OUTERTHOUGHT.BLOG

Be our guest for a cup and a chat

2009-06-29T09:51:35.000+02:00

Are you in the neighborhood and fancying a cup of coffee? We've just upgraded our coffee brewing equipment and offer a nice Nespresso Lungo or Espresso to anyone joining us for a cup and a chat. With complimentary free Wifi!

Outerthought: Spiking ourselves with caffeine so we can work harder for you. :-)

IKS workshop results are out

2009-06-22T16:22:55.000+02:00

IKS - Interactive Knowledge Stack is an Integrating Project part-funded by the European Commission. It started in January 2009 and will provide an open source technology platform for semantically enhanced content management systems.The IKS project has adopted an open communication and development policy to guarantee innovative and relevant results. To support this, IKS will host workshops every six months to consult with CMS vendors, developers and end-users.

The first IKS workshop took place in Salzburg, Austria on 28-29 May 2009. It provided an open forum for a diverse group of CMS vendors and developers to have their say on semantic requirements for the Interactive Knowledge Stack. Outerthought delegates were Bruno Dumon and Steven Noels.

Despite the limited visibility of IKS, (project only launched in January 2009) interest in the workshop was strong across the board of CMS communities, with experts from as far as India and the USA expressing interest to attend. This justified not only the timely relevance of IKS given the current discussions on Semantic Web and Web 3.0, but also how receptive the CMS communities are to the topic semantic information technologies and services.

You'll find all the results of the workshop on the IKS website.

Interview with Steven Noels from Outerthought from IKS Project on Vimeo.

Browser makers, where art thou?

2009-06-19T15:21:08.000+02:00

These days, we're dreaming about Daisy 3. We've just filed an innovation grant proposal together with a nice group of organizations where our research contribution will focus on the design of a scalable content repository, and are now exploring what we could/should do with regards to the user-facing parts of Daisy 3. While much of the focus of D3 will be around scalability (think 'exponent' rather than 'factor'), obviously we also want to provide a nice and user-friendly default content editing and publishing environment - like we do right now.

We've always been proud of our WYSIWYG HTML editor - in the sense that, even though it isn't the fanciest in its kind, it Works As Advertised (tm). Users are able to use both Firefox and Internet Explorer concurrently, while we try to ensure that consistent, well-formed almost-XHTML is saved in the repository.

Obviously, the base platform of in-browser HTML editing has its specific downsides, namely ... that editing support happens as an after- rather than a forethought (here follows a pun about outer-thoughts). Looking at the current state of browser-based WYSIWYG editing, we see some progress and surely sustained effort, but also must realize that the base run-time environment of such kludges, i.e. the browser, still doesn't natively supports the Writeable Web.

That means we have been developing Daisy for almost five years now, and now must realize that browsers haven't evolved quite as much in the direction we want: a stable and developer-friendly platform for building applications that help us realize the Writeable Web. We're not Google, obviously, which kind of came to the same conclusion and started Chrome as a consequence (hoping the corporate world will rapidly switch over to a new web client). Not that there is no progress at all, quite the contrary, but the speed of change is below one would expect.

Still, the alternate options are equally awkward. Java applets running in browsers? An exercise in self-inflicted pain. Flash? It doesn't ship with a serious web editing component neither. JavaFX? Silverlight? Let's see those gather some marketshare first.

Now people might react that the state of the art already allows a lot, and will point me to some sort of nifty Javascript or Flash library which looks Really Really Good and has a great demo page. However, what we're looking for is a lot more boring and mundane:

serious copy/paste buffer support on all platforms, so that I can copy text from Word or OpenOffice and the formatting is preserved while mapped to XHTML constructs, on Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X
the ability to drag-n-drop images from my Windows Explorer or Mac Finder in my editor and a consistent way to upload those (possibly sets of!) images to a back-end
worse, the ability to copy-paste images from Office or other desktop applications and convert those automatically to a decent web-friendly format (like PNG) *after* scaling them to the size I want (and still preserve the original paste buffer in case I change my mind)
real-world, performant spell-checking and auto-correct
supporting longer documents (beyond what Google Docs currently supports) while still spell-checking (an issue in my Firefox installation)
a unified way to handle temporary local storage (for those people like me who hit command-S after every paragraph) like having Google Gears installed by default on all browsers on all platforms - because I'd like to have access to my data and applications on the road
and all that while saving semantically-squeaky-clean XHTML, while still allowing specific extensions to encode non-Web constructs

Simply being able to open up browser content to the Writeable Web. Wouldn't that be nice?

