The Plan

It’s been 2 weeks since I’ve started my sabbatical and I think I’ve come up with ‘The Plan’ for what I’m going to do. This actually required a little bit of business planning, in addition to technical planning, so it took me a little longer than I would have liked. So here’s what I’ve come [...]

Instant Outlining

I had no idea that Instant Outlining has been around since at least April of 2002. Dave and the team at Userland shipped a version in Radio 8 back then. As always, Dave was ahead of his time.
I first encountered Instant Outlining in August of 2005 when Dave added it to the OPML Editor. I [...]

Twisted vs. Asyncore

I’ve spent the last couple of days digging into Twisted to try and figure out if it is worth the hassle to tear out the networking code for CoffeeTalk, my Instant Outlining Server. Turns out that Twisted is waaaaay too much for what I need. Asyncore will be just fine, now that I pulled my [...]

The site that was…

Way back on April 1st of 2003, 4 long years ago, we started a site called NowStream.com. The idea was simple: Allow people to broadcast live events from anywhere to anyone. We had a few broadcasters setup here in Las Vegas and a few others scattered across the country. Version 1.0 was decent, but it [...]

Testing the waters and deciding to jump in head first…

I’ve been given the chance of a lifetime: Take an extended sabbatical from work and spend my time working on a new project all by myself. No distractions from actual work. No one to answer to but myself for the foreseeable future. And I still get paid! What a deal…
I’ll be taking this time to [...]

Flash/Flex vs. WPF/e: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Some interesting discussion about Flash/Flex vs. WPF/e on Robert’s blog, and an old post I just read on Anne’s blog.
Selecting a platform to write for and worrying about how easy it will be to port to another platform is a sign of unintelligent design. It’s a sign you have no idea who your target market [...]

Organization

Outlining is the core of CoffeeTalk. The internal structure of data is based on OPML. There are some example OPML files on OPML.org.
The OPML format has become a favorite amongst RSS readers like Google’s Reader, NewsGator. and many others. I see OPML files commonly referred to as ‘reading lists.’
A nice definition of what [...]

and the Client…

Forgot to include something about the client side of things. The only current client is written in Python, but future clients will be coming.
I originally thought the next client would be Java or perhaps an Ajax-ish client, but I’ve been won over by Adobe’s Flex.
So what exactly does the client do besides connect [...]