Month February 2003

Mailinglist Networks

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Recently, some interesting projects emerged that make the vision of exchanging distributed information from mailinglists more and more true. ZZ/OSS has the vision that one day it will be able to reuse a certain mailinglist post or thread in an online publication or forum for example, and automatically preserve the relation with the mailinglist. Mailinglist Networks are one step towards interchangeable information – no matter from which source it comes. We develop the Content Network System to become a supportive software architecture for this purpose.

1. RSS Feeds

There are mailinglist archives/scripts available that offer RSS feeds aka XML annotated threads for harvesting. Take for example the mailman-archive-to-rss.txt script or Archive.

2. Visualization

Contextual relations between threads and postings are often hard to grasp once a discussion involves many contributors and goes over a long period of time. With Apache Agora, Stefano Mazzocchi has written a Java Applet to visualize social relationships in a community by analyzing the postings, especially the replies, to that community’s mailinglist.

First Hungarian PHP Conference

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

From php.net: “The members of the Hungarian PHP community announce the first Hungarian PHP Conference which will take place in Budapest, on Saturday March 29th, sponsored by several international and local companies. The conference offers an entirely free one-day activity with several presentations addressing basic and advanced topics, as well, exclusively in Hungarian. Moreover, a five kilobyte-limited PHP contest has been started to discover the most talented PHP programmers in our country. The program includes the first session of the so-called PHP Division which will be established with the set purpose of representing the community itself and promoting their interests in any national business and official phorums.”

Sandro is happy that PHP has growing momentum in Hungary – he spent a year in Hungary during his University studies. Congratulations and thanks to Goba for making the conference happen!

Bitfluxeditor

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

Christian Stocker is doing a rewrite of Bitfluxeditor based on Midas. Here’s an excerpt of his mail to the Bitfluxeditor developers mailinglist:

“I was able to insert arbitary elements and intercept/override key/mouseevents, so everything I had doubts about, seems to be possible.Therefore I will give it a try for the BXE NG and try to integrate it. This will save us certainly a lot of hassle with the keyevents handling and hopefully make it faster. Furthermore, the big Ã?, resp. dead keys do also work with midas. I couldn’t get them working with JS keypress events (http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=192935 for the record).

Concerning Mozilla < 1.3 /Netscape 7, I think, it should be possible to still support them. We'll use Midas mainly for the typing stuff, not the formatting stuff, so it should be just a matter of additional keyevents in Mozilla <1.3 as it is now (of course, it's much more debugging/testing work, but as long as Mozilla 1.3 isn't that widespread (it's not even out yet..) it's well worth the effort.)"

SRM Modifications

Sandro Groganz Leave a comment

The Script Running Machine (SRM) will be optimized. Maintainer Derick Rethans sent the following TODO list to the SRM mailinglist:

– Make connection handling Multi-threaded
– Port the extension to ZE2
– Implement timers

SRM is a PHP extension that does all sort of persistent storage for PHP. This storage can be simple variables for applications, but also objects, and even running objects called Bananas (similar to Java Beans). For more information see the website dedicated to SRM.