rubys@rubix:~/pirate$ python PirateTest.py
.............................................................
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Ran 61 tests in 17.008s
rubys@rubix:~/parrot/languages/python$ make fulltest
cd ../.. ; perl -Ilib t/harness t/dynclass/py*.t
t/dynclass/pybuiltin....ok
t/dynclass/pyclass......ok
t/dynclass/pycomplex....ok
t/dynclass/pyfunc.......ok
t/dynclass/pyint........ok
All tests successful.
Files=5, Tests=42, 11 wallclock secs (10.11 cusr + 0.88 csys = 10.99 CPU)
perl t/harness t/basic/*.t
t/basic/01_hello....ok
t/basic/02_expr.....ok
t/basic/03_types....ok
t/basic/func........ok
t/basic/iter........ok
t/basic/oo_attr.....ok
t/basic/oo_class....ok
All tests successful.
Files=7, Tests=110, 45 wallclock secs (12.54 cusr + 2.79 csys = 15.33 CPU)
perl t/harness t/pie/b*.t
t/pie/b1....ok
t/pie/b2....ok
t/pie/b3....ok
t/pie/b5....ok
t/pie/b6....ok
All tests successful.
Files=5, Tests=35, 39 wallclock secs ( 8.27 cusr + 0.88 csys = 9.15 CPU)
What does this mean? Pretty much only that these particular
tests pass, nothing more, nothing less. These tests focus
mostly on breadth (can I iterate over a dictionary?) vs depth (does
dictionary have a keys method?) As there is no
current test case which requires dict.keys, this
method is not yet coded. Not that it would be difficult to
add, but it won't be added until there are test cases to back it
up.
Bigger issues include unbound methods, dictionaries with
non-string keys, and multiple inheritance. In these areas, I
have some "scaffolding" code in place until the real code can be
put in place. While some of these may be difficult to design,
all the design work is done in Python, what's left is the
implementation.
What is does mean is that there is some hope that
pie-thon can be revisited at the next
PyCon or
OSCON.
While I'm optimistic that Parrot will be competitive, I believe
that the real win won't be in performance, but in providing Python
programmers access to CPAN.
Things I'd love to do... work with the
Jython,
iron-python, and
CPython folks to work out the
details of a common Python compatibility test suite. And work
with the PyPy folks to see
if the Parrot work I have done could be leveraged there.
If anybody is interested in helping with any of these things,
leave a comment here.
Jacques Distler: A recent Wired article to the effect that
the National Weather Service is now offering their data in XML
format got me intrigued enough to want to test out the
service.
Double encoded, ill-formed weather forecasts, via POST.
For those who don't have
SOAP::Lite installed,
here's
a LWP version.
Some people like to do crossword puzzles,
lately I've been amusing myself by getting some new feature of
Python implemented on Parrot. Here are some recent
successes:
...
Jacques Distler: You either have to be a programming whiz,
a deranged physicist, or some equally atypical character,
who’s willing to cobble together something half-way
bulletproof.
...
It sadly is an all too common story.
Somebody new to a codebase, oblivious to all the history, sees one
thing they can't do, and proposes a radical refactoring. Why
should I be any different?
...
In many ways, it seems like Python and Parrot are from different
planets.
In Python, the general approach seems to be to reduce everything
possible to a canonical form as early as possible, and then deal
with everything consistently.
In Parrot, the general approach seems to be to leave everything
in its original form as long as possible, and then deal with
everything separately.
...
Don Box: Had we started with a simpler basis (perhaps Relax
NG + some SOAP-specific extensions), my guess is we'd be having
different discussions right now.
I don't.
...
Slides
from
my
Sells’ DevCon presentation.
Note: the correct display of some characters in the presentation
may depend on what fonts you have installed. Some pages may
display better on Mozilla on large screens, but everything should
mostly work cross browser.
I've been trying to make sense of Python's
scoping in the context of Parrot. Whereas Dan saw
two
types of variables, I see
three: builtin, module, and lexical. Consider the
following scope1.py
...
def isForbidden(self):
""" only allow two anonymous posts per hour per ip address"""
if self.request_method == 'POST' and not self.user.name:
lasthour=str(time.time()-3600)
log=os.path.join(config.data_dir, 'event.log')
file=open(log)
pages={}
for line in file:
if line>lasthour and line.find("SAVEPAGE")>=0:
if self.remote_addr == line.split('&')[1].split('=')[1]:
pages[line.split('&')[0].split('=')[1]]='1'
if len(pages) >= 2: return True
file.close()
Update: I've changed it to allow only two pages to be updated per
hour. A single page may be updated multiple times without penalty.
Pirate's
unittests were structured in the conventional way: one class
with a large number of test_* methods, each containing
a single test case. One of my first changes to Pirate was to
unbundle these into separate
files. I did this using a trick I picked up from
Mark Pilgrim, namely to create
a loop which dynamically created test_* methods, one per
file, thus:
# For every test/*/filename.py file, create a test_filename method
for test in sys.argv[1:] or glob("test/*/*.py"):
testName = "test_" + os.path.splitext(os.path.split(test)[1])[0]
testFunc = lambda self, test=test: self.runTest(test)
testFunc.__doc__ = testName
instanceMethod = new.instancemethod(testFunc, None, PirateTest)
setattr(PirateTest, testName, instanceMethod)
While exploring Python on Parrot, I was
curious to see how Parrot handled
Dealing with Diversity.
...
I'm putting
this out here so that people can poke fun at it. It is
totally
TDD, and
YAGNI.
In fact, the only portion that has had more than a few moments of
thought put into it is in the ast.__init__ source
file.
I'm totally impressed by Michal's
Pirate, in a put
everything in one source file as the author has the whole problem
in his head sort of way.
What I would like to see is a refactoring so that blocks of code
are objects which understand their own symbol tables. My goal
is to implement patterns which reflect how a human coder would
chose to implement something in Parrot.
Comparison of various Python implementations
for conformance.
...
TIOBE Software: The TIOBE
Programming Community index gives an indication of the popularity of
programming languages. The index is updated once a month. The ratings
are based on the world-wide availability of skilled engineers, courses
and third party vendors. The popular search engines Google and Yahoo!
are used to calculate the ratings. Observe that the TPC index is not about
the best programming language or the language in which most lines of code
have been written.
Summarizing:
| Language |
Ratings |
Delta |
Pos |
| C/C++ |
33.188 |
-1.30 |
 |
| Perl/PHP/Python |
20.677 |
+5.05 |
 |
| Java/C# |
18.694 |
-5.15 |
 |
| VB/Delphi/Pascal/Kylix |
14.225 |
+5.37 |
|
| Other |
27.441 |
-3.97 |
|
One of the name for Python running on Parrot
is Pyrate. I'm trying to make sense of the current state of
the effort.
...
Jarek
Zgoda: It still doesn't have native unicode support, so all
this XML buzz is just that -- a buzz. In modern world lacking of
unicode awareness makes any solution incomplete.
