Got Gobby?

Gobby is a collaborative code editor, just like SubEthaEdit. Only, Gobby is open source (GPL), cross platform, and I can actually fucking use the thing.

I love it already - we just had a guy call in sick for a few days because of uni work. Now, when his code has really fucked bits in it, it'll be a matter of getting him to download Gobby and join a session, as opposed to a phone call.

Only complaint: You can't see where the other person is focused - if you could see what they were selecting with their mouse / keyboard / currently editing, this would push it from kick ass app into killer app.
The reason: I tried to explain to a colleague a bit of code. Normally, he'd stand over me, and as I talk, I'd highlight and point to sections of it as I explain - I can't do that and I *really* need to.

Great work guys! Don't forget to consider donating to 'em :)

Seven Days

Only leave software on your computer for seven days as evaluation - if it doesn't stick, it's gone.

A friendly reminder

Follow style convention or be stabbed.

That is all.

My Kind Of Speech Writer

This is my kind of speech writer.

Hungry Readers & Ning == Book Feed

Hello 5am. Bookfeed has been a very tiring twelve hours of learning, tinkering, breaking, etc.

What sucks about Ning:

• Your change / save / test cycle is now a change / save / upload / test cycle - through SFTP, that's not quick.


• No local test environment. It's either live or nothing.


• Read only access to shared data. Ok, it makes sense, but I want to share my data with other applications and use them as services to push more data onto it. For instance, I can snaffle ratings and traffic and such from Bookshelf if I could only just use the "Add this to my bookshelf" button. I'd rather just say "Let application X fuck with my data please".


• Documentation. It's great but a pain to navigate - I kept getting lost all night.

What absolutely rocks about Ning:

• Everything. The fucker just works, and once you get your head around the pattern and the content store...

If you aren't using it yet, start. If you don't even know what Ning is, go and find out. Now. Or else.

Zend PHP Framework

I was blathering on to crschmidt the other day about my impressions on ning: basically saying that all I wanted was an open source style of framework I could take anywhere instead of Ning.

I saw then Zend PHP Framework. It's a start... But I'll remain unconvinced until I see some releases. To be honest, I'm not an advocate of Zend products.

Got My Flock On

Semapedia looks fun, but more importantly I got my Flock developer preview.

This thing better not kill my firefox :/

Win Prizes and Be A Hero Of The State!

Flickr Adelaide Group for the SA Great Big 6 Competition.

Niall, Rob or Chrissie, if you guys don't win this, I'ma disown you.

Big Weekend Event

I had a big weekend. I think we can get back to coding things now.

Ning App Of The Day

StupidList.

Genius.

Recent development

News and Summer of Code updates.

Hurrah for the gaim-vv branch being merged back into the code!

A summary of where gaim is headed:

The “pencils down” date for the Summer of Code was September 1st. Here’s a list of some of the spectacular things the Summer of Code students accomplished during their two months.

