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2002-04-26

Pass the SOAP

Of Google and SOAP and URLs.

Paul Prescod has written a quietly provocative article at xml.com about Google's decision to open up an XML-based API to its search results. As Prescod sees it, the core problem with Google's solution is that it would've been simpler and more efficient for Google to provide access to that XML goodness in the form of standard URIs via plain old HTTP. Instead, you now need to make SOAP calls via HTTP POST, which is not only a lot heavier and less secure, but essentially breaks the Web model of transparent addressing -- see the penultimate section of the article, titled "The Web's Crowning Glory". (Why no links to page fragments at xml.com? Beats me.)

Although I tend to agree with Prescod that something like a search result deserves to be a full-fledged (and uniquely-addressable) data object in its own right, I feel he's a bit too tied to the traditional Web in some respects. For instance, let's think about what a Jabber interface to Google-ish resources might look like. Although some folks have gotten excited about a Jabber Google (Joogle?), I tend to think that doesn't make a lot of sense (a Web interface to Google is a lot more productive since it's essentially feeding you a set of hyperlinks to Web documents), so my preferred example is an online dictionary service (perhaps something like the nascent Worldwide Lexicon Project.) Here you just want a definition -- in the context of your work, you don't really care that the definition you receive is uniquely-addressable. That might be handy if you want to link to the definition from a web page, but if you're working on a document and you just want that definition in a hurry, wouldn't it be more useful to simply type "/define penultimate" in your Jabber client and receive an instant definition? Sure seems so to me.

Posted on 2002-04-26 at 21:07. File under technology.

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Labeling is Disabling

Am I just an ism?

Thanks go to Eliot for a pointer to a blog entry by Doc Searls on political labels. It seems that Doc is something of a left-libertarian, too, though he feels labels are not very helpful. I must agree. While I've somewhat settled on the term "progressive libertarian", even that doesn't quite capture my thinking about politics (which in turn is downstream from more deeply-held ideas). Given my view that labels don't tend to be fully descriptive, it's ironic that some people know me mainly for The Ism Book, which carefully catalogues all the various pigeonholes of philosophical discourse. Probably one reason I haven't updated that resource since 1996 is that I don't find the activity of fitting square pegs into round holes all that satisfying any longer. But I really do need to complete a good once-over on the Ism Book, since I'm rather embarrassed by much of it now. Maybe by the end of 2002 I'll get around to it....

Posted on 2002-04-26 at 20:50. File under politics.

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Protocol Progress

More movement on the Jabber front.

Yesterday (or was it the day before?) the protocol for the jabber:x:data namespace (as described in JEP-0004) advanced to Draft status. Progress! I've also received a JEP on Jabber Identifiers (yes, they need to be cleaned up a bit -- we can't specify no limit on the size of resources), I need to poke the Jabber Council about the jabber:iq:browse spec, and I'd like to get some discussion going within the Standards JIG about the JEPs that pgmillard put together about server-based privacy rules and client feature negotiation, since I think they're both worthy of advancement.

In other Jabber news, I posted the second-ever developer interview on www.jabber.org, this time with DJ Adams. DJ is a great guy -- smart, funny, and good-looking to boot! :-) He does get a bit whingey now and then, though. ;-)

Posted on 2002-04-26 at 20:37. File under jabber.

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2002-04-21

On Constitutional Government

Where have you gone, Thomas Jefferson?

Someday I would like to do some in-depth research on the history of constitutional government, especially the constitutions of the American states. These days constitutions are not well-respected (politicians don't like them, since strictly following the constitution would severely limit their pursuit of power), but in olden times they were taken very seriously indeed. The Framers wrote constitutions to limit the power of government. The constitutions of some states go so far as to contain explicit provision for the right of revolution! For instance, here is Article 10 of the New Hampshire bill of rights:

Government being instituted for the common benefit, protection, and security, of the whole community, and not for the private interest or emolument of any one man, family, or class of men; therefore, whenever the ends of government are perverted, and public liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are ineffectual, the people may, and of right ought to reform the old, or establish a new government. The doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power, and oppression, is absurd, slavish, and destructive of the good and happiness of mankind.