I agree with Adam Trachtenberg, Unicode support is on my
list of things that would be great to add to PHP 6
...
Parrot seems to be an eclectic mix of the
familiar and the alien.
...
Paul Graham:
When one looks over these trends, is there any overall theme?
There does seem to be: that in the coming century, good ideas will
count for more. That 26 year olds with good ideas will increasingly
have an edge over 50 year olds with powerful connections.
In a World of Ends,
who needs
Connectors?
Mark Baker: Yet another service which opts for REST rather
than SOA. Victory is mine! Muhahaha! 8-)
rpc.bloglines.com/
getitems: n=1 - mark unread items as read
You know what distinguishes this "definition" of REST
from WS-*? A
blank line.
But I suspect it will be popular anyway.
Del.icio.us certainly
is. And it is even further away from REST.
Here's code that will do a posts/add request using HTTP
GET. Sweet.
You know what people like in APIs? Hint: it is not where
you put the blank line. People like it when
you
don't need to throw in the kitchen sink to make this work.
Yesterday, I had lunch with
Dave
Johnson. He asked me how hard would it be to add support
for the RFC
3229 "feed"
instance manipulation method to
Roller. I said
that I would take a look into it.
...
Cory Doctorow: The theme for this year's ETech is "Remix,"
encompassing those nexus points of iterative hacking and large
ideas that have a way of transforming technology:
I now know what I am going to be submitting as a
proposal.
...
Rebecca Dias: often times you take detours only to
experience a different road.
Aaron Swartz:
Afterwards, we went over the dos and don’ts of campus
life. You know: smoke your pot over by the lake, keep your vomit
from binge drinking off the floor, and never, ever share files over
the Internet.
Doc
Searls: There have been prolific times in the history of
this blog. But, on the whole, I doubt its bulk exceeds the outbound
text in my daily emails, or even (lately) my daily instant
messaging. In fact, I think of this blog as public email. A way to
do cc: everybody.
User agents of clients that provide support for the
RFC 3229
"feed" instance manipulation method:
...
Michael Koziarski: Once you’ve installed FYR
you’ll see a new Feed Icon
(
) in the status bar, that behaves just like the
live bookmarks menu. However, instead of opening the bookmarks
menu, selecting an item will launch your Feed Reader. [via
Nick Bradbury]
Cool!
Wishlist:
- allow an option to support
http://www.bloglines.com/sub/ instead of
feed:
- instructions on how to remove the current icon, making this a
replacement instead of an addition
- replaceable icon - to me it makes sense to display the icon of
your feed reader instead
Is the source to this extension available?
Experimental support for
RFC 3229
"feed" instance manipulation method:
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} /blog/index.atom$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:A-IM} \bfeed\b
RewriteCond /home/rubys/blog/history/index.%{HTTP:If-None-Match}.asis -s
RewriteRule index.atom$ /blog/history/index.%{HTTP:If-None-Match}.asis
cache.py
has the delta function.
Garrett Rooney: What does it do? In short, it allows you to
only send new entries in your Atom feeds down to the clients. The
client program adds a few HTTP headers (a If-Modified-Since to tell
you what the last time they got was and an A-IM that indicates you
support the 'feed' IM) and things just magically work. Best
of all, the content that's sent down, while smaller, remains valid
Atom XML, so no real change is needed on the client side other than
sending the new headers.
It looks to me that the delta required for clients that already
support If-Modified-Since is to add exactly one header
on the request: A-IM: feed. This would work
together with support for things like gzip, making the total
request look something like this:
GET /asdf/atom.xml HTTP/1.1
Host: asdf.blogs.com
If-Modified-Since: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 00:18:36 GMT
Accept-Encoding: gzip
A-IM: feed
... with the last line being the only addition. Note:
compression techniques (like gzip) can be handled either as
content-encoding or instance-manipulation.
Now, the question is: can we get one or more major hosting
providers to deploy this filter (and patch)? And clients to
add this one line?
Update: Removed gzip from A-IM example above. It
is legal to include it there; but for now, let's settle on the
example above as being recommendation for the moment.
Shelley Powers: That was a mistake on his part.
James E. Robinson, III: Bob Wyman
suggested i implement
RFC3229 to make
proxies and caches behave nicely with sending only modified
content. The new
wp-rss2.php file does just that.
In addition to the lack of Apache support that James mentions, I
see three problems
...
Nelson Minar: If you're comfortable parsing XML, you're
comfortable parsing doc/lit SOAP. But SOAP also offers the
possibility of automatic data bindings (no parsing required) and
WSDL (service description). Alas, those technologies still don't
work so well in Perl, Python, or PHP where doc/lit support is weak.
It does work pretty well in Java and .NET.
Automatic data bindings is not as important in dynamically typed
languages. Parsing XML in PHP is pretty easy with things like
SimpleXML. Taken
together, this leads to the conclusion that a toolkit approach may
not be required.
At the moment, in PHP if you want to do an HTTP POST, you need
to use functions like
fsockopen.
A built-in function that made it easier to do a arbitrary POST
would be useful in its own right.
Bob Wyman: PubSub.com is willing to offer a $5,000 bounty
to whoever builds the "best" full implementation as an open source
Apache module by Jan 1, 2005.
It seems that some of the smaller but more aggressive feed
consumers have the most to benefit from bandwidth reduction
measures than even the mega colossal feed producers do.
Uncompressed, undelta'ed, full text feeds may be becoming the
barrier to entry to the next
Bloglines,
Feedster,
PubSub or
Technorati.
Another bandwidth reduction idea, compliments
of FooCamp04. The core idea is that, sites that are willing
to trade a little CPU for a bandwidth savings, subsetting the feed
that is returned on a GET based on the ETag that was provided on
the request may make sense.
...
FeedMesh
is a group working to establish a "peering network" for
decentralized
web(site|log) update notifications and content
distribution.
The initial discussion happened on Sept 10th at Foo Camp.
Companies and representatives involved so far are:
Scott Johnson
(Feedster),
Mark Fletcher
(Bloglines),
Jim Winstead
(blo.gs),
Jeremy Zawodny
(Yahoo!).
The current plans are to stage the implementation into a series
of concrete, tangible steps.
...
Rob Howard: We're going to try and get back to the point
where full RSS feeds can be offered. While there are lot of good
RSS clients out there, there are also plenty of bad ones that don't
honor all the HTTP codes.
To be fair, most of the
HTTP
headers involved are optional, and most developers are not
accustomed to dealing with the protocol at this level.
Despite being optional (which is fair given the range of
applications HTTP supports), many of the HTTP features were
explicitly designed to solve the problems posed by applications
such as syndication. After all,
If implemented properly, the check for new content is an
"infinitesimal" burden.
What may help is
guides and
compliance
test suites.
JR
Conlin: Yo’ product weenies, pay attention:
Influencers use weird crap.
Sean Mc Grath: My belief is that Postel's Law cannot be
applied without understanding the context of its application. I am
all in favour of smart software but I am also all in favour of
knowing exactly what is doing guesswork and where it is doing
it.
