Danny Ayers posted on the Joy of VNC. I found it ironic that he's installing it, because I've been using it for the last 3 years, and today I turned it off for my linux boxes. The reason: X11.app. I have an X server right here on the Powerbook. So instead of opening a VNC window that swallows my screen (I like them big), I just ssh forward X and open multi-gnome-terminal, emacs, WingIDE, whatever, right on the Mac. I get cut and paste between X apps and Mac apps -- didn't have that on VNC. X integrates with CodeTek's Virtual Desktop, so virtual desktops are there, and the X windows are of course managed by Expose. The only drawback is that VNC sessions can be opened and closed multiple times without restarting the X server -- you keep your desktop state. Not so with what I'm doing now. So I may revisit VNC later, but right now, I've closed the windows and killed the server. If you're gonna use it, you want TightVNC.

Like a whole bunch of other bloggers, I see that Ecto is available for public beta. This impacts me in a slightly different way. I've wanted an upgraded blogging UI -- mine is a hacked cgi page. NNW's built-in weblog editor got me itchy, but the Ecto features are pushing me over the edge. I'm going to try to site down and write a metaweblog plugin for pyblosxom, so that I can join in the fun. I was going to skip metaweblog and just go straight to Atom, but the Atom API isn't done enough to be ready. Besides the refactoring of pyblosxom internals will make lots of things easier when its time to do Atom.

Today I remembered that iCal can share calendars via WebDAV. I also discovered this iCalender formatted file for ETCon 2004. There's also a great source of calendars at iCalShare. Here's a good application for RSS. I want my aggregator to subscribe to an RSS feed of available calendars and then I want to hit a button and have the calendar downloaded / subscribed to.

This is really making me look forward to cool stuff that we'll be able to do in Chandler once we get a working calendar.

Sara Williams of Microsoft announced the Microsoft is doing a Planet MSDN. Of course, theirs is called blogs.msdn.com, which makes total sense. They are using the weblogs.asp.net infrastructure, and I have to give a lot of credit, because these folks were among the earliest to aggregate blogs for a development community. Maybe they'll fix their infrastructure to do 304 and Gzip.

This led me to think about other commercial development communities, which led immediately to Java. So of course, there is java.blogs, which has been out for a while. weblogs.asp.net is to javablogs.com as blogs.msdn.com is to part of java.net. And indeed java.net is aggregating bloggers. Unfortunately, the blogging activity at java.net is very, very low. If I was a Java engineer, I would be begging my management to let me put some content up on java.net. Among the early adopters, Sun looks distinctly unclueful on this.

I also stumbled across lemonodor's announcement of Planet Lisp. Awesome, except like so many of the Planets, no RSS feed. (More points for MS). Althought the speed of implementation is impressive (Xach is a Lisp hacker after all). Especially considering that the Planet developers already sent us the code so we could do Planet Apache.

Planet Apache is on the way, but it's probably not happening until early next week due to concerns about oversight of the blog content. The ASF is full of "oversight" conversations nowdays. So, look for more info early next week.