Willy Dobbe - xml

Indexed

Sat, 31 May 2008 08:11:08 +0200

I really like Indexed, a index-blog. You do not understand what I am talking about? Take a look at this beauty:

And there are lot and lots of other funny ones over at his site:

I added it to my way-too-big-to-be-all-read RSS feed... I really should drop 90% of the sites ~~I am following~~ waisting bandwith from.

Drupal as a Home Service Bus (beyond Home Automation)

Fri, 30 May 2008 13:57:14 +0200

If... If I would start my own company... But I won't. I do not have the skills, money, balls and most of all, I am rather happy with my current employer Dutch Open Projects. But if I would start my own company, the services would not be based upon Location Based Services, a carbon copy of free available software or "Social Networking two dot ooo". It would be based upon my hobby in combination with my "vision"

Part of my (IT) related hobby's include Drupal (the best Content Management System), MythTv (the best way to watch less junk TV) and everything Mac related (the best way to communicate with a CPU).

Combining these elements will give you nice opportunities. For example your iPhone could be your remote control for your telly:

(Youtube)

But you could also use your iPhone as a device to watch television on; recorded streaming television based upon your preferences towards your telehone!

(Youtube)

And these are just two simple examples; it could be expanded to controlling and integrating the Squeezebox (cheesy: WiFi to your HiFi) I own and towards all the other electric equipment in my house with X.10 (cheesy: control your house from your mouse) like Mr House does. But you will directly see two problems; all these devices and software packages act like they are the master:

they do not talk to each other
they do not provide a nice consistent user interface

In fact, most of the user interfaces these devices provide are really really bad, if you think Drupal pre4 sucked usability wise, try a MythTV distro from one year a go or even the current version of MrHouse! Now the time might not be right for my "business plan". I know that in the USA the concept of Tivo is rather normal for early adapters but here in the EU harddisk based PVR's are just catching on. It will take some time before the public sees and needs that these devices should be integrated .And by that time I am sure that our friends from RedMond have a very nice "solution" for you; "Vista Home Automation # 1984".

By not combining, not integrating, they do not give the user the option to co-related information about their house. For example, if my central system that my family would not be in the house since there are no blue-tooth telephones detected at 2:00h in the morning while the camera sensors motion, I would like to be paged, see the camera images from my iPhone and when I will not react within a certain amount of time, the system should dial out to the police. Okay, bad example, I do not want that since most likely I forgot my phone or the battery is dead and I am in the kitchen to make some milk for my son to get him to sleep. But you get the idea; a centralised place where information is gathered from multiple sources, co-related and with work-flow, action upon this information.

And by not combining, not integrating, they do not provide the user with a good user interface that is consistent and adapts (context aware) towards the client (text messaging, instant messaging, telephone, full browser etc). A key factor forsuccess beyond the usual geeks.

I would like to be able to solve these two problems, make a central place that talks to all devices and can be "smart" and provide the user with the best UI (s)he can get. Now before you state that there is such a product, I am aware of pluto. Pluto combines music (squeezeboxes), television (MythTV), voice (asterisk) and much more into a central box. See for more information their (nasal!) presentation. But they do not combine it in what I would call a "central smart box". That and the fact that they can use some competition :-)

A central smart box would be able to adapt fast, if there would be an API for a grocery shop, it will be in the software in the box within days, weeks. It would know my spending habits and my income and would swap money to places where it would get the most interest, it would read my RSS feeds and based upon time and location "read" them to me, it would know my agenda and the availability of my friends and it would do so much more that I can think of right now.

And by now, you should see why I would like to add my other hobby; Drupal. I think that a central system that acts upon actions and can do more then that could be a Content management Framework like Drupal. I know that PHP by nature would not be very good for acting as a real time broker between information, but I still would go for a Drupal solution instead of J2EE. Drupal is easier, it adapts way faster, can integrate, has a geeky loving community that probably has some of the devices I mentioned, can look beautiful, has a very small footprint and can be context aware.

I would like coin the phrase Home Service Bus, after the Enterprise Service Bus. More the Home Automation that enables a user to control electronic elements, it would be able to make decisions on its own, based upon input from my actions and the status of electronics devices. It would be a broker of information; it would be a Home Service Bus! Now let's just wait until the Gartner People catch up on this phrase in half a decade :-)

So, if I would start my own company it would be based on building this. But since I will not, you a free to make it. And -lazy as I am- I will buy it from you!

CBS in de buurt, RSS en een braindead webmaster

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:45:21 +0100

Best een aardige site, CBS in de Buurt. Waar je statistische informatie over een wijk kan verkrijgen geplot op Google Maps. Het zou van mij wat minder AJAXy mogen van mij maar leuk gedaan. Alleen...