Article 7 of the same document also defines clearly that the people of New Hampshire are fully sovereign:

The people of this state have the sole and exclusive right of governing themselves as a free, sovereign, and independent state; and do, and forever hereafter shall, exercise and enjoy every power, jurisd iction, and right, pertaining thereto, which is not, or may not hereafter be, by them expressly delegated to the United States of America in congress assembled.

Given that "the United States of America in congress" has arrogated to itself vast powers that were never expressly delegated to it by the people of the several states, I'm coming to think that it is an open question whether the Federal government is at root legitimate. But that's a large topic for another time, I suspect....

Posted on 2002-04-21 at 19:52. File under politics.

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Of Rednecks and Epicures

Are freedom and culture mutually exclusive?

The other night I had occasion to revisit one of my favorite essays: Of French Caryatids and American Rednecks by French Canadian writer Pierre Lemieux. Lemieux notes that there are two basic types of individualism: the rugged American variety (typified by rednecks who carry weapons and show little respect for established authority) and the refined French variety (typified by Epicures who enjoy fine art, fine wine, and intellectual conversation). And he asks: are these two types mutual exclusive? As one who harbors a healthy disrespect for authority but who tends toward the refined end of the individualist spectrum, I would hope that there is no dichotomy between rugged and refined individualism. Lemieux's thoughts on the subject are well worth revisiting every once in a while. Indeed, his site is chock full of thought-provoking essays, including one in remembrance of Robert Nozick and another arguing against total war even in the face of last year's terrorist attacks.

Posted on 2002-04-21 at 13:00. File under philosophy.

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My Type, Again

Revisiting personality type theory.

For various reasons, I've been reading up a bit lately on personality types (you know, Myers-Briggs and all that). Several years ago I took the Keirsey test and came out definitely NFP (iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving as opposed to Sensory Thinking Judging), and borderline on the Introverted/Extraverted dimension. I think I'm probably by nature introverted -- even into my early twenties I was painfully shy -- but that I've learned over time to become more extraverted. In any case I've found some good descriptions of both the INFP (1 | 2 | 3) and ENFP (1 | 2 | 3) personality types, in which I can definitely see aspects of myself.

With regard to their work, INFPs tend to most enjoy a career that is not just a job but a passion or crusade, and I definitely bring that to my work with Jabber (that's one reason people call me the "patron saint" of Jabber, I suppose, since I bring an almost evangelical fervor to the technology). And ENFPs tend not to be detail-oriented and to have a hard time finishing projects, which unfortunately I must admit is true of me. ENFPs also tend to have good diplomatic skills and often are able to translate technical ideas into plain English (and vice-versa), which are strengths of mine. INFPs often express themselves best through writing, and supposedly most of the world's great writers have been INFPs. Not that I'm a great writer, but writing does come easily to me and it's one of the things I do best. So I see a lot of *NFP in me, for better or for worse. :)

Posted on 2002-04-21 at 11:20. File under personal.

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2002-04-19

Happy Patriots Day

Celebrating a forgotten American holiday.

Today is Patriots Day. Which day, you ask? An American holiday that is celebrated in only two states (Massachusetts and my home state of Maine, which until 1820 was a province of Massachusetts), but which deserves to be recognized more widely. Patriots Day commemorates the events of April 19, 1775, when the "shot heard 'round the world" set off the first hostilities in the war of the American Revolution. Probably the most famous remembrance of those events is Emerson's Concord Hymn (written for the dedication in 1836 of a monument to those first American revolutionaries):

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Amen.

Posted on 2002-04-19 at 06:55. File under politics.

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2002-04-17

Large-Scale Gulching

More free-state reflections.

It strikes me that the Free State Project is rather like gulching on a large scale. The term "gulching" was coined by Mary Lou Seymour and Claire Wolfe on the model of Galt's Gulch in Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged; they define it as "the act of building, or living within, low-profile communities of freedom seekers" (see their gulching guide). The FSP won't be exactly low-profile if it takes off, but it's definitely focused on building a state-wide community of people who are seeking freedom. Claire Wolfe's essay on the FSP makes the same community connection, and it's touched on a bit at the end of this article by Steve Trinward (in the context of the Libertarian Party generally). I think community is an important element that's been missing in past and present efforts for liberty, so hopefully the FSP can address that imbalance.

