as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

Steve Champeon’s on temporary hiatus, but he’s left us with some CSS art (via Scott Andrew). (I wonder if there’ll be a permalink for this, since the link will break when he comes back.) Anyway, it’s photographs, displayed by having a large block of hashes (not quite one-per-pixel) and then colouring them with CSS declarations. The converter program is also smart enough to run-length encode the images, so a horizontal line of identical “pixels” is all within one span.

—–

Aquarion has suggested that we move LINKs to metadata from a given page into a separate XML format document, and then just have one LINK to this new document, in what he calls UMD.

I’m sort of reserving judgement on this for the moment, because I’m unclear on exactly how it’s to work. Does it replace all LINK tags? It’s “to stop every visitor to my site having to download half a million <link> tags contianing references to metadata.” But what’s metadata in this context? I’m assuming, say, that CSS is not metadata, because if you move your stylesheet LINKs into a separate file they won’t work. FOAF, on the other hand, is clearly metadata (and, moreover, about the page author, not the page), and Aquarion includes it in his example UMD document. I’m not seeing where the dividing line is, though; are <link rel=”section”> tags metadata, or page navigation? What about next and previous? I expect that a discussion will develop in the comments.

All that aside, I don’t think I like the idea anyway. It’s an optimisation for bandwidth. The rest of this is not really about UMD, I ought to note, but it’s a launchpad for the discussion, because it’s a very mild example of what I’m about to talk about.

Optimising for current limitations means that we take a step away from the ideological purity of the semantic web and start making compromises for the sake of keeping page sizes down. We’re starting to move into an era where we can use standards rather than workarounds for everything — we’re moving from nested nested tables to clean CSS, we’re adding RSS summaries to pages, we’re pinging central servers and other linked-to blogs. There are implementation problems with all these technologies, but they’re not conceptual problems most of the time; we’re not compromising on the standards but attempting to meet them. Falling short of the purity of the standards but trying to get it right is better than corrupting the standard so that what we’re doing is “standards compliant” but the term doesn’t mean anything. People like Paul Ford (and presumably the W3C) are beginning to glimpse the potential available in the Semantic Web. But I don’t think we’ll get there if we start compromising early on.

—–

The Checkershadow Illusion (via Jason Kottke) is quite astounding. I still don’t believe it, and I’ve checked.

—–

The Game Neverending: do I sign up?

—–

A few days ago, I wrote about iSiloWeb not being available for the Zaurus, and suggested that Opie-Reader now supports PML, and it wouldn’t be too hard to write something that grabbed a whole website and converted it to PML, ready for reading on the Zaurus.

So, this afternoon, I sat down and wrote such a script. But it didn’t work. My lovely PML document didn’t seem to get rendered with hyperlinks and whatnot. I was discouraged, frankly.

Then I noticed that Opie-Reader also supports documents in Plucker format. Pow. That’s all you need. plucker-build http://URL and then sync the resultant pdb file to your Zaurus. Blimey. So I can now snarf whole websites and read tham on the Z. Yay!

Hixie: Whitepaper: Pingback vs Trackback. Although I think that Ian might have been slightly over-critical of TrackBack, this does a very satisfactory job of answering the questions and flaws that people have pointed out with Pingback over the last week or so.

—–

Hixie has a selection of pingback proxies which allow people to get email notification of pingbacks, convert trackback notifications to pingback pings, and so on.

—–

Christian Koans — parables but in the Zen style. I’m not a Christian, but these are well written. The author has a note explaining his motivations in writing them.

—–

czr mentions Melancholy Elephants, a futuristic story about copyright law’s descent into insanity, and puts it, hustifiably, in the same box as RMS’s The Right To Read, which is also dystopian fiction about copyright law and the suppression of rights thereof.

—–

The helpdesk at work decided to add a somewhat customised picture to our Knowledge Base website. Only the head is mine, in case you couldn’t guess ;-)

—–

Dorothea Salo asks for “a menu command �Show anchors� and then highlights (or pops a character or image into�something like that) each spot where there�s an anchor. Right-click the highlight, copy link to clipboard, just as I can do with blog-generated permalinks.”

