Rubies and Pearls · I’m still feeling my way into this comments system, but my first days with Ruby are making me think back a dozen years or more, to when I was learning Perl. It was a big data-filtering job and Michael Leventhal had pulled together a very typical Perl bundle-of-regexps and suddenly one day I was pitching in on handling more types of input data and pulling out more structure. Larry Wall, the author of Perl, is a linguist by training, and is proud of the fact that with Perl, as with a natural language, you don’t have to be an expert to be effective Just as a child derives value from using English even if inexpertly, a novice Perl programmer starts being rewarded quickly. Other languages have this characteristic to a greater or lesser degree; and I’m beginning to think Ruby is right up there. (For me, Java had it too, as it would I think for any expert C programmer comfy with O-O thinking.) At the moment, there are lots of Ruby idioms that are still gibberish to me; but I find two crucial things: my pidgin Ruby is already pretty useful for getting things done, and I’m learning new tricks.
The Databox · After I reported on the Thumper announcement yesterday, Simon Phipps wrote: I want one. I kind of snickered, thinking “Simon, get real, that sucker weights 77kg and probably sounds like a 747.” But last night, coincidentally, I ran a backup, which provoked thought, and you know, I think Simon’s right, I think there’s a huge opening for a consumer product in this space. [Update: Hah! Bill Pierce specs out a Databox, it’ll cost you $2,312.33; dig it!] ...
Magnificent Silliness · In the wake of the passing of Syd Barrett, Roberto Chinnici pointed out that you can see a compendium of Barrett video at YouTube, and I spent the best part of an hour watching some. Ah, YouTube, feels like the Napster glory days; beyond any doubt a life-enhancer. Colby Cosh has innocent fun searching it by date. And, like Napster, it feels doomed. Pumping video around the Net isn’t cheap for anyone, and I just don’t see how it gets paid for. For more Internet video negativity, see Mark Cuban. And speaking of magnificent silliness.... Syd. Bye, Syd. He never made it out of the Sixties and I had a few friends not make it out of the Seventies, you can burn the candle at both ends and in the middle too, but not for that long. I looked into the record collection and didn’t find anything with Barrett on it, so last night I listened to Atom Heart Mother, which is not far off. It’s hard to know what to think of PF these days. Their later work is far too much on the radio; suddenly about the time of the execrable The Wall, the world flipped and they were a symptom of everything wrong with Rock; Johnny Rotten was picked out of his London gutter wearing an “I Hate Pink Floyd” T-shirt. Still, I’m quite sure that the music will remain loved by many long after we’re all dead; but I bet most of them will never have heard of Syd.
That Open Source Thing · We haven’t been saying much since Java One, so I thought I’d mention that I spent some time this week in the internal work process around Java and Open Source, and that it’s moving along nicely. As of now, I’m really optimistic that it’ll turn out well for the community and for us too.
Feed Format Kitten Fight · Like your syndication politics tasty and fresh? Head over to DeWitt Clinton’s Unto.net and read On RSS and Atom. Clinton’s at A9, Amazon.com’s Silly Valley search-wonk cauldron, and his stuff keeps coming across my radar in recent weeks. Anyhow, he has what seems to me a clear-eyed and dispassionate evaluation of the feed-format choices facing implementors these days. There is one place he gets it backward, saying: “I’ve been consistently impressed with how well the authors of the Atom syndication format anticipated the needs of the advanced content syndication community.” No; Atom’s design reflects the backward-looking experience we got in the last few years of working with RSS; it turns out that the future is somewhat like the past. But don’t stop when you get to the end of DeWitt’s piece, there are dozens of comments, most of them instructive, coming at the issue from all sorts of directions. Scoble pushed back at length, follow the pointer from his comment. Someone who signs himself “Raja” has an awfully familiar style. And a final note: when Mr. Clinton talks about XML, for example an RSS <description> element, he says <description/>. Now, that’s the kind of pedantry I can relate to.
