Older blog entries for ldodds (starting at number 5)

So I'm extremely busy in my day job, as I'm temporarily managing an engineering team that are close to an application release.

However I need time to do 'something different'. And while I'm currently daunted by the amount of XML-DEV activity to catch up on, I found a useful displacement activity in getting involved in a conversation on the cocoon-dev mailing list about documentation.

I suggested (and I don't think this is the first time it's been suggested) that they use a Wiki as a means of capturing documentation, perhaps culled from the mailing list. It's also a useful environment for collaborative editing.

The suggestion went down well. It also looks like we've avoided (narrowly) the usual open source/engineer rat-holes ("lets build a Cocoon based Wiki!").

Happily someone set up a site based around JSPWiki which is my current favourite -- it's not got a huge number of features, but it's very easy to install, configure and maintain. I'm using it for my personal Wiki into which I dump my research notes.

Last night I took the time to pull my Cocoon-related content out of my site, and into the Cocoon Documentation Wiki -- largely a cut-and-paste effort. This has the happy effect of allowing me to finally publish a whole raft of material I've been accumulating, as well as adding some additional momentum to the idea.

Things seem to be ticking along nicely, and others have begun adding content too.

Updated the FOAF-a-matic.

Pulled together the W3C's HTML Tidy and XSLT services to create the FOAF Bulletin Board. Thats how easy Web Services should be IMO.

Well I have Debian installed -- turned out I was using the wrong server to grab packages from. I was relying on the defaults presented by the install, but for 3.0 you need to override these (at the moment anyway).

So it's all installed, just need to get on and configure various services and devices. Haven't touched it for a few days because I was away.

I hacked up a Javascript application today -- the FOAF-a-matic to generate FOAF descriptions automatically. Don't know what FOAF is? It stands for "Friend of a Friend" and is a way to describe yourself in RDF. Edd Dumbill's "XML Watch: Finding friends with XML and RDF" is a good starting point.

28 Jun 2002 (updated 28 Jun 2002 at 15:28 UTC) »

Currently in the process of transferring my domain to it's new home and investigating how painful it'll be to install Debian on my laptop.

I've messed about with Linux previously (a Red Hat distro) but this is the first time I've seriously looked at using it as my main work machine. No doubt this admission will bump me back down to Observer level! :)

23 Jul 2001 (updated 23 Jul 2001 at 12:50 UTC) »

I've managed to update eclectic (my 'blog tracking the XML-DEV mailing list) for five straight days now. Lets hope I can get back into the groove I was in during the first of last year when I barely missed a day. Kind of lost the thread of things after I got married! :)

I even managed 4 xmlhack stories yesterday. Must be because I've started drinking coffee again.

If there are any XML developers out there writing SAX based applications, you might be interested in this article I wrote recently: "The Collected Works of SAX". The XML-DEV folk are interested in collecting a series of links to open source SAX utility code to begin compiling a library of useful utility code. I'm particularly interested in SAX filters.

If you've got code to share, please email me and I'll compile a list.

I've got a bundle of bits and pieces of code that I need to dust off, tidy up and then stick up on the web. Probably the most interesting bit is a package (working title 'gauze') that manages SAX processing pipelines. Just need to get the time to finish off the initial release. Never seem to have enough 'round tuits' though.

Promisingly I've just moved into a new role as a full-time researcher at ingenta, so that should mean more time spent hacking bibliographic metadata, RDF, XML, and all that interesting stuff.

Started drafting some notes on an application for mining data from archived mailing lists the other night. I'll try and post these soon.

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