I was curious tonight to see how the JBoss community looks like, so I went off for some casual browsing of their email archives. They sure have "some different style":http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?t=102934985700001&r=1&w=2 out there. Looking at "how this project is evolving":http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524 towards a model where "a few key people":http://www.jboss.org/index.html?module=html&op=userdisplay&id=team will be (hopefully) happy, and some of them, the _JBoss Group LLC_ members/shareholders, I reckon, (hopefully) "rich":http://biz.yahoo.com/bw/030325/255339_1.html, I'm not so sure whether JBoss is the community I'd like to live in. Then again, why am I blogging about it? ;-) Andy has been doing his usual devil's advocate "blog":http://linuxintegrators.com/hl30/blog/general/?permalink=Miss%20Bla%20and%20her%20love%20for%20Marc%20Fleury%20or%20OpenSource%20is%20all%20about%20the%20Benjamins.html&page=comments about it, discussing a bit with "that female programmer":http://freeroller.net/page/chiara/ everybody wants to be seen together with (guess what, it would be really funny if she discloses within 2 days that she really is a 45 year old male doing a massive "perception-is-reality":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/archives/000523.html scam). It worries me to see Andy using the 'proof your statements' discussion style in the comments on that blog, while he has been pretty quick himself in extrapolating his own context towards a global trend (don't we all sometimes?) - coincidentally designing his own reality for which no proof must exist. All-in-all, I find it tiresome, having sometimes to pierce through a layer of style verbs, to find out about the real message. This blogging thing too, is often more about style and discussion tricks rather than information and content. When Andy explains at length he's not as abrasive IRL, I'm pretty sure that actually means he spends less on style, and more on content, of which he has plenty to offer. Ditto for that girl, for MarcF and Rickard, and many, many more, including myself, I fear. I had the luck of encountering "Rik":http://users.skynet.be/rikvanbruggen/ several times in the last few days. We had this recurring meme that people should be able to self-relativize. It's hard. Andy is right, most of the times, but his style is kind of obfuscating. *Update:* fun reads in the TTS forum thread: * "http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78057":http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78057 * "http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78110":http://www.theserverside.com/home/thread.jsp?thread_id=18524#78110

"Wiki":http://users.skynet.be/rikvanbruggen/archive/2003_03_23_index.html#200047204 states OSS is only for the happy few. I don't think you have to be particularly smart to make use of OSS tools, as I'm the archetype of the enthusiast but clueless guy myself. Much of this has to do with enthusiasm and the desire to get there, and the willingness to share your travelogue with close or distant peers. Of course, many IT professionals might not see the benefit of learning new things or sharing knowledge (preferably doing both things at the same time) with their peers, as they are afraid this will endanger their position in the team. Clueless and naive as I am, I decided to forego this way of thinking a long time ago. From personal experience, we as a company have been retroconverting _average_ (bah - hate the word) developers to make real benefits of OSS tools quite successfully in the past year. This also has more to do with enthusiasm and plain hard work, rather than with trying to outsmart competition.

Duh. I just banned my first IP address from commenting on my blog. Sorry, bess-proxy.montoursville.k12.pa.us. I know you seem like some school proxy server, and any of your student PCs might be the culprit, but the more systems/servers I manage, the less thought I spend on such actions. If you like to abuse public resources on the Internet, don't be surprised if the Internet protects itself from you.

Since "Wiki":http://users.skynet.be/rikvanbruggen#200042423 and I are going out for lunch tomorrow, some deep thoughts who might be of interest, carefully culled from an open source mailing list: * "http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=103374991623719&w=2":http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=103374991623719&w=2 * "http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=103375351328015&w=2":http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=103375351328015&w=2 * "http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=103424570300773&w=2":http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=jakarta-general&m=103424570300773&w=2 I can only say that I'm proud to carry the "same feathers":http://www.apache.org/~jim/committers.html these fine people wear. "Werner":http://www.shiftat.com/blog/page/werner/20030325, how about contributing your changes to the DbUnit team?

