Ranting and Roaring

Ahem (†Transterrestrial Musings). You should have went with that screeching guy that was going to take South Dakota. At least he believed in something.

Dave Winer writes with regards to licensing Frontier.

1. No breakage. I want old scripts continue to run in new environments. A lot has been invested in code that runs in the Frontier environment, one of the reasons to release the kernel as source is so that those apps will run better, in more operating systems. I want to limit incentives for people to fork based on compatibility. I don’t want to create a dozen semi-clones of Frontier, rather I want to incentivize people to add to the culture, add new features, fix user interface bugs, but not to break apps.

2. I want it to be possible to create a commercial business from the code base. However, I want the general rule to be that if you make an improvement to the code, you must share it on equal terms.

I think these two goals clearly imply a base license that’s GPL-like, with an option for a more liberal license, for either a cash fee, or an agreement to remain compatible, or a combination of fee and agreement. This is a derivative of the MySQL license system.

This are pretty well exactly the same terms under which I want to release Jäger. I was looking at the MySQL license and it doesn’t look like that great a base to start with so I may just try to throw something together very simple myself based on one of the Python licenses and then run it past a friendly lawyer.

Supported by several just-past-teenagers, I did a headstand on a beer keg floating in iced water while I was timed on how long I could consumer beer while doing this. This is apparently called a “keg stand”.

8 seconds, BTW.

Mark Steyn writes:

At the beginning of the year, Thomas Lifson, who was at Harvard Business School with George W Bush, made an interesting observation about the President. He notes that young George “was a very avid and skillful poker player” when he was a Business Administration student and that “one of the secrets of a successful poker player is to encourage your opponent to bet a lot of chips on a losing hand. This is a pattern of behavior one sees repeatedly in George W Bush’s political career”.

“How Can Companies Profit While Giving Code Away?“. I guess we’ll find out.

This is my “state of the union” address, letting you all know what’s up with Jäger.

Jäger 1.4

The Jäger 1.4 launch was very successful, with several hundred downloads happening the first few days. On the negative side, I’ve got a lot more “hate mail” than previous releases meaning either the quality of my code has gotten worse or you’re doing a lot more with it. Keep your comments coming, they’re very useful to me. I can differentiate between “there’s a problem with your product” and “you suck”, so don’t spare me your comments. If something looks broken, it probably is and I’m fully committed to fixing it.

Source Code

The source code is coming, very soon, as soon as I get eight hours together to figure out what the particulars are going to be. My feeling is that the way I’m going to make enough money out of Jäger is through a higher level of exploitation (i.e. bundling it with something else), so I’m not too worried about the source getting out there. That said, the license will be something like MySQL, where I’m going to reserve the rights for commercial exploitation. If you have any suggestions here or you know of something that you think would make a good model let me know.

I’m also not sure where or how I should host the code. Sourceforge? My own server? CVS? Subversion? “tar.gz”. Let me know.

Templates

Jäger uses a Python library called Cheetah to generate the “offline content”. An upcoming version (very soon) will make all these available as text files that you can edit, independently of whether you have the source code.

UNIX

Jäger is built on top of wxPython and wxPython runs under UNIX. I actually made a version that worked with Netscape under Redhat 8, but I didn’t distribute it because there’s a lot of different UNIX flavors and a lot of different browsers in each of this flavors. Because Jäger needs to control a browser, there’s a significant amount of poking around at X Windows structures needed to make this work – and it’s all done, it just needs to be expanded.

There’s no reason Jäger wouldn’t work under Mac OS 10.2 too, if someone wants to take the time.

GMail Integration

I will be releasing a version of Jäger in the next six weeks with GMail integration, courtesy of the “libgmail” library. What will this do for you? When you get new mail in GMail, it will be listed in Jäger. When you double click on the link, you browser will be brought to the appropriate GMail page.

You may say “no big deal”, I can just check the GMail page regularly. What I’m working on is making Jäger a generalized interface for checking all the events happening in your environment. More on this below.

Outlook and NNTP

I’ve got a significant amount of code written that demonstrates integration of Outlook and NNTP. The trick with this is that we’re dealing with a lot of data and in some instances, most of it useless. In both the Outlook and NNTP code, I’ve attempted to group multiple entries together into a single long post: i.e. an entire thread in NNTP will be a single entry in the blog that either gets updated or replaced. The mechanics of how this will work in practice is quite difficult, which is why you haven’t seen this yet.

Searching

The really next big thing coming to Jäger is improved searching. I’ve got a version I run with Amazon and Technorati integration built right in. I want to be able to extend this to any type of search: Google, medical libraries, your file system, and so forth. Jäger has an excellent scraping system that has never been exploited, so we’re not even dependent on the search systems having an API.

I’m going to write a lot more about this in the near future. Jäger has a built in web server running on port 5335 than can be extended simply by dropping in a Python module. The logical interface for search results is RSS. This is very doable.

What is Jäger?

I think Jäger is much bigger than an RSS aggregator. That’s part of the reason why I’ve moved from calling pages “weblogs” to “webpages” in 1.4. In general, I’m viewing Jäger as a “browser companion”. Since Jäger has a built in Python engine, I’m viewing this an extensible desktop tool that should be viewed as top-tier application on your desktop as much as your browser is.