The problem is bigger than syntax and markup. For
starters, why doesn't the article
validate?
Mandajan: you are looking for a 35 mm film canister with
a neon green top.
Interesting adventure game for GPS users. Or even
mapquest users (hint: zoom in). Either the map or a GPS device will
get you close, and if you look hard enough, you will find
this.
Dave Johnson: It's official. Roller is now my full time
job. I just accepted a job with Sun Microsystems to "design,
develop, and deploy the primary blogging system for Sun in
conjunction with other engineers" and to evangelize blogging both
inside and outside of Sun.
Adam Jack: Ok, so I used RDFLIB to allow Gump to generate
some RDF... Even this small foray allowed me to come up with some
questions, and want more input
Rumor has it, some people who have experience with RDF read this
weblog (go figure!). Responses on the
mailing
list are preferred, but I will see to it that any comments
posted here are relayed.
Mark Pilgrim's
Identifying
Atom article indirectly makes three assertions about what would
be ideal in a syndication protocol with respect to ids, which I
will paraphrase thus
...
Mark Johnson: When a protocol ends with "bis," it means
that it's the second version of that protocol.
Bruce Schneier: It's time for us all to migrate away from
SHA-1.
What triggered this? A
collision
in MD5. I am not an expert in cryptography, but I do find
this subject fascinating. Here is what I have pieced together
so far:
...
Joel
Spolsky: I must warn you not to start reading it before you
go to sleep because nobody I know has been able to put it down
without reading through to the end.
And Joel still doesn't. I picked up this book this
afternoon.
So I got some new shoes. That was about a month ago.
Yesterday, I walked out in bare feet after it had
rained.
...
Chris Sells is at it again.
Applied XML
Developers Conference 5.
Hey Chris... do me a favor and change the title of my
presentation from
"Atom
in Depth" to "XML is an
attractive nuisance". Most of the examples will come from
my experiences with the
feedvalidator, and will
cover pretty much the same territory as
Atom in
Depth did, but to a much deeper level.
The
votemaster: it may all come down to Missouri. Watch it
closely.
Phil Ringnalda: Sam will be delighted to know that they
validate out of the box. Charles will be delighted to know that
they include both Last-Modified and Etag headers, and apoplectic
over the way that when presented with the proper If-Modified-Since
and If-None-Match headers to reply to a request with a 304 Not
Modified, they instead return a 200, with the exact same
Last-Modified and Etag headers, and the exact same
content.
I would share Charles's concern. On the plus side, I'm
pleased to see utf-8 used consistently throughout (in both the
content and the HTTP headers, and in both the html and feed).
I'm also delighted to see feed
autodiscovery being used.
If you have an aggregator, or are running one of those popular
planet* type of sites where you republish a combination of the
feeds of others, then you really should make sure that you pass
these aggregator tests.
urlnorm.py
Passes the tests defined in
PaceCanonicalIds.
Passes all but three of the tests defined in
MNot's
urlnorm.py, as I interpret the specs differently for these
three.
Only exercised significantly for http URIs.
Testcases welcome.
Doc
Searls: So I note with relief that a small grace of aging
is giving a progressively smaller shit about stuff for which giving
a shit would still do no good.
In researching how Atom and the FeedValidator
should handle URI equivalence, I took a look at how language
environments with built in URI classes implement equality
methods.
...
Russell
Beattie: Navigate to Links, then "Install AtomME". It
should download and install. I tested it on the phones I have handy
at the moment: a Nokia 7610, 6200, SonyEricsson 616 and a Motorola
v400.
Ben
Hyde: Things fall apart when the organization starts
getting highly invested in the analogy between a nail and screw.
Then they start engaging in various
thought stopping
processes and begin singing in unison: "I gotta hammer, I
hammer in the morning..." For a while they think they are
happy!
Vigilance is hard work.
Kevin
Railsback: As InfoWorld's CTO, Chad Dickerson, posted here,
InfoWorld has been noticing a lot of congestion at the top of the
hour when thousands of RSS clients all hit our servers
simultaneously to check for updated feeds. We've done a number of
things to alleviate this
Excellent! Kevin, since you have popped the hood anyway,
here are a few things to consider:
...
Dare Obasanjo: At this point I'd like to note that HTTP
provides two mechanisms for web servers to tell clients if a
network resource has changed or not. The basics of this mechanism
is explained in the blog post
HTTP Conditional Get for RSS Hackers which provides a way to
prevent clients such as news readers from repeatedly downloading a
Web document if it hasn't been updated.
The functionality is clearly there in HTTP. The word is
clearly not getting out to everywhere it should be.
Todo:
- Propose language for Atom that the Last-Modified, ETag, and
Content-Transfer-Encoding headers that HTTP specifications
indicates MAY be used in HTTP protocols, SHOULD be used in the case
of
Atom.
- Update the
feedvalidator to provide
warnings when feeds are detected that don't support these
headers. This would apply not only to Atom, but also to all
flavors of RSS.
I can't change the world, but these two actions I can take.
Michael O'Connell: I sense that Microsoft has been rather
concerned about Linux lately. Why else would their top dog, CEO
Steve Ballmer, get so riled up when asked this week
...
The motivation for
this
implementation was Java enabled cellphones with tight memory
requirements.
Russell Beattie ported
this code to
Java, I then inlined everything that was called once to reduce the
footprint.
J2SE implementations can use the builtin java.security classes.
demo
Ben
Hyde: If you drag this bookmarklet into your bookmark bar:
Tasty? Then when visiting a page you can click on it to see how
many people thought it was interesting enough to bookmark at
del.icio.us. You can read their comments and category
assignments.
Cool! I find the
del.icio.us feed to be of
less than fully useful as it doesn't have anything that I can
identify as a permalink. Now with five lines of code, I can
rectify that in my
extractor
script.
Ideally, at some point, people will converge on
standard
for feeds for link blogs, and these special purposes
hacks can be retired.
Jonas Luster:
It's the often overlooked things, that are truly great. Amidst
all the hype for bigger screens, RSS in Safari and Apple ripping
off Konfabbulator's Widget technology, the real revolution won't be
broadcast widely.
Yesterday, Cupertino released the first preview version of
its
ZeroConf/Rendezvous
technology for Windows XP and 2000.
I've changed my weblogging software to send trackbacks in utf-8,
and to try to respect the charset, if specified, on trackbacks
received.
This involved four changes.
...
In response to a
question from Christian Romney:
this web page was the inspiration for my current
favicon.ico.
...
Jacques Distler: You gonna turn off Trackbacks (which don't
declare a charset, and could be sent in any charset imaginable, but
very frequently are Windows-1252)? Unless you have a way to guess
the charset and re-encode the result to UTF-8, they will invalidate
your pages as quick as you can sneeze.
It turns out that by design it is rather hard for a string of
bytes to accidentally be
valid utf-8, unless that string is pure US-ASCII, in which case
it doesn't much matter which encoding you presume.
...
