Chaos Magnet

Want to do some good?

Two weeks ago, I told you about Lynn Carroll, and how she was killed in an accident on her way to visit her husband in the hospital, leaving behind two small children. Next weekend, the Chambers community will be holding a huge flea market/garage sale on the powwow grounds to raise money to cover her funeral expenses and try to set something up for the girls, Cheyenne, 9, and Dakota, who turns 6 tomorrow.

The funeral home is working with us to keep expenses down, but even so they are just over $3100, and the community has raised $900. There are four ways you can help:

1. Come to the sale May 1 and buy stuff. In addition to lots and lots and lots of "stuff," we'll also have food, cake, and so on. (And Sarah's going to make her world famous bar-b-que sauce, and her death-by-chocolate cookies, so that's worth the trip!)
2. Donate stuff for the sale so other people can buy it. Rick will be on the grounds collecting this weekend; email Sarah for information or to have her call you and make arrangements, especially if you want to come another time.
3. Anything that's left from the garage sale will be sold on eBay, so if you're not close enough to attend the sale, you can still buy stuff afterwards. If you want to be notified when we get things set up, email me.
4. You can make a straight donation via PayPal. We've set up a PayPal account for lynnsfund@nicholaschase.com, so it's separate from our own stuff.

So where are the grounds? They're in Orange Springs, Florida, at 22400 NE Hwy 315, between Fort McCoy and 318. The sale starts at 9am on Saturday, May 1, 2004.

Lynn and Ferret have always been there for everyone. They had nothing, and yet they were always there to help when others were in need. This is our chance to help them and those they care about most: the kids.

Domino applications and the Portal API

This must be my week for being featured! Domino applications and the Portal API was featured in this week's IBM Portal News:

Lotus Domino is great for storing all sorts of information in one place, and WebSphere Portal is great for gathering information from all sorts of places. But how do you get the two of them together? One option is to directly incorporate your Domino data into your portal application using the WebSphere Portal API. This tutorial details the process for reading from, and writing to, a Domino database from within a portlet.

What's the big deal about A9?

I've been hearing a lot about A9 lately, but at first glance it doesn't look like anything special. Just another search engine that uses Google's database. Or is it? Not so, according to A9: The Future of Information Access?

The making of MetroSphere, Part 29: Understand the web.xml and portlet.xml files

Now featured on the developerWorks home page: The making of MetroSphere, Part 29: Understand the web.xml and portlet.xml files

With all of the magic that goes on in the WebSphere® Portal Web interface, it's easy to forget that at its heart, a portlet application is just a collection of servlets and their supporting classes, strung together using the web.xml and portlet.xml files. As we moved to customize the MetroSphere.com experience, we realized that understanding just how these two files fit together was crucial to controlling items such as the initial title of a portlet window. This article explains the major pieces of these two files and how they control what you see in your portlet application.

Craig's List comes to Tampa Bay!

I've written about Craig's List before. It's a local community thing, where people can offer/look for jobs, stuff for sale (or for free, if you just want to get rid of it) and now it's come to Tampa Bay. Hooray!

One trip to Austin

I've been publishing for IBM for a couple of years now, so I don't even blink when they feature an article of mine, but this
is really cool. Last summer, I took a trip to Austin Texas to sit in on a session of IBM engineers talking about their brand new Autonomic Computing initiative. I came home and proposed about 15 articles and tutorials and such. Or was it 25? I can't remember now. It's been such a long road to get here -- I didn't write all of the pieces, but I've been involved in most of them in one way or another -- but it's still cool to see my "vision" out there for people to see.

Introduction to Autonomic Computing

Now the featured story on developerWorks: A quick tour of autonomic computing

Autonomic computing architecture is a range of software technologies that enable you to build an information infrastructure that can, to lesser and greater degrees, manage itself, saving countless hours (and dollars) in human management. And all this without giving up control of the system. This tutorial explains the concepts behind autonomic computing and looks at the tools at your disposal for making it happen -- today.

Jane White is Sick and Twisted

I just finished watching Jane White is Sick and Twisted. It's a small, independant film that we only rented because it had Colin Mochrie in it. I was afraid it was just going to be stupid, but it was absolutely hysterical. Not fine art, and you've got to disengage your brain first. Let's just say you can't take this too seriously, but once you accept that, you will really, really enjoy it.

And the opposite of privacy is...

Every time I consider writing something about my life, I find myself thinking very carefully about whether or not I want to tell the entire universe that potentially private thing about myself. I don't even like having my picture on the web. You'll notice it's nowhere on this blog. Gene Cowan apparen't has no such hang-ups, judging from his about me page.

