I’m writing up three proposals for the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference. I think the content is compelling enough but I’m not overly hopeful that any will be accepted because it turns out I really struggle with writing session abstracts. This is actually the first conference I’ve submitted proposals too so hopefully I’ll get better (and faster!) at it with a bit more practice. In a lot of ways I’m actually more interested in just getting practice at submitting proposals than actual speaking at the conference – the timing of the conference is bad, but can be worked around.

If you’re using the scp or ssh tasks with ant, you may run into a problem where part way during the upload or never disconnecting after the command completes for the ssh task. There are a couple of possible causes:

1. The scp problem is almost certainly caused by using ant 1.7.0 or below and jsch 0.1.30 or above. You could upgrade to the latest nightly of ant1 but it’s probably easier to just drop back to jsch 0.1.29 which is what ant was developed against and works nicely. Bug 41090 contains the gory details.
2. If the command you’re executing with the ssh task starts a background service or otherwise leaves a process running, that may be the cause of the problem. You can add ‘shopt -s huponexit’ to your /etc/profile, .bashrc or somewhere like that. I must admit, I’m somewhat vague on the exact details of what that does but the basic idea seems to be to signal any background processes that bash is exiting and then not wait for them to complete (which allows your ssh connection to close). If you’re starting a server they’ll probably ignore the hup signal it sends and if not, use the nohup command.

Hopefully that will be the last I’ll see of that issue.

Andy Herron:

Tomorrow  is a day I’ve been looking forward to for quite a few years.  Dylan Just, one of my best mates from uni, is starting at Ephox.  He’s not yet on Planet Ephox but I think we’re fixing that tomorrow morning.

 Indeed that has been fixed. Welcome on board Dylan! Any other Ephox folk who want to start blogging – just let me know!

The realization that there is valuable information in users attention data is a wonderful thing – it leads to so many really useful features like Amazon’s recommendation system. I’ve seen a lot of really good uses of this kind of data where systems use fuzzy logic to improve a users experience or make recommendations of things they’d like. It appears that Microsoft has noticed this trend as well, but somehow I think they missed the point:

So it seems that our super secret project “EditLive! Dynamic” has been outed somehow. Apparently Andrew Frayling is on the case (twice in fact) but I have no idea where the source of the leak would have come from. Any bets on how long it will be until we get a “Ephox Rumors” (and the associated “Crazy Ephox Rumors”) site?

Oh and it’s never hard to get contact details of Ephox people, a large number of us blog, and there are plenty of contact details floating around (including my details in the sidebar of this blog). Trying to get information about EditLive! Dynamic out of us will be much more difficult – it’s so secret, most of the company won’t know it exists. We’ll talk endlessly about Rythmyx integrations, and anything else we know about though.

Some interesting responses to my complaint about feed readers stripping CSS:

• Nick Bradbury – Response: On Stripping Styles For Security
• Sam Ruby - Stripping Styles

There’s a common misperception that my complaint was about all styles but in fact I was just referring to inline styles on the basis that they are actually part of the content, not just presentation. Sam Ruby points to a feed from Wikipedia that is exactly the use case I had in mind. Many of the comments however want to strip styles to preserve a uniform look in a “river of news” type of reader, for example Nick’s comment:

Got my MacBook Pro back from service today, all fixed up. Total repair bill would have been $2500 if it wasn’t under warranty. So all up it took three and a half days to get fixed which isn’t too bad actually. I still think it’s a shame that Apple don’t offer guaranteed turn around, on-site support – it would make buying Macs for businesses a lot nicer, but I can understand it’s not their primary target market. I’m still impressed at how easy it was to switch to a backup machine and back – keeping a full clone of the system around is definitely a good idea.

A while back people discovered that many RSS readers, and all online RSS aggregators didn’t sandbox content from different sites and malicious HTML could cause cross site scripting (XSS) attacks and general nastiness. As a result most feed readers filter HTML through a seriously restrictive white list, including removing all CSS information. I’ve reached the point where I’ve simply had enough of this. CSS is a vital part of the internet and if feeds are going to be useful, we need them to work with CSS properly. So let’s take a look at what’s really going wrong:

My MacBook Pro has acquired insomnia and it’s firewire ports have given up the ghost so I’ve had to part with it while it gets repaired. It’s always annoying when problems emerge with new things, particularly when you depend on them to get work done, but it hasn’t worked out too badly. With Carbon Copy Cloner I backed everything up before putting the laptop in for service and commandeered the mac mini we have for testing so I’m up and running like normal – just a lot slower and with a tiny fraction of the RAM.

Here’s a really simple golden rule for anyone thinking of adding auto update to their products – never ever include any user identifiable information_._ There’s simply no reason you need to know who is checking for updates, you only need to know what version they have. Given the infrastructure of the internet you will wind up getting their IP address, your policy should be that these aren’t stored.

It comes as no surprise to me that the WordPress mob broke this rule with their new auto update – they always seemed shifty to me. Tell me why exactly you need the URL of the blog to determine if a new version is available? Exactly what use to you is blog.ephox.intra going to be? Oh well, I’m already removing all the pointless blog entries they spam the dashboard with and those weird technorati partner parameters so I guess I’ll be asking for updates from wordpress.com or something too….

It’s a common question – what’s the point of social networks? The most common answer is basically none. Most social networks provide yet another way to get in touch and keep in touch with people which is great but lets face it, there are about a billion different ways to communicate and leaving messages on someone’s wall only looks good compared to sending smoke signals. Some people might argue that it lets you map out and visualize your social network but seriously I know who my friends are, why don’t you? The address book has been around a long time and it still works seriously well.

 My open tabs in NetNewsWire have exploded in the last couple of days with really good articles about driving wiki adoption and generally making wiki’s work. First up Making Wikis Work is a pretty good overview of all that is wrong with wikis. It’s odd to think that a technology as young as wikis has legacy cruft but they do.

In particular, WikiWords are no longer required or a good idea, use an editor that makes creating links easy or use a simple shortcut for creating links (the square bracket notation was easy for most people to learn, but you need to provide a completely GUI alternative as well).