Jonas Beckman

Still raining in Stockholm, but I am feeling better and better. Old friends are talking about new jobs and ask me questions – well, why not?

Maybe I should call WikiHolicsAnonymous?

I couldn’t stay away and found that the major case study of ExtremeProgramming, the C3 Project, had been terminated. Everyone involved seemed to consider it AnAcceptableWayOfFailing, though.

Anyway, I could say I am JustAProgrammer – but I don’t think that has ever been quite true. Maybe I need another vacation like this one to think things through?

Oh, I forget: tech stocks are still falling! But I don’t care – that was never my kind of game, anyway.

Stockholm is still wet and cold, but I don’t care – I just came home from a warm dinner with friends.

I found an interesting discussion about WikiWikiWeb on Advogato today.

There was a theory about the lifecycles of online communities that could be applied to Manila and EditThisPage. Somehow, I think there is a difference – but I am not sure what it is yet.

I have a VERY stubborn cold: a good part of every day is still spent freezing&shaking. And outside, there’s a cold rain. But I feel a lot better than I did a week ago, so it’s OK.
Zope (and Python) interests me more and more. Sometimes, “dynamic websites” is more than a buzzword.

Unfortunately, my cable operator doesn’t allow servers. Of course, I occasionally run Frontier, Zope, PSW, Pike and some homegrown server locally… there are servers all over my machine But I can’t do any serious publishing from here. Maybe I should sign up with an ISP who does Zope Hosting?

Meanwhile, I can always play WikiWiki – some very smart and nice people do. It’s a great way for several people to write together on the web. Maybe Dave Winer found some inspiration for EditThisPage there?

Speaking of Dave: let’s hope he finds a good way out of his recent problems with Conxion. He is fighting an important battle here – anyone who can think of a way to help him should.

I found it interesting when Scripting News linked to Gnutella a few days ago – and so did many others. There is a lot more to that kind of software than ripped-off MP3:s and bad porn – ultimately it’s about freedom of distribution and freedom of expression. The people who make FreeNet are very explicit about that.

write later.

Maybe:-)

Downloaded and played around with Gnutella.

Great potential here! I love how simple this software is. But I don’t love all the junk it’s used to ship around – and the way it sucks up bandwith is a problem.

Jacob Levy posted some observations to the Userland discussion group and so did I.

Cold, a little grey… very early spring in Sweden

But we’re getting there

Slowly… the bamboo will have to stay indoors for a while…

dreaming about the end of summer

Today, I know it will happen again: the balcony becomes a small jungle and we have wild strawberries for breakfast.

Yesterday I bought a swedish translation of Kalevala. In the past, people suffering through the long nordic winters would sing these ancient songs.

I just tried to read up on some of the new W3C specs and recomendations, especially the last call for XML Schema and some new stuff about XForms. And I am still wondering how end users should edit XML documents.

But right now the phrase “a UI that smoothly operates at both the structural and presentation level” feels like some kind of high tech koan. The kind you think about while dilligently sweeping the temple garden, for years…

I am still not entirely well – I honestly think I would feel different about this stuff if I didn’t have so much fever. Well, that’s life – I will go to sleep and try again tomorrow.

How do you make it easy for end-users to produce XML documents?

Jon Udell, in a recent Byte discussion thread:

“There is a tremendous need for this sort of thing. Everybody wants the results that flow from well-structured documents. Nobody wants to write documents that way, though.

The obstacles appear to be twofold:
- Hard to get users excited about the idea of document structure.
- Hard to implement a UI that smoothly operates at both the structural and presentation level.”

I could tell stories about this (and sometimes do), but Jon sums it up almost perfectly. Making this kind of software looks so easy – but so far nobody seems even close to getting it right.

State of being: a lot better. Very tired, but no fever today. And the sun is shining outside!

Yesterday, I couldn’t get Netscape 6 to work, after a multi-hour download. Well, I am stubborn: I removed all Netscape files, made sure my anti-virus programs were off and started another download.

And then I played around: discovered stupid bugs in the bookmark-manager and crashed, got rid of unnecessary toolbars, made the font readable (jesus, what an ugly default!) etc, etc. In the end I realized what I had already read here: this is Netscape’s beta, not Mozilla’s.

Mozilla is for developers – I will keep looking at Mozilla as an interesting starting point for web apps. But I am writing this in IE5 – and I can see no compelling reason to use Netscape instead.

Jo, jag vill diskutera själva -knappen. Jag har ‘lÃ¥nat’ den, säg till om det inte är ok…