Advogato blog for mindcrime

OpenQabal 0.0.3 available

Sun, 11 May 2008 02:22:37 GMT

OpenQabal 0.0.3 has been released and is now available from the SVN repo. As with previous releases, there are not yet pre-built binary releases available... you will have to check the code out from SVN and build it. Thankfully this process is now *much* easier as a result of massive work on the build system and the addition of scripts to automate most of the tedious stuff. You can now essentially build and install OpenQabal with 4 commands.

Changes in this release include:

New, more modular build system using Ivy for dependency management and incorporating useful tools such as FindBugs, JDepend, PMD, TestNG, Cobertura, etc.
New "User Dashboard" component that provides the main point of entry and ties the various components together visually
Concordantly with the introduction of the new User Dashboard, all of the old Sitemesh stuff has been ripped out
New configure and install scripts to automate most of the tedious parts of building and installing OpenQabal
Addition of many unit tests (we still don't have 100% test coverage, but progress has been made)
New "IdentityEngine" component introduced (more on this later)
Posting blogs using MetaWeblogAPI now works with the OpenQabal IdentityEngine component
Various minor bug fixes and tweaks

This release is a huge step in the direction of having a really usable system, but there is still a LOT of work to be done. Some things that had originally been planned for this release had to be deferred to 0.0.4, with OpenID support being the most notable such item. And of course there are still plenty of ideas on the roadmap that we haven't even gotten started on yet. But we're now in a lot better position to be able to start on some of the more interesting stuff, such as the "distributed conversation" support, tools for building a managing the "social graph," etc.

Look for a new post soon with more discussion of what the roadmap will look in the near future, as well as some discussion of some of the important changes that did make it into 0.0.3. And with any luck, the long-awaited "demo server" will be coming soon, as well as some screencasts and other ways of exploring OpenQabal.

2 more tasks until OpenQabal 0.0.3 can be released

Sun, 4 May 2008 22:10:01 GMT

Finally getting closer and closer to getting this OpenQabal release out. The last two tasks to do are: A. verify the new SQL which includes a "seed" admin user, and B. make the install/config/uninstall scripts and any utility scripts working on Windows. Most of that stuff is in Ruby so it should be pretty portable, but there are some Bash scripts which will need equivalents written as DOS batch files. Ugh. Still, this stuff should be done soon, maybe tonight, which means the release should happen in the next day or two.

In other news, I've started working on getting setup with Amazon EC2, in order to host a "demo" instance of OpenQabal.

And after that, I think I need to go on holiday for a while. :-)

OpenQabal Update

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 04:12:26 GMT

Ok, the new OpenQabal release that was mentioned a few weeks ago is *finally* eminent. No really, it's coming soon. The big hold-up turned out to be a bit of Roller integration that had been overlooked. Getting single-sign-on and integration with the centralized identity stuff working using Acegi and CAS takes care of web access; and that stuff has been in place for a while now. But at some point we realized that API access for posting new blog entries also needed to be wired into the new authentication stuff. And that's a whole new can of worms.

Basically, deciding to implement that in this release meant moving forward with implementing an initial version of what we're calling the IdentityEngine, which will eventually be the centralized source for all things identity, vis-a-vis OpenQabal. Even for OpenID logins or other logins using an external authentication provider, OpenQabal has to keep track of that that that such-and-such identity exists, and map it to resources, etc. So getting this piece in place was kind of a big deal, even if this first cut at it is fairly naive.

Anyway, with that in place and API access now working, the last things left to do before a release are basically all "fit and polish" work. Clean up some loose ends here and there, more testing, tweaking the SQL scripts and the install scripts. Oh, and the install stuff needs to be tested on Windows and any relevant tweaks made. At any rate, if things go well, look for the new release maybe this weekend, or early next week.

Update on my Data Portability presentation @ "Refresh The Triangle"

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 20:18:08 GMT

So apparently there was some miscommunication or whatever, and I'm not going to be presenting at this month's Refresh The Triangle after all. I am, however, now officially "on the hook" to present a talk on Data Portability at the September "Refresh" meeting. The actual date will be Thursday, Sept. 25, 2008. Location TBD, as far as I know. Check the Refresh website for more details.

