Coffee & Gems

It has been a while since I have been on a standards committee (the last one was OMTP ), but I have now joined the Technical Committee of CMIS : Content Management Interoperability Services. Better interop is certainly something the CMS world is in dire need of.

Today, I am happy to announce that minimeme.org is finally "officially" going live. minimeme is a news aggregator focused on tech and software development news. minimeme was born out of a personal frustration of mine: each morning I would skim through my feed reader only to find the relevant items twice or more times. On the other hand the signal to noise ratio of many feeds was way too low. I felt like a machine trying to retrieve the important items. So I decided to build a machine to do that for me. There is no human intervention in the news selection - it is all done in a bias-free, neutral algorithm. Hence there is the claim "little Switzerland of tech news", minimeme is supposed to be neutral like Switzerland. Having tested the algorithm for a couple of months I believe minimeme is now stable enough to be officially let loose. On top of the two currently implemented sections " dev " ( feed ) and " valley " ( feed ) there is a Twitter accou...

(cross-posting from here ) CMS analyst Janus Boye has blogged about the expected lifetime of a CMS installation , i.e. for how long an installed CMS can be expected to be in production. His guess is a lifetime of 3 years. On the blog's comments Janus and I got into a discussion about the accuracy of that guess where he asked Day to publish actual real data about this topic. I like this idea because publishing this data provides a benefit to our potential new customers: a reliable indicator (without any hand-waving or gut feelings) of the CMS's lifetime that can be used in business plan The data The data I have used is taken from Day's support contracts. Only customer data from outside ouf Europe was used (simply because it was available to me). This selection is likely to bias the results towards shorter lifetimes as Day's oldest customers are based in Europe. The basic assumption is that the life time of the CMS is equivalent to the duration of the support contract...

Stefan Tilkov brilliantly sums up the out-of-band information problem in REST's HATEOAS constraint on the REST-discuss group : Given the representation contains <link rel="some-concept" ref="/some-uri"> you don't hardcode the string "/some-uri" into your client, but rather the string "some-concept".

Today I went to a talk at the local Ruby on Rails group. The speaker was quite clueful. He had even implemented his own DSL to describe his business problem. Obviously, the guy was not a noobie in Ruby. However, what really turned me off was his usage of the word "RESTful". For him, it seemed to be a way to describe the inner workings of his application, like, say, "separation of concerns". RoR guys are generally not the most clueless people, but nobody in the audience challenged him about this. It seemed to be the generally accepted usage of the term in the Rails community. This made me think that DHH and Rails have done two things to REST: First, they greatly help to evangelize the term "RESTful" Second, they hijacked the meaning of the term and changed it from "architectural style" to "application architecture" As it happens I listened to a podcast from the Pragmatic Programmers on my way home. It was about the .Net Ruby implementati...

In my current pet project I do a fair amount of parsing of rel-tags (the microformat spec for "tagging"). At first I got a bit agitated how many occurrences there are where the spec is not implemented correctly. But I have come to realize that the spec is simply broken. There are two ways I can think of a spec to be broken: If it's internally inconsistent or inconsistent with other specs. If it's somehow useless. The rel-tag is almost 1.), which makes it a little bit of 2.). Here's why: the spec says that this tag <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">fish</a> denotes "tech" rather than "fish." This means that this microformat restricts the URL space on your server. You need to have the "tag" folder and in it there must be a file "tech" - unless you link to another site which is not a solution to the problem. Being able to control my own URL space is one of the pronciples of the ...

By pure chance I found a useful feature on my iPhone: when you play music but have another application in the foreground double-clicking "the" button will bring up a mini iPod control. That's nice e.g. for skipping a song without having to leave the app in the foreground. Related news from the Macworld: Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard