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Comments
Daynotes: Week of 26 June - 2 July, MM
Daily notes and commentary -- Week 26
* Latest update modified 3 July MM at 01:15
GMT+2.
The
latest-link (above/right) points to current date
(or latest addition). The redirector page
(current.html) points there too
-- use this instead of weekly page or index.
Associated links:
Three domains for the webmaster under the sky. ...
One domain to rule them all. One domain to find them.
One domain to bring them all and in the webspace bind them
In the Land of LeufNet where the Wikis serve.
Jacob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article,
The Network is the
User Experience
,
makes the provocative initial point that "Microsoft's .NET strategy
is a brilliant counter-move" against the Justice Department. Actually,
the point JN is really making is: "Operating systems are history as
the nexus to coordinate users' interactions with their computers."
-- What users really only care about is the navigation layer, which
today increasingly means how you access resources on your system and on the
Net. Ideally, the user should not see any difference, no matter where the
resource is. From that point of view, browsers are also extinction doomed
as applications become increasingly Net-aware, and as XML (or similar, future)
protocols allow a richer, unified Internet user interface.
The proposed next article, The End of Web Design, promises even
more heresy: "Since the network is the user experience, individual
sites will have to tone down their individual designs and aim at fitting
in." This position is anathema to many (most?) web-designers (and
companies), who strive for individuality and some kind of visual "branding"
effect. And for that matter to "portals".
Further reading:
Some may have reacted to that I first posted news of the MS announcement
using the term "dot.net" -- other media reports have claimed that
the official name is "MS-Net". Not so, the strategy is called literally
".NET" (urk) by MS, and is read as "dot-net". My guess is
that natural usage will push writing usage to "Dot-Net" unless the name changes
(Net2k2 ? <g>).
Now, I don't agree with everything that Dave Winer writes, and sometimes
his attitude is a bit, well, opinionated (some say
abrasive) -- there is some ill feeling within for example the
Squeak community (DW is a Mac user) about his proprietary
attitudes to wiki and wiki-like technology (see
editthispage.com
)
-- but the whitepaper provides some interesting insight into what this MS
initiative might mean. I quote a small portion:
Microsoft says "Now that we have a common language, this is what we want
to talk about. Would anyone like to talk with us?" ... What do they want
to talk about? Membership preferences, through Passport, for example. This
raises a question. Do I want to give my personal information to Microsoft?
Hmmm. I don't want to do that, at least not at this time. But can I agree
with Microsoft how to do this? Absolutely, no problem with that. Can I operate
a Passport-compatible server? Of course. Good idea.
Note that DW has a sort of vested interest in all this, since he is a
co-developer of SOAP
,
Simple Object Access Protocol, the underlying technology that Dot-Net
relies on -- "a lightweight protocol for exchange of information in
a decentralized, distributed environment".
This all definitely bears keeping an eye on.
Even if we're not successful, the world will be better off.
-- Steve Ballmer, Microsoft, talking about
Dot-Net.
By the way, do take the time to read Chairman Bill's speech -- it's
much clearer on some conceptual points than the official press-releases.
There are a lot of loose, fragmented quotes floating around out there. A
lot come from this context.
--
This week I am in the LiteStep
(LitestepOrg,
LitestepCom) shell when running NT,
instead of EVWM as during the past few weeks. So far no problems.
--
Why MS has "abused" HTML... According to Bill, "HTML
is defined purely for presentation." That quote alone suggests MS
has not read the W3C guidelines very carefully. Fact is, most HTML tags define
logical content markup, based on the SGML -- the visual results
are incidental and largely determined by each browser client and its settings.
Additional visual tags were defined, but only as a convenient complement.
Many are in fact now depreciated (such as the FONT tag) given that "visual
layout" can be much better specified in CSS. Seen in that light, it is easier
to understand why MS products produced such strange and non-conformant HTML
code -- wysiwyg presentation was clearly the sole aim.
Hmm, today I find several daynotes sites are down. Common denominator appears
to be...? (Jerry, Bob, Dan, ...)... aha, hosted on pair. Either
their servers, or connectivity somewhere between here and there.
(tracert dies in a black hole after sl-pairnet-1-0-0.sprintlink.net
[144.232.190.142]). So, with less reading to do, I move directly
to lunch and thence work. (...) Lunch in oven, I try again the dead sites,
and things seem to have resolved themselves. Goodie, I do get my
reading before eating.
As of this afternoon, I'm on what's known as a writer's vacation.