Daisy 2.3 is out!

2009-06-09T11:56:00.000+02:00

We are very happy to announce the release of Daisy 2.3 today.

While we've missed our usual bi-yearly schedule for this release, we believe there's plenty of goodness in this new 2.3 release to make up for this delay:

a spiffy global search-and-replace tool
say goodbye to boring download-upload cycles with our new document uploader applet, bridging the gap between your desktop editors (Office, Photoshop ...) and Daisy
a vastly improved document browser (including a built-in facet browser), everything configurable without any coding, with also lots of tiny usability fixes

and for the technical Daisy integrators out there:

an inline editor hook that allows you to modify the default document editor to your heart's content, e.g. putting fields and parts on a single heavily customized screen
we're using FOP now (instead of IBEX) across the board for PDF generation, even for books
even more granular access control
a lot of new workflow features, and the possibility to query the jBPM workflow engine from inside publisher requests (e.g. to show status per document)

The list of changes between daisy 2.2 and daisy 2.3 can be found here: http://daisycms.org/daisydocs-2_3/13-cd/591-cd.html.

You can download Daisy 2.3 here: http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=176692

The installation instructions can be found here: http://daisycms.org/daisydocs-2_3/13-cd.html

Next up, two things will be happening:

work is already underway on the 2.4-dev branch, for the moment mostly related to book-publishing and single-sign-on-integration
we've also set up a formal R&D activity that is focusing on Daisy 3

Daisy 3 will be a quantum-leap revolution:

we're moving from Apache Cocoon to Kauri for front-end development
the ambitions we have with the new repository engine will be far beyond what is possible with Daisy 2 now, in terms of volume, distribution, and whatnot.

Daisy 3 is planned for 2011. Obviously, these are pretty exciting times for us.

In the mean time, enjoy Daisy 2.3 and let us know what you think of it.

Thanks, Outerthought - or rather http://www.flickr.com/photos/stevenn/3597192333/

Second Wikipodium event

2009-03-18T20:40:25.000+01:00

We'll be hosting the second Wikipodium event, a loose gathering of Belgian wiki-philes. The theme will be "Wikis and Classification, or Water and Fire?", in which I'll try to defend Daisy's überclassification capabilities against an army of opinionated Wikimedia lovers. We provide drinks and munchies. RSVP at the Wikipodium wiki.

Daisy 2.3 approaching

2009-02-01T23:06:49.000+01:00

OK, blame us. Or rather, blame our customers, who kept us so busy over the past 10 months, working on exciting projects and improving Daisy along the way. So no, do blame us, for not sharing all these goodies with you over such a long period. Well no, blame yourself, since all of this work has been happening out in the open, the only thing you had to do was grab Daisy trunk from Subversion, and build it for yourself. Oh well, do blame us in the end, because we could have been more talkative about all these goodies, and prepare a proper Daisy release for you to enjoy them. :-)

So, without further ado, familiarize yourself with the Daisy 2.3 new features on Bruno's blog. And do blame us if we don't keep our promise again: Daisy 2.3 is just a couple of weeks away. Really!

PS: we did ship Kauri 0.3.1 in the mean time. Well, last week to be exact.

Kauri 0.3 sees the light at Devoxx

2008-12-09T15:35:29.000+01:00

Yesterday, we presented Kauri 0.3, our take at Java-based RESTful web application development for a full room of Devoxx attendees in Antwerp. It was great fun seeing the many hours of Kauri development finally coming together.

Kauri 0.3 is now in a usable state for a wider audience: check out www.kauriproject.org for download links. This packaged release makes the many changes and new features from the source tree readily available to all.

The 0.3 release marks a level of feature-completedness that delivers on our "holistic teamwork" promise in offering a framework equally allowing hardcore Java developers and UI engineers to collaborate on shared projects.

