... and what is this RALLY thing, anyways?

RALLY is an architecture and a set of specs form Microsoft that describes how to create devices that will easily configure themselves into a Microsoft centric network, with a heavy focus on home networking at this time. Here is their overview site:

http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/rally/default.mspx

A couple of important technologies include:

• PnP-X Plug and Play Extensions - This will allow external devices on the network to link themselves into the Windows OS and appear to the OS as Windows devices.
  
• LLTD Link Layer Topology Discovery - the name says it all ...
• Web Services Profile for Devices - I sense a candidate for another round of OSP.. or maybe not?

Now the question at hand is, how this program will possibly integrate with J2ME, Jini and JXTA. Any ideas anybody?

I just installed Windows Vista RC1 (Build 5600) and had some serious problems getting Windows Update to work from behind my proxy server. The error I got was 8024402C, along with the recommendation to try the Automatic Proxy configuration. Needless to say that this did not work ...

Here is how to get rolling with this issue:

1. Get the WinHTTP system proxy settings right

When configuring IE in Vista, you DO NOT configure the system HTTP proxy settings. In former versions of Windows you would use the proxycfg.exe command for doing this. In Vista, you will have to use the netsh.exe. (Does anybody know of a UI way to do this?) Do this:

netsh> winhttp

netsh winhttp> set proxy myproxy.company.tld:80

You have to do this in a CMD.EXE windows with administrative privileges (right click CMD.EXE in Accessories and select 'Run as Administrator').

2. Delete old setting for Windows update

- Stop the Windows Update service (e.g. through the Services MMC plug-in or through net stop wuauserv).

- Delete C:\WINDOWS\SoftwareDistribution (again, with administrator privileges)

- Start the Windows Update service

It should work now.

Just like some time earlier this year, Build 5600 (RC1) of the Windows Vista OS has difficulaties with VMWare. Fortunately, life is somewhat easier this time around: If your problem is that Vista seems to freeze during installation at the "Windows is load..." text stage, you should try to add the following lines to your .VMX file:

svga.maxWidth = "640"
svga.maxHeight = "480"

Thanks to Joel on Software for this tip.

Microsoft today announced their "Open Specifications Promise", essentially a non-assertion covenant for a huge chunk of WS-* protocols. This OSP means (as fas as I can tell - and I am NOT a lawyer ) that people can start implementing WS-* specifications without having to fear any action from Microsoft, as long as they do not sue Microsoft over these specs - duh!

This is quite good news for a number of reasons:

1. All existing implementations of WS-* technology are safe from any legal harassment from Microsoft. Not that they would do this necessarily, but this covenant gives peace of mind.
   
2. Since pretty much all security specs are out, OSIS and Higgins are now in a much better position to implement a WCS compatible InfoCard selector.
3. The best thing about this is the fundamental mindshift at Microsoft. A couple of years ago this would have been unthinkable. Now it is real. This is really major change in the way Microsoft deals with the open source community. It can be hoped that this OSP is just the beginning of a much more open discussion with Microsoft.
   

Thanks to the folks at blogs.sun.com, crossposting works for me (again). THe issue was that in the new 3.0 Roller deployment, all XMLRPC traffic was redirected to an HTTPS endpoint - which makes a lot of sense, but caused my client (dasBlog) to give up.

Hopefully, we will see ATOM based publishing soon ....

Tom Clark brought a very interesting article on patents to my attention:

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,2013011,00.asp

This is really not to single out Microsoft - everybody in the technology field(s) is doing this kind of thing right now. But it is plain wrong: On the one side I do see legitimate needs for software and similar patents - but the current system is obviously so overwhemled that all kinds of nonsensical applications can make it through the process.

From personal experience: some time ago, I had a friend who was in deep trouble: he wrote some open source software to control toy trains. Open source software - nice. Well, some patent troll from Oregon contacted him and told him about a patent he was granted that was - allegedly - infringed by this OSS package. My friend got an invoice for $200,000. It turned out that tthe patent in question "covered" any  cross-process communication - as long as it was related to toy trains. This patent was actually granted in 2003 - about 35 years after the first DARPAnet cross-machine communications RFCs and more than 17 years after Marklin released their first digital control system for toy trains. Bottom line: the system *is* broken.