This means the family is out of town, the further the better as it were,
and the writer is parked in front of the screen for some serious productivity
for periods ranging from days to weeks, or for some even months. In a few
special cases, the writer actually leaves the home (Jerry's beach house come's
to mind), we tend to be more tied down to the regular connectivity points
when not dealing with fiction. Although, as some of my colleagues have noted,
many automatic appliances around the home mysteriously stop working, and
meal calls get dictated by residual daemons (hi, Salem, lunchtime already?),
the disadvantages to the regime are offset by longer periods of less
distractions. Or so we hope...
--
Ah, simple but adequate lunch . A spring roll.
About the domain change forms (aka templates) at NSI. Some people report
great problems getting them accepted when they need changes made. Tom Syroid
reported no problems, but this is the exception, not the rule. Depends on
your email client and settings, I think. The general advice for responding
to and returning a filled in form is to FORWARD it, not reply, because
reply generally reformats the text. However you do it, ensure that the template
lines remain exactly as in the original, each item on its own line.
The automated parsers work on line-by-line basis, so if Item 8b gets concatenated
with Item 8a, tough -- the form gets rejected, even if those particular items
were intentionally blank.
Another day, another chapter? We'll see. So far, I've had to take one of
the cats to the vet (USD 60, sigh), so I expect full concentration
first later in the day. Hmm, pretty quiet around here... (apart from Salem
chasing bees and wasps -- very successfully too, I might add)... This morning
I instead read the rounds and caught up on some news.
I continued "cleaning up" the wiki code last night, preparatory to inserting
snippets in the book. Funny how one keeps seeing new angles all the time,
even in functionality I considered well-understood and nailed down. I ended
up completely rewriting a couple of code segments instead of just formal
clean-up.
I also have a pile of stuff about Apache configuration and need to ponder
which tweaks to recommend for the advanced admin chapter -- the question
is usually not if you can do such-and-such, it's to pick out one
of the many ways possible most suited to the context at hand. This means
I need to experiment with at least half-a-dozen different approaches to making
"controlled" access to a wiki. And given the multitude of options when coding
the wiki, I see the potential paths forking like mad here -- TMTOWTDI ("tim
toady") with a vengeance (There's More Than One Way To Do It).
I'll be setting up a couple of "secure" wikis for some interested third parties.
It'll give practical experience and provide grist for case studies. Few people
actually dare to even contemplate running completely open ones.
The first reaction to learning how open wikis work is invariably to ask
"But is there nothing stopping anyone at all from editing a page?"
When they hear the simple answer "No.", the shock is a palpable
thing. What most people (think they) want is something more like a guestbook
-- where visitors can add/append comments to (some) pages, but only the admin
or a small core group of editors have full editing permissions. Of course,
that's not a wiki anymore, strictly speaking...
(break for cleaning up mess) Salem may have been a tad
too successful at chewing up bees. I just discovered him throwing
up under the sofa. There being crisis in the air, Murphy of course ensures
that the phone rings with "urgent" messages while I'm in the middle of that.
One advantage of cats over dogs: their messes are generally significantly
smaller, and the animal is easier to move out of the way.
A note on LiteStep as shell. Overall, it's working as advertised.
I'm still a bit unused to the four-screen model (virtual desktops) in a Windows
context, and the way the context sometimes switches automatically with current
focus. I should perhaps try the scrolling version of this and see if that
feels better or worse. The default "jump" tends to disorient me at a fundamental
level about where the mouse pointer is (it remains fixed in terms
of the virtual screens, but is therefore flipped top to bottom or left to
right on the physical screen). I've sometimes ended up inadvertently
flip-flopping between two screens because I at the gut level expect to have
to move the pointer back from the edge. Then I realize my mistake
and move to correct, but it's too late, context switched back, but no, it
just flipped again in response to my last mouse movement, and so on... (It's
a bit like when learning to fly a sailplane behind a tow plane -- you invariably
overcompensate, too much control, too late, and yo-yo to ever greater extremes,
vertically or sideways. I choose this example, because it's visually -- and
viscerally -- much more dramatic than another typical choice: learning
to ride a bicycle.)
I've also discovered that the "ugly" Rasmon box is in fact always
"on-screen" even when not selected (Preferences: show icons, not as
window), just moved off the bottom of the usual Windows screen. This
turns out to be the top of one of the other four LiteStep screens, so if
Rasmon gets the focus (which happens), the visible context jumps there. Hmm.
That explains the mysterious Ramon windowshade bar that appeared whenever
I minimized all in EVWM.
Framemaker has a minor quirk (or feature, depending on your mood of the moment)
in this setting as well. It automatically repositions its windows so that
the nearest edge or corner moves into whatever screen of the four you switch
to. The "feature" interpretation is that you never lose track of the app
windows. The quirk is that the windows never stay put. Hmm again.
