On Opting Out of Copyright
Wednesday, 18 September 2024
The EU AI Act and emerging practice flip copyright’s default opt-in regime to an opt-out one. What effects is this likely to have on the balance of power between rights holders and reuse?all entries
What RSS Needs
Sunday, 25 August 2024
Web feeds could be so much more if we put some effort into them. This post explores some ideas of how to start.Are Internet Standards Competitive or Collaborative?
Tuesday, 16 July 2024
It's often assumed that standards work is inherently competitive. This post examines why Internet standards are often more collaborative than competitive, and outlines some implications of this approach.Openness in Internet Standards: Necessary, but Insufficient
Friday, 5 July 2024
The phrase 'Open Standards' is widely used but not well-understood. Let's take a look at what openness in standards is, with a focus on whether and how it helps to legitimise the design and maintenance of the Internet.Consensus in Internet Standards
Friday, 24 May 2024
It’s common for voluntary technical standards developing organisations (SDOs such as the IETF and W3C) to make decisions by consensus, rather than (for example) voting. This post explores why we use consensus, what it is, how it works in Internet standards and when its use can become problematic.Modularity: Enabling Interoperability and Competition
Friday, 10 May 2024
Mandated interoperability is often highlighted as a way to improve competition on the Internet. However, most of the interoperability we see there today was established voluntarily: mandating it is relatively uncharted territory, with many potential pitfalls.No One Should Have That Much Power
Monday, 29 April 2024
It’s a common spy thriller trope. There’s a special key that can unlock something critical – business records, bank vaults, government secrets, nuclear weapons, maybe all of the above, worldwide.Considerations for AI Opt-Out
Sunday, 21 April 2024
Creating a Large Language Model (LLM) requires a lot of content – as implied by the name, LLMs need voluminous input data to be able to function well. Much of that content comes from the Internet, and early models have been seeded by crawling the whole Web.There Are No Standards Police
Wednesday, 13 March 2024
No one requires tech companies or open source projects to use most Internet standards, and no one requires people to use them either. This post explains why the voluntary nature of its standards are critical to the Internet's health.RFC 9518 - What Can Internet Standards Do About Centralisation?
Tuesday, 19 December 2023
RFC 9518: Centralization, Decentralization, and Internet Standards has been published after more than two years of review, discussion, and revision.How to Run an Australian Web Site in 2024
Monday, 27 November 2023
A while back, the eSafety Commissioner declined to register the proposed Industry Codes that I’ve previously written about. Now, they’ve announced a set of Industry Standards that, after a comment period, will likely be law.Technical Standards Bodies are Regulators
Wednesday, 1 November 2023
There are lots of ways to view what Internet standards bodies like the IETF and W3C do. This post examines them as a type of regulator and explores what that means for how they operate.How we Build Platforms
Sunday, 19 February 2023
I’m fascinated by the Metaverse. Not because I want to use that steaming pile of legless avatars, but because it’s the latest prominent attempt to establish a new platform. As Mark Zuckerberg said in internal emails about it:What I Learned in Law School
Thursday, 5 January 2023
In the last decade or so, it’s become increasingly apparent that the Internet is going to be subject to more legal regulation. Because it’s a global network, this is tricky; fragmentation risk grows if regulation isn’t consistent between jurisdictions. And of course, there are all the other pitfalls of regulation — it’s difficult to agree on societal goals, much less change working systems to meet those goals without ill effect.A Safer, More Centralised Australian Internet
Sunday, 11 September 2022
There are many potential criticisms of the Online Safety Act 2021 (Cth)1. While my own concerns are mostly about whether there are appropriate checks and balances on the eSafety Commissioner’s powers, I will give credit where due; the current Commissioner’s implementation of it has – so far – demonstrated nuance and thoughtful balancing of the legislation’s goals with the preservation and enhancement of the unique properties that make the Internet so valuable to society. See, eg, ‘Explainer: The Online Safety Bill’, Digital Rights Watch. ↩What willwould a Chromium-only Web look like?
Wednesday, 22 June 2022
Most of the complexity and nuance of the Web is stuffed into browser engines. Even though they’re a huge burden to develop and maintain, the world is lucky enough to have three major ones, and they’re all Open Source.Yet More New HTTP Specs
Wednesday, 8 June 2022
The HTTP “core” documents were published on Monday, including a revision of HTTP semantics, caching, HTTP/1.1, HTTP/2, and the brand-new HTTP/3. However, that’s not all that the HTTP community has been up to.A New Definition of HTTP
Monday, 6 June 2022
Seven and a half years ago, I wrote that RFC2616 is dead, replaced by RFCs 7230-5.Server-Sent Events, WebSockets, and HTTP
Sunday, 20 February 2022
The orange site is currently discussing an article about Server-Sent Events, especially as compared with WebSockets (and the emerging WebTransport). Both the article and discussion are well-informed, but I think they miss out on one aspect that has fairly deep implications.How the Next Layer of the Internet is Going to be Standardised
Monday, 21 June 2021
A big change in how the Internet is defined - and who defines it - is underway.No news is... a sign of a stagnating Internet
Thursday, 18 February 2021
Today, Facebook shut off the news in Australia – all of it, and much more besides. For example, when I tried to post a link to this blog entry on Facebook, they responded:RFC 8890 - The Internet is for End Users
Friday, 28 August 2020
The Internet Architecture Board (IAB) has published RFC8890, The Internet is for End Users, arguing that the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) should ground its decisions in what’s good for people who use the Internet, and that it should take positive steps to achieve that.What limits legal access to cloud data in Australia?
Monday, 29 June 2020
The Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 20181 has proven controversial both before and after passage,2 with considerable debate about its industry assistance framework and its potential for systemically weakening encryption on the Internet - a framing emphasised by the explanatory memorandum which introduced the legislation as ‘measures to better deal with the challenges posed by ubiquitous encryption.’3 Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (Cth). ↩ See, eg, Stilgherrian, ‘What’s actually in Australia’s encryption laws? Everything you need to know’ ZDNet (online, 10 December 2018) https://www.zdnet.com/article/whats-actually-in-australias-encryption-laws-everything-you-need-to-know/. ↩ Explanatory Memorandum, Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Act 2018 (Cth), 2 [1]. ↩On RFC8674, the safe preference for HTTP
Thursday, 5 December 2019
It’s become common for Web sites – particularly those that host third-party or user-generated content – to make a “safe” mode available, where content that might be objectionable is hidden. For example, a parent who wants to steer their child away from the rougher corners of the Internet might go to their search engine and put it in “safe” mode.How Multiplexing Changes Your HTTP APIs
Sunday, 13 October 2019
When I first learned about SPDY, I was excited about it for a number of reasons, but near the top of the list was its potential impact on APIs that use HTTP.Moving Control to the Endpoints
Tuesday, 11 June 2019
The introduction of encrypted DNS is a natural step in the process of securing the Internet, but it has brought a considerable amount of controversy, because it removes a means of control for network operators -- including not only enterprises but also schools and parents. The solution is to move control of these services to the endpoints of communication -- for example, the users’ computers -- but doing so has its own challenges.Eight #aabill Predictions
Thursday, 6 December 2018
As I write this, the Australian Senate is in the final stages of passing the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 (with some but not all amendments).Australian Assistance and Access Bill 2018: Amendments
Thursday, 6 December 2018
In a great hurry, Australia’s house of representatives today passed the controversial Assistance and Access Bill 2018. However, there were some last-minute amendments slipped in. Currently, it’s being debated in the Senate.Designing Headers for HTTP Compression
Tuesday, 27 November 2018
One of the concerns that often comes up when someone creates a new HTTP header is how much “bloat” it will add on the network. This is especially relevant in requests, when a little bit of extra data can introduce a lot of latency when repeated on every request.Do you Trust Australia? Part Four
Thursday, 15 November 2018
On 20 August, I went to Canberra to participate in an Internet Society experts' panel on encryption.Do you Trust Australia? Part Three
Sunday, 19 August 2018
Not that long ago, the US government attempted to compel Microsoft to reveal a customer's data that was located in Ireland.Do you Trust Australia? Part Two
Thursday, 16 August 2018
After a couple of sleeps, I think my concerns about the proposed Assistance and Access Bill 2018 have crystallised.Do you Trust Australia?
