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Current WordJim Mathies's Web Log 10/4/2005 CurrentWord is MovingI've spent almost a year here on Spaces and have enjoyed it very much. This is by far the best everyday user oriented blogging software that exists. Personally though I'm interested in maintaining some control over my content, and yes, I'd would occasionally like to use the word 's**t' in a published title. :) So I've moved my bog on over to my main web site on mathies.com.
My new blog is hosted here: http://www.mathies.com/weblog/
and my new RSS 2.0 feed is here: http://www.mathies.com/weblog/?feed=rss2
So far I've setup the basics using WordPress. I even managed to get a nice template I found on the net installed too. (PHP, ack.. cough.. *cough*.)
Kudos to the folks at MSN, Spaces is excellent. Thanks so much for having me.
Jim
Microformats UpdateRyan King point out to me that the hReview microformat does support the min / max rating information I was complaining about. I'm going to have to dig into these microformats a bit more before I pass judgment. What I did realize in doing some additional reading on microformats is that I've un-wittingly stepped into the middle of a battle between the XHTML folks, and the XML folks. It seems the microformats crowd feels HTML is perfectly suitable for representing structured information, rendering formats like plain XML and RSS pointless. On the flip side, we have quite a large crew of folks who feel structured data via XML is the way to go. At this point I have to say, I think I'm leaning toward the latter group. I'd much prefer to parse XML over wild wild western world of HTML any day of the week. And I find it hard to believe that RSS for a web site could easily be implemented using the raw (X)HTML of the page as the syndication source.
Phillip Haack makes some interesting comments back in July on the subject. Dare jumps in as well.
But I'm not passing judgment yet. I've stumbled into a very interesting discussion and want to dig a little deeper.
UPDATE
Some clarification from Ryan via email: "I ask this because in reading more about it, it feels like the microformats camp is saying that there's no need for RSS XML, you just structure the data in the HTML of your site, and, for example, a client aggregator would then go to the page for the information it's looking for." What we're saying is that RSS is an envelop format- useful for delivering data, but you should put the data *in* the envelope, not on the outside of it. The point is to have one, cananonical representation of your data, which you can publish in xhtml, rss (in the payload), or arbitrary xml. 10/3/2005 Cable that CranksI'm not sure what Cox Communications has done to their network down here recently, but lately I've been downloading fat binaries from Microsoft at about 450 KBytes/sec, or about 3.6MBits/sec. Thats equal to about two and a half T1 lines. Upload speed isn't as crisp, but still respectable at about 500MBits/sec. All for the low low price of about $35.00 a month. In comparison, my high speed DSL line in San Francisco back in 2001 supplied 1.1MBits/sec. down, and 768MBits/sec. up, for about $350.00 per month. I also remember when I used to run an ISP with a friend of mine in Tallahassee which had a 56KBit/sec line from the local phone company. I think that line used to run about $650.00 per month back in 1995. My how times have changed. 10/1/2005 Microformats and Structured BloggingI'm not sure I like these new microformats. The concept, from their site, goes as such:
"Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards."
The problem I see with some of their current formats is that the data really isn't structured in way that machines can take advantage of the information at all. For example, in the hReview (movie or book reviews) format, some key values aren't clearly defined -
<div class="hreview">
<span><span class="rating">5</span> out of 5 stars</span> <h4 class="summary"><span class="item fn">Crepes on Cole</span> is awesome</h4> <span>Reviewer: <span class="reviewer fn">Tantek</span> - <abbr class="dtreviewed" title="20050418T2300-0700">April 18, 2005</abbr></span> <blockquote class="description"> Crepes on Cole is one of the best little creperies in San Francisco. Excellent food and service. Plenty of tables in a variety of sizes for parties large and small. </blockquote>
<p>Visit date: <span>April 2005</span></p> <p>Food eaten: <span>Florentine crepe</span></p> </div> The scale is a 1-5 scale, but there's no way for a machine to know this, so the scale can't be normalized with other reviews. The final rating is tagged, class="rating" but the scale isn't. 5 out of 5 stars. What if another hReview is published, but the author chooses to use a scale of 1 to 10. Expecting a machine to parse the 5 from "out of 5 stars" isn't acceptable. It seems most of the microformats suffer from this problem in some way. Human readable, sure, but the power of structured data in blogging is in the machines ability to index and compare similar data across large data sets.
