Wikify…. I like wiki. But… its too hard. I want to be able to wikify my entire website, so that if… [development]

I believe that snipsnap attempts to meld blogging with wiki. Might be worth a look.

Deriving backtracking monad transformers.

[Lambda the Ultimate]

Am I alone in thinking ‘Huh?’

Party like it’s 1993.

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

1993 was also when I first heard the word ‘Linux’, which, because we were British, was pronounced ‘Line-ux’. One of my Uni acquaintances showed it to me. “Look, free Unix on a pc”. “That won’t go anywhere”, I thought… This rates alongside my other great predictions such as, ‘Netscape are having an IPO, should I invest? Naa, they probably won’t be worth much’. And Yahoo, and Redhat… I console myself that I was a poor student and didn’t have much to invest at the time anyway. Wouldn’t have had enough money to get rich, just enough to have had one whale of a time at Uni.

I couldn’t unplug…. But I’m going to be brief tonight. It’s 11:19 p.m. I want to be off the computer by 11:30 (maybe 11:45’s more realistic).

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Russ, if you’re reading this and its NOT just after you got up on thursday morning, switch off. Now. 🙂

Fed my book-buying habit today with the acquisition of the O’Reilly BEEP book. Build your own network protocol. Cool. BEEP looks very interesting as an alternative for all the contortions distributed application developers have to go through to make them work over HTTP. It provides a framework where most of the complex low-level stuff is done for you, and you just have to build your application-specific stuff on top of it. So the developer gets to decide whether the connection should be pull/push or both, stateless or stateful, pipelined or multiplexed etc. And security appears to be pluggable too.

I seem to remember Paul Hammant mentioning something about writing a BEEP module for AltRMI, which sounds like a great idea, especially for doing asynchronous callbacks. Must read more in case I’m totally wrong…

…you’ve replaced sendmail as your default MTA (in my case with postfix). Oh my word. Talk about stressful. At one point I thought I’d just obliterated a whole day’s worth of incoming mail because I kicked off fetchmail (thinking I was ready when I wasn’t), and postfix threw a wobbly. Thankfully it kept all the undelivered messages so after a few frantic minutes skimming the docs, hacking the config and one ‘postfix flush’ later, all my email reappeared. Phew.

I flatter myself that I can usually puzzle my way through most techie things, but email delivery systems are way more complex than I ever imagined. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started. Its still not working as I expected but I appear to be able to send email, so I think I’ll leave it until my palms stop sweating.

Interesting article by Mark Harwood here regarding distributed

lucene indexes. Using distributed indexes is how google achieves its scalability I

believe, but they are a fairly special case.

If scalability in the sense of concurrent users is the issue, I tend to favour

multiple identical boxes with a load balancer and an RPC frontend. This can be

as simple as a servlet, or you can use SOAP or XML-RPC etc. (Possibly RMI,

although I’ve never tried that across a load balancer). Doing things this way

is probably a lot simpler to manage than splitting your indexes across boxes and

means that even if your queries are asymmetric (ie. 85% of the queries are for

the same thing), the load can be fairly balanced. Reliability is achieved for

free as well – if a box dies just stop sending requests there. Given Lucene’s

performance (it has been used to index collections of more than 10 million

documents) its pretty unlikely that your dataset will get so large that sheer

size starts to affect your query times. Unless of course, you are google 🙂

Lucene is great, but some of the default settings are heavily biased towards interactive indexing and searching. If you’re building an index in a batch process style, set the IndexWriter.mergeFactor value to something big. I use 10,000, which makes it burn about 500 meg of RAM while indexing, but speeds it up a lot over the default value of 10. YMMV as ever.

More for personal reference than anything else: Things I’ve learned about mutt

Next Generation Email Clients.

Wow, you want a lot. 🙂

“A reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him. An unreasonable man expects the world to adapt to him. Therefore, all progress is made by unreasonable men.” – George Bernard Shaw.

Of course, he was a lot more eloquent than me. I just look pointedly at the title of my blog 🙂

First of all you should probably be using IMAP in the short term as it will provide a much better means for accessing email in a centralized location. The downside is that IMAP tends to require a good connection speed because the messages stay on the server and are downloaded on demand, as opposed to the POP strategy which downloads all messages in your INBOX and lets you organize and store them locally.

Yeah, I’ll probably end up doing something like that. Although I can never do things the easy way, so what I might well end up doing is running my own local IMAP server…

As for a cross platform GUI client which actually works well, I have yet to find one which satisfies me. On W2K I use Outlook, and while it is adaquate there are a number of things which really piss me off. Sometimes Outlook just sits there for 10 or 20 minutes “checking for messages”. Then there is the virus issue. On OS X I use the included Mail application which works pretty darn well. In the worse case scenerio I resort to Pine on Linux (if I can only get in via SSH).

The most powerful windows email client I’ve ever used is The Bat!. Also used by Ron Jeffries I believe.

On my side I think I have abandoned the desktop client in favor of a web client. There are just too many issues with synchronization accross clients which are too difficult to overcome. The existing protocols (IMAP and POP) do not really work well when you get into the level of tens of thousands of messages in hundreds of folders. You will essentially need to have a custom server and protocol which deals with these issues so that synchronization is not completely up to the client. Unfortunately this will be a painful if not impossible uphill battle due to the fact that people have their email servers in place and would be very relucatant to replace it with your server.

I wasn’t really suggesting a replacement for established servers, but something more along the lines of a web service. As connectivity increases and more people have permanent connections, it’s not unforseeable that your own static IP is as common as having a phone number. If you believe the IPv6 hype, even your fridge will have a net presence in the not-too-far future. Anyway, if you have your own server on the net, you have more options with regard to applications. Image the scenario: your powerful home server is collecting and indexing your email, news feeds, etc. according to the criteria you have defined. You have your lightweight wireless device / laptop with you, and can simply hook up to your central system and be presented with a condensed and sorted view of all the stuff it has for you. Read some emails, send some replies, organise your calendar, all centrally stored and managed from your personal server. Your personal server could equally well be a hosted service, much like many bloggers already have.

Here are my ideas for a web-based email/information manager:

• It will not emulate a typical client-side application. No folder trees. No drag and drop. My idea is a single “INBOX” which is an aggregation of your different message sources such as email, RSS, newsgroups, etc.
• It will link together email/contact management/history/tasks/issues etc. in a fashion which makes it easy to view the lifetime of a particular discussion as well as the results of a discussion.
• It will provide multi-user functionality so that a group of users could share some messages which are related to the group but not others which are related to the individual only.
• It will work with POP and IMAP servers.
• It will track EVERYTHING which comes in and goes out.
• It will link with JIRA! 🙂

[All Things Java]

All good stuff. Especially the JIRA bit 🙂