Tuesday, 14 August 2018
This morning, the Australian Department of Home Affairs released the Assistance and Access Bill 2018 for consultation.How to Read an RFC
Tuesday, 31 July 2018
For better or worse, Requests for Comments (RFCs) are how we specify many protocols on the Internet. These documents are alternatively treated as holy texts by developers who parse them for hidden meanings, then shunned as irrelevant because they can’t be understood. This often leads to frustration and – more significantly – interoperability and security issues.How (Not) to Control Your CDN
Wednesday, 7 June 2017
In February, Omer Gil described the Web Cache Deception Attack.How to Think About HTTP Status Codes
Thursday, 11 May 2017
There’s more than a little confusion and angst out there about HTTP status codes. I’ve received more than a few e-mails (and IMs, and DMs) over the years from stressed-out developers (once at 2am, their time!) asking something like this:The State of Browser Caching, Revisited
Thursday, 16 March 2017
A long, long time ago, I wrote some tests using XmlHttpRequest to figure out how well browser caches behaved, and wrote up the results.Ideal HTTP Performance
Friday, 22 April 2016
The implicit goal for Web performance is to reduce end-user perceived latency; to get the page in front of the user and interactive as soon as possible.Alternative Services
Wednesday, 9 March 2016
The IESG has approved “HTTP Alternative Services” for publication as a Proposed Standard.Why 451?
Friday, 18 December 2015
Today, the IESG approved publication of “An HTTP Status Code to Report Legal Obstacles”. It’ll be an RFC after some work by the RFC Editor and a few more process bits, but effectively you can start using it now.Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
Tuesday, 18 August 2015
One of the things that came up at the HTTP Workshop was “distributed HTTP” — i.e., moving the Web from a client/server model to a more distributed one. This week, Brewster Khale (of Archive.org fame) talked about similar thoughts on his blog and at CCC. If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d highly suggest watching the latter.Snowden Meets the IETF
Monday, 20 July 2015
Last night, we had a screening of CITIZENFOUR at the IETF meeting in Prague, and about 170 people showed up to see the movie about Edward Snowden’s relevations — information that led the IETF to declare such pervasive monitoring as an attack on the Internet itself.HTTP/2 Implementation Status
Monday, 15 June 2015
RFC7540 has been out for about a month, so it seems like a good time for a snapshot of where HTTP/2 implementation is at.Improving Captive Portals
Wednesday, 25 March 2015
Yesterday at IETF92 in Dallas, we had a “Bar BoF” (i.e., informal meeting) about improving the behaviour and handling of Captive Portals — those login pages that you have to click through to get onto networks in hotels, airports, and many other places.HTTP/2 is Done
Wednesday, 18 February 2015
The IESG has formally approved the HTTP/2 and HPACK specifications, and they’re on their way to the RFC Editor, where they’ll soon be assigned RFC numbers, go through some editorial processes, and be published.Dissecting Australia's Proposed Data Retention Law
Monday, 19 January 2015
Much has been written about the societal impact of Australia’s proposed data retention laws (see some examples here and here) which I won’t repeat. However, they are quite interesting — and worrisome — from a more technical perspective.Why Intermediation is Important
Saturday, 27 December 2014
A few months ago I went to the Internet Governance Forum, looking to understand more about the IGF and its attendees. One of the things I learned there was a different definition of “intermediary” — one that I think the standards community should pay close attention to.Python 2 and TLS SNI
Saturday, 27 December 2014
Python 2.7.9 was recently released, and that means that it supports TLS Server Name Indication.What is the Web?
Thursday, 4 December 2014
This post is mostly for folks who haven’t been following Web standards closely — especially IETF folks. If you have been, there’s probably not much new here (but feel free to poke holes!).RFC2616 is Dead
Saturday, 7 June 2014
Don’t use RFC2616. Delete it from your hard drives, bookmarks, and burn (or responsibly recycle) any copies that are printed out.Chrome and Stale-While-Revalidate
Sunday, 1 June 2014
Chrome is looking at adding support for RFC5861’s stale-while-revalidate, which is really cool. I wrote about the details of SwR when it first became an RFC, but its application to browsers is something that’s a new. Seems like a good time to answer a few potential questions.If You Can Read This, You're SNIing
Friday, 9 May 2014
When TLS was defined, it didn’t allow more than one hostname to be available on a single IP address / port pair, leading to “virtual hosting” issues; each Web site (for example) now requires a dedicated IP address.How Many Package Managers Should I Support?
Monday, 5 May 2014
For whatever reason, my little hinclude JavaScript library is mildly popular. It’s just a bit of JS that you stick in a page to do declarative includes client-side; mostly, it was an experiment in doing composition a la ESI in the browser. However, Symfony picked it up, and since then, I’ve had a trickle of e-mails, issues and pull requests.Trying out TLS for HTTP:// URLs
Monday, 17 March 2014
The IETF now considers “pervasive monitoring” to be an attack. As Snowden points out, one of the more effective ways to combat it is to use encryption everywhere you can, and “opportunistic encryption” keeps on coming up as one way to help that.Nine Things to Expect from HTTP/2
Thursday, 30 January 2014
HTTP/2 is getting close to being real, with lots of discussions and more implementations popping up every week. What does a new version of the Web’s protocol mean for you? Here are some early answers:Strengthening HTTP: A Personal View
Saturday, 4 January 2014
Recently, one of the hottest topics in the Internet protocol community has been whether the newest version of the Web’s protocol, HTTP/2, will require, encourage or indeed say anything about the use of encryption in response to the pervasive monitoring attacks revealed to the world by Edward Snowden.Five Reasons to Considering Linking in Your HTTP APIs
Sunday, 23 June 2013
There’s been a lot of interest in and effort expended upon “hypermedia APIs” recently. However, I see a fair amount of resistance to it from developers and ops folks, because the pragmatic benefits aren’t often clear. This is as it should be, IMO; if you’re not able to describe concrete benefits without hand-waving about the “massive scale of the Web.”A Few Thoughts about PRISM
Friday, 21 June 2013
The NSA PRISM story broke while I was on the road; last week I was in Tokyo for W3C meetings, moving to San Francisco for a HTTP meeting and Velocity.Indicating Problems in HTTP APIs
Wednesday, 15 May 2013
A common part of HTTP-based APIs is telling the client that something has gone wrong. Most APIs do this in some fashion, whether they call it a “Fault” (very SOAP-y), “Error” or whatever.A Short Note
Sunday, 20 January 2013
In 2001, Charlie was born, and (understandably) we were freaking out a bit, having a new child and all. However, at about the same time, I met this really remarkable kid at the W3C, and I asked him what advice he could give me, from his perspective.Exploring Header Compression in HTTP/2.0
Friday, 4 January 2013
One of the major mechanisms proposed by SPDY for use in HTTP/2.0 is header compression. This is motivated by a number of things, but heavy in the mix is the combination of having more and more requests in a page, and the increasing use of mobile, where every packet is, well, precious. Compressing headers (separately from message bodies) both reduces the overhead of additional requests and of introducing new headers. To illustrate this, Patrick put together a synthetic test that showed that a set of 83 requests for assets on a page (very common these days) could be compressed down to just one round trip – a huge win (especially for mobile). You can also see the potential wins in the illustration that I used in my Velocity Europe talk."Why Don't You Just…"
