the ryan king

….at least, that is, every IDE I’ve ever tried.

I’m having to live in Java land for the time being, as required by my coursework. This hasn’t been extremely bad so far, as I’ve had simple enough projects that I could easily just use vim or TextMate and a few shell scripts to manage everything.

However, I’m now working on a project with significantly larger scope. Therefore, I thought it useful to try out one of the popular Java IDEs. First, I tried NetBeans 5.0 (beta) because Tim Bray seems to like it. I couldn’t really get it to work and it was quite ugly, to boot.

Next, I tried Eclipse, because, you know, its what people use. No go, spent 30 minutes figuring out how to run my code.

I like the idea of a good IDE, but unforunately, Eclipse gets so many simple things wrong that I can’t use it. Can’t. I’d like to, but I can’t get any work done with it. So much for helping my productivity.

Here are my objections regarding Eclipse, I’d love to be proven wrong on these:

• The keybindings are so wrong on Mac OS X. There are years, nay decadesm of well-established precedent on the Mac. You break those, you break everything. When you make Option-left-arrow do anything but skip 1 word to the left, you make the application worthless to me.
• Ok, so the keybinding suck, but you can’t change them, right? Um, I guess so. Though I think I found the interface for changing them, I haven’t been able to actually change any of them, so I’m stuck with the idiotic behavior.
• I couldn’t figure out how to actually run my code. I went to the Run menu, tried all the reasonable options, but was unable to run my code. I went to the command line and it took me 2 seconds to run my code.

I haven’t had a chance to try IntelliJ and xCode doesn’t seem to really give me anything, so I’m going to ignore it. Instead I’m gonna use TextMate and write shell scripts.

So, today is the last day of my internship with Technorati.

I can’t believe how much has happened, how many people I’ve met and how much cool stuff I’ve gotten to work on in such a sort period of time. I’ve learned a lot about developing software, running a business and how those two things interact.

I start school again tomorrow at USF and am really looking forward to the classes I’m taking this fall.

Thankfully, though, I’ve arranged to stay at Technorati part-time while in school. That’s right- I’m still going to be working at Technorati while in school!

I’ll get to learn even more about balancing multiple ongoing projects (time to go re-read GTD).

Thank you to everyone at Technorati for giving me this opportunity.

You’ve probably heard about Open Search, A9’s format which allows anyone to be a search source for A9.com. Despite the name of the technology, the registry of sources is not open to the public, only to A9. A few of my fellow students have changed this by creating the ChorroSearch Open Search Registry. One of my professors, David Wolber explains:

Chris Fraschetti and Deniz Efendioglu, two students in my Internet Systems Research course, developed this metasearch tool based on A9’s Open Search protocol. It displays results in a column-based manner similar to A9’s client. It also allows information sources to register and immediately have their data searchable to ChorroSearch or any other client that uses ChorroSearch’s open registry (as far as I know, A9 doesn’t provide an open xml-based list of registered opensearch sources). The guys also developed ‘Got Chorro?’ which allows an ordinary user to create a search engine from documents on their desktop, register as an opensearch source, and automatically become a producer of information as well as a consumer (a prosumer).

(Via The Absent-Minded Professor.)

I got two new converts this week:

• David Wolber is one of my professors, who’s advising me and my partner on our Small Web project.
• Eran Globen is my partner on that project.

Both using WordPress and both worth reading.

Update: After thinking about this a bit more, ‘citeVia’ may be a better potential name.

For my Internet Systems Research class last night, we had Tantek Çelik come speak on microformats. I believe it was more or less the same presentation he gave at SxSW this year.

Everyone in the class seemed very interested and excited by these new developments and Eran and I were so excited that in our regular after-class-beer-drinking, we worked out an idea for a new microformat.

The problem we want to deal with are ‘Via links’ (also called Hat Tips). These are the links at the end of a blog entry that give credit to someone for providing the information to the blogger.

It seems obvious that this is a type of citation, so the <cite> tag would seem the appropriate choice. However, this is a special kind of citation which is well recognized among bloggers and and distinct from content citations.

Before describing a solution, let me pause to explain why we think this is a problem– first of all, there have been studies done to track the spread of ideas through the blogosphere. Unfortunately, Adar, et al, had to do a lot of work related to inferring connections where there were no supporting data (ie, when people didn’t put via links, they had to infer where they got the information). So, having parseable via-links would be a great benefit to those who study the blogosphere.

Secondly, via-links can be useful to bloggers and blog readers. We all care (or should) about people’s sources and via-links are a way for bloggers to be transparent and give credit where credit is due. The practice of using via-links will enable blog-readers to track ideas back to their source.

Thirdly, bloggers who attribute their sources will benefit by incentivizing their readers to send them pointers to interesting material.

So, given those reasons, we conclude that using via-links is a best practice for bloggers and that there is reason enough to have a machine-parseable semantic format for these citations.

Here’s our idea– we’ll use the <cite> tag with a special class. For example, original markup from BoingBoing:

<em>(Thanks, Dave Gill!)</em>

and in our format:

Thanks, <cite class="via">Dave Gill</cite>!

Of course, BoingBoing could use a CSS rule to style this element with italics, to have the same presentation style they have now. Also, not that in this case, there’s no URL for the person being cited. This leads us to the second part of our proposal– when citing someone as the source, you should use the most specific URL possible.

So, if the pointer comes from someone else’s blog entry, you should reference that entry. If the the info came in some other manner, but the person still has a personal website, you should link to that site. Of course, if the person doesn’t have a personal website, their name is the best we can do and is considered sufficient.

Now for some more robust examples of what we’re proposing:

First, from [photomatt](http://photomatt.net), an example of a non-specific web citation. Here’s his markup:

<cite>Hat tip: <a href="http://deadheart.net/">neiljmorrow</a> via email.</cite>

As you can see, he’s already using <cite>, so he’s ahead of most, but we think things can be improved. For the sake of clarity it seems more useful to put only the person’s name (and link) within the <cite> tag. So, with our proposal, Matt’s markup would become:

Hat tip: <cite class="via"><a href="http://deadheart.net/">neiljmorrow</a></cite> via email.

Matt may not think this situation is optimal, and he would have to do some more work to get things styled the same way he has them now, but we think keeping the <cite> element to just the name/link of the person is worth the tradeoff.

This example also brings up an issue we discussed last night– the issue of source types. As Matt does here, bloggers often indicate how the information reached them, whether via a blog, email, im or face-to-face. At this point we’ve decided to not try and encode that into the microformat, but the idea is open for future work.

Ok, so what I’ve presented here is a rough outline of what we think would be the best practice regarding a via-link microformat.

Please give any feedback you have, public or private, especially if you have a better idea for a name (the working name is ‘hVia,’ but is open to change). My email is ‘ryan’ at this domain.