Andrew Shearer's Drivel

Away...

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 22:46:43 -0400

I’m leaving for the next couple of weeks on the Bermuda 1-2 race. The second leg (Bermuda to Newport) starts this Friday.

Here’s hoping for a smoother start than the first leg’s.

Email access will be poor. (And yes, there is a dearth of Wi-Fi hotspots in the Atlantic.)

The race organizers put up a Java race tracker applet. If you’re curious how I’m doing after June 20th, check class 4, Nimros.

Comment APIs, going once, going twice

Sun, 15 Jun 2003 09:22:28 -0400

Joe Gregorio has a RESTy comment API based on RSS 2.0. His article compares it with the soup of other protocols available: TrackBack, PingBack, and Post-It. One problem: it links to the author’s home page rather than a specific post, so it’s not good as a link-notification mechanism, as TrackBack is. And John Gruber points out that TrackBack isn’t really that good for comments in practice, because the dominant implementation just resends the article summary.

His Referrers list, however, continues to show a lot of junk along with the real links, including one user’s local Radio Userland aggregator on port 5335.

DirectRSS

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 20:16:37 -0400

Announcing DirectRSS. For when you want as little as possible between you and your RSS.

It’s an open-source MetaWeblog API implementation that modifies RSS 2.0 files in place. It also supports the Blogger and b2 APIs. No database required.

With it, you can use a weblog editing client such as NetNewsWire or w.bloggar to update an RSS feed, then use XSLT or the companion HTML renderer to generate a web site.

To handle larger collections of posts, it supports Dave Winer’s blogBrowser format, which, instead of a single file, uses one RSS file per month and one folder per year. To the weblog client, it looks like one big file, with all posts editable. A file containing the few most recent postings is generated automatically, for the benefit of news aggregators.

It was originally written as an XML experiment, but it’s proven reliable. It’s packaged as a Python CGI script, and comes with its own pre-configured Python web server for running locally. If you already have Python installed, there’s no setup required to run the working tutorial. (If you don’t, it only takes a few minutes to install Python.) It’s compatible with the bundled Python in Mac OS X 10.2 (Jaguar) and other Pythons lacking an expat parser. (It falls back on xmllib.)

New features in this version include full support for namespaces in both the RSS file and the MetaWeblog API, post modification dates, and a tutorial showing how to render the posts into HTML.

Currently, it’s packaged with ShearerSite, the (awkwardly-named) web interface that also performs the rendering into HTML. I may split out just the RSS editing portion if there’s interest. The HTML renderer can display RSS 2.0 files or blogBrowser archives filtered by category, date range, or numeric range.

See the download page (hosted by SourceForge), tutorial, and revision history.

Trackbacks, Referrers, Comments?

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 19:45:17 -0400

I pointed to Daring Fireball’s Trackback critique, but I didn’t comment. On the Internet, if I don’t do it, someone else will, and this article did. It’s a very well thought-out response.

To summarize: John Gruber’s criticisms of TrackBack are valid, but his referrer system has its own problems. It trades increased ease on the sending side for lower quality on the receiving side.

To improve TrackBack, it should be made easier. I don’t see why all comment forms on sites with TrackBack couldn’t be changed into combined comment/TrackBack forms. TrackBack would almost disappear to the web surfer; it would just be Remote Comments.

I hope to find a way on my own site to integrate comments with static main pages. (I have a few ideas.)

IE on its way out

Sat, 14 Jun 2003 01:28:16 -0400

No one has been covering the Internet Explorer from a web author's perspective as well as Zeldman.

2005? Are they kidding?: “Scoble says Longhorn will be available in 2005. Which is another way of saying IE/Win won't change for at least two years. It is not good enough to stay as it is. ...Can anyone tell us how two more years of flawed standards support is supposed to be a good thing?”

RIP:

...Our friends there [at Microsoft], we knew, were working on improvements, particularly in the areas of CSS and DOM support. Yet no significantly new browser version ever came of their activity. IE6/Win still had trouble with parts of CSS1, still did not support true native PNG transparency, and still did not incorporate Text Zoom...

