grack.com

I’ve decided to take the plunge and switch RSS readers. I was using SharpReader at work under Windows and Liferea at home under Linux. Neither reader met my needs very well. I found that SharpReader was a big memory hog and suffered from the general heaviness of most client-side .NET applications. Liferea at home was fast and supported the page-per-blog model, but it was somewhat crashy.

Starting today, I’m using the Sage RSS Reader at home and work for my RSS reading. It’s a firefox plugin, so I can use Adblock to block those annoying feedburner ads in some of the feeds that I read.

Sage is very fast and the integration with Firefox is a big plus for me. I enjoy having tabbed browsing available with the feed items (something not available in SharpReader). Another plus is that it stores the RSS feed list in my bookmarks list, allowing me to use an extension like Syncmarks to keep my feed list synchronized between work and home.

There’s an active wiki for the Sage community where you can find stylesheets for your feed list and GreaseMonkey scripts. Who would have thought that you could use Greasemonkey scripts in your RSS reader?

From Groklaw:

The Australian National Archive has selected OpenDocument XML for long-term storage of government documents. GovTech News also reports that Open Source Victoria has called for all remaining Australian government institutions to follow Massachusetts’ lead in adopting OpenDocument XML…

Wow.

eInk is offering a development kit for its new active matrix electronic paper prototype. For only $3000, you can build yourself an e-book reader with their Linux-based evaluation board.

I think I’ll bite when this drops below $300.

I’ve decided that after nearly a year of very little activity, it’s time to start looking for a new maintainer for nprof.

nprof is pretty much the only open-source .NET profiler on the map. It has support for multi-threaded, multi-appdomained applications and even has basic support for profiling ASP.NET.

I am sad that I have to move on from the project before it hit 1.0, but it’s clear that my limited time isn’t going to change any time soon. With someone that has time to contribute to it at the helm, I’m certain the 1.0 release will be spectacular.

Contact me either via email or on the nprof-developer mailing list if you are interested.

UPDATE: The project has moved to Google Code.

I took a close look at Edgewall Software’s trac tool today. It’s an integrated bug-tracker, wiki, Subversion repository browser and general project goal management tool, all available in a single web interface. It’s open-source and free for anyone to download.

The tight coupling of all the services seems to be a major win for this tracking tool. All of the components are aware of changes in the other components and can react appropriately. This is apparent in the timeline view that picks out changes from all the modules and puts it into a single project overview.

trac also features an interesting concept for storing its current state – it keeps it in Subversion itself, serialized as XML. This gives you the ability to roll your project back to a previous revision if something goes wrong, as well as giving you direct access to the data itself to modify externally. On top of all this, it’s been designed with a pluggable architecture from the ground up, potentially allowing developers to add custom functionality as necessary.

From what I can tell, they look like they’ve done a lot of work on the new, unreleased version. It’s been a few months since the last release, but this upcoming release should be well worth it.

UPDATE: Fixed the URL.