Susan Campbell: Think about this a moment, and then look
into the shining faces of your loved ones. You didn't opt for the
DVD option on the minivan, did you? And you will be trapped for
hours in an area roughly the size of a kitchen table with the
people who know how to push your buttons better than
anyone.
If you have kids, a DVD option is a wise investment.
Andrew
Grumet and I finished debugging
this problem yesterday. It took a number of sessions, via
AIM, phone, and email, to finally track it down.
...
Scott Hanson: I was unable to quickly apply my script to
Susan’s files (i.e. I’ve gotten stuck), and I’m
short of time. Since a
number of people had publicly offered to help export Manila
sites, people with a probably a better understanding of Manila and
XML than I have, I decided to plea for help via a Wiki page
entitled
ConvertingManila.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
I'll see what I can do, and will contribute to the wiki.
Ross
Mayfield: Identity and messaging are deeply intertwingled.
Right now, email has the identity of Receivers and syndication has
the identity of Senders. Doc points out that the combination may
allow us to circumvent tier 3 identity. But assume for a moment
that Sender ID becomes adopted, perhaps even before the next
Exchange upgrade cycle. Then email gains end-to-end identity. Its
doubtful you will see a similar push in RSS/Atom unless transport
begins to leverage Atom’s API functions for tangental
benefits to transmission.
This is not a time for religious debate or
partisanship. It is a time for compassion and an opportunity
to learn and improve. Enough so that I am willing to step
forward and offer to help with writing of conversion and migration
tools.
...
Dan
Sugalski: If anyone sees a bunch of guys on horses, don't
forget to offer 'em some carrots.
Rogers
Cadenhead: If you're going to point a dead site's feed to
nowhere, why not simply delete it? Any decent aggregator will
eventually dump a feed that results in "file not found"
errors
If your server supports it, a
410 status code means gone. Whereas a
404 status code may be transient, a 410 is clearly intentional,
so you would think that any decent aggregator would
respect a 410, wouldn't you?
...
Matt
May: We at W3C like Atom.
Speaking for myself, my concern remains about openness, not time
to market. The one thing that I felt that was not adequately
explored in the meeting was the possibility that there might be a
difference from a legal perspective between these two
organizations.
...
I've converted
yesterday's utf-8 tests to
utf-16
(little-endian, with the appropriate BOM).
For those that want to play along with RSS, there also are
RSS
1.0,
RSS
2.0, and
RSS
2.0 + Atom versions.
Here is a
simple
set of tests for verifying that an aggregator properly handles
various combinations of
international
characters and
character references. The desired result is that the
title of every entry should be displayed as
Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn.
This is not meant to be comprehensive, in particular, it focuses
only on one encoding (utf-8, which is
guaranteed
to be supported by any
conformant XML parser), and doesn't do
mode base64.
Russell
Beattie: Everything I did in the past two hours was trial
and error. My HTML web pages were working, my XML feed pages were
not.
Brent
Simmons: My job is to treat Atom and RSS as peers, and to
do a great job supporting both formats. I do not prefer one over
the other, and I go out of my way to stay far away from the
fighting. (One of the beautiful parts of newsreaders is the
Unsubscribe button.)
...
Doc
Searls: I'm on the phone with somebody who just said "Open
source doesn't do R&D. It does D." It was meant as flattery. A
get-IT-done thing.
Cool! I didn't even know that Doc had a Garage.
Subscribed.
Tim Bray: I don’t think it’s that useful as a
business book, but it’s fascinating (particularly towards the
end) as a study of how a closed belief system reacts to the
introduction of fact-backed heresy. Since the human race in general
and technology profession in particular tend to the development of
closed belief systems, this I think will find a lot of resonance
with a lot of readers.
Purchased
This morning, I got a
trackback
from a
Korean weblog. Unfortunately, if you look at how a
typical trackback is sent, you see that character encoding
information is not provided.
Something to think about the next time you are tempted to think
that you can get
queries
for free. While both
HTTP
and
XML
provide mechanisms for defining encoding, support in widely
deployed implementations is much better in XML than in straight
HTTP.
URI's seem to be
converging
on UTF-8, albeit at an excruciatingly slow pace. Don't
leave this to chance - if you are defining a
GenerativeNaming scheme today, make this explicit.
If you are defining a protocol based on HTTP POST, encourage the
use of the charset parameter on the Content-Type header.
Require it if you can.
Dan
Sugalski: So, if you've not heard from me, don't be too
surprised, and try again--you might've gotten caught by a rogue
bayesian network.
I've been thinking and reading about the IETF
and W3C lately. A lot. A brain-dump of my current
thinking
...
To the ASF
Board of Directors.
Again.
Ken Coar has the
details.
Notable: for the first time, I'm no longer the token
Jakartan. New to the
board are Geir
and
Stefano.
A personal goal of mine is to get more non-core people to view the
ASF board as their own. Beware: that likely will involve more
active nominations the next cycle...
Two of the new members are also bloggers:
Bertrand
Delcretaz and Leo
Simons.
Dion Almaer: The "User Threads" view shows the various
threads that a community member has participated on. We have added
some more information below the threads, which shows a list of
other community members who have posted from the same location as
this user.
FYI: I capture the same information (you can see it by hovering
over a name in a name in the comment thread), the real
innovation here is exposing the information in a user friendly
manner.
Dave Winer: At some point in the next few months, there
will be an open source release of the Frontier kernel.
Does anybody remember Domino Go WebServer? Anybody?
Bueller?
The thought process that Dave describes exactly mirrors the
thought process that IBM went through a few years back when it
decided to participate in Apache.
Matt
Croydon: I'm still using Radio on this blog, mostly because
the thought of cleaning up and converting 3000 some entries scares
me.
Matt, you really need to face your fears. There is
absolutely no data lock-in in Radio UserLand.
This is all you you need to migrate to
Blosxom. I'd recommend
that you do the migration just to convince yourself that it can be
done, and then go back to using whatever software you are most
comfortable with.
It is not just about the code...
Simon
Phipps: It's not enough to listen to the conversation;
success in business will increasingly depend on
participating in the conversation
And
trackbacks have proven to be one rather effective way to start
a conversation. Unlike Simon, I do hope my colleagues
in marketing are listening because there are some pretty
tricky questions to answer about using this medium for
business.
Shelley Powers: if you’re going to learn about MySQL
or PHP, especially if you want to learn about both, grab any one of
the many freely available open source applications, install it, and
then learn by tweaking.
Don Park: How about doing it like the way
XML-DSig specs were
done? FYI, XML-DSig specs were under both IETF and W3C and
Joseph Reagle
managed to push it along rather fast.
Lauren
Wood: Four basic rules. WordPress gets them right. Other
products do too, even when they don’t have the same amount of
support from a user community. Call it Product Management
101.
I feel the same way.
...
I wonder how the draft IETF
Charter would need to change in order to become a
W3C
Charter. It would seem to me that someone
from the W3C would be in the best position to answer this.
Any takers?
...