Tuesday, 18 December 2012
A proposal by John Graham-Cumming is currently doing the rounds:HTTP Status: 101 Switching Protocols
Friday, 7 December 2012
The HTTPbis Working Group met in Atlanta last month; here’s how things are going.Evolving HTTP APIs
Tuesday, 4 December 2012
One of the most vexing problems that still seems to be facing people when I talk to them about HTTP APIs is how to handle versioning and extensibility – i.e., how they evolve.OPTIONS is Not the Method You're Looking For
Monday, 29 October 2012
Once in a while, people ask me whether they should use the OPTIONS HTTP method, and whether we should try to define formats for discovering resource capabilities with it.Production Notes
Sunday, 28 October 2012
I’ve (finally) moved this server to another Rackspace cloud server; same (small) size, but with a fresh OS.Caching POST
Monday, 24 September 2012
One of the changes in Apple’s release of iOS6 last week was a surprising new ability to cache POST responses.Akamai, Again
Thursday, 13 September 2012
I’ve spent the last year working at Rackspace, and it’s been quite a ride. However, I joined there thinking that our work on HTTP was winding down.Why PATCH is Good for Your HTTP API
Wednesday, 5 September 2012
A common problem for APIs is partial update; when the client wants to change just one part of a resource’s state. For example, imagine that you’ve got a JSON representation of your widget resource that looks like:HTTP in Vancouver
Saturday, 4 August 2012
The HTTPBIS Working Group is in a transitional phase; we’re rapidly finishing our revision of the HTTP/1.1 specification and just getting steam up on our next target, HTTP/2.0.Bad HTTP API Smells: Version Headers
Wednesday, 11 July 2012
One thing I didn’t cover in my previous rant on HTTP API versioning is an anti-pattern that I’m seeing a disturbing number of APIs adopt; using a HTTP header to indicate the overall version of the API in use. Examples include CIMI, CDMI, GData and I’m sure many more.HTTP API Complexity
Monday, 25 June 2012
@dret: if your scenario is homogeneous and models are harmonized across participants, #REST is of limited utility for you.Profiles
Tuesday, 17 April 2012
Erik Wilde - otherwise known as dret - has published an Internet-Draft for a “profile” link relation type:User Personas for HTTP APIs
Saturday, 14 April 2012
When you’re designing HTTP APIs, you need to keep a lot of concerns in mind. Stealing a page from XP, let’s look at some possible personas and their user stories for HTTP-based APIs:JSON or XML: Just Decide
Friday, 13 April 2012
When people create HTTP APIs, one of the common decisions is about what format to use, usually revolving around “JSON or XML?”What's Next for HTTP
Saturday, 31 March 2012
We had two great meetings of the HTTPbis Working Group in Paris this week — one to start wrapping up our work on HTTP/1.1, and another to launch some exciting new work on HTTP/2.0.Linking in JSON
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.Web API Versioning Smackdown
Tuesday, 25 October 2011
A lot of bits have been used over on the OpenStack list recently about versioning the HTTP APIs they provide.Why ESI is Still Important, and How to Make it Better
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.Thinking about Namespaces in JSON
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.RFC6266 and Content-Disposition
Friday, 2 September 2011
HTTPbis published RFC6266 a little while ago, but the work isn’t finished.Better Browser Caching
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;And now for something completely different... again.
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 well; I’ve learned and done a lot, and Y! has given me a lot of room (both metaphorical as well as physical, given that for most of it, I’ve been more than 7,500 miles from my boss), which is much appreciated.Distributed Hungarian Notation doesn't Work
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.HTTP Pipelining Today
Friday, 5 August 2011
Last week, Blaze.io highlighted how mobile browsers use HTTP pipelining.CSP
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.What Proxies Must Do
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”*.Fixing AppCache
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.Linked Cache Invalidation
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.On HTTP Load Testing
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.HTTP POST: IETF Prague Edition
Monday, 4 April 2011
Your REST worries have ended.
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Now, you can test any URL to instantly determine if it’s RESTful.htracr in Two Minutes
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
I made a quick and dirty screencast to show off some of the newer features in htracr.Last Call: Content-Disposition
Tuesday, 1 March 2011
The IESG has received a request from the Hypertext Transfer Protocol Bis WG (httpbis) to consider the following document:Digging Deeper with htracr
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.HTTP Roundup: What’s Up with the Web’s Protocol
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.Thou Shalt Use TLS?
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 in a new blog entry, but his summary is simple: “users want it.”Падручнік па кэшаванню
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
Patricia Clausnitzer has kindly translated the Caching Tutorial to Belarusian. Thanks!The Winter of Our Disconnect
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 one of the more enjoyable and informative reads I’ve had in a while.Why Our New TV Doesn't Like the Web
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.RFC5861: HTTP Stale Controls
Thursday, 6 May 2010
On a bit of a roll, RFC5861: HTTP Stale Controls has (finally) been published as an Informational RFC.Thoughts on Archiving HTTP
Wednesday, 5 May 2010
Steve Souders and others have been working for a while on HAR, a HTTP Archive format.RFC 5785 - Well-Known URIs
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 took it up after that.Caching-Tutorial für Webautoren und Webmaster
Wednesday, 10 March 2010
Thomas Hühn has graciously translated the caching tutorial into German. Thanks!Are Resource Packages a Good Idea?
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.WS-REST (heh, heh)
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.HTTP + Politics = ?
Wednesday, 16 December 2009
Australia has apparently decided, through its elected leaders, to filter its own Internet connection.Will HTTP/2.0 Happen After All?
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.Traffic Server
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 of AOL, when AOL was still how most people accessed the Internet.Working with the US on Education
Monday, 19 October 2009
Dear Ms. Gillard,#gov2au
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.RED gets a blog
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…Come to the Stockholm IETF!
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).The Resource Expert Droid
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.面向站长和网站管理员的Web缓存加速指南
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!).What to Look For in a HTTP Proxy/Cache
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.Opera Turbo
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;Most Revealing Google Wave Comment
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:Counting the ways that rev="canonical" hurts the Web
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 have to wait. Going offline for a few days always brings a certain dread of what one’s inbox will hold when you get back, and this one was no exception.The FSF, IETF and Use Patents
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;Caching When You Least Expect it
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
There’s a rule of thumb about when a HTTP response can be cached; the Caching Tutorial says:Cobbler / children / shoes / etc.
Tuesday, 24 February 2009
Rob Sayre points out that this blog still doesn’t show a preference for Atom, embarrassingly enough.Stop it with the X- Already!
