“Design depends largely on constraints.” — Charles Eames
Friday, 25 November 2011
To be a full-fledged format on the Web, you need to support links -- something sorely missing in JSON, which many have noticed lately. In fact, too many; everybody seems to be piling on with their own take on how...
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Tuesday, 25 October 2011
A lot of bits have been used over on the OpenStack list recently about versioning the HTTP APIs they provide. This over-long and rambling post summarises my current thoughts on the topic, both as background for that discussion, as well...
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Friday, 21 October 2011
More than ten years ago, I was working at Akamai and got involved in the specification of Edge Side Includes (ESI), sort of a templating language for intermediaries. In that time, interest in ESI has grown, waned and been reborn. As...
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Wednesday, 12 October 2011
Since joining Rackspace to help out with OpenStack, one of the hot topics of conversation I’ve been involved in has been extensibility and versioning. I think most of my readers (yes, all six of you) are fairly familiar with, if...
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Friday, 2 September 2011
HTTPbis published RFC6266 a little while ago, but the work isn’t finished. This is the RFC that clarifies how the Content-Disposition header is used in HTTP; in a nutshell, while basic file downloads worked OK, there wasn’t any broad interoperability...
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Sunday, 28 August 2011
In discussing my whinge about AppCache offline with a few browser vendory folks, I ending up writing down my longstanding wishlist for making browser caches better. Without further ado, a bunch of blue-sky ideas; Cache Contexts Most current HTTP caches...
Thursday, 25 August 2011
Today is my last day at Yahoo!, after five and a half years (yes, I got a gumball machine). It’s been a lot of fun and I wish all of the folks there that I’ve worked with over those years...
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Wednesday, 24 August 2011
It used to be that when you registered a media type, a URI scheme, a HTTP header or another protocol element on the Internet, it was an opaque string that was a unique identifier, nothing more. Sure, there are some...
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Friday, 5 August 2011
Last week, Blaze.io highlighted how mobile browsers use HTTP pipelining. I’ve been active in trying to get pipelining more widely deployed, but to date I haven’t tested mobile browsers much. So, one VM and two test pages (20 images...
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Wednesday, 27 July 2011
FYI, I’ve implemented Content Security Policy on this site. If your’e a Mozilla user, please tell me if you have any problems. (No, I’m not particularly worried about XSS here; I just want to get a feel for it; see...
Monday, 11 July 2011
The explosion of HTTP implementations isn’t just in clients and servers. An oft-overlooked but important part of the Web ecosystem is the intermediary, often called just a “proxy”*. These days, it’s pretty easy for anyone to build a proxy...
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Sunday, 19 June 2011
HTML5’s AppCache mechanism is one confused little puppy. Purporting to be for taking web applications offline — a compelling and useful thing — it’s more often used by performance-hungry sites that want to use it as an online cache....
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Friday, 27 May 2011
After designing and deploying Cache Channels, it quickly became apparent that one Web cache invalidation mechanism wasn’t able to cover the breadth of use cases. In a nutshell, Cache Channels trades off immediacy for reliability; that is, while cache...
Wednesday, 18 May 2011
A lot of people seem to be talking about and performing load tests on HTTP servers, perhaps because there’s a lot more choice of servers these days. That’s great, but I see a lot of the same mistakes being...
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Monday, 4 April 2011
Last week found lots of HTTP-ish folks in Prague for IETF 80. In short, the good bits: HTTPbis HTTPbis had a cracker of a meeting, with three RFC2616 authors and representatives of all five major browsers in the room....
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Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Now, you can test any URL to instantly determine if it’s RESTful. You’re welcome....
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Wednesday, 9 March 2011
I made a quick and dirty screencast to show off some of the newer features in htracr. htracr demo from mnot on Vimeo. It’s still a work in progress (you can see at least one visible bug if you’re...
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
The IESG has received a request from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis WG (httpbis) to consider the following document: 'Use of the Content-Disposition Header Field in the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)' <draft-ietf-httpbis-content-disp-06.txt> as a Proposed Standard The IESG plans...
Saturday, 27 November 2010
There’s a lot of current activity on the binding between HTTP and TCP; from pipelining to SPDY, the frontier of Web performance lives between these layers. To get more visibility in exactly what’s happening down there, I decided to...
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Friday, 1 October 2010
I’m going to try to start blogging more updates (kick me if I don’t!) about what’s happening in the world of HTTP. HTTPbis The effort to revise the core HTTP specification (RFC 2616) is going nicely, albeit slowly. Given...
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Friday, 23 July 2010
Since SPDY has surfaced, one of the oft-repeated topics has been its use of TLS; namely that the SPDY guys have said that they’ll require all traffic to go over it. Mike Belshe dives into all of the details...
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Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Patricia Clausnitzer has kindly translated the Caching Tutorial to Belarusian. Thanks!...
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Monday, 21 June 2010
A few weeks ago I was browsing through My Bookshop in Hawksburn, where on a whim I picked up The Winter of Our Disconnect by Susan Maushart. As I write this, I’m at 30,000 feet, and have just finished...
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Thursday, 3 June 2010
A while back we used an absurd amount of reward points from our credit card to get some Myer gift certificates, and on the weekend these miraculously turned into a new TV, the Sony 32EX600. Overall, we really like...
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Thursday, 6 May 2010
On a bit of a roll, RFC5861: HTTP Stale Controls has (finally) been published as an Informational RFC. As discussed before in “Two HTTP Caching Extensions,” these are very useful ways to hide latency and errors from your end...
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Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Steve Souders and others have been working for a while on HAR, a HTTP Archive format. I love the idea behind HAR, but as I expressed on the mailing list (so far no response), I have a hard time...
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Wednesday, 7 April 2010
One of the nagging theoretical problems in the Web architecture has been finding so-called “site-wide metadata”; i.e., finding something out about a Web site before you access it. We wrestled with this in P3P way back when, and the TAG...
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Thomas Hühn has graciously translated the caching tutorial into German. Thanks! See also the Chinese, Czech and French translations. To help the translators keep up with changes, I've started hosting the raw document on Github, which can also be...
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Resource Packages is an interesting proposal from Mozilla folks for binding together bunches of related data (e.g., CSS files, JavaScript and images) and sending it in one HTTP response, rather than many, as browsers typically do. Intuitively, this seems...
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Friday, 15 January 2010
If you haven’t seen it already, check out the Call for Papers for the First International Workshop on RESTful Design (WS-REST 2010), where I’m on the program committee, along with many of the usual suspects. Submissions due February 8, 2010,...
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Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Australia has apparently decided, through its elected leaders, to filter its own Internet connection. Since many, many other people are discussing whether this is advisable or indeed effective, I’ll focus here on what this will do to HTTP, and...
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Friday, 13 November 2009
A couple of nights ago, I had a casual chat with Google’s Mike Belshe, who gave me a preview of how their “Let’s make the Web faster” effort looks at HTTP itself. SPDY (nee FLIP) is an alternate application...
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Friday, 30 October 2009
A long time ago*, the word in high-performance proxy-caching was Inktomi’s Traffic Server. It was so fast it was referred to being “carrier grade” and this could be said without people smirking, and it was deployed by the likes...
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Monday, 19 October 2009
Dear Ms. Gillard, I am a US citizen who moved back to Melbourne almost three years ago with my Australian wife. We did so largely because we wanted our sons to grow up in Australia and go to Australian...
Thursday, 13 August 2009
Although I'm a bit concerned to see so many references to "Web 2.0", it's very exciting to see Australia talking about opening up government. They've asked for feedback, so I've submitted my AU.02, and will try to attend the...
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Just FYI, for those interested: RED now has a blog detailing news and other developments. I’ll still post about it here occaisionally, but most RED-related things are going over there… First (substantial) post: Using RED on a page’s assets....
Friday, 3 July 2009
The Stockholm IETF meeting is shaping up to be an interesting one (and not just because it’s in such a beautiful city). As announced on the mailing list, we are having a HTTPbis working group meeting. It looks like...
Thursday, 25 June 2009
A (very) long time ago, I wrote the Cacheability Engine to help people figure out how a Web cache would treat their sites. It has a few bugs, but is generally useful for that purpose. However, as I’ve got...
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Wednesday, 17 June 2009
The caching tutorial is now available in Chinese, courtesy of Che Dong (and apologies for taking so long in linking to it!). Norwegian should be coming soon......
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Friday, 12 June 2009
Part of my job is maintaining Yahoo!’s build of Squid and supporting its users, which use it to serve everything from the internal Web services that make sites go to serving Flickr’s images. In that process, I often am...
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Friday, 5 June 2009
HTTP performance is a hot topic these days, so it’s interesting that Opera has announced a “turbo” feature in Opera 10 Beta; Ever felt a Web site was loading slowly? Do you think it will happen again? Think again:...
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Friday, 29 May 2009
Everybody’s atwitter (yeah, sue me) about the Google Wave developer preview. Lots of new stuff there, but for me the most revealing comment, almost a throwaway, was here: Did we mention we use Squid? In other words, Google’s hot...
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Tuesday, 14 April 2009
I had a lovely holiday weekend in Canberra with the family, without Web access. Perhaps I’ll blog about that soon — Canberra being in my opinion one of the nicest overlooked cities in the world — but that will...
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Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough. I know that at one point I had a transition plan, and started by generating an Atom feed alongside the RSS, but I...
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Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Over the past few weeks the Free Software Foundation has had its knickers in a twist about TLS authentication — specifically, its patent encumbrance; That patent in question is claimed by RedPhone Security. RedPhone has given a license to...
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Tuesday, 24 February 2009
There’s a rule of thumb about when a HTTP response can be cached; the Caching Tutorial says: If the response’s headers tell the cache not to keep it, it won’t. If the request is authenticated or secure, it won’t...
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Wednesday, 18 February 2009
Sometimes, it seems like every time somebody has a great idea for a new HTTP header, media type, or pretty much any other protocol element, they do the same thing. Rather than trying to figure out how to fit...
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Friday, 2 January 2009
Now here's a good meme for the New Year... Instructions: 1) Copy this list into your blog, with instructions. 2) Bold all the drinks you’ve imbibed. 3) Cross out any items that you won’t touch 4) Post a comment...
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Friday, 21 November 2008
There are lots of new “Web 2.0” specs emerging — many beginning with “o” — that are both exciting and concerning. Exciting because the Web is still evolving and still being applied to new problems, but concerning because the...
Monday, 27 October 2008
Ryan Tomayko announces Rack::Cache, a HTTP cache for Ruby’s generic Web API; The basic goal is standards-based HTTP caching that scales down to the early stages of a project, development environments, light to medium trafficked sites, stuff like that....
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Thursday, 16 October 2008
Metadata discovery is a nagging problem that’s been hanging around the Web for a while. There have been a few stabs at this problem (including at least one by yours truly), but no real progress. This is both unfortunate...
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Friday, 4 July 2008
Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list: As most of you know, over the last several years fairly good progress has been made on standardizing Web services. Many Web services specifications have, in fact, been standardized in W3C...
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Thursday, 22 May 2008
Some folks at work were having problems debugging HTTP with LWP’s command-line GET utility; it turned out that it was inserting Link headers — HTTP headers, mind you — for each HTML <link> element present. Blurgh. This brought to...
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Thursday, 15 May 2008
Huh. The Atom Format RFC has been out for a while, and as one of the authors, I get the odd mail now and again asking a question or just saying “thanks.” In the last week or two, however, there’s...
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Wednesday, 2 April 2008
It’s become quite fashionable for large IT shops to give blanket Royalty-Free licenses for implementation of “core” technologies, such as XML, Web Services and Atom. I’ll refrain from linking to any of them, as the purpose of this post*...
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Thursday, 20 March 2008
Having complained before about the sad state of HTTP APIs, I’m somewhat happy to say that people seem to be getting it, producing more capable server-side and client-side tools for exposing the full range of the protocol; some frameworks...
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Monday, 3 March 2008
Not many people that I know outside of IETF circles realise that a new *DAV effort has started up; CardDAV. An address book access protocol leveraging the vCard data format. The Internet-draft draft-daboo-carddav will be the starting point. The...
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Sunday, 17 February 2008
It’s 7am, I’m sitting in the Auckland Koru Club on my way home and reading the minor kerfuffle regarding PATCH with interest. For me, the critical difference between PATCH and POST is generality; PATCH is a generic method (as...
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Wednesday, 13 February 2008
I’m back in the Bay Area for work, and out of curiosity I thought I’d check in on the housing market here. After updating my super-secret source of housing sales, I tried something new; charting price paid for square...
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Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Here’s one that I’ve been wondering about for a while, for the LazyWeb (HTTP Geek Edition); PUTs and POSTs can result in the creation of new resources, or changes to the state of existing ones. The response to both...