Show anchors — drag to your bookmark toolbar.

(Updated: Dorothea pointed out that it should work for links with an ID as well as a name, since URL fragment identifiers scroll to them too. (Did you know that? I didn’t know that.)

—–

This site should no longer crash IE6, although I think that the design might be broken in IE5.5. I can’t test that because I only have one WIndows box, and I can’t have both 5.5 and 6 installed on it. Sorry if it is.

—–

Since I got my Sharp Zaurus, the one thing that has annoyed me is that there has been nothing like iSiloWeb for the Palm, which snarfs a whole website into one file and allows you to browse said site on your Palm. It looks like, however, that QTReader (now called Opie-Reader) understands PML, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to write a thing that wgets a site and then drops it into one document, making web pages into PML chapters and fixing internal links. A project for someone, ideally me when I get time.

—–

Aquarion invents ESF, a reaction to RSS {0.9[0-9]|1.0|2.0}, which displays syndication data in an RFC-822 message-headers-like format. I may knock upa quick parser for it. Or at least a thing to convert it to RSS so it can be used in weblog aggregators ;)

—–

Sarabian has bought a Sharp Zaurus like mine. We will rid the world of iPaqs, one step at a time.

—–

The mozilla/browser project, retitled Phoenix, has just released 0.1, codenamed Pescadero. It’s a cut-down version of Mozilla, something like Galeon and so forth, but it still uses XUL to build the UI, rather than native widgets. And it’s really, really, really fast. And I just dragged a bookmarklet from my Moz links bar to the Phoenix links bar and it worked! How cool is that?

—–

As per Hixie’s post, the Pingback specification is a stable spec at 1.0.

—–

Last night the UK was hit by an earthquake measuring 4.8 on the Richter scale, meaning about the power of a kiloton nuclear device. The epicentre was about six miles away from Castle Langridge. The earth truly moved for me. And I slept right through it. Typical.

—–

Dejavu’s browser emulator is a work of unadulterated genius. It shows you what current web pages would look like in various old browsers (and I mean old here, Mosaic is in it, and it’s just as bad as I remember :)), and emulates those browsers’ user interfaces too, with frames and JavaScript. And it all works in Mozilla too. Genius. I’m also pleased to say that kryogenix works fine and all its content is accessible, because it separates design from content.

Sustainably Powered Microwave Transmissions: documentation of how psand.net rigged up a satellite net connection, powered by solar panels, in a field, at the Big Green Gathering. This is very cool, although according to dc-sat.net who supplied the hardware, to get this on a permanent basis will cost £355/month with six grand in setup costs. Oof.

—–

Dorothea Salo’s husband apparently abandoned a bank account some time ago, and the nice IRS helped the bank get back in touch with him to give him the money. Now, this shows me a human face to the big American governmental institutions that I wasn’t aware existed — Bill Bryson notes in Notes From A Big Country that the British public services can appear to at least have a human face, unlike American ones — but we’ll leave that aside for the moment. We will also leave aside the notion that a bank would ever be helpful and try and give money back to you, an area in which the Americans obviously have it better than us, because British banks define the word “heartless”, as well as the words “complicated”, “mercenary”, and “uncaring”. We will also not dwell on whether forgetting about a bank account is easy or hard, and whether it should happen or not. I know for a fact that I’ve got an account somewhere I haven’t touched in a while — it’s in the Woolwich, I think.

No, what we’ll pick up on here is Dorothea noting that “the final upshot of the encounter [is] a nice little windfall that whacks another five months off our mortgage.” Five months? Are American houses loads cheaper than ours or what? That Woolwich account I mentioned earlier has about four pounds in it. If we assume that they have a mortgage like mine then David Salo is either unbelieveably, unnaturally careless with money, or they’re very rich, because five months of my mortgage is about three thousand pounds. There is no chance, none, not one little bit of a chance, that I’d forget about three grand, or walk off and leave it. What am I missing here?