Here is a very nice introduction to ontologies within the context of the semantic web and - in particular - OWL:

http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~horrocks/ISWC2003/Tutorial/

Here is a suggestion for the dasBlog folks:

After our corporate blog host (http://blogs.sun.com/) was upgraded to Roller 3.0 (which - by the way - has a couple of really nice improvements), my cross-poring would no longer work. Since this is quite annoying is went to figure out why this is so. It turns out that the Roller folks (at least at Sun) were thinking ahead and made sure that all calls the XMLRPC endpoints get redirected to a protected HTTPS handler. Makes sense.

Unfortunately, this break the posting mechanism for dasBlog, as well as a lot of other blog clients out there. While the Roller admins are now fixing this, I came up with a small idea how to get dasBlog to post to HTTPS endpoints as well. Since it uses the Cook Computing XML-RPC library, this fix is actually very straight forward:

You will need to fix just a very few items:

• The CrosspostSite class in the newtelligence.dasBlog.Runtime namespace. Here you should add a propety like String transportProtocoll = "http" or similar. Also the schema for the siteConfig file file to accomodate this additional attribute.
  
• The UI to allow proper configuration (duh!).
  
• The HandleCrosspost() method in newtelligence.dasBlog.Runtime.DasBlogDataServiceGFactory.BlogDataServiceXml.CrosspostJob. This UriBuilder should be reconfigured to something like:
  UriBuilder uriBuilder = new UriBuilder
                                  (ci.Site.transportProtocol,
                                   ci.Site.HostName,
                                   ci.Site.Port,
                                   ci.Site.Endpoint);

And this should be it.

Obviously, for the long run I would love to see an ATOM protocol based mechanism, but so far this is a dream (I guess?!). Here is the URL for the Bug I submitted on SF.NET.

Well, I finally bit the bullet and decided to update my production blog engine to the latest build. This will be a new adventure, since I am now really on some 'terra incognita': I am running on a beta platform, with unchecked code. Cool.

Part of this experience was to migrate away from CVS (at least for this project) to SVN. One of the reasons I was hangin on to CVS was the wonderful Tortoise CVS gui that makes versionb control usable even for people who do not love command lines of at least 120 chracters. Realizing that there is now a Tortoise client for SVN as well (here), the move was easy.

The next 'challenge' was to migrate my blog from a .NET 1.1 platform to 2.0 (since I definitively prefer VS.NET 2005 over the older versions, and also like some of the performance improvements in 2.0). Again, this was reasonably painless (almost like Java (tm) ).

So now here I present dasBlog 1.9 on ASP.NET 2.0. Hope it does not break.

BTW: Many thanks to the entire dasBlog developer team! Great job.

Since I was recently going through my inventory of Javascript components to update a web site, I decided to link a few of the nicer ones here. They are not as integrated as the GWT or Microsoft Atlas, but - at times - still quite useful:

Tigra Menu

http://www.softcomplex.com/products/tigra_menu/

This is a nice, easy to configure JavaScript menu bar that works quite well across different browsers (with the notable exception of using absolute positioning, so IE and FireFox will *always* require some different handling).

There are a few more components ot SoftComplex - check also their 'Tigra Hints', 'Tigra Tree Menu', and some more of their components.

The basic edition is free - they have PRO components for money.

SynForce

http://www.netspinner.co.uk/synforce/html/synforce.html

This is a small validation library, that comes under LGPL.

Xin Calendar 2

http://www.yxscripts.com/xc2/index.html

Really nice JS calendar that is free, as long as you keep a link to yxscripts.com from your web site. REALLY nice and extremely configurable.

Here are the architectural overview pages for Project Higgins and Project Bandit:

Higgins

Overview: http://spwiki.editme.com/HigginsIntroduction

Presentation: http://spwiki.editme.com/HigginsOverview2

Bandit

Architecture: http://www.bandit-project.org/index.php/Architecture_and_Design

Roadmap: http://www.bandit-project.org/index.php/Roadmap