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Monday, 21 January 2008
I’m following the discussion of RESTful Web description in general, and WADL in particular, with both difficulty and interest (see Dare, Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast). Difficulty because there’s so much of it, and it’s hard...
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Friday, 4 January 2008
The stale-while-revalidate and stale-if-error extensions aren’t the only fiddling we’ve been doing with the HTTP caching model. Now that Squid 2.7 is starting to see daylight, I can explain about a much more ambitious project — Cache Channels. In...
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Wednesday, 12 December 2007
We use caching extensively inside Yahoo! to improve scalability, latency and availability for back-end HTTP services, as I’ve discussed before. However, there are a few situations where the plain vanilla HTTP caching model doesn’t quite do the trick. Rather...
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Sunday, 9 December 2007
I haven’t talked about it here much, but I’ve spent a fair amount of time over the last year and a half working with people in the IETF to get RFC2616 — the HTTP specification — revised. That effort...
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Friday, 2 November 2007
I've updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to; Fix a bug with finding and displaying XML Schema Make it compatible with xsltproc (and hopefully most other XSLT1.0 processors that understand EXSLT node-set) Generate valid XHTML The hard part was...
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC. For many non-traditional (read: non-blog) applications of Atom, I think archived feeds in particular are going to be vital. I’m already using it in...
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Tuesday, 7 August 2007
I’ve been hoping to avoid this, but ETags seem to be popping up more and more often recently. For whatever reason, people latch onto them as a litmus test for RESTfulness, as the defining factor of HTTP’s caching model,...
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Saturday, 28 July 2007
URI Templates -01 is now an Internet-Draft. After sitting on the spec for a while and trying to figure out an elegant solution to the encoding problem, we decided to take the simple route and see how it sticks....
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Saturday, 30 June 2007
For the somewhat limited audience of parents looking at neighbourhoods and schools in Victoria, Australia, I present the Victorian Schools / Google Maps Mashup. Note that there are two pages; one for secondary schools, one for primaries. It’s not...
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Wednesday, 20 June 2007
A while back I wrote up the state of browser caching, after writing a quick-and-dirty XHR-based test page, with the idea that if people know how their content is handled by common implementations, they’d be able to trust caches...
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Wednesday, 13 June 2007
It's a little thing, but I'm very pleased to see that Safari 3 will check with you before you discard a page where you've entered data on a form; A nice step forward....
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Tuesday, 15 May 2007
I occasionally get a question from readers of the caching tutorial about whether to use the Expires header or Cache-Control: max-age to control a response’s freshness lifetime. Some people claim that Expires is better, because it’s defined by HTTP/1.0,...
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Thursday, 10 May 2007
For a while, I’ve had the fairly well-known Charles Eames quote “Design depends largely on constraints” as the tagline on my blog (if you read this in a feed aggregator, you’ll have to go to one of the HTML...
Monday, 7 May 2007
We were… refreshingly reminded that we’re not in Kansas (or even California) any more while watching The Daily Show on TV tonight, and this commercial came on; Nando’s is a national fast-food chicken chain. They’ve spent years building their brand;...
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Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement; It is my pleasure to announce two new versions of httperf: 0.8.1 and 0.9.0. version 0.8.1 fixes the known bugs in version 0.8, which was released almost 7 years ago. The primary new...
Sunday, 29 April 2007
The QCon presentation (slides) was ostensibly about how we use HTTP for services within Yahoo’s Media Group. When I started thinking about the talk, however, I quickly concluded that everyone’s heard enough about the high-level benefits of HTTP and...
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Sunday, 22 April 2007
I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been on the road, a lot. Although I got back a while back, I’m just now catching up. Part of working this remotely means visiting the mother ship regularly, and this...
Thursday, 5 April 2007
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup. For example, Ryan Boyd from Google will be presenting about GData right before Pasha Sadri talks about Yahoo! Pipes. These are two cutting-edge...
Tuesday, 27 February 2007
I think that most of the debate about REST focuses on the wrong things, leading developers down the garden path at the expense of their productivity and the success of their projects. Time and time again, I’ve seen folks...
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Monday, 12 February 2007
It’s always more expensive than you plan. The few weeks before you go are the busiest of your life. It’s on the scale of planning a wedding where royalty are involved, because there are so many loose ends to...
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Wednesday, 7 February 2007
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together. Niall gives the geeks-eye view, and to be clear, this is not going to be the next great consumer Web site;...
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Wednesday, 7 February 2007
A reminder: proposals for the Developers’ Track at WWW2007 should be in by February 16th. We’re looking for Web-focused presentations, demos and tutorials for and by developers. I’m particularly interested in seeing what’s happening in Syndication, HTTP, XML, and...
Wednesday, 3 January 2007
So, no that we have a place to live, there are a few choices; Phone — Since we’re keeping jobs as well as friends and relatives in the States, we’re going to be making a lot of international calls....
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Wednesday, 3 January 2007
I say “Victoria,” not Melbourne, because we’re currently staying in Forest Hill, courtesy of Roger and Marg, who are on holiday. The good news is that today we signed a six-month lease for a flat in Kia Ora on...
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Sunday, 24 December 2006
It’s Christmas Eve, and Charlie and I have been on the ground in Melbourne for a week. So far, we’ve got a new mobile phone (sweet), checked in with his school, and looked at a lot of apartments, trying...
Monday, 4 December 2006
Uche calls it; So the SOA wars are heating up. More and more smart people are pointing out that the emperor has no clothes; but stakes is still crazy high. Some folks haven’t yet made all their money from...
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Thursday, 30 November 2006
One of the perceived deficiencies of JSON is that it doesn’t have a schema language. I say “perceived” because the problems that a schema language brings often outweigh the benefits; after all, look at the mess that XML Schema...
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Wednesday, 15 November 2006
In a nutshell: After a lot of angst, back-and-forth, and false starts, we’re moving back to Melbourne next month, seven years and a few days after we arrived in San Francisco. This shouldn’t surprise anyone who knows us well,...
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Friday, 27 October 2006
There are plenty of reasons to hate HTTP Cookies, but there’s one thing that especially annoys me; their syntax. Specifically, the Netscape spec allowed an “expires” field that contains the date the cookie should be discarded; Set-Cookie: CUSTOMER=WILE_E_COYOTE; path=/;...
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Thursday, 19 October 2006
Dave Johnson writes up a nice summary of the issues of adding new elements to HTML for declarative Ajax, something that I ran into when doing HInclude. Basically, IE doesn’t give you access to any non-HTML element that’s not...
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Tuesday, 17 October 2006
My team at Yahoo! is looking for a mid-level developer (5-10 years experience) to help build our HTTP/REST toolkit, among other things. The job is mostly coding Perl and PHP, with some C or C++ skills desirable. There’s also...
Monday, 16 October 2006
I’ve been playing with sales data for houses in the Bay area for a while, and have always wanted to come up with an index of same-home sales — reputed to be one of the more accurate ways to...
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Friday, 13 October 2006
A couple of interesting things have happened recently; first, Jonathan Marsh has a new job; WSO2 is a year-old startup which provides support services around Apache’s Axis 2 Web services application server. The company’s CEO, Sanjiva Weerawarana, on Saturday...
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Wednesday, 4 October 2006
As mentioned a while back, there are a variety of places where it would be useful to be able to describe the structure of a URI, rather than just convey a URI itself. I took a stab at this...
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Sunday, 1 October 2006
Hot on the heels of the last batch, Stefan pointed me to Jesse Skinner’s addDOMLoadEvent, which seems to avoid the problems I found earlier (you know you’re in for some debugging when you’re cutting-and-pasting code from blog comments!). As...
Thursday, 28 September 2006
I’ve updated the url_template.js and json_form.js libraries to fix some bugs, to make the demo I gave at XTech run more smoothly. It should work well on Safari, Mozilla and IE6 (despite some glitches at a showing inside Y!...
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Saturday, 16 September 2006
Apple’s shipping an iSight camera in just about everything these days, and one of the coolest apps to use it is Delicious Library. If you follow that to its logical conclusion, everything should be barcode-enabled, by Web-enabling it. For...
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Wednesday, 13 September 2006
Everyone seems to be gushing about Microsoft’s Open Specification Promise. While any headway is good in the horrible landscape that is Intellectual Property, my initial reaction is that it — like most such vendor promises — is too little,...
Sunday, 3 September 2006
A while back, I mentioned that I was considering changing my hosting setup. In the end, I decided to outsource, for a few reasons; Administration — There’s always an overhead to running your own box. Security — Keeping systems...
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Monday, 21 August 2006
There have been some interesting developments in Web caching lately, from a performance perspective; event loops are becoming mainstream, and there are lots of new contenders on the scene. Fortuitously, I’ve been benchmarking proxies with an eye towards the...
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Friday, 18 August 2006
Many thanks to J.J. Solari for translating the Caching Tutorial to French!...
Monday, 14 August 2006
Timbl has this great term “Webizing” that he uses to talk about giving existing systems the benefits of the Web architecture. Despite the first part of “Web 2.0”, I think AJAX is in severe need of some serious Webizing....
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Monday, 10 July 2006
This would be funny, if this wasn’t so scary. Subscribed nevertheless....
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Friday, 30 June 2006
If you boil down the BNF in both RFC2396 and RFC3986, path segments can contain the following characters without percent-encoding them: ALPHA DIGIT ! $ & ' ( ) * + , - . : ; = @ _ ~...
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Saturday, 24 June 2006
Hugo has finally blogged the big news. He’s left one of the coolest jobs in the world — working for the W3C — to come to another one of ‘em, working for Yahoo. I’m really looking forward to continuing...
Thursday, 22 June 2006
Recently, there’s been a resurgence for the Link element in HTML; everything from Microformats to Atom autodiscovery is using it. This isn’t surprising; as machines start processing Web documents more, it’s necessary to use hyperlinks — the foundation of...
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Tuesday, 20 June 2006
A friend (who shall remain anonymous) pointed me to Microsoft’s announcement today regarding their foray into robotics, of all things. My eyes glazed over until they rested upon the Microsoft Robotics Application Model; The term “REST” was originated by...
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Friday, 9 June 2006
See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.While you’re there, it would be interesting to know what happens if you shut down / log out of your aggregator, get back...
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Thursday, 25 May 2006
When I joined Yahoo, one of the biggest adjustments I had to make was to their use of “Web Services”. There, that phrase means any kind of machine-to-machine communication using HTTP; SOAP isn’t assumed (or preferred). This is diametrically...
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Tuesday, 16 May 2006
I just finished my XTech presentation, “Web 2.0 on Speed”. here are the slides [pdf]; I’m going to try to s5 them soon. There isn’t much new in this talk; it’s just a synthesis of a few different observations;...
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Thursday, 11 May 2006
Updated 2006-06-03 One of the big problems that Web developers have with HTTP caching is that they don’t know how the caches behave; while the specs say one thing, the actual behaviour of the cache often significantly deviates — usually...
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Thursday, 11 May 2006
Yaron publicly says what he’s doing at Microsoft (scroll down); I hear that HTTP stuff is pretty cool. If anyone cares you can peruse a bunch of blog entries on my website (www.goland.org) where I walk through a number...
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Wednesday, 10 May 2006
Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*; The single, most important feature that inspires my enthusiasm about WS-* is that it has universal support from all the major vendors. Ah, there we are; major vendors. What she’s basically saying...
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Sunday, 23 April 2006
The Economist gives a heads-up [subscription required] about the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s plans for housing derivatives; In the next few weeks, the CME is likely to open trading in financial futures and options linked to American house prices. Investors...
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Sunday, 23 April 2006
It’s official; I’ve got a last-minute slot at XTech, talking about all things Web caching....
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Thursday, 20 April 2006
Back at the W3C Technical Plenary, I argued that Working Groups need to concentrate on making more Web-friendly specifications. Here’s an example of one such lapse causing security problems on today’s Web. Safety in HTTP HTTP methods have a...
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Tuesday, 18 April 2006
I’m quickly coming up on three months as a Yahoo, and a bunch of people have been asking me how things are going, as well as what I’m doing. In a nutshell, I’m having more fun than should be...
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Friday, 14 April 2006
A friend in the trenches put me on to the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Paging through the quotes, there are a few that are especially apropos; [X-wings are approaching Death Star] Wedge Antilles (Red 2):...
Thursday, 13 April 2006
According to ABC Online (that's Australian Broadcasting Corporation to the Americans out there): Two Melbourne men have been elected to the Italian Parliament. It is the first time Italians living overseas have been allowed to vote and stand for...
Thursday, 13 April 2006
I’ve had a lyric running through my head for the last day or so, thanks to a couple of bugs. I am thinking it’s a sign that the freckles / In our eyes are mirror images and when / We...
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Sunday, 9 April 2006
Most discussion you see about the housing market these days tends to focus on a) whether there’s a bubble (reliable sources say yes, at least in many places) and b) when and how it will pop (it already is,...