Another Baseball Proposal · Back in July 2004, I wrote about going to a baseball game with fireworks, and a marriage proposal unexpectedly breaking out on the field. I guess this must be somewhat of a tradition, because it happened again this last Canada Day, where, once again, I took fireworks pictures. Only there was a different spin this time, and I got photos of the proposal too. I thought the whole thing was too tacky to write up, but the pictures have been playing on my mind every time I go past them in the July-pix folder. And the story is not entirely without interest; so make up your own mind ...
Boundaries · “This town was named after a minor Dostoyevsky character...” is the beginning. The Landscape — Marfa, Texas Pt. 1 is by David Byrne and it’s really a must-read, ranging through landscape and music and boundaries of various kinds. By the way, Mr. Byrne needs an Atom feed; recently something changed and in my newsreader, his pieces are full of raw HTML markup and sans images.
Apocalypse · I’m not kidding. This is the End, maybe, of Civilization As We Know It. I’m thinking now would be a good time for the Borg to come along and assimilate us all. I’m talking about Yahoo’s new The 9. Surely the Internet must have an “Off” switch somewhere?
Thumper & Friends · We announced a bunch of new boxes this morning (of, course, the damn Register has had the poop for weeks, I find our leakiness irritating). There’s a Real Big Opteron server (personally, I’m more of a scale-out than scale-up kinda guy, but big iron is a big part of our business). There’s a blade box. I know nothing about blades, never been near one. Then there’s the Thumper oops X4500, it’s interesting. I even have a grainy amateurish photo of the inside of a pre-production model ...
Hao Wu and Graham McMynn · Graham McMynn is a teenager who was kidnapped in Vancouver on April 4th and freed, in a large, noisy, and newsworthy police operation, on April 12th. Hao Wu is a Chinese film-maker and blogger who was kidnapped in Beijing on February 22nd in a small, quiet police operation not intended to be newsworthy, and who has not been freed. Read about it here, here, and here. Making noise about it might influence the government of China to moderate its actions against Mr. Wu, and can’t do any harm. Mr. McMynn’s kidnappers were a gaggle of small-time hoodlums, one of whom was out on bail while awaiting trial for another kidnapping (!). Mr. Wu’s were police. In a civilized country, the function of the police force is to deter such people and arrest them. A nation where they are the same people? Nobody could call it “civilized”. [Update, months later: Hao Wu is free.]
Comments on Camping · Last month I said I’d make a comment system for ongoing, and I got lots of good advice. Several of the people who wrote suggested I consider Camping, so I decided to give that a try, and started today ...
World Cup, the Day Before · Sunday is the big day. I’m unlikely ever to watch as much of any future World Cup as the combination of the new daughter and Sun’s summer pause made possible this time ...
FSS: Brothers · Friday Slide Scan #33 is from early 1962; it features my bare bottom ...
With Bloglines to Atom · A few days back I noted approvingly that Bloglines was working on their long-broken Atom 1.0 handler; and that there were a still a few relative-URI problems. I got a puzzled, polite email from a Bloglines engineer saying “Uh, are you sure? I don’t see that, might have been switchover artifacts.” I went and looked and sure enough, they were gone. I did see one little Keith-and-the-roaches bug with a stray “&” so I wrote back saying “fantastic, great work, oh BTW you’ve got a stray ampersand”. Within a few minutes he wrote back “Just fixed the & issue. It might not show up on production until later.” This is the way the Web is supposed to work. (Sam Ruby tells me there are some lingering corner-case bugs; report ’em and I bet they’ll fix ’em.) As of now, I am absolutely recommending Bloglines to all newsreader newbies as a good place to start; and also to anyone, newbie or not, who doesn’t want to deal with the fuss and bother of a separate newsreading program. And with Bloglines’ switch, every major piece of infrastructure that I know of is now Atom 1.0-capable. So I just permanently redirected my RSS feed to the Atom 1.0 version. If this looks weird in your newsreader, please do let me know; and more important, file a bug so your reader gets fixed. Once this settles down, I look forward to taking the axe to a whole bunch of double-escaping and RSS-writing code.