Posted on 2002-04-17 at 21:38. File under politics.

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Jabber Update

More news on adoption of Jabber.

Interest in Jabber continues to widen and deepen. Over at the Worldwide Lexicon Project, Brian McConnell has posted a new essay about how his project is using Jabber to build a distributed, multilingual dictionary. The good folks at DotGNU are seriously discussing how to use Jabber in their open alternative to Microsoft's .NET platform (the mailing list thread starts here with a posting by Adam Theo). The KDE desktop project has been discussing how to build Jabber support into their IM application and perhaps more broadly (Psi developer Justin Karneges started it off). And DJ Adams continues to work with Jeremy Bowers on integrating Jabber with Radio Userland. Keep up the good work, guys!

Posted on 2002-04-17 at 20:16. File under jabber.

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More on Non-Intervention

Non-intervention and the Founding Fathers.

Ron Paul has a short but sweet essay on the foreign policy wisdom of the Founding Fathers. Here's what Thomas Jefferson had to say in his First Inaugural Address (1801):

Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations -- entangling alliances with none.

Two hundred years later, those words sound like something out of a dream, not a description of American principles. More and more, I'm coming to see a non-interventionist foreign policy as a key component of libertarian thinking, and the natural complement to the libertarian philosophy of voluntary, peaceful interaction among individuals.

Posted on 2002-04-17 at 10:58. File under politics.

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2002-04-14

Happy Tax Day

Dark thoughts for a dark day.

Gerald Ford once said that "the power to tax is the power to destroy". A surprisingly honest statement from one who was once the most powerful man on the planet. On the eve of the day when American income tax payments are due, it's worth reflecting on the implications of Ford's statement.

Taxation is destruction. Income taxes destroy incomes and livelihoods, forcing people to work much more than they would otherwise. Sales taxes destroy sales and businesses, forcing even more work and making it harder for people to trade peacefully. Property taxes destroy property, forcing people to sell their homes and subdivide their land.

Taxation is destruction. When your home can be taken from you if you don't pay every year for the privilege of living in it, then you don't really own your house, you rent it from the true owner: a government. When your business can be seized for alleged violations of the tax code, then you are allowed to peacefully engage in what Robert Nozick called "capitalist acts between consenting adults" only at the mercy of a government. When you can be thrown in prison if a government feels that you have not paid enough in tax, then your life is not your own -- you are a slave.

Taxation is destruction. It is theft, force, power, plunder, the brandished sword, the loaded gun. It is no better than the forced tribute demanded by every Attila, caesar, pasha, prince, satrap, pharaoh, king, potentate, caliph, czar, or other self-proclaimed overlord throughout the sordid march of human history.

Yet here we are, two thousand years after the birth of the one so many have hoped to be the savior of humankind, still rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Only a miniscule and powerless few object that no, your life and your livelihood and the fruits of your labor do not belong to Caesar, they belong to you, and they are yours to dispense with as you see fit.

We moderns speak of progress, but that progress is in fundamental ways illusory. Today, for all our proud modernity, we are still ruled by empires and Caesars, to whom we render all, receiving not much more than bread and circuses in return.

Morituri te salutamus!

Posted on 2002-04-14 at 21:12. File under politics.

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2002-04-12

Music Update

News from the musical side of my life.

My composer friend Jeffrey Lindon reports that the premiere performance of his solo-piano interpretations of my Urban Haiku was a smashing success! Here's an excerpt from his "report":

Urban Haiku opened last night's composition department recital, to great success. In addition to the pianist (Nicholas Ong, who did a superb job), I worked with a reader, Nimrod Weisbrod. Nimrod contributed the idea of acting the part of a different city character when reading each Haiku. For Broadway Crazy Man, he was the crazy man (walked along like normal; then stopped and acted paranoid; then cursed at himself, slapped himself, then stopped one hand from slapping himself with the other hand). For Midnight in the Park, he was a detective type person wandering and dictating notes to himself on a hand-held recorder. For A Pigeon's Death-Throes, he was a commuter who noticed a dying pigeon by the curb and left the scene. For Old Woman Crossing, he was a taxi driver, complete with Indian accent. For How Many Will Live, he was an environmentalist protester. For Fighting Traffic Noise, he was a construction worker (complete with prop hard-hat and imaginary jack-hammer). And for Orange City Glow, he was just a normal guy, and he walked off the stage and exited down the center aisle of the room as he recited the text. Between the others, he went to the small backstage area.