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Friday, 7 April 2006
It’s become axiomatic in some circles — especially in WS-* land, as well as in many other uses of XML — that the preferred (or only) means of offering extensibility is through URI-based namespaces, along with a flag to...
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Thursday, 6 April 2006
I’m a little confused by Mark Baker’s stance regarding SOAP; he seems to encourage the Web services world to use SOAP on top of HTTP in a fashion compatible with HTTP. As I asked Chris Ferris recently, what’s the...
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Sunday, 26 March 2006
A few snippets from the day; 1) The Wall Street Journal reports on the divergence between productivity and wages; Since the end of 2000, gross domestic product per person in the U.S. has expanded 8.4%, adjusted for inflation, but...
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Monday, 20 March 2006
True to form, Don’s using his witty charm and good looks (such as they are ;) to shape discussion of a topic… in this case, REST, where he splits the RESTifarian world into two; “hi” and “lo.” To get...
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Thursday, 16 March 2006
There’s some excitement out there about “Cookie-less HTTP Authentication.” While it’s tempting to say that cookies are evil (the fru-it of the dev-il), using them for authentication isn’t actually that bad, from a REST standpoint; the main loss is...
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Wednesday, 15 March 2006
Microsoft and friends (of the keep your enemy closer variety, I suspect) have submitted WS-Transfer to the W3C. I found the Team comment interesting; e.g., WS-Transfer can therefore be seen as an underlying protocol-independent version of HTTP, i.e. bringing...
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Wednesday, 1 March 2006
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History. The big (and hopefully, last) change this time is the use of the “previous” and “subscription” Atom link relations, rather than extension elements. Of course, just because they’re...
Saturday, 18 February 2006
Have you ever posted a comment to a blog, found it missing, so you re-posted it, only to find two entries? Annoying, huh? Aaron pinged me the other day with this problem, and I responded that the Right way...
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Wednesday, 15 February 2006
So, a few weeks ago, I was sitting in the Galleria with Pete and Brian, having a coffee and talking about work. When, up comes two women with clipboards, asking us to take a survey. We’re bored, and want...
Tuesday, 7 February 2006
Interesting; there are not one but two sessions at the upcoming ETech about taking Web applications offline. Given the current bent of O’Reilly conferences — speed dating for VCs and their willing prey — this is a pretty sure...
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Friday, 27 January 2006
For the past three and a half years, I’ve learned a lot, had a tremendous amount of fun, and made some really good friends working at BEA Systems in the Office of the CTO. I’ve also enjoyed working with...
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Wednesday, 25 January 2006
About two years ago, I got a little grouchy about those little orange XML buttons, and exhorted people to label them properly with RSS. Then came along a little thing called Atom, and “RSS” doesn’t necessarily cover it. Besides...
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Monday, 23 January 2006
I’ve been playing around with some ideas that use XMLHttpRequest recently, but I keep on bumping up against implementation inconsistencies on IE vs. Safari vs. Opera vs. Mozilla. Although the interface exposed is pretty much the same, what it...
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Friday, 13 January 2006
The RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters has been translated to Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the efforts of Maurício Samy Silva. Note that while the title says “RSS”, it isn’t limited to that; or as Maurício wrote, Apresenta...
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Wednesday, 11 January 2006
It took two years, but Apple has finally taken steps to limit Safari’s content-sniffing ways; Safari now displays certain documents that have text/plain headers as plain text rather than treating them as HTML. — About the Mac OS X...
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Monday, 9 January 2006
On the heels of mod_cgi, PHP now does the right thing (at least in 5.1) when setting the Allow header. mod_dav is still broken, though. Backstory here....
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Sunday, 8 January 2006
After hearing about how I lusted after Bob’s D100 in Japan last November, Anitra kindly splurged on a Nikon D50 for my birthday, and I was re-introduced to serious photography. After getting some lenses and figuring out the basic...
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Monday, 26 December 2005
Another year has gone by, and rather than cataloguing music, movies or books that I liked, here are some feeds on the Web that I enjoyed reading throughout the year. I’ll avoid repeating the obvious news, technical and blogroll...
Saturday, 24 December 2005
The useful end of RFC 3864 (at least regarding HTTP) is finally* here. When you need to know where a particular header is defined there’s now one place to do it; IANA’s Message header registry and repository have been...
Thursday, 22 December 2005
One thing I detest about many technology companies is their tendency to treat employees like overgrown 15-year-olds with no social skills. This was most evident at Java One’s “Social Event” as previously discussed, but you also tend to see...
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Wednesday, 21 December 2005
Every parent should take a flip through the OECD’s Education at a Glance*, their annual look at the state of learning in most industrialised countries. Why? First of all, it’s a wonderful way to cut through a lot of...
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Tuesday, 13 December 2005
Like a blogger trying to pump up their buzz, the New York Times declares; Australian Unrest Spreads to Other Cities What’s happened now? Have Melbourne and Brisbane been overrun by rioting yobs? No, this is what the Times is...
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Tuesday, 6 December 2005
Bloomberg calls it; In the U.S. bond market, the housing bubble has burst. Bonds backed by home loans to the riskiest borrowers, the fastest growing part of the $7.6 trillion mortgage market, have lost about 2.5 percent since September on...
Monday, 5 December 2005
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC. What does this mean? It doesn’t mean that it’s (necessarily) technically better, is easier to use, or will be more...
Saturday, 26 November 2005
The first in an occasional series about the real-world benefits of REST and the Web architecture, as applied to HTTP. I used to work for a fairly huge company as a Web/Internet guru. One day, I got sucked into...
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Wednesday, 23 November 2005
My pictures from a week in Japan are now up. This was a trip for the Addressing WG, with a day beforehand to get over jetlag, and a few days afterwards on my own time. Many thanks to Hitachi...
Tuesday, 22 November 2005
One of the oldest continuously-run enterprises in the world (and a former employer of my wife), Oxford University Press, first publisher of the King James Bible, namesake of a punctuation mark, now has a weblog....
Friday, 18 November 2005
Just got an e-mail from Progressive, who want people to sign up for Tripsense; What driving habits determine whether you’re a safer driver than others? We’re trying to determine that with TripSense, Progressive’s innovative program that collects driving data...
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Monday, 7 November 2005
More and more people are getting turned on to the advantages of using REST as a higher-level abstraction for networked applications, often comparing it favourably to SOAP and Web services. However, as many have pointed out, this is a...
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Sunday, 30 October 2005
Stumbled across this, from Ian Bicking; My problem with a lot of MVC web frameworks is that they are really a way of codifying one developers internal thinking about a web application, and they don’t map well when they are...
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Wednesday, 26 October 2005
Does anybody know of a program or service that will look at a calendar file (e.g., vCalendar, iCalendar, hCalendar) and publish the entries on it as an RSS feed, where each entry in the feed has a link to that...
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Sunday, 23 October 2005
I don't know if this has already been done (it's not exactly rocket science), but for the benefit of those who want to emulate the W3C's cool ,tools functions with mod_rewrite; # tools RewriteRule ^(.*),validate http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1 [L,R] RewriteRule ^(.*),checklink http://validator.w3.org/checklink?uri=http://%{HTTP_HOST}/$1...
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Saturday, 22 October 2005
Why is it that Web browsers — Amaya excluded — don’t support PUT and DELETE? After all, if there are enough VCs foolish enough to part with their money for something like Flock, surely we could at least support all...
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Wednesday, 19 October 2005
Roy Fielding has just closed a bug that’s been around since 1996, and which I’ve previously lamented here; The block has now been deleted from all active branches of httpd (1.3.35, 2.0.56, 2.1+). Thanks for sending in the more complicated...
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Tuesday, 18 October 2005
I’ve raved before about how useful the XSLT document() function is, once you get used to it. However, the stars have to be aligned just so to use it; the Web site can’t use cookies for anything important, and the...
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Wednesday, 5 October 2005
Does anybody else chortle quietly when they see “2.0-this” and “2.0-that”? It’s getting absurd; first we had “Web 2.0” (never mind that this term has been used for years in different ways, and that what they’re referring to is...
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Monday, 5 September 2005
Feed History draft -04 is out, with the only major change being the replacement of fh:stateful with fh:incremental, with corresponding changes throughout the document, to make the concepts a bit clearer. This revision also makes cardinality, relative URIs and...
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Thursday, 1 September 2005
I took a pass at a revision of the RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters on the train this morning, as I realised it was dreadfully out of date. It now includes Atom, and RSS 2.0, rather than...
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Monday, 29 August 2005
I’m happy to announce that version 0.8 of sparta, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. This revision requires rdflib 2.2.1, as the APIs sparta relied upon have changed. It also...
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Thursday, 25 August 2005
It seems that the debate has switched from if there’s a housing bubble to when and where it will pop. “Americans pay for their houses with money they borrowed from the Chinese.” — Paul Krugman...
Thursday, 25 August 2005
Does anybody know of a mutual fund manager who also has a blog? I’d be interested if someone in the financial industry had such a rich channel to their customers (and potential customers). It probably won’t happen due to...
Monday, 15 August 2005
Is it just me, or is this a thinly-veiled press release? I don’t see how Bluetooth is relevant; they might as well point out that it runs on electricity and uses transistors. Sure, the fact that it’s wireless is...
Monday, 15 August 2005
I’ve had a few e-mails asking how I got this site’s RSS feed to include its history, so here are the instructions for doing it in Moveable Type (the software that I use to manage this site). If you...
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Monday, 15 August 2005
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include: Added fh:archive element, to indicate that an entry is an archive Allow subscription feed to omit fh:stateful if fh:prev is present Clarified that fh doesn’t...
Saturday, 13 August 2005
When I worked in the financial industry, I quickly noticed that Excel spreadsheets contain the bulk of the data in the enterprise. It may make IT execs tear their hair out, but having the data nearby and ready for...
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Wednesday, 10 August 2005
For some time, I’ve noticed that people defining XML formats spend an inordinate amount of time talking about the structure of the format. This is especially apparent in standards working groups, where hours — no, days — can be...
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Monday, 8 August 2005
Some folks at IONA have written a paper entitled Where HTTP Fails SOAP. I had a chance to look at this before I got it published, and their conclusions make a lot of sense — if you accept the...
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Saturday, 23 July 2005
The FT Global 500 is pretty much what you see when you look up “capitalistic orgy” in the dictionary. It’s a compilation of the largest 500 mega-corporations in the world, as measured by the market. So, when I picked...
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Friday, 22 July 2005
Don Box (whose blog doesn’t seem to be taking comments any more, so I’ll do it over here) points out some very cool technology he’s using, Microsoft’s Office Communicator. Sounds very slick, I’m jealous (with my old tech phone...
Thursday, 21 July 2005
Both my wife and I signed up to johnkerry.com’s mailing list during the last federal election cycle. After he lost, we inevitably lost some immediacy of interest in what he had to say, so we’ve unsubscribed from the list....
Monday, 18 July 2005
Am I just behind, or is Core Image Fun House the coolest thing ever? With Core Image, Apple has basically built Photoshop into the OS, except that all of the filters are real-time. If you’re on Tiger, install the...
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Saturday, 16 July 2005
After more than five years, syndication is maturing rapidly. It’s being used for more than blogging — whether it be stock quotes, system logs, or order lists — and even blogging will change in nature as it gets more...
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Friday, 15 July 2005
It’s been covered before elsewhere, but just a friendly reminder: ‘feed’ URIs are bad for the Web, as are any that are used solely for dispatch (e.g., ‘itms’, ‘pcast’). I’m looking at you, Apple. Interestingly, Apple also supports doing...
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Tuesday, 12 July 2005
Talk about ground-breaking online business models! Naked & Angry lets you submit your own patterns that people will vote on for seven days; the winners will get $500 and free product, and the winning designs will be made into...
Saturday, 9 July 2005
While a lot of companies are exploring blogs as a means of building communities, Intuit* (makers of Quicken, TurboTax, etc.) has skipped directly to the next logical step; using Wikis. TaxAlmanac is a Wiki about taxes, for tax professionals;...
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Friday, 8 July 2005
You can describe just about anything with sufficient precision in plain English, given enough words. In practice, this doesn’t happen; specialised fields — whether science, finance or art — develop specialised jargon as a shorthand for concepts that are...
Friday, 1 July 2005
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has announced that as of today, their online publications and tables are now free to download, instead of requiring an account and a per-download charge, as before. Considering the breadth of statistics they’re involved...
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Thursday, 30 June 2005
So, this week was my first JavaOne. It felt like most other industry conferences; an exhibition floor, free lunches, good technical sessions, and so forth. The big news this year was Microsoft; they had quite a few MSFT people...
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Monday, 27 June 2005
I don’t talk much about it here, but I’m honoured to be the Chair of the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group. This is something of an experiment for the W3C, so I gave an update on its progress...