Klik op RSS onderaan de pagina en wat verwacht je? Precies, een validerende RSS feed. En wat krijg je? Een greybox effectje met een pagina waar het nieuws van de site op staat. Please webmaster.. Ale je niet weet wat RSS is, val dan terug op het animated "NEW" gifje van web 0.1 maar ga niet onze standaarden vervuilen met je "nieuws".

How many RSS readers do you have?

Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:09:18 +0100

The other day -based upon some twitter messages I was doing with some friends- I thought about how many RSS readers I have for my frontpage. I didnt feel like investigating /all/ possible RSS readers since every taxonomy item in Drupal (the CMS under this site) is a RSS feed and since since only very few people are subscribed to these feeds; most follow the frontpage.

The problems with RSS readers is that big aggegator sites get the RSS feed on behalf of multiple people, just counting readers does not do the job. Fortunately, bigger sites mention how many people are reading the feed, like this in the headers:

(+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 12 subscribers;

The other problem is that I have three RSS feed URL's for one and the same feed:

/myblog/atom/feed

/myblog/node/feed

/myblog/rss.xml

So I run the following code on an access log of half a day:

[root@tug httpd]# grep "/rss.xml" access_log | awk '{print $1, $11, $12, $13, $14, $15, $16}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | more

[root@tug httpd]# grep "/myblog/node/feed" access_log | awk '{print $1, $11, $12, $13, $14, $15, $16}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | more

[root@tug httpd]# grep "/myblog/atom/feed" access_log | awk '{print $1, $11, $12, $13, $14, $15, $16}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | more

(note: Most RSS readers grab the feed muliple times per day. I dont count them via the onliners above and having only half a day of sampling data is not that bad)

Then count the "on behalf of xxx subscribers" by hand and...

I couldn't believe it, in half a day I have some 554 subscribers! Wowsers!

Speechcasting going funny bij de NOS

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 07:13:34 +0200

I am a big fan of podcasts, it helpt to overcome the trafficjames on the A9. I am a big fan of "web 2.0", reusing /combining content in a smarter way. Part of "two dot ooohh" is IMHO speechcasting. Reading out via synthesized voices HTML text you can take take them with you on your iPOD, see an older posting.

The NOS.nl has since some time the readspeaker integration where you can select an option to let the text be spoken out to you, ~~see~~hear for example this dutch posting about old politics that don't get the new style.

I haven't found an XSS exploit in the NOS.nl site (old ones have been patched) so I can use this for my own site. But what if you enter a 404 ("web page not found") URL in the readspeaker?

listen

The Dutch is fine. But the Dutch robot reading the English text in the second part, is funnier then Rutgers stonecoalenglish.

Everyday objects...

Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:37:02 +0200

When I was in college, I played Doom ][ a lot. Too much I think, because when I was at the university I always kept my back against the walls and was planning on shooting when an elevator door opened. You know you spend too much time behind your computer when something like that is happening.

Now that I have grown up, have steady job, girlfriend, daughter, son, house, now this wont happen to me anymore. Or will it? The day my girlfriend came home with some new boxes, I could not help but think about where I should click to add them to my aggregator.

This you can put in your pipe and smoke it, Drupal is community pipe-ing

Sat, 10 Feb 2007 09:54:12 +0100

Yahoo's Pipe service is realy great. You can build a webservices with webservices via a drop and drag interface that feels so naturally it feels like you are running a native application. I couldnt believe this was done in HTML/Ajax/DHTML/buzzword. It *really* feels like a native application.

So I played with it a bit and within a couple of minutes I made a "webservice" that searches for "Drupal" content from

www.google.com
ebay.com
flickr.com
api.ebay.com
rss.api.ebay.com
api.flickr.com

(note: the Google search isnt working since Google blocks automated searches But I have it in just in case they get it.)

See it in action at My Pipes.Y! (Y! account needed but you want one to play with Pipes, believe me it is worth the email address!) Play with it here, make it better and share your service. The result is online as well and you can import it as RSS in your feedreader. Never miss anything from Yahoo!, EBay or Flickr again mentioning the word "Drupal".

Tim can stop defining "Web 2.0" and just point towards this pipe site; easy, rich application, mashups, RSS, hell take one buzzword 2.0 and see if that doesnt fit in this pipes.

If the Internet is not a big truck. And it is not "a series of tubes.", it is pipes! And we are plumbing!