Over the past weeks, the stories we and others have been covering (including the unavailability of an improved version of IE5/Mac outside the subscription-based MSN pay service, and the news that IE/Win was dead as a standalone product) painted a picture of a product on its way out. And now we know that that is the case.

We know that, after spending billions of dollars to defeat all competitors and to absolutely, positively own the desktop browsing space, Microsoft as a corporation is no longer interested in web browsers...

From here, as it has for several weeks now, it looks like a period of technological stasis and dormancy yawns ahead. Undoubtedly the less popular browsers will continue to improve. But few of us will be able to take advantage of their sophisticated standards support if 85% of the market continues to use an unchanged year 2000 browser.

OK, enough quoting. Go read the articles. It‘s getting late, but I’ll comment on one thing. I’ll do it even though it requires another quote.

IE5/Mac, with its Tasman rendering engine, was the first browser to deliver meaningful standards compliance to the market, arriving in March, 2000, a few months ahead of Mozilla 1.0 and Netscape 6... IE5/Mac introduced innovations like DOCTYPE switching and Text Zoom that soon found their way into comparably compliant browsers like Navigator, Konqueror, and Safari. And all but Text Zoom eventually made it into IE6/Win...

Add to that feature list the printer equivalent of Text Zoom: interactive fit-to-page controls in the print preview window. A very useful solution for a problem I saw users on other browsers and platforms (including IE/Win) struggle with frequently.

The reason IE 5/Mac was good was because it had to be. It was fighting against a large installed base of Netscape 4 on its merits, and Microsoft couldn’t fall back on their Windows franchise to push it. It was designed to be better than Netscape 4, and it succeeded at that. (Also helping its market share was Microsoft’s public threat to pull Office for Mac, which resulted in Apple shipping IE as their default browser.) Still, the competition made Microsoft produce some of its best work.

Soon after, with the game won (or at least, with everyone but Microsoft having lost sufficiently) Microsoft has gone home. They may have even done that years ago, quietly.

IE 6/Win wasn’t much of an upgrade. (A CNET review: “Just about the only reason we can figure that IE 6 even deserves the full 6 version number is its release in conjunction with Windows XP. For those of you not upgrading to Windows XP, whether you run IE 5.x or Netscape 6.x, there's no need to rush for this download.”)

Which brings up a question: when was this decision made? It was made public only recently, but could have been in the air in the Microsoft executive suite for much longer. They have the money to keep the development teams going regardless of the outcome. (According to a Think Secret article, IE 6/Mac was largely finished last year, but according to a former developer “We were told by upper management to hold it back until they gave it the green light.”) Aside from a 2001 update just to keep up with the release of Mac OS X, there haven't been any real feature upgrades to Internet Explorer for either Mac or Windows for the past three years. Both of them might as well have been cancelled then.

We’ve been using a dead product all this time and didn’t even know it!

TrackBacks, or Referrers?

Fri, 13 Jun 2003 00:04:25 -0400

Daring Fireball: The problems with Movable Type's TrackBack protocol.

‘God particle may not exist’

Thu, 12 Jun 2003 01:36:50 -0400

BBC News writes: “The most sought after object in particle physics, the Higgs boson, may not even exist.”

Cross-platform, cross-browser XML apps

Sun, 08 Jun 2003 23:14:30 -0400

Jon Udell writes: “Let's review what's happening in this screen shot. I'm running Mozilla Firebird on my Mac. The application is a structured search of my OSCOM slides. There's no search engine beyond the browser itself, which provides the JavaScript UI, the XPath-based search, and the XSLT-driven results display.”

This is great. It’s a working XPath lab in your browser. At least, if your browser is IE or a recent Mozilla derivative. (Come on, Apple, implement XSLT and the XMLDocument request APIs next in Safari.)

Link: Accelerated PHP for Windows; Turck MMCache and FastCGI

Sun, 08 Jun 2003 22:04:47 -0400

PHP Everywhere: The Ultimate PHP for Windows with Turck MMCache (and FastCGI)

The old problem with running PHP on Windows is that many extensions are not thread safe and can only run safely in CGI mode. Unfortunately CGI is dead slow because the web server creates a new CGI process for each page request.