I do agree with Dave Farquhar's original comments, that LiteStep can lessen
desktop clutter, and that one has full freedom of configuration. I'm still
exploring the latter -- although text based, this is "integrated" into a
one-click button to edit, and the "recycle" button instantly updates changes.
Minor science-in-action note:
-
Brit tries a working model of Da Vinci's parachute, built using 15th C materials
and tools. It worked. From two miles up. "Smoother than a modern chute."
Don Armstrong wins
the virtual eagle-eye award of the week...
Subject: You must be psychic
In your notes for this week, for Sunday July 2, you say that "yesterday
it rained". In fact, this bears a remarkable resemblance to your post for
the Sunday preceding July 2. Either this was some kind of a test, or if not
it provides information about how thoroughly people (yourself included?)
read your postings anyway.
Best wishes,
Don Armstrong
Nitpicker to the stars.
Indeed, it provides ample evidence of many things, including the sometimes
very rushed way I set up the template for the coming week, be it bleary-eyed
past midnight, or equally bleary-eyed morning. On the other hand, many days
during the year do seem to resemble each other uncannily much -- sometimes
so much so, that it bears looking into if one could not implement some automated
daynote-producing code (in wiki-perl for example) for such majority default
days.
Any given statement, such as "yesterday it rained", has a
priori a 50/50 chance of being true for any given future time -- either
it will turn out to be true, or it won't. Factoring in further known
(statistical or murphological) datapoints (location, weekends, holidays,
vacations, season), one can surely push projected veracity to 95+%,in most
cases obliviating the need for manual tweaking of the text.
In fact, I should be able to produce the daynote journal on the fly, from
a minimum of stock phrases and suitable algorithms, cutting down storage
requirements to at most about 100K, give or take. Search functionality would
also become virtual, and blindingly fast since it too would deliver
on-the-fly content. Hmm...
Quantum cryptography, the Schroedinger principle
applied to making a message both readable and unreadable at the same time
in a sealed (virtual) envelope, until it self-destructs by collapsing into
a cyber-nano-blackhole when "opened".
So, ok, last night I downloaded and installed the v4 release of Opera
("Elektra"). Very smooth and very fast, and excellent rendering
of the sites and pages I've tried so far. The beta testing seems to have
had the desired results. So I paid my USD 15 to upgrade from 3.62 and got
my v4 registration key within a couple of hours, 8.45 PM local. (Word
of warning to anyone who's been using betas parallel to a registered v3.x
-- your most recent hotlist .adr file is the v4 copy, even if
you made changes from v3 during this time. So copy it over somewhere safe
before you kill the beta installation and remove the test directory. I knew
about this from an earlier beta version change. Always check the datestamps
for the different adr files and preserve the latest.)
Got less done than I thought yesterday. Errands. pay the rent and some bills.
Feed the plants and water the cats, or was that the other way around? Eat.
Eat again. And more coding, rather than finishing up the chapter. On the
other hand, the coding nails down several outstanding issues concerning
controlled access wikis, so I figure that as progress too. It makes writing
those snippets much quicker.
Today: rain, and the pervasive/invasive crash and clatter
of junk into containers. After the mounting problems of having paper and
junk containers permanently on the lot, the landlord implemented a one weekend
a month pickup. Container placement changed to just outside our corner of
the building, but the first pickup at the end of May never occurred for some
reason. This is the next weekend slot and two containers were in place this
morning. There has since been a never-ending stream of tenants with bulky
paper bags, large black sacks, and loads of rubbish. The weekend will likely
see streams from the greater neighborhood as news spreads, not to mention
scavengers. Bedrooms are on the other side of the building, luckily.
From an exchange about domainsquatters with Bob Thompson, where I remarked:
I consider the domainsquatters little better than connectivity empowered
"Q-tag resellers". These latter are the bums who go into the liquor monopoly,
post office, or bank branch on rush days, punch out a ream of queue tickets,
and then hang around outside selling low- latency numbers to people in a
hurry. Yes, idiotically enough, enough people do pay for this "service" to
keep these guys in business.
Bob thought that sounded sleazy indeed. Market forces at work, even here.
Probably it is a constant throughout human history: there's always someone
who sees an opportunity for a quick profit by acting as an uncalled-for
intermediary. (Just look at the history of the priesthood -- now there's
an interesting concept of services and commodities provided by
intermediaries!) I found it interesting that much the same "market"
mechanisms are realistically implied in the future world of Babylon 5.
YahooGeocities... yah, eventually records get checked, even there...
