Mark Roseman's Blog

Three Hours Later...

We setup the guest bedroom as a full second office, so Pauline could use it for studying, since she'll be around more often during the day and having more to do in the coming months. Before that we were both sharing the main office area (a 300-ish sq. ft. loft), with the guest bedroom as a place either of us could use as another work area if we wanted a closed door etc. The new setup for her looks great.

As part of that, she moved her computer (a five year old Win98 laptop) in there as well. Rather than running Ethernet cables we bought a wireless card (only $100). Getting it to work, all I can say is, its definitely not a Mac. Took several hours of futzing to get it to talk to our Airport and then properly routing traffic. Some of the things that needed to be mucked with are not exactly the kind of thing ma-and-pa consumer are going to figure out either. Scary.

Time to Start Gearing Down for a Few Days.

Got (hopefully) the final builds for 2.6 done; barring any problems that will go out on Tuesday.

Pauline has a week off, so we're going to get away for a few days, Friday to Monday. Good time for a break. She's starting to sort through job and/or fellowship stuff too, as well as starting to study for her exams in April/May.

We had a monk from Finland as a house guest last night (cousin of Pauline's, but it sounds weirder that way).

Time to finish up some other odds and ends...

ActiveState gets Bought.

Bought by another anti-spam company. Good for all the investors and owners at ActiveState (and hopefully the employees, though the valuation isn't that stunning to my eyes). I can't imagine the open source stuff kicking around there for very long, unfortunately for Jeff, Andreas et. al., but such is life.

Java is the SUV of programming tools.

Jean-Claude passed along this entry from Philip Greenspun's blog. I haven't done any Java web programming, but looked at it a fair bit (confused as to why bother..), so this article seemed spot on.

Eolas vs. Microsoft Patent Update.

While I'm not hugely in favour of patents like these in the first place, I don't think this one is completely out of left field, and I'm happier when the smaller guys have them and the bigger guys. No bias of course, what with Mike also being a member of the Tcl/Tk community, and a nice guy the times I've chatted with him at conferences, etc.

VoodooPad API.

Looks like the newest version of VoodooPad now has an API, allowing it to talk to a server-based Wiki (VoodooPad is a fairly popular Wiki like app but runs single user as a desktop application, Mac only). I exchanged some email with Gus at Flying Meat, and there might well be the possibility of hooking this into CourseForum and ProjectForum, which could be very cool.

Lots of CF/PF Coding.

Got a fair bit of stuff into the 2.6 release of CourseForum/ProjectForum so far... a good mix of new features, bug fixes, markup enhancements, etc. I've posted a beta if you've got access to the internal site.

Microsoft's Web Conferencing Service.

Newly introduced; this is based on their acquisition of PlaceWare earlier of course. It'll be interesting to see how all this evolves. My hope is that this will raise the profile of web conferencing at least, and maybe then some other company might benefit... I'd really love to have my lottery ticket be worth something one day!

CF/PF 3.0 Ideas.

Starting to update the CF/PF internal site (let me know if you don't have access and would like to request it) with possible 'centerpiece' features for version 3.0. I think where the product is now it stands as a very solid and well-packaged Wiki application, but I'd like to see 3.0 deliver something to take it beyond that.

Both Raymond and Jean-Claude are already coming up with some other ideas for me, which is fantastic...!

Wiki Discussion.

Good discussion on some "big picture" Wiki things on Don Park's blog. I sent him my thoughts on a couple of things which he's posted there.