Icon Story

Ever wonder what happens on your computer when you're not looking? Check out Icon Story.

Java in XSLT: Extension Functions

Now on InformIT in the XML Reference Guide: Java in XSLT: Extension Functions

Using XSLT to transform XML into another form has a lot of advantages, not the least of which is flexibility. When you want to change the output, you don't have to go back to the code, you simply have to change the XSLT style sheet. But it's easy to mistake this simplicity for shallowness. XSLT can enable you to do much more than simply reformatting text.

Browser-based Trackback

I've gotten tired of the fact that I can't get CIHost to update any software on the server without charging me for it, so I sat down and wrote a standalone trackback tool.

This is just a first version, and unfortunately, it only works in IE for the moment, but I'd appreciate comments on how it works, or suggestions on making it better.

Free download of Free Culture

Rogers Cadenhead points out that the free download of Laurence Lessig's Free Culture: How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity includes a standard copyright term, rather than the Founder's Copyright of 14 years, with an option to renew for 14 more.

Thing is, he also released it under a license, which enables other people to use it -- which is the point of his fight against insanely long copyright terms.

I do agree with Rogers, though; would have been nice if the book reverted to Public Domain sometime in our lifetimes.

What Bill Gates is thinking

Sarah is always bugging me to come up with an idea for "the next big thing." (I've got a pretty good track record of figuring out what the next trend is, but I never have the time or the funds to capitalize on it...) Anyway, Bill Gates gets to do the one thing I'd love to do: Think Weeks. He goes off and doesn't answer any emails or phone calls or anything, and just researches and makes comments. Eweek has an article on What Bill Gates Is Thinking that's interesting...

The last thing someone hears

My son always thinks it's ridiculous that the last thing I say before I walk out the door to go somewhere is always "I love you."

This past weekend, Sarah and Eric set up at the Chambers Farm Gathering, which is basically a powwow up in northern Florida. On Saturday, our friend Ferret, who's been on the list for a lung transplant for about a year, was hospitalized once more. As we were leaving after packing up on Monday, the last person we ran into was his wife, Lynn. She gave us the lowdown on his condition, and said she didn't expect him to come home from the hospital this time. She also rolled her eyes at how ornery he was being.

Sarah reminded her that it was the medication and the disease talking, and that she couldn't argue with a disease. She reminded Lynn that she needed to watch what she said, because she didn't want the last thing he heard from her to be anger. She also reminded Lynn that she needed to take care of herself, and get some rest so she'd be able to take care of their two young daughters.

Lynn thanked her and hugged us both goodbye.

Last night, on her way to the hospital to visit Ferret, Lynn was killed in a head-on collision.

An exterminator's nightmare

Um ... yyyyyeah.

Thought for the day

You become what you think about.

Earl Nightingale

To heck with the critics, I loved "The Postman"

One of my favorite books of all time is The Postman, by David Brin. So I was thrilled (and a little nervous) when I heard Kevin Costner was making it into a movie. Still, I loved the movie. Did it follow the book? Well, not completely. In fact, it left out about half of the book. Fortunately, it was the half I didn't think belonged in the book in the first place. (Sorry, David!) I wondered what Brin thought of the film, and while searching for confirmation that I'm not losing my mind -- well, OK, that's debatable -- and he really did call the intelligent agents in Earth ferrets, I discovered that he's let us in on his thoughts about the movie. I'm glad to see that I'm in line with him. :)

Portable ZIP codes: April Fool's parody

I was on my way home from the Chambers Farm Gathering -- too much work to do to stay longer than it took to drop off Sarah -- when I heard a story about how the Post Office was going to follow cell phone companies' lead and offer portable ZIP codes. I thought it was ridiculous, and was trying to figure out how it would work, when towards the end, the NPR story said:

The new vanity zip code feature is only the latest addition to the Go Postal program, which began last April 1. USPS officials say Go Postal has already been a success, with millions of dollars of new revenue coming from the introduction of pop-up ads on postage stamps. They are hoping to issue the first portable zip codes by April 1, 2005.

I was pretty sure it was an April Fools' joke, so I looked it up when I got home and was pleased to find the whole Portable Zip Codes story online. According to the sidebars, All Things Considered does this every year. Previous stories include Shellac, the Sound of the Future, Universal Pet Health Care, and Projecting Ads on the Moon. I'll have to make a point of listening next year.