Seems like "Andy":http://linuxintegrators.com/hl30/blog/technology/?permalink=great+Anti-FUD.html is picking up on the blogversation being held between "Wiki":http://users.skynet.be/rikvanbruggen/index.html, "Werner":http://www.shiftat.com/blog/page/werner/20030324#opensource_and_business_ethics_the and "myself":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/archives/000808.html. As soon as I read Wiki's post, I knew I was assumed to do a step-by-step rebuttal, but had no time to actually do it since I wanted to commit some little patches to "an open source project I'm involved in":http://xml.apache.org/forrest/. And I believe that's exactly the point in understanding open source: you have to experience it before you can come up with a decent justification, and once you are experiencing it, you don't feel the need anymore to defend it since there are always "more pressing issues to spend your time on":http://cvs.apache.org/viewcvs.cgi/xml-forrest/src/resources/forrest-shbat/forrest.build.xml.diff?r1=1.58&r2=1.59. :-) All-in-all, while Andy claims Werner is coming up with some great anti-FUD, I'm pretty sure Werner can do better: both Wiki and Werner are focussing too much on the _cost aspect_. And while admittedly, open source can lower TCO, adopting open source in your organization just for lowering costs might be a 'negative choice', i.e. a choice with only negative arguments. One of the first times I met "this wonderful person":http://radio.weblogs.com/0116284/, who now has become my business partner, he taught me a lesson about negative choices - they won't last. If you choose for something, be prepared to come up with some positive, non-anti arguments. And to be honest, choosing open source only because of the cost aspect, is a very good example of making the right decision with the wrong arguments. It's my firm belief that the aspect of cost really is a problem of the commercial tools vendors, who have to earn back the huge marketing/sales costs only with the sale of licenses and support contracts. Getting rid of this marketing/sales budget, which often surpasses that of R&D, might bring the equation back into balance. Looking at a typical product organisation, you see the developers (who aren't necesseraly better than that bunch of open source hackers, but could be) being shielded from the outside world by multiple layers of insulation: product managers, pre-sales consultants, sales and support people, marketing bunnies, and so on. All of these people need to get paid (there's nothing wrong with that, of course). Funny enough, if you have a _real_ problem with your commercial tool, and the vendor cares enough about you, your question will tunnel through all these layers of insultation, back to the developer in the center of the onion. Also, that developer is surrounded with testers, UI specialists, and various other people which you typically won't find as much in an open source project. So there's a good reason why commercial tools are typically more expensive than open source projects, but that reason is just plain boring: "more fluff and less stuff":http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/. In the end, open source projects might be more realistic in what they promise: what you see is what you get, nothing more and nothing less. I'm really worried when I see SLAs sticked upon commercial sales contracts which I'm pretty sure nobody is capable of living up to. Anyhow, let's get back to "Wiki's points":http://users.skynet.be/rikvanbruggen/index.html... and again, almost all of them are based on interpretation, and of course both sides have the eloquent people explaining they are right. So I'm not going to spend time on these, as I'm not as eloquent in this language as I'd like to be. One anti-OSS point strikes me however: _"How do I know that this OSS software is as compliant with the open standards that are on the market?"_. Knowing Wiki (who is a great guy BTW) IRL, I'm pretty sure he refers to "this":http://www.sys-con.com/Java/articlenews.cfm?id=1930, since it is an issue he cares a lot about. Frankly, whether JBoss will ever be J2EE TCK certified, I don't really care, but he told me big companies _do_ care about this, and that adoption of JBoss in commercial settings will accelerate once they have their "J2EE certified!" badge. Of course, many commercial vendors went at great length to get their appservers certified. Funny enough, I see the real competition shifting to the developer's desktop, i.e. they are pushing to sell _developer seats_ of their J2EE IDE. And while some of these companies might try to generate J2EE compliant code out of these tools, I'm pretty sure they are trying to make customers depend on the specific APIs, wizards and whatnot they offer with their bright and shiny IDE, which are carefully crafted outside the J2EE specification range. This way, while people technically should be able to switch appservers and be more independent, they won't since they would loose the 'benefits' of tools-specific APIs, interfaces and glue code. Looking at the typical amount of underspecification in recent standards, I see plenty of carefully designed space for these vendor-specific 'interpretations' which will lock developers into a single vendor's proposition. So if I had to choose between a de-facto standard with direct access to the development team, or having to tunnel through layers of FUD and politics, my choice would be quick and positive. *Update*: as usual, "Marc":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/cgi-bin/mt-tb.cgi/212 was mindreading again. It's funny to see, though our style surely is different, how much neurons can be shared. Does that mean there's actually less imagination between the two of us? ;-)

