danbri’s foaf stories

The Widgetarians.org feed aggregator is now running Venus, Sam Ruby’s reworking of the Planet codebase. I had been getting sporadic “KeyError” errors; with the upgrade, that’s gone away. Many thanks to Sam Ruby, Scott James Remnant and Jeff Waugh for some handy software :)

Some advice from Garrett Rooney on Subversion. I was asking about moving the historical records for the FOAF project (xmlns.com etc) from dusty old CVS into shiny new Subversion. In particular, from CVS where I own and control the box, to Subversion where I’m a non-root normal mortal user (ie. Dreamhost customer).

The document records are pretty simple (no branches etc.). In fact only the previous versions of the FOAF RDF namespace document are of any historical interest at all. But I wanted to make sure that I could get things out again easily, without owning the Svn repository or begging the Dreamhost sysadmins.

Answer: “…a slightly qualified yes. assuming the subversion server is running svn 1.4 or newer a non-root user can use the svnsync tool to copy the contents (i.e. entire history they have read access to) of one repository into a new one. with servers before 1.4 it’s still possible to extract the information, but it’s more difficult.”

And finding the version number? “if they’re letting you access svn via http you can just browse a repository and by default it’ll tell you the server version in the html view of the repository“.

Easily done, we’re on 1.4.2. That’s good.

Q: Any recommendations for importing from CVS?
A: “Converting from cvs to svn is a hellish job, due to the amount of really necessary data that cvs doesn’t record. cvs2svn has to infer a lot of it, and it does a damn good job of it considering what a pain in the ass it is. I’m immediately skeptical of anyone who goes out and writes another conversion tool ;-) ”

“If you don’t have the ability to load a dumpfile into the repository you can load it into a local repos and then user svnsync to copy that into a remote empty repository. svnsync unfortunately won’t let you load into a non-empty repository, if you want to do that you need to use a svnadmin load, which requires direct access to the repository. most hosting sites will give you some way to do that sort of thing though.”

Thanks Garrett!

I’ve just made Widgetarians.org, a Planet-based aggregator of Widgety stuff.

The contents are somewhat ad-hoc, and will evolve in unpredictable ways as people publish and fix feeds, and as I hear about new sites. For example, at the time of writing I couldn’t find any working public feeds for the great things the Opera folks are doing with widgets. The exact focus of the site might evolve, but the audience I have in mind are developers who are building widgets (and “gadgets”, “applications” etc.) using standard Web technologies. So I’ll gather feeds from blogs, galleries, developer discussion lists that might interest such people. The site also aggregates anything tagged with “widgets” on delicious, so that’s a quick way to share things into this site.

Since I’ve been working at Joost this year, I ought to take care to be clear that widgetarians.org is done in my own time, using my own resources, and suchlike. Of course I’d be happy if people checked out the evolving Joost widgets platform, but this particular site is not Joost-specific. The more developers building widgets (of all kinds) using standard Web technology, the better! I’m also not going to make a big fuss about what exactly counts as a “widget”; it’s a pretty intuitive, family-resemblance concept. In many ways the old Java applet dream of Web from 1995 or so, or modular computing architectures like OpenDoc were in the same space. But the focus I have here is around desktop and Web page add-ons that bundle up javascript, css, xml markup etc., and on the use of emerging standards for interop and skill-sharing around such platforms.

ps. the logo features venezuelan ants… in orbit around planet sugar :)

A Monkees spooky-special on Joost. (Seems to be globally available except USA).

see also - http://www.joost.com/halloween/

IMDB - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0650671/

Trivia - http://monkeestv2.tripod.com/season1/monster.html

From Joost : Monkees, The - Episode 18 - I Was a Teenage Monster (Digital Continuous Edit)

Monkees, The - Episode 18 - I Was a Teenage Monster (Digital Continuous Edit) from the album Episode 18 - I Was a Teenage Monster

Shadow trade and industry secretary Alan Duncan said: “Whatever the rhetoric, there is nothing in this White Paper that will guarantee that a single nuclear power station will be built.”

“Business will only invest in nuclear power if it knows its costs - it needs certainty about carbon, decommissioning, and waste.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6681377.stm

“Clean, safe and efficient…”

From Joost : Class of Nuke Em High

Readin’, writin’ and radiation! When the nuclear power plant next door springs a leak, the students of Tromaville High begin mutating into psycho-punk freaks! Featuring an appearance by the Smithereens!

Just started watching this one on the Raindance TV Joost channel, but I don’t have time right now. In the absence of a bookmarking system I’ll clutter my blog with links. It’s good to have more watchable stuff on Joost than I’ve time to watch :)

See also http://www.cascadesky.com/projects_nick.html

From Joost : Shooting Nick

Intending to shoot a documentary about American life, middle-aged loser Dan (director Daniel Yost) is instantly kidnapped by a manic couple (Robert Blanche & Sarah Rosenberg) who demand that he documents their trip to the beach on video.

OK, what happens if I put an URL in the Blog text: box?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0398037/

And how can I tag this to be in my “conspiracy theory” category? http://danbri.org/words/category/world/conspiracy-theory

Do blog posting APIs support categories? I hope at least Atom’s does…

From Joost : EMR

Stuck in a dead-end job and living alone with his cat, Londoner Adam Jones (Adam Leese) spends his free time obsessing over the latest conspiracy theories on the internet.

(via Simon)

From Joost : Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers, Chapter 2 - Tunnel of Terror

Aura helps Flash to escape as Zarkov is put to work in Ming’s laboratory and Dale is prepared for her wedding to Ming. Flash meets Prince Thun, leader of the Lion Men, and the pair return to the palace to rescue Dale