—–

According to The Death Test, I’ve got another 36 fun-filled years before popping my clogs. July 30th, 2038, to be precise, which annoyingly means that I’ll live to see the Y2.038K problem come to pass. I’m probably going to die of cancer, although I’m taking that with a pinch of salt since I allegedly have a 13% chance of dying of auto-fellatio, something that would doubtless kill me right now if I tried it, let alone if I were 62. I’ve also got my doubts about the statistical validity of the test data, since, according to the closing page, just under quarter of a million test-takers have leprosy. Cheered me up, though; if I get hit by a bus can my estate sue for a breach of the Trades Descriptions Act?

—–

Excellent story from someone at the LUG. Apparently a couple of spods went to see a stand-up comedian. One of them was wearing a T-shirt with <BODY> on the front (and, obviously, </BODY> on the back). The comedian noticed them and, pointing, asked, in a mocking tone of voice, whether they had hats with HEAD written on them. The two spods turned to one another and started talking, in tones of excitement, about what a good idea this was. The comedian, in a state of puzzlement that his sarcastic comments didn’t seem to have had the desired effect at all, stood in a state of confusion. Clearly humour is where you find it!

—–

Aquarion points us at a handy little thing called BlogSnob, which he describes as “a sort of text-ad service for weblogs”. So I now have an ad for someone else’s blog here (under the Also to try heading), and maybe an ad for adpb will show up elsewhere. Intriguing idea.

—–

Tonight I watched Moulin Rouge. And it was absolutely brilliant. I had been advised that it works a lot better on a big cinema screen, and having seen it I can entirely believe that, but it was still fantastic. Pretty random in places — all the swift-cut fast-zoom cinematography — but it worked really well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film quite like it, and I really, really enjoyed it. Fantastic film.

Oh, and it having Nicole Kidman in it had nothing to do with me liking it, honest. Well, maybe a little bit.

Wasn’t she gorgeous, though? And a really rather good singer, too. Her acting skills go without saying. But..yum. :-)

—–

I have a response to my fax to my MP about the EUCD!

Not a very useful response, though.

Thank you for your recent communication cncerning the proposed European Union Copyright Directive. I have noted your comments and concerns on this matter and have forwarded a copy to Fred Bloggs MEP to take note of your views. I have no doubt that you will be hearing from Fred in the very near future.

Once again many thanks for taking the time to write to me on this issue.

…and then there’s some bumph about a Drugs Information Hotline, which concerns me not at all.

Does this sound like a fob-off to you? It does to me. It boils down to “there’s a Somebody Else’s Problem field around this; talk to someone else.” Now, fighting this at the European level needs doing, but I also want to know what our government is doing about it. I’m unclear how best to proceed; should I come back to my MP and ask for a more satisfactory answer?

—–

Bill points me at conspiracy theory central, with the comment, “Check out all the data they’ve gathered! It’s amazing.”

Conspiracies about “Consealment [sic] of information”: none.
Conspiracies about “Government interaction with ETs”: none.
Conspiracies about “Secret Weapons testing”: none.
Conspiracies about “Testing of bio distrabution [sic] on public”: one.

The world is clearly a safer and less secret place than I thought.

—–

Lawrence Lessig’s talk at OSCON 2002 addressed the changing world of copyright law and the suppression of individual rights by content producers. It fuelled a long discussion at the LUG meeting last night.

Lessig took as the central thread of his talk something that he called a refrain: a key summary, the point of it all.

• Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
• The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
• Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
• Ours is less and less a free society.

He moved on from discussing the problem of the dominance of copyright law and the growing digital rights management nature of the world, which everyone in the audience and, I suspect, most (although not all) of the people reading this know about and sympathise with, to asking the audience what they had done. In the two, three, four years since it became apparent that the world was going to go this way, and in the two, three, four years that hackers everywhere have been complaining about this, what had anyone done about it?