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Thursday, 23 June 2005
As you might guess, I’m not too keen on buying a house at the moment, due to what I (and others) perceive to be a bubble in prices. That’s a situation that will undoubtedly correct itself in the long...
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Monday, 20 June 2005
This week the Economist continues casting doubt upon the notion that housing prices will continue going up, up, up: This boom is unprecedented in terms of both the number of countries involved and the record size of house-price gains....
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Tuesday, 14 June 2005
Or, What’s Wrong with XInclude? QNames are evil (at least in content), so I never really liked the WSDL convention of using them to name and refer to constructs. It makes much more sense to refer to things on the...
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Tuesday, 24 May 2005
The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats; This mailing list is dedicated to discussion of Web description languages based on URI/IRI and HTTP, and aligned with the Web and REST Architecture. Unlike...
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Sunday, 22 May 2005
There’s been quite a kerfuffle over Google’s Web Accelerator, because it prefetches Web content. It’s amusing to see these issues recycle over time; in the late nineties, prefetching was one of the biggest areas of research in Web caching....
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Sunday, 22 May 2005
After hearing a review on NPR and reading the Economist’s, I was (as was once said) with child to read Freakonomics. After finding myself in a queue of 411 other people putting it on hold in the Peninsula Library...
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Saturday, 21 May 2005
If you accept that QNames in content are evil, the next logical question is whether XML Base is any better. In fact, if you turn your head a certain way, it appears that there’s very little difference between a...
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Wednesday, 18 May 2005
Marc Hadley has released WADL in the wild, and I’m intrigued; based on a first look, I’d say it’s the most promising Web (as opposed to Web Services) description language yet. Why? First of all, it’s very resource-oriented; you...
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Tuesday, 17 May 2005
OxygenXML 6.0 is out, and it sucks even less. The biggest news is — finally! — a visual Schema editor. This may be the biggest threat yet to Gudge’s job security, as Human Schema Editor. :) I’ve only played...
Sunday, 15 May 2005
Last week, the Australian government announced a new budget. It included a number of tax cuts that were even more ambitious than expected. To help figure out who these cuts benefit, I’ve fed the rates that will take effect...
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Thursday, 12 May 2005
I happened to look at the HTTP headers returned from Google News just now (what can I say, I’m a HTTP geek), and I noticed something unusual; Last login: Thu May 12 16:52:59 on console Welcome to Darwin! mnot-laptop:~>...
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Tuesday, 10 May 2005
Social Security represents a pact between generations—a financial and social commitment among people of all ages. — US Social Security Administration Although George Bush has caused a brouhaha with his ill-defined plans to reform Social Security, it’s actually part...
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Monday, 9 May 2005
There’s a lot of cool apps emerging for GreaseMonkey (and GreaseMonkIE and PithHelmet, for IE and Safari respectively). It seems like these extensions have a love/hate relationship with the Web, philosophically. On the one hand (with L O V...
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Sunday, 1 May 2005
In the interest of equal time, two quotes attributed to Keynes; If you owe your bank a hundred pounds, you have a problem. But if you owe a million, it has. The market can stay irrational longer than you...
Friday, 29 April 2005
A while back, I published a series of entries (1,2,3,4) about would-be Web Description Formats, with the intent of figuring out which (if any) is suitable, or whether a new one is required. I’d like to keep this moving,...
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Friday, 29 April 2005
Today’s release of Tiger includes a new but little-discussed framework for developers, CoreData. What’s most interesting to me is its similarities — and differences — to SDO, IBM and BEA’s* effort to abstract away the specifics of how data...
Sunday, 24 April 2005
Should cookies be shared between your RSS aggregator and your Web browser? If they were, sites would be able to automatically personalise the feeds you subscribe to; would people be interested in that, or see it as an intrusion...
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Sunday, 24 April 2005
XML is arguably one of the bigger things to come onto industry’s radar for a while, and as a result programming languages (e.g., ECMAScript, Comega, Java) are changing to accommodate it. This isn’t just happening in libraries; the syntax...
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Tuesday, 12 April 2005
Way back when I put the first Atom drafts together, I included a placeholder for a section that I hoped would allow reconstruction of feed state. Presently, this often isn’t necessary, because you have to be away for a...
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Sunday, 10 April 2005
As if flying wasn’t enough of a trial already, you may have heard that the FCC is considering lifting their ban on mobile phone use in airplanes. While the FAA may still restrict their use, this is just one...
Sunday, 10 April 2005
Those who have been preoccupied by Two Funerals and a Wedding may have missed news of a developing diplomatic crisis in Australia. Sir Michael Somare, the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, happened to transit through Brisbane airport on his...
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Sunday, 3 April 2005
Web metadata discovery is not a new topic, and one on which the final word has not been spoken. However, one of the most basic means of discovering something about a resource, the HTTP OPTIONS method, is not widely...
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Friday, 1 April 2005
RDF has a simple, usable, universal model; everything’s nodes and arcs, so it avoids the problems of the Infoset, which IMO are brought by its complexity and special cases. Years of disquiet about attributes by portions of the XML...
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Wednesday, 30 March 2005
Just added a 512M module to the Powerbook for a total of 1G (was 768M), for a pittance — $79! — courtesy of Amazon. Everything’s much snappier, especially Eclipse; I feel more productive already. If you have an Aluminum Powerbook,...
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Friday, 25 March 2005
After a deeply wounding comment about this site’s design from SOMEONE WHO KNOWS WHO THEY ARE last week, I’ve refreshed the mnot.net stylesheets and front page design. OK, truth be told I was working on it anyway. Still, the...
Monday, 21 March 2005
A while back, I wrote up a description of a pattern for avoiding messages like “click submit only once.” I didn’t do much after that, because I’ve been a bit busy, and because I wanted to do some implementation...
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Thursday, 17 March 2005
I’m happy to announce that version 0.7 of sparta.py, a simple API for RDF, is now available. As always, feedback and suggestions are appreciated. My goal for this release was to clean up cardinality. In particular, I wanted to...
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Thursday, 17 March 2005
I personally like Airbus planes, especially the A340, but Risks Digest has given me a reason to avoid some of them; [A]fter (an earlier) disaster, more than 20 American Airlines A300 pilots asked to be transferred to Boeings, although...
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Saturday, 5 March 2005
Carlos sent me an interesting summary page about the Bay area housing bubble. I wish there were more links substantiating the assertions there (a few ring false), but it is thought-provoking. I happen to have a bit more specific data;...
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Wednesday, 2 March 2005
So, you’ve got some data that you need to give to somebody else, and you want to use XML to do it; good for you, you’ve seen the light / hopped on the bandwagon / drunk the Kool-Aid. At...
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Tuesday, 22 February 2005
I love the XSLT document function. With it, you can access the whole Web from a stylesheet; this gives a lot of flexibility, in the right situation. For example, my local library’s online system is based upon iPac (now...
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Monday, 7 February 2005
Werner makes an excellent point; [W]e need to continue to take care that we do not consider The Model to be The Truth. The web based internet is a massive organic process that is similar to Nature, and we...
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Saturday, 5 February 2005
Listening to people talk about the economy -- and the housing bubble in particular -- made me wonder; what happens after it bursts?
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Monday, 24 January 2005
I’m intrigued by the JSON effort. While many people (and vendors) have chosen XML for data interchange because it’s not platform- or vendor-specific, these folks have chosen the other path; by leveraging the serialisation of data structures in ECMAScript...
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Sunday, 23 January 2005
There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL. WS-Addressing doesn't have MEPs, but it does allow you to create patterns of messages.Meanwhile, SOAP has bindings and WSDL has bindings, and WS-Addressing have bindings too. But, a SOAP binding binds an underlying transport, a WSDL binding binds an abstract interface, and an Addressing binding binds abstract properties.That's not the properties in SOAP, by the way, which aren't exactly the same as the properties in WSDL.
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Wednesday, 19 January 2005
More than a year after my modest suggestion, Google takes a step to fix comment spam. Hopefully, other people who re-publish Web content (like mailing list archives) will start doing this as well. Perhaps the most interesting thing about...
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Wednesday, 5 January 2005
Since the W3C Web Services Addressing Working Group is visiting my (sort of) home town in a couple of weeks, I've updated the Opinionated Guide to Melbourne that I sometimes give to people by e-mail and put it on the Web. /me dons flame-retardant suit...
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Friday, 17 December 2004
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released an SVG-based "animated population pyramid" that very nicely visualises the change in that country's population over time.
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Wednesday, 15 December 2004
I’m thinking about whether it would be a good idea to have a media type for Python source files, call it “text/python.” The main benefit that I see to doing this is the definition of a fragment identifier syntax;...
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Monday, 6 December 2004
Based on feedback (thanks, John), it's now mapped to an object that implements a subset of the interface of sets.Set, and produces a full sets.Set when you call the copy() method. rdf:Seq is mapped to a list, joining rdf:List; this allows Sparta to work with RSS 1.0, along with other formats that use Seq. The factory takes an optional schema_store argument, so you can store schema hints for Spara separately, if you wish.
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Friday, 26 November 2004
Stephen Roach, the chief economist at investment banking giant Morgan Stanley, has a public reputation for being bearish. But you should hear what he’s saying in private. Roach met select groups of fund managers downtown last week, including a...
Wednesday, 17 November 2004
I tend to use shopping carts at online stores as to-buy lists; if I'm interested in something, I'll hold it in a shopping cart and muse on it for a while.... Having someone use your site to save their shopping list is a gold mine; you get to see what they're interested in, and they tend to come back to you a whole lot more, because they've built up a lot of state.... Well, Later has apparently come and passed; I've finally made a choice about my next digital camera, and upon adding it to my shopping basket, discovered that -- wait for it -- the camera was the only thing in there.
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Friday, 5 November 2004
For some reason, people are considering a change, such as this one. Might I make another suggestion [pdf].
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Saturday, 16 October 2004
I’m not the first to blog this by any means, but it’s notable enough to interrupt our regular… err… broadcast. Stop what you’re doing and see John Stewart take on Crossfire. A taste; STEWART: It’s not honest. What you...
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Sunday, 10 October 2004
In a recent post, Don gave his take on the enlightening nature of WS-Transfer; Honestly, WS-Transfer has been in the oven for quite a while. It’s been interesting to see people’s reaction to it. Stage 1. What good is...
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Wednesday, 29 September 2004
As I'm sure many others were, I was intrigued to see that Microsoft published an Introduction to the Web Services Architecture the other week. Unlike their usual collaborative selves, they did this without any partners, co-authors or even acknowledgement to the outside world; it reads as if Web services is a beast that was bred purely within the gates of Redmond.
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Monday, 27 September 2004
I was very interested to see the reaction that people had to WS-Transfer over the last few days. While the SOAP Resource Representation Header had opprobrium heaped upon it (""), Transfer passed by with nothing more than a few nodding heads and people saying "aha." In my view, WS-Transfer deserves a lot more of that criticism; if anything, the Resource Representation Header tries to supplant MIME, not HTTP.
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Sunday, 19 September 2004
If you're wondering where the promised travel stories from Melbourne got to, you'll have to wait a bit longer. Right after I got there, Anitra was bit by a spider (a supreme irony, really) and had to go to the emergency room, because all sorts of unpleasant things were happening.
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Wednesday, 8 September 2004
I'm typing this from the Red Carpet Club in San Francisco International Airport, about to disembark on a snap vacation to Australia. By 'snap vacation,' I mean that I didn't have a gleam in my eye about this trip two weeks ago, but thanks to generous fares from United ($650 round trip!)... Anitra and Charlie are staying behind for this one; she couldn't get away from work, and will be going to Australia to hear some wedding bells (shhh, big secret) in January.
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Wednesday, 8 September 2004
An update to the Internet-Draft that provides initial values for the HTTP Header Message Registries is now available.
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Monday, 6 September 2004
In BusinessWeek, Chris Kenton brings us a thoughtful piece about the Faustian bargains that localities are making in the name of progress; [A]t the end of the day, we are giving up a society in favor of an economy....
Thursday, 2 September 2004
...I have learned that to be right and useful, one must accept a continuing divergence between approved belief -- what I have elsewhere called conventional wisdom -- and the reality. And in the end, not surprisingly, it is the reality that counts.-- John Kenneth Galbraith, "The Economics of Innocent Fraud"I'm just starting this book, but it's pretty thought-provoking so far.
Thursday, 26 August 2004
It's no secret that HTTP authentication isn't used as often as it should be.
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Wednesday, 25 August 2004
Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article, “Hot Housing Market Simmers Down.” I can’t reference it directly because I’m not a subscriber, but it basically notes that, according to the Association of Realtors, existing single-family home sales declined 2.9% in...
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Saturday, 21 August 2004
Version 0.5 of sparta.py is now available; with this release, it's roughly feature-complete.