Most notable changes for this release are:

a convention-based "pages" routing subsystem that allows fast prototyping without extra coding or configuration
run-time-based mode setting of prototype vs production state allowing easier plugability of mock-up and real service modules: both routing and Spring configuration can now vary depending on this flag
an improved basic data REST service module for building CRUD services with two implementations: JPA-driven for straight Java to database persistence, and a json-based 'dbmock' module which can be used to fake data services in prototype mode
many improvements to the templating module and its samples with a special focus on the newly-introduced template inheritance mechanism, which allows abstraction of shared layout components
completion of an extensive form framework refactoring, including the release of an elaborate list of ready-to-use form controls
a Maven plugin for packaging Kauri apps into industry-standard web application containers
an expanded set of samples showing typical usage scenarios and features
a bunch of renames to accommodate common sense and improved naming conventions throughout all Kauri artefacts (template tags, config files, form configs, etc etc)

We're psyched to see Kauri in a fully usable state, and we would appreciate any sort of feedback or comments that will help us to set goals for the next 0.4 release.

Lastly, we've also polished up our web presence a bit to blend more logically marketing content, documentation and the development wiki. If you fail to find what you need from our website, let us know!

In order to grow the Kauri community, you can also join us on Facebook and Ohloh:

Be a doll and sign up there: more Kauri fans means a lot to us in these early days!

Thanks also to our early adopters and project sponsors Schaubroeck.

Hope you enjoy this release,

The Kauri developers

ps: here's our Devoxx presentation on Slideshare.

Outerthought goes Volvo

2008-11-19T10:55:43.000+01:00

Running a small business is a on-going battle between risk management, opportunism, long-term strategy and medium-long-term thinking. The joy of being small however, and having a short decision cycle, is to be able to act and re-act swiftly, and to make a point when it matters rather than when the media campaign dictates. We've made a small decision a few weeks ago we're quite proud about, and we want to share it with you.

That decision is to go Volvo for our entire car fleet. OK, it's a small fleet with six vehicles, however we feel the message behind this decision is important. The car industry is going through an extremely bad time at the moment, and needs any help it can get. Being a large industry, car manufactures do a lot of outsourcing and subcontracting, which means other companies will be impacted as well.

Volvo is one of the more important employers in the Ghent region, and should get credits for that. Local employment is very important in order to cut traffic and thus pollution, but it also builds a spirit of togetherness and entrepreneurship for the entire Ghent region. That's why we joined Gent BC right from its start: Ghent is a great region to work from, and we're proud to share that region with companies like Volvo.

The Volvo brand, in our minds, is a factor of quality, cost/value balance but also a level of environmental awareness we want to be tied to. Not so much the pure ecological values, but an awareness of a product existing, operating, evolving in a certain context. A sense of ungreediness, not abusing the available resources - very much like we try to grow the business context of our open source products: by finding customers that want to share our common ideals and goals, by growing common platforms where win-win solutions can be created.

Plus, they're great cars to drive as well, obviously. ;-)

So from now on, our car brand will be Volvo, preferable car models which are assembled in the Ghent manufacturing plant, and purchased by our leasing partner at a local Volvo dealership (ACG).

Disclosure: Volvo isn't on our customer list.

UnReSTful thoughts

2008-10-22T09:35:00.000+02:00

It seems as if ReST has reached some sort of tipping point: different schools of ReSTfulness are starting to appear, and its original creator has a challenging time defending what defines 'true' ReSTfulness. As architects of a ReST-centric web application development framework, it's the kind of tension which shows interesting times are ahead of us, and a call for caution to do the right thing.

I'm particularly struck by this blog post from (very) old acquaintance Dave Pawson, who I enjoyed meeting many years ago at an XSLT training course then organized by the Belgian SGML Users Group's president Paul Hermans. Talk about dinosaur memories. ;-) Here's what Dave writes on the ongoing debate between 'true' ReST designs and their more diluted forms:

Ten years ago I saw James Clark in action on DSSSL then XSLT. I gave him a nickname, BSOP, brain the size of a planet (Hitchhikers reference). James seems to operate on a level (and I'm told at a speed) quite different from mere mortals. Others whose opinions I value have confirmed this. No complaint from me, I'm grateful for what James has given freely to the world of software. The perspective though is that the James's of this world are few and far between. Never having met Roy, I've heard enough to believe that he's quite possibly in a similar category. His thinking seems far enough away from the people that are approaching REST for the first time that there is almost too big a gap. Roy has forgotten more than most are likely to learn about HTTP. When I want to use REST to get a message over that's the focus, not architectural issues. I think this is one of the reasons that REST is still misunderstood. Until such as Paul and a good few others do some really good job of 'translating' from architecture to ... whatever you want to call the practical layer of thinking that more common folk work at, then REST will be misunderstood, 'adapted for use' and otherwise abused due to misunderstanding.

