Wednesday, 28 April 2004
Stop pulling!
A while ago, herb
contacted me because he was writing his thesis in Brazil. He said he was
very interested in my work on Publish-Subscribe
using Jabber. So, I said: Ask away
. Just now he contacted
me again, stating that he was very interested in testing out Mimír and that he was busy working on
an RSS component for the TYPO3
Content Management System.
I don't know any CMS systems that well, but I am told that TYPO3 is
a great, powerful, Open Source CMS. Herb's plan is to hook up TYPO3 up to
Jabber, using pubsub to publish items to interested parties. Very nice!
I've written
about
Mimír on
a
few
occasions,
and initiatives like this might bring us further to the goal of
having news pushed to you instead of having to pull it yourself.
I've set up a pubsub node
(mimir/news/typo3_test) for him for testing, and had
the Mimír news bot subscribe to it for its accociated channel. The only
thing he has to implement is some magic to send a snippet like this to
the pubsub component:
<iq to="pubsub.ik.nu" type="set">
<pubsub xmlns="http://jabber.org/protocol/pubsub">
<publish node="mimir/news/typo3_test">
<item id="{$url}">
<news xmlns="mimir:news">
<title>{$title}</title>
<link>{$url}</link>
<description>{$description}</description>
</news>
</item>
</publish>
</pubsub>
</iq>
Of course, the stuff in curly brackets needs to be filled in. At
the moment Mimír uses a simple proprietary namespace for holding the
data, but I can imagine using a format like Atom for this instead. Anyway,
herb has not coded anything so far, but I'll keep you posted of his
progress. If anyone is interested, let me know.
By coincidence, I had been thinking about the future of Mimír
again this morning (under the shower, good thinking place). Ideally, when
systems like TYPO3 have pubsub capabilities, you would want to optimize
the distribution of notifications. For now, the pubsub JEP only talks
about direct subscribers, but it would be far more efficient in terms of
bandwidth and speed to have a distribution tree, where the root of the
tree is the original content provider, the leaves are the end users
(human or not), and the nodes in between pubsub repeaters. Compare with
mirrors of websites and the way real world gossiping works.
I think I'll be working on that next. Maybe we need a JEP on that. For verifying the
origin of a notifications, you could use either trusted repeaters, or
signed notifications.
Using the eyes...
Giving the BOFH page another
look, I noticed a little orange button on the bottom of the page. I could
have saved myself the trouble of fixing the scraper, since they have a
nice RSS 2.0 feed
now. They have probably moved to a new CMS, which explains why all the
URLs have changed, and got feeds along the way. Good for The Register.
Missing out on things...
A few of my Mimír channels
had been very quiet recently. One of them was the channel for the BOFH stories over
at The Register. This channel is being screenscraped by a little Perl
script that uses LibXML and LibXSLT to turn the HTML into a nice RSS
file. Then this RSS file is simply aggregated by the modified Janchor
aggregator that feeds Mimír. Aparently, they've also changed the URLs to
the stories, so a lot of old stories came up as being new.
While checking if Janchor now did get the new BOFH feed, I saw a
error warning for 
Dizzyd's blog, Gradual
Epiphany
. Turns out he's moved to Movable Type for holding his
blog, and the URL for the RSS feed also changed. Seems he did not migrate
his archive (yet?), so that is too bad. Need to ping him on that. Also,
it seems he has not sent presence to my site's bot for over a week.
Hmm.
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
Filling the void...
My last entry was about receiving a grade for my Master's.
I didn't really party all the way into today, but I did have fun!
After a two-day vacation (the weekend), I started working as
Scientific Programmer at the Eindhoven University of Technology,
Mechanical Engineering department. I started setting up my environment
(installing my desktop machine with FreeBSD and GNOME), and slowly
started getting to know people and finding out what I am to do over
here.
Since I am the second programmer in the group, we needed a way to
work on code together. CVS came into mind, but we also needed ways to
handle bug reports, feature requests, etc. Also, in the near future,
other people will probably start producing code, in related projects, but
still separate from our stuff. So, I decided to try out GForge, the Open Source variant of
the well-known SourceForge. I found an unused
box (Dual Pentium 350Mhz), and started setting it up. Much fun, since
there is no (good) port to FreeBSD.
Also, the machine this site is hosted on
mag.ik.nu, has been moved to a co-location facility in
Amsterdam on 1 April. This has been a wish for me and a couple of friends
for a long time, and we can now enjoy good bandwidth, and maybe also host
other stuff. With the money collected from that, we might be able to
cover the bills for co-locating the machine.
And a week ago, I finally received my Master's degree
during the official ceremony, so I may call myself Master of Science
from now on. Nice.
More to come...