Tim Bray: reachservices is a good
example of what the SOA deployments of the future will look like. I
think that if there are any protocols, technologies, or standards
that turn out not to be necessary for this project, then maybe
they’re not that necessary at all.
Let's read the
fine print:
...
Evan
Williams: Today, I added better permalinks
Yesterday, all my relative links worked. And all content
was served with the correct file type.
...
I've mocked up what I think an
Atom POST request for Tim Bray's
How
Fast is This Thing Growing? blog entry would look like using
the MIME
Multipart/Related Content-type. I chose this particular
entry as it has a title, a summary, full content, and two pictures
- one displayed inline, and one by reference.
I've posted two versions: a
7
bit safe version using
Quoted-Printable
and Base64
transfer encodings, and a 24% smaller
8
bit version using 8-bit and binary encodings. Clients
would be permitted to transmit any combinations of these.
Note: what you are seeing is the actual bits that would be
transmitted - HTTP + MIME + XML + Atom + XHTML + PNG, complete with
authentication.
Unless somebody identifies a showstopper, I'll submit a
proposal.
Mark
Nottingham: In a nutshell, XOP is an alternate
serialisation of XML that just happens to look like a MIME
multipart/related package, with an XML document as the root part.
That root part is very similar to the XML serialisation of the
document, except that base64-encoded data is replaced by a
reference to one of the MIME parts, which isn’t base64
encoded.
I guess I am supposed to take comfort in the assertions that the
serializations look like and are very similar to
XML and MIME respectively. Hopefully, I'll find more rigor in
the working
draft.
...
Mark
Nottingham: The real question here — and boy,
is this the elephant in the virtual room — is whether XML is
the best way to model data. This is something I’ve been
musing on lately, and I’ll get back to you soon with some
preliminary results.
iesg-secretary at ietf.org: A new IETF working group has
been proposed in the Applications Area. The IESG has not made
any determination as yet. The following description was submitted,
and is provided for informational purposes only. Please send your
comments to the IESG mailing list (iesg@ietf.org) by May 12th.
Tim Bray: We’re going to have an
Atom
Community Meeting June 2nd at Sun’s Silicon-Valley
offices.
Bill de hÓra: From the MC Escher school of
standardization
It seems that there is a feeding frenzy over this
tasty
morsel which was tossed in the shark infested waters of the
internet.
I'll not sure what I am about to say is either agreeing with or
disagreeing with
Sean McGrath on this subject, but here goes:
Reality is Corrosive.
Tim
Bray: The real goal isn’t to get everyone at Sun
blogging, it’s to become part of the industry
conversation.
Impressive.
Barbara Walters to
host a contest where the prize is a baby.
Uri Geller
threatens to file lawsuit based on
patent. [source:
BoingBoing]
Is this
feed valid? Both SharpReader and Bloglines handle it
flawlessly. In fact, there are
active
blogline subscribers.
The feedvalidator
chokes on it.
...
Jon
Udell: This time, though, I heard something I hadn't the
first time -- about standards. When the construction project drew
in artisans from the 13th-century French countryside, the first
order of business was to agree on standard weights and
measures.
It seems to me
engineers
who were brought up in the late 20th century could learn a lot
from the 13th century artisans.
...
Shannon
Campbell: I'm moving to North Carolina next
weekend Fayetteville, apparently (approximately an hour
away from me). Coolness. Perhaps some day we can do
lunch.
Now running
Hopefully, these notes will make it easier for me the next time
I upgrade.
Martin
J. Dürst: It is very important to always label
Web documents explicitly. HTTP 1.1 says that the default
charset is ISO-8859-1. But there are too many
unlabeled documents in other encodings, so browsers use the
reader's preferred encoding when there is no explicit charset
parameter.
Martin describes how to set the charset in a number of popular
servers and scripting langauges. If you see something
missing, let him know.
Jacques Distler: If I converted to UTF-8, presumably, this
problem would be solved. Unfortunately, the last time I tried it,
the interaction between UTF-8 and MT’s Comment Form was such
a horror
story that I’m loath to try it
again.
...
Gareth Simpson: Objectively speaking, if I downloaded
FeedThing
in its current state, I’d not bother with it again (I know
this by the pile of dead aggregators in my recycle bin).
...
Torsten Rendelmann: Hey, partitially good news: my local
RSS Bandit beat build 109 does not fail anymore on Sam's test feed,
if it is compiled with .NET 1.0
Whether that is good news or (or even news at all) is
debatable, in any case, this should not be an accidental
feature. If this is to be pursued, here a
few more things to think about.
Brad Wilson: THAT is the reason you buy a car that's
over-designed like a tank.
Have you considered putting the car
on EBay?
Robert Scoble: The blogosphere is a passion
chamber. This comes as the
echos of Scoble's piece on
persuasion
die down.
...
Hossein
Derakhshan: We should promote Unicode standard among
English speaking programmers. Many tools do not work well with
Unicode and this sucks.
Spread the meme Please
test
your clients, servers, comments, and feeds.
...
Tim O'Reilly:
The big question to me isn't privacy, or control over software
APIs, it's who will own the data.
Joe Gregorio: lacking any other indications, a browser will
submit the data from a form using the same character encoding that
the page is served in.
This mind blowing statement was embedded in an otherwise
interesting article on Atom and Wiki's. It has caused me to
rethink how I serve pages on my weblog, and has caused me to begin
the switch to utf-8. Here's why:
...
In the
next
installment of the
atom
guide, I tackle what may very well be the number one issue in
ill-formed feeds: character encoding in general, and smart quotes
in particular. In the process of producing this
documentation, I am struck by two things:
- How hard it is to find all the right pieces, and figure out how
they interrelate
- Despite the pervasiveness of the issue addressed here, I'm
surprised that I can't readily locate other similar
documents.
Perhaps the former is the reason for the latter.
DanBri pointed me
to a specification named
GRDDL. It
looks like exactly what I was looking for
last
August. Any XML file is one namespace declaration, one
attribute definition, and one XSLT file away from RDF.
Oddly, it defines a completely different mechanism for
XHTML. I'm not sure what I think about that.
Definately something to watch, and probably something to include
in a best practices guide to Atom.
It seems to me that there is a real need for a one stop shop for
the information necessary to understand the 'how' behind
syndicating, archiving and editing episodic web sites. Specs
are good, but they only tend to cover what is not covered by other
specifications. Blogs and mailing lists often provide a much
needed missing context for the information, but the discussions
found there are often inconclusive and it is virtually impossible
to determine if the decisions made have been superseded.
Here's a first installment.
Joi Ito: traditionally, the (content) industry has been
wrong about how consumers use these devices.
I have mild myopia and tinnitus. Neither
are much of an issue in close range, but each imply data loss
and/or require extra concentration for picking up signals at a
distance. Normally, I compensate for this by choosing a seat
up near the front and/or the middle of any grouping whenever
possible.
...
Janne Jalkanen: It's a way of self-expression and
relaxation, not a method for nursing your inner diva ... It's just
a song. It's just text. Don't worry about it too
much.
