mnot’s Web log

“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames

Sunday, February 15 2004

Caching Tutorial Update

I’ve published a revision of the Caching Tutorial for Web Authors and Webmasters, the first non-trivial edit in some time almost since I wrote it in 1998. That said, there...

A Strategy for Atom Migration

One of the problems facing the syndication community as a whole is the number of formats that have been minted. This a particular concern for Atom as the newcomer; a...

( 1 comment )

Economic Approaches to Spam

SPF is getting a lot of attention, but it’s got some pretty fundamental limitations, as well as some shorter-term practical problems. What else is there? An approach that makes sense...

Saturday, February 14 2004

Redefining the Ability to Pay

I know little about the politics or economy of Canada, but a proposal by Tony Clement (Conservative) is interesting. Mike Moffatt explains; The innovative “JumpStart” program he’s proposed would tie...

Krugman on Bush

Paul Krugman points out continuing efforts to shore up George Bush, the Myth; By my count, this year’s budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president...

( 3 comments )

XOP and MTOM

The XML Protocol Working Group (of which I’m a member) has released a first draft of XOP, XML-binary Optimised Packaging, and a revised draft of MTOM, the Message Transmission Optimisation...

( 3 comments )

Tuesday, February 10 2004

RSS.py, version 0.45

This minor revision fixes the “admin” namespace’s URI to agree with the feed validator and pretty much all other implementations. From the docs; This library provides tools for working with...

( 1 comment )

Monday, February 9 2004

Video Chat — It’s Here

We’ve been playing with iChat AV, and I’ve got to say that it puts video chat in the same class as E-Mail and Web; killer app. This isn’t video chat...

( 2 comments )

Irony Defined

In the same week that Melbourne is yet again called the most liveable city in the world (a regular occurrence), John Howard, the Prime Minister of Australia, has negotiated a...

( 5 comments )

Sunday, February 8 2004

Delusions of Churchill

George Bush on why he should be re-elected: “I’m a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind.” Well,...

( 2 comments )

Saturday, February 7 2004

Messages vs. Files

Jon Udell is thinking about the benefits of data being globally available, rather than localised to a machine. I’m in complete agreement; in the last two years, I’ve used Linux,...

( 1 comment )

XPointer: Friend or Foe?

One of the uglier corners in the Web architecture is the relationship between fragment ids (the bit of the URI at the end, after the “#”) and content negotiation. In...

( 2 comments )

Friday, February 6 2004

Caltrain Scheduling Changes (and other thoughts on Public Transport policy)

Caltrain has proposed a set of schedules that re-introduce weekend services and tweak a number of trains’ timings and stops, to enable “bullet” service. These changes are honest attempts to...

Wednesday, February 4 2004

Singing the Brief

I’m so sick of watching presidential candidates confidently telling news anchors that they’re doing well in the race, and explaining how well their ideas are going across. Where are the...

( 2 comments )

Tuesday, February 3 2004

What is NetKernel?

Just got some mail regarding the Cacheability Engine which led me to NetKernel; NetKernel is a Java-based virtual REST operating system for internet applications. NetKernel is a scalable microkernel which...