Microsoft’s simple list extensions to RSS were launched at Gnomedex 5 with much fanfare. Simple List Extensions improve the experience of working with lists of information delivered through RSS– things like your Netflix queue, to-do lists, job feeds, and so forth.

The proposal inspired a brief flurry of activity in technical blogs; here’s my post on the topic. Much was made of the fact that the spec was released under a Creative Commons license, with Lawrence Lessig appearing on video to praise the release. The world has much to gain in general from a Microsoft that knows how to evangelize an open standard, and in particular RSS would benefit greatly from an effective list standard.

Unfortuantely, Microsoft has done little so far to evangelize or even fully specify the standard. The specification and community process wiki haven’t seen updates since June.

In a list ditch effort, I contacted Dean Hachamovitch, lead of the IE team, and Sean Lyndersay, the PM in charge of the spec.

To their credit, they gave me some helpful examples including the live Amazon feeds that use the simple list extensions, and said the right things about wanting to support and finalize the spec– they’ve been quite busy getting the IE7 beta out the door. Sean promised to post links to the live feeds and the updated specifications by Wednesday this week.

If I were Microsoft, or a competitor of Microsoft, I would take an open source RSS reader like RSS Bandit, add support for the extensions, and support the extensions whereever they made sense on early adopter sites like MSDN. Sadly, Microsoft doesn’t do much of this sort of gonzo development these days– they hitch everything to big, slow moving ship trains. (Prove me wrong guys!)

Longer term, the innovators in RSS extensions will be the companies that can test new extensions without requiring users to manually upgrade their RSS Readers, and that have the ability to trial those extensions in feeds that have sufficiently broad readership. This argues either for zero install web based aggregators like Bloglines, or a client aggregator that can automatically and seamlessly upgrade itself.

While I’m on the topic, Rss-extensions.org is a Wiki about efforts by companies and standards groups to extend RSS.

The newest Berry 411 search plugin allows you to search local jobs scraped from a variety of sources.

If you want to search for Linux jobs on your smartphone, can simply enter ‘jobs: linux’ in Berry 411 or Smart 411. Or, just point your mobile browser at http://thebogles.com/tools/jobs.py and complete the web form.

OK, maybe it’s a bit of a stretch that you’ll find your dream job on your cellphone, but the XML API of Jobster Search was so convenient that I couldn’t resist building a mobile friendly version of the page. The robust and friendly Python parsing tool Beautiful Soup made light work of the parsing.

Check out the lively debate of J2EE heavy hitters going on at Scott Haug’s blog right now.

Joining in the debate are Gavin King, co-founder of Hibernate, and Juergen Hoeller, a co-founder of Spring. The whole thing started with a post by Scott Haug entitled Hibernate hates Spring, noting that Hibernate had edited their wiki to remove all references to Spring’s existence.

Categorize this one under thematically similar project names leading to seasonal irony.

How much does Hibernate seemingly despise Spring? So much that they no longer acknowledge that Spring is a “Related Project�. Just today, Christian Bauer (core Hibernate developer and website maintainer) removed all references of Spring from this page in their wiki. Nevermind that for a good percentage of J2EE developers, Hibernate and Spring are like chocolate and peanut butter. Of course, this kind of editorial exorcism isn’t unprecedented for Hibernate; they previously heavily edited, then removed completely, the Spring integration page (no longer available) on their wiki. I guess it’s hard to blame JBoss (Hibernate’s owning company) for desiring perpetual winter (and never Christmas?); Spring’s popularity is due in no small part to its promise of successful Java enterprise development sans EJBs and, thus, the managed containers (like the JBoss Application Server) required to deploy them.

Gavin replied with a lengthy response, followed by rejoinders from Juergen and a series of back and forth posts. It’s an interesting discussion, definitely worth a read if you’re interested in Java and open source.

For the record, Jobster happily uses both Hibernate and Spring.

I recently stumbled upon Skweezer, a free mobile content reformatting service. Skweezer can take any web page and automatically reformat it (as well as any content it points to) to be more mobile friendly. That means simplifying the formatting to make it easier to read and stripping out unneeded markup to make the page faster to download.