Yesterday, we had an interesting meeting with some colleague, also working in the field of Java and Open Source. Even though we could be regarded as competitors by the outside world, it was good to see we were able to exchange "thoughts and feelings":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/tomk/ open and freely. The topic of discussion was the preparation of a new seminar on 'the practical use of some Java Open Source tools in real-world projects', presenting an overview of what is out there, hopefully explaining to people what they are missing if they restrict themselves to the commercial IDEs and things packaged with the appserver of their (boss') liking. Basically, we'll be skimming subjects like Ant, Hibernate, XDoclet, JBoss CMP, Forrest, Cocoon and some more, and how you can put these wonderful open source frameworks to practical use in a project. Of course, we'll be preaching sound development practices, like unit testing, URI namespace management and _real_ thinking about O/R mapping, things which are obvious to us, but apparently not to the Belgian market in general. Of course, we also have been discussing 'business' in general, and what differentiates us from other Java consultants. To be frank, the situation in Belgium isn't very stimulating if you are trying to adopt new business models based upon, or around Open Source. You have a huge league of 'Linux companies', which are a lot into hardware and infrastructure, not so much as into application architecture and development as we do. So the message of open source Java _being good for you_ is kinda obfuscated by the image of bearded Linux gurus recompiling kernels and playing around with iptables. To the market, Open Source == Linux. To us, Linux is _only_ an operating system, for which luckily there exists a Java VM, so that we can do our thing. Still, we see Linux companies offering end-to-end solutions, installing groupware packages, or doing some PHP development on top of their "LAMP":http://www.onlamp.com/ environment. We've seen some truly horrific 'applications' being built and deployed like that. In the end, much of this has to do with identity and positioning, and the uptake of it by the outside world. What gives if you are claiming to be able to learn people to do things _the right way_, if they can get two lousy developers for the same price? What gives if you want to teach people into being capable of building _extensible_ applications, in the era of the one-year-CxO? What gives to be modest about the number of open source projects you are specialized in, if other people don't see _intimate_ knowledge of codebase _and_ community as a strict requirement before saying _'I'm a Tomcat/Ant/Cocoon/whatnot guru'_? _Update:_ "Hi, Werner":http://www.shiftat.com/blog/page/werner/20030321#opensource_and_business_ethics ;-)

The fine people from "The Werken Company":http://www.werken.com/ have opened "codehaus":http://www.codehaus.org/, _an extension of The Werken Company that aims to assist open-source Java developers by providing infrastructure and visibility to interesting, useful and viable projects_. That brings the count of _open source suburbs_ in my radar to 3: "Krysalis":http://krysalis.org/, codehaus and "cocoondev.org":http://cocoondev.org/. Each suburb has its own characteristics, of course, being focused on specific technology, infrastructure providing or community nurturing. While being very modest about the real inspiration behind "starting up one of them":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/archives/000491.html, I'm pretty sure now a new trend is rising.

More insanity will surely follow during the day. News companies sure are having a ball. The stock exchanges of the world will rejoice. In the mean time, "they are still trying to clean up the previous one":http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/03/19/attack/main544719.shtml. "News Tracker":http://news.google.com/news/gnworldleftnav.html

Within a couple of hours, I'll be heading off to bed. Nothing special, of course, except that tomorrow morning at 7:00AM already the first special news show is starting on "national network television":http://www.tv1.be/, and that - presumably - I will be sleeping through _that moment_ at 2:00AM. "48":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/archives/000797.html - 43 = 5 more hours to go. My kids are fast asleep already. I'm pretty sure many other kids won't sleep tonight, fleeing to Syria or Jordan.