More on this soon too.

I just posted this idea as a comment to Marc Canter’s weblog. RSSCalendar should consider making the “ICAL” object an RSS 2 Enclosure so it can then be “picked off” automatically by tools interested in this data (without scraping the internal HTML object).

The ICAL object contains data that looks like this (original link):

 BEGIN:VCALENDAR CALSCALE:GREGORIAN PRODID:-//RSSCalendar.com - 1.0//EN VERSION:2.0 METHOD:PUBLISH BEGIN:VEVENT UID:d6128a5c44f82653361a48a60cbc47c2 DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20040820 DTEND;VALUE=DATE:20040821 DTSTAMP:20040415T140000Z TRANSP:TRANSPARENT SUMMARY:Conference DESCRIPTION:RSSCalendar is an exciting ... uses, including: LOCATION: PRIORITY:3 END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR 

It’s not XML but it does have its own RFC.

I don’t seem to have access to e-mail right now so anyone expecting an e-mail will hear from me Monday since I’m going away for the weekend.

Neil writes:

It’s a verb and it’s strange because the past participle starts with a different letter to the present participle. This is very common in other Teutonic languages such as German but I had no idea there were any such words in English.

Read about participles here and here.

Update: Ah, I figured out the answer as I went for a little walk. Check the comments.

I physically and mentally crashed this week. No, I’m feeling fine, really. I just lie-in-the-bed-and-look-at-the-ceiling crashed. I’m feeling much better today, finally though I won’t be posting much (disappointed?) since I’m off to Windsor area to do some Shark racing.

Kevin Jaeger has a brief posting over at The Shotgun about our cool weather. The “Hockey Stick” graph of massive recent global warming has been under serious attack by researchers attempting to duplicate these results — without success. You can read more here (previous posting):

The Corrigendum in Nature today (July 1, 2004) by Professors Mann, Bradley and Hughes is a clear admission that the disclosure of data and methods behind MBH98 [the research behind the "hockey stick" -- dpj] was materially inaccurate. The text acknowledges extensive errors in the description of the data set. Even more important is the new online Supplementary Information (SI) site, which concedes for the first time that key steps in the computations behind MBH98 were left out of (and indeed conflict with) the description of methods in the original paper.

These items were published on the instruction of the Editorial Board of Nature in response to a Materials Complaint that we filed in November 2003. That our complaint was upheld and the Corrigendum was ordered represents a vindication of our view that, prior to our analysis, there had been no independent attempt to verify or replicate this influential but deeply flawed study, something which was forestalled, at least in part, by inadequate and inaccurate disclosure of data and methods.

This is only the first step in resolving the dispute we initiated last fall. The Corrigendum and the SI contain the gratuitous claim that the errors, omissions and misrepresentations in MBH98 do not affect their results. If this were true, then a simple constructive proof could have been provided, showing before and after calculations. This is conspicuously missing from the Corrigendum and the new SI. We have done the calculations and can assert categorically that the claim is false. We have made a journal submission to this effect and will explain the matter fully when that paper is published.

Further, detailed comments on the Corrigendum and new SI will be released shortly.

Jäger 1.4.2 is now available for both Windows and Macintosh and is a recommended upgrade for everyone.

What’s changed?

• If an attempt to view a Category page would result in a huge HTML page being displayed, the Category is broken into sub-pages. This is described here.
• A number of problems in the Category display of search results is fixed. The net result? Text will show up correctly now.
• An attempt has been made to make the internal webserver bind with the Loopback interface. I’m not sure if this works or not, but it doesn’t break anything

There’ll be a version 1.4.2 released later either later today or tomorrow some time.

The main change is that Category offline views are broken into multiple subpages when their are massive numbers of entries to display. The actual number is set in Settings > Jäger Preferences…: Online/Offline: Entries per offline page; the default number is 50.

This became a problem because some Jäger users have OPML files with category structure, thus ending up with everything in 1 category. When viewing offline, well, it’s a little too long to be useful!

The minor change is that the internal webserver is bound to the Loopback interface rather than the Internet interface. Functionally, this makes no difference as Jäger rejects all connection attempts from outside your computer anyway.

For both Windows and the Mac. This massively speeds up loading OPML files, if that’s what you need to do.

Robert Scoble writes:

Everytime I talk with David Janes about his news aggregator named “Jäger” I think of Jager Meister (the alcoholic drink).

For the record, the name is a hat tip to the year I spent living in Vienna. It’s the German word for “hunter”, it’s pronounced like the American test pilot Chuck Yager’s name, and I choose it because (a) it’s a tireless hunter for information on the web and (b) it looks cool. I tried Jägermeister for the first time about three weeks ago and, hey, it’s pretty good stuff too.

Chris Pirillo writes:

The umlaut is what gives it an jump on the competition; few other news aggregators are bold enough to use funny little dots above their lowercase letters.

You bet it does/you bet they aren’t! I was entirely inspired by turn of the 80′s rockers Blue Öyster Cult and Mötley Crüe and Bloom County’s Deathtöunge.