I've gotten away for nearly twenty-three years
without the need for business cards.
...
People who want to produce a syndication feed
in a consistently correct manner will find that they will need to
master not only the syndication format, but also HTML, and
XML. It is all too easy to underestimate the total learning
curve involved. I continue to be surprised at the subtle
interactions that continue to trip up even the most knowledgeable
and careful.
...
Shelly
Farnham: I came away from the symposium with the sense that
the most exciting research in the space will occur with a) the
integration of web services and mobile technology -- taking your
network with you b) always on, multi-level communication,
blogging/chatting/IMing/SMS/email/web surfing/ all in one moment,
and c) implicit social "computing"; processing social metadata
across people through implicit, inferred behavioral patterns.
The biggest problem to be solved in a social networking,
profile-centric age is the control of multiple personas/identities
across private, public, and social spaces.
It's been fun participating vicariously in the
recent
Microsoft
Social Software Symposium via weblogs, IM, and IRC.
...
It seems that both Blogdex
and KeepMedia
seem to think that they each have exclusive rights to the domain of
small positive integers. I wonder what part of
Globally
Unique Identifier people have difficulty
understanding? Seems clear enough to me.
...
The last few days I've been playing Sysadmin for one of the new IBM xSeries
345's that will be used as a dedicated Gump Server. And having a blast.
...
David Weinberger: I love meeting new people — not a
statement I would have made before the Net — but I like
meeting them because we first engage in discussion about some
topic. An email to me saying, "I disagree with your blog entry
about X or Y, and let me tell you why" is much more likely to lead
to a friendship than one that says, "Hey, I see we're both
interested in video games and Peeps art!" That's just the way I
am.
Ditto.
Joseph Walton:
I’ve put de-xhtml up as a hack. It’s a simple
transformation from XHTML to HTML, essentially the identity
transformation with the right xsl:output attributes. It’s not
all that complicated, but I couldn’t find it anywhere
else. Like all technology, it’s also a statement, in
this case about the web’s implied evolution from tag soup to
XHTML 2.0.
Joe Gregorio: I actually recognized the first speaker on
this
NPR
Radio Postcard by his voice and not his blog. See how many of
the voices you can identify.
I've installed and configured a
test version
of the
Atom
wiki using
MoinMoin 1.2.1. The intent is to cut over so that
Acess Control can be used to
require
valid logins on selected pages in an attempt to reduce
WikiSpam.
...
Four
IBM
xSeries 345 machines have been
delivered to the ASF
in response to
this
request.
Jay Allen: In fact, these days, there are tools and plugins
that make this a bit easier like
wiki formatting,
Textile and, most
recently,
Markdown.
So what’s not to like? Why don’t I personally use one?
Because of lock-in.
Tom
Chi and Kevin Cheng: Ridiculously Easy Monetization of a
Web Savvy Audience LOL! Note the panelist named
Sam Emerald. Clearly this had nothing to do with
this panel.
Right on target. I do believe that
the panel
format works best if there is some controversy..
WikiSpam seems to
be on the rise. Today, a link to a porn site was added.
It didn't last long, but perhaps we should begin planning for the
inevitable.
I'm not a big fan of blacklists, nor do I think this would be
particularly effective in this case. The latest was by
somebody simply surfing in on a Google query for
wiki.
Things I am considering:
- Locking down the FrontPage, and possibly the Roadmap.
These seem to be the primary point of entry and are rarely updated
except to leave and revert spam.
- Creating a wiki-wide password, which I will freely share on the
atom-syntax mailing list. The goal here is to lock out the
casual opportunists, not the people who desire to contribute.
- Require registration and login. May have the side effect
of reducing contributions, but in fact doesn't actually exclude
anyone who desires to contribute.
Suggestions welcome.
I've asked Tim Bray to co-chair
the IETF working group, and optimistically updated the
draft charter
on the wiki.
Tim Bray: As of today, I work for Sun.
Excellent!
This panel did not result in any bloodshed. Which is a
bit unfortunately, really, as I believe that the panel format works
best if there is some controversy. Unfortunately, each of the
participants were too damn agreeable.
...
So, I was sitting at a table and the fellow
sitting next to me looks over and says "hi Sam! I've been following
your weblog for six months or so. I'm Dave Shea".
...
This
working document distills Information axioms for emerging
policy networks. We culled these information axioms from a variety
of analysts whose work examines primarily - but not wholly -
emerging commercial information networks on the Internet. These
"axioms" do not necessarily apply to non-profits, or true
communities, but rather, are to serve as a starting point in
understanding the role of information and information technologies
in the policy process.
...
Joe
Gregorio: I am now the number one result for the google
search
naked operating table valium. The only reason I know this
is because I found it in my referer logs. Which means someone out
there typed that into google and ended up at my site. I sure hope
they found what they were looking for.
Paul
Bausch: #sxsw on
IRC (link opens the channel in IRC-aware browsers.)
There also appears to be
two
blogs. A search for
wiki's turned up one at
JoiIto's
site.
Sean McGrath: I normally find myself in agreement with
Bruce but not on this one. The way I see web services, its almost
like your saying the machine doesn't matter. What matters is the
abstraction of the machines behaviour - a "service".
My guess is that Bruce was reacting to a description of a single
endpoint which implemented a bazillion services, and made the
observation that the endpoint is the noun. The way to
"objectify" such remote procedure calls would be to move the object
reference outside of the request.
See also:
REST + SOAP
Ted
Leung: If I'm looking for thought leadership from the community, in
the Java community, I'm looking towards the non Sun bloggers -- these
are the folks doing AOP, Groovy, SGen, Prevalence, WebWork, etc.
This shows the rich ecosystem that has grown up around Java. If I
look at the .NET community, I pretty much look for the MS
bloggers.
Let's not confuse cause and effect here. There used to be
plenty of .Net bloggers who didn't work for Microsoft. I
still haven't forgiven Microsoft for what they did to
Peter Drayton.
... something
borrowed, something
blue.
What started me down this path was posts by
Tom Coates and
Phil Ringnalda. Together, they started me thinking about
rethinking my original story vs. post
dichotomy, and toward what is emerging as the blog standard of
post vs.
remaindered
links dichotomy.
I've also updated a number of my feeds - notably, I've updated
the rss
1.0 and
rss 2.0
feeds to conform to description being an optional synopsis.
My RSS 2.0 feed has replaced link with
guid - I think all aggregators that have RSS 2.0 support can
handle this, but if there are any that have lagged behind, I still
have plenty of other
feed formats to choose from. Finally, I've removed a
number of usages of admin and
dublin core
namespaces from the rss 2.0 feed (I still use dc:creator in my
comment
feed to avoid revealing email addresses).
While the header is shamelessly borrowed from Bob Congdon, I
plan on evolving it.
I've tested all this under a number of browsers and aggregators,
and I don't believe I have broken anything, but if I have, let me
know.
