why knallgrau is not an option.

recently, i was asked if i could recommend knallgrau as a company to host weblogs.

in fact, i can recommend their adaptation of antville called twoday (which is proprietary software built-around an open-source project).

but honestly: if somebody wants to host weblogs she could simply download antville and jump on the bandwagon. (on the other hand, the technical university of vienna was not able to do exactly that; don't know for sure what this says about the quality of an institution committed to educating technology.)

nevertheless, there was a much more important reason: knallgrau lacks integrity. a simple example can illustrate this: the company knallgrau never was involved in the development of fm4.

fact is, that the project manager referred to at this impertinent portfolio entry did some dhtml work (no management at all) for the fm4 site – at a time when neither knallgrau gmbh was funded nor ostleitner was a member of the company.

such kind of chuzpe is something i already got used to by knallgrau.

strange, i thought the concept of two semi-celebrities stepping through the night of the big city is pretty old... (i just cannot remember when it was that i watched rocko schamoni and schorsch kamerun nightclubbing in berlin.)

the dorn/akin episode i watched myself, already some years ago as well. but in fact, i enjoyed it.

reiser is in the house! (the girl into film, not the file system.)

now, the next thing kris should do is an amr weblog. no kidding.

btw. shelter is a hot location! where else in vienna would one get to hear 6t's beat and watch a burlesque show in a smoke-filled basement?

tiny pointed me to the vlc download statistics. very insightful: good news for the maccies, bad ones for the linux desktoppers, isn't it?

ajaxpatterns.org – "We are uncovering new ways to weave the world wide web".

yahoo buys del.icio.us.

let me see you stripped down to the chitin.

or: a rough sketch of steps i'd like too see taken concerning antville (the software).

first of all, apologies to all the folks who tried so desperately to contact me as one of the antville developers. (i am still reading my mail, btw.) it's been some bumpy times lately and hardly a free minute for practical antwork, however i've had a few headaches from being lost in thoughts about how to react or continue...

it's so difficult for various reasons:

• the development team is practically non-existent, anymore.
• the current antville design still resists flexibility and modularization.
• there's a lack of supportive backflow from other antville developers (instead we have a strange competition of the same product with two different names).
• helma, which antville is built upon, is shifting towards a completely rewritten version 2.

e.g. to implement a new action i do not only need to know a little bit too much about antville's internal access permission management – i even have to write every permission check (i.e. whether a user is allowed to create, update or delete an item) mostly from scratch.

and even displaying a simple feedback message is quite a pain in the neck due to an internationalisation engine that was half-heartedly implemented and never finished.

from my own experience creating antville's parss client i just would not want to do such a thing again at this point.

well, obviously i am scared of my and our own code. and pretty hesitating to touch it for the benefit of a new cool feature (even if it's one i impatiently desire).

thus, my idea is to re-enable antville for easier development again. the goal is to strip down the antville code to its bone by replacing any inessential feature with a modular extension while simplifying the remaining "chitin" skeleton to make it more understandable even for regular (i.e. not helma-related) javascript developers.

to achieve this i consider the following steps:

• unify text, files and images to one hybrid content structure. this way, any new item can be added without patching the database.
• simplify access control by providing convenience methods that sort out a user by verifying the necessary permissions with the actual role privileges. a developer should be able to do this with one or at most two function calls from an arbitrary action.
• rework the whole internationalisation engine. here too, a developer should only need to call a simple message funktion. and user's probably should be able to edit message files from within their site environment.
• improve skin handling and editing. as gobi already shows there are ways to shift the input (i.e. editable forms) and output skins towards each other. wouldn't it be amazing to only edit one skin once and both, your text editor masks and the user front-end appear just right and in sync?
• delegate the user interface to the client again. client-side javascript has become mature enough to use it for simple tasks like paging and sorting; and as all the web 2.0 hubris and ajax cleansing promise, it even could be used for fancier actions...
• while we are at it: of course, antville could do with an appropriate dose of (not so) recent hot web features. well, i did not say "trackbacks" or "tags", but let's see what makes sense, here, anyway. (tags for sure!)
• yes, and all the rest (e.g. polls or blogger apis) goes into modules. in fact, in modules every enthusiastic javascript developer should be able to write.
• while rewriting the code helma 2.0 will evolve and hopefully new accomplishments can be reflected in antville just in time.

but to be honest: just as the last years have proven i, personally, hardly see any perspective to support another developer community now or in the near future. no empty promises, anymore.

because praschl asked, somehow rightfully, if not knowingly: "why further developing antville", i'd like to promote kris' idea of (ab)using donald knuth's versioning scheme, emphasizing that antville – six apart from other blogging tools – is a product with limited capabilities; it does a bunch of things, and these pretty well, but it won't get all the nifty stuff automagically just because it was mentioned on technorati. (but it can if somebody is willing to write an appropriate module.)

thus, let antville's version number grow towards φ – the greek letter "phi" and the mathematical symbol for the divine proportion.

A Critical History of Computer Graphics and Animation.

according to netcraft's latest server survey, the internet is shrinking again.