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Thursday, 19 August 2004
Alfred Marshall, who is credited with turning economics from a sideline to a proper discipline of its own, had this to say: (1) Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than as an engine of inquiry. (2) Keep to them till you have done.... (4) Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.
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Sunday, 8 August 2004
Baileys Irish Cream (2 measures) Kahlúa (3 measures) Macadamia nut liquor, or dark rum (e.g., Myer’s) (1 measure) Coconut Milk (4 measures) Cream, or half and half (3 measures) Banana (1 whole) Ice (to suit) Blend; makes two very large...
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Sunday, 8 August 2004
Bill points out the inevitability of the Pythonification of the world. I couldn’t agree more; if you listen to the whispers in the halls, all of the old objections are falling away, and people are taking a serious look at...
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Thursday, 5 August 2004
(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”) One of the foundations of most vendors’ approach to Web services is called document-oriented messaging. This is the notion that interoperability is improved by describing a protocol in terms of the artefacts that are exchanged...
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Thursday, 5 August 2004
Oh LazyWeb, please give me software that lets me use my Powerbook as a Bluetooth speakerphone…...
Monday, 2 August 2004
Melbourne’s The Age now has RSS feeds available — hooray! I’ve been scraping them and bugging the staff for a while, so it’s nice to see that Fairfax (now “Fairfax Digital” instead of “f2”… whatever) finally get it. Oh, and...
Saturday, 31 July 2004
A few days ago I blogged a straw-man API for client-side HTTP based on dictionaries. This turns out to be well-aligned with a project I’ve had on the back burner for a while; coming up with some Python APIs for...
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Friday, 30 July 2004
Apple is making an executive summary of the 9/11 commission report and the major speeches from the Democratic National Convention available for free on the iTunes Music Store. They deserve a lot of praise for this, and I hope they...
Monday, 26 July 2004
From the Daily Python URL comes another noteworthy API for XML; XMLFragment. I haven’t tried it yet (it doesn’t appear to be separately available, hint, hint), but I like the look of it. There are two interesting things going on...
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Sunday, 25 July 2004
Baileys Irish Cream Kahlúa Macadamia nut liquor, or dark rum (e.g., Myer’s) Coconut Juice Cream Banana Ice The labs will be working on the exact proportions; stay tuned....
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Sunday, 18 July 2004
Timbl has talked about Web-izing databases and languages; what about operating systems? Despite Microsoft’s legal troubles brought about trying to integrate the browser into Windows, it’s a good idea. Here’s one for the LazyWeb: create a Mac OS X Contextual...
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Saturday, 3 July 2004
Surfin’ Safari hints that the next version of WebCore will be able to edit as well as render HTML. Does this mean that we’ll soon see Safari sport an “edit” button along with HTTP PUT, a la Amaya? Even better...
Friday, 2 July 2004
To develop a previous theme; As markets become more transparent and liquid, it becomes more easy to see opportunities for arbitrage. A wide-scale example of this (to stretch the definition of “arbitrage” a bit) can be seen if you consider...
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Thursday, 1 July 2004
When Tim O’Reilly gave his keynote at eWorld this year, one of his major points was that Internet-based mapping (e.g., Yahoo maps, Mapquest) had failed to take off, despite their obvious utility, because they were walled gardens; unlike eBay and...
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Thursday, 1 July 2004
The W3C Workshop on Constraints and Capabilities for Web Services promises to be a quiet, calm, tightly-scoped discussion of a well-understood topic, lacking any controversy whatsoever. What else could possibly result from mixing up Web services and metadata? Make sure...
Wednesday, 30 June 2004
HSBC has apparently been indiscreet enough to call it a bubble, but I can’t find the actual report (“The U.S. Housing Bubble — The case for a home-brewed hangover.”). Anyone have a link? Prices are 10 to 20 percent too...
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Wednesday, 30 June 2004
Way back when the XML Protocol Working Group started kicking around, Henrik and I had a long-running, low-level “discusssion” about whether SOAP was a protocol or a format. Henrik won, and SOAP is known as a protocol* today (despite the...
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Monday, 28 June 2004
If you work in the United States or intend to retire there, grab yourself a copy of today’s Wall Street Journal, which contains a special section that covers this topic with unusual lucidity....
Wednesday, 23 June 2004
John Schneider was in the office last week and gave me a demo of something he’s been working on for a while, E4X — by far one of the coolest technologies I’ve seen in some time. I think that every...
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Wednesday, 16 June 2004
Check out the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group; it looks like our last, best hope for extending the browser platform to grow the Web....
Monday, 14 June 2004
One thing about Web description formats that hasn’t seen much discussion yet is how people intend to use them. The WSDL Working Group has a Usage Scenarios document and a Requirements document, but unfortunately they only talk about the kinds...
Saturday, 5 June 2004
Because Web sites often don’t make information available to us in the way we’d like, we have to bring the mountain to Mohammed and scrape screens. I’ve played around with this in the past with xpath2rss, a scraping tool that...
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Saturday, 5 June 2004
Netcraft reports that “Search Engine Optimisers” are unable to resist the siren call of spamming. Digging a little deeper, it turns out that this is part of a little contest between practitioners of that sordid profession. Apparently, the SEO who...
Monday, 31 May 2004
Benjamin Wallace-Wells’ “There Goes the Neighborhood” captures what many have been saying for a while now; it’s a bubble, a bubble, a bubble....
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Sunday, 30 May 2004
Tim Bray is trying out “purple number signs” on his Web site to make fragment identifiers ubiquitous and easy to find. This site has something along similar lines, through this CSS: [id]:hover:after { content: " #" attr(id) " "; font-size:...
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Friday, 28 May 2004
RFC 3744 has been published: This document specifies a set of methods, headers, message bodies, properties, and reports that define Access Control extensions to the WebDAV Distributed Authoring Protocol. This protocol permits a client to read and modify access control...
Friday, 28 May 2004
I’ve been talking with a few people about my previous assertion that the Infoset is a bad abstraction for data modelling, and my subsequent post about the informational properties of the Infoset. The feedback has been positive, especially regarding the...
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Friday, 28 May 2004
Hey mac fans — I need to track changes in a lot of documents, so I’ve cobbled together a simple AppleScript that renames the Finder’s selected files with the date: Rename with Date. For example, The File.doc becomes The File...
Tuesday, 18 May 2004
A few people got together in NYC to talk about Atom going to the W3C this morning. One part of the minutes of this discussion raised my eyebrows a fair amount; sr: […] Lots of people are saying RSS won’t...
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Saturday, 15 May 2004
After a short pause (OK, nearly three years), I’ve released version 0.4 of sparta.py. Sparta is a simple API for RDF that binds RDF nodes to Python objects and RDF arcs to attributes of those Python objects. As such, it...
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Wednesday, 12 May 2004
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the influences that using the Infoset has on the information you place in it. To put it another way: if you work with XML at the Infoset level, what tools are you given to express...
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Tuesday, 11 May 2004
I’ve been playing around with the new OxygenXML 4.0 plug-in for Eclipse M8. Overall, it's very good; much better than the competition, although a lot of the slickness can be attributed to Eclipse. While it isn’t everything I want in...
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Friday, 7 May 2004
It looks like Google is starting to index books and magazines; I came across this in a Google search I did today, but can’t find any reference to it on their public pages. I don’t think this is the same...
Friday, 7 May 2004
To help inform discussion of XOP (and to save Sam the trouble ;), I’ve put together a quick-and-dirty (we’re talking two hours) XOP parser in Python. It isn’t particularly efficient, nor is it well-tested or robust; it’s only to demonstrate...
Wednesday, 5 May 2004
I’ve got to say that iTunes 4.5 is scary addictive. Usually, I have a problem in buying music, because by the time I get to the record shop, I forget what I want, and I’m confronted with rows and rows...
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Wednesday, 5 May 2004
Without pointing fingers, some people have a bee in their collective bonnet about the dangers of allowing binary content to be represented in XML, care of XOP. Others are up in arms about re-inventing HTTP in SOAP, courtesy of the...
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Monday, 3 May 2004
It looks like the HTTP PATCH method proposal might be based on Delta Encoding, which is IMO one of the cooler and lesser-known HTTP technologies. I've heard of a few implementations of delta, including one by Patrick McManus a long...
Sunday, 2 May 2004
I probably shouldn’t go around interpreting OECD statistics, as I’m not an economist (I just play one on the Web). However, the OECD’s Centre for Tax Policy and Administration has made some excerpts of its 2002/2003 edition of “Taxing Wages”...
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Sunday, 2 May 2004
An idea for the LazyWeb: Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) is a measure of how much goods and services cost in different countries, irrespective of exchange rate; it’s a way to compare the true cost of living in different countries. The...
Saturday, 1 May 2004
I’m watching a company called Riverbed with interest, because they just released a new product, “Steelhead”. In a nutshell, it’s IP datagram compression done with a shared, dynamic dictionary. That’s right, it has a disk on each end of the...
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
Way back when in the XML Protocol Working Group, one of the concerns that came up was the processing model for SOAP headers. In particular, while SOAP 1.2 does a good job of specifying how that model operates, a key...
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Tuesday, 27 April 2004
In the past, I’ve talked about reusing WSDL as a format for describing Web resources, as well as coming up with a bespoke format. One path that I’ve overlooked so far is reusing WebDAV to describe Web resources. The WebDAV...
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Tuesday, 27 April 2004
I think I'm starting to sympathise with Our Great Governor in California; the state senate has passed a bill banning the production or sale of foie gras. That's right, when they're not telling us what's good for us on the...
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Monday, 26 April 2004
Don Box: As for OpenOffice’s lame typography support, have you tried Microsoft Office 2003. I still have ~$200 left of quota over at the company store… Hmm. In OSX, It’s built-in; no need for apps to fiddle with typography; it’s...
Saturday, 24 April 2004
This is why heuristics aren't such a hot idea. UPDATE: For those wondering what this is about, the original version of this article had a picture of Madonna, the actor/singer/etc., and links for more information about her, not the famed...
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
Sean McGrath always has carefully considered positions, and he hits it out of the ballpark with this one. A few thoughts; Eventually though, to fully realise RESTian SOA we need to get linguistic determinism working for us, not against us....
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Monday, 19 April 2004
One of the things that people find compelling about Web services is its promise of asynchrony. “HTTP is only request/response, and therefore synchronous; it’s terrible for long-lived business processes, where the server needs to contact the client at some arbitrary...
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Friday, 16 April 2004
To use WSDL to describe RESTful interactions, you need some way of accommodating generative resource identifiers. In a nutshell, this means some part of the URI is dynamic. For example, with HTTP I might describe an address book where someone...
Thursday, 15 April 2004
Lots of papers come and go over the years; take a look at any tech conference, online bibliographies (even subject-specific ones; Webbib is a favourite), and you’ll be inundated. However, a few rise above the rest (no pun intended) and...
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Wednesday, 14 April 2004
I’ve talked before about describing RESTful Web resources, going as far as prototyping a new format. That work was predicated on the assumption that WSDL wasn’t adequate. However, Dave Orchard has been looking at this in the WSDL WG, and...
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Tuesday, 13 April 2004
Spike is a networked clipboard that allows you to easily share text, pictures and other interesting things with others near and far. The nice part is that a) it uses ZeroConf (a.k.a. Rendezvous) and b) it’s cross-platform (Windows and Mac)....
Tuesday, 13 April 2004
People of Fremont, you might want to consider your voting choices a little more carefully. Liz Figueroa (your senator) has decided that Google’s GMail is “like having a massive billboard in the middle of your home,” and therefore wants to...
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Monday, 12 April 2004
From the Washington Post: This is Bush’s 33rd visit to his ranch since becoming president. He has spent all or part of 233 days on his Texas ranch since taking office, according to a tally by CBS News. Adding his...
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Friday, 9 April 2004
Elegance in integration is multiplicity — solving one problem in ways that aid another. Elegance is optimization. Elegance is assembly — an apparatus readily put together and taken apart. Elegance is tolerance-ordering, where tolerance means uncertainty in some manufacturing operations....
Friday, 9 April 2004
This is a good idea for so many reasons. The media type registration will have to be changed to take advantage of it, but I believe that RFC3023 is under review anyway....
Thursday, 1 April 2004
Google’s AdWords program allows advertisers to target their dollars at specific words; for example, I can say that I want to buy advertising on search results when the terms are “elephant cookie.” This is cool, because it creates a market...
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Monday, 29 March 2004
OK, so I know they’ve been around for a while, but I haven’t really got into Python’s metaclasses until just now, because I’ve been… well… busy. This excellent presentation about them from the most recent PyCon woke me up to...
Monday, 29 March 2004
Aaron Swartz has started to document the iTunes Music Store; this is a good example of a non-browser, cross-platform application reusing HTTP. It would be interesting to see the interface documented on a per-URI basis. Now, if they’d just allow...