The audience laughed at most all of the humor, and was dead quiet during the serious moments. The applause was ample. And I received, both last night and today, high praises from many quarters, including my teacher, the department head, and several students whose opinions I value.

I wish I could've been there -- sounds fun! Jeffrey has promised to send me a CD of the evening's festivities, so I'm looking forward to that.

In other music news, I've been thinking lately about buying an electric bass. I've got my eye on a four-string Corvette model from Warwick. Those Warwick basses are simply beautiful and they play as sweet as they look. I'm also starting to research home-recording equipment in a more serious fashion so that I can finally record the music I've written. As I've been saying since at least 1995, one of these years....

Oh yeah, and I've been listening to this new Kasey Chambers CD all the time recently. Kasey who? Well, she just happens to be a great young Australian singer-songwriter whose musical styles seemingly stretch all the way from Alanis Morissette to Lucinda Williams to a bit of Sarah McLachlan. The critics call her alt-country, but as Haim Ginott used to say, "labeling is disabling" -- so stop worrying and just enjoy the music already. ;-)

Posted on 2002-04-12 at 21:26. File under music.

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2002-04-09

Isolationism Revisited

Wherein I reconsider a recent blog entry.

Hmm. The other day I blogged a bit about the tendency toward isolationism among some libertarians. In a rare display of wishy-washiness (is that a word?), I hemmed and hawed about intervention vs. non-intervention, and pretty much sat on the fence. Now along comes Justin Raimondo to counter the claims of Virginia Postrel and company. I can't say I'm comfortable with his (past?) support for Pat Buchanan, but on the other hand the neo-conservatives don't come out of his critique smelling very good either. The USA has strayed so far from its non-interventionist roots it's not even funny. I'm not sure when we became an imperial power, a superpower, a hyperpower, but I don't have to like it.

Is there nowhere on earth for someone who just wants to be an individual and not a citizen of the empire or some less expansive yet still authoritarian government? It's enough to make me consider even more seriously the value of secession, along the lines of an article yesterday by Walter Williams. If the true peace-loving, non-imperialistic, progressive liberals and libertarians have no voice and are forced (and I do not use that term lightly) to support American intervention all over the globe, would it not make moral and political sense for them to withdraw their support by seeking refuge and freedom in some smaller political entity? Is the time drawing near for a new declaration of independence?

That's what my friends at the Free State Project are advocating, though they don't always frame the issues in such progressive terms. The FSP is exploring the idea of encouraging a large number of freedom-loving Americans to move to a specific (and yet-to-be-chosen) state in order to more vigorously expand freedom in at least that one state. Absent a system of proportional voting (which ain't gonna happen), this strikes me more and more as perhaps the only viable strategy for freedom in America. For geopolitical reasons, I'm coming to think that the best location for such a movement is probably Maine, since it is separate enough to legitimately claim sovereignty if it came to that, yet not as strategically valuable to the federal government as Alaska or Hawaii. Sure, a free state movement is probably a pipe dream, but freedom-loving people have got to try something, because the way things are going we're all going to be subjects of a fascist state in another ten years.

Posted on 2002-04-09 at 21:00. File under politics.

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Inventing the Future

Tim O'Reilly strikes again.

Tim O'Reilly has an insightful essay over at oreillynet about the cutting edge of technology today. And I don't say that just because he mentions Jabber. Check it out.

Posted on 2002-04-09 at 17:37. File under technology.

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Jabber and the Argonauts

More open-source sweetness.

I'm still in the design phase for my Jabber Headline Service. I've set up a CVS repository for it on JabberStudio and a barebones website. Although I started out using Dia for my UML diagrams, I've switched to ArgoUML, which is a vast improvement. ArgoUML 0.9.8 (which I'm using) is not far behind TogetherJ with regard to features IMHO, and you can't complain about the price. Open-source rocks.