I prefer the much clearer approach taken by the guys at PubSub, who are working on a new set of xml schemas for this type of information. The have a web site up at structuredblogging.org. Here's the schema for their review format. Note the base and rating of the review, along with a great deal of other important information must be provided. IMO a smarter approach. Here's an example XML record of a review that can be embedded in HTML or an RSS feed:
<!-- the following is structured blog data for machine readers. --><subnode alternate-for-id="sbentry_1" xmlns:data-view="http://www.w3.org/2003/g/data-view#" data-view:interpreter=http://structuredblogging.org/subnode-to-rdf-interpreter.xsl xmlns=http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns#subnode> <xml-structured-blog-entry xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns"> <generator id="wpsb-1" type="x-wpsb-simple-review" version="1"/> <simple-review version="1" xmlns="http://www.structuredblogging.org/xmlns#simple-review"> <review-title>Great Jam Band</review-title> <review-type>CD</review-type> <rating number="4" base="5" value="0.8">4 out of 5</rating> <product-name>Doin’ Something</product-name> <product-link>http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000059QYA?v=glance</product-link> <product-image-link>http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B000059QYA.01._SCMZZZZZZZ_.jpg</product-image-link> <description type="text/html" escaped="true"> Soulive is one of the great jam bands. They’re almost impossible to capture well on CD, but this disc comes the closest. I don’t really know what to call it: acid jazz, or just jazz, or trip-jazz, or something. It’s basically just a really good flow. And there’s no singing (except for some guest vocals on a couple of tracks). Not necessarily good or bad, just different. I probably would have given this disc 5 / 5, but part of the reason for the post is showing off the “stars”, and I wanted to demonstrate an empty one too. </description> </simple-review> </xml-structured-blog-entry> </subnode> 9/30/2005 ShiningMy boss Gary points me over to this hilarious spoof of a trailer for the movie The Shining. Awesome! Perfect friday afternoon fun. Cool Music VideoThe video shows a screen on an old Apple][ doing some cool text stuff. It was programmed in Applesoft II on a 1979 Apple ][+ with 48K of RAM. They even list the code. The song isn't bad either.
There's also some cool stuff here. I haven't quite figured out what it's all about though. 9/29/2005 Info Panels using OPMLA while back I worked for a startup. It was a very cool startup, but now, it's gone - swallowed up by the big political machine. So sad for me, not for the owners. :) After this, one of the owners created another startup. It's purpose, to take content from company A, and put it, in little HTML rendered panels, on B, C, & D's company site. He labeled it Pigs in a blanket. He spent millions, and a year plus developing a Java based server side system to support it. The point of course was, to take a cut, be the middle man. From what I've heard, it never really worked right.
Dave Winer designed the same thing in a couple weekends using OPML. The only difference, he's not taking a cut. And already people are using it. Neat. RSS Killed the Search Star
I wonder if Dave Winer knew what he was doing? In recent discussions with a good friend of mine I've come to realize that RSS is the Ultimate Pigeon. Maybe that's why, while Microsoft pours support for RSS into every application and OS, Google is trying it's best to kill it. Killing something is an act of desperation.
Microsoft makes it's money off software, Google makes it's money off finding information. RSS channels information directly to the user, without effort, without search, without browsing to a portal - the ultimate customizable informational remote.
Interesting stuff. The Desktop RSS Reader LandscapeThe RSS desktop newsreader landscape in a nutshell - all in all, very boring. Very little innovation. Everything looks the same. The Outlook user interface seems to be pervasive. I'm not a 100% subscriber of the river of news concept. I think there's a lot of room here for improvement. Blogs are following the same path the web took, evolution is inevitable. What were seeing here is a large number of Mosaics. I wonder who's in a garage someplace working on a Netscape? I know I'm kicking some ideas around. Is anybody else?