Sunday, 28 March 2004
Ian Hickson is thinking about client-side technologies (scroll down a bit). Some of his ideas resonated; Sortable tree views and list views with rich formatting. Do a search on eBay, and you’ll find you have to hit the server whenever...
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Tuesday, 23 March 2004
I just stumbled across Apple’s new preview of XGrid, their ad hoc clustering technology. It’s got lots of cool features, like discovery via Rendezvous (aka ZeroConf), a job control dashboard, and a bioinformatics demo app. This will be invaluable in...
Monday, 22 March 2004
Interested in living in actual communities, rather than subdivisions or “pods”? Tired of spending most of your life in a car? I’ve been getting a lot of books from the library recently, and one of my recent reads was Suburban...
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Wednesday, 17 March 2004
In an otherwise excellent article, Jon Udell blames the lack of one-click subscribe in syndication formats on lack of vision; How users will interact with the formats and APIs is left as an exercise for the implementer. But of course...
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Wednesday, 10 March 2004
Someone calling themselves Scott Wiseman has started sending messages to the HTTP-WG mailing list. Although anyone has a right to make on-topic posts to the list, Scott is stretching it; each of his posts responds to someone else’s in a...
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Sunday, 7 March 2004
An interesting issue poked its head up at the W3C Technical Plenary last week. XML Protocol (known as SOAP to mere mortals) is defined in terms of XML Infosets — it describes how to move Infosets around and process them,...
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Friday, 5 March 2004
I’ve just got back from a two-week business trip, during which my 15” Titanium Powerbook showed increasing signs of shaking off this mortal coil. Specifically, the bottom 1/3 of the screen kept on flickering white. At first, I was able...
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Monday, 1 March 2004
This just popped up on the iTunes “new releases” list. I think we’re going to see some Atom-related products called “Tomato.”...
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Sunday, 15 February 2004
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 aren’t any substantial changes; this is mostly tweaking and incorporation...
Sunday, 15 February 2004
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 common argument against it is that RSS content will never...
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Sunday, 15 February 2004
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 is to acknowledge that spam is in the eye of...
Saturday, 14 February 2004
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 the income tax rate that someone pays to their lifetime...
Saturday, 14 February 2004
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 in front of a giant American flag, in front of...
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Saturday, 14 February 2004
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 Mechanism, that leverages XOP. In a nutshell, XOP is an...
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Tuesday, 10 February 2004
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 RSS feeds as data structures. The core is an RSS...
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Monday, 9 February 2004
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 like you’re used to; it’s fluid, has good resolution, and...
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Monday, 9 February 2004
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 free-trade agreement that allows US businesses to invest as if...
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Sunday, 8 February 2004
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, I’ll sleep better at night....
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Saturday, 7 February 2004
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, Windows and Mac OSX on the desktop, leading me to...
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Saturday, 7 February 2004
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 a nutshell, because dereferencing a single URI can return multiple...
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Friday, 6 February 2004
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 improve service; after all, faster is better, right? The problem...
Wednesday, 4 February 2004
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 ideas? Instead of telling me why I should vote for...
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Tuesday, 3 February 2004
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 implements a modular REST abstraction in which all software components...
Thursday, 29 January 2004
I found a link in the referrers to a Latvian blog where they’re discussing a previous entry here. Can anyone offer a translation? Google and Babelfish don’t do Latvian (something I’m sure Google, at least, will soon correct, with their...
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Thursday, 29 January 2004
I have to confess to being a bit underwhelmed by Orkut after all the hype; it feels like just YASN. I’m not complaining — it’s cool, and until I write my own social networking software, I don’t have the right...
Wednesday, 28 January 2004
It’s like having a “get your ASCII here” button; completely meaningless. There are literally thousands of XML formats out there, so you’re not really being helpful by labelling it as such (the */xml media types have similar problems). If you...
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Sunday, 25 January 2004
As alluded to before, you’re taking on legal risk when you allow people to say things to you. Yes, this is crazy, but hey, it’s the US legal system. Go figure. For Weblogs, this means copyright on comments. Specifically, if...
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Saturday, 24 January 2004
Last weekend, I bought a Pioneer DVR-A06U DVD/CD Writer from Fry’s, for about $120, after a $30 manufacturer’s rebate. This weekend, I started filling out the rebate paperwork. All of the standard stuff is there; UPC (original, not copy), receipt...
Thursday, 22 January 2004
This is the way syndication should be; user-customisable and aligned with the Web view of the resources it talks about. Cool. I’ve updated the RSS Tutorial to point to this as a shining example; it’s what all RSS feeds should...
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Thursday, 22 January 2004
Over the past month or two, I’ve been noticing a little link on larger news organizations’ Web articles, such as that of the New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. Note the “Reprints and Permissions” link. When you follow...
Wednesday, 21 January 2004
Just got this: Subject: DELETE to stay in debt, OPEN to become debt free. Non Profit Debt Elimination So close.. if they'd just said GET instead of OPEN......
Tuesday, 13 January 2004
This week’s Economist has an interesting article about parental leave in Sweden (alas, the Web version requires a subscription), a long-standing and generous benefit; they can take up to 13 months of leave, paid at 80%. Furthermore, it’s possible to...
Monday, 12 January 2004
Wouldn’t it be great if, whenever a business, government organization or just the guy down the block came up with a new format for their documents, they could easily get a media type, so that the format would be a...
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Monday, 12 January 2004
There’s a lot of interest out there about exposing XQuery 1.0 / XPath 1.0 / XPath 2.0 in Web interfaces. On the face of it, this is quite a compelling idea; it allows you to reuse a generic query mechanism...
Monday, 12 January 2004
From the Washington Post: The Army War College has published a paper questioning the scope and approach to the war on terror. Record’s core criticism is that the administration is biting off more than it can chew. He likens the...
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Sunday, 11 January 2004
Well, this should liven things up… “These people are nasty and they have a long memory,” [O’Neill] tells Suskind. But he also believes that by speaking out even in the face of inevitable White House wrath, he can demonstrate loyalty...
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Thursday, 8 January 2004
Rod Chavez has posted an article about running BEA WebLogic Server 8.1 on OSX to O’Reilly. It’s really, really cool that this works, and I’ve had the entire platform (including Workshop) running on my TiBook happily for several months, thanks...
Wednesday, 7 January 2004
What a steal. If you live near San Francisco, or are visiting this month, make sure you check out Dine About Town — three-course, chef-selected prix fixe menus at over a hundred restaurants, $19.95 for lunch, $29.95 for dinner, all...
Wednesday, 7 January 2004
Anitra is trying to beat a head of traffic that's built up behind an accident upstream; was able to check on the excellent SF Bay area real-time traffic map. I used one of these when I first moved to the...
Tuesday, 6 January 2004
Welcome to the jungle, David Orchard, Chris Ferris and Tom Glover (Tom, we need RSS, OK?). (Yes, I know what song you can’t get out of your head now… get your fix here.)...
Saturday, 3 January 2004
In his blog, Sean McGrath wonders about two potentially competing faces of standards; extensibility and interoperability. If “compliance” to X is open-ended via an extensiblity mechanism, then “X-compliant” means very little when it comes to interoperability. This is the constant...
Saturday, 3 January 2004
Mail already shows you a little picture of someone when they’re in your address book. Why doesn’t it send and display X-Faces? Can somebody write a plugin to do this? (It also doesn’t display pictures in the LDAP server that...
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Tuesday, 30 December 2003
Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms: Additional support for this activity has been provided by DARPA under the DAML program. Dig a bit further on the DAML site, and...
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Monday, 29 December 2003
Hyperlinks have been disallowed in comment bodies on this blog for a while now, and I've just removed the link associated with comment authors as well. This is based on the assumption that the lion's share of comment spam is...
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Sunday, 28 December 2003
Before all of this “Web” stuff came along, I was a photographer; I designed an… unusual university program that had me study fine art photography, photojournalism, aesthetics and the physics of light. After that, I spent a little time doing...
Saturday, 27 December 2003
Inger put me onto a new travel guide, and I’m already planning the trip. Molvania (“A land untouched by modern dentistry”) looks like a really interesting country. For example; Molvania’s national anthem was chosen in 1987 as part of a...
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Friday, 26 December 2003
Shortly after I moved to Melbourne in 1995, I set up a Red Hat Linux box in a little corner of our apartment on Flinders Lane. Shortly after that, the box was connected to the Internet via a 33.6k permanent...
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Friday, 26 December 2003
We’ve lived in California for more than four years now, and Anitra grew up in Melbourne, with the result that she first saw snow falling from the sky when she was 25. When we had an opportunity to take a week’s holiday right before Christmas, we decided against somewhere sunny; why more of the same? Instead, we booked some tickets to Washington (so as to drop off the kid), then to Munich, and spent some serious time researching our advent travel opportunities, with the help of the Die Bahn Travel Planner, a couple of DK guides, and Google. Here are my notes from planning the trip, as well as my thoughts on what’s good if you go. See also the pictures.
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Monday, 15 December 2003
Small apps that make my life much, much easier: Kung-Log — Weblog writing and management, off-line (thanks, John) Shrook — RSS reader extraordinary Address Book — Yes, it comes with the OS, but I don’t think most people appreciate just...
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Saturday, 13 December 2003
Anitra turned me on to what happened to Steve from Blue’s Clues. As he would say, “Cool!”...
Friday, 12 December 2003
The other day, I bought a copy of an extremely nifty piece of software, Virtual PC. It didn’t come with an OS, but that’s OK, because I have a copy of WinXP Pro on a box that I’m not using,...
Friday, 12 December 2003
As you may know, I’m editing the Atom format draft in my copious spare time, but not actively participating in the community (I am watching, but I don’t have the time to really dig in). I think this is healthy,...
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Thursday, 11 December 2003
Tim Bray's latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS; But, pointed out Sam, think of it as a synchronization/offline problem. If I stick the whole essay in the feed, then someone can read it even when they're offline, because...
Wednesday, 10 December 2003
mnot-laptop:~> uname -a Darwin localhost.local 7.0.0 Darwin Kernel Version 7.0.0: Wed Sep 24 15:48:39 PDT 2003; root:xnu/xnu-517.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc mnot-laptop:~> echo "<a href='/'>test</a>" > ~/Sites/test.txt mnot-laptop:~> chmod a+r ~/Sites/test.txt mnot-laptop:~> curl -is http://localhost/~mnot/test.txt | grep Content-Type Content-Type: text/plain...
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Tuesday, 9 December 2003
IronPython is an implementation of Python for the CLR with some intriguing initial perf numbers. [ via Jeremy Hylton’s Weblog ] Shame I don’t have a Windows box where I could play with this… I got Virtual PC last week,...
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Monday, 8 December 2003
HTTP provides considerable benefits to Web applications that take advantage of it; everything from scalability (through caching), client-integrated authentication, automated redirection, multiple format support and lots more. I’ve been drafting some entries about how cool all of these things are;...
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Monday, 8 December 2003
The BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | UN warns of population surge" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3302497.stm">BBC reports that the UN is a bit concerned about population growth. Pretty much everybody knows this, I’m sure, but the degree of their concern is a bit of...
Sunday, 7 December 2003
Adam asks if there’s a description format for REST. I don’t know of any that have wide acceptance (and I think the hard-core RESTafarians will answer “REST is self-describing, that’s the point” ;) but I have been noodling on something...
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Sunday, 7 December 2003
I spent a little time on the plane the other day reading the latest WD of the RDF Primer. I didn’t attempt to review the entire document set, as reading a 71 page primer is quite enough! I haven’t followed...
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Saturday, 6 December 2003
How's this analogy: Putting QNames into your XML content is like using TCP packets as delimiters in an application protocol. Both can be technically done, but they force an awareness of the special problems they bring up in software layers...
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Wednesday, 26 November 2003
I’m getting a few requests for clarification and additional information from 3rd party vendors regarding my previous rant on XML editing. With any luck, XML editing will get much more interesting soon…...
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Sunday, 9 November 2003
I've done some adjustment to this Web log; you may or may not notice the differences. Most of is is cosmetic and tightening up of the templates, but I've also changed the URI layout (thanks, Mark), and as a result...
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Thursday, 30 October 2003
'cause Gudge says so, and as we all know, Gudge is always right....
Tuesday, 21 October 2003
I can't help but wonder if what Adam wants could be had using plain old HTTP by just defining a new format that is nothing but a list of links to stuff that's in-scope for a query. That way, when...
Friday, 17 October 2003
Love your work, Banksy. A statement from Tate Britain said that a man "had left a personal possession in one of the galleries"....
Friday, 17 October 2003
Now that hell has frozen over, it's interesting to speculate how far Apple will dip their toes in, and what their market opportunities are. Case in point, Tristan Louis considers the DRM built into Apple's iTunes, and the implications of...
