Archive for February, 2009

Lost In Translations

I’ve updated the book, again. I’ve added a new chapter to the book on how to make
a Nuxeo bundle behave correctly in different locales:

Chapter 7:
Internationalization and Localization

This is a chapter that is near and dear to my heart as a beginning (or
dare I say intermediate?) student of la langue français. One thing
that I didn’t really get into this too much in the chapter, although it’s important to
me these days, is how quickly you can process (or misprocess) things when
the language is your own. Some of the applications on my desktop here in
Paris are in French and I find myself glancing at things like menus and
thinking it says “Close File” when really it’s saying something totally
different. The brain can really play tricks on you when things are buried
way down there will all that reptile stuff!… Read more

This coming saturday morning–maybe on your way home on the metro from a Friday night outing–Unix time will reach 1234567890. The CET time for this monumental event is:

Sat Feb 14 00:31:30 2009

Be ready. The world may end. Or not.

Look, I get a laugh out of reading the announcements of new (or rebuilt old) operating systems. I am frankly pretty skeptical that world needs a great many more operating systems now that it has 1 poor, big commercial, closed-source one, 1 good free, small-or-large, open source one, and 1 good, small-or-large, half-open-source-half-closed-source one. From a market standpoint, I’m not sure we need more since it’s really unclear where the gap is that is going to be filled by something else that can grow into something better than either of these; the alternative of replace-all-at-once cannot even be accomplished by one of the largest, richest companies in the world and is, in my view, too much work to be useful.

So, this new Phatom OS would have been just another laugh-at-somebody-else’s-expense… except something caught my eye.

The clever bit, at least to me when I read it, was that by … Read more

Learning
Nuxeo

I’ve been asked by some of the good folks here at Nuxeo to
coordinate work on a new book about programming Nuxeo EP 5. Unlike the Nuxeo book, which is intended to be a reference to all
the details of the platform, this book is intended to be more of a gentle
introduction. This book will help readers gradually master the concepts in
Nuxeo 5 (we hope the book will be ready by the time of Nuxeo EP 5.2 GA) and
be able to develop software for the platform.

The first few chapters
are gelling, and we’ve been looking for feedback. So, we’ve decided to
gradually open up the book for comments from the Nuxeo community, or, I
suppose, from any other community that can provide useful help!

My
plan is to reveal a new chapter each workday or so, on the book draft’s website, and… Read more

What Is ECM?

Exploiting OpenOffice

I decided to start off with the good
stuff for this post. I couldn’t really call this article, “How you really
don’t need Microsoft Office anymore because the open source tools are good
enough” because I was afraid of Bill Gates. Or, to be more specific, I was
afraid his hired goons; I would guess that he has the best goons
money can buy, and lots of ‘em! Anyway, if you haven’t been following the progress of
OpenOffice, you should catch up on
things; the product has come a long way since of the … cough,
ahem…. “rough” builds of the early days. It runs really smoothly
now, and being open source it’s designed to allow other programs to leverage
the great work that the Open Office (O-O) developers have done. (I am sure
there is a climate-controlled cave somewhere for the poor … Read more

Another day, another chapter

Today, I’ve updated the book site with chapter 3 (really the second
meat-n-potatoes chapter). This chapter explains a bit about how to run the
Nuxeo server, how the Nuxeo server is related to JBoss and proposes some
excercise for you to do to explore how to use Nuxeo. These exercises are
probably “old hat” to folks with a lot of ECM experience, but if you are
new to the genre you are likely to find them quite enlightening about how
an organization can use the basic Nuxeo (and ECM) tech.

Great Feedback

After the website debuted yesterday the chairman of
Nuxeo, Stefane Fermigier, suggested that I check out this new tool called
Intense Debate. I have to say
it was a good call! IntenseDebate is a tool for allowing you to get
feedback about content on your website or blog. It’s a bit better
integrated … Read more

Atlas Ventures Crashes

H/T to Trevor Smith on this one.

Annotations may, in fact, rock!

If you haven’t played with
the 5.2 milestone 4 release. yet, you should! There are some amazingly cool
new things in there; I’m going to be trying to get through some of them this
week–despite all my packing for my upcoming move!

If you aren’t
aware, there has been a work in progress with the W3C for some time create a standard called Annotea. The idea of this
standard is to have inter-operable annotations on web pages (really URLs).
So, being an open-source and generally standards-following sort of company,
we used that standard to build this new feature into Nuxeo 5.2. That said,
we had to extend it in some pretty cool ways to make it work well within
nuxeo.

Previews

This should be the subject of a separate blog
entry, but I’ll put a bit here since you access annotations through the… Read more

Improved Image For Amazon EC2 Users

This instance is built from the Nuxeo EP 5.2.0.m4 distribution.
Great work to all the folks who contributed to it!

I have built a new version, for those that want to have something
closer to a “turnkey” image that they can run on amazon ec2. If you missed
my previous blog post, then you may want to go back to it and make sure
you have the proper background and understanding of amazon ec2.

The new image ami is:

ami-12997e7b

The major improvements with this AMI over the previous one (besides
running 5.2.0.m4):

• The jboss server has been locked down somewhat so it’s closer to
  something you can use without too much installation hassle. The most
  dangerous security problems have been dealt with. See
  /usr/local/nuxeo-ep-5.2.0.m4/banned for the removed parts
  of jboss and some more info. It’s probably not production ready, but the
  worst

… Read more