Plan-B for Software Documentation

I can’t believe what I just found on the Yahoo!Search Blog about removing pages from a website. The author says “The best way to remove dead URLs from the Yahoo! Search index is to return an HTTP Error 404 when our crawler requests the page.”

Are they serious, really serious?

The HTTP spec clearly says return code 404 is “Not Found” temporarily and 410 is “Gone” permanently. They even say in th explanation for code 404 “The 410 (Gone) status code SHOULD be used if the server knows, through some internally configurable mechanism, that an old resource is permanently unavailable and has no forwarding address.”

Yahoo slurp is free to treat a 404 page as if removed although I don’t think it serves the searching public well. However, I can’t understand why the Yahoo!Search blog teaches webmasters to send a 404 if a 410 return code is appropriate.

Just needed to rant about this, because this blog has for sure a wide readership.

Apparently, interest to use OpenOffice.org as a tool to other means is growing. I just discovered that OpenMRS, an open source Medical Record System framework, plans to use OpenOffice.org as an alternative Data Entry mechanism.

More precisely, Matthew Harrison proposed this project for the Google summer of Code challenge, and apparently got accepted. Michael started blogging about his project. Currently he is reading up on OpenOffice.org macros programming and XForms, which he intends to use for formalized data entry.

Google’s summer of code pays student interns for the summer to create open source code for many open source projects. It has been quite popular with students from around the world. While the stipend of $4,500, is nice compensation for something a student might do anyhow, it is a lot of money to many students in other countries. In any case it does help many open source projects to get some additional resources which they mentor and help to achieve the project’s goal.

OpenMRS is an initiative to build a much needed medical record system framework, that is affordable for developing countries to manage their are number of patients or such diseases like AID/HIV. Impressively, the project is only one year old, but has implementations in seven countries and collected millions of patient observations.

It was bound to happen sooner or later, OpenOffice.org caught it’s first worm. Sophos reports the first sightings of an OOo scripting worm in the wild. It uses an OOo document to carry itself. Remarkably, the worm is cross platform and uses perl on Linux, ruby on Mac OS X and JavaScript on Windows to infect other files and distribute itself through instant messaging.

The damage? It looks like the worm does download and display a porn image.

To the delight of Sophos, the presumable author did send the file directly to Sophos address.

The GullFoss Blog announces the availability of a first version of the ODF Toolkit for .NET.

The new library is called “An OpenDocument Library” (AODL) and written completely in C#. This library allows .NET project to support ODF documents.

It currently supports only a limited set of functions

• Creating new documents in the text and the spreadsheet format.
• Loading and manipulating documents in the text and spreadsheet (not complete yet) format.
• Export loaded or created documents into the HTML format (text and spreadsheet documents).
• Export loaded or created documents into the PDF Format. (this is in an early state of implementation and only available for text documents)

I saw first at the Debian Security website that the WordPerfect and StarCalc import libraries used by OpenOffice.org have some vulnerabilities for overflow attacks. Then is spread around the web in all security services.

The flaw allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code. Affected are users that open WordPerfect documents, a rather small number of users. As far as I know, Word Perfect is used a lot by the legal profession. The work around, is to not open WordPerfect documents before you upgrade to the next version or install a patch.

Debian and SuSE have already issued patches.

Last summer I went to the first BarCamp Boston. I had a great time there and did not want to miss BarCamp Boston 2 this past weekend.

BarCamp Boston 2 was held at MIT Stata Center, the famous building by architect Frank O. Gehry.

The rules for a BarCamp an unconference of geeks are simple. Every participant can chair a session, discussion or provide a lightning talk. The organizers have set aside a few appropriate meeting rooms and a schedule on a blackboard where one can read the program and add one self to the offering. In addition the organizers and sponsors did provide us with food and refreshments.

The first session I attended was “JavaScript Encryption” by Alan Taylor. Alan presented a self contained HTML document that included encrypted content which could only be revealed with the correct password. He calls his project Message Vault. His experience with making the application secure was very interesting. His biggest challenge was to embed an encrypted form of the password that was hard to decipher.

Next, I attended “Open/Collaborative/Green Mapping” by Jerrad Pierce. I had met Jerrad earlier in the hall where he presented his maps and had talked him into presenting his experience with this project in a session. He has created a Green Map of Cambridge, as part of the GreenMaps initiative. He also wrote his thesis on the subject of a better index to points on the map. Jerrad had 45+ interested listeners and a lot of questions where asked. How did he get the data from public sources? What tools did he use? What other tools he could recommend, especially those that where available at no cost?

Amanda Watlington presented before the afternoon break about “Video - How to Make It Found in Search Engines”. She stressed that video and audio files become more important to search as people use the web increasingly to consume media. So she told webmasters that it is important to annotate the media assets with internal and external keyword tags and to write, if possible, a transcript from the media and post it on a page that contains the file. In addition she recommended to submit the media file to specialty search engines, in order to make it available to the searching public.