Measuring the Web · This is the title of a talk I gave on May 7th, 1996 (over ten years ago!) at the Fifth International World Wide Web Conference, at La Défense in Paris. It won a gold medal from the Mayor of Paris (one of two at the conference thus distinguished) which I display in my office; I worked awfully hard on that paper. I wanted to cite it recently, but the WWW5 Web Site has been AWOL the last few times I’ve tried to go there. Coincidentally, I ran across the conference CD in a recent basement re-organization. So I’ve staged it here: Measuring the Web. It’s no more than a historical curiosity now, but it’s a history that’s not that well documented. Plus there are some pretty pictures. Occasionally I wonder what might have happened if I’d been smart enough to follow up on the significance of the notion of “visibility”.
Microsoft & ODF · I’ve been wondering how to react to this Microsoft ODF Announcement. Andy Updegrove points out that the news isn’t that new, but still I see this as significant. From a glass-half-empty point of view, I could object, as Bob Sutor does, to the misdirection and outright lies in the Microsoft spin. Or I could echo Mark Pilgrim in pointing out that this is currently largely vaporware (more details here). But I think that on balance the big story is that Redmond has moved from a “There’s no demand for ODF” stance to admitting that, in fact, there is. Currently, it’s largely a public-sector thing; and reading between the mellifluous lines of Chris Capossela’s A Foundation for the New World of Documents, I sense a tone of barely-suppressed fear: “We encourage public sector organizations to move to XML file formats but not to mandate a particular format or implementation.” We can all agree on implementation—that’s the point, after all—but to refuse to bless a format seems to me to ignore the lesson of the Web, written in letters of fire 500 feet high: agree on the smallest-possible number of data formats, and compete on what you do with them.
The Prompt of Doom · You know the one I mean; when you visit some site that you haven’t been to for a while, long enough that you’ve changed browsers or something expired, and it asks you for your your username and password and you don’t have the vaguest idea, so you guess, and the browser says “Remember this username/password?” I always get a sinking sensation, knowing that my immediate future probably contains email confirmations (which will probably end up in the spambucket) and half-forgotten password (is the answer case-sensitive or not?) hints. I confess to rankly superstitious behavior, telling the browser “No, don’t remember it.” in the hopes that the general orneriness of things will cause me to guess right. I know some Internet Identity gurus, and they say “It’s about so much more than single sign-on”, but dammit, do I ever want single sign-on; and I can’t be the only one.
Germany 0 Italy 2 · Well, that was quite a show. Hey, LazyWeb, where’s the deep, erudite, funny, World Cup commentary to be found? Who’s the Roger Angell of soccer? The best I’ve found is Mondial 2006, but something in my own language would be nice. As for the game: Cannavaro Cannavaro Cannavaro, what else is there to say? [Update: Oscar Merida writes to point at Soccer Blogs, an aggregation with some good stuff, while Marc Lacoste points to les cahiers du football (en français, obviously).] ...
Canada Day Fireworks · The only substantial show in Vancouver this year was at Nat Bailey, the minor-league ballpark ten blocks from home, much written-about in this space. Since Canada’s birthday is also my son’s we took him along and let him stay til the end to see them. They aren’t the world’s biggest fireworks, but the intimacy you get in a little park like that is hard to beat, and nothing improves the enjoyment of the fireworks experience so much as having a kid along. Now I’m going to waste your bandwidth with six different fireworks pictures, none exhibiting any photo-realism ...
Open Source and Money · Simon Phipps made a speech at OSBC (he claims that, whatever was reported, this is what he meant). Ben Rockwood, who’s a really smart guy, is eloquently revolted by OSBC in general and Simon’s message in particular. [Ed. note: I have a bunch of technothings to write about which I’ve been putting off till midsummer braindeadness abates, but this is too urgent.] ...
