I’ve been on holidays for the past four weeks (life is tough sometimes) and away from internet connectivity so I’ve been blissfully unaware of what’s been happening in the tech world. Catching up with the RSS feeds this morning though, I’ve discovered many wonderful things:

• Robert Dawson has started with Ephox. I’d forgotten he was starting while I was away.
• Someone in the engineering team managed to work out how to add Robert to Planet Ephox. I left instructions on the various systems I’d set up before I left but this is the first time someone else has had to try to follow them.
• Our integration with the open source Alfresco CMS has been released on LiveWorks! There are two great things about this, first that it’s out and second that it’s another system that someone else has successfully picked up.
• New releases of some of our products have gone out and the change logs have been posted to the Ephox Releases blog!
  • Downside, for some reason the major update to our IWWCM Integration didn’t get a mention on the releases blog, could someone fix that ASAP please?
• The main Ephox website now has a link to LiveWorks! Yay! Now we just need to add a link to the releases blog.

The best part though, is that I still have another two weeks holidays. I’ll be back in the Ephox office on the 5th of February.

I’ve been playing around with OpenID on the few occasions I’ve had internet access over the Christmas break and have it set up, but not ideally. Currently, everything points to http://www.symphonious.net/id/ as the OpenID URL, but server and delegate. Ideally I’d like my identity URL to be just http://www.symphonious.net/ and the server ad http://www.symphonious.net/id/ but I’m not familiar enough with the whole process to make it work.

Mostly I’ve followed Sam Ruby’s instructions, but the process was done in a few different sessions following a few other explanations of OpenID, but I think it matches what Sam describes.

I found an unexpected source of frustration while getting LiveWorks! online. The site is primarily an instance of WordPress1 but the mailing lists are handled by Mailman and the archives by Lurker. All three of them are simple to customize their outward appearance, but all three of them use a different template language. So now instead of having one site design, I have to have three very similar looking, but completely different design implementations2. Every time we want to update the common parts of the site, we have to do it in multiple places in completely different ways.

It’s taken quite an effort to get everything up and ready to go, but just in time for Christmas we’re ready to announce the availability of Ephox LiveWorks! The grand plan is to give our clients and the public in general better insight into what’s going on in the Ephox labs and give them the ability to shape the company’s direction.

The site is starting off small, with just a few neat little plug-ins for EditLive!1 available and a mailing list, but I’m really excited about it. Ephox’s products are used by nearly all the big name CMS vendors, so the direction our products takes has a huge impact on the CMS industry as a whole. Getting more people involved with that process is going to make a big difference. We’re hoping to ramp up the site over time, following what user’s want, but we’re thinking along the lines of early access releases, providing integrations into open source systems and eventually weekly builds of our products to let our clients take advantage of new functionality as soon as possible.

Ephox took a couple of leaps forward today in terms of being more open and accessible to our clients. Firstly the planet instance that I’ve had running as a proof of concept for a while has been moved over to an actual Ephox server and is now at http://planet.ephox.com/ If you’re subscribed to the old feed your client should automatically switch to the new domain now but please do check it as test.symphonious.net will probably go away at some point.

I’ve learnt way more about mod_jk in the last week than I ever wanted to know. Apparently the configuration is completely different between Debian 3.1 with Tomcat 4 and the current Debian testing with Tomcat 5 (point something). Why the mod_jk package doesn’t just do the configuration for you is beyond me, or at least have a debconf wizard to do it.

Anyway, with Tomcat 4, the magical directive that makes deciding what to delegate and when simple goes like:

The internet connection started working at my new unit today. Shiny new ADSL2 connection so no more 1500k connection limit for me. Technically my ISP doesn’t know it’s up and running yet so they haven’t activated the VOIP line that’s bundled and the connections capped at 3000k which is what it’s happily connecting at. In the next couple of days that should get sorted out and it will jump up to a cap of 24000k. It remains to be seen how fast my actual connection will be given the poor quality phone lines generally found in Australia.

So Doug is excited about how we took our first steps in a new product and how well it went. Personally, I’m impressed with the way that we presented all the usual engineering setup tasks to the client in a client focussed manner. We could have done it better by not discussing up front all the engineering tasks we were hiding behind the suggested first story, but that’s okay. The first story was that we wanted to ship a distribution of the new product. It’s really quite backwards to think of things that way – normally you build the product then work out how to package and distribute it, but it’s impossible to ship anytime if you don’t build the distribution mechanism at the start.

I spent some time this afternoon trying to reduce the amount of spam that gets downloaded and dumped into my spam folder. Between SpamAssassin and Mail.app’s spam filters there’s basically no spam that makes it through to my inbox, but the sheer amount of spam being sent to symphonious.net, then downloaded from their to my home IMAP server before finally being processed by SpamAssassin is overwhelming and takes up a lot of bandwidth and processing time. Besides, with that much spam going into my spam folder I haven’t been bothered reviewing it so if there are any false positives they are pretty much doomed.

I’ve long been a proponent of UI designers making decisions about what the best way to do something is instead of just providing configuration options to the user – after all, if you are a fully trained and experienced UI designer, shouldn’t you know better than your completely untrained users? Seeing some of the discussion going around about Joel’s criticism of the Windows shutdown menu, including Arno Gourdol’s comments on the Mac OS X shutdown options and they both seem to being taking it a little bit too far.

Robert Scoble:

I’d love to know what you think? Does any of the Office 2.0 vendors have a chance to edge in on Microsoft’s market?

Edge in – sure, it’s been happening for at least the past 5 years or more. I’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve sold EditLive! to companies who were replacing Word to make life more pleasant for users. Notably though, these aren’t situations in Word’s core target market – creating documents destined for print. Word has picked up a lot of market share in all kinds of weird and wonderful content creation scenarios that it wasn’t designed for and it’s picked up features to make it work quite well there. Despite that, these fringe areas are ripe for competitors to specialize in and provide solutions that fit better with the user’s intentions.

I’ve just moved my blog and email hosting over to an unmanaged VPS running Debian so I no longer have to fight an extremely outdated RedHat and an awful Plesk control panel to get stuff done. It comes as quite a surprise that I’m finding the software in the Debian stable APT archives refreshingly up to date. Still no PHP4, but I have apache 2 and Python 2.4 (as opposed to Python 2.2 previously) so I’m happy.