Everyone’s been busy arguing about what the appropriate name for those things that NetNewsWire and FeedDeamon download, parse and display (eg: Scoble, Steve Gilmor, Scoble, Dave Winer, Scoble, Scoble and of course Scoble – not that Scoble posts a lot or anything….)  Anyway, no one really cares, the vast majority of people haven’t heard of any of those terms and will have to learn what they mean so whatever the majority of people wind up learning is what will stick and everyone will have to live with it.  I’m betting the easiest thing to say will win – most likely “feed”.

For the past few weeks I’ve been investigating and planning a move from CVS (CVSNT actually) to Subversion at work. Hopefully this week I’ll be able to do the actual conversion and see what mess it makes.

The main thing that’s missing from Subversion is an exact equivalent for CVS’s meta-modules. Subversion’s externals are good but need to support relative URLs so that branching is simple. Even so, it’s not that hard to go back and re-edit the externals property after branching and it can probably be automated with a small script.  It might actually be a good opportunity to automate adding new branches to our automatic build setup as well so whenever we create a new branch the build machine (affectionately known as Bob) automatically starts building it.

Ken Coar starts each post with a one-line comment/quip/remark which may or may not be related to the topic of the post.  Apparently Leo Simmons reads them:

Hi, Leo!

This isn’t the only not-so-hidden message to Leo hidden in Ken’s summary and I’m beginning to suspect their up to something.  If only I could crack the devious code their using…

Maybe I need a monacle…  BTW Ken, do you always wear that or is it just to make you look uber cool on your blog (which it does btw)?

I’ve previously griped about the lack of a good IDE for Ruby on Rails and despite trying out TextMate for a month I just wasn’t happy enough with it – I’m still spending far too much time navigating files and not enough time coding.  There’s a lot of talk about just using VIM and being happy with that (example) but that VIM just doesn’t have a good enough interface for selecting which file to edit and navigating the file system, let alone for quickly scanning files to find the section I want.

I’ve got a few little projects in mind that I think Cocoon would be a good fit for and one system already in production that uses Cocoon (badly) so I’m thinking I need to work take some time and really learn how to use it properly and what the best practices are for using it.

So, oh great Cocoon guru’s who hangeth outeth at planet apache (and those who don’t), what’s the best way to go about learning Cocoon?  Book recommendations, article recommendations etc?  Where do I learn best practices and get a good overview of all the parts etc rather than just how to do specific things?

Wikis were invented to make it easier for people to contribute content.  They do this with two key features:

1. In browser editing.
2. Users don’t have to learn HTML.

That sounds awfully familiar.  It is in fact two of the key things that Ephox provided as we helped create the in-browser WYSIWYG editor industry which is now a key feature of most content management systems, knowledge management systems, document management systems and most other enterprise systems that people want to encourage contribution to (or reduce the complaints from people who are forced to contribute).  As a side note, I’m not sure whether the inventor of EditLive! had heard of wikis or not when he started his work and I’m not sure which was created first but it really doesn’t matter.

I probably should title this post, Why Big Media Is Dominating Podcasting, because I suspect that there are already more listeners of “big media” podcasts than there are of “little guy” podcasts.  I don’t have figures to back that up though so lets not worry too much about what the current state is and look to the future – will podcasting stay true to it’s roots and be a way for the “little guy” to have his say or will big media take over?

Scoble pointed to a random blog posting of someone saying they prefer Windows over Mac OS as he’s paid to do.  Usually I skip them but for some reason I read this one.  It really struck me as odd that in a post that’s meant to be pro-Windows, it’s really more about how to get by with Windows:

There are a few things to remember about windows. Turn on automatic updates and put everything on a broadband connection behind a router. They can be picked up for about $40 bucks. Don’t install every crappy shareware program or file sharing software that comes along .

A while back, Benjamin commented about a problem his parents had organizing photos:

Watching my mother trying to use Windows XP to locate her holiday snaps makes it clear to me that tagging is the right way to interact with personal documents. The traditional “one file, one location” filesystem is old and busted. The scenareo begins with my mother learning how to take pictures from her camera and put them into foldlers. Unfortunately, my father is still the one managing short movie files. The two users have different mental models for the data. They have different filing systems. Mum wants to find files by date, or by major event. Data thinks that movie files are different to static images and that they should end up in different places. The net result is that Mum needs to learn how to use the search feature in order to find her file, and is lucky to find what she is looking for.

I’ve finally got around to changing over most of my mailing list subscriptions to use my Symphonious.net address instead of my intencha.com address.  I think I’ve got them all…  My intencha.com address will continue to work indefinitely though so it’s not a big deal if I’ve missed one, it just means that from here on in I plan to try and send everything from my symphonious.net address so any mailing lists that haven’t been changed over may get caught up in moderation.

I noticed Evan made a side-comment about Ephox licensing which I wanted to clarify and since he doesn’t have comments enabled but does have trackback on I’m posting it here.  Ephox products are available both in limited seat licenses as well as on per-server terms with unlimited users.  The server licenses make it much easier to deploy in big organizations as you don’t have to deal with the overhead of ensuring you have enough user licenses etc (which is what Evan was originally talking about).

Symphonious.net has now moved to it’s own virtual server hosted by eApps.  I think everything is set up right but if you see any problems please let me know.  Sorry for any disturbances caused.

Also, a massive thanks to Iain for letting me use his server up until now (the header image is his too).  The service was excellent – you’ll have to come round for gratitude beer and nachos soon.