Speaking of open-source goodness, Ryan Eatmon and the rest of the JabberStudio crew have Jabber-enabled the CVS installation there, so now I can receive a Jabber message every time someone updates a file in any repository I'm interested in. The only module I'm using this for so far is the one containing JEPS, since that makes my job as JEP editor much easier. Thanks, Ryan!

Posted on 2002-04-09 at 09:45. File under jabber.

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2002-04-07

Wordology

A lexicographical excursus.

It's amusing how a simple typo can send you scurrying for the OED. In a post about the intellectual history of the Enlightenment, Diana Hsieh writes of the "philosophical cannon". Now there's a concept! The OED notes that "the spellings canon and cannon occur side by side down nearly to 1800, though the latter is the more frequent after circa 1660". Both 'canon' and 'cannon' derive ultimately from the Greek καννα meaning "a reed". Yet the terms diverged early on, with κανων meaning "a straight [and presumably solid] rod" as well as "a rule" used by carpenters, whereas 'cannon' derives from the hollow side of the reed/rod family (Italian cannone is a large tube or barrel). Nietzsche once claimed to be philosophizing with a hammer, but to philosophize with a cannon is really to bring out the big guns!

That line from Nietzsche is often interpreted in a nihilistic sense, with "hammer" understood to be a sledgehammer (something one step short of a philosophical cannon, as it were). Yet the full quote from the preface to Twilight of the Idols reveals a lighter touch:

This essay too -- the title betrays it -- is above all a recreation, a spot of sunshine, a leap sideways into the idleness of a psychologist. Perhaps a new war, too? And are new idols sounded out? This essay is a great declaration of war; and regarding the sounding out of idols, this time they are not just idols of the age, but eternal idols, which are here touched with a hammer as with a tuning fork: there are altogether no older, no more convinced, no more puffed-up idols -- and none more hollow.

Nietzsche's talk about idols hearkens back to Francis Bacon and his discussion of the Four Idols in The New Organon (an οργανον is a man-made tool, which is why our current sense of "organic" is diametrically opposite from the term's root meaning!). Interestingly, the English meaning of idol as the image of a false god (extended by Bacon to mean a dogma) was the final sense of the Greek ειδολων to develop historically -- the term originally meant an appearance or phantom, later on an image (as in a mirror), then a mental image or idea (as in Plato's "Theory of Ideas"), then a mimetic likeness as in a statue or "graven image". In English we retain the same root notion of vacuity in the word "idle".

And a dogma is just idle words: it is what one believes or holds to be true ('tenet' comes from the Latin tenere meaning "to hold") -- usually a philosophical belief, and not always one that is justified (for Bacon a philosophical dogma was prima facie suspect, since it was not derived from nature but from the self-spun web of human ideas and language). Because karma is a Sanskrit term that means "action", when we say "my karma ran over my dogma" we essentially mean that actions speak louder than words. Tenets, anyone?

Posted on 2002-04-07 at 21:45. File under language.

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2002-04-04

Isolationism

What are those libertarians thinking?

Virginia Postrel links off to essays by Brink Lindsey and Jay Manifold on the isolationist, anti-war, indeed anti-state strain of thinking in contemporary libertarianism. She also provides some reflections of her own. I detect a bit in her thinking of what I've always perceived as the conservative tilt of Reason Magazine, the journal she long edited. At the same time I recognize that the anarcho-capitalists don't have a coherent answer to the question of national defense (other than to recommend that we do away with nations), and that to claim that pulling out of all international relations would magically make terrorism against Americans evaporate is wishful thinking at best.