Wednesday, 18 February 2009
UPDATE: RFC6648 is now the official word on this topic.Have a Drink (or hundred)
Friday, 2 January 2009
Now here’s a good meme for the New Year…OAuth in Minneapolis
Friday, 21 November 2008
There are lots of new “Web 2.0” specs emerging — many beginning with “o” — that are both exciting and concerning.Dev-Friendly Web Caching
Monday, 27 October 2008
Ryan Tomayko announces Rack::Cache, a HTTP cache for Ruby’s generic Web API;/site-meta
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.The WS-Empire Strikes Back... feebly
Friday, 4 July 2008
Here’s a gem on a little-used mailing list:The Pitfalls of Debugging HTTP
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.Atom gets a new audience
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.”Moving the Goalposts: “Use” Patents and Standards
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* is not to pick on any single one**.Moving Beyond Methods in REST
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 are even starting to align object models with resource models, where HTTP methods map to method calls on things with identity. Good stuff.DAV WTF?
Monday, 3 March 2008
Not many people that I know outside of IETF circles realise that a new *DAV effort has started up; CardDAV.POST and PATCH
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.Location, Location, Location
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 foot by county.Another Kind of HTTP Negotiation
Wednesday, 6 February 2008
Here’s one that I’ve been wondering about for a while, for the LazyWeb (HTTP Geek Edition);Watching WADL (and other rambling thoughts)
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 Patrick and Joe’s thoughts for a nice contrast).Cache Channels
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.Two HTTP Caching Extensions
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.Why Revise HTTP?
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.WADL Documentation XSLT Updated
Friday, 2 November 2007
I’ve updated the WADL documentation stylesheet, primarily to:5005
Saturday, 8 September 2007
Feed Paging and Archiving (nee Feed History) has finally made it to a standards-track RFC.ETags, ETags, ETags
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, and much more.URI Templates Redux
Saturday, 28 July 2007
URI Templates -01 is now an Internet-Draft.Vic Schools Mashup
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.The State of Proxy Caching
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 a bit more.Safari 3: Protecting Client-Side State
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.Expires vs. max-age
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.Intelligent Design, Eames-Style
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 pages to see it).Australia != America
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;httperf rev
Tuesday, 1 May 2007
Martin Arlitt makes an exciting announcement;Squid is My Service Bus
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 not nearly enough details of what it does on the ground. So, I decided to concentrate on one aspect of the value that we get from using HTTP for services; intermediation, as an example.Around the World in 24 Days
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.WWW2007 Developers’ Track
Thursday, 5 April 2007
We’ve announced the program for this years’ Developers’ Track, and I’m very excited about the lineup.REST Issues, Real and Imagined
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 who are new to REST get caught up on small stuff like this;Things to Remember when Moving Country
Monday, 12 February 2007
It’s always more expensive than you plan.Pipes!
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
Yahoo! (finally!) released Pipes as a beta today; congrats to the very talented team that put this together.Developers, Developers, Developers
Wednesday, 7 February 2007
A reminder: proposals for the Developers’ Track at WWW2007 should be in by February 16th.Week Two in Victoria
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.Connectivity in .au - Help!
Wednesday, 3 January 2007
So, no that we have a place to live, there are a few choices;Week One in Melbourne
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 to find somewhere to live for a few months while we house-hunt. Not quite as fast as I’d like, but not too shabby. Meanwhile, most of our possessions are about two months behind us, somewhere between San Francisco and Singapore.SOA Jumps Shark
Monday, 4 December 2006
Uche calls it;Schema for JSON
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 is in.Seven Year Itch
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, although many of our Australian friends have expressed that they won’t really believe it until we step off the plane.Friday Fun: I Hate Cookies
Friday, 27 October 2006
There are plenty of reasons to hate HTTP Cookies, but there’s one thing that especially annoys me; their syntax.Thoughts on Declarative Ajax
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.Wanted: HTTP Yahoo!s
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 Flipperdex
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 do an index, because you’re not having to compensate for differences in intrinsic value between different houses.Does the Enterprise (Vendor) Get the Web?
Friday, 13 October 2006
A couple of interesting things have happened recently; first, Jonathan Marsh has a new job;URI Templating, the Spec
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 in the Link Header draft, and have also been working in the background with DeWitt Clinton, Joe Gregorio, Marc Hadley, Dave Orchard, and James Snell on a more general specification, URI Templates, the first draft of which we (finally!) got published today.More JavaScript Updates
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!).Javascript Updates
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! the other day; the demo gods were not smiling). It does not work in Opera; it seems like the more I use XHR in that browser, the more bugs I find. I’m thinking of updating the XHR tests to catch more of them, but it’s a fair amount of work.Surfing the Barcoded Web
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.Some Questions for Software Vendors
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, too late.This Site Powered By...
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;Caching Performance Notes
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.Un tutoriel de la mise en cache
Friday, 18 August 2006
Many thanks to J.J. Solari for translating the Caching Tutorial to French!Putting the Web back in Web 2.0
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.On Patents, Briefly
Monday, 10 July 2006
This would be funny, if this wasn’t so scary.Friday Fun: Percent Encoding
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:Welcome, Hugo!
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 to work with him; there’s lots to do!Bringing Back the Link - With a Twist
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 the Web — to tie resources together, without getting in users’ faces.Microsoft's RESTful Robots
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;Friday Fun: Feed Authentication with Cookies
Friday, 9 June 2006
See if your aggregator can subscribe to this feed (username/password: test/test) and post the results in comments.Web Services are Dead, Long Live Web Services
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).Caching Web 2.0
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;Yaron Uncloaks!
Thursday, 11 May 2006
Yaron publicly says what he’s doing at Microsoft (scroll down);The State of Browser Caching
Thursday, 11 May 2006
Updated 2006-06-03Vendor-pires
Wednesday, 10 May 2006
Anne-Thomas Manes extolls the virtues of WS-*;XTech
Sunday, 23 April 2006
It’s official; I’ve got a last-minute slot at XTech, talking about all things Web caching.Housing Derivatives
Sunday, 23 April 2006
The Economist gives a heads-up [subscription required] about the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s plans for housing derivatives;DOM vs. Web
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.Three Months at Yahoo!
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.Another WS-*
Friday, 14 April 2006
A friend in the trenches put me on to the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.Viva Italia!
Thursday, 13 April 2006
According to ABC Online (that’s Australian Broadcasting Corporation to the Americans out there):Bug Syncronicity
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.Looking for a Big House? Wait!
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, and agonisingly slowly).Are Namespaces (and mU) Necessary?
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 tell consumers when an extension needs to be understood (a.k.a. mustUnderstand).What good is SOAP to HTTP?
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.Workers of the World, Untie
Sunday, 26 March 2006
A few snippets from the day;Don’s False Choice
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.”Web Authentication
Thursday, 16 March 2006
There’s some excitement out there about “ Cookie-less HTTP Authentication.”WS-Transfer, WAKA and the Web
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.,Feed History Redux
Wednesday, 1 March 2006
Over the weekend, I submitted a new draft of Feed History.Invalidating Caches with POST
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?Prosper
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 distraction, so why not?Offline
Tuesday, 7 February 2006
Interesting; there are not one but two sessions at the upcoming ETech about taking Web applications offline.And Now for Something Completely Different
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 the great people at WS-I and in the W3C’s Web Services Working Groups (particularly, the folks in Web Services Addressing).Little Orange “feed” Buttons
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.How Web-Ready is XMLHttpRequest?
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 does in the background is very different, especially with regards to HTTP.Para publicadores de conteúdos e Webmasters
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.Safari and Content Sniffing
Wednesday, 11 January 2006
It took two years, but Apple has finally taken steps to limit Safari’s content-sniffing ways;Making headway on OPTIONS
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.Colour Management in OSX
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.2005 in Feeds
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 feeds.RFC 4229: HTTP Header Field Registrations
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 filled with HTTP-related headers by RFC 4229.How to Throw a Holiday Party
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 it in Silicon Valley holiday* parties.Choosing a School in a Global Marketplace
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.Where have the Professional Journalists Gone?
