Burningbird

Rolling out Radio 8.0

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 10, 2002

Okay, one point to Dave. But he owes me for Joseph Crosby ;->

-earlier-

Quick note to Userland folks — I’m happy you all rolled out a product, but the hype’s beginning to equate to a certain iMac I know.

Radio 8.0 is a weblogging tool/personal CMS. And that’s cool. It isn’t the second coming.

-earlier-

Congrats to the UserLand folks for rolling out Radio 8.0.

Dane’s dumping Greymatter for Radio, but I’ll stay with Greymatter or Movable Type when I move off Blogger. However, the open source route’s not for everyone and I can respect that. (Not understand it, maybe; but respect it.) For folks wanting to run from their own desktop, Radio seems to be very affordable. And it runs on Mac OS X as well as Windows.

Now, if we can only convince the Userland folks to open source the code, the software could run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris,…

RDF Technology

Nextware Conference 2002

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 10, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine. I was signed up to do two sessions, but had to cancel. I was broke and had to move out of San Francisco in June. Back then, conferences didn’t pay travel expenses.

I received a brochure from the Nextware conference being held in Baltimore in May. The conference will cover an interesting mix of topics such as Web Services, XML, open source, wireless, and a host of other topics all related to a common theme of the next generation of software. The effort is being organized by Ken North, managed by Penton Communications, and yours truly will be giving two presentations.

We’re seeing a new trend in conferences this year — different technology topics, usually related to some common theme, combined into one offering in order to cut costs and increase attendance. I think it’s an idea whose time has come. In the last few years, we were seeing too many conferences being held by too many organizations on too many separate topics. That was back when there was money to burn and people could afford to attend 3-4 conferences in a year. Today, conference organizers have to assume that each person reading their brochures is going to one and only one conference — competition will be fierce. End result: Conferences with a lot to offer.

Now, if you’re thinking about attending a conference this year — HINT HINT — I’ll be speaking about Bringing RDF out of the Lab and The .NET Free Zone, covering .NET technology alternatives. Baltimore in the spring time, right next to Washington DC in the spring time. Cherry Blossoms and me speaking on .NET and RDF — what more could you want?

Technology Weblogging

Moving off Blogger

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 9, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

If you blinked, you missed my test case of a new look for the Burningbird weblog. It looked much better on the drawing board…but purple, I don’t know, I don’t feel like a purple person. What do you think? Am I a purple person?

Back to the CSS style editor. I hate web site design as much as I like server-side development. And as you can see, I’m still on Blogger, still playing with other blogging tools (Greymatter and Movable Type).

I’m also working on post-content information system method for handling pulled or moved information. In chi-chi clever biztalk terms, a Post-CMS (and doesn’t that sound like a hormonal condition?) The system is using an RDF-XML vocabulary that’s a combination of my own RDF vocabulary and the Dublin Core. The RDF provides the information used by the system to display pages that are,hopefully, more useful than “404 Page Not Found” when a page is pulled from the site.

If you’re curious, you can try out the Perl/CGI prototype that’s currently in use (I’m working on a Java/Jena/JSP open source version). Any of the following will trigger the system:

http://www.yasd.com/dynatech/tutorial.htm
http://www.yasd.com/samples/scripting/TYPEOF.HTM
http://www.yasd.com/samples/scripting/
http://www.yasd.com/rumbles

Don’t expect a razzle dazzle Flash show or anything like that — this is an information system. Information applications inform, educate, and enlighten; they don’t light up sparklers and tap dance with red sequined shoes in a little pink net tutu.

-earlier-

Unfortunately, Blogger is pretty much unusable at this point. I’m finally going to have to get off my butt and move to blogging software I host at my server. I have Greymatter installed, but am looking at Movable Type.

I feel a bit guilty leaving Blogger while it’s having problems. However, I realize that it’s multi-posters like myself that are part of the problem, so I consider that I’m doing Blogger a favor by pulling my blog from the servers.

While I’m at it, I’ll most likely change the look of the weblog, something to match the rest of my web sites. You know: plain and readable. I’m a verbal not a visual person, and my site designs tend to reflect this. Sorry.

Until I make my move, I won’t be posting too frequently, if at all.

Web

National Park System break in

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 8, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

No rain for at least five days. Five Whole Days! It must be MacWorld — Apple brought us a break in the rain. (Well, they sure didn’t bring us anything exciting technologically).

Tomorrow I hit one of my favorite walks — Golden Gate to Presidio to Crissy to Embarcadero.

Speaking of walks and the great outdoors, this one was sure missed. The National Park Service web site is offline because of a court order. Why? Because a hacker was able to break into the system.

Now, breaking into the National Park System isn’t that big a deal; after all the FBI, the CIA, the White House and several other sites have been broken into. Many times. However, the same agency that controls the NPS — The US Department of the Interior — also controls a multi-billion dollar Native American Trust Fund. And the US Department of the Interior is currently involved in a lawsuit brought by several Native American Tribes over said handling of the trust fund. And the court reviewing this case was the one who sanctioned the hacker to break into the system (and into the trust fund itself) to show that it’s vulnerable, and therefore could be a security risk to said trust fund. So because the NPS web site was cracked, it was ordered pulled indefinitely until security can be assured for the site. And we all know how we can guarantee web server security, don’t we?

End result: yours truly — in an effort to achieve peace, calm, and enlightment through a lovely walk — goes out to my favorite NPS web site to get a map of the paths of the Presidio and finds that the site is down, thereby leading to a search to find the reason, thereby finding the only reference to this event at SF Gate, thereby beginning to burn yet again.

If this continues, your favorite bird that burns is going to be extra crispy.

Blogger Lexicon 2

Post author By Shelley Powers
Post date January 8, 2002

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Karl Martino of Paradox1x sent me an email with a new Lexicon entry he found at Dangerousmeta:

Flowbe:

Thanks a lot Karl! I agree with you, it is a good addition to the Lexicon. We’ll use it until we get sued. In the meantime, go have a Blogsticker, on me!