George Washington counselled against entangling alliances, and we're certainly caught in those snares now -- supporting Israel with one hand and Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia with the other. My old friend James Robbins once wrote an article that argued for a "muscular libertarianism", in which the USA would flex its muscles as appropriate and be actively engaged in the world to spread the culture and politics of freedom. I'm not sure which position I'm more comfortable with. International relations are notoriously messy. As I wrote last month, I don't want to be a citizen of the empire, and I don't want America to degenerate into an empire that attempts to project its power all over the globe. I feel that the USA has meddled in the affairs of too many nations and that it has propped up way too many authoritarian regimes, from Central America to Asia to the Middle East. We'd be better off today if we had been more discerning and principled about our international partners. Yet today we're also facing an unprecedented threat -- a many-headed terrorist beast that could, for all I know, appear tomorrow in the form of suicide bombers throughout America and the world. How do we protect American citizens (and world citizens) against such an amorphous enemy?

Given the abject failure of government agencies like the INS, national ID cards and an ever-more-vigorous prosecution of the war on drugs are not the answer to terrorism. Yet we're dealing with a meme that I can only call primitivist -- and these 8th-century mentalities are armed to the teeth. I would hope that there is a way for the answer to involve more freedom, not less. Let's not forget that the September 11th atrocities occurred in one of the only zones (airports) in which American citizens are by law not allowed to carry the means of self-defense (another such zone consists of government-run schools -- can you say Columbine?). When the victims are disarmed, the predators will be attracted to the opportunity to wreak mayhem. But I suppose the politicians don't care -- they've all got bodyguards and Secret Service agents to protect them.

But that gets us into the whole gun issue. It's getting a bit late to delve into that one tonight, other than to note that Cathy Young has a good, short article on the topic over at reason.com right now.

Posted on 2002-04-04 at 21:36. File under politics.

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FO Redux

Posting my XSL-FO examples.

My Jabber buddy pgmillard asked me the other day about my experiments with XSL-FO. I'm not an XSL-FO guru by any stretch of the imagination and there is much I need to learn about the technology, but I promised him I'd post links to what I've done so he could have an example or two to work from. (Yes, we're back to that whole "view source" ethic.) So here are the files that resulted from my work on XSL-FO, from XML source through XSLT and FO to finished PDF:

  • XML source file for a collection of poems and translations by yours truly
  • XSLT stylesheet for transforming my XML format into FO
  • FO file (note that this is the biggest of the bunch!)
  • PDF file that resulted from running the FO file through FOP

While I'm at it, here is a collection of web pages I found helpful in learning about XSL-FO:

Posted on 2002-04-04 at 21:13. File under technology.

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Jabber Rolls On

Headlines from the Jabber front.

It seems that DJ Adams and Piers Harding, part of the growing contingent of UK-based Jabber developers, have been cooking up some fun code related to publish/subscribe systems. Piers has posted an early version of a pubsub component that implements the protocol DJ proposed in JEP-0024. In addition, DJ has been hard at work with folks from Userland and the Radio 8.0 community to build bridges between Jabber and Radio. As Dave Winer notes, this rates a definite "Bing!". DJ told me that he's implemented the stuff on the left side of this diagram, while Jeremy Bowers has built the connecting pieces on the Radio end of the diagram. The result? Further integration between the worlds of Jabber, pubsub, weblogging, Userland, and Radio 8. Well done, chaps!

In other news, as I have posted over on jabber.org, the Worldwide Lexicon project has chosen Jabber as the medium in and from which they will build a distributed, worldwide dictionary service. What a cool concept!

Posted on 2002-04-04 at 15:01. File under jabber.

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RSS Revisited

On designing a Jabber headline service.

I've spent the last few evenings starting to design a Jabber-based headline service. This will be an external server component written in C++ on top of the JECL libraries. I've never written anything in C++ before so this should be a learning experience -- which is part of the point, naturally. My forays into Jabber development so far have been client-based software (bots) written in Perl or Python, so this is a big leap for me. Last night I finished a first pass at a design document for the headline service, and pgmillard said it looked pretty good so I take that as a positive sign. :) I'll try to finish the design process this weekend (still need those sequence diagrams!) and then start on coding next week. It's been a long time since we had any RSS notifications in Jabber, so it'll be cool if I can get this working!

Oh, and it's a new month, isn't it? Last month's blog entries are here if you're interested in reading -- the index page looks rather sparse with just one entry... :) I guess I'll try to blog a bit more tonight.

Posted on 2002-04-04 at 10:55. File under technology.

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