The next meeting of the IETF is scheduled for
August 1-6, 2004 in San Diego, CA, USA. Excerpts from
RFC2418.
...
My weblog software's design is based on
blosxom's, with entries stored in the familiar title followed by
body format. On my longer entries, such as this one, the
first element in the body is a div tag with a class of excerpt,
something that I parse out with a set of regular expressions.
This approach can be implemented in blosxom as a plugin
...
[link]
Huy
Zing: My Orkut.com death was a slow painful one that lasted
1.5 hours starting at 20:44 on Monday, February 23, 2004. [via
Danah Boyd]
Jacques Distler: The anonymous nature of the internet makes
the problem of “identity” a hard one. In physics, when
we encounter an intractably-hard problem, our most frequent dodge
is to redefine the problem to one which admits a solution, and hope
that the result is a “good-enough” stand-in for the
original problem. In that spirit, I (re)defined the problem as
reliably associating comments posted with the websites of the
commenters.
Just a suggestion: a lesser, but very much related and much more
tractable, problem is trackbacks. The reason why it is more
tractable is that the trackbacks are issued by software which could
reasonably be expected to have direct access to your weblog's
private keys. This could make signing totally automatic -
simply check a box once, and your template could be updated and all
future trackbacks would be automatically signed.
The signatures could be passed as a new CGI parameter or as a
HTTP header. Neither would likely affect any existing
software that wasn't expecting this information.
Once trackback signing is widely enough adopted, people may feel
comfortable turning off the ability to accept unsigned
trackbacks. And then much of the infrastructure will be in
place to tackle the harder, and more important problem, of comment
signing.
The key nut to crack there is to make it easy and painless to
sign a comment.
Sharing my experiences with installing a
network printer using CUPS and Samba.
...
There are a few more options in large screen
televisions than there used to be. In addition to CRTs and
projection TVs, LCDs and plasma have come into their own.
There are also several new options like
DLP, which
this
thinly disguised advertisement for Samsung explores. It
turns out that
Gateway also has an offering in this area, as does
RCA.
I found the
techology behind this fascinating.
A color wheel, a light bulb, and a million tiny mirrors.
Rod
Smith: Here is the offer: IBM would like to work with Sun
on an independent project to open source Java.
Rebecca Blood invited me to join
this SXSW Panel. That makes
two.
Joe
Hildebrand posted some thoughts about how Atom could integrate
with XMPP (and therefore Jabber).
...
I've posted a
draft
IETF working group charter for Atom on the wiki. I've
presumptuously placed my name as (one of the) chairs of this group,
but there really shouldn't be any surprises in this draft.
In March, I expect the names of the IETF director(s) and
advisors to be filled in, each bullet in the description to be
replaced by a paragraph, and dates to be determine in the goals and
milestones section.
After perusing the IETF's
Working Group
Guidelines and Procedures, I went perusing the web for charters
to 'crib' from. I came across
SIMPLE
and
XMPP.
These are not just interesting from a potential future IETF
bretheren point of view, but also from a basic syndication and API
point of view. In particular, such protocols can avoid the
scalability problems associated with a polling based architecture
and can potentially navigate through gateways, firewalls and
routers.
Authentication is the one area where I expect things to be
different, but the uniform layout of the feed and entries are
something that I don't expect to vary based on the transfer
mechanism.
Yesterday, the
Apache Software
Foundation's
Board of
Directors appointed Geir Magnusson Jr. as the new chair of the
Jakarta
Project
Management Committee. I will remain on the PMC as well as
the board.
I was appointed as the chair
just under three years ago after having served as the release
manager for both Ant and
Tomcat.
For the
past year, I have been actively seeking a replacement.
The reason is simple: while at first, I had an itch that needed
scratching and I sought to make a number of good things happen,
over time those itches were scratched and my role evolved into one
of stopping bad things from happening (project members misbehaving,
addressing criticisms from within the foundation, etc.).
Focusing exclusively on defense is not a sustainable model: there
also need to be a focus on building.
In
addition to Geir and my world views being very much aligned, Geir
is also the ASF's representative to the JSPA's SE/EE
Executive Committee.
I had heard good things about
BlogLines, so I thought I
would give it a spin. I didn't plan on switching, but I did:
that's how good it is.
...
Adriaan
Tijsseling: The uniqueness of this situation is that one
guy in SF is without car keys, and it takes IRC and IM via Japan to
make the connections that will lead Jonas to his treasure.
Unreal.
11 bugs, 4 patches, 1 feature, and 12 messages to the mailing
list. All resolved. Noteworthy: the validator will now
support gzip encoding; unknown and misspelled attributes will now be
flagged; timezone, character encoding, and email address checking has
been tightened up; and the distinction between relative and invalid
URLs has been made clearer.
Special thanks go out to
Joseph Walton who submitted
three quality patches.
Last week at the ETCON, James Duncan Davidson
posted this picture which captures so many different themes to
me.
...
Dare Obasanjo: Mark Pilgrim has a post entitled
Determining the character encoding of a feed where he does good
job of sumarizing what the various specs say about determining the
character encoding of an XML document retrieved on the World Wide
Web via HTTP. The only problem with his post is that although it is
a fairly accurate description of what the specs say it definitely
does not reflect reality.
OK, so given this, what should a
feedvalidator
do? Should it follow the specifications? Should it
follow Dare's recommendations? Should it issue a warning if
the specifications and Dare's recommendations differ for a given
feed?
Christian Lindholm: Pertti Korhonen, Nokia’s new CTO
introduced PhotoBlog for Series 60 in his keynote at ETech in San
Diego. This application proof-of-concept is supporting the Atom API
enabling users to post to leading blog platforms. The application
was developed by Futurice, who
is developing a Photblog platform.
This made my day.
Slides
from today's
presentation
[source]
Davd Sifry:
Technorati Hack - Most popular products
people are talking about today.
This uses the Technorati API combined with the Amazon API to get
aggregate information on the products people are linking to on Amazon,
in real-time, and then showing a combined view of the product picture
along with the context from the most authoritative blogger who has
posted about the product in the last 24 hours.
If you have found me to have been even less
responsive than usual to email in the past few days, it is because I
have had a mail malfunction.
...
Andrew Grumet: This patch catches 404 Not Found errors and
inserts them into the standard error handling flow, which until now
was just dealing with parser-generated errors.
This patch has been applied on
feeds.archive.org.
If all goes as planned, this will automatically propagate to
atomenabled.org
and feedvalidator.org
in a matter of hours. Sourceforge propates all changes to the anonymous
cvs servers
every 5 hours.
As with many journeys, most of the interesting
things happen in the tangents and detours taken.
...
Feed validators seem to be popping up
everywhere...
...
One of the nice side effects of the efforts
towards fortifying my weblog against comment spam and floods, is
that I've invested some time into logging of various unusual server
conditions. Initially, this was for forensics, but it has
proven much more useful than that.
...
Continuing adventures with Time Warner
Cable...
...
Welcome to Raleigh, North Carolina, where the
official snow removal strategy is "pray for sunshine".