Dear GeoCities Member,
In June, 1999, we notified you that GeoCities had merged with Yahoo!
and asked you to go through a one-time re-registration process in order to
maintain your GeoCities email account. Our records indicate that you haven't
yet taken the time to go through the process, and we really need you to do
that right away. ...
Any bets that doing nothing now will actually remove the account? The full
geocities letter is on
the wiki. That's one problem with free services -- they really have little
incentive to unregister you, which is ok until they remove the means for
you to do it yourself. An IPP who charges a monthly will at least close you
down pretty quick if you stop paying them.
As Bob noted regarding my mail to him, the
mailexpire.com
service seems as good as advertised, at least as far as the technical
time-limited forwarding goes. A control panel gives the option of lengthening
or shortening the original time-to-live for the temporary address. You get
a helpful email confirming activation of an account,, and also when it expires.
It's really the perfect solution for those annoying registration pages that
require a valid email address, but from which you don't want any email, not
to mention subsequent spam from resold user lists. Much easier than opening
temporary hotmail accounts -- with mailexpire, just hotlink there
in a new browser window and fill in two things only: the address you want
mail to be forwarded to, and the time-to-live. On submission, you come to
a page that shows your temporary email address. Copy and paste this into
the waiting form in the first window that was the reason for getting the
temp. Time cost, maybe 15 seconds.
Hmm, this service is so good, that I suppose it'll be upgraded to
something much less usable in about 6 months or less. Isn't that the way
it goes?
--
In
an unprecedented move, the Swedish
Competition Authority
(Konkurrensverket), has sued the country's five largest oil
companies for SEK 740m (USD 90m), charging that they operate a secret price
and discount cartel to control gasoline prices on the Swedish market. The
companies are accused of systematically "fixing" prices and rebates during
regular meetings ostensibly held to discuss environmental issues.
One example given was how Swedish prices were consistently higher than
international ones in Sept-Oct 1999, something often criticized in the media.
On 1 Nov, all companies lowered prices by a modest amount, simultaneously
removing all customer discounts. After a few more months, prices uniformly
rose again to the international level, this time without any customer discounts.
Authority representatives carried out a "dawn raid" in December of last year
at offices around the country belonging to Statoil, OK-Q8,
Shell, Preem and Hydro, during which they seized
notes, protocols and email. After analysis and subsequent interrogations,
the authority is convinced it has a strong enough case, including several
key admissions, to run it through the courts. The formation of cartels is
forbidden by the Competition Act in Swedish law, and is punishable by fines
and "other measures".
See the full
pressrelease no.14,
29th June 2000, in English
,
although this generic link looks likely to get new content eventually. On
the other hand,
here is a PDF
version
with a unique identifier.
--
This, on the Amazon Associates backchannel...
... While the news lately is full of stories about failing dot-coms,
Amazon.com is healthy and getting healthier. All signs at Amazon.com show
a clear path to profitability and continued growth into the future. Our numbers
tell the story best ...
Is this braggadocio, intended to offset the recent shares slumps
or what? More interesting, and perhaps disturbing is the way corporate lawyers
are insinuating themselves even into mailings like this. At the bottom of
this glowing pronouncement was this fineprint section:
p.s. our lawyers like us to add the following.......
This announcement contains forward-looking statements that involve
risks and uncertainties that include, among others, Amazon.com's limited
operating history, anticipated losses, unpredictability of future revenues,
potential fluctuations in quarterly operating results, seasonality, consumer
trends, competition, risk of distribution center expansion, risks related
to fourth quarter, risks of system interruption, management of potential
growth, risks related to auction and zShops services, risks related to fraud
and Amazon.com Payments, and risks of new business areas, international
expansion, business combinations, and strategic alliances. More information
about factors that potentially could affect Amazon.com's financial results
is included in Amazon.com's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission,
including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended 1999 and Quarterly
Reports on Form 10-Q for the quarters ended March 31, 2000.
Sort of tarnishes the glow, don't you think? Like a castor-oil chaser after
a gala dinner and desert.
Jan Swijsen remarks about my daynote-on-the-fly thoughts:
>>In fact, I should be able to produce the daynote journal on
the fly, from a minimum of stock phrases and suitable algorithms, cutting
down storage requirements to at most about 100K,
After creating that script/program everyone could download it and read
your daynotes locally without ever going to the web again. Saves on
bandwidth.
Absolutely! Amazing the consequences of even a simple idea if you just
extrapolate it far enough. This would mean that the Web as such could be
dismantled entirely in very short order, because all content sites could
develop comparable algorithmic scripts. Haha, what a thing to totally
invalidate the Borg's Dot-Net embrace-and-absorb designs on the
Internet.