Google is now an OpenID provider: Use your Google account to sign into any site that accepts OpenID

Wed, 9 Apr 2008 04:12:22 GMT

It appears that Google is now an OpenID provider, which means you can log into any site which allows OpenID logins using a Google account. This is a pretty big win for OpenID in terms of putting even more momentum behind the protocol. Of course the truth still holds - as said before - that "it doesn't matter if everybody and their brother is an OpenID provider, if nobody allows OpenID logins." But the number of sites that do accept OpenID appears to be growing and an endorsement by Google can't hurt in terms of encouraging others to move in that direction.

Unfortunately this blog itself doesn't actually support OpenID logins, which is something of a bummer. It'll be fun when we reach a point where we can go "self-hosted" using OpenQabal and use this blog as a place to play with some of the new and nifty stuff coming down the pipe. With some luck, that'll happen before the entropic heat death of the universe. <big-grin / >

The Economist: Social Networks Are Not A Business

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 10:17:16 GMT

Just stumbled across an interesting article from The Economist which makes an case that social networks, ala Facebook, Orkut, Myspace, etc., are not a business. Or rather, that the "social network" per-se is not valid as a business model in and of itself.

From the article:

Social networking appears to be similar in this regard. The big internet and media companies have bid up the implicit valuations of MySpace, Facebook and others. But that does not mean there is a working revenue model. Sergey Brin, Google's co-founder, recently admitted that Google's “social networking inventory as a whole” was proving problematic and that the “monetisation work we were doing there didn't pan out as well as we had hoped.” Google has a contractual agreement with News Corp to place advertisements on its network, MySpace, and also owns its own network, Orkut. Clearly, Google is not making money from either.

Facebook, now allied to Microsoft, has fared worse. Its grand attempt to redefine the advertising industry by pioneering a new approach to social marketing, called Beacon, failed completely. Facebook's idea was to inform a user's friends whenever he bought something at certain online retailers, by running a small announcement inside the friends' “news feeds”. In theory, this was to become a new recommendation economy, an algorithmic form of word of mouth. In practice, users rebelled and privacy watchdogs cried foul. Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, admitted in December that “we simply did a bad job with this release” and apologised.

Of course the point here isn't to disparage the usefulness of social networks, in fact, they article goes on to elaborate on how ubiquitous social networking (as opposed to "social networks") may become (emphasis added):

So it is entirely conceivable that social networking, like web-mail, will never make oodles of money. That, however, in no way detracts from its enormous utility. Social networking has made explicit the connections between people, so that a thriving ecosystem of small programs can exploit this “social graph” to enable friends to interact via games, greetings, video clips and so on.

Coming up for air
But should users really have to visit a specific website to do this sort of thing? “We will look back to 2008 and think it archaic and quaint that we had to go to a destination like Facebook or LinkedIn to be social,” says Charlene Li at Forrester Research, a consultancy. Future social networks, she thinks, “will be like air. They will be anywhere and everywhere we need and want them to be.” No more logging on to Facebook just to see the “news feed” of updates from your friends; instead it will come straight to your e-mail inbox, RSS reader or instant messenger. No need to upload photos to Facebook to show them to friends, since those with privacy permissions in your electronic address book can automatically get them.

The problem with today's social networks is that they are often closed to the outside web. The big networks have decided to be “open” toward independent programmers, to encourage them to write fun new software for them. But they are reluctant to become equally open towards their users, because the networks' lofty valuations depend on maximising their page views—so they maintain a tight grip on their users' information, to ensure that they keep coming back. As a result, avid internet users often maintain separate accounts on several social networks, instant-messaging services, photo-sharing and blogging sites, and usually cannot even send simple messages from one to the other. They must invite the same friends to each service separately. It is a drag.

Of course this closely parallels what Om Malik was saying a while back in his Are Social Networks Just a Feature? article. Specifically, Om says "It is time to rethink the whole notion of social networking, and start thinking of it as a feature for other online activities. "

Needless to say, we here at OpenQabal agree, and are one of a handful of projects working on creating software to support "social networking as a feature." That's not to say that when OQ is finished you couldn't take it, put an instance on the public 'Net, and position it as a Facebook competitor. It's just that we think doing so would be a really bad idea, if you plan to make money.

