Older blog entries for highgeek (starting at number 24)

Code and Work

Started playing again with some XML tools. There have been a lot of cool ones coming out, since I last checked, to validate DTD/schemas and allow you to edit with a DTD restricting you. Tools such as Xeena, DDbE and some of David Megginson's additions to PSGML for XPointer. Also looks like PSGML is being shelved onto source forge with hopes others will contribute. I hope this doesn't mean I need to give up my trusty emacs.

Sablotron latest versions do not ./configure anymore on my FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE system because of the lack of ANSI C Wide Character support. Lots of talk on FreeBSD mailing lists, so I guess this will be done soon. There have been lots of code flying around including talks of integrating code from the CITRUS project or xpg4dl which got imported by NetBSD. I had some code off the list that I played with for a while, but figured I should probably downgrade for now to 0.44 of Sablotron till the wchar stuff gets integrated into FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT.

Music

Hit up just about every record shop that I know of in Downtown Berkeley over the weekend from Amoeba, Rasputin to Skills DJ Workshop. It was a pretty good run (read bad for my wallet.) and I got some Tilt, Christian West, Squaremeter, Clicks and Cuts and other stuff. Still kinda bummed I didn't pick up the new Cass: Cerebral Noodles EP (Really need to watch for is Fire Recordings stuff. Should be good.) Oh well, I got more chances to get things. My girlfriend got her Chicane fix from the Xtravaganza tab at Skills. It was pretty interesting to see her face light up with the fact they actually had a tab for one of her favorite labels.

I need to check out some the places in the Haight Area such as Frequency-8, BPM and others. I will doing some traveling between San Diego and San Francisco on a semi-regular basis (not like I haven't been), so it will be interesting to what the differences will be between Off the Record, CSL, Equinox and the Bay Area shops.

Anyways.. till next time.

I have recently discovered the Recent Log and now read that on a semi regular basis to see what is going on in this world. It is a great way to find new people and see what they are spending their time on.

Code and Work

I have been doing a lot of research and reading of ISO and IETF documents lately. It is always good to keep up on internet drafts especially those that you might not find later cause they do not become RFCs. I have been refreshing my memory and learning new technologies. It has been fun.

I just can't wait to get my hands dirty again in coding. I have also been looking at the Apache 2.0 build/configure infrastructure and try to rebuild the -srcdir and --shadow flags. The problem is related to dependancies on apr and apr-util which can only be defined with --with-apr which does seperate the source from the object and generated files. I enjoy keeping these seperate in most of my projects and I am kinda bummed that it doesn't work right now. On a related note, my ApacheCon 2001 talk got accepted. So this means I will be giving people a pretty basic introduction to how to configure apache to make it suitable for Audio downloading, streaming, semi-streaming etc. Quite different from my past talks, but change is good.

San Diego

I spend the last weekend at home in San Diego with my girlfriend. We spend most of sunday hanging out along the beach by our home. It was really a perfect time, well except the fact that our digital camera ran out of batteries. I also spend a good amount of time hitting up different record shops and building out my vinyl collection and some more rare stuff on CDs. I have been spinning roughly about 3 hours each day that weekend and hopefully I didn't annoy our upstairs neighbors too much.

Online Audio/P2P

Out of the online audio space and especially napster we find ourselves in this new Peer-2-Peer craze. To a point where O'Reilly actuall has a conference and website about this. The idea to me is more like IRC turned WEB. Things like IMs like Jabber and the like. So if P2P is really getting this popular, the next step would be to make global DAP type services to "hook up" people with shared interests. The Register has Microsoft preps Napster clone, which definately makes you wonder where this idea will end up. In an Interview, Lawrence Lessig states an obvious but valid point.

"But now the real danger is that the recording industry has succeeded in its objective, which as Hillary Rosen (president and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America) said, is to guarantee that no venture capitalist invests money in new modes of distribution unless Hollywood signs off. Well, that's to reinforce an old model of creativity that I think the Internet has the opportunity to destroy. "

This might partially be catalyzed by the financial hit, but still the big five might get their way in retaining their power to stay in the old fashioned way of thinking. So much for revolutionizing the way we do things.

Happy New Year! It has been almost 4 months since my last confes^H^H^H^H^H^Hentry. The last few months have been busy and somewhat stressful. Trying to figure out how I want my personal life to continue. What color to dye my hair next? etc. Trying to keep a personal life in two places at the same time is very difficult and very hard. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone, it is almost like choosing between fun work with great people and a personal life outside of work.. I really wish that I could be in two places at the same time.

Code and Work

I haven't really written a lot of code lately. I have been spending most of my time doing research on different technologies and trying to get a better understanding of the space. Some of the work is somewhat familiar to me, but it is kinda scary to see how much has changed in just a few weeks. Although it has been very educational and enjoyable to be able to spend some time getting the hang of new technologies such as attending the 49th IETF. I will be happy to back in the code. I have written a few proposals for different conferences so we will see if those stirred up any interest. Now lets hope the coding doesn't involve too much crunch time when it does become time.

Dee Jay-ing

I have been a music fanatic for a long time and spend a fair time playing keys, I have recently picked up moving into upgrading some of my DJ gear. I picked up a pair of legendary SL-1200MK2s to suplement my CMX-5k and got a new DJM-600 Mixer. I really love the new set up. It is very scalable and flexable, now only if I could find the time to play with it more and get good enough to creatively mix some of my more obscure musical desires for the harder edge. Maybe one of these days I will feel more comfortable to give you all a taste.