Talking RSS feed

Sun, 17 Dec 2006 13:22:36 +0100

Ever since I have an iPod (nano 4GB with only space for a percentage of my MP3 collection) together with an iTrip, I am hooked to podcasts. One of the things I was missing, was the ability to have newsfeeds read out to me. I want to have a couple of newsfeed with the latest news (not "radio"-casts but newssites-casts) on my iPod. The problem being that it is hard if not impossible to have all the items of a newspaper being read out in time by a human for the publisher.

And then I thought, it doesnt have to be a human, it has to sound like a human! With the zillion of "text to speech" programs out there, it would be easy to parse an RSS feed and turn it into a RSS feed wit embedded MP3; a podcast!

And I wasnt the only one thinking this, since a couple of days nu.nl, an easy digestible dutch newssites, "man bites dog" news - does have a spoken rss feed I can use. Sync before leaving home/work and listen in my car to the latest news without having to listen to the bad radio jockeys. In fact, Chiel Beelen -a Dutch popular DJ- is the reason I bought an iPod!

This would be a great feature request for CMS-es like Drupal, combine an open source text to speech reader with a bit of code in a module to make RSS into "podcasts". And that way you dont have to use an external expensive party like readspeaker. Useful? What do you think?

BTW: in good unix tradition, all device that have an IP address have to be Christianized with a name. My iPod's name is "iPodium".

My Delicious Cloud Tag

Thu, 26 Oct 2006 11:08:15 +0200

Here you can see my current Delicious tag cloud:

Yahoo and Microformat

Tue, 27 Jun 2006 04:59:12 +0200

We Now Support Microformats, screams the Yahoo blog. What? You dont know "microformats"? Tjeeeah, in that case more information can be found on microformats.org. "Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards. Instead of throwing away what works today, microformats intend to solve simpler problems first by adapting to current behaviors and usage patterns (e.g. XHTML, blogging).". And checkout wikipedia as well.

Well, back to Yahoo:

Starting today, we’re happy to announce Yahoo! Local fully supports the hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, searn=right valign=topch results, events, and reviews. There are a few reasons behind this change, which for now, will be transparent to almost everyone.
In less-techy terms, “microformats” are an open standard for structuring web page content in a meaningful and reusable way. At Yahoo, we’ve been big microformat fans — Yahoo! Tech uses the hReview microformat for all product reviews, Flickr supports XFN and hCard on all profile pages, and our own Upcoming.org was the first big hCalendar supporter.

Belgen doen het beter

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 14:39:54 +0200

Lef hebben ze wel, de Belgen. En ze doen het beter, dat is bekend. Maar nu verbieden ze content in een niet-open vorm, en dat is wel een grote stap!
Overheid bant Microsoft-documenten

ODF of Open Document Format is een bestandsformaat voor kantoordocumenten dat vorige maand officieel werd geaccepteerd door de internationale standaardenorganisatie ISO.
Het gaat om een ,,open standaard'', die door software-ontwikkelaars naar believen kan worden gebruikt om er toepassingen voor te ontwikkelen. ODF is daarmee een potentiële concurrent voor de eigen bestandsformaten die de softwarereus Microsoft gebruikt in zijn kantoorsoftware Microsoft Office .
De federale ministerraad nam afgelopen vrijdag het radicale besluit om de ODF-standaard vanaf september 2008 verplicht te maken bij alle federale overheidsdiensten. Eén jaar eerder moeten alle diensten al in staat zijn om ODF-documenten te lezen. Volgens het vakblad IT Professional is België het eerste land ter wereld dat een dergelijke stap doet, en zo de facto het gebruik van onder meer de Microsoft-formaten verbiedt.

Meer Engelstalig news is ook beschikbaar

RSS watch

Wed, 07 Jun 2006 01:15:18 +0200

Oreilly's radar site isnt the worst techno-watch-site, in fact it is rather good from time to time.

Did I say "time"?

Now Oreilly's RSS feed on time on your watch! Found on flcikr

Amazon Book AJAX test

Fri, 02 Jun 2006 12:00:50 +0200

This link towards a Drupal book on Amazon will display when you do a mouseover /for some users/ information about the book. AJAX and Amazon's API to the max. Useful you think?

Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix

Mon, 27 Mar 2006 03:41:57 +0200

ProgrammableWeb: Web 2.0 Mashup Matrix. An experimental matrix of Web 2.0 mashups. A timeline with vertical compnies and on the intersections "two dot oohhh" stuff. Also avail in cloud, popular , RSS and special API.

tvRSS

Sun, 26 Mar 2006 03:36:16 +0200

In case your cable provider doesnt have the shows you need to record with your PVR, there is the internet. tvRSS - Syndication for your television, and then a link towards a bittorrent site. RSS. Bittorrent. Why isnt this Beta and two dot oooh?