Jonas Beckman

I like getting messages via Groove! But… for some reason answering either doesn’t work or is extremely slow today. If you send me a message and I don’t reply for a long time, please try again and add a mail address. Mine is .
I just made my first Groove tool. It’s empty and does nothing, of course: Hello Groovy World!

Here is the tutorial.

However, it’s much easier to get working files by cutting-and-pasting from this message in the Groove Tools developer Forum. Ironically, the guy who sent them can’t get it to work – but the files are fine.

You get all four necessary files that way – but do make sure you can build the GRV-file yourself, using the Perl-script. Otherwise you won’t be able to change this tool into something more ambitious later.

When you edit the other files, it really helps to have a good XML-editor. Anything that shows the outline and keeps the files well-formed will do.

For instance, Radio Userland or XMLSpy are fine – but Notepad is a certain way to waste time.

Unfortunately, the DBNav tool that’s necessary to take the next step can’t be installed unless you already have MS Visual Studio installed. This thread in the developer Forum describes the problem. The Groove people are very active and helpful, they say they hope to fix this by tomorrow.
Which is fine by me – I’ll get some sleep now

Last week Stan Krute and me did some experiments with Radio Userland and Groove. The next step might be a custom tool that uses Radio Userland’s outlining functionality.
But that’s a little harder than Hello World

And today Russ Lipton started a discussion about different ways to integrate Groove and Radio Userland. Lively discussion, several interesting posts.

Link via Scripting News

XML Schemas: Best Practices

via Eclectic

Jon Udell wants to Groove, too! Maybe this really is the-next-great-thing? Right now it feels that way to me.

There may be lots of hype about P2P, but also some really interesting new technology. O’Reilly now has a peer-to-peer directory, listing many companies and products. As always, if you know anything about these products, you might not agree with the comments – but it’s an interesting collection of links.

via DangerousMeta

I am working from home today, my cold is better but not well.

A few days ago I lost my mobile phone and had to buy a new one. The Nokia 6210 may not be innovative (unless you count WAP 1.1), but it’s a very well-designed and solid phone. It shows what happens when designers have a clue: it feels almost like my old Nokia… just a little better in almost every small way I can think of.

On the other hand, the Club Nokia website shows the dark and clueless side of mobile computing: Nokia ask for lots of personal information to sign you up for initially free services that will cost money later. But it’s impossible to find any prices on the entire site! They are also very anxious to share your information with anyone they please, at any time – yet the site doesn’t even have a visible webmaster.

The moral is simple: don’t ever trust manufacturers of great things to sell you great new services. It does happen, of course – but don’t bet on it.

Guido van Rossum: PythonLabs Team Moves to Digital Creations. “I am proud to have found a new home for my entire team: starting today, Tim Peters, Barry Warsaw, Jeremy Hylton, Fred Drake and myself are working for Digital Creations. We will be spending part of our time on core Python development (including Jython and Mailman) and part of our time on Python infrastructure improvements that also benefit Zope.”

Link via ZopeNewbies. And Luke Tymowski wonders: did BeOpen simply run out of money? BeOpen isn’t talking, but the CEO of Digital Creations had this to say.

As usual, Booknotes has interesting links if your are intested in things like: ancient script systems, interactive archeology sites and coptic manuscripts.

Craig is in fine form. Most weblogs are made to be read once – but Booknotes you can come back to.

From a recent interview with Ray Ozzie:

The platform we’re building serves individuals at the edge of the organization, as opposed to systems at the center. The tools that people are using successfully at the edge of the organizations—e-mail and telephone—are self-empowering tools. People don’t have to ask somebody to make a phone call; they just dial the number.

So Stan Krute and me just entered a Groove shared space and tried to edit RU outlines from inside Groove. It turns out we can open and edit, but not save successfully. What we have is a nice new way of setting up a discussion group – but no real integration with anything else.

Right now Stan is reporting those bugs and I’m reading up on some developer stuff. The next step is probably to build a simple Groove tool (this link is a Powerpoint slide, sorry about that). A Groove tool is an XML-based template that script COM-objects. There are tutorials and samples in the Groove Developer Kit.

There is also a COM type-library called GrooveXMLRPC that I am curious about.

Stan reports that Groove’s outliner sucks and thinks there is a win-win with RU. I agree!

The U.S. Software Industry and Software Quality: Another Detroit in the Making?

Indian software instead of japanese cars, this time? Via ZopeNewbies

Everything you know about the new economy is wrong

This isn’t exactly news, just old and unpopular facts. Historically, most revolts against extreme inequality have been shortlived failures – but there will always be new attempts.

