An interesting twist is that Martin (who's been helping with this project for a while now) and I are planning on setting aside proceeds from the sale of the book to fund Pike development and marketing projects. That means that, in addition to getting up to speed on your favorite programming language, you'll also be helping to advance and promote Pike.

I expect the book to be available at online outlets such as Amazon or Barnes and Noble in about a month. Until then, you can get your copy from Lulu, our printing vendor for USD 29.95. In addition to getting your book sooner, Lulu's commissions are lower, meaning that a larger percentage of your purchase price will be made available for supporting the Pike community.

Learn more about the book, and purchase your copy today by visiting:

http://book.gotpike.org/

Enter Stomp...

Stomp is a text based protocol designed to be easy to implement, yet full featured. The protocol supports text and binary messages of arbitrary length and the Pike client supports asynchronous message receipt. I wrote a client for Stomp a year or so ago, and used it a bit, but recently spent some more time working on it. Newly added features to the Stomp client include reconnection and off line message sending for more reliable behavior.

Through the use of the Pike Stomp client and StompConnect, you can connect your existing and new applications to enterprise messaging buses such as ActiveMQ or MQSeries. This opens up a whole world of possibilities, ranging from integration to transaction processing.

Additionally, I added support for Stomp (and possibly other asynchronous messaging systems as well) to the Fins framework, making it incredibly easy to write applications in Pike that utilize Messaging. I'll be posting some examples of how to use Stomp with Fins over the next few days, be sure to keep an eye out for them.

For those of you that may have missed the original announcement, this year's Pike Conference will be held in beautiful Riga, Latvia, from October 18 through the 22nd. Riga's old town was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and getting to and from Riga has never been easier. For more information, send an email to the conference coordinators at conference at gotpike dot org, or visit the conference website at:

http://conference.gotpike.org

If you know you'll attending, but haven't registered yet, please take a moment to do so now, as it allows the conference team to better plan activities to suit your interests and schedule. Also, we still have spaces for participants; so if you'd like to make a presentation, suggest a topic for group discussion or just want to say a few words in person, do let us know, as we'd love to include you in the program.

I'm personally very excited about getting to meet everyone (again, even). We always have a good time and a lot of good information is passed around. If you're thinking that maybe you'd like to get more involved with your language of choice, you probably won't find a better chance to chat with like minded folks. Additionally, I've got some very cool things to talk about, so I hope to see you in Riga!

Even more interesting are the possible modding opportunities. By appearance, the whole affair seems like a webcam strapped to some high power optics, but that may be over-simplifying the situation. This tool would be useful for all kinds of work, including comparison and measurement. The resolution is a little low, but someone suggested that it might be possible to rig up a digital microfilm reader (or scanner, even.

First, in the eye-candy department, I started working with Dojo 0.3.1, which has some better widgets than previous releases. It adds some quirks, especially with the DHTML effects, but hopefully we'll be able to work through them. I also added a new widget called RTEditor, which extends the Rich text editor widget to be tabbed: one tab is allows you to edit text in Rich Text format, and the other tab lets you edit the raw text. As you change from tab to tab, the version from the other tab is brought along with you, so you don't lose content. It's pretty neat, and lets users who are more comfortable with HTML tweak their content.

Second, on the Fins side of things, I've added some developer admin tools. We're hooking into the pike -x command, and so far, a new application creation tool is available, as well as a replacement for fin_serve, which should make it easier to run your Fins apps.

Most significant, though, is automatic configuration of Model objects by examination of the database schema. This means that if you write your database to follow the rules that Fins expects, you don't have to write Model code. It's all done for you… just create a (more or less empty) class for each datatype, and Fins will handle the rest… it's pretty cool. It's also completely optional. If you've got legacy databases to work with, Fins can also use those, but you'll have to resort to increasingly manual tactics.

FinScribe is built on the MVC framework I've been writing, called Fins, and is written in Pike with support for mysql, sqlite and (hopefully) postgresql. Originally intended as a demonstration application for that framework, FinScribe has taken on a life of its own.

It's been a busy few months; we finally finished the floor in the foundry area after winter set in early. A new entrance door was cut in the concrete wall in order to allow equipment to be moved in. We moved the two English casters in May and they're awaiting a plan for getting them off their pallets.