I pulled the list from the sites listed here.
http://www.rssreader.com/images/rssreaderscreenshot.gif http://www.feedreader.com/images/fr27.jpg http://www.sharpreader.net/srFiltered.png http://www.newzcrawler.com/images/scrshots/main.gif http://www.flickr.com/photos/rssbandit/7971118/in/set-181772/ http://www.usablelabs.com/img/BlogExpress/screenshots/Main-Window.gif http://www.feeddemon.com/feeddemon/screenshots/screen.asp?img=1 http://www.wildgrape.net/images/interface.png http://bitworking.org/images/AggieScreenShot.jpg http://www.awasu.com/tour/MainWindow.jpeg http://www.proggle.com/novobot/screenshots/novobot3.jpg http://www.blueelephantsoftware.com/MainWindow.gif http://activerefresh.com/screenshots/main.gif http://www.yole.ru/projects/syndirella/Syndirella-DitM.png http://www.effbot.org/images/effbot-exe-0-9.png http://www.lektora.com/imgs/lektora_newspaper.png http://stevenwood.org/images/screenshot1.jpg http://www.onfolio.com/images/sshots/02.png http://www.blogbot.com/lite/gfx/screen2.gif http://www.jetbrains.com/omea/benefits/read_feeds_big.gif http://www.perfectxml.com/RSSConnect/screens/ReadFeed.gif http://www.jelovic.com/rssaggregator/content.png http://www.deskshare.com/images/awr-interface.gif http://www.seeita.com/RSSA/ScreenShots/SS10.jpg http://www.rsspoint.net/screens/big/s1.gif http://www.charlwood.com/tristana/reader/reader_2005.png http://www.ziecom.com/Screenshots/FolderNav.png http://www.newsinterceptor.com/Resources/Upload/Images/NI3_front_en.gif http://www.curiostudio.com/style1.jpg http://www.pluck.com/images/screens/ie-digestview-sm.png http://www.naissoft.com/main_normal.jpg http://www.theextremeedge.com/enewscrawler/images/mainshot_02.gif http://www.rsscaptor.com/images/rss-captor-screenshot.gif http://www.korzh.com/newspiper/images/np_sshot2.gif http://newzspider.com/images/3pane.png http://www.h3k.biz/images/ffscreen1.png http://www.accusoftware.co.uk/images/main-nc.jpg http://www.g2007.com/hotzoup/screenshot.gif 9/26/2005 The Superdome - Fact or Fiction?From the Times-Picayune - Rumors of Death Greatly Exaggerated. Still, this was a huge catastrophe, and even larger failure on the part of our emergency response services. But one has to wonder just how much of the real-time news coming out of New Orleans in those first few days was hype and how much was real. News cameras can capture a very thin slice of what's really going on. PalmOS - R.I.P.Here's the Video of the Press Announcement. This probably has something to do with Microsoft's continued growth in the mobile market -
CNet Nov., 2004: "Shipments of handhelds that use Microsoft's Windows CE operating system rose by about 33 percent to about 1.4 million in the third quarter, compared with the same period last year. Meanwhile, shipments of handhelds that use the Palm operating system shrank by 26 percent to 851,000. Research In Motion showed huge growth, with shipments jumping more than 356 percent to 565,000 to round out the top three, the research company said."
Technically, I suppose PalmOS (PalmSource) isn't totally dead, just replaced for the most part since it was purchased by a Japanese firm a while back. I'd be willing to bet Palm will phase it out over time assuming the Microsoft relationship works. Russell on MacsRussell over at Yahoo! says "Anyone who says that Macs are more stable than Windows are smoking dope." The in thing to do today...Today's in thing to do seems to be to fill in this silly political quiz and post the result. I'm sure all my Democratic and Republican friends will be surprised by the results. It's important to keep them guessing.
   9/24/2005 This DecemberFrodo? who the hell is Frodo? Harry Potter... don't know him.