Tuesday, 13 December 2005
Like a blogger trying to pump up their buzz, the New York Times declares;The End Is Nigh?
Tuesday, 6 December 2005
Bloomberg calls it;RFC 4287: The Atom Syndication Format
Monday, 5 December 2005
Atom has finally realised its most important advantage over the various flavours of RSS — it’s a Standards-Track RFC.Leveraging the Web: Caching
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.It's Official: Blogs are Everywhere
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.TripSense
Friday, 18 November 2005
Just got an e-mail from Progressive, who want people to sign up for Tripsense;REST vs..?
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.Frameworks
Sunday, 30 October 2005
Stumbled across this, from Ian Bicking;Calendar <-> Feed?
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 one calendar entry?Emulating W3C ,tools with mod_rewrite
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;Why Just GET and POST?
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 of HTTP’s methods.OPTIONS Getting Better
Wednesday, 19 October 2005
Roy Fielding has just closed a bug that’s been around since 1996, and which I’ve previously lamented here;XSLT for the Rest of the Web
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 content you’re interested in has to be available in well-formed XML.2.0
Wednesday, 5 October 2005
Does anybody else chortle quietly when they see “2.0-this” and “2.0-that”?Bennet Murray Nottingham
Wednesday, 14 September 2005
…has entered the building.Feed History -04
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.RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Webmasters
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.sparta.py 0.8
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.Wanted: Blogging Fund Manager
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).Bubble Fun
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.Putting History in Your Feed
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 have instructions for other feed-generating software, please either leave them in comments below, or send me an e-mail.Feed History -03
Monday, 15 August 2005
Draft -03 of Feed History: Enabling Stateful Syndication is now available. Significant changes include:Advertise on the BBC!
Monday, 15 August 2005
Is it just me, or is this a thinly-veiled press release?Adding Semantics to Excel with Microformats and GRDDL
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 analysis is sloppy, but oh-so-effective. The challenge is to make the data reusable elsewhere.Separating the Data Model from its Serialisation
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 spent agonizing over whether to make something an attribute or an element.HTTP Performance (again)
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 premise that SOAP (and Web services) is about integration with existing applications.Who Do We Work For?
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.Transformational Standards
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 line and last year’s GSM mobile)!John Kerry, Spammer
Thursday, 21 July 2005
Both my wife and I signed up to johnkerry.com’s mailing list during the last federal election cycle.Core Image Fun House
Monday, 18 July 2005
Am I just behind, or is Core Image Fun House the coolest thing ever?Making Syndication Enterprise-Grade
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 popular; people will be using blogs to fundamentally change the way they do business, inside and outside the firewall.Don’t use the ‘feed’ URI Scheme
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’).Naked & Angry
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 limited-run numbered neckties (and, apparently, other silk things too) that are for sale on the same site.Never Mind the Corporate Blogs; Here’s the Wiki
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.One Description to Bind them All? Nah.
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 well-understood in that field. It gives greater precision, easier flow of ideas, and yes, it raises the bar to entry for newcomers.(Statistical) Information Wants to Be Free
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.JavaOne
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.Perspectives on the Addressing Experiment
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 as part of a panel discussion at the Advisory Committee meeting a few weeks ago. I’d like to share some of what I presented there.Another, More Disturbing Reason Not to Buy a House
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.Bubble News Roundup
Monday, 20 June 2005
This week the Economist continues casting doubt upon the notion that housing prices will continue going up, up, up:Getting Rid of QNames in Content
Tuesday, 14 June 2005
Or, What’s Wrong with XInclude?Web Description at the W3C
Tuesday, 24 May 2005
The W3C has just started a mailing list for discussion of Web description formats;Prefetching (again)
Sunday, 22 May 2005
There’s been quite a kerfuffle over Google’s Web Accelerator, because it prefetches Web content.Freakonomics
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 System, I broke and bought it.XML Base: Evil?
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 default namespace and XML Base.WADLing towards Web Description
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.OxygenXML, Now with Visual Schema Editing
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. :)Effects of Australian Tax Cuts
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.Google's Cache-Control Extensions
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;Notes on Generational Accounting
Tuesday, 10 May 2005
Social Security represents a pact between generations—a financial and social commitment among people of all ages. — US Social Security AdministrationGreasemonkey and the Web
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.Arguments for Buying a House Now
Sunday, 1 May 2005
In the interest of equal time, two quotes attributed to Keynes;Questions Leading to a Web Description Format
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.Data Modeling and Abstraction
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 is stored.Syntax for Distributed Computing
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 of the languages is changing.Personalised RSS and Cookie Sharing
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 in their privacy?Try This RSS Experiment
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 seriously long time (e.g, on vacation) before you actually miss anything. However, I’d put forth that this state of grace is going to be increasingly unlikely.Tempest in a Teacup, Counterclockwise*
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.Coffee, Tea, or Shove that Phone Right Up Your…?
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 barrier less to having a person yammering away for hours on end, one foot away from your ear.A Call to OPTIONS
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 enabled by current implementations.Can Somebody Explain to Me...
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 cognoscenti support this view unintentionally, I think.Memory, Sweet Memory...
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.Site Updates
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.Nevermore
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 of a more general HTTP framework before I wrote a more formal document.Sparta.py 0.7
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.Travel Warning
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;More notes on the Bay area housing market
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.Using XML in Data-Oriented Applications
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.document(Web)
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.The Map is Not the Territory
Monday, 7 February 2005
Werner makes an excellent point;Who’ll Clean Up?
Saturday, 5 February 2005
Listening to people talk about the economy — and the housing bubble in particular — makes me wonder; what happens after it bursts?JSON and XML
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 (nee JavaScript) — a nearly ubiquitous language, on every desktop that has a browser — they get an automatic installed base and at least one API for free.WS-Who's on First?
Sunday, 23 January 2005
There are MEPs in SOAP and MEPs in WSDL; both describe patterns of messages, but at potentially different layers.On How Google Fixed Comment Spam
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.Melbourne
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.Tufte would be Proud
Friday, 17 December 2004
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released a very cool SVG-based animated population pyramid ( non-SVG preview) that very nicely visualises the change in that country’s population over time. While the pyramid technique is fairly common, the addition of a fourth dimension — time — and the ability to track a cohort through it really brings the data to life. Try the “highlight surplus of males or females” feature to see when you’ve got the least competition.text/python?
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.”Sparta.py 0.6: RDF (and RSS!) Made Easy
Monday, 6 December 2004
Version 0.6 of sparta.py is now available. Changes include:Shop ‘til you Drop
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 group at Fidelity. His prediction: America has no better than a 10 percent chance of avoiding economic “armageddon.” Press were not allowed into the meetings. But the Herald has obtained a copy of Roach’s presentation. A stunned source who was at one meeting said, “it struck me how extreme he was - much more, it seemed to me, than in public.” — The Boston HeraldWhat's Going on at Amazon?
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 there and muse on it for a while. This lets me build up an order over time and get it shipped in one go; I won’t buy everything at once, but eventually, everything gets bought.FYI
Friday, 5 November 2004
For some reason, people are considering a change, such as this one. Might I make another suggestion [pdf].Partisan Hackery
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;Why POST is Special
Sunday, 10 October 2004
In a recent post, Don gave his take on the enlightening nature of WS-Transfer:Is there a Web Services Architecture?
