NoSQL databases have been around for a while and they offer a lot of attractive features. I’ve been meaning to have a look at CouchDB for a while and having some time I’ve spent some time over the last few days trying to get a basic webapp running using CouchDb and CouchApp. I’d like to say that I’ve been impressed by how easy it is as that would fit with the hype, but sadly I’ve...
I’ve been a member of the ASF for a while now. During my time as a member the foundation has changed and I find myself wondering where it’s going and how much the ride will cost. No organisation can afford to remain the same over such a period, so change was inevitable – it’s the direction of the changes that concerns me. Gaining membership of the foundation used to mean that you had contributed for a period in...
After a reasonable amount of time and effort by several people the community site is now live and available at http://people.apache.org/. I’m very glad it’s made it to, what should be, it’s final resting place. The automatic generation script seems to be working well and we have 136 committers now listed. Maybe now it’s in an “official” place we’ll have some more committers add their details? This isn’t the end, merely...
I’ve been spending a bit of time recently getting the committers information on asylum working correctly in preperation for it’s move. Sebb has been keeping me honest by catching a lot of minor problems and pointing out IE issues that happily pass me by as Firefox is my browser of choice. One thing that has started to conern me slightly is the way we add geo data. Presently most people add their actual co-ordinates, but as Sander points...
After advertising the committers site a little more it now has details for over 100 ASf committers. Not bad, but there are still over 1,100 who haven’t added their details yet. Somehow I suspect the current layout and organisation won’t scale that well if we ever get near to the full number, but it should be interesting to see! Planet RDF threw up this link today. Given how much XSLT I’ve been using for the asylum...
A while ago I started looking at using foaf files to allow ASF committers to add their information to a web site. All too often committers to the ASF go unnoticed and I felt it was about time we had some way of allowing people to add their details and gain some visibility. Of course, it’s voluntary! Along with the basics (name and projects) I wanted to allow geographical information to be added so we can have a map....
After a couple of days of hacking on XSLT the site is now back in (almost) full working order and is updating on a regular basis. The reasons why this hasn’t been the case are boring and long winded, and now a matter of history 🙂 There’s still some work to be done and I’m hopeful that I’ll get to that this week. The look hasn’t changed much with just a few tweaks to the CSS...
I’m home again after completing the journey home from Austin. The conference was good fun and quite unbelievably I think I managed to complete my entire ToDo list! Rich and I worked really hard to achieve the goal of releasing a Feathercast episode every day from the conference and we managed to get some very good interviews and sound bites in doing so. We’ve got a small amount of material to be edited and released at a later...
As I’m almost done with my packing and it seems as though todo lists are the “in” thing this time around… record a feathercast a day record some material for future feathercasts work on moving mod_sparql towards a filter and adding stores support try and push rdfcal towards mainstream adoption persuade as many people as possible to add their details to the committers info try and remember the sessions I’m chairing (TH3, TH6) get my presentation fully...
One of the projects I’ve been interested in working on for quite a while now has been gathering and sisplaying information from all the committers involved with the ASF. The number is over 1200 now and keeps growing, so it’s a large group. While the ASF advertises who it’s members are it doesn’t really do the same for the committers – yet these are the people that are the lifeblood of the organisation! When I last tried...
A while back I spent some time and wrote some scripts and XSL that handle RDF calendars. The idea is the same as the other RDF stuff I’ve been doing – allow people to maintain their own data and have a central location aggregate and display the data in useful forms. As Leo points out it’s not really Web 2.0 as I don’t use Ruby on Rails and presently tags aren’t used, but it’s still...
I’ve been playing more and more with RDF technologies over the past 6 months and have started to see a lot of potential uses for the technology within the ASF. I’ve created a few demonstrations in the site-dev sandbox I have at http://asylum.zones.apache.org/, but these are very much still in development. The one that I think is ready to make an appearance is the calendaring. The basic idea is that every project (or even...