An interesting discussion about Data Portability

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 07:11:29 GMT

If you've been following the whole Data Portability scene with any interest, there's an interesting discussion going on here that is worth reading / participating in. Obviously there's still a lot of disagreement about certain aspects of this whole thing, but hopefully things will coalesce sooner than later and the discussion will become even more pragmatic.

On a related note, I'm tentatively scheduled to present on the subject of Data Portability at next month's Refresh The Triangle event, so any Triangle area folks who are interested, please do come out and take part.

In the mean-time, I have to do some catching up with what the current areas of focus, themes, patterns, etc. are among the players in this space. I'm a little behind on reading the DP list, so it's time to get back into that conversation a little more earnestly. And even more so if OpenQabal is going to implement "Data Portability" (which, of course, depends on what that turns out to be!).

Also, the technical documentation section of the dataportability.org site has some interesting reading for anybody who's trying to understand what this whole discussion is about. In particular, see the use cases section.

OpenSocial Foundation

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 10:15:59 GMT

Old news by now, but I wanted to comment real quick on the announced OpenSocial Foundation. In light of my previous comments about the status of the OpenSocial specification(s), I am happy to see this:

Today we are pleased to announce that Google is joining together with Yahoo! and MySpace in the creation of a non-profit foundation for the open and transparent governance of the OpenSocial specifications and intellectual property. This foundation, modeled after the community-led and industry-supported OpenID Foundation, will seek to ensure that the technology behind OpenSocial remains implementable by all, freely and without restriction, in perpetuity. The establishment of the foundation is a necessary and exciting next step toward an open model for application syndication via an increasingly socially-enabled Internet, and we invite and encourage your involvement as we complete this process over the next several months.

I'm not sure about the creation of a new organization to do this work,as opposed to working with an existing standards body, but I suppose this is - at minimum - a positive step in the right direction. At best, it means we can put fears about the status of the OpenSocial spec(s) to rest.

More info at:

Google
TechCrunch
CNet
Mashable
ReadWriteWeb
CenterNetworks
GigaOM
ProgrammableWeb
FaceReviews
EWeek
InformationWeek
InfoWorld
ComputerWorld
CIO Insight

New OpenQabal Release Coming Soon

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 08:11:29 GMT

The last month has been an interesting time for OpenQabal. Thanks to my previous employer graciously laying me off from my job about 5 weeks ago, I've had the opportunity to spend most of the last month essentially working on OpenQabal full-time. A lot of progress has been made, and I anticipate making a formal 0.0.3 release soon, probably within the next week.

Some of the changes that will appear (this does not, btw, map exactly to the previous road-map. As they say, "planning is essential, but a plan is useless.")

New, more modular build system using Ivy for dependency management and incorporating useful tools such as FindBugs, JDepend, PMD, TestNG, Cobertura, etc.
New "User Dashboard" component that provides the main point of entry and ties the various components together visually
Concordantly with the introduction of the new User Dashboard, all of the old Sitemesh stuff has been ripped out
New configure and install scripts to automate most of the tedious parts of building and installing OpenQabal
Addition of many unit tests (we still don't have 100% test coverage, but progress has been made)
Various minor bug fixes and tweaks
Probably some other stuff I'm forgetting

Unfortunately a couple of things that I'd hoped to get in a 0.0.3 release are going to have to be deferred, with the most notable being OpenID login support. However, a subsequent 0.0.4 release should be around in relatively short order, and will include OpenID and - if things go well - a number of other big improvements.

Unfortunately I have to go back to work for "the man" now so that I can pay my rent, so I won't be able to spend quite as much time on OpenQabal. But things will continue to move forward. There may actually be some even bigger news in the near future, so stay tuned.

Prolog? I'm going to learn Prolog?

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 07:12:32 GMT

Sometime ago I blogged about the availability of some great resources for learning Prolog. At the time, the available materials I'd found were:

Now, thanks to programming.reddit.com, I've found a couple of additional references on Prolog, which are also freely available online.

Simply Logical: Intelligent Reasoning by Example
and
Logic, Programming and Prolog

Luckily there are also a number of high quality implementations of Prolog available, including GNU Prolog, SWI Prolog and Ciao Prolog.

Now to find some time to dig in... and figure out what part(s) of OpenQabal to write in Prolog.

Edit (03-30-200): Apropos, this link just appeared at the top of programming.reddit.com. Good stuff.