About the time we were moving things in, I got a call about a Thompson typecaster down in North Carolina (at Heritage Letterpress, who was in the process of shutting down their hot metal operation). I went down with Ian Schaefer who was picking up a composition caster. We pooled our resources for the big move and spent all night driving the truck back to Pennsylvania. We also got lots of spares and some nice composition and display mats. I've also started a Matrix Inventory to keep track of what faces and sizes I've got. There are still a few faces that I have mats but no wedges, so I'm still on the lookout for those. If you've got spares, drop me a line!

Finally, I have a first pass at a keyboard emulator up and running. This piece of software is designed to fix a lot of the shortcomings of working with the standard pneumatic keyboard, yet still retain the flavor of working in a traditional way. It will output files that can be sent to the caster driving software (not quite written yet) for final casting. Eventually, I'll adapt the keyboard sofware into something that can take a standard text input file and turn it into an "e-ribbon" for casting.

I guess that about sums up the latest happenings; lots of stuff going on, and I'm excited about finally getting some of these projects wrapped up!

First of all, while the whole "search as you type" thing is a nice idea, the reality is that most of us just don't have the horsepower to spare to make that happen. I'd get two or three characters into my search string, and things would lock up for 20 seconds. Not my idea of making my life easier or faster. HoudaSpot patiently waits till you're done typing in the criteria before it goes searching for your things. Then you can be amazed at how fast Spotlight really is!

Second, you can save your search criteria for use later as a "template" search. Nice.

Third, the search remains live (not sure if that's the case with out of the box spotlight or not. That means if you go moving things around or add files that fit the criteria, they automatically show up in your search.

Anyhow, they're looking to get people to try it out and write reviews today. For each registered review on June 16, 2006, the folks at MacZOT will knock a nickel off the selling price. If it gets to the end of the day and the price is zero dollars, everyone who wrote in gets it for free. You can also buy it at the current going price, which is a steal anyhow.

The software in this case is SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys. If you've never used SubEthaEdit before, it's kind of a jarring experience. We first played around with it at the Pike conference in Essen two years ago. It's Bonjour enabled, so everyone in your area who's using the application can collaboratively edit documents with each other. You see the editing as it happens. It's pretty neat. Not exactly what you want for every document, but there are lots of great applications, especially when brainstorming. If you know lots of Mac users and wished you could collaborate more effectively, this is the tool for you.

Anyhow, here's the deal: for each post about it, they reduce the price for everyone by 5 cents. Right now, it's at $20, which is a pretty good deal as it is. If it hits zero, it's free for everyone who participated by writing about the promotion. They're calling the whole thing "BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZOT.com". They also claim that MacZOT and TheCodingMonkeys will award $105,000 in Mac software, someone else will have to do the math. Perhaps I'm just not young and hip enough to get the edgy names and whatnot, but I like the idea, especially if people write informative posts about any of this.

So, last night I threw together the Fins[2] equivalent that searches SmugMug[3] for images and returns the results to you. It's functionally equivalent to the Rails demo application that uses Flickr.

A running instance of the sample app can be found here:

http://buoy.riverweb.com:9098/

The code is available here:

http://hww3.riverweb.com/dist/Fins/samples

You'll note that most of the bulk of the download consists of the Dojo[4] javascript library we're using to achieve some of the client side functionality. You'll also need to download Fins, which can be found in the directory immediately above. Simply untar both files, and run

./fin_serve.pike -p yourportnumber /path/to/smugmug

If you don't have the Public.Image.SmugMug and Public.Web.RSS modules, this app won't do much for you, but that's sort of beside the point.

The only other difference between the amount of work required to achieve the pike version is that you're responsible for doing a lot of the javascript work yourself. I'm not sure how I feel about the Rails way of doing things, which is to say there's a lot of magic involved. I suppose it might be worthwhile to build some convenience functions that make some of this easier.

As always, comments and suggestions are welcome!

[1] http://media.rubyonrails.org/video/flickr-rails-ajax.mov
[2] http://hww3.riverweb.com/space/pike/Fins
[3] http://www.smugmug.com
[4] http://www.dojotoolkit.org