Older blog entries for gregorrothfuss (starting at number 14)

has last.fm jumped the shark?

last.fm used to give me great recommendations, now it gives me nirvana and nine inch nails when i ask for bands similar to air. looks like the site is being overrun by people with horrible music tastes, alas.

Syndicated 2006-07-04 02:08:17 (Updated 2006-12-01 16:44:06) from gregor

opensourcing the google os

it has long been argued that the google os, particularly MapReduce and GFS, is google's real competitive strength. yahoo, meanwhile, is paying developers to develop clones of these. with seeming consolidation on a common computing platform, and ever-rising data center expenses, you gotta wonder how much sense it makes for the big three to duplicate all that CAPEX. they might be better off outsourcing their datacenters, and sharing some base datasets, such as a crawler cache (kinda like the feedmesh network).

the outsourced company, on the other hand, would end up running a grid with several million nodes and could optimize running costs overall, by using very low power servers, running on an opensourced processor architecture.

Syndicated 2006-06-19 23:27:28 (Updated 2006-12-01 22:44:35) from gregor

the call for papers for OSCOM III is now out. here is the intro paragraph:

Open Source CMS Conference III
Harvard University
April 16-18, 2003 -- , Boston, MA


Call for Participation
Proposals Due: January 15, 2003

The theme of the next OSCOM is "Leveraging content with CMS: authoring and syndication towards the semantic web"
Content management treats content as something static more often than not. Content can be much more than that, though. OSCOM III will show attendees how to make more out of the content that is stored in their CMS, how to make content discoverable, provide annotation and other advanced services. OSCOM III will also explore the frontiers with a look at semantic web technologies, and what they might add to content management in the future.

The theme has several aspects:

  • Content Annotation
  • Content Authoring API
  • Blogger API
  • RDF
  • Dublin Core
  • Multichannel publishing
  • Content discovery
  • Searching
  • Semantic web in general
  • Copyrights, Creative Commons
  • Digital Rights Management

the recent postnuke forks might be a good thing, if the following two things materialize.

embedding technology
postnuke: The Embedded PN initiative will allow us all to leverage all the amazing pieces of php code out there in a fast and reliable way, by allowing client applications to work under PostNuke seemingly. This will hopefully become the PN applications server framework.

dynamic api
envolution: This whould more or less be a direct replacement for the current hooks (autolinks, wiki, and ratings) but would not replace hooks. It would allow for direct api calls to classes that provide functionality for any module to call if it is turned on by the site administrator. So for instance polls and comments could be loaded dymaicly and used within any module as a direct api call. This would allow the wite administrator to add polls directly to a news article. This would also allow comments to be used by any module that you want to allow to use them. For instance you could allow comments on your downloads. This is a small example of the functionality this could provide.

guess where those features will end up.

I have written a master thesis that aims to establish a Open Source Projects Framework.

The historical roots of Open Source are outlined. A comparison between Open Source projects and classical projects highlights strengths and weaknesses of both, and defines their attributes. Existing Open Source theories are evaluated, and the requirements for a framework for Open Source projects are determined. The framework introduces the notions of actors, roles, areas, processes and tools, and depicts their interrelationships in a matrix. Each aspect of the framework is then further developed to serve both as a conceptual foundation for Open Source and a help for organizing and managing Open Source projects.

I would appreciate any feedback, comments, suggestions, rants, corrections at rothfuss at abstrakt ch

deekayen: what you see in postnuke today is indeed not very impressive, and i think you are right that we cannot expect innovations from the old codebase. i have higher hopes for the new codebase that has proper templating among other goodies.
edd: i see you are interested in OSCOM. lets talk :)
deception
the "phoenix" release looks more like a dodo under the hood. consider this gem:
if (isset($format_type_home) && isset($format_type_body)) {

$format_type = ($format_type_body%4)*4 + $format_type_home%4;

}

way to go on the cruft road.

slideml to opml
i have been playing around with xsl to convert slideml to opml, which should allow to use the buzz outliner to write slides when it is finished.

niceguyeddie: i think one aspect that is underappreciated in the various open source organizational models is the fact that some of these groups have been staffed by the same persons for years. this creates consensus because everyone knows everyone else. i dont think that the apache guys arrived at their current model without some roadblocks.

oscom is coming closer. tomorrow i plan to write my slides using our new, fancy slideml.

I had a very interesting conversation with nisheet from netscape today. he heads the xml dom system and several other initiatives, and is now looking for ways to make the browser do more interesting stuff. we talked about how innovations happened pretty much on the server side (cms, j2ee, xml technologies) and that the browser is still stuck with basic forms for most of the gui.

nisheet is eager to learn more about the content management open source community, and to figure out how to work with oscom to make mozilla a better plattform for accessing cms. I mentioned xopus to nisheet as an example for gui innovation, and we mused about ways to provide stuff like xopus for a wide variety of systems.

there is a lot of good technology out there in the browser that needs to be leveraged. nisheet thinks that the interests of mozilla and oscom are well aligned and I have invited him to our mailing list so that we can start the dialogue.

we agreed that discussions should be result-driven, and that we should start to look for issues that we can solve together rather than talk about interop all day :) going forward, we should ask ourselves what mozilla can do for us, and vice versa. that may be a good approach to getting results.

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