Outerthought.Blog

Hi! Please let me introduce myself: I am Freya and I'm the latest addition to the Outerthought team.

As a getting-up-to-speed project, I'm currently integrating Mollom - a webservice for spam filtering - in a blog comments extension in Daisy - the extension you would be using when leaving a comment on this blog.

Mollom is easy to use (it's based on XML-RPC calls) and works like a charm: if a comment is doubtful, it presents a captcha, it keeps statistics, and gradually a Bayesian database is built so more and more spam should get captured and ham gets through without captcha. Despite a few bugs (which were fixed by Mollom mostly on the day itself!) the integration was really easy - a great way for me to learn Daisy and its extension framework.

However, as it says on the website: Mollom is currently in public beta. So once in a while, things go wrong . Recently I had 2 days where I could not reach any Mollom server, which raised a few questions I wanted to share here.

If Mollom is down, what should we do with the comments posted at that time? Post the comments anyway, thereby letting the door wide open for spam? Disabling to post any comment and thereby keeping regular blog readers from posting a comment? Or should I opt for the solid engineering approach, and start queueing the comments and process them afterwards? In this case, we should also wonder: if Mollom is down and vast amounts of comments were post during this period: how is Mollom going to react if we send them all at once? What if all blog- and CMS-platforms would implement such a queuing feature, and start submitting unchecked comments to Mollom once it becomes available again?

I'm looking for a best practice here, so leave a comment (unchecked by Mollom ... yet) if you have an idea. And yes, the plan is that the entire blog (+ comments) application will be made available as well, as a simple yet non-trivial example of the Daisy extension framework.

Zap - another month has gone by. We're great at this blogging thing, aren't we? After Seth left the Outerthought HQ's building back to his homestead, May remained ever so busy.

Marc and Bruno, together with Jeroen and Ives from partner Schaubroeck have been working hard on the 0.2 release of Kauri, to the end that Bruno released a first runnable binary preview release on June 5th. Try it and tell us about it!

Paul, on his merry own, delivered a knowledge base system based on Daisy for Mitsubishi Equipment Europe in Almere, Holland and has started working on the last phase of the Competency Management system we're preparing for the Canadian Coast Guard College, and Karel has been fighting various assorted Java plug-in bugs in various assorted browser and OS combinations, preparing some very cool new feature for Daisy 2.3.

Alongside all this work, Freya joined us beginning of May as it became clear the success of Daisy and our other ventures was requiring extra staffing. Freya is currently working part-time and combining her learning curve of Daisy and related technologies with teaching students Java at the University College West Flanders. Her first learning project is to integrate Mollom spam checking with the commenting facility we're using for this very blog. Welcome, Freya!

Business- and strategy-wise, we have joined the new Gent BC initiative - a gathering of innovative organizations based in or around Ghent, and I've been so lucky to present at the annual V-ICT-OR conference. V-ICT-OR is the Flemish member society of IT folks at the local administrations, and part of my luckiness was that this presentation bought me the lottery ticket to meet and impress Richard Steel, president of the English (hence much larger) sister organization Socitm. Which means I'll have another go at my presentation during their annual conference as well.

Adding onto that, there's some interesting pre-sales things going on, however I won't try our luck and shut up about those until we got the signed PO. ;-)

It's Thursday today, which means a week has already gone by since our first Fireside Chat. For those who haven't found out yet, I've posted some pictures on Flickr, and uploaded a presentation to Slideshare. They're embedded below this post.

First, the format. Seth Gottlieb did a one-hour presentation on his findings from the Open Source Java CMS report. That went well, and was a good warming-up exercise for the participants. The setting was as intimate and cosy as possible, with a live fireside (albeit an electronic one) and a sofa for full effect.

Next, we had two small (30') discussion rounds on a number of topics I had prepared. The group was divided in four sub-groups and they each had a quick tour-de-table of introducing themselves to each other. After each round, each group had to bring forward a presenter highlighting what had been said in a two-minute presentation with Marc and me serving as the flipchart secretary. Thereafter, topics were swapped between groups.

That facilitated discussion went really well, as the master of ceremonies I had great pains in tearing the groups away from their discussion table. Everyone wanted to carry on, though obviously time was limited. The fact we had two consecutive rounds was a good idea as well: it left some room for expanding on a given subject or picking up a statement from the previous group.

The topics were:

• local open source: what is happening and what could be happening on the local open source scene in Belgium
• content management in  a webservices world
• core technology in content management
• standards in content management

Second, there's was a definitive "let's do this again" feeling at the end of the event. That, and the recent launch of GhentValley.be - a (LinkedIn) network for professionals hailing from or working in the Ghent area, is making me really happy these days. The success of these (unconnected) network events shows there's definitive room for such events in our area, and it's a great energy-boost for our day-to-day work.

Outside the fireside chat event, we took the opportunity of Seth being here to showcase new Daisy work and projects to him, and we had a nice time concluding his stay at the Amadeus - one of Ghent's better known sparerib restaurants. That, and perfect weather to show Seth around Ghent, were a recipe for a great one-and-a-half day of semi-vacation. :-)

I have some ideas about next editions I'll post in another blog. In the mean time, I'll be distributing Seth's presentation to the participants. Thanks a lot everyone to be there!

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That's it, we're done for the (second) day of our hackathon. And we got where we wanted: build a non-trivial, useful website using Daisy in two days (admittedly with 4.5 people - so that's 9 real days, and we had some stuff laying on our shelves as well obviously).

The result is available from http://gardemo.outerthought.org/  - it's a Flemish demo unfortunately, but the theme is a gardening company. It features some Google Map integration (use the GMap widget to select the location of a garden project), and a rather full-featured iPhone skin.

Kudos to everybody involved!