0xDECAFBAD - Tag: radio

Ancient code drifting down the newsRiver

2006-01-28T06:08:57+00:00

So, while working through some writing blockages last weekend, I started doing some hacking on Dave Winer's newsRiver running on the OPML Editor platform. (Oh, and it is a platform, maybe more so than even emacs—don't let the moniker 'editor' fool you.)

Here's the thing: It was a lot of addictive fun, and it takes me back to the love/hate thing I had with Radio, back toward the first days of this blog. This Frontier / Radio / OPML Editor environment is undeniably satisfying for me to work in. It's like potato chips: Jump to an outline here, tweak some code there, mangle an outline node up there, reload a browser page, watch things go—lots of moments of instant gratification all building incrementally atop one another.

In one package—which reminds me a lot of Squeak—the OPML Editor bundles a crazy amount of integrated machinery for both Windows and Mac OS X:

UserTalk, a very capable scripting language
An IDE based on outlining, somewhat like Python's syntactic indentation
Persistent on-disk hierarchical hashtables (aka the Object Database)
Code and data all live in the same object database
A web server and a host of other networking code—including Jabber messaging, although I can't attest to its freshness.
Blog editing and no-effort external web hosting file synch
Hot patching and easy upgrades that most other software packages dream of
Years and years and years of (mostly) working code with datestamped change notes and living history.

And the thing is? This was the state of the art for Radio back in 2002—and earlier than that even for Frontier. Fast forward from then till today, and you'll find that Frontier is now Open Source—with many of the same sorts of warts Mozilla's open source release helpfully revealed back in 1997. (Some hero needs to come along and port this beast to Linux! Good luck!) And now, much of the guts of Radio are released as the OPML Editor.

In a lot of ways, this whole family of apps built on this common ancestry of code is really shitty software. Kind of like all that code on the Qeng Ho from Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. This stuff crashes and sets itself on fire a lot, but then again it's amazing to see just how many wheels have been reinvented and re-reinvented since 2002 (and before) when I fire up this code today.

And now, it looks like the embers are stirring for this thing again. There's been a lot of time for a lot of angst to fade from a lot of places, and it looks like there's a new crop of fresh people rediscovering this stuff.

So, anyway, I like these potato chips. I think I want to start munching on them again, as time permits. Oh, and while I'm talking about potato chips—I have to say, don't pee in the potato chips and be nice to the guy holding the bag.

Archived Comments

Robert Brook
2006-01-28T15:03:50

Serious question: why not use Squeak?
l.m.orchard
2006-01-28T16:01:26

Robert: Short answer is that I saw Radio first for the RSS aggregator and blogging support, started hacking on that, and got sucked into other aspects of it along the way.

For Squeak, I saw some fun colorful things and kind of got the gist of the environment, but never got hooked on any daily uses of it after a weekend or two of playing. So, it fell into my "Learn Smalltalk" todo item that keeps getting pushed down the list by other things. That item's still on my list, though, and I mean to get to it someday...
Danny
2006-01-28T16:07:44

From what I've seen and read there are loads of good ideas in that platform, but there are two things I personally find extremely offputting : the pervading sense of Not Invented Here, and the sheer age (in the negative sense) of the stuff.

Now the code's been open sourced, maybe there's a chance of the tastier crisps (UK localization) catching up and being integrated with the rest of the world. Ok, very IMHO but : swap US-ASCII for utf-8, XML-RPC for doc/literal XML, RSS 2.0 for Atom, Object Database for triplestore, Python for UserTalk, outliner for modern IDE (although actually the outliner UI is probably one bit that might be worth preserving as-is) etc.

Well, ok, maybe it is a bit much to expect. Maybe a maximally interoperable version of the Frontier approach could be recreated (without reinvention) by plugging together various existing open source libs..?

For now I guess I'll have to make do with Web as Platform (and/or Squeak) ;-)
l.m.orchard
2006-01-28T16:28:59

Danny: Yeah, I agree with a lot of those points, and they fall into the 'hate' side of the 'love/hate' thing for me. (Well, more like 'strong distaste' than 'hate' anyway).

And I've realized that, since drifting away from Radio/Frontier, I've been recapturing it in various forms using tech like Python, triple-stores, mini-HTTP servers, and the like. And although these things have felt 'healtier' in a non-NIH, bigger community, more loosely coupled way... it's still a satisfying experience (like potato chips) to find it all buttoned up in one integrated package that works on most of the platforms I care about.