FastCGI is the solution to this. Instead of creating a new CGI process for each page view, it reuses existing CGI processes. This also improves database scalability because persistent db connections work properly.

...Well there is a lesser known GPL'ed accelerator, Turck MMCache that supports both Windows, Unix and Linux, written by Dmitry Stogov. I tested MMCache and FastCGI against several PHP scripts accessing MySQL, Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server. I gave the web-server a good pounding with a 60 minute stress test using fiendish scripts that cause PHP in ISAPI mode to crash. MMCache appears to be made of sterner stuff and passed with flying colours. While the test was running, I modified the source code of the test scripts; MMCache auto-detected the changes and recompiled.

[via PHP Everywhere]

2003 Bermuda 1-2 Start From Newport

Sun, 08 Jun 2003 13:44:40 -0400

We sent my father off yesterday on the first leg of the 2003 Bermuda 1-2 Yacht Race, on his boat, Nimros. There were a few last-minute things to finish, as always. So he ended up leaving the dock a few minutes before the official start, as we hurried over to a vantage point on Newport’s Goat Island to watch it.

Nimros, in front of a boat with sails

Even from far away, Nimros was easy to identify, because it was the only sailboat in the race with no sails. Making sure they could be raised was one of those last-minute things we hadn’t quite finished.

The starting gun went off, and the other boats that had been jockeying for position finally tacked forward across the starting line, while Nimros alone drifted lazily backward, away from Bermuda, and toward the Newport Bridge.

A minute later, the mainsail started to rise. Almost immediately it stopped, with only a small triangle visible, and stayed that way for several minutes. Nimros appeared to be racing with a sail the size of a picnic blanket.

Then even that small concession to the practice of sailing was taken down, and Nimros drifted further away from the starting line over the next few minutes, toward the rocks at the foot of the Rose Island lighthouse.

Fortunately, Nimros avoided a wreck by raising the jib, which proved powerful enough to get the boat over the starting line about ten minutes later, for a total of about half an hour’s delay. Nimros was still easy to identify, because all the other boats had their larger mainsails raised, in addition to having already left.

We left as Nimros disappeared into the mist at the mouth of Narragansett Bay, headed out into the Atlantic, mainsail still down.

My father contacted us later that day to explain that a winch had failed, forcing him to re-thread the main halyard before he could raise the mainsail. So everything is apparently fine again.

It’s my turn on the boat next week, as the crew for the return trip. Wish me luck.

More coverage from the Bermuda 1-2 web site: [2003 Bermuda 1-2 Start From Newport].

News.Com: Fighting for a new Net...

Sat, 07 Jun 2003 15:14:53 -0400

News.Com: Fighting for a new Net copyright deal. Q&A with Lawrence Lessig. We're ready and eager to build a large grassroots organization of people who demand of Congress that it do something to restore some balance here. This petition is a first step toward going to Washington and saying that there's a large number of people who want you to consider this. [via Tomalak's Realm]

AskTog: Multiple Mistakes Drown Interface ....

Sat, 07 Jun 2003 15:12:37 -0400

AskTog: Multiple Mistakes Drown Interface. “I’m a member of the Building and Grounds committee at our Quaker meeting house. This month, when the group got together to check out problems around the building, someone had posted a hand-written sign on our new ultra-quiet dishwasher: ‘Do not operate the dishwasher unless John or Bettie is here to help!’ ” [via Tomalak's Realm]

Rage against the fruit machines

Sat, 07 Jun 2003 14:56:45 -0400

A UK activist clade is taking on the insidious digital fruit machine (AKA, “slot machine”). These things are supposed to be random and fair, but by design or by glitch, the pubside gambling systems are anything but.

Fruit machines cheat you on practically every spin of the reels. Almost every spin is entirely predetermined - which symbols are going to drop in, whether you're going to be awarded nudges, which numbers the "random" stop will land on, the lot. Ever had two cherries on the win line, not held them, then watched the third one drop in on the next spin and thought, "Damn, if I'd held them I'd have won"? Well, you wouldn't. If you'd held the two cherries, the machine would have dropped in a different symbol. And now we can prove it.
Link Discuss

(via NTK)

[via Boing Boing Blog]

Nice technique for proving program behavior without looking at its code. To summarize: they run the machine’s software inside a program on a regular desktop computer, and save the state of RAM at various points. Then they can “go back in time” at will by restoring RAM, and try making different choices.