I'm almost convinced that Roy can't | won't | is too busy to do such a translation. It's down to others to try.

Like it or not, this is one of the challenges ahead of us when trying to raise awareness (and sympathy) for Kauri. Rather than the technical details, which is all fairly mundane Java stuff anyways, what we should try to achieve with Kauri is to create some practical level of can-do-mentality with Java developers, while gently guiding them to do ReST the right way.

And not step into the trap of alienating ourselves from the user community on the basis of principles rather than usefulness. Kauri should bring usefulness to ReSTfulness.

Marc and I will be preaching ReST for Java folks on December 8th at Devoxx, so by then we should be ready with some real answers.

Interesting times ahead.

Outerthought joins Gent BC

2008-10-03T11:05:49.000+02:00

Yesterday, the first general assembly of Gent BC was held in the dean's offices of the Ghent University (UGent). Outerthought, together with SMO bvba, were the only SMEs to join this new initiative right from the start as an associate member, with Steven also joining the board of Gent BC.

Gent BC is a new initiative from the Ghent city administration, the University of Ghent, and the Provincial Development Agency and aims to become the prime online and real-life networking platform to stimulate technological entrepreneurship and innovation in the Ghent region. The goals of Gent BC are threefold: to combine and strengthen efforts of all actors in the Ghent knowledge economy, to stimulate academic, technological and innovative entrepreneurship, and to promote the Ghent knowledge region in Flandres and abroad.

Outerthought is the only SME currently joining the Gent BC board, and while our primary aim obviously is to connect with all involved parties, many of them being academic institutions and large organisations, we also want to represent the specific needs and priorities of innovative and technology-driven SMEs.

It is often said that SMEs have difficulties collaborating with academic research institutions or exploiting governmental support to grow their business and thus also local employment, compared with larger organisations and research centra. By joining Gent BC, Outerthought wants to cut this longstanding prejudice short and try to bring a pragmatic, SME-reality-sized voice to this new innovation platform.

More specifically, in the context of Gent BC, we aim to further professionalize our R&D activities around Kauri and related web development methodologies, hopefully in collaboration with other Gent BC members. Also, we want to further steer the development of Daisy towards a leading framework for knowledge-centric content applications.

Summer fading away

2008-09-17T18:04:03.000+02:00

I don't know about you people out there, but we ordered our landlord already to ignite the central heating system as the days are getting chillier and chillier. Summer time has gone by again, and it's about time to put up a summer redux on our starving company blog. The usual excuse: we have been busy, and we prefer to focus on customers and projects.

I'm not sure if we're allowed to say so already, but we successfully delivered a first large Kauri-based project a couple of weeks ago. It's a ReST service layer for user-generated content, i.e. tags, annotations, polls, comments and such, and it's been designed for one of the world's largest media organizations. Let's say we learned a lot about scaling, partitioning, mysqlproxy and various other exotic (for us) technologies and concepts, and that we were happy to at least not have to worry about the Java-side of things, as that part of the application fitted extremely well with Kauri.

That, and one of our Outerthinkers becoming a proud twin-father (congrats, Karel!), another one getting married (congrats, Paul!), Freya who switched from a part-time to a full-time scheme, combined with a healthy dose of holiday leaves and such: yessir, it was summer chaos season again.

The next few weeks will be quite remarkable as well: it's been a serious while since we had a full house working on a single project. Our first big Kauri user is eagerly awaiting for his development team to hit the road with a first serious release, which means Kauri is getting our undivided attention these days.

And after that? Well, there's still and always Daisy 3.0 looming a bit further around the corner, but first we have to ship this Kauri baby. So if you excuse us for now, and join us in welcoming some more silence: we will be back!

Integrating Mollom with Daisy

2008-06-25T12:29:14.000+02:00

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.

Yay!

2008-06-24T07:45:25.000+02:00

Another day, another project

2008-06-12T15:36:38.000+02:00

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. ;-)

Fireside Chat afterglow

2008-05-15T11:42:55.000+02:00

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!

| View | Upload your own

Daisy Hackathon Day 2 (and final)

2008-04-11T19:06:50.000+02:00

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!