"Carsten":http://radio.weblogs.com/0107211/ is blogging again (I like), and he's "feeling some air pressure changes":http://radio.weblogs.com/0107211/2003/03/19.html#a98 too. Nope, you are not the only one thinking about this, rest assured.

"http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2003/03/17.html":http://blogs.salon.com/0000014/2003/03/17.html (through "Matthew":http://radio.weblogs.com/0103021/2003/03/19.html#a857)

The "Apachefication":http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=cocoon-dev@xml.apache.org&msgNo=12312 of Lenya looks to be in progress. As much as I have been debating the potential good and bad of this in the past few weeks, I'm going to refrain to comment with my Apache feathers on. I've looked into the codebase and it's oversold. I've lurked on the project's email lists and "all":http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.general/177 "my":http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.general/184 "worries":http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.general/213 are coming true: no real traffic on the lists, just the three wyona.com guys talking among themselves, off-list design sessions, and taken the Apachefication for granted. People will hate me for posting this, but if I measure Lenya/Wyona up against Tapestry, I think the difference is clear. The sponsoring Apache members should question themselves on the utility of this incubation, and be clear on the real reasons behind this. And commit themselves to more than just doing the "lab rats":http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/archives/000550.html thing.

"Sam":http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/ "explains":http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=general@jakarta.apache.org&msgNo=14731 what qualities a good Jakarta PMC Chairman should have: bq. _Being a parent helps - most disputes are of the "her leg is on my half of the car seat" type._ Hm. Being a father of three kids, it seems I'm qualifying.

_(and now for something completely different)_ "Rich Persaud":http://www.wildatstart.com/players/companies/addapt.html said "something interesting":http://nagoya.apache.org/eyebrowse/ReadMsg?listName=general@jakarta.apache.org&msgNo=14718 on general@jakarta: bq. When a culture of discussion comes into conflict with a culture of bureaucracy, debate is not an optimal change instrument. Discussion cultures have evolution as their goal, while bureaucratic cultures have risk reduction and cost distribution as their goals.

I'm a 7th grader and in general, I think I'm getting along pretty well with the boys (not so much with the girls) at school. I'm not terribly smart, but not stupid neither: I have a sense of self-awareness. I have wealthy parents. They help me out when things get messy, like in the past year when I kept on failing that math test. They talked to the stupid teacher, then. I'm pretty good at math, now. I play football. When we need to split up in groups, I'm never picked up last by the team chiefs. They know I'm good fun to be on the team. I'm a daredevil. I'm a tough guy, I'm not afraid of anything. That's at least how I pretend to be. But basically, you know, I'm scared to shit since that day. I'm a big boy who gets goaded into doing silly things by his friends all the time. Like last year, when I put that barn on fire. My friends were cheering and yelling at me. They never thought I dared to do such a thing. It was a hot and dry summer day, that day. We were sitting in a barn, smoking sigarets and drinking root beer. There was lots of dust in that barn, and I had to sneeze. I was a bit drunk too. We had been talking about girls, but I kept silent for most of the afternoon. I was playing around with my friend's lighter (I'm not allowed by my parents to carry around one myself), when my friends told me I should make a fire. That it would be so cool. I like to be cool, and I like it when they see me as the daredevil: a fire in a barn full of hay! So I made a little fire, and Ken and Chucky were cheering. I made some more fire: my friends loved it! Then Becky, Chucky's girlfriend which I really digged a lot, she was afraid. I told her to be cool, and threw some more stuff at the fire. Becky was angry, and she left. It was then that I saw that can of fuel in the corner of the barn. I really like to play with fire. It makes me feel great. Ken and Chucky saw me looking at the can, and they started cheering even more. They said I would be a coward if I didn't finish the job. I hate it when someone calls me a coward. I really hate that. So I took the can. Big woosh. Fire everywhere. Ken and Chucky ran outside. I was just behind them, but then I tripped over some piece of wood and I fell down. When I scrambled back to my feet, I was all alone, in the middle of that huge corn field. I looked back and the entire barn was on fire. Ken and Chaucky were speeding away, and these four big farm boys were walking up on me. I hate it when that happens. I was so scared. I felt so lonely. My friends were gone. My palms were sweaty, and without my friends cheering, I didn't felt so cool and tough anymore. _When you are living to please your audience, and the audience makes you pretend you're a different kind of guy than you really are, where do you go if the audience leaves?_ My name is George. I'm still angry they did that to me. I still like fire. And I'm mad. Really mad. Care to look at me?