These daynotes contain statements and cross-looking projections that
involve risks and uncertainties pertaining to, but not limited to, the thought
processes of presumed readers. The author, his immediate family, ancestors,
descendants, kin and cats can assume no responsibilities or liabilities pursuant
to the reading of this content or subsequent intellectual digestion or
indigestion thereof. No guarantees of palatability, political correctness,
tastefulness, usefulness, tastelessness, uselessness or even readability
of these notes are given, implied or otherwise.
Layman's condensed version: "You take your chances like the rest of
us."
Øresund Bridge Opening Day. This means portentous and pompous
pronouncements on the artificial island connecting bridge and tunnel, a symbolic
meeting between Danish Queen and Swedish King during the afternoon. The weather
is appropriately gray. Normal traffic will be allowed on from about 11 PM
tonight. As of this weekend, all rail goods transports will go by way of
the bridge. The traditional rail ferry Helsingborg-Helsingør is being
retired. I'm not sure the residents of this region south of Helsingborg realize
the marked increase of especially night-time heavy railtraffic such a fundamental
shift in connections implies.
Local new items...
Newspeak strikes again. The Swedish Immigration
Authority changes its name to the Swedish Migration Authority,
ostensibly to reflect the change in terminology (migration policies
and migration issues). What's in a name? About SEK 2.6 million invested
to make the change.
Piracy pays informants. Two Swedish companies were charged
to pay a total of SEK 410,000 because they used pirated (unlicensed) copies
of software. The cases were pursued by the international anti-piracy organization
BSA. In line with BSA policy, the tipsters who ratted on the companies each
receive 10% of the respective fines collected.
DNA crime registry grows. Swedish police have to date entered
in 600 DNA "traces" in a new DNA registry to combat crime. Although the most
publicized use concerns rape cases, police representatives say they use matching
in more mundane crimes as well. The legal guideline states that to use DNA
technology "actively", i.e. to try and match DNA forensics with a suspect's
DNA profile, potential conviction must give at least two years in prison
-- such as "aggravated rape". The same condition applies to creating a trace
entry for an individual in the database: the individual must have been convicted
to at least two years in jail. Correlation runs based on existing data however
seems unrestricted, and is thus applied to anything from car theft to other
routine cases. (Technical footnote: the matching currently uses nine
markers in a profile, compared to six in the other Nordic countries that
apply the same method.)
I have the BBC World news on in a corner. Rather depressing these days. So
I guess it's lunch and back to work for me. Have a good weekend! (Thank
you, JHR for your positive feedback on yesterday's ramblings.)
PS: It's a bit difficult to find decent pictures of the 8 km bridge section,
but here's one that doesn't make it look like a "wall" stretching across
the Sound. Malmö would be to the left (South). The descent to the right
(N by NW) is to the artificial island that marks the beginning of the 4 km
tunnel. Isn't it amazing what 2 or 3 billion dollars will get you...
So much for history...
I watched last night on the TV as thousands of cars lined up on both sides
of the bridge, and at the stroke of 11 drove across and back again, drivers
paying the USD 60 or so it cost for a round trip. The first "accident" occurred
when a lead police car followed a police motorbike through one of the tollgates,
not realizing that the boom would close again after the bike. Clipped the
boom very smartly in front of live TV.
It was all a rather remarkable sight really, given the dark and the thousands
of lights. Copenhagen was later lit up with fireworks.
Today was nose to the keyboard. Mostly. Like yesterday. Hence the late update.
I'm starting the editorial review submissions tomorrow. I hope. A bit late...
new things keep turning up in re-readings, but one has to draw the line
somewhere. I have over 350 pages, and still have things to write. Tech review
should start some weeks into July. That's the plan. That may well mean that
next week's updates can end up a bit on the short and erratic side. We'll
see.
I spent part of the time designing a new localized version of the wiki, in
Swedish, implementing some of the "security" aspects I've been writing about,
along with a rather different CSS-specified layout according to a client
site's preferred look. I'll post a link to it when it goes live.
Some of you might also have noticed that I removed full edit as an option
for casual visitors to a couple of my reference wikis. Comments can still
be added, but existing content can no longer be modified. This is a mixture
of testing and pragmatic caution. A test site was set up for a local computer
magazine, and some of that readership rather lacked good posting manners.
There have been a few "hits" on the other wikis, easily restored, but at
least some of the wikis will no longer be wide open.
It's possible that some other forums may end up editable (or even readable)
only for a specific membership, but I've not yet made any decision about
that. Some previews of the book might be posted to a wiki with append-only
permissions. It's one way of gathering feedback.
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