It's still kind of a writing-with-my-wrong-hand kind of pain in the butt to get all the loose coupled stuff working sometimes. And many times, there are very good reasons for thing being hard and lots of things need minding. Like, XML-RPC style web services versus REST:

REST is a cleaner, more web-natural approach—but sometimes it takes a lot of thoughtful meta-tinkering where that XML-RPC stuff would've had you on the road hours ago. Of course, years from now, the XML-RPC stuff might smell a bit while the REST stuff will have stayed solid and revealed further unexpected benefits... but bah. They both have their place.

It's a lot like baked versus fried. Anyway, rambling now.
Danny
2006-01-28T16:57:00

"It’s still kind of a writing-with-my-wrong-hand kind of pain in the butt to get all the loose coupled stuff working sometimes." Nicely put, yup. Bit of a challenge. Coincidentally, yesterday the idea of "Semantic Web in a Box" came up - maybe the place to start would be "Web in a Box"...
arbitrage betting
2011-06-23T02:16:57

Nice points there. I agree with you. Those steps dated in the past are still very useful and helpful until today. We just need to be careful which ones to use. Munch more potato chips! Cheers!

A bit of newsRiver hackery

2006-01-21T06:54:30+00:00

Update: I moved this code over to my space over at hosting.opml.org and added some updater code from Nicholas Riley's webdav tool, so that you should be able to just "Get Latest Code..." once you've got this installed. (Or reinstalled, if you grabbed last night's version.) Also, I fixed a bug or two.

So, I couldn't resist poking around with Dave Winer's newsRiver in the OPML editor. For whomever's interested in this sort of thing, here's the result of a couple of hours' hacking this evening:

decafbadNewsRiver.root

In this is a tool to be dropped into your OPML Editor install's Guest Databases / apps / Tools directory, right alongside newsRiver.root itself. You may need to restart the OPML Editor. Once installed, you should see a new "DecafbadNewsRiver" menu item under the Tools menu, allowing you to view your news in this new UI. Expect lots of bugs, though.

Basically, this provides an alternate DHTML outline rendering of the news items gathered by newsRiver—quite similar to what I did back in October for FeedSpool. I'm not sure how far I'll take this, if I take it any farther. I've got a bit of a notion to tackle some REST/AJAX interaction with newsRiver for on-the-spot item deletion, and maybe on-demand item content retrieval.

But, for newsRiver hackers: You might like what I've done with the viewNewsItems script under decafbadNewsRiverSuite. I've made an attempt to pull all of the HTML out of the midst of the processing code. That's was icky, and I hated it back when I first ran into it in Radio UserLand.

I've broken all of that out into smaller external templates for page, feed, and item under decafbadNewsRiverData. This should allow for easier styling and customization of the code that newsRiver produces, as well as maybe swapping themes on the fly with a preference that points the rendering process at a different root table for templates.

In any case, do what you like with this work. I hope it's useful to someone out there.

Archived Comments

Donovan Watts
2006-01-21T07:55:24

neat! i much prefer this interface. thanks much.

Look mom, I'm on the podcast!

2006-01-07T16:24:02+00:00

I just caught a brief mention of Hacking RSS and Atom on Show #45 of the Mike Tech Show.

Thanks for the plug, Mike! I hope you enjoy the book!

Podcasts in my car via CDR sneakernet

2005-10-31T20:14:21+00:00

Since the recent demise of my iPod, I've returned to poking around at pre-iPod strategies for listening to podcasts in my car. Hopefully, the little thing will be returned good-as-new from AppleCare-land within the next few days. But until then, I'm left with what I can do using the Blaupunkt MP3 CD player in my 2004 Ford Focus.

The closest I've come to anything usable is burning MP3 CD's from iTunes playlists, in combination with some applescript to make paper CD cases that list all the podcasts on the disc.

Not too shabby, other than the fact that this approach would eventually leave me with a large pile of paper-encased CDR's to either archive or toss. But, even considering archival, it's a bit wasteful since I never really have 650MB worth of new podcasts accumulated at convenient times—and even if I did, that'd be quite a lot to listen to.

I've tried burning multi-session CDs so as to use up all the space before moving onto the next blank. However, that just results in the MP3 CD player recognizing only the first session. I really would like to reuse a handful of CDRW's for a temporary sneakernet. But alas, it seems my Blaupunkt MP3 CD unit won't read from CDRW's—at least, not the ones I have on hand.

But, I do have to say that these MP3 CD's sound a hell of a lot better than my old Griffin iTrip FM transmitter sounded. :)

Archived Comments

g.
2005-11-01T11:19:19

I have a friend who had success in improving the quality of the itrip transmission by enhancing the antenna. just a tip ;-)