My last session for the day was “Financing your Startup” by David Kaufman. It wasn’t all new, but certainly a comprehensive overview of how to finance your startup. I took away the following tidbits of wisdom: “Revenue or advanced financing by your (future) customers is the best way to survive the first phase” and “VC financing is only appropriate if you can show a very fast adoption curve and a large market.” Typically VCs want to invest X Millions and have that returned 10 fold within 3 to 5 years. If your business model does not show a plausible case for this kind of development, do not spend (waste) your time with talking to VCs. In addition, think about who the VC would potentially sell his share in the company? It helps to know who would be a potential buyer, especially as the default exit strategy of an Initial Public Offering (IPO) is not as available as it used to be.

Unfortunately, I was not able to attend the socializing in the evening, as I had prior commitments.

I attended yesterday the Boston PHP Meetup (User Group) meeting for August.

Scott Mattocks introduced the basic concepts of PHP-GTK 2. He gave a well researched sample application using PHP and the Gimp Toolkit (GTK). The application queried an online database of events. His presentation went from from an empty window to the mostly functioning application with query form and result page.

Following his presentation we had a lively discussion about features such as long running tasks and complex widgets. Scott also assessed the learning curve as being a bit steeper than HTML forms but not as steep as Swing for example.

Finally we wondered “When would you use this kind of interface instead of plain server logic and HTML in a browser?” We figured that applications with sophisticated interaction patterns or requiring access to local data/databases would be best suited for PHP applications with an GTK interface. The caveat appears to be that there is limitations in deployment. The currently best method is deploying PHP, the libraries and the GTK one at a time. An alternative is emerging in Gnope, the PHP application installer.

Some lucky dudes took home Scott Mattocks book “Pro PHP-GTK” and T-Shirts. also many thanks to Optaros for hosting.

Eike Rathke reports that IANA registered officially the MIME-types for OpenDocumentFormat

• vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.chart-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.formula-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.graphics-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.image
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.image-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.presentation-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.spreadsheet-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-master
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-template
• vnd.oasis.opendocument.text-web

Time to update Firefox and Apache HTTP server, so they can interpret ODF documents and the new ISO/IEC 26300 document mime-types correctly.

Yesterday evening, I listened to a remarkable presentation from David Temkin from LaszloSystems. David presented the upcoming release of OpenLaszlo “Legals” (will be released as 4.0) which supports the rendering of OpenLaszlo applications in DHTML and Flash.

OpenLaszlo is a really remarkable framework. To achieve such sleek user interfaces they use “cinematic experience“. this kind of eye candy that is unheard of in the web-application world. OpenLaszlo claims it allows a user to better understand the transitions from one state of an application to the next and therefore makes navigation easier to understand. and delivers near desktop performance to a web-browser near you.

David showed some real world applications such as web-based Gliffy a Visio like diagram drawing application and Pandora, a personalized web-radio that plays to your individual taste, if you train it well. He also demonstrated a sleek application for Barclays Global Investors tracking stock indeces which LaszloSystems did create in 2 weeks.

However, a really great application is their LZPIX Photo Application. It’s an application that pulls some photos from Flickr and displays them in a Laszlo based interface. It is making use of almost every thing in the LZX language. The remarkable part is that the same source code can be rendered in Flash and in the new DHTML engine. And it is extraordinary, that in parts the DHTML version is even faster than the Flash version. Look at the speed in which the images load in DHTML vs. Flash. This is quite an achievement for the development team of OpenLaszlo.

Amy Muntz delivered a convincing plea for open source contributions to the OpenLaszlo project. If you are a designer or programmer and want to show off a really cool application or component. This is the place to go. and off course you can also contribute to the overall development of the engine.

The only disappointment for me was that I didn’t hear a story, how to get this great platform to the desktop. It looks like Adobe is going to deliver Flash based applications to the desktop with the Apollo project. I think that is a great development, because many web-based applications do not need the browser to function, look at Pandora or the very own LaszloMail. They would be better off with loosing the browser back button and navigation bar and trade it in for some local storage. I hope that the upcoming Apollo will play OpenLaszlo Code in Flash as well as in DHTML.

The good news of the evening was that OpenLaszlo 4.0 will be released any week now.

I must conclude, that OpenLaszlo is really hot (70+ attendees are proof of that) and heads and shoulders above developing a Rich Internet Application (RIA) from scratch. Thanks to the folks at Optaros hosting this event.

Laszlo Systems invites the Boston developer community to an evening of pizza, beer and OpenLaszlo AJAX development on Thursday, June 8th. They will present a preview of the new DHTML runtime for the OpenLaszlo platform and have the chance to meet other Laszlo advocates. Please register or sign up to present your latest OpenLaszlo project.

Who Should Attend
OpenLaszlo (LZX) newbies and seasoned Laszlo veterans alike are welcome.

Where and When
Optaros
60 Canal Street, 4th Floor (Map)
Boston, MA 02114
Phone: (617) 227-1855

Cost: Free. Pizza, beer and non-alcoholic drinks will be provided by Laszlo Systems.