Dear lazyweb (actually, just more intelligent web, I’ve done a lot of searching on this already…),

I have a nice install of WebSphere Application Server and IBM Portal 6.0.1.3 up and running with the WCM component configured. This is great, really happy.

I’d like to add Quickr (later also Connections and maybe even Sametime) but all the Quickr installs I can find want to deploy a second instance of WAS which isn’t ideal. Is it possible to just add Quickr to an existing install or is it possible to install it separately and move it into an existing install?

Since the search function for Apple’s mailing lists is pretty much useless, I’m making a note of the Reading PICT Images thread which contains numerous options for rendering PICT images in Java on OS X.

James Robertson:

Having a catchy and memorable intranet name is a great way of promoting the intranet.

A name can help build an identity, even give the intranet a personality, removing that ‘techy’ edge. This is useful when trying to build staff awareness and engagement with a new or relaunched intranet.

It is an opportunity to leverage off the organisation’s brand or simply to differentiate the intranet from the organisation’s internet site.

So here’s a surprise – FireFox 3.0.1 can’t handle RSS/Atom feeds that have a port number in the URL. The problem stems from the fact that it uses a custom feed: protocol instead of just working off of the mime-type of the content.  So if you visit http://www.example.com:10038/ and it provides an RSS autodiscovery link that points to /feed/, FireFox will try to go to feed:http//www.example.com:10038/feed/.  Note the missing colon after http.

Ephox provides a bunch of different sites with feeds to help people keep up to date about what’s happening with our software and the company.  For example, LiveWorks! helps you learn more about our products and get the most out of them, the releases blog keeps you up to date with the latest stuff and the official Ephox blog has all the company news. Then of course there’s a range of blogs by Ephox employees like this one and they’re all gathered up at People@Ephox. So guess which feed is the most popular by far?

I’ve always liked the Atom spec. It’s neat and tidy with strict rules about what’s valid and what’s not with all those rough corners and incompatibilities of RSS sorted out (well, mostly). If I run into one of the silly sites that offer both RSS and Atom I pick Atom just because it feels right even though both would work perfectly well for me. So it came as quite a surprise to me to discover a major weakness in the Atom spec – it’s a right pain to generate. Let me explain…

Working in the world of editors there are a range of blog posts that float back up to the surface every so often, generally because they discuss an age old concern that just keeps resurfacing.  Recently a post from Moxiecode resurfaced complaining about the lack of focus on editing support in browsers. There’s been a few such posts in the past that I’ve seen and while the world of contenteditable support has definitely improved lately, it’s still one of the weakest areas of modern browsers.

For those who are interested, I’ve put together the collection of links that I found on getting MathML to render in browsers on LiveWorks! I’m a little unsure about the status of Safari and Opera so if anyone familiar with MathML in those browser could provide any info that would be greatly appreciated.

Also, as a bonus tip that I’ve picked up while researching XHTML modes in browsers, if you save a file with a .xhtml extension (or .xhtm or even .xht I think) browsers will actually use their XML parser to read and render the file. Much simpler than reconfiguring your web server to send the right mime type if you’re just testing stuff. Web servers with up to date extension to mime type mappings will also serve the file as application/xhtml+xml which is handy if you are serving static files too.

Sylvain Wallez:

If your application uses java.net.URL, and chances it does are very high, and you are using Sun’s JVM (since 1.4.2), you should set the sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout and sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout system properties to a reasonable value. Otherwise, if a remote site hangs, your application or server will also hang. Useful to know…

A couple of years back I went on a crusade against manual deployment of pretty much everything in Ephox. It was originally driven by a desire to “dog food” our products so we needed to automatically deploy each nightly build to our internal systems. From there it went out to automatic releases (still problematic due to a dodgy FTP server at our hosting provider) and got a fancy webapp front end that let you pick which version to deploy.

Dear Lazyweb,

Since this worked so well to find a great article on HTTP caching… Does anyone know of a good introductory article for how to get MathML to display in Web Pages across multiple browsers etc.

My primary recommendation unfortunately will be to convert it to an image, but I’d like to provide instructions for the folk who want to maintain accessibility for their equations as well. Related and also interesting is anything discussing mime-types, XHTML and how to solve the IE problem.

I’ve just gotten back from a wonderful trip around Italy and have discovered a second endemic fail-point for mobile technology solutions: assuming you always have network connectivity. I suspect this really only applies to mobile phones more than mobile devices that only have wifi. When travelling internationally, your mobile phone becomes incredibly expensive if you leave international data roaming on so while you’re away you only have internet via wifi. When travelling in Italy (and Australia), this means you don’t have internet access, period.