Wednesday, 29 September 2004
As I’m sure many others were, I was intrigued to see that Microsoft published their idea of an Introduction to the Web Services Architecture and Its Specifications the other week.The ‘Web’ in Web Services
Monday, 27 September 2004
I was very interested to see the reaction to WS-Transfer [PDF] over the last few days. While the SOAP Resource Representation Header had opprobrium heaped upon it (see previous discussion), Transfer passed by with nothing more than a few nodding heads and people saying “aha.”Back
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; other events overtook me.And now for something completely different: Roadblog!
Wednesday, 8 September 2004
I’m typing this from the Red Carpet Club in San Francisco International Airport, about to depart on a snap vacation to Melbourne.HTTP Header Registries
Wednesday, 8 September 2004
Ever wonder where the heck a particular HTTP header is defined?Saving the Village with Wal-Mart
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;Innocent Fraud
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.HTTP Authentication and Forms
Thursday, 26 August 2004
It’s no secret that HTTP authentication isn’t used as often as it should be. When I talk to Web developers, there are usually a few reasons for their use of cookies for authentication;“It seems that the housing party is over”
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 July, while in California the housing inventory has increased to 3.3 months, surpassing three months for the first time since February 2003.sparta.py 0.5: RDF made easy
Saturday, 21 August 2004
Version 0.5 of sparta.py is now available; with this release, I think it’s roughly feature-complete.On Jargon and Applicability
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:Resistance is Futile
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 dynamically typed languages.Preliminary Experimentation Indicates...
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)ComputerSpeakerPhone
Thursday, 5 August 2004
Oh LazyWeb, please give me software that lets me use my Powerbook as a Bluetooth speakerphone…The ‘Document’ in Document-Oriented Messaging
Thursday, 5 August 2004
(Another instalment in “XML Heresies.”)The Age Gets RSS Feeds
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.The Whole Web in a Python Dictionary
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 HTTP that are usable, encourage good practice, and well-aligned with the specifications.Corporate Citizenship
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 continue this practice.Dictionary as API?
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.A Monkey’s Lunch is…
Sunday, 25 July 2004
Baileys Irish Cream Kahlúa Macadamia nut liquor, or dark rum (e.g., Myer’s) Coconut Juice Cream Banana IceWeb-izing The Finder
Sunday, 18 July 2004
Timbl has talked about Web-izing databasesand languages; what about operating systems? Despite Microsoft’s legal troubles brought about trying to integrate the browser into Windows, it’s a good idea.Safari as HTML Editor?
Saturday, 3 July 2004
Surfin’ Safari hints that the next version of WebCore will be able to edit as well as render HTML.Geopolitical Arbitrage
Friday, 2 July 2004
To develop a previous theme;Internet Mapping For the Little Guy
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 Amazon, they don’t integrate user data and third-party applications very well.Come One, Come All
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.SOAP: Protocol or Format?
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.More on the Housing Bubble^H^H^H^H^H^HMarket
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?Social Security
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.XML Language Bindings Done Right
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 language is going to want one when they see this stuff.What?
Wednesday, 16 June 2004
Check out the W eb H ypertext A pplication T echnology Working Group; it looks like our last, best hope for extending the browser platform to grow the Web.Use Cases for Web Description Formats
Monday, 14 June 2004
One thing about Web description formats that hasn’t seen much discussion yet is how people intend to use them.Send Wiki and Comment Spammers a Message
Saturday, 5 June 2004
Netcraft reports that “Search Engine Optimisers” are unable to resist the siren call of spamming.Extreme URL Scraping and Debugging
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.Why I Won’t Be Buying a House in the Bay Area Soon
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.Ubiquitious Fragment Identifiers
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.WebDAV Access Control Protocol
Friday, 28 May 2004
RFC 3744 has been published:Rename with Date.applescript
Friday, 28 May 2004
Hey mac fans —XML Infoset, RDF and Data Modelling
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 Syndication Sky is Falling!
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;sparta.py 0.4: Data Binding for RDF in Python
Saturday, 15 May 2004
After a short pause (OK, nearly three years), I’ve released version 0.4 of sparta.py.Informational Properties of Infosets
Wednesday, 12 May 2004
Recently, I’ve been thinking about the influences that using the Infoset has on the information you place in it.OxygenXML is Good Enough
Tuesday, 11 May 2004
I’ve been playing around with the new OxygenXML 4.0 plug-in for Eclipse M8.XopParser.py 0.2
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 how a XOP parser might behave.What is print.google.com?
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.iTunes
Wednesday, 5 May 2004
I’ve got to say that iTunes 4.5 is scary addictive.Boo!
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 Representation Header. Both of these are products of the XML Protocol WG, of which I’m a member, so I’d like to share my viewpoint (which is not that of either my employer nor the working group, etc., ad nauseam).Go PATCH Go
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.Taxing Wages
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” available, and there’s some interesting reading therein.Economic Indicators from the Web
Sunday, 2 May 2004
An idea for the LazyWeb:Stupid Compression Tricks
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.Using WebDAV as a Description Format for REST
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.How do we use SOAP Headers?
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 peice of information is missing; how to order the steps in processing a message.Understanding Arnie
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.Typography Out of the Box
Monday, 26 April 2004
Don Box:Madonna Dead
Saturday, 24 April 2004
This is why heuristics aren’t such a hot idea.Sean’s Words of Wisdom
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;Asynchrony: There Is No Spoon
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 time in the future” they say.Describing Generative Identifiers in WSDL
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 named “Jones” has a corresponding entry URI;Five Favourite Protocol Design Papers
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.A(nother) Description Format for REST
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.More Software that Everybody Should Download
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.GMail
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 outlaw it.Leading from Afar, or Out of Touch?
Monday, 12 April 2004
From the Washington Post:xml:id is Coming
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.Elegance in Integration
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. Elegance is simplification. As engineering designs evolve, they gain false sophistication — empty but seductive ingenuities. Ruthlessly, agonizingly, these must be stripped away. Elegance, finally, is work-arounds — minimizing the risks, endemic to all [projects], of… failures or costly delays during fabrication.The Market for AdWords
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.”Python Just Got a Whole Lot Cooler
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.Behind the Scenes at Your (very) Local Music Store
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.Growing the Web
Sunday, 28 March 2004
Ian Hickson is thinking about client-side technologies (scroll down a bit). Some of his ideas resonated;XGrid and BEEP
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.Thoughts on a Suburban Nation
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?Outage in the Web: Server Configuration
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;Google Spam Redux
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 trivial fashion (e.g., “That is so deep”), and includes a lengthy signature containing a variety of URLs for sites he’s presumably promoting (I won’t reproduce the mail here, lest I encourage them).The Problem With Infosets
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, as the basis of Web services.The Powerbook is Dead; Long Live the Powerbook
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 to tap the screen to make it better, but as time went on, tapping became hitting, and by the end, it was unresponsive. Considering the work this machine has done, I’m not terribly displeased.Atom Theme Song?
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.”A Strategy for Atom Migration
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 go away, so it’s just adding to this problem.Economic Approaches to Spam
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?Caching Tutorial Update
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 of new information.XOP and MTOM
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.Krugman on Bush
Saturday, 14 February 2004
Paul Krugman points out continuing efforts to shore up George Bush, the Myth;Redefining the Ability to Pay
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;RSS.py, version 0.45
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.Irony Defined
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 it were just another state in the union.Video Chat — It’s Here
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.Delusions of Churchill
Sunday, 8 February 2004
George Bush on why he should be re-elected:Messages vs. Files
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 be ruthless about data portability.XPointer: Friend or Foe?