bq. "In any conflict, your fate will depend on your actions. Do not destroy oil wells, a source of wealth that belongs to the Iraqi people. Do not obey any command to use weapons of mass destruction against anyone, including the Iraqi people." ("transcript":http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/onpolitics/transcripts/bushtext_031703.html) * Don't touch my oil. * We still need some Iraqis to operate the wells. *Update:* seems like I'm not "alone":http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15406. More cynically: !http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/images/stockmarkets-go-at-war.png! Huuray for Mr. President.

48 Hours is not nearly enough to explain my two boys of 5 and 6 about the insanity of this war. To both presidents, here's a Dutch song text:

Mijnheer de president, welterusten.
Slaap maar lekker in je mooie witte huis.
Denk maar niet te veel aan al die verre kusten
waar uw jongens zitten, eenzaam, ver van thuis.
Denk vooral niet aan die zesenveertig doden,
die vergissing laatst met dat bombardement.
En vergeet het vierde van die tien geboden
die u als goed christen zeker kent.

Denk maar niet aan al die jonge frontsoldaten
eenzaam stervend in de verre tropennacht.
Laat die weke pacifistenkliek maar praten,
mijnheer de president, slaap zacht.

Droom maar van de overwinning en de zege,
droom maar van uw mooie vredesideaal
dat nog nooit door bloedig moorden is verkregen,
droom maar dat het u wel lukken zal dit maal.
Denk maar niet aan al die mensen die verrekken,
hoeveel vrouwen, hoeveel kinderen zijn vermoord.
Droom maar dat u aan het langste eind zult trekken
en geloof van al die tegenstand geen woord.

Bajonetten met bloedige gevesten
houden ver van hier op uw bevel de wacht
voor de glorie en de eer van het vrije westen.
Mijnheer de president, slaap zacht.

Schrik maar niet te erg wanneer u in uw dromen
al die schuldeloze slachtoffers ziet staan
die daarginds bij het gevecht zijn omgekomen
en u vragen hoe lang dit nog zo moet gaan.
En u zult toch ook zo langzaamaan wel weten
dat er mensen zijn die ziek zijn van geweld,
die het bloed en de ellende niet vergeten
en voor wie nog steeds een mensenleven telt.

Droom maar niet te veel van al die dode mensen,
droom maar fijn van overwinning en van macht.
Denk maar niet aan al die vredeswensen.
Mijnheer de president, slaap zacht.

Boudewijn De Groot

Some conference organizers needed fresh mug shots of "us":http://outerthought.org/, so we held a little "photoshoot":http://outerthought.net/photoshoot/ this morning. Any comments, of course, will be deleted. Hit them while they last! Abuse them for improving your Photoshop skills!

I installed "MT":http://www.movabletype.org/ 2.63 and the new fancy-ish "Textile":http://www.textism.com/tools/textile/index.html TextFormatting thing "plugin":http://www.bradchoate.com/past/mttextile.php. I assume it's following more or less Wiki-style, although linking apparently has a separate syntax. Anyway, we'll see how this works out--the only reason I'm trying this is because "MozBlog":http://mozblog.mozdev.org/ is still broken when running under Moz1.3. ...