A lie that should become classic: the cracking of Microsoft’s internal network was not very damaging.

Via Cam

I just registered a new domain for my experiments with shared editing.

And Stan Krute, who is already doing interesting experiments, wants to hook up the RU FAQ via Groove. I’m all game, we’ll see what happens tomorrow.

In general, it’s very, very hard to build good editors with XML underneath and a wizzy user interface – continously re-rendering the users work area is difficult once you get beyond simple demo apps.

Something to note about Radio Userland outlines is that OPML stores the actual content as an XML-attribute. It’s not wrong, just a little different from most markup languages. A potential problem is that parsers treat attribute values and content somewhat different. But for the application developer this spec might be easier to use.

Remember, we are talking about live documents here. When you open an outline in RU, it looks like it does because it’s rendered that way – but underneath it’s all XML. And every time you save, that XML must be updated. But if adding formatting is allowed that must be stored somewhere, too.

The naive idea is to have the editor add things like this:

<text>This is plan text, <bold>some bold text</bold>, more plain text and some <italic>italics</italics>.</text>.

But polluting your content that way is usually a bad idea. A cleaner alternative is to encode character positions and what kind of formatting and save that as special attributes. Naturally, stuff like that is completely application-specific – but extra attributes are easier to ignore.

Ray Ozzie, creator of Lotus Notes, launched an ambitious new software product called Groove today.

There is some software to download. But what is it? Here are some attempts to describe it:

“a platform for development of tools you can use in a collaborative fashion across the Internet, like chat, or a discussion group”

Dave Winer

“Groove enables groups of collaborators to form in a decentralized, ad-hoc, administrator-less fashion… group members interact in highly-secure shared spaces… all the documents, messages, and applications (“tools”) related to a group activity is available for online or offline use… activities like shared editing in real time.”

from Jon Udell’s interview with Ray Ozzie

My first impressions: end-users don’t really have what they need to feel comfortable, yet. It’s too big, there is too much functionality and it feels unfamiliar.

But Groove appears to be very strong when it comes to things like security, user management, replication – and if other developers can leverage that, this just might be a platform that will take off.

I am thinking hard about infrastructure for shared editing right now – it seems to be a recurring theme for my customers.

But the first thing I want is a smooth way to share my own outlines with partners and customers. It’s important to “eat your own dogfood”.

What I don’t want is to maintain a mess of folders and filenames on lots of machines and manually edit all kinds of user access. Radio Userland has interesting concepts, like upstreaming and editorial outlines. But will that be enough? I’ll find out soon.

Could Groove work with Radio Userland outlines? Dave Winer thinks it’s possible, so I guess we’ll see.

I’m debugging some XSLT – and I am very stuck, for the moment.

And I have still have a bad cold, maybe it’s really the flu, this time… I guess that’s globalization in practice: all us nice professional webloggers coming down with the same kind of sickness at the same time.

There is a very interesting debate going on at Andreas place: Coke and other evils.

Like Hal, I tend to agree with most people who write here – but Garret has a point: we should pause our weblogging long enough to make a difference right where we live.

The mood of the world, right now: markets are not enough (at least not when they are going down). Me, I tend to think in terms of “up-stream” and “down-stream”: it’s no use trying to swim up-stream. Market economy works, in that sense.

But deciding how rivers run, and where dams and bridges should go – that’s politics. And politics works, too… it has never been fair, but if you want to change things, that’s where it’s at.

It’s sunday and far to late at night.

Trouble in Paradise: Problems Facing the Usability Community

Everybody say they want systems that are easier to use – but where do usability experts enter the picture?

Joe Clark says: The web is just like Canada.

Most people will never know the Web as it was for the pioneers.

Aila always has funny pictures over at her weblog.

And here are the Top hundred bestsellers about dreams

I had a great massage late friday afternoon. Then I bought more books:

Josephus: The Jewish war

Describes the Jewish uprising against the Romans 66-73 A.D, ending with the fall of Masada and the legendary mass suicide. When I visited Masada in 1989 I hadn’t read the original story.
Ray Monk: 1921-1970, The ghost of madness

The second part of Monk’s Bertrand Russell biography.
Basho: On love and barley
Haiku poems
Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy

Last work of Roman philosopher executed in AD 525
Hilary Rose & Steven Rose: Alas, Poor Darwin

An antology with criticism of evolutionary psychology
Allan Hobson: Dreaming as delirium

A well-known psychiatrist and dream researcher speculates about why we dream.

I’m intrigued by Stackless Python. The concept of continuations is mind-expanding – but I didn’t know it was that close to being added to Python.