The Chronicles of Narnia - The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe
Yeah! Walt Disney and C.S. Lewis rock!
Hey Walt, my suggestion for your next would be Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh. "A Big Let Down" - CNNWhat do you know.. category fives don't roll into the Gulf Coast every other weekend. Who would have thought? Certainly not CNN, MSNBC, and FOX. This morning, Wolf Blitzer seemed almost frantic in his search for some video, any video, of some destruction. But there isn't much. Rita turned out to be your average category three hurricane - within 30 miles of the eye a little destruction, but outside of that, some rain, some wind, and one bus filled with old people burning on a highway. (Unfortunatley they had to get out, the news media's hype was just too much for them.) New Orleans is under water again, but hey, been there, done that. The oil platforms are ok, the infrastructure intact, and that big Ammonia plant still stands. Nothing to see here, move along. 9/22/2005 "Perfect in every way" - CNNCategory 5 Hurricane Rita Update I've fished off the sea wall in Galveston, I've gorged on lobster caught in traps a few feet off the coast while vacationing there as a kid. I wish the folks there the best of luck. The Texas coast was the place I prodded my folks into every spring break and every summer vacation. We used to pack up the camper my dad would lower over his Ford truck. I'll always remember the process he went through... those four table leg winches that clicked and lowered the weight down on the action of that funny wrench he worked.. inching our camper down onto the bed of his truck.... Bolts in place, time to go. I would climb up into the sleepover, headed down Powers Avenue away from our ranch in Colorado with my sister, we had miles ahead of us. But we didn't care. We were headed for the Texas coast. And that's all that really mattered. Again, best of luck to the folks down there on the coast. We're with them. 9/21/2005 InvasionWednesday, on ABC.. After a major hurricane, a son finds his hot, blonde, blue eyed white chick of a mom in a swamp, naked, after she's been raped by little floating gold sperm spawned from the eye of the storm.. and it's all, the U.S. Military's fault. RIGHT AFTER Lost, on ABC Primetime! Don't miss it. Security and OSXThe playing field continues to level... this has been predicted for a long time. Increased popularity - increases the size of the target on your back. Firefox seems to be taking the brunt of the interest, but OSX has also started to grab some of the real estate in the hacker tool chest. I have to admit too, as a long time, heavily embattled Windows user, I'm sitting back and enjoying every last delectable drop of this. "Mac users may be operating under a false sense of security as a noteworthy number of vulnerabilities and attacks were detected against Apple Mac’s operating system, OS X. ... While the number of vendor-confirmed vulnerabilities in OS X has remained relatively constant during the last two reporting periods [12 months], Symantec predicts this could change in the future. Symantec’s analysis on a rootkit (OSX/Weapox) reveals it is designed to take advantage of OS X. This particular trojan demonstrates that as OS X increases in popularity, so too will the scrutiny it receives from potential attackers." Symantec chronicled 1,862 new vulnerabilities during 1H2005 - an average of 10 new flaws a day – 73 per cent of which it categorizes as easily exploitable. The time between the disclosure of a vulnerability and the release of an associated exploit was just six days. Half (59 per cent) of vulnerabilities were associated with web application technologies. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/09/19/symantec_threat_report/9/20/2005 Rita and the News MediaCNN, and Fox, and MSNBC are practically beside themselves with anticipation of the "massive death and destruction" that will be "raining down on Texas or possibly New Orleans" as Rita makes landfall. Blanco has batted away the responsibility for Rita hitting Louisiana by requesting that President Bush declare her state a disaster area in advance, and Galveston city officials have a mile of buses lined up ready to ship those without transportation away from the coast. Rita is a tame category one, but CNN has already predicted it will make land fall as a storm that is even stronger than Katrina. Whew, god damn, after five minutes of this stuff I think I need a stiff drink. 