...
What is Planet
Apache?
What
is Technorati?
These questions fascinate me.
Mailing
list vs comments as a venue for dialog? To me, that's
like comparing board meetings vs pubs for as venues for making
business decisions.
I am told that
using
information at the IP layer to affect behaviour two layers up isn't
going to work? And yet I run firewall programs filter
outgoing connections based on the path of the main program which
issued the request. Despite coming up with "perl.exe" for a
fair number of commands, it does seem to catch a lot of
spyware.
Classifications are so impossible, yet so darn useful.
Project info
here.
Over the next few days I will be setting up an archived mailing
list, bug tracker, importing the source code and
documentation...
If they don't come back, it is not possible to
have a two way conversation, is it?
...
Brent
Simmons: What I could do—what I’d like to
do—is include Mark’s and Sam Ruby’s validator in
NetNewsWire.
+1. I'm in.
This will require some work, none of it hard. Prereqs are
Python 2.x and
pyxml. There
currently are three interfaces: a CGI/web interface, a command
line, and a web interface.
- The CGI/web interface contains a number of absolute paths and
direct references to the host. However, this is probably the
best place to start.
- The command line interface is designed primarily for
development use. However, something like this that returns
back a simple return code might be useful for your
optional
indicator.
- The web service interface accepts a simple HTTP POST,
optionally with SOAP envelope and body elements. This could
be evolved into something that does exactly the same as the above,
but without requiring any installation on the client. Of
course, this would require that the user be online at the time, and
would have quite different performance characteristics.
Overall, probably not the path to pursue in this case.
In any case, none of this work is difficult, and I would be glad
to do it.
I've gone ahead and ordered a
PVR
350 from newegg.
This should be fun.
I picked this card primarily because of it's support by products
such as MythTV and
VideoLan.
How would you complete this sentence:
You might be a spammer if
...
Stefano
Mazzocchi: I am very happy to announce that I have accepted
a two-years research position at the
MIT Libraries. This means
that I will be moving to Boston in a few weeks. I will be involved
with the SIMILE
project, the goal is to show that the semantic web can
work.
I'm reminded of Niobi's line from Matrix Revolutions: "I
don’t believe in the one. I believe in him". SIMILE is
now officially a project to watch.
I've thought about Brent's proposed
compromise, and to borrow a phrase that is a favorite of Tim Bray,
I think that there is a way that 80% of the value can be obtained
with 20% of the effort. Is there really a market requirement
to be selectively pedantic on a feed by feed basis?
...
Tristan
Louis: Robert Scoble mentions on his blog that he had a
meeting with the IE team and that they are solicitating feedback
from the blog community about what to include in the next update of
the browser. While particular features are nice, I'd like to
suggest something much more radical...
Based on the lively discussions of the past few days, it
certainly appears that
requiring a
preview does not impede the flow of discussion.
Cool.
Spam also is way down, despite my having removed and relaxed a
number of other defenses. Notably, my
spam
throttle has not been activated for over two weeks.
Apparently some spammers do read weblogs and warnings
deter these folks.
My initial
implementation of requiring a preview was simply to omit the
submit button from the page - the underlying code did not
change. Amusingly, about 40% of the spam I did receive did
not do a preview first, indicating that they had bypassed the html
pages. This is easy enough to fix - a
nonce is
now provided on the preview form, and verified on the submit.
As currently implemented, nonces can only be used once, and
expire after 30 minutes... so if more than 30 minutes elapses
between preview and submit, then the submit will effectively be
interpreted as a second preview, resetting the clock.
What does your aggregator think of
these
feeds? While
UserLand's Validator and the
FeedValidator both declare them to be invalid, the W3C
validator indicates that these feeds are
valid Disney RSS 0.93.
Does your parser accept
this
namespace? Does it handle the date format?
Can I ever be sure?
...
What does your
aggregator do with
this?
Is it
valid?
Update: The above was updated to point to a snapshot of this
this feed as
it existed at the time this blog entry was originally posted.
P.S.
Hint.
Tim Bray: When you’re explaining something to
somebody and they don’t get it, that’s not their
problem, it’s your problem; When someone’s explaining
something to you and you’re not getting it, it’s not
your problem, it’s their problem
Instant classic. Added to my favorites.
Marvin
Robert
Scoble: those of us who fly coach often sure would love a
nice "video iPod." I agree. However, the road
there is likely to be rocky.
Last month, I bought a
Casio EX Z4
camera. I'm quite pleased with the form factor and the
quality not only of the pictures, but of the monitor screen.
In fact, I remarked to my wife that this would be an ideal form
factor for a
Location
Free TV, and she readily agreed.
So I did a bit of research, and
found
that EX-Z4U marketed in North America does not include the
Movie Mode. Thanks, Casio.
Now, let's take a look at the
video formats supported by proposed
Portable Media Center. Windows Media Video, and an
assorted set of still image and audio formats. No mention of
Real. No Quicktime. And most importantly, no
MPEG. While I intend to keep an eye on this, for the moment,
I'll pass.
For the short term, I'm looking into the
WinTV-PVR-350,
and possibly MythTV.
Since I tend to travel with my laptop anyway, for the moment, that
will be my target device.
What does your
aggregator
do with
this?
Is it
valid?
Note: in the proper application of
scientific method, observation precedes the formulation of a
hypothesis. In that spirit, I’d like to ask that people
indulge me for a moment and refrain from rationalizations,
justifications, and explanations, and focus for the moment on
simply gathering data.
John H.
Robinson, IV: I will show you a way that you can have apt
mix-and-match between Stable, Testing, and Unstable sources. This
will allow you to run a mostly-Stable system, but also track the
latest and greatest of those packages that you are most keenly
interested in.
It is much easier to install
XML::Atom on a Debian system if you have first issued the
following command:
apt-get -t testing install libxml-libxml-perl libdatetime-perl
libdigest-sha1-perl libwww-perl libxml-libxslt-perl
Jim
Geier: As a design rule, access points within range of each
other should be set to channel frequencies with minimal overlap.
Otherwise, you'll find that roaming doesn't work well, and
performance will degrade because of interference between access
points.
OK, an initial implementation of my
preview
required functionality is complete. Other than requiring
a preview, most of you should not see any different behavior.
I've also relaxed my spam
throttle
to allow three comments - this allows the first to go through and
two warnings before someone is temporarily shut down.
Now I plan to watch and see what action is warranted next.
This is a
trial balloon. What I am trying to explore is what would
happen if I were to convert the act of posting a comment into
request/response interaction. I would very much like to do
this in a way that does not significantly inhibit the
sponteneity that an comment system which does not require prior
registration allows.
...
Don Box: To date, the few times I've wanted comments, I've
pointed people over to Sam's place and let the peanut gallery
operate on Sam's bandwidth dime. I think this time around I'll do
it mainly because I want to experiment with some
anti-troll/anti-spam ideas.
Comment spam has gone from a curiosity to an irritant to an
amusement of mine.
...