For instance, here is skweezed CNN, which shaves almost 60k off the size of standard CNN page, and here is skweezer Jobster. On a mobile device with a slow network connection, the size savings are really significant.

Skweezer is quite a bit better than Google’s WAP reformatter, which won’t handle pages with query string parameters and which strips too much out of the content. (It strips all links and forms, for instance.)

Skweezer Integration with Berry 411 and Berry Bloglines

Berry 411 and Berry Bloglines pages were carefully optimized for mobile devices, but links to external content were always difficult to read.

You no doubt have guessed where this is leading– external links in the Berry apps are now automatically skweezed. If you click on a blog link in bloglines, or a web link related to a business in the yellow pages, for instance, you will notice that the page is mobile optimized. In addition, if you search for a web address (e.g. ‘cnn.com’) in the yellow pages, you’ll be automatically taken to the skweezed version. Compared with launching the browser and going to the Skweezer home page, this saves several steps, as well as giving the benefits of history and autocompletion on URLs.

This is all done on the server, no new download is required.

Ad supported reformatters?

Sweezer is supported via ads appended to the bottom of the page, so it can be used used in any mobile software or service. (There’s also a premium version for users who want to pay to avoid ads and gain additional features.)

There has been some controversy about whether Skweezer is playing fair by appending its own ads to the page. You might ask the same question about Google’s reformatter, however– it doesn’t append its own ad, but it does strip the sites ads, which by some measures is worse! On the other hand, Skweezer is expanding the audience for sites by making it accessible on more devices, so it’s not necessarily a bad thing for site owners.

There really needs to be a equivalent of robots.txt for proxies that says to what extent a site wishes its content to be remixed and reformatted.

Slashphone.com - Nokia Release Mobile Search for Smartphone

Nokia today introduced a pioneering mobile search software solution that provides users with easy and fast access to leading search engines directly from their Nokia handset. The search application is a simple, convenient, and fast way for Nokia smartphone users to find and connect to any website as well as local search engines.

The mobile search application is currently being piloted in the UK, Finland and Sweden. The application will be distributed in the standard sales packs of the Nokia 6680, Nokia 6681 and Nokia 6630 smartphones. Existing owners of these devices can download the search application for free from the Nokia website at www.nokia.com/mobilesearch.

With the search engines integrated and easily accessible in just one application, users of Nokia smartphones can search for anything on the web, including websites, images, news and weather information, as well as mobile content, such as ring tones, games and wallpapers.

This weekend we went to Whistler; even spending just a single night it was a memorable trip. If you’ve only been to Whistler in the winter, it’s definitely worth a summer visit.

The Sea to Ski Highway is spectacular on a clear summer day and we scarcely felt the drive. Even more stunning were the views from the mountain after taking the gondola up… alpine lakes and meadows with wildflower, the Canadian rockies still covered in snow.

There are hikes for just about every difficulty level; some with minimal elevation gain, one that goes all the way to the summit.

There were an eclectic range of activities going on. This happened to be the weekend of a major mountain biking festival called Crankworx so there was an abundance of live music and competitive events, not to mention full body armor and mountain bikes that cost more than some cars.

The crowd was international, more so than the typical Seattle tourist crowd. A much larger representation of Brits and Austrialians, for instance– probably that’s partly due to the Commonwealth effect, and partly due to– ahem– other factors that have cropped up in the past few years in the US.

At the same time we were able to enjoy restaurants like Araxi, whose tasting menu I highly recommended; pictured is the leek and cheese souffle.

We stayed at an Austrian style B&B called the Durlacher Hof, which I also recommend. The hotels in the village are nice but tend towards to blur together into a theme-parkish sameness. At the Durlacher Hof there were some surprising idiosyncracies– like being asked to remove our shoes when we entered– but also great hospitality, quiet, large rooms with lots of warm golden pine, and a deeply satisfying breakfast (European style breads and cheese, apricot pancakes, fresh fruit, and much more.)