Rendezvous Plugin (Juanjo Molinero Horno) – Wrote a protocol plugin (PRPL) that communicates with Apple’s iChat using the Bonjour protocol. The Bonjour protocol uses multicast DNS to automatically discover other Bonjour users on your local network. The PRPL currently uses the Howl library for multicast DNS, but we’d like to switch to using Avahi in the future. This in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
D-Busified gaim-remote (Piotr Zielinski) – Added D-Bus bindings to Gaim which allow other D-Bus aware programs to interact with Gaim. Removed the old, socked-based gaim-remote executable. It is being replaced by a python script that communicates with Gaim via D-Bus. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Improved Perl Scripting (John Kelm) – Fixed the problems with our Perl interpreter and added support for lots of Gaim’s newer functionality. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
UPnP NAT Traversal (Adam J. Warrington) – Gaim will now talk to your router and arrange for certain ports to be forwarded to your computer when doing file transfers. This should greatly improve file transfer success rates. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Gadu-Gadu Support (Bartosz Oler) – Our Gadu-Gadu protocol plugin is now using a much more recent version of libgadu. Many many improvements were made, and this protocol plugin is now working very well. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
SIP/SIMPLE (Thomas Butter) – We now have a working protocol plugin for doing IM over a SIP connection, compatable with kphone, iptel.org and sipgate.de. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
ICQ File Transfer (Jonathan Clark) – ICQ file transfer turned out to be pretty easy, since new versions of ICQ use the same file transfer protocol as AIM. After Jonathan got that working, he went on to add support for proxying a file through AOL’s file transfer proxy servers, and made lots of other improvements to the file transfer code used by both AIM and ICQ. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim. Some of his changes also made it into earlier releases of Gaim.
Music Messaging (Christian Muise) – Music Messaging is a Gaim plugin that allows collaborative musical score editing. It uses the SoC DBus Gaim project to link Gaim with a score editor that is geared to use this functionality. This requires the DBus plugin to be operational. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
SMS PC-to-mobile routing over Bluetooth (Mel Dooki) – This project does not releate directly to Gaim, but we thought it was neat. Mel wrote a Java client that runs on a computer. The user types an SMS, the client transfers the message to a cell phone via Bluetooth, then another program on the cell phone transmits the SMS. See the SMS Routing over Bluetooth webpage for more information.
Crazy Chat (Charlie Stockman) – TODO
Doodle (Andrew Dieffenbach) – Created a “whiteboard” system for Gaim and used it to implement Yahoo!’s Doodle protocol. It may need a little more work before it’s completely compatable with current Yahoo! clients, but it works fine between two Gaim users. This is in CVS HEAD and will be in the next release of Gaim.
Collaborative Code Editor (Chisthian Kim) – TODO

See more progress on: Fix gaim

Heh: Google is *so* doing this goal

I wonder what he’ll be able to do if he can get a few more googlers using their 20% project time on gaim?

Google’s just hired Sean Egan (the main developer of Gaim open IM client), just the same day Yahoo! and Microsoft plan to link their respective proprietary IM networks.” From the post: “While Yahoo! and Microsoft link their proprietary networks for Instant Messaging, Google bets on Open Protocols to make information universally accessible … Currently, Google uses XMPP/Jabber specs, but they claim to be supporting open server-to-server federation, and work “to hear from other people in the communications industry about how best to build a federation model that is open, scalable”. In fact, there are this month several tests with firms like EarthLink, Sipphone or PeopleCall.

Article

See more progress on: Fix gaim

Here's a thought

Perusing the GeoWanking list just then, I came across talk of 10cm resolution GPS - a very real prospect in the not so distant future. So we can tag things down to a very small area. Very. Very. Small.

Continental Drift is Very Very Small also. What happens when the very precise data from 10 years ago is all out of whack?

Reminder To Self

Print Your Flickr Album

gaim: What's broken?

Articles always seem to be giving gaim shit about its UI.

Very rarely does anyone actually point out a specific problem they can put their finger on, it’s always just “Bad UI /grumble mutter/”.

I don’t think there’s too much actually wrong with the gaim UI; personally. There’s a few menu options in all the wrong places, but that’s about it.

Don’t think I’m right? Got specific problems. Stuff that makes gaim unusable for you? Tell me about it and make me eat my words.

See more progress on: Fix gaim

Gnowsis: Jena, Java, & UI Framework

Note to self, have a read of the gnowsis tutorial.

What You Get Is What You See

How would you implement WYGIWYS for designing a webpage?

3D London

3D London.


Wow.

Happy Link Day

Cool shit:

• Deskzilla - a slick interface to bugzilla based bug tracking systems. I want it. Now. Sucks that there's no open source version, but I'd almost part with money for it.


• Ning Developer Dox - I haven't gotten to play with it yet; but the dox hint at a lot of interesting crap you can do. Oh, build social software in a social environment or something too.


• PlanetRDF is still aggregating away; pointing me to the ever so handing Semantic Web Starting Points and PiggyBank 2.1. I've been sitting on the mailing list; lurking for a while. There's significant fixes with memory leak problems, a shiny new toolbar, a much slicker install process and more. I still can't use it for very much practical yet. (Piggy Bank is a browser extension that collections metadata from webpages as you browse, and stores it.)


• Validate_AU makes it into PEAR. *mumbles something about not screwing up a release this time*.


• Work is close to being working completely.

GeoTorrent

GeoTorrent is a service for hosting all of those huge GIS files with bittorrent. There's a few bits of Australian data in there, worth a look :)