Wiki wonders why we insist on calling ourselves geek-level technical, and seems afraid we don't sound business-minded enough. I'm not going to say there is a relation between our focus (or at least the way the way we approach business) and this mail, but I'm having warm and fuzzy feelings nonetheless. I'm pretty sure us geeks solved a real business problem over there.

Abuse it while it lasts: my XML Europe paper submission.

Today, we had a Bob The Builder day: Can We Fix It? Yeah!

We were at a customer's site trying to solve some encoding issues they had with some very strange combo of JNI-called native Windows DLLs, a huge collection of mainframe-generated Beans and JSPs, some closed-source controller servlet and Cocoon used purely as a PDF rendering engine. Driving back, we were amazed about the fact this all worked, and reasonably well too. Reading back Wiki's comment on my code generation rant, I'm starting to see where big blue companies (amongst others) are able to sell obscure integration and generation wear. I'm also starting to understand how these architectures scale: throwing lots and lots of big iron at it. Bah. Still, I can understand those developers are delighted to see effective reuse of their many hundreds of thousands of lines of mainframe code, neatly packaged and deployed on a laptop inside Tomcat.

With much reluctancy since a second edition most likely will be interpreted as the promise for a third, here's the week 2 weather report of all the nice open source projects or related communities I'm working in on lurking on (lots of lurking since always short on time):

Avalon

Some spring showers, unfortunately now shielded behind the umbrella of the PMC list. There are some ancient solar spots on the face of Avalon which don't fade away.

Cocoon

An unexpected tornado has left some citizens in search for their home. Luckily, the community at large is helping to tidy up the scene.

Community

No real weather this week, expect from some nice weather perspectives by Santiago and Andy.

Forrest

Apart from one very active high pressure zone, the mushy coulds of winter are still preventing the project to fully experience spring.

Jakarta

Sun is everywhere in Jakarta-land, whether some of us like it or not. I'm not allowed to say much about this since I'm under a Not to be Documented Agreement ;-)

Outerthought

The slow weather of the past few months is being replaced by a certain degree of buzyness. Still, business isn't falling from the sky like that manna thing from some time ago.

Ouverture

Some separated drops, but nobody getting wet. We could all use a fresh shower, however.

Xindice

Still very much a no-weather zone.

XML Belux

Also some separated drops, hopefully we'll be able to gather them into a decent bucket full of water.

???

Nice and shiny weather, some clouds have been seen on the horizon, but really only just enough to know we are lucky.

Doing this on a weekly basis will be hard to keep up with. Remind me of weather reports older than a couple of weeks, will ya?

I'm invited to speak at the NLUUG's Spring conference on 22/May. The NLUUG is the Dutch Unix User's Group, and I'll be talking about Cocoon and Forrest. The conference theme is Zen and the art of internet programming. Sounds fun.

During lunch, I read two articles in some Dutch software magazine, talking about a popular seminar theme these days: Java is an unproductive programming language since it's simply too hard, so let's go for .Net or use code generation tools instead. There's two problems with that:

• the majority of these fancy seminar speakers or writers haven't written a single line of production code for at least 5 years, let alone been involved in some real software project, so who cares about their opinion anyway (except that they can be nice to listen to if you're lucky, but I prefer Statler and Waldorf instead).
• one of these articles made the wise remark that business constraints like security, robustness, resilience, ease of maintenance, let alone transaction management or logging are never part of that fancy UML model which they want us to believe will be the only 'coding' effort required by these tools. So where will that 'supporting infrastructure' code be materialized then? Generated by your code generation tool? Provided automagically by your J2EE container? You bet. This industry survived already one huge 4GL wave, and we replaced all these tightly-integrated, monolithical, closed and unscalable installations with light-weight combos of n-tier Java applications. Let's not fall into the same trap again: there is no way to easily factor out the deployment context of your application, pretending you don't care. Your manager will still kill you if you're not able to keep that deployed application up and running. And like it or not: you will be required to think about the deployment context upfront to offer him that guarantee.

