Oh, JavaOne. I remember you well, and would that I were there again. The swag. The booths. The bags. The bofs. The sore feet. The sheer geeky joy of it all, rubbing elbows with hungry dreamers, coders and Javasseurs.

I went to JavaOne as a tech journalist, four years ago, during the heady cold war between JBoss and Sun microsystems over the future of their J2EE standard. It was great fun, but more than fun, it exposed me to some of the most forward thinking minds in the United States, and really got the taste of innovation in my mouth. I would absolutely do it all over again, but it sneaks up on the world each year, I suppose. Where were the tension building news articles that slowly introduced us all to the big concepts at stake this year? Where, that spark of human drama that envelops the masses and brings them closer to Sun? I'm too provincial, and missed those things.

But, there smacks of incredible change afoot, and hope that there are good journos there in San Francisco this week, someone who can see the big picture, who can write, and who loves or at the very least has a cold eyed respect for Java and its potential. Our eyes on the ground, as it were. Good luck to everyone who has worked hard to get their booths set up, who braved all of the frantic trips to Kinkos in downtown San Francisco. And good luck to Sun. We're watching out here.

Posted by Alexander Saint Croix on 9 May 2007 at 08:18 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If you're interested in polishing up your UMWiki web, you should highly consider using the NatSkin plugin that we installed in December 2005. NatSkin is something of a hidden gem inside of the UMWiki, and we purposely have avoided proselytizing it because it deviates from the pattern skin in a way that would severely confuse people in our documentation.

But, I think that 18 months is long enough to wait and I'm just going to start talking and writing about it. First of all, you can see what your UMWiki web would look like using the NAT skin by adding the following snippet to the URL of any topic inside of the UMWiki:

?skin=nat

https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome?skin=nat

To get it back to normal, set the skin variable equal to 'pattern' like so:

https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/Main/WebHome?skin=pattern

That's a start. Tomorrow I'll give some tips on how to put on your "natural skin glasses" and override how you see ALL pages in the UMWiki, by jimmying your personal settings in the Main web.

Posted by Alexander Saint Croix on 6 May 2007 at 11:17 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I wrote an AJAX RSS reader to pull UMJIRA RSS feeds into generic web sites. Normally you'd have all kinds of trouble getting content between pages located in different domains (such as from this blog.lib.umn.edu to umjira.umn.edu, but I found a way to get around the problem without sacrificing security. Better still, I give all of the control over how the resulting data is presented to YOU, through CSS. So, if you ever wanted a handy little RSS feed from one of your JIRA projects, say, like this:

Issues for arete-1.0-alpha-05

Now's your chance.

I built it over the course of the last four evenings. I've added further refinement of the RSS reader this morning, and am ready to call it complete. In addition to the feed URL being completely configurable from inside of a remote client (like a blog entry or a TWiki topic), the URL of the CSS stylesheet for the feed can also be configured through a URL parameter. So, whatever the feed is that you're looking for on UMJIRA, you can now pull it directly into your web page. I'm going to build one for the UThink blogs next, but everyone's got a different RSS layout so I'll likely have to require that people standardize their RSS feed structures to use the UThink feed reader.

I have posted up the new code inside of the arete project site:
https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/Arete

You'll see it on the left bar.

This table is being drawn from the RssFeed-1_0-alpha-05 topic:
https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/Arete/RssFeed-1_0-alpha-05

You can see how I configured the target of the RSS feed and the CSS stylesheet by looking at:
https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/Arete/RssFeed-1_0-alpha-05?raw=on

The CSS stylesheet for this table is now an attachment of the WebStyleSheets topic at:
https://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/bin/view/Arete/WebStyleSheets

And, of course, the contents of this CSS file can be viewed online at:
http://wiki.umn.edu/twiki/pub/Arete/WebStyleSheets/twiki-sidebar.css

Once again, I send my heartfelt thanks to the University of Minnesota Science and Engineering library for providing late night and weekend study hours. What a difference it makes to have a safe and quiet place to work at night and on weekends!

Posted by Alexander Saint Croix on 5 May 2007 at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm so thankful that the Science and Engineering library on campus will be open 24 hours a day for the next week. I was here until midnight last night, working on building an inline RSS reader for the UMJIRA. I wanted to post a quick thanks to the UMN librarians who made the call to offer a 24-hour study hall. And the Great Hall is absolutely beautiful.

Contrary to the impression that the majority of students give the public, there are quite a few people on campus who actually study, do coursework and apply themselves to productive and creative ends on Friday and Saturday nights.

Posted by Alexander Saint Croix on 5 May 2007 at 10:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)