By the way, wouldn’t it be interesting if you could do that with the real world? You could try out different things to see how people, or the world, would react, without risk of harm. Physics with “undo”. Heaven for opportunists.

IE on ice?

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 20:15:55 -0400

CNET: Microsoft's browser play. The removal of IE as a free, downloadable software application could have a profound effect on the Web and the development of Web standards.

Zeldman: IE/AOL; the flip side. Why proposed negative (anti-IE) and positive (pro-luxury-browser) grassroots campaigns cannot change consumer behavior or alter Microsoft and AOL's business decisions. What is likely to happen to design and development methods over the next few years. Some of this is actually good news, really.

Whopper of the Day

Wed, 04 Jun 2003 20:04:32 -0400

Whopper of the day, another one from Microsoft:

In response to some skeptical questioning from the Indian press about the investments, Gates had this to say:- "It is only because of Microsoft's approach that the computer industry has become a worldwide industry."

And he probably believes it, too. In Bill's model of globalization, he is the world.

Quoted in the Register: We've seen the future, Indian Prez tells Gates - and you're not in it.

Orphan IE

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 19:48:17 -0400

CNN: Microsoft to pay AOL $750M. Tech titans settle Netscape lawsuit, set seven-year licensing pact for AOL to use Internet Explorer.

CNET: Microsoft to abandon standalone IE.

So, AOL can now install IE with their product for no charge, just as MS terminates development of the installable IE. Great deal.

Jeffrey Zeldman has some great analysis.

Aside: does this mean AOL must use IE? From initial reports, the answer appears to be no. The alternative browser would just have to be free to AOL (or strategically valuable enough to justify its cost). However, AOL’s track record has it bundling IE for Windows even without a special agreement, even as it owned Netscape.

Presumably the termination of IE development means that users can only receive major browser updates by buying new versions of Windows. For the majority of users, who are likely to stick with their current OS version for a while, IE 6 SP1 is the end of the road. Its slow march toward compliance with CSS and other standards can go no further, no new web technologies will be added, and no more bugs will be fixed.

This is a huge problem for web programmers and designers. A large majority of web surfers—those using IE on probably all versions of Windows before Longhorn (scheduled for 2005)—have just had their browser orphaned, with no simple upgrade path. With all its warts, it’s going to stick around for a long time.

In other words, Internet Explorer 6 has been Netscape 4-ed.

Whopper of the day (from the CNET article): "Legacy OSes have reached their zenith with the addition of IE 6 SP1," [IE program manager] Countryman said. “Further improvements to IE will require enhancements to the underlying OS.” Is he trying make us believe that bug fixes, CSS3, XForms, etc., are impossible without a new operating system, due to some technical limitation? Maybe the quote was meant to look like a statement of technical possibility, while it was really a marketing dictum. As in: for the users to get further improvements in IE, they must first buy and install an updated OS. (Because we want it that way.)

Tim Bray, wresting with page layout in IE, puts it more strongly:

The problem isn’t that CSS is too hard. The problem isn’t browser incompatibilities in general. The problem is specifically that Microsoft Internet Explorer is a mouldering, out-of-date, amateurish, out-of-date pile of dung. Did I say it’s out-of-date? As in past its sell-by, seen better days, mutton dressed as lamb, superannuated, time-worn. It’s so, like, you know, so twentieth-century.

Ron Green raised the alarm, which echoed through Scripting News and then around the usual hallways: “All this has lead me to ask if IE is dead.”

Firebird [mozilla.org] and Safari [apple.com] are looking really good right now.

Eldred Petition

Tue, 03 Jun 2003 18:56:26 -0400

Aaron sums it up nicely:

Everything is under copyright. But most of those things aren’t making money, so no one cares about their copyright anymore. The Eldred Act will let you use those things.

Sign the petition. Tell your friends.

[via Aaron Swartz: The Weblog]