I coined a somewhat nice definition of software release management today, and why voting on releases, even in open source projects, is important:

... Still, the way I see the practice of voting in 'good projects' is that concensus generally is
reached through discussion, and voting mostly is an administrative affair for important issues (like
releasing software which [also] means committing yourself to the maintenance of a user-facing API
for some time to come).

I remember going to the zoo when I was a kid, and the main attraction then was the visit of the monkey house. Not only where these great animals involved in fun-to-watch everyday human activities such as eating, drinking and general family affairs, also some of them could become really excited when good-looking female human creatures tapped on the windows (no, it wasn't allowed, but we did it anyway). In fact, that much excited that one of them picked up a handful of hay and started pleasuring himself manually. So these are basically my memories from the early family zoo visits: pretty girls and horny monkeys. (I'm pretty sure you won't believe me, but really, this happened!)
Completely unrelated except to my sick mind, there is now an Apache community mailinglist where only committers, members and invited guests are allowed to participate in, yet anyone can read the archives. There was a huge discussion and subsequent vote at the time of the creation of that list whether the Apache community allowed on that list should also involve users of our software and other interested parties. I voted +1 on allowing non-Apache people to post on that list, but the majority was against. That's how community at apache.org became a read-only mailing list for the most of you.
The funny thing is that I now start to see a parallel between that list and the monkey house of my child memories. I don't know whether the monkeys are (already) aware of the fact that the world can see them through the glass while sitting in their cages, and I'm only wondering what will happen if a pretty girl taps on that glass. :-)

Yesterday, an employee of the steel cord company Bekaert was sacked over a bad practical joke distributing some spoofed adult cartoons figuring his colleagues and bosses. Apparently, he took some pictures and used these to "personalize" some flesh-intensive scenes, distributing the result by email afterwards. Admittedly, that move wasn't particularly smart. The result however is quite startling in my opinion: being utterly clueless and absolutely paternalistic, the company fired him right away. 1600 colleagues of him are now on strike. Talk about clueless? Mind you, this is a company which virtually owns the entire city its HQs are located in, and has been cut quite some slack over the years by local gouvernment in terms of zoning, polution and whatnot. But anyway, I won't digress on my opinions about large companies ;-)
It appears the Belgian legislation, as one of the first in Europe, has already adopted some regulation towards the use of electronic communication (email and web) for private matters during working hours, which seems quite fair to me:

• using email for private stuff is allowed given reasonal boundaries
• monitoring is allowed:
• but it must be done globally
• rules with regards to abuse must be communicated prior to monitoring
• you can't single out people, but only act on obvious deviations

(Reminds me of that really big multinational which believes my weblog leads people to sex sites.)

In a rather successful attempt to learn us whining Python newbies how cool scripting languages really can be, Sam has posted a screen-long (!) 3-pane RSS feed aggregator. Which seriously tickles me that I really should start hacking on my own blogging tool, now that MozBlog decided to stop functioning under Moz1.3b, and I'm getting sick at typing HTML inside a text pane.
Funny to see how expressive scripting languages can be without falling into the modem-noise-trap of Perl. I remember Tom and I discussing how we could easily create referrer logs for our blogs on Friday, and both of us arriving on Monday with 'our' solution. While his likely will be better and more extensible (Java, of course), mine was only a few lines of Python code (underneath, don't laugh).

#!/usr/bin/python2
import re, time
from string import find

def compareandreversereflist(item1, item2):
    if item1[1] > item2[1]:
        return (-1)
    elif item1[1] == item2[1]:
        return (0)
    else:
        return (1)


pattern = re.compile(r'^((?:\d+\.?){4}) \S \S \[(.*?)\] \"\S+ (\S+) \S+" \d{3} - \"(.*?)\" \".*?\"$')

logfile = open('/logs/blogs.cocoondev.org/http/access_log', 'r')

referrers = {}

for line in logfile.readlines():
    linematch = re.match(pattern, line)
    if linematch:
        refmatch = str(linematch.group(4))
        pathmatch = str(linematch.group(3))
        if find(pathmatch,'/stevenn/') != -1:
            if refmatch != '-':
                if find(refmatch,'http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/') == -1:
                    if not(referrers.has_key(refmatch)):
                        referrers[refmatch] = 1
                    else:
                        referrers[refmatch] = referrers[refmatch] + 1