Erika, the owner, mentioned the business climate crisis currently troubling Whistler. It was a bad winter, the US dollar is weak, and so much energy and expense went towards winning the 2010 Olympic bid that little is left over for cultivating current tourism. I imagine this is only a temporary situation, but it does create opportunities for good deals for visitors in the summer seasons and especially in the fall shoulder seasons.

Lots of cool Sony PSP hacking going on.

Here a nice hack that turns a Playstation Portable into a linux system monitor

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And here’s Josh Bancroft of Tiny Screenfuls posting to Blogger.com from the Sony PSP.

Certain devices, even if they aren’t perfect or fully baked, are good playgrounds for software experimentation and good proxies for future technology. The Blackberry is a good stand-in for future devices that will combine ubiquitous though slow network access with a keyboard and decent screen. The PSP looks to be a similar stand-in for a portable, cool wifi device with a high quality screen.

Vishwa Srinivasan has been a busy guy. He’s created a native Windows Mobile 2003 version of Smart 411, his Berry 411 client for smartphones. Vishwa reports that this version is more reliable and usable than the MIDP version running on the same phone, so use this one if you’re running a Windows flavored phone.

IT Conversations: Adam Bosworth - MySQL Users Conference: “Building a system that is capable of handling one billion transactions a day is easier than it sounds. That is Adam Bosworth’s view and he should know because he works for a company that has managed to achieve this level of scale on a simple architecture based on commodity hardware and simple brute force algorithms. Adam covers a lot of ground in this presentation that focuses on the success of the web, the scalability of simplicity and the emergence of the information server.

It’s not always about finding a simple solution to a complex problem, occasionally it’s about simplifying the problem. Whereas complex solutions are brittle and break, simple solutions just tend to work. HTML, HTTP, RSS and ATOM all fall in this category; simple solutions that have been widely adopted and work well. Adam believes it is time for database vendors to reflect on how they can provide an open, simple data model to easily server up information similar to the way a web server delivers content to the browser. Delivering an information server that is capable of federating information across the web, intelligently caching and scaling linearly is the next big database challenge.”

I was originally slated to be on a team lead by Adam Bosworth when I started at Microsoft. Alas a Microsoft reorg intervened. He’s an extremely smart, yet grounded, thinker.

Adam Bosworth believe we need enabling technology and protocols to allow massively scalable queries of distributed data on the web– “the HTTP and HTML of data”, in Adam’s words.

To do that for he proposes a simple protocol for distributed queries–akin in simplicity to HTML– for talking to decentralized databases. A query engine and presentation layer could then combine results from a number of different query sources.

Most approaches to the distributed query problem have tended to focus on exposing data in a structured format that can then be crawled, indexed, and queried in a central location. For example, Google solves the massive scaling problems by having a massive farm of servers in house, and building a software layer that allows queries to be efficiently distributed across those machines.

Adam’s proposal would allow, in essence, a federated cloud of machines equal in power to Google. Ironically (considering Adam’s affiliation with Google) this would dilute the power of Google.

To allow the queries to scale linearly across machines, the queries need to be able to run at the item level, that means no joins.

An extended RSS/Atom format is used to describe queries and their results. The proposed query format is an extremely simple item-only query language. There are no joins, because to make the queries scale, each machine must be able to handle the query on its own.

Adam’s ran out of time during his talk, so he didn’t have room to talk about the hard issues. One of hard issues is the economics and ownership issues regarding the data. Why should I run queries on the behalf of anyone who asks, when my data may be sliced and diced beyond recognition by the time their done with it?

On the other hand, if restrictive terms and conditions are attached to the use of distributed query engines, it’s going to be a damper on the growth of the federated data network.

Maxivista is a cool utility that makes a notebook function as a second (or third, or fourth) monitor to a host PC.

I don’t have a second monitor, but can extend my desktop on main PC over to my notebook and drag Outlook over to that screen, or even split windows across the screens. The additional screen shows up in the control panel just if you’d added a real monitor.

It’s extremely easy to use and install. The protocol they are using works very well over LAN, and there are compressed versions that work well over wireless. The cost is right too, only $29.