Tuesday, 7 October 2003
Saute Wednesday has exposed one of our vices... ashed goat's cheese is like nothing else on earth. These days it's Humboldt Fog (from the Mollie Stone's around the corner; hell, there are the remnants of a $4.69 chunk in the...
Friday, 3 October 2003
Jeremy Allaire is writing about something he calls RSS-Data, and I must say it touches on a lot of interesting points. A few; data encoding - Jeremy's view of SOAP Encoding (aka "Section 5 Encoding") seems to be contrary to...
Friday, 3 October 2003
Mark Baker says that REST is SOA + late binding. While I see the truth in this, I think it's pretty orthogonal, and it's not that compelling for most SOAish folks. This is because their use cases are machines talking...
Thursday, 2 October 2003
Many XML-based formats could benefit from using references to promote modularity. For example, imagine a catalogue format; <x:catalogue owner="Bob"> <x:widget id="foo" name="FooWidget"> <x:description>The Foo Widget</x:description> </x:widget> <x:widget id="bar" name="BarWidget"> <x:description>The Bar Widget</x:description> </x:widget> </x:catalogue> The format's designer wants to allow...
Thursday, 2 October 2003
I'm seriously sick of using programs that call themselves "XML editors" because they colourize markup. I'm talking about XML Spy, Oxygen, BBEdit, and thousands of lesser programs. All of them are just glorified text editors - they still operate on...
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Wednesday, 24 September 2003
Tim Bray wonders what the difference between an RSS feed delivered via HTTP and an e-mail folder (e.g., via IMAP) is; I've wondered the same thing myself. As far as I can tell; * Subscribing to an RSS feed is...
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Thursday, 18 September 2003
The BBC reports an... inconceivably large rodent, aka "Guinea-zilla". They "... could have run in huge packs," and weighed 700kg. 700kg?!? I'm going to have nightmares tonight......
Saturday, 13 September 2003
Next time somebody says "let's install Bugzilla to track that" consider Roundup instead (unless you *like* painful, bloated software). Roundup is well-architected, modular, extensible, small in footprint, and Pythonic. You can run it on top of any number of back...
Saturday, 13 September 2003
I shudder when I see these words. Everyone I’ve asked has, at least once, gotten two orders of something online (personally, I’ve had the SonyEricsson store ship *three* duplicate orders); “Click Submit Only Once” is intended to stop that. The...
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Friday, 12 September 2003
I was in Stockholm earlier this summer as a stopover on the way home from Helsinki. One morning, Jorgen and I were walking along Strömkajen, waiting for a ferry, when a well-dressed man walked by, just a few feet away....
Wednesday, 10 September 2003
One of the most interesting examples of architecture I’ve seen in a while is the nearly-finished Swiss Re building(aka 30 St. Mary Axe) in London, also known as “The Gherkin” by locals there. I first saw it wondering the streets...
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Wednesday, 10 September 2003
Our problems continue. We took advantage of the $39.90 restocking fee to upgrade to the new 20G iPod; no difference at all in the battery behaviour (although the circle pad has a different design, IMHO spiffier; A doesn't like it...
Thursday, 28 August 2003
As previously noted, I often pass San Francisco figure Frank Chu on the way to and from work. This morning, I noticed something new - there's a professionally-printed ad on the back of his sign, for a crepe place, with...
Monday, 25 August 2003
I got Anitra an iPod (an intensely desirable object) last week, because the new car (new to us, at least) doesn't have a CD player, and she's got a long commute. Along with an iTrip, it seemed just the ticket....
Sunday, 24 August 2003
Somehow, I've been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft. I'm reasonably happy with the language around the requirements, but a lot more needs to be said about conformance (maybe it's all...
Saturday, 23 August 2003
I've had a fairly large and annoying bee in my bonnet for the past few months, regarding media type registration. It started buzzing when I tried (and failed) to register a media type for RSS, and has continued to...
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Thursday, 21 August 2003
I've heard several people in the industry assert that HTTP fundamentally limits the performance of applications that use it; in other words, there's a considerable disadvantage to using it, and that therefore other protocols (usually proprietary or platform-specific systems that...
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Monday, 18 August 2003
If you're lost in a sea of specs, pundits and opinions, might I suggest two very well-written, thoughtful papers: Principles of Service Oriented Integration by Sean McGrath at Propylon [pdf] Putting the "Web" in Web Services by Steve Vinoski at...
Tuesday, 12 August 2003
Here's something different. WebCapture "is a secure capture and playback system that records, in context, all web session pages that comprise an e-business transaction." "Capturing the INTENT and PROCESS is a centuries old and important standard essential in proving that...
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Monday, 11 August 2003
I love iPhoto's interface and its functionality, but the fact that the metadata is so closed is frustrating. I think I'm going to be able to import the RDFPic metadata embedded in most of my photos, with a short detour...
Monday, 11 August 2003
I just found a draft finding that the W3C TAG published about a month ago, regarding the use of metadata in URIs. This is very cool, and I especially like the emphasis on authorities’ ability to embed metadata in URIs....
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Monday, 4 August 2003
Marc Hadley points out that the version of iDisk in OSX Panther looks like it will enable offline functionality with caching; it also looks to do some synchronization. I'd really like to have a look at how they've done it....
Monday, 4 August 2003
RSSJobs looks interesting; hopefully, we'll see more of these "non-traditional" uses of RSS as time goes by....
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Saturday, 2 August 2003
Boy, I'd sure like some of whatever the Boeing folks are smoking. [ via The Economist, print edition, pg. 8-9 ]...
Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Ted Leung points out that caching PUT (and other WebDAV methods) would suit Subversion - probably the most interesting WebDAV application under open development - quite well. The only thing he says that I disagree with (and it might just...
Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Mark Baker is the latest in a series to weigh in on the TAG issue regarding what a HTTP URI can identify. I haven't followed the debate closely, but it appears that the arguments haven't changed substantively. Another way of...
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Saturday, 26 July 2003
If we WebDAV-enable Web applications, people will be able to interact with them like filesystems. To blog something, you'd be able to write an entry in the text editor of your choice, and then drag-and-drop them into what MSFT has...
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Saturday, 26 July 2003
One of my personal background tasks in the last couple of months has been finding sample applications to excercise Tarawa with. Although my load is high and I've only got a single processor - me - I'm still trying to...
Saturday, 26 July 2003
I spent more time today saying "dude" than I ever have before (proportionally), because I took a little drive. As you may have guessed, Antibes left me a little cold, despite the weather; I'm not a big fan of seaside...
Friday, 25 July 2003
Mark Pilgrim is starting to think about issues surrounding the transport, transfer and general moving around of the Format Formerly Known as Echo (nee Pie). This feels suspiciously like a profile of HTTP. We tried that a little bit in...
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Friday, 25 July 2003
Pros * Makes everybody jealous when you say you're going there * Great beaches and the Alps nearby * Sailing! Cons * Very hot and humid, especially when you're used to weatherless northern California * Full of tourists in high...
Friday, 25 July 2003
Adam Bosworth gives us a small taste of his thoughts re: Web services, with a promise of more. Glad to see the writer's block has broken!...
Monday, 21 July 2003
Back when we were exploring the possibity of a profile of RSS, I set up a wiki on the topic and promptly let it run wild, to see what would happen. Although most people have moved on to other approaches...
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Friday, 18 July 2003
Dave Winer has announced a few changes to RSS, which seem positive at first glance, but need a little closer inspection. It appears that the copyright for RSS 2.0 is now in the hands of Harvard Law school, and maintained...
Tuesday, 15 July 2003
I'm very happy to say that, after using Windows on the desktop for about a year, and various flavours of Unix on the desktop for about six years, I've Switched back to the Mac (which I happily used for about...
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Thursday, 10 July 2003
Adam Curry explains how he's bought placement in RSS aggregators. Trouble is, RSS isn't universally supported, as evidenced by the echo project, and he feels cheated. Now, I'd understand this if RSS were a well-defined standard, backed by a broad...
Saturday, 28 June 2003
Pros: * They're serious about this "midnight sun" thing * Discovered I actually like herring * Fantastic mobile phone coverage * Hima & Sali * Free bicycles! Cons: * They're serious about this "midnight sun" thing * Finns don't seem...
Saturday, 28 June 2003
I feel compelled to respond to Norm Walsh's thoughts on caching. It's important to distinguish between the capabilities of a specific product (such as WWWoffle) and the technology that it implements (caching). I would agree that the general state of...
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
You might notice a few ads in the Weblog and a few other places on the site; I'm playing with Google AdSence, first pointed out by AaronSW. This is really nifty - Google looks at your page, decides what's relevant,...
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Tuesday, 24 June 2003
The W3C Semantic Web wiki has an entry called 'BeesAndAnts' that very effectively conveys something that I've been trying to articulate for a while (and, as usual, failing). It's not about the Semantic Web in my mind, so much as...
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Tuesday, 24 June 2003
We finally did it. More than two years ago, I went to North Carolina almost by accident; at the last minute I asked David Fallside if I could come to the first meeting because it sounded "interesting." One of the...
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS. I and many other people have been tempted in the past to do this, and the landscape is littered with the their bones (always wanted...
Monday, 23 June 2003
Pros: * quick 1.5-hour boat ride from Helsinki * cool, still-foreign-looking passport stamps * full of beautiful european architecture / city planning Cons: * v. aggressive postcard-selling girls on EVERY corner * still not sure what the currency is called;...
Sunday, 22 June 2003
Mark Baker responded to my thoughts on RSS history a while back, and I'm *finally* getting around to responding (nothing like a hotel lobby to clear your thoughts...). I agree very much with just about everthing Mark says; RSS feeds...
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Sunday, 22 June 2003
Looks like a good to-read list: John Beatty: Economics of Standards (via John Beatty, one of my fellow BEA-ers; hi John!)...
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Friday, 20 June 2003
Is a Weblog a medium or is it a genre? (yes, this is a Weblog post about Weblogs. Oh, dear God, I've been sucked in...)...
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Tuesday, 17 June 2003
What does this interesting new, ad hoc work have to do with this interesting , new standards work and this interesting, new-ish effort by GK?...
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Monday, 16 June 2003
Sam Ruby has announced a Wiki about what a weblog entry is. Couple of things out of the way first; * 'log' is confusing; I thought he was talking about logfile formats when I first saw it. Call it a...
Saturday, 14 June 2003
Sean McGrath, Macintouch and others point out OxygenXML, a pretty slick-looking XML editor. Either it's pretty new and only now coming onto the scene, or I've had my head deeper in the sand than is typical. To put it through...
Thursday, 12 June 2003
Having a network-enabled (even if only through BlueTooth and infrared) is a heady experience; the ability to access the Web and sync applications from anywhere - really anywhere - is quite liberating. However, after playing with the new toy for...
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Thursday, 12 June 2003
I'm surprised by Dave Winer's continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given howstrongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions. If RSS 2.0 had a namespace, the conformance and semantics of a particular RSS document would...
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Friday, 6 June 2003
Got the Palm Tungsten T the other day ($309 from buy.com, - $50 trade-in). Nifty, much better than the aging handspring I was toting around. Cool apps include Kinoma for video viewing (anyone asking how Charlie is doing now gets...
Wednesday, 4 June 2003
Tim Bray is looking for an RSS soundbite, what some people would call an elevator pitch, I suppose (aren't they supposed to be level? Never mind). I made an attempt at motivating RSS for people a while back, in the...
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Thursday, 29 May 2003
Jo Walsh has created a Semantic Web system that appeals quite strongly - a means of using RDF to map to the real world in "gonzo geographical data collection". Very nice. I've been thinking about RDF-izing the Travel bookmarks for...
Thursday, 29 May 2003
Jonathan Rosenberg published a new Internet-Draft, XCAP, to the SIMPLE Working Group in the IETF. Here's the skinny: Abstract This specification defines the Extensible Markup Language (XML) Configuration Access Protocol (XCAP). XCAP allows a client to read, write and modify...
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
I agree with just about everything that Jim Waldo says here (at least for protocol standards). Well said!...
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line: The same philosophy dictates an end to the disagreement over RSS. If they want respect for the formats and protocols they implement, they must do RSS exactly as UserLand does....
Sunday, 25 May 2003
Tim Bray thinks out loud about mechanisms to allow RSS subscribers to be counted. His poison of choice is adding a query components to the URI in the Referrer header. I don't think that this is such a hot approach,...
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Monday, 19 May 2003
Oh... My... Gawd... I'm sooo confused. It's a Web site, and it has an RSS feed, and it uses Moveable Type, and it even has a blogroll down the side, so it must be a blog, right? But, like, it's...
Friday, 16 May 2003
Hmm. Passed the 12 Galaxies guy on the way home from work today. Usually, he's very polite and keeps to himself. This time, he was yelling at passers by and waving his sign at him. Violently. Hope he's OK......
