Blue Sky On Mars

ActiveGrid sounds interesting. They’re creating a LAMP+java application server/application builder for making typical business apps. The key that they’re going after, and you can get this straight from their name, is easy deployment on grids of commodity hardware. Their tools support (or will support) several databases and PHP/Perl/Python or Java for development. Everything is XML-based, so much of the system is language-neutral.

It all sounds very interesting, but I’m left wondering what the business model is when I see a site like this. The application builder and server tools are available in early access right now (version 0.7, they say). And, they’re available under an Apache license. Are they starting one of the fabled services-based open source companies, or is there something else coming up?

I couldn’t find anything on their site that provided direction as far as ActiveGrid’s commercial offerings are concerned.

Apparently, a real request has been filed to build Hotel Lost Liberty on the current site of Supreme Court Justice Souter’s house. That is a very appropriate way to protest the eminent domain ruling, and I’m quite certain that Hotel Lost Liberty and the Just Desserts Cafe will definitely provide better revenues to the city. Via Boing Boing.

So, I just happened to notice that the Google Blog has moved. I hadn’t been paying very close attention, because I think it moved a while ago.

In doing the move of their blog, Google did the right thing by putting an HTTP response of 301 - “permanent redirect”. That’s swell. However, they appear to have done a blanket redirect of the whole blog to the front page of the new blog. That’s a nice, easy solution… the only problem is that their old feed

http://www.google.com/googleblog/atom.xml

redirects to the front page of the new blog location, not the new feed. Anyone with a feed reader pointed there, would start having some trouble.

So, the right thing to do when moving your blog (and I’m pretty sure I did this all properly when I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress) is to do a 301 redirect from your old feed to your new feed. Feed readers will pick that up automatically and you’ll notice no difference.

If you use Apache, you can just toss a line in your .htaccess file that looks something like this:

Redirect permanent /index.xml http://www.blueskyonmars.com/feed/

That line will redirect any requests for index.xml to my new feed location.

As rumored, iTunes 4.9 dropped today, with podcasts in tow. I’m not a podcast person (yet), because I just haven’t had the time to devote to listening. The integrated podcast support in iTunes is very easy. They’ve added a whole section to the music store for finding podcasts, and you can also subscribe to any podcast you know the URL for. In the Podcasts part of iTunes, you see one podcast per line. What about the multiple items that can appear in a podcast? They’ve added a new widget for selecting between the items in a podcast.

On the one hand, podcast subscriptions is an RSS thing that you’d think belongs in your feed reader. On the other hand, podcasts generally need to hook up with your music player so that they can be conveniently downloaded to your portable player (and there’s a 70% chance that’s an iPod). Since both types of programs have a hand in this, I think the podcast support in iTunes is a logical step, and it looks nicely done.

Slashdot has a posting about the growing problem of weblog spam. They’re not talking about comments or trackback spam. They’re talking about whole weblogs that are nothing but spam for the search engines.

This is a problem for the search engines that are using RSS, and it will be critical for those search engines to come up with a filtering technique that eliminates the chaff from the wheat.

Luckily, though, this is not a general problem for RSS. Unlike email, you can subscribe directly to people’s feeds and be assured that you’re only going to get the items posted by those people. If you’re reading nothing but individual sources, weblog spam is completely non-existent. That’s one step up that RSS has over email. (That said, very little email spam gets through my filters these days, so I’m sure the problem is a tractable one for the RSS search engines.)

Personally, I’ve never used Grokster and would probably have no familiarity with Grokster if it weren’t for the fact that their name is attached to a case that made it to the Supreme Court. Boing Boing, not surprisingly, has some good coverage of today’s decision in the case. Here’s the roundup of Boing Boing’s coverage:

* [Cory Doctorow of the EFF has a PopSci editorial](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/corys_grokster_edito.html)
* Grokster had a press conference that [you can listen to](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/grokster_pressconfer.html)
* You can read notes about [Hollywood's press conference](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/notes_on_riaampaa_pr.html)
* Former Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) head Hillary Rosen cautions that a court victory [does not necessarily translate into a real-life victory](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/hilary_rosen_killing.html)
* The Grokster decision can be downloaded via another P2P mechanism: [a bittorrent file](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/grokster_decision_in.html)
* Here are some notes from the [pro-Grokster press conference](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/progrokster_press_co.html)
* And here is the [early coverage](http://www.boingboing.net/2005/06/27/blogs_on_todays_scot.html) on the decision.

That’s a lot of links, and they’re all just going to *Boing Boing*, which has even more links when you follow those links. Gadzooks.

In a nutshell, if you make and promote software as being good at aiding in copyright infringement, you can be held liable for that.

What do I think about the decision? I go along with what Cory Doctorow had to say in PopSci. The more we stack our laws in favor of Hollywood, the more we lose our ability to compete in technology. A lot of really cool ideas will never see the light of day, because of the forest of lawyers standing between the person with the idea and the individual consumer. Or rather, a lot of really cool American ideas will never see the light of day. There are many countries that have not yet adopted some of the crazy laws we have here.

The problem with Grokster doesn’t lie with the court, in my opinion. I think the real problem is the laws that have been passed in the first place. We’re giving away America’s ability to innovate, one bad law at a time.

Matisse - the new NetBeans GUI Builder looks quite nice from the demo screencast. Though it’s been several months since I was looking at the Eclipse GUI building tools, this is far ahead of those tools in ease-of-use. Very nice work!

I did see one comment that compared this with Apple’s Interface Builder. Something I didn’t see in Matisse (maybe it’s there, but it wasn’t in the screencast), is the data binding aspect of IB. Being able to draw a nice looking, internationalizable, resizable, cross-platform GUI is quite a trick… but, being able to also wire it up to your objects without a whole bunch of controller code is the bit of beauty you get from IB.

Perhaps the data binding of JDNC will get hooked up with a future version of the Netbeans GUI builder.

Amazingly enough, at this moment in time, Google has declared that I am the King of Self-Proclamation. I even beat out Michael Jackson, who was apparently previously declared the King of Self-Proclamation (oddly, by someone other than himself).

After the recent appearance of Google’s AJAXSLT, it’s interesting to read about del.icio.us direc.tor (page subtitle: Delivering A High-Performance AJAX Web Service Broker). As I commented yesterday, I don’t like the XSL-T syntax. However, when I look at the XSL used by this project, I will freely admit that this XSL is not bad. It is more verbose than a Velocity-like template language, but there just wasn’t a lot of template code necessary for direct.or.

When working with a fairly good size chunk of data (80,000 records!), leveraging as much C code as possible makes good sense. It’s a shame that Safari didn’t expose the XSL engine to JavaScript. That would have made tools like this one work well in every major browser except Opera.

Microsoft’s Simple List Extensions Specification is, in fact, simple. I do think there is value in where they’re headed with this, because this provides some more machine-readable data that is presently user-configured in tools like Zesty News.

It is great to see something that looks different from the “embrace and extend” Microsoft of old: this spec uses XML namespaces, making it pretty transparent to existing tools. And, the spec is published under a Creative Commons license with a royalty-free grant to use any Microsoft patents that may cover this particular spec.