Daisy Hackathon day 1

2008-04-10T16:36:40.000+02:00

Loads of fun today (and tomorrow) during our Daisy demo hackathon. What we're trying to achieve is to build a fully operational, non-trivial company website that serves as a demo of some of Daisy's capabilities.

We've started the day setting out a theme (a garden design company) and a base document repository model, consisting of entities such as projects, products, workorders, and a classification hierarchy. Karel and Paul from there on started working on two skins, one for the intranet/public website, and one customized for the iPhone. Bruno is working on a spiced-up image uploader that will automatically transfer ("employee") photos from my digital camera to Daisy, and Marc is working on publisher requests and general navigation, while I'm already collecting some content to fill up the demo.

The first occasion to show our new demo will be during the 'Bedrijvencontactdagen' next week in Flanders Expo.

Restlet visitors

2008-04-02T22:15:21.000+02:00

Yesterday, we got two visitors from France: Jérôme and Thierry from Noelios Technologies. Noelios is the company behind restlet.org - a Java library for ReST-based application development, and the heart of Kauri's request handling.

We have been contributing to discussions on the restlet mailing list for a while now, some of our patches and bugfixes made it into the restlet source tree, and just last week one of Jeroen's patches was accepted as well. So it was time to meet face-to-face and especially learn more about the commercial entity behind all that ReSTy goodness.

It was great getting to know Jérôme and Thierry, as their ambitions and plans resonated a lot with how we started Outerthought seven years ago. A strong desire for independence, and most importantly a desire to create a setting for accomodating a technological vision: a great motivation to start your own company.

We presented both our companies to each other, discussed the general vision and future plans of both Restlet and Kauri, and even found some opportunities where we could contribute more to Restlet.

For instance, once the Kauri Template Language has sufficiently matured, and also because we've made sure it can be used without the Kauri runtime environment, we'll make sure to provide a KTL adaptor to Restlet, so that people can use KTL stand-alone inside their Restlet application.

'Ecosystem' was the word of the day. Meeting Noelios was a meeting of like-minded businesses, like-minded people behind the business facades, with a passion for software engineering and Doing The Right Thing. I'm hopeful that this meeting is but the start of an on-going conversation, and that this conversation will be mutually beneficial, for both companies, and for the Restlet and Kauri community at large.

Open invite: Daisy demo hackathon

2008-04-01T17:40:38.000+02:00

This is a spur-of-the-moment thing: an open invite for our Daisy demo hackathon.

We have three trade shows and demo sessions coming up in the next few weeks, thus we need to brush up some of our existing demoware with some casual and contemporary Web2.0 goodness. So on Thursday and Friday 10-11 April next week, we're having a Daisy demo hackathon. Think of a refresher of our photobooth demo, with GoogleMaps integration, think of OpenID, think of a rough intranet knowledge management tool, think of some Flickr API hacking. Nothing too serious, all perfectly feasible within a couple of good coding hours, but stuff good enough to show how easy it is to integrate Daisy with outerworldy services.

If you have some spare time, and would like to hang out with us and perhaps learn also a bit about Daisy's innards and extension hooks - stuff we habitually use during every Daisy project but which perhaps lacks from a bit of underexposure, feel free to join us! Even though the setting is very informal, I'm sure it will be educational for everybody.

Two conditions: we can host only two, maximum three extra hackers, and are required to bring your own computer, and skill set, obviously. Those skills could be anything however: it would be great if fpr example a skilled XHTML/CSS slice-and-dicer would be able to attend for instance, and learn some more about Daisy publisher requests, faceted browsers and link hierarchies in return for a n33t design.

In return, there'll be beer and pizza, and the winner for the coolest hack gets a big box of Geomag magnets for keepers. And eternal fame, of course.

Mail us if you want to be there: 10-11 April, in Zwijnaarde in our offices!

Outage

2008-03-31T20:02:28.000+02:00

Starting this afternoon around 17:00, some of our customers are affected by an outage at our hosting partner's datacenter. We're checking out status ourselves at the moment and apologise in the mean time. Our Kauri project server is affected as well.

Update: http://status.combell.com/ provides a bit more info - it's an electrical outage and presumably it will take quite a few hours to be solved.

Update 21:15: we're good again. Fingers crossed.