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 formats, and because the fragID is interpreted by the client based on the format, it’s possible to have a fragID mean wildly different things across representations of a single resource.Caltrain Scheduling Changes (and other thoughts on Public Transport policy)
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.Singing the Brief
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.What is NetKernel?
Tuesday, 3 February 2004
Just got some mail regarding the Cacheability Engine which led me to NetKernel;Orkut
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 ;) — but it isn’t everything that such a beast could be, and I don’t think it would take that much to get it there.Anybody in the house know Latvian?
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 forthcoming influx of cash).Can we stop it with the orange XML buttons already?
Wednesday, 28 January 2004
It’s like having a “get your ASCII here” button; completely meaningless.Legal Implications of Feedback on Weblogs
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.Rebates and Privacy
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.iTMS does RSS
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.©
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.RESTful SPAM?
Wednesday, 21 January 2004
Just got this:Papa Leave
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 divide this time between both parents, and it can be taken until the child is eight.XQuery on the Web
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 (goodness) to access arbitrary data based on the client’s needs (more goodness) and only the bits of data that you want go across the wire (yet more goodness).Jeffrey Record
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.Decentralised Registration
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 first-class citizen on the Web?Paul O’Neill
Sunday, 11 January 2004
Well, this should liven things up…Officially Unofficial
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 to Sam’s efforts.Traffic
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 Bay area, but it went away; Google found us another one.Cheap Eats
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 through January.More blogs
Tuesday, 6 January 2004
Welcome to the jungle, David Orchard, Chris Ferris and Tom Glover (Tom, we need RSS, OK?).Extensibility and Interoperability
Saturday, 3 January 2004
In his blog, Sean McGrath wonders about two potentially competing faces of standards; extensibility and interoperability.Mail.app and X-Faces
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?The Semantic Web’s Dirty Little Secret
Tuesday, 30 December 2003
Browse through the W3C Semantic Web pages and you’ll see this notice in a few different forms:Comment Spam and Google
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.What I want in a digital camera
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 newspaper and studio work before realising that I wanted to do something else (long story here; buy me a beer).Next trip: Molvania
Saturday, 27 December 2003
Inger put me onto a new travel guide, and I’m already planning the trip.What’s after Red Hat?
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 dial-up connection with a static IP address, and it became mnot.cyber.com.au, later mnot.net.Travel Notes: Vienna, Venice, Bolzano
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?Cool OS X Software roundup
Monday, 15 December 2003
Small apps that make my life much, much easier:For those who've had kids recently.
Saturday, 13 December 2003
Anitra turned me on to what happened to Steve from Blue’s Clues. As he would say, “Cool!”Now I remember why I switched...
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, so I can move it over to the mac (after appropriate decommissioning, etc.).Notes on Atom
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).Tim and Sam talk about offline content
Thursday, 11 December 2003
Tim Bray’s latest missive contains a passage about offline RSS;Oh, for shame, Apple, for shame.
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 mnot-laptop:~> open http://localhost/~mnot/test.txtPython for the CLR
Tuesday, 9 December 2003
IronPython is an implementation of Python for the CLR with some intriguing initial perf numbers. [via Jeremy Hylton’s Weblog ]Perspective Enhancement
Monday, 8 December 2003
The 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 a shocker;Why Do Web Server APIs Suck So Much?
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.A Description Format for REST
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 for my own purposes.The New RDF
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!QNames are Evil
Saturday, 6 December 2003
How’s this analogy:Hoping for Better XML Editors
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…housekeeping
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 RSS aggregators may act strangely before they settle down. Or not; mine, Shrook - a very fine aggregator for OSX indeed - doesn’t get tripped up.DIME is dead.
Thursday, 30 October 2003
‘cause Gudge says so, and as we all know, Gudge is always right.You say tree, I say URI...
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.ROTFL
Friday, 17 October 2003
[Love your work, Banksy](https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3201344.stm “BBC NEWS Entertainment Graffiti star sneaks work into Tate”).Cross-Platform DRM and other artefacts of Hell freezing over
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.Humboldt Fog
Tuesday, 7 October 2003
Saute Wednesday has exposed one of our vices… ashed goat’s cheese is like nothing else on earth.RSS-Data and Web services
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;Loose Coupling, Late Binding and REST
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.Why do XML editors suck so much?
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 the level of characters, not information items.Modularity by reference
Thursday, 2 October 2003
Many XML-based formats could benefit from using references to promote modularity. For example, imagine a catalogue format;RSS and E-mail
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;Seen this week's Economist?
Saturday, 20 September 2003
A rodent of *truly* unusual size
Thursday, 18 September 2003
The BBC [reports](https://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3120950.stm “BBC NEWS Science/Nature Giant rodent astonishes science”) an… inconceivably large rodent, aka “Guinea-zilla”.Roundup
Saturday, 13 September 2003
Next time somebody says “let’s install Bugzilla to track that” consider Roundup instead (unless you like painful, bloated software).Click Submit Only Once
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 problem is, it puts me and every other shopper between a rock and a hard place.Anna Lindh
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. This wasn’t unusual, but the larger man in sunglasses with a discrete earphone behind him at a discrete distance was. This was the only sign that he wasn’t an ordinary person; a single bodyguard.iPod update
Wednesday, 10 September 2003
Our problems continue.The Gherkin
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.Frank Chu update
Thursday, 28 August 2003
As previously noted, I often pass San Francisco figure Frank Chu on the way to and from work.The 'i' stands for 'idiot'
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.Atomic Draft
Sunday, 24 August 2003
Somehow, I’ve been drafted into editing the Atom syntax specification, and have just thrown up a first draft.Registering Media Types
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 grow as I attempt to do the same for SOAP, on behalf of the XML Protocol Working Group.HTTP Performance
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 those same people happen to sell) are needed to “unleash the power of Web services.”Web Services
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:WebCapture
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.”Structured URIs
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.Photos and metadata
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 through IPTC metadata, courtesy of Caption Buddy (great stuff, a real gem) and a bit of Perl scripting.RSSJobs
Monday, 4 August 2003
RSSJobs looks interesting; hopefully, we’ll see more of these “non-traditional” uses of RSS as time goes by.iDisk Offline
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.NewAirplane
Saturday, 2 August 2003
Boy, I’d sure like some of whatever the Boeing folks are smoking.Subversion
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 be a misunderstanding) is in regard to a need for a Subversion-specific client cache; the whole point of doing this with Web protocols it to avoid application-specific infrastructure. A well-designed WebDAV cache should work equally well for any application, not just Subversion.httpRange-14
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.Dude
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 resorts.Caching PUT
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 called “Web folders.”Blogging with WebDAV
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 push this.Profiling HTTP
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).On Antibes
Friday, 25 July 2003
Pros Makes everybody jealous when you say you’re going there Great beaches and the Alps nearby Sailing!BosBlog
Friday, 25 July 2003
Adam Bosworth gives us a small taste of his thoughts re: Web services, with a promise of more.RSS Profile Testbed
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.The RSS Advisory Board
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.Switcher
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 six years before that).Hey Dave
Friday, 11 July 2003
This is exactly what namespaces are for.Too much money, not enough sense
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.On Helsinki
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!Caching is often enough
Saturday, 28 June 2003
I feel compelled to respond to Norm Walsh’s thoughts on caching.Starting Fresh
Tuesday, 24 June 2003
Sam Ruby suggests a roadmap for a new effort that may very well replace RSS.SOAP1.2
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.”GoogleStuff
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.Bees and Ants
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 it’s about REST and Web Services (which means that there’s something to this Web architecture stuff yet, I think).On Tallinn, Estonia
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 planningRSS History as state transfer
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…).Economics of standards
Sunday, 22 June 2003
Looks like a good to-read list: John Beatty: Economics of StandardsQuestion for the day
Friday, 20 June 2003
Is a Weblog a medium or is it a genre?Spot the difference...
