For a long time I've wanted to put together a web service to host on my site. I always had modest goals in mind; start with a service to spit out movie lines, favorite lyrics, or quotes. I never got around to implementing them though, even when I was working on WSDL support at Netscape or flat-out investigating web services for opportunities there. I even put together some tools to auto-generate all the files and configuration you need for a Java based web service. (man what a pain!).

Today I finally got an XML-RPC service running for the first time, in Python. I've been playing around with it on the train to and from work, off and on, for a week or two. Today I finally had a chunk of solid time to dig and figure out my problem. (as it turns out, it was the lack of an actual procedure call -duh). While doing it I got to play around with the SimpleXMLRPCServer and BaseHTTPServer (because I thought I had to do something really tricky, which I didn't). In the end I got my little helloworld web service written and functioning. I'll post the code and maybe even host it on jgaunt.com for fun.

Part of what may have kicked me into gear to get this finally written was the end goal. This time around it's not just a silly web service. I have in mind a pretty complicated integration with bugzilla to allow me to do more tracking of the Songbird eng team. We have an agile shop going and as lead I need to keep a close eye on the bugs and having a tool that is written with that in mind should really help (versus the standard bugzilla query-based interface).

In other Songbird news I'm having a really good discussion with a couple of Mozilla engineers (:bs and :rstrong) over in bmo bug 472606 about appname and distributionId and the effect of changing how those pieces fit in to the application puzzle. I have an idea of what I think would work for Songbird, but I don't think Mozilla has the same requirements for customization (or end goals), so I may have to adjust my vision of what an ideal solution will be, hopefully we can hash our way into a solution that works for both parties and is backward compatible with what they need (we don't have anything to be backward compatible with!).

I've been trying to implement the Getting Things Done process in my life, on and off, for some time now. As in more than a year. I forget exactly how long, but if I looked back through my blog entries I'd find out spouting about how I thought it would slice my bread for me or something. I've had trouble getting it working in my life largely because it's a lifestyle shift. Putting everything into a system isn't so tough, but actually USING the system is where it gets tricky.

There is a lot of talk going on these days, all over the web about GTD and how people are making it work for themselves and what tools they use. I recently read an article that talked about some tricks in Gmail that were useful in implementing the lists. Instead of dismissing the idea ( it's email not a listing tool! ) I read through the article and then opened my Gmail tab and tried it. Neat. It worked.

Ah, but I have a work Gmail account and a home Gmail account and Gmail is very funny about letting you log into two accounts at the same time ( as in you can't do it - or maybe that was Gcal that didn't like it, anyway ). And while I'm going to use it for work related stuff I don't really want to HAVE to log in to my work Gmail to get my home stuff. Drats. This means I'd have to be constantly logging in and out of Gmail to send myself emails to remember to do stuff. What a pain in the.... side ( Stand up straight ).

Ah, but that's where the magic of Firefox comes in. A little known feature that wasn't completely removed, just hidden from common everyday use, was the profile manager. Yes, it still exists and you can use it! You have to set an environment variable first: MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1 under computer->properties->advanced->environment or something like that. Then open the shortcut to the app and add a '-p' (no quotes) after the quoted string pointing to the firefox.exe. Launch it and you should see the profile manager pop up. Create two profiles and then open firefox using each one. You are now able to log into Gmail and Gcal twice!

Okay, so maybe not Earth-shattering, but pretty cool non-the-less.

I'm going to go through the steps to get this working and then write it all up here, so look for a link in the next few days. I'll have docs on Windows and Linux at least, don't know if I can get my hands on a Mac to try it out.

Now it's time for pizza and Heroes on DVR!!

I was just checking my website tracking, something I've not done for a long time. It was interesting but not too surprising to see that most of my traffic (and there's not much) is coming from Songbird and is going to my Extension Tutorial. I guess it's time to take another look at it and clean it up.

I should also probably look in to getting my commenting back online so that people can leave me comments and questions.

Things are going well with Songbird these days. We're in the process of cleaning up a bunch of interfaces and preparing for the 0.2 release, the date of which is still not determined!!! So don't go saying I said it was on such-and-such a date. Because it's not!

I was purusing a friends website and noticed he had a Creative Commons license on his page (along with having completely re-designed his website). I had heard about Creative Commons a little and decided to check it out. Very cool. They're all about licensing things, text, audio, video etc., to allow copyright holders some rights while letting others use their works in certain ways. For those familiar with open source licensing, they have similar things to the GNU-GPL. They let you pick what kinds of rights you want to retain and then give you some code to drop on your website that points back to the license.

So I am now licensing my website, all of it, under a Creative Commons license. If you'd like to use anything from my website, that's cool, just give me credit for it, don't use it commercially (can't make money from it) and whatever you do with it has to be licensed similarly. For more details click on the button in the nav-bar, it will take you to the CC site.

In general, the CC site is worth checking out. They have a section where people can upload their works, audio, video, images. I was listening to some music earlier and it was pretty good. They also have an article right now on a guy named Kembrew McLeod. He's a teacher at a college and he actually trademarked the phrase "Freedom of Expression®". He has a free book in pdf format that is licesened through CC and is doing a documentary, part of which is currently up on the CC site.