list = referrers.items()

list.sort(compareandreversereflist)

print """<html>
    <head>
        <title>Referrer report</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1 align="center">Referrer report</h1>
        <hr>
        <ul>"""

for item in list:
    print '            <li><a href="' + item[0] + '">' + item[0] + '</a>: ' + str(item[1]) + '</li>'

print """        </ul>
        <hr>"""

print '        <p align="center">Generated on ' + time.ctime(time.time()) + '</p>'

print """    </body>
</html>"""

Hm... How difficult should it be to embed that infamous IE RichText/HTML editing thingy into a wxPython app?

MoveOn.org: Emergency Appeal to the U.N.: "The U.N. Security Council should back tough inspections, not war." Go there and speak out.

I forgot to mention that Saar, my baby daughter of 9 months, is finally having her first tooth (or should that be teeth instead?). And that it was Sander, the oldest boy of 6 who discovered it. Obviously, once you're having three of them, you tend to forget follow-up of such important events, or delegate such delights to the boys. Tim, the second boy of almost 5 was blissfully ignorant as ever: there's so much to discover in his own world that he has not much time left for ours ;-)

Night to all.

Werner writes about BEA WebLogic Portal using Webflow and maybe Struts in some subsequent version. I couldn't care less about any portalware, but he refers to some BEA doco explaining a GUI to edit pipelines. Not XML pipelines, of course, and from the looks of it this sucker won't scale (in terms of UI, dunnow about what's inside) to a complex portal/webapp. Must be a common issue in the declarative world: you can say a lot in a dense XML configuration document, but will have a hell of a time translating that same semantical richness in some point-and-click GUI. I know some other application having the same 'problem' - even with its well-hidden grammar.

I really need to start writing my XML Europe Paper this week, and I'm readying my toolset to do so. My preferred XML editor ATM is XXE, which unfortunately isn't supported out-of-the-box by the 'abundant' set of tools being provided by the conference organisation. Leaves me with the familiar problem of having a job at hand, but spending more upfront time on the infrastructure tools rather than on the job itself. One of the glaring issues with that gcapaper.dtd thing is hyperlinked browsable DTD documentation, but fortunately the Forrest DTD documentation framework comes in handy. Funny though: I have a $$ copy of Near&Far Designer which is also capable of generating DTD documentation, but I end up using my own open source tools instead.

Update: I abused Bruno's first cut at a Forrest document-v11 XXE config, translating it into one for that GCA Paper DTD. If you want, go get it. Unzip in the XXE config directory, add gcapaper.cat to the list of XML catalogs in the XXE options menu, and off you go, without expensive trial-licensed bloatware on your harddisk. It's nothing fancy and it will only help you to get started, but hey, I'd better start writing that paper now ;-)

Just a stupid idea before heading off to lunch: I was thinking of publishing a highly personal and IMVHO Community Weather Report, which reflects on a weekly basis how the few communities I'm working with or lurking on are going along. Of course, one can wonder WTF might be interested in my analysis of community health, but that's the entire vision behind blogging IMO: except for those I happened to meet and greet, I'm just a dog and nobody should really care :-)
So here's the first weather report for the previous week, all ASF communities which translate to mailing list available from the archives:

• Cocoon: good weather even though the recent massive CVS reshuffling has raised the tension somewhat between the commercial and non-commercial contributors to the project
• Xindice: in Dutch, we call this "windstil and wachten", which means no real weather
• Avalon: looks like some clouds are gathering again, and bad feelings of the past are not forgetten yet
• Forrest: spring is waiting to happen, but the amount of debris after the winter hacking storm is preventing the crocus to blossom
• Community: it's spring time already with lots of things happening, some little showers here and there
• Jakarta: same as usual, but a little storm is in preparation over who gets to run the club

That's about it for this week, stay tuned for the next weather report.