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Sunday, 11 May 2003
Don wants to send RSS to OASIS, of all places. Doesn't that mean it'll have to be corporations standardizing it? Urgh. I agree with most of Tim's assessment; the IETF is the most hospitable place for this. I'm happy to...
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Saturday, 10 May 2003
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS. I don't think blogs are the best medium for this kind of development - it's too hard to follow a thread, and it's too easy for...
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Saturday, 10 May 2003
If you are in "the industry," you owe it to yourself to go out and pick up a copy of this week's Economist. Alongside their customary digs at Larry Ellison (what do they have against that guy? I can't imagine...)...
Friday, 9 May 2003
Before, I was wondering about the intersection of Wikis and the Semantic Web. I've since done some noodling and prototyping, and the idea came together on the train home tonight. You *can* build some semantics using just WikiNames. For example,...
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Thursday, 8 May 2003
I know at least one person who will think that this is a good idea. Anybody else? I'd looove to do this work......
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Monday, 5 May 2003
I've finally gotten sick enough of a project that I've been working on for waaaay too long to release it to the unsuspecting^H^H^H general public. Tarawa is, in short, a HTTP server API that tries to apply some of the...
Sunday, 4 May 2003
Don't get me wrong - I love Apple and all things apple. But, the Genius bar at the Apple Store never fails to annoy. Every time I go in with a hardware problem, I have to wait behind an endless...
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Saturday, 3 May 2003
From the Montreal Gazette - "Deborah Wolfe, a Canadian citizen who was just breast-feeding her son and changing his diaper while en route between Houston and Vancouver, says her "subversive" actions led to her being threatened with detainment, RCMP involvement...
Saturday, 3 May 2003
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module. This approach is the most sensible for ANY application of Semantic Web technology (as I've argued before). Rather than foisting RDF's ugly, unusable XML syntax on applications, map from...
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Saturday, 3 May 2003
I'm setting up a weblog for a fairly well-known colleague, and doing some traffic estimates to try to size his server. Assumptions: * 5000 people will eventually subscribe to the weblog * Each person's aggregator will poll once an hour...
Saturday, 3 May 2003
One of the joys of moving to a mac for my personal machine is using Apple's excellent Mail.app; IMHO it's the best GUI mail client yet. However, I'm having a WEIRD problem; it seems that all drag-and-drop in Mail.app is...
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Thursday, 1 May 2003
Anybody know how to get ZeroConf working on Linux, so that I can advertise services on my server to the Macs at home?...
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Tuesday, 29 April 2003
Sam mentions dc:date; that's what I was thinking, except that 'date' on its own is pretty useless. As Bill points out, dcterms gives you different date semantics. dcterms:issued seems to match RSS's pubDate most closely, while as far as I...
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Monday, 28 April 2003
Anybody else notice how you can use a Wiki like a Semantic Web engine? For example, define a WikiName, say PersonThing. Only use the PersonThing WikiName on pages that identify... person things! You're basically saying a :PersonThing . OK, it's...
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Monday, 28 April 2003
[ I tried to post this as a comment on Sam's blog, but I think there may still be transitional issues over there... ] Overlord? COOL... I don't think I've ever been the overlord of anything. Seriously, as Sam says,...
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Monday, 28 April 2003
Amazon sent my wife a nice, juicy bit of SPAM this morning. "Get the Amazon.com Platinum Visa card!" This despite her having her "Communication Preferences" set to not allow anything but legal notices. Are credit card offers legal notices, suddenly?...
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Sunday, 27 April 2003
For discussion: RSS history module (the eventual result of this)....
Saturday, 26 April 2003
For those who have been helping, it's alive, has been for almost a week, but I still want to do a bit more documentation, hunt down a few bugs, and get some more unit tests down. Unfortunately, I need more...
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Thursday, 24 April 2003
It's not necessary to lament the lack of ETags on generated Web pages; cgi_buffer automagically generates and validates them for Perl, Python and PHP scripts. Yes, I keep on shamelessly plugging this one, but the question keeps on coming up......
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Thursday, 24 April 2003
OK, here's the deal. As previously reported, we got the nifty Ericsson phones that come with free cameras. They're Internet-capable. The next obvious step is to hook it up to a blog, and presto! You've got photoblog! You get to...
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Wednesday, 23 April 2003
Anitra and I have taken to watching What Not To Wear. Yes, it's a fashion show, but it's probably the most non-American show on right now; very refreshing and wicked good fun to watch. Contrast with the US version -...
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Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Tim says thatRSS Needs Fixing. Right on! Some people are intereted in endless tinkering with RSS - I'm not. I'm interested in putting it on everybody's desktop, and making it transparent to them. This means we need better interop. How...
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Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Sam proposes some changes to RSS 2.0 regarding namespaces. My first question was, "why?" but upon reading his next post, I get it. The Big Problem with namespaces the first time around was that it broke some software, which Dave...
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Saturday, 19 April 2003
RSS.py has been revved; fixed some problems with addItem (now takes an index argument to say where to add the item; default is first - used to be last), and a few other tweaks. Yes, I am aware of the...
Friday, 18 April 2003
Don's worried about the glaciating influences of having a stable spec for RSS 2.0. I couldn't disagree more. Like Don, RSS is my hobby; has been since about 1999, when I started the Syndication list. I watched and occasionally pitched...
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Friday, 18 April 2003
RSS needs a bit of stablity (as I've often said), so I've gotten off of my duff and done something about it. For your interest, an Internet-Draft of RSS 2.0. As it says, this is RSS 2.0, as Dave has...
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Thursday, 17 April 2003
There seems to be a a lot of new blogs showing up from inside companies... I can only wonder if it's becoming the microserf equivalent of flair....
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Tuesday, 8 April 2003
LiveHTTPHeaders for Mozilla is the best HTTP header sniffer I've seen yet; up till now, I've been using WebTee, but for *most* purposes, this is much better. Enjoy....
Thursday, 27 March 2003
Dave seems excited by Macromedia's announcement. I'm less enthusiastic. Not only does it lock you into one vendor, but their product, well, sucks. Anitra loaded up Flash MX on the trusty eMac the other week, to refamiliarize herself before teaching...
Tuesday, 25 March 2003
Jorgen hits a subject that's of great interest to me; RSS standardization. I originally started the Syndication list to get RSS moving towards some sort of recognized standard; more recently, my effort to register an RSS media type was stalled...
Friday, 14 March 2003
Not sure I like the name, but Friendster looks interesting. In a nutshell, it's a social networking tool that's very similar to the FOAF efforts, but with better UI and features. It would be nice if it plugged into FOAF...
Thursday, 27 February 2003
Just finished reading Blue Latitudes, which follows the trail of Captain Cook, both in history as well as geography; Horowitz follows (roughly) the path of cook, sailing and flying to destinations such as New Zealand, Australia, Tonga, the Aleutians and...
Friday, 14 February 2003
Word is that somewhere in the neighborhood of200,000 Melbournians got out of bed yesterday and decided to give a peice of their minds to the government. Good thing, too; you can argue as much as you like about whether America...
Thursday, 13 February 2003
One of the goals for me in using computers is to make my data and access to it platform-indenpendent; I've switched platforms too many times (Mac->Ultrix/Digital Unix->Linux->SunOS/Solaris->Windows NT->Linux->OSX->Windows2000->WinXP->?); I can't have my data tied up in proprietary formats or APIs,...
Thursday, 30 January 2003
Travel bookmarks have been reorg'd and cleaned; the RSS feed gives you the latest additions. Suggestions welcome....
Sunday, 26 January 2003
I always wondered why so many people had their blogs' comments and even trackback indicators turned off. Go ahead and surf around; it's a rare blog indeed, at least in my experience, that has these features visible for the world...
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Tuesday, 21 January 2003
So all the sudden everybody's talking about RSS again. It came up spontaneously at work - DaveO proclaimed "I'm totally getting into RSS" unprompted the other day. Very cool. Now Tim Bray is pondering the future of RSS. Interestinger still....
Tuesday, 14 January 2003
Dave takes issue with people's comments about the Bay area. I have mixed feelings; SF has a lot against it - cost of living and some measures of quality of life (let's face it, there's not a lot going on...
Saturday, 11 January 2003
If you haven't read Patrick O'Brian's astounding Aubrey/Maturin novels, now's probably your last chance before at least one is made into film, by none less than Peter Weir. I am very, very excited....
Wednesday, 8 January 2003
I'm no SVG expert, but this sure seems like it. Gotta get me a copy of that....
Wednesday, 11 December 2002
Aaron points out the Apple Switch commercial starring Yo Yo Ma. Cool; how long before we see a Switch ad with TBL? :)...
Sunday, 8 December 2002
Wouldn't it be great if The Royal Society, the Commonwealth Club and your local council all had RSS feeds available, conspiquous and up-to-date?...
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Wednesday, 27 November 2002
I'm extremely wary about the new prefetching feature in Mozilla. The Web caching community has tried this from about every angle, but the general consensus of professionals (with one notable exception) is that prefetching is a bad approach. For...
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Tuesday, 26 November 2002
Hixie, Mark and others are talking about serving up application/xhtml+xml selectively to browsers. One question; how do you do this without either doing the wrong thing (e.g., if a shared cache in between stores a copy meant for, say, Mozilla,...
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Monday, 25 November 2002
Almost forgot - today I put an exploration of the semantics of RSS:Channel out there for comment. I've been thinking about various aspects of this for a while; not sure how far I've gotten, but I think it's important to...
Monday, 25 November 2002
RSS: XHTML Profile, to me, is another proof that syntax isn't important, as long as you can boil whatever you get down to a format you know. Nice job!...
Sunday, 17 November 2002
We just replaced our phones with Sony Ericsson T300s with T-Mobile; sooo cool. I've never really been interested in WAP, WML, etc., but now the floodgates have opened. Unfortunately, there are a few problems; apparently, their gateway limits page size...
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Saturday, 16 November 2002
Jack William Bell makes a precise, short and readable effort at explaining why RDF is simple and important. In the article and subsequent discussion, it's clear that RDF model and syntax are very different topics. EVERYONE that I talk to...
Sunday, 10 November 2002
Finally, the IESG puts its money where its mouth is; this tool allows you to see the status and individual AD's comments about a particular I-D. It's only a start, but at least you have some idea of what's going...
Friday, 1 November 2002
unböring is a great campaign - I'd love to know who their agency is. It's so... Swedish; the one with the creamer and the guy on the bicycle is classic. Speaking of Sweden, this reinforces the resolution we made on...
Thursday, 12 September 2002
Jeremy Allaire talks about establishing a "rich client" platform because HTML is "stagnant." Two questions; will it be standards-based, and what about SVG? I'd really rather not have Macromedia succeed in its ambitions to be the next Microsoft......
Tuesday, 10 September 2002
iCal is out, and is pushing me ever so closer to taking my perfectly reasonable Dell laptop and shoving it down the throat of the next IT person that I see. Nothing personal. The few chances I get to work...
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Tuesday, 10 September 2002
The Story About the Baby is the funniest thing I've read in a while, doubly so considering it's about children. Every geek parent has thought these thoughts. (from memepool)...
Friday, 6 September 2002
I'm trying out movabletype, as there were some pretty severe limitations doing it with the bookmarks......
Tuesday, 3 September 2002
I've been following the Economist's new Global Housing Index with some interest. They seem to have softened their view somewhat, but I'm hearing more about a global housing bubble recently - first, in a WSJ article about the author of...
Tuesday, 3 September 2002
I see Dave is once again rev'ing RSS. I have reservations about the some of the new mechanisms (e.g., shoe-horning MIME into XML is a horrible idea) but I'm encouraged by hints that using XML Namespaces is being considered....
Monday, 26 August 2002
One of the most intriguing parts of this, to me, is section 3.1.2; "How people meet: being in the in-group." Possibly because I'm usually not in the in-group... Storper theorizes that F2F communication is necessary to maintain the boundries of...
Monday, 26 August 2002
This pisses me off. Victims of terrorism certainly should get some support - that's the function of government in a society. But why should that support take the form of tax relief? People who pay a lot of taxes -...
Saturday, 24 August 2002
This article (you can google for the original paper) is, to me, pivotal to emerging Web standards. Both Semantic Web and Web Services are about machine-to-machine communication; the promise that machines will be able to act as an agent,...
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Saturday, 24 August 2002
Interesting; I'm glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough. However, it still doesn't approach what I see as the critical problems with using RDF in RSS. First of all, considering that it's trying...
Tuesday, 20 August 2002
Don talks about the evils of tolerance in receiving implementations, and I say Amen, brother! Preach! The classic approach works when there are relatively few implementators; however, when the whole world implements a protocol (whether it's SOAP or HTML or...