence my study materials. i went to my parents, and used their cable modem to query google about the subjects of my exam. not only did i get 10s of papers for each keyword, those lecture notes were often much better than the one provided by my university. i was thus able to understand many key concepts at the last minute, because i was able to pick the lecture note that explained it best for each topic. applied more broadly, this means that lecture notes from one university have to compete with 100s of others because i can instantly compare them. more empowerment for me, and the incompetence of most faculty members becomes obvious.