In Traction

I am now using Disqus to handle the comments on my blog. Disqus is a new global blog commenting system. It has a lot of nice features, such as avatars, threaded conversations and global notifications. It allows you to track when a comment you posted got replied to and will in the future even support SMS notifications (hopefully this will work in Belgium as well). The Disqus forum page for this blog can be found at http://intraction.disqus.com/.

They have a simple Wordpress plugin that you can install. I ticked the option “Replace all entries with no comments (including future posts)” to keep my existing comments, and use Disqus for posts without comments. When they have an import system, I will probably import all existing comments into the system as well.

Robert Scoble did an interview with Daniel Ha, the CEO of Disqus.

Adam Greenfield would like to know how people respond to his talks, so hereby a call to everyone that will be attending his talk in Leuven to blog about it

I am using FeedBurner now, after reading about its powerful features.

If you are subscribed to this blog, please change the feed URL to http://feeds.feedburner.com/InTraction.

In August, they started to build another floor on top of our institute. They have progressed nicely so far:

Yesterday evening it started raining heavily (the typical Belgian weather I guess), resulting in water dripping from the wall. Fortunately, we could move back into our office this morning. There were still some stains on the wall though:

To conclude with a final picture for this blog post , I have moved into a new office since the end of August:

The room is pretty nice, there’s a lot more light than in my previous office.

In other news, Lode now finally has a homepage and even a blog. Just to let you know Lode, I don’t give up that easily

I will post a report of the other two days at Ubicomp soon (I still have to go through the notes on my laptop).

So I eventually switched over my blog to Mephisto. As I explained in my previous post, I had enough of the Typo madness. I had a brief look at Simplelog as well. It might be a nice alternative if Mephisto gives me problems as well.

I had some problems lately with my domain (jozilla.be). The guys who I registered it with didn’t answer any mails, nor did they answer any phone calls. I was lucky once to speak to someone from support, who told me everything would be taken care off if I deposited another 4 Euro’s to get the domain out of quarantaine. Of course, this didn’t solve anything. My domain is still in quarantaine.

I wish I knew who the CEO of this company (and others) was before I registered my domain with them. It seems he has quite a disputable reputation. The people of the be.comp.internet newsgroup didn’t have a high esteem of him either.

Since you are reading this, I guess you found my new and permanent domain (jozilla.net), which I registered with Site5 for no more than 7 Euro’s.

I’m glad everything is working again. As always, the staff of Site5 was very helpful to resolve any problems I had during the migration.

In the future I will be looking into integrating my blog more into my main homepage. I might also move away from Typo since its instability is quite annoying. Apparantly the original creator of Typo has moved on as well. Mephisto seems promising. If the infrastructure is in place I hope to blog more often, and publish more material about my current research.

Edit: A few days ago, my .be domain was reactivated after all. A little too late however, since I already registered jozilla.net by then.

I updated my FOAF profile today with most of the metadata that is applicable to me. I also added my geographic position (longitude and latitude), which was already listed on my blog and homepage.

If you annotate your website with geographic information, it is possible to view sites near you through the GeoURL initiative. You can for example take a look at websites near this blog (within a range of 30 km).

If you are curious about FOAF and want to create your own profile, it might be good to read Tim Berners-Lee’s advice.

I decided to stop running my blog on Typo SVN and installed Typo 4.0.3, the current stable version.

Everything seems to work fine, except for the fact that it is still running in development mode. I think I’m going to send a mail to the Site5 staff. Fortunately they are very helpful, and quick to respond.

There are still some blog posts in the queue, as always… I hope to finally push some updates through in the next few days.

This blog has been down for a while. Maybe using Typo from trunk wasn’t such a good idea after all.

It might also have been caused by an incompatibility between the Rails version Typo used, and the main installation at this server.

Anyway, the blog is back online. Since there are a lot of things I couldn’t blog about, I will probably post frequent updates in the next couple of weeks.

There are new packages available for Uiml.net. Previously, when you just ran uiml.net.exe, it would exit saying that it could not find the frontend UIML files. These are now included in the packages, meaning that you get a nice graphical interface for choosing a UIML file to render. There is now also a dependency on at least one of the rendering backends.

Takis also moved his repository to another server. To install Uiml.net or Cassowary.net packages, just add this line to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://issaris.be/breezy/ ./

In other news, Takis has been playing with a Nokia 770 lately: