Mark Roseman's Blog

Smog Day.

Yech... just disgusting coming down the mountain and barely being able to see the other side of the Dundas Valley, even at 6:30am. Definitely one of those things that makes you think twice about living in southern Ontario (though I guess its a good chunk of Ontario and Quebec these days).

Completed a draft of the Tcl paper and proofread it, and put out the ProjectForum 2.3 release. Got a few more people stumbling through the demo site... plan is to announce the beta of the hosting service just after the CourseForum 2.3 release goes out, which should be sometime next week.

Procrastination Day.

Have to spend today working on a paper for the Tcl conference at the end of July. Its about deployment of network apps, and how we built on the Starkit framework for CourseForum/ProjectForum. While I think it'll make for a good presentation, the full paper itself is going to be more than a bit on the boring side to actually write...

RSS Feed in ProjectForum.

Had a little chat about this with Steve Landers last night. Looks like with the proliferation of CF/PF sites associated with the hosting service and demo servers that RSS was implemented right on time. I can easily monitor dozens of these sites, which are grouped together into one item in NetNewsWire. So if someone updates something on the internal beta server, adds some changes to the demo site content on the development server, or just comes in and vandalizes one of the demo servers, I find this all out automatically via their RSS feeds. Awesome!!!

Demo Server.

Spent some time this weekend working on some sample sites to put up on the new demo server. Still got a ways to go... sigh. This is one of those things that I definitely wish I had someone else around to help out with, who was really good at putting such things together. Brad actually did help out by chipping in some material from his portfolio of work, and I'm trying to con him into helping me tweak it somewhat, though its a bad week for him since he's moving shortly. Update: First cuts are here and here.

Damn.

I knew this was going to happen.... start getting busy and don't bother updating this weblog. Just put the wraps on feature development for CF/PF 2.3. Lots of new changes, including RSS support, various formatting enhancements, cross-forum linking, lots of bugs, etc. Also getting the hosting server up and running.. lots of details to get worked out there. Have to write up a paper for the Tcl conference. But soon it'll be time to sit back and do a little bit more medium-term development and marketing planning again.

Typical Wiki Install.

This article says it all. Got to find a way to get the word out...!

Fixing Venture Capital.

Good article by Joel about VC and software companies... yeah, maybe its just the techie types that "don't get it" about the "right way" to do business, but I think we're happier this way, and more likely to create something that will have more of an impact... and more importantly, let us do what we want on our own terms.

Related Work to Proxy Tk.

This site talks about another system similar in idea to Proxy Tk, where a server-side program drives a thin-client GUI. Especially good is the "Related Work" page which lists a number of other such systems.