Content syndication / aggregation – an old technology from the BBS days

May 302005

With all the rage about RSS/Atom and aggregators and podcasting and blah blah blah. I thought I would take a moment to mention that this is yet another technology that was born in the era of the almighty BBS (Bulletin Board System).

Those of you that know me personally, know that I was a long time SysOp of many BBSes over the years starting out when I was about 15. So every now and then I feel nostalgic and start thinking back to the ways that the innovation around BBSes is what did them in with the internet.

For example, RSS is pretty simple, right? You’ve got an application that goes around pulling down XML feeds from various web sites and when new items are detected they are shown to you as new headlines and at this point they are completely in your control. You are not connected to the web site while you are reading the document.

Aside from the fact that RSS has been around for many many years on the internet (anybody remember iSyndicate?), this idea was pioneered by the geniuses at Clark Development, the company that made PCBoard, one of the best BBS software systems for DOS Mark Herring of Sparkware and it found itself quickly integrated into a number of different BBS software systems. The technology back then was called QWK.

Basically, you would configure your full featured terminal software to automatically log into your favorite BBSes and issue automated commands (think of them as HTTP GET requests) for the QWK packets that you subscribed to. The BBS would grab all of the messages and bulletins posted since your last download and ZIP them into a file with a predictable structure. The QWK reader, then acts in much of the same way that your RSS reader does. Some QWK readers even supported writing offline replies and new messages which would be uploaded on the next round. Similar to blogging APIs that let RSS readers act as blog posters as well.

Anyway there’s tons more. Soon I’ll go on my rant about why the single most useful feature of BBSes (message networks) have no parallel today in the various message forums on the internet.

I wish I had more time. I really would love to develop the BBS of the 21st century.

(Thanks to Jason Scott who corrected my recollection of the QWK origin…)

Whoever SAId programming was fun?

May 292005

Been working on my C# implementation of the Sylantro Application Interface (SAI) all week, including this weekend. Don’t really have a catchy name for it right now other than SAI.NET. It’s going to come in two flavors: A command-level layer and an application-level layer. I’m currently working on the lower level command layer.

Here’s how it basically works…

SAI is a bidirectional TCP/IP stream that receives and sends comma separated values. The number of commands is pretty massive. I think I counted something like 50. But anyway the commands are not human friendly, the structures are inconsistent and unpredictable, and being CSV, you need a reference manual just to see what’s coming and going. Enter SAI.NET’s command interface.

What I’ve done is basically grouped all of the commands by common parameters and behavioral categories and created a large (really large actually) object model hierarchy. Each command class represents a command in the SAI specification.

Then we’ve got the all important magical Connection object which hides the underlying TCP/IP tasks that are required to maintain a successful SAI session such as authentication, session keep alive, and asynchronous command responses and events.

All in all, I really like the application and once I start working on the application layer (you gotta see it in action to appreciate how cool that is) I will talk about some examples of what I’m doing with it.

The bottom line is, I am getting burnt out from all this work. I didn’t go out all week/weekend. I did however, get a significant amount of work done out on the balcony though and I got to sit and watch afternoon rain showers which I always find fun to watch and a really nice and sunny day today. I’m actually out on the balcony now in my pajamas. Hope the neighbors don’t mind.

Oh well back to work. Just thought I’d take a break and ramble on about some useless shit.

Tablet PC isn’t always about the ink

May 222005

As I sit here brainstorming how I am going to design my managed implementation of the Sylantro Application Interface (SAI) protocol, I am reminded that the benefit of the Tablet PC isn’t always about the ink. Sure that’s what first comes to mind, how useful it is to draw, sketch, write, etc. But there’s more to it than that.

I find that I am much better at the initial design on the Tablet PC because of its form factor. It allows me to be more relaxed and comfortable which lends itself well to the creative process. At first I’ll brainstorm some ideas in TEO’s Journal, but soon I’m moving to the VS.NET 2005 Class Designer to start laying out the object model. This is where I find that I work better on the tablet. Sure it’s more time consuming to enter class names and member names with the TIP, but for some reason, with the tablet, my thoughts flow better and ideas come more easily and I’m less distracted. All the while I’m using the tablet in slate mode but not using a pixel of ink.

So this is the message that I think sometimes gets lost when talking about the Tablet PC. It’s not always about the cool things you can do with ink. It’s about having a highly portable full fledged Windows XP computer with a flexible form factor that lets you use it just about anywhere.

Now I just gotta wait for all 3.8 GB of VS.NET 2005 to download to my tablet since I deleted the ISO. :(