9/19/2005 IE 7Dean does a great job of explaining why three of the most common knee jerk requests by developers regarding IE security might not be such a good idea: "take it out of the operating system (or integrate it less), get rid of ActiveX, and rewrite IE to be secure." I'd also add these comments: re - take IE out of the operating system: For the most part IE is separated from the operating system. The rendering engine is encased in MSHTML.dll, with another control on top of it that has additional functionality, known as the 'web browser control.' Both are COM controls that can be embedded. A large number of applications leverage these controls, I know I've written quite a few myself. This embedded approach to a fully operational browser was and still is a brilliant design, originally implemented back in IE 4.0. A perfect example of how Microsoft engineers took a basic concept, the stand-alone browser application, and extended it into a framework their development community could leverage. The ability to place a full blown, tried and tested, HTML rendering engine in a 3rd party application. Also, of note, Firefox is similarly embeddable, although their overall design for doing so is much more cumbersome, and poorly documented. Also, Apple's Safari uses an embeddable rendering engine too. re - get rid of ActiveX: Yes, lets get rid of active-x, or more generally, get rid of active or executable content in the browser experience. Lets get rid of Flash, lets get rid of inline video, QuickTime, inline PDF viewing, Doc viewing, SGML, inline audio, 3D, and everything else that actually does something more interesting than display text and animated gifs. While were at it, lets get rid of AJAX, because it also makes use of active content too. Brilliant. not. Now I'll agree that Active-X control have been too easy to install through the browser, and as Dean mentions, this will change in IE 7.0. But removing active content from the browsing experience would be a very very bad idea. Also, of note, Firefox has a similar technology to Active-X, known as extensions which allow arbitrary code to execute within and along side the browser. Safari, Netscape, and Firefox also allow embedded active content through the antiquated Netscape plug-ins interfaces. re - rewrite IE to be secure, so um, there were a bunch of Slashdotter's at the PDC? :) Maybe these guys should spend less time criticizing IE and more time finding the security holes in Firefox. Good Beer. No S***. It's on the label of their Road Dog porter. "Good Beer. No Shit." Which is why I first tried Flying Dog beers. I was standing in Publix, surrounded by women with baby strollers, when I noticed this beer sitting to the left of Sierra Nevada and to the right of one of my faves, Guinness. The words "No Shit" were plainly visible on the label. We'll naturally I had to try it. The label speaks truth. I highly recommend Flying Dog beers. Brewed in my hometown of Denver Colorado, sporting excellent taste and label art drawn by Ralph Steadman, Flying Dog has been around since 1995. The original brew pub was based in Aspen, Colorado. It's good beer. 9/18/2005 YAFVYet Another Firefox Vulnerability was publicizes recently. I found this particular exploit rather humorous, it's a buffer overrun in link handling code. You would think developers would have thought that extremely long or malformed links might be something hackers would try. It also seems odd that Firefox would be handling strings from web pages using raw buffers, instead of some sort of string object that has buffer overrun protection built in. It makes me wonder how well this new browser is designed. The Firefox development community likes to tout their browser as the most secure, but this obvious exploit smacks in the face of the community's claims. Also of note, the number of vulnerabilities in Firefox, and the number of publicly available exploits for vulnerabilities has exceeded that of IE for 6 months now. I'm reminded of the line from Field of Dreams, "build it and they will come." In this case it's the hackers that are coming, to hack Firefox, and with a freely available code base, I would venture a guess that they will an easy time of it. 9/17/2005 Didier LourencoI've been searching for the right painting to place in my bedroom after I finish my redecorating project. I think it will be a Didier Lourenco print, an artist I fell in love with on a recent trip to an art gallery here in Destin. I've considered splurging on an original, but Lourenco's become quite popular, with originals selling for 5K to 10K or more, So I think I'll have to be happy with a limited edition print. Didier's a modern artist, born in 1968 in Premia del Mar, Barcelona.
9/16/2005 Vista's DesktopCheck out two incredible videos of the Vista Desktop from Winsupersite. The 3D is used in subtle ways so that it doesn't overload the user. Really impressive stuff. The dekstop is still oriented toward getting work done, which is what I love about Windows, but it also has this polish to it that is just, amazing. I can't wait for the release.
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