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?Weblog data modeling
Monday, 16 June 2003
Sam Ruby has announced a Wiki about what a weblog entry is.OxygenXML
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.Web-izing the Palm Pilot
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.Identifying RSS-Like Formats
Thursday, 12 June 2003
I’m surprised by Dave Winer’s continuing reluctance to identify RSS 2.0 with a namespace, given how strongly he feels about interoperability and respecting format definitions.Newest Toy
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.RSS Soundbite
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).XCAP
Thursday, 29 May 2003
Jonathan Rosenberg published a new Internet-Draft, XCAP, to the SIMPLE Working Group in the IETF. Here’s the skinny:Real-World RDF
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”.While we're talking about standards...
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
I agree with just about everything that Jim Waldo says here (at least for protocol standards). Well said!One-Man Standards
Wednesday, 28 May 2003
Dave Winer argues that RSS implementers should toe the line:RSS, Subscribers and Business Models (oh, my!)
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.Look what the browser dragged up...
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?A sign of bad times?
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.Are we bored of RSS Standardization yet?
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.RSS Profiling Wiki
Saturday, 10 May 2003
Don, Sam, Ben, Mena and others have started blogging about a profile of RSS.IT Survey in the Economist
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…) are several excellent articles, including topics such as growth, commoditisation, and open standards (although one paragraph was so far off-base that it made me LOL).We need WikiVerbs!
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.Conneg based on XML Dialect
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…Tarawa
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.The Genius Bar is dry
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.Yet more proof of things being seriously wrong in the US these days...
Saturday, 3 May 2003
From the Montreal Gazette -Semantic Syndication
Saturday, 3 May 2003
Excellent. Danny Ayers proposes a Simple Semantic Resolution RSS 2.0 Module.RSS Traffic Characterisation
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.Mail.app broken?
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.ZeroConf is cool
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?RSS Schema and dates
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.Wiki as Semantic Web?
Monday, 28 April 2003
Anybody else notice how you can use a Wiki like a Semantic Web engine?I'm an overlord and I'm OK...
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… ]Amazon and Privacy
Monday, 28 April 2003
Amazon sent my wife a nice, juicy bit of SPAM this morning.RSS history module
Sunday, 27 April 2003
For discussion: RSS history module (the eventual result of this).It's alive
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.now available - Photoblog!
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 see people I meet, places I go and the mediocrity of daily life (as well as my struggles with predictive text input) in near-real time!ETags
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.Current favourite TV
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.Sam wants namespaces
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.RSS needs Profiling
Tuesday, 22 April 2003
Tim says that RSS 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.RSS.py 0.43
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.Pellet, indeed.
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.Let's try this.
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.Flair?
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 microserfequivalent of flair.HTTP header sniffing
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.Macrosoft, Part II
Thursday, 27 March 2003
Dave seems excited by Macromedia’s announcement.RSS standardization (again)
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 by the lack of a stable spec published by a recognized group.Friendster
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.Prototyping Kirk
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 Hawaii, as well as Cook’s native Yorkshire.Australia thinks twice
Friday, 14 February 2003
Word is that somewhere in the neighborhood of 200,000 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 should be invading Iraq, but Australia has no business there whatsoever; they can barely mind their own back yard.Why oh why is it so hard?
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, despite the best efforts of various vendors. Doing so is also a nice complement to the Web.mnot : Bookmarks : Travel
Thursday, 30 January 2003
Travel bookmarks have been reorg’d and cleaned; the RSS feed gives you the latest additions. Suggestions welcome.Blogging Zipf
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 to see.Interestinger and interestinger...
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.Location, location...
Tuesday, 14 January 2003
Dave takes issue with people’s comments about the Bay area.Master and Commander
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.Keynote
Wednesday, 8 January 2003
I’m no SVG expert, but this “sample Keynote file” sure seems like it.Switching
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? :)RSS Wishes
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?Mozilla Prefetching
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.Eh?
Tuesday, 26 November 2002
Hixie, Mark and others are talking about serving up application/xhtml+xml selectively to browsers.What is an RSS Channel?
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 nail this down if we want to move RSS forward.RSS XP
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!New toys
Sunday, 17 November 2002
We just replaced our phones with Sony Ericsson T300s with T-Mobile; sooo cool.RDF Model and Syntax
Saturday, 16 November 2002
Jack William Bell makes a precise, short and readable effort at explaining why RDF is simple and important.IETF Transparency
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 on, instead of being left out in the cold.You Are Crazy.
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.Googlism
Wednesday, 30 October 2002
Cool.Macrosoft?
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?So funny... so true...
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)iCal, youCal
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.Pardon our dust...
Friday, 6 September 2002
I’m trying out movabletype, as there were some pretty severe limitations doing it with the bookmarks…RSS 0.94
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. IMHO the smart thing for Dave to do would be to start a version of “Minimal RSS”; maybe 0.95, that is just the very, very core markup (say, title, link and description, maybe one or two others for channel metadata) and put EVERYTHING else in modules (coordinating the release of them with the spec). This would produce a very stable core spec that would allow him to experiment with new facilities with impunity, whilst strengthening 0.9x’s position; my impression is that most people use 1.0 because of Namepaces, not RDF.Global house prices
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 “Manias, Panics and Crashes” (which I’m now reading, alas, too late) and later in a story on NPR. It is interesting that there aren’t good tools for tracking the state of real estate, even though there’s more money there than in equities, worldwide.Unequal Relief
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 - and therefore get the most benefit - are the ones who least need this (and witness the high threshold on death taxes forgiven; 8.5 million). They already have substantial assets and generous life insurance to take care of their survivors. The guaranteed $10,000 payout is a joke; I know of at least one victim whose family would have received at least a $20,000,000 tax refund because of this (that’s 20 million, and in reality it was probably closer to 50, but let’s be conservative). Is that family’s loss 200 times greater than someone who only gets $10,000 back? On top of this, the Wall Street Journal recently reported that government compensation for 9-11 victims would be based on… you guessed it, the victim’s salary. Apparently, every man does have a price.Buzz - Continuing thoughts on F2F
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 the in-group, so that one who has been ejected can’t rejoin, but AaronSW pointed out that IRC has a similar function without F2F. Fascinating. I wonder what the intersection of this and the Advogato trust metric is, along with a project-oriented community like SourceForge?RDF and RSS
Saturday, 24 August 2002
Interesting; I’m glad thiswas written, because RDF is good stuff, and this is a good walkthrough.Face-to-face communications
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, and to integrate business processes, respectively (yes, there’s a lot more to each). The question is, when will people trust and actually use machines to do this? If Storper’s paper is correct, the pie-in-the-sky visions of a ‘Web of Trust’ and those of dynamic markets of smart Web Services are both without ground. To me, this is a good thing; both technologies have significant benefits to offer the world, if they’ll just get their heads out of the clouds and back down to earth.DC:Date
Saturday, 24 August 2002
Harumph. Date is a datatype, not a property.Don Box on Tolerance
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 whatever), you’re asking for trouble if you allow too generously.