I spent some time last night working on Javagato, my Java front end to Advogato, using the XML-RPC interface. Come to find out, like cmacd I found that I had fogotten my password, as I wasn't really in a password remembering "mode" when I created the account. I found this out while I was going to test the UI login screen, but I was very happy that I had my own UI to the XML-RPC interface, because I could keep easily changing the password, and hitting the OK button, rather than having to click on back, modify it in the html field and submit, etc. So I find the first undocumented feature of Javagato is to figure out what your password is a bit faster than through the Web UI.

These password issues finally led me to do some looking into some password "tracker" utilities out there, and my biggest problem with all of them is, I don't trust them, so I may put together an nice Java password tracker after I am done with Javagato, and I already have an encrypted storage mechanism written for Symbiosis, which I can easily re-use.

Because of the painful XML-RPC interface I have decided to make Javagato extremely cache oriented, with some options on diary retrieval depth. As some folks post daily (like myself, thus far), I don't want to pull down all 200 posts if the user is only interested in the last 10, so this value will be either a) configurable through a preference b) configurable at run-time or c) both, and I am leaning towards c.

It is a fun little project to throw together, and I hope someone here finds it useful, and it is refreshing to get my mind off of not only work, but also Symbiosis for a while to fiddle with some new ideas, but I am starting to see Symbiosis more as an ideal than a piece of software, and as such, no matter how much work I do on it, I don't think I will ever be "finished with it". It reminds me a lot of Xanadu in that way.

To finish up, let me thank tk for being the first one to give me a rating, and I agree that at this point, from an Open Source standpoint, Apprentice is about right. I hope after I retire from "real work", that I can spend more time on Open Source software development, and perhaps be a Master before I die (and possibly even finish Symbiosis!), but for now I am stuck to only working on it at night and on weekends.