FYI: occasionally, you will see Jäger written as Jaeger. This is a concession to environments that don’t reliably support non-ASCII charater sets. It’s exactly the same word though.

This reminds me of a joke we used to tell in CompSci: did you hear there’s an object-oriented version of Cobol coming out to compete with C++? It’s called ADD 1 TO COBOL.

Jäger is a little, OK, a lot slow importing large OPML files. I thought this was an avoidable consequence of certain program decisions, but then I thought some more and realized it could be a lot better. There’ll be a new release (1.4.1) this afternoon with super-fast OPML importing, if that’s important to you.

Since Bush seems to have a lost his balls somewhere in the last 15 months, please let the Iranians be stupid enough to do this:

Iranian Defense Minister Ali Shamkhani warned that Iran might launch a preemptive strike against US forces in the region to prevent an attack on its nuclear facilities.

“We will not sit (with arms folded) to wait for what others will do to us. Some military commanders in Iran are convinced that preventive operations which the Americans talk about are not their monopoly,” Shamkhani told Al-Jazeera TV when asked if Iran would respond to an American attack on its nuclear facilities.

They’re threatening you: take them at the word. And it’s way better than Iraq, since you can avoid the whole occupation phase afterwards too. Just flatten their military resources and reactors from the air and call it a day. The worst case is the Mad Mullahs take back over; the best , all the people agitating for democracy (but never seem to get around to doing it) take over.

Al Gore: planet hating monster.

CNN reports:

Bear guzzles 36 beers, passes out at campground

A black bear was found passed out at a campground in Washington state recently after guzzling down three dozen cans of a local beer, a campground worker said on Wednesday.

“We noticed a bear sleeping on the common lawn and wondered what was going on until we discovered that there were a lot of beer cans lying around,” said Lisa Broxson, a worker at the Baker Lake Resort, 80 miles (129 kilometers) northeast of Seattle.

The hard-drinking bear, estimated to be about two years old, broke into campers’ coolers and, using his claws and teeth to open the cans, swilled down the suds.

It turns out the bear was a bit of a beer sophisticate. He tried a mass-market Busch beer, but switched to Rainier Beer, a local ale, and stuck with it for his drinking binge.

I just gave RSSCalendar a quick spin. RSSCalendar is, strangely enough, an online calendar service. You can enter events, appointments and whatnot on your Calendar and you can log back into RSSCalendar to view them at a later date. The twist is that RSSCalendar also publishes your Calendar as three different RSS feeds: daily, weekly and monthly ones. You – or someone else – can subscribe to these feeds and be notified of what’s happening. If you’re the someone else, you can load the event into your calendar program, such as Outlook, or even into your own RSSCalendar account. Alternatively, you can also just mail the URL of the calendar event to someone else so they add it to their Calendar. Neat.

There’s a few UI glitches that I’ve encountered so far, which I shall mention here in the hopes that the RSSCalendar folks will fix them:

• The “Add Event” page requires a Description. I don’t always want to do this.
• It should be possible to have multi-day all day events. For example, “Mom visits; Sept 3 – 9″.
• The “Start Date” should display the day of week.
• The popup Calendar selector is ugly as hell. How about a single button from with a graphic displaying a calendar? That’d be much slicker.
• If you press any of the “Recurrence” buttons, it’s not possible to turn them off.
• It should be possible to hide my e-mail address in the public feeds. I entered one of my “real” private e-mail addresses into my account information (as opposed to one of my “expect spam” public e-mail address).
• After you log in for the first time it says “Welcome Back”. This is a very minor nit I know.
• BlogMatrix Jäger is not mentioned as one of the readers

There’s one feature I’d like to see added. In fact, I think this is kinda critical: there should be a fourth “notification” feed that will republish events several times before they happen, say at 3 hours, 1 hour, 30, 15 and 5 minutes before the actual event. These entries should have all the same links but different GUIDs so they will be seen a distinct events by aggregators. Private events should be published in this feed. This will act as a notification channel for me when I’m using the calendar from Jäger.

Minor editing changes made 2004.07.20

I’m considering making the source code for Jäger available for non-commercial use, something along the lines of MySQL or Sleepycat. Anyone interested, have ideas, suggestions they’d like to share?

Jäger 1.4.0 for Windows and for Macintosh is now available. Download it starting here (Download.com is listing the wrong version number; this will be fixed soon).

Jäger 1.4.0 is a substantial upgrade from the 1.2 version of Jäger and features:

• A much simplified user interface.
• Full-text searching of all the blogs you are reading.
• A proper Windows XP look-and-feel (on Windows XP!)
• A cleaner and much improved Mac OS interface.
• Extensive offline reading features, including the ability to read whole categories of blogs simultaneously.
• Improved OPML import and export.
• Technorati integration in the offline views.
• A “self-healing” database which can deal with disk saving errors much more cleanly.
• A new pricing model: $0, though we’re still asking for contributions. Do you like that better?

If you’re upgrading from a 1.2 version, there will be about a 1 minute delay at startup as your old database is converted to the new format used internally.

Mike Campbell got a letter published in today’s National Post. Cool. And since I’m on the topic Local Hero is one of my favorite movies too.