ApacheCon 2000 Europe

Back from ApacheCon Europe. It was pretty good. I met a lot of people I had never met face to face before, and overall got a better vibe of things and where things are going in the future. Talked with the author of AxKit Matt Sergeant, gstein, rbb, sterling, wrowe, daniel, Jick and many others. I finally lived up to my reputation by attending the conference with greenish blue hair.

needless to say there was much rejoicing with english ales and bitters.

Back to work

Now that I am back I am updating and working some more on the Apache Mailing List Archives, yes wrowe, search is still one of the things I am working on. ;-) But better support for different charsets is also a thing I am working on with some of the better support in the CVS versions of AxKit.

Advogato Certification

Another comment on wrowe diary, I must say that I am actually quite happy with being a Journeyer, since I really do not feel that I have contributed enough to Open Source to qualify as a master. There are a lot of things I would like to see and things I would like to do better, the archive being one, and hopefully we will get to a point where I might feel I might deserve the certification

I am currently kicking it in london for ApacheCon. Hanging out with many including Jick, daniel, dirkx and others.

I will put up some pictures of this weekend which was a group of about 30 people hacking on Apache projects with some minor 56k connectivity to the net. ;-)

Tonight there is mod_perl get together at a local pub. Should be fun.

Last week I was at BSDCon, which was a lot of fun as well. fanf went up for only a day or two, just to kick it with us and to have some beers and visit a few sessions.

Hack SDMI "Hacked?"

According to this Salon arcticle, the watermarks have been hacked. So much for the boycott. I guess we will get to see what this means to SDMI.

Inside has the SDMI response to the article.

Hack SDMI Boycott

As brought up on several music and technology sites, SDMI is looking for someone to hack their latest watermarking. After doing a little hacking, I realized that however much fun it was, it really didn't matter.

Since we really want to find something that allows for our current "fair use" rights, having what we have now would be a good solution from the consumer perspective. As an artist this might be a little bit of a different story, but you definately would like to make your own decisions and get compensated for your work, rather then giving a huge share to the record labels.

After getting several "employment opportunities" from different label projects such as Sony's "digital locker" project. I really look at this as an attempt to undermine the consumers interest. Therefore, as an EFF member, I am Boycotting the HackSDMI challenge. Whose servers, ironicly, sit only a single hop away from my co-lo box.

This salon article (note: I am currently working in the ex-salon offices in San Francisco.) Points out some interesting view points of some of the technology industry members of the SDMI. Although, I think they might have a point,, I still think probably the best way to ensure consumers rights is to Boycott the challenge. Hopefully they will then go live with a technology that is seriously broken and we can go on with life.

Mailing List Archive

Things seem much more stable. I am working on cleaning up the layout a little bit. Making it more plain in a hope the pages will load faster and will format a little better. Slowly but surely things are getting much like the way I envision it. It is still pretty far away from that, but I enjoy the progress I have been seeing in it.

Last night I cut over the Mailing list archive to AxKit which is a mod_perl based XML/XSL-T system that will replace the old Cocoon setup that was giving us JVM Memory issues (not to mention the java 1.3 bugs I ran into).

I also fixed a bug in the code when e-mail was PGP Signed and was a multipart message. Things so far seem to be running pretty good and will allow me to concentrate more on getting the software more mature. I have had some requests by folks to have the code available for use in their projects. This is definately something I am interested in I just need to determine the right way to go about doing this and will provide you with an update when the code is actually available.

As some of you might have noticed, one of my fun projects, Apache Mailing List archives, went live a week or so ago. I rewrote the mailing list software in OO perl from scratch using many of the great modules available on CPAN. Instead of the usual creation of HTML, this rewrite creates XML documents that then can be converted to just about any format using technologies such as XSL-T, XSL-FOP etc. It has MIME attachments support and to a limited extend handles different charsets and message/rfc822 forwarded messages.

I looked at using MHonarc and have it spit out XML instead, but it was totally written in Perl 4 style, which was something I wasn't too thrilled about. So, I decided to write this from scratch. It probably has about 70% or so of MHonarc's functionality, but over time I hope to surpass it.

As some (most?) of you might have noticed the site hasn't been very stable, which is mainly because of JVM memory issues. I currently am using Cocoon which is written in Java. It is one one of the longest publishing frameworks around that use XML and XSL-T, so I was hoping for some stability. I have been playing with the settings, but haven't gotten it to fully work (yet).

I am also playing with other tools such as AxKit which are mod_perl based and something I would be more comfortable hacking on, so it could be we might switch to that in the near future.

Ultimately I would like to see a C apache module that implements most of the functionality in C that would then provide (XS) glue to mod_perl and such if someone wants to do something more dynamic with it. If I can find the time I will probably spend a few nights coding something like that together.

There are still some minor bugs in the current version of my mailing list archive perl code that I hope to fix in the next few days. Once that is fixed I will have to write some documentation with it so people will know how to use it and I will ask the higher powers if they would be alright with me throwing the code on CPAN. I will try to keep you all posted.

Stuff is going pretty well. I will probably post in my next diary about my fun projects. I just read this article on Motley Fool and figured I would pass it along. Definately worth a read.