22 February 2005

I got some new books today. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon, purchased on the recommendation of fictional character Seth Cohen from The OC, Oblivion by David Foster Wallace, Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi, suggested by Roozbeh Pournader, the new McSweeney’s, and something else I can’t remember right now.

A full report will be forthcoming when I have finished these books or given up trying.

OSNews has an article listing a huge diversity of Mono-based applications. I hadn’t heard of a lot of these!

My wrist works again.

Hula is only a week old and yet has enjoyed tremendous attention already. The activity level is fantastic:

• Martijn van Beers has written a perl script that queries the NMAP agent to get your calendar, then exports it to the web, in a manner suitable for reading by clients like Evolution and iCal. Take note of the screenshot, which even shows recurring events working. Hoozah!

  Not content with this, Martijn is pushing ahead to write GroupDAV support for Hula. Good luck Martijn!

• Dave Camp has ported Hula to Mac OS X, where it builds and runs even without the support of fink, having so few dependencies.
• Paul Querna has got Hula working on BSD.
• Alex Hudson has posted some debs of Hula for Debian and possibly Ubuntu users.
• Kyle Yencer has created RPMs for Mandrake.
• Lachyg has Gentoo ebuilds of Hula available for download.
• John Kelley runs hulaTar, a service that provides tarballs of each svn revision.
• Dave Camp has posted an update to the hula-general mailing list wherein you will find some details on what he and some of the Novell-employed Hula hackers are planning on doing this week.

One of the important things happening this week is the re-normalization of the URLs that Hula uses for calendars and mails. We want Hula to have simple, memorable URLs. This will get us most of the way toward allowing easy calendar publication, which I am looking forward to in particular.

See, Joe and I have a mailing list that all of our friends, mainly in the Boston area, use for group communication. Most of the time the traffic on the list is of the form, “Hey, Kelly is having a party this weekend; here’s the invitation.” Or, “Anyone want to go to New York to see The Life Aquatic next week?” Or other things of this nature.

Robert and I were talking recently, and we realized that this mailing list is essentially a calendar. A calendar with no way to get a view of what’s happening on what days or who’s coming to what without reading all the mails and constructing a view in your head. A calendar that we are running on mailing list software.

So we want to try to replace, or at least augment, our mailing list with a shared calendar. One of the first steps is to allow calendar publication, so that people can maintain social calendars that their friends subscribe to (“here’s the cool sutff that’s going on in Boston”); later, we can make group calendars with multiple writers.

The new URL scheme will also be an important step to support CalDAV in the future, which we’ll probably start on in earnest next month, and which we’ll need to work with Sunbird and Chandler.

Also I lost my camera about a week ago. I think I left it in a taxi. Oops.