21 Apr 2004
I’ve contemplated writing some software to handle bookmark synchronization in Mozilla Firebird (between computers). I’ve been side-tracked lately with rea
l work, but I came across this. It’s a bookmark synchronizer that uses FTP t
o export your firebird bookmarks into xbel and ship them to an ftp site of your choice. You can then hookup your other browsers and have them download the
xbel bookmarks from the ftp site. I develop both at home and the office and like to have some commonality in my bookmarks between the two locations. Tra
ditionally I’ve just exported from mozilla and manually transfered the bookmarks across and imported manually. A bit of a pain to say the least.
The firebird extension is not perfect, but works alright. It might be nice if it did the file transfers over ssh but I can live with ftp for now. Additio
nally, it doesn’t look like it has the ability to merge remote and local bookmark files so that may cause problems if you are simultaneously modifying book
marks on different systems.
My original plan for a Java implementation was centered on a distributed system. I don’t have much experience in the area and wanted something that would
force me to check out Jini, JXTA and the like. No luck so far but perhaps I’ll have some time in the future.
Bottom line, if you have multiple systems and want to facilitate some sharing of the bookmarks, check out the ‘Bookmark Synchronizer’ extension for Mozilla
Firebird. It’d be nice if there was such a thing built into my RSS reader (Straw), but for now I
can live with the manual exports.
17 Apr 2004
I’ve been thinking about this sometime and figured I’d throw the idea out and see who else is on the same wavelength.
Problem: Email and blogging (reading) is a significant part of my profession life. I’m a software developer by trade, specifically in the
areas of Java/J2EE mixed with biotech, and reading various blogs helps me keep up to date. Now, in Linux, afaik I’m forced to help two seperate application
s running. In my case, Evolution for email and Straw for blog reading. In my perfect world, these two applications would be integrated ala the NewsGator pl
ugin for Outlook (never used it, but it looks like what I had in mind). To take things a step further, I’ve been reading on Robert Scoble’s blog about his
experiences with OutlookMT. As I understand it, it’s an Outlook-integrated plugin that allows him to directly drag-and-drop items that should be posted on
his blog. I think that’s pretty slick but given my rather low volume of posts, something I don’t need yet.
Possible Solution: Integrate one of the existing RSS-readers with Evolution. I personally use Straw (python-based) which is imho an excell
ent reader. It’d be nice to see it integrated with Evolution, perhaps adding a ‘News’ folder and shortcut that takes you to your list of feeds. Just someth
ing nice and simple that saves me from having multiple applications performing seperate but conceptually similar tasks (I don’t consider it a stretch to th
ink about an RSS-feed as if it were a mailing list.).
This is more a post to see what kind of interest there is out there for such integration. I really don’t know the feasibility nor do I really have enough f
ree time to make a serious attempt at it. However, I’d be willing to contribute if people are interested in putting forth a collaborative effort.
Anyways, it’s a feature I’d like to one day see implemented and would help the open-source community keep pace with some of the recent windows-only advance
ments i’ve been reading about.
27 Nov 2003
Ok, maybe its not totally a commercial world but heres the situation…
I’m involved in the development of a grid computing project with the primary goal of facilitating the sharing of data.
Choosing to go with the globus toolkit was pretty much a no brainer, its seemingly far along, has a fair number of users, and is easily deployable within t
he open-source world.
The Globus Toolkit integrates rather seemlessly with tomcat but also comes with its own web services container which for this particular project was ideal.
We’re running a JDK1.4.2 environment and all is well…
Introduce Websphere
Now I used to consider IBM a good company, but after getting down and dirty with their app server, portal server and eclipse-based development environment,
I’d put my trust in their software at about the same level as Sun and iPlanet. My biggest peeve is the lack of support, by the major players, for anything
beyond JDK1.3 and old GLIBC’s. Listen all you commercial application server (and DB for that matter), I don’t want to have to radically modify my developm
ent environment to fit in with your world, and I shouldn’t have to. I don’t even want to get into the costs of these servers and development licenses, but
for what its worth, one would expect these companies to at least make an effort to support a JDK that has been released for over a year or updated operatin
g systems that were released over a year ago (notably RedHat 9.0, which is still unsupported by many pieces of IBM’s enterprise software).
Note to companies: If you’re expecting developers to do cutting edge things with your tool sets, make an effort to ensure that you’re going to make sure th
ey have the proper support. I don’t want to bombarded with press about how great and easily it would be to develop grid apps in your environment, only to f
ind out that I have to re-invent the wheel because existing solutions won’t run b/c simple library conflicts.
Thats enough of a rant for today. I will credit IBM with providing a relatively decent management interface for Websphere Application Server. If only they
could get their act together on their messy Partnerworld download site.