Even on the audio version of the talk, even reading the transcript of the talk, you could practically hear, you could certainly imagine, everyone in the audience looking down at the floor. Shuffling their feet in embarrassment. Murmuring, well, I was going to do it. I was going to complain, but then I had some code to write, and then I went out for a drink, and I didn’t get around to it. I’m going to do it tomorrow, though, promise. Or the next day. Sometime soon, anyway.

Then they came for me
and there was no one left
to speak out for me.
Martin Niemöller

Now, I’m aware that I’m just as guilty as anyone else. I faxed my MP about the European Union Copyright Directive (and I harangued the whole LUG about not having done it, with one exception who did listen to me and did do it); I try to stay in touch with what FIPR are up to; I try and explain the issues to people who I think will care. But, basically, I’ve done nothing. I haven’t donated to the EFF. I haven’t actually confronted my MP in any way. I haven’t donated to FIPR. I haven’t helped the CDR.

I feel guilty about this. I’m exactly the constituency that does care. I’m the archetypal person who should be opposing the ceaseless march of law taking away our rights. If I’m not doing anything, how can I expect people who don’t know about the issues, who don’t think they care about them even if they do know, to do anything? I want to speak out for someone else before there’s no-one left to speak out for me.

—–

I have a completely random IE bug. I have a web server: let’s assume that it’s called terriers.foo.com. If I request a page http://terriers.foo.com/test.html, and follow a link from there to http://terriers.foo.com/test2.html, test2.html does not get the HTTP_REFERER environment variable: it’s empty. However, terriers.foo.com can also be called electra (a local alias). If I request http://electra/test.html and follow the link to http://electra/test2.html, test2 does get a referrer! Why! This is really, really annoying, and I can find neither documentation of it nor any ideas on how to fix it.

—–

Michel complains about only having one phone line. Interestingly, though, he posted the phone number for said line.

See, I’d never do that. Up until fairly recently, I was very leery of even posting my name online, which is why you’ll see a lot of stuff on this site (and other places) referenced as Aquarius. I’m still reluctant to give out personal information like where I live, that sort of thing. My extremity on this point has been pretty diluted, but it’s all fairly new to me; I’ve only really started using a real name online since I started this weblog, and that wasn’t all that long ago. Maybe I should get a cooler name. Any suggestions? Maybe I should be “Ric”, or something.

—–

“Sweetcode reports innovative free software. “Innovative” means that the software reported here isn’t just a clone of something else or a minor add-on to something else or a port of something else or yet another implementation of a widely recognized concept. ”

—–

Scott is full of good stuff, and he’s only been back a day. Hisneat header trick is a really pretty way to do headers, and one I have to steal, I think, just as soon as I can think of where to use it. This is the sort of nice thing that I wanted to see happening when I talked about finding our feet in CSS; little tricks like this that can be combined into beautiful designs.

—–

Scott Andrew LePera (welcome back, Scott!) rants about yellowjackets, so, this being a truly noble subject, I thought I’d join in.

Now, anyone who knows me will tell you that I’m terrified of wasps. Not just that I dislike them, or that they irritate me, or that I don’t like them flying around. Terrified. When I see wasps I run away. I once spent a whole lunch break hiding in my car because one chased me. I hate them, the horrible little stripey bundles of malevolence. Scott points out, quite accurately, that they don’t sting to defend the hive, or if they feel threatened; they just sting. For fun. Because there’s nothing good on telly. To watch your face. And they have this mind-numbing droning buzz, which doesn’t sound scary until you hear it around your face. Especially when everyone around you says something like, “Don’t swat at it, you’ll make it angry.” It’s already angry. Wasps are born angry, and they never get any happier. And they serve no purpose other than to sting and be nasty; bees pollinate flowers and make honey and all that. What do wasps do? Sting people. That’s it. They’re like some evil equivalent of the Jewish tzaddikim, the 36 righteous people on who the weight of the world rests; wasps embody evil in all its forms and are the representatives of the Prince of Pain on earth. You might think that this is an overstatement, but you’d be wrong.

Someone I know once, in an over-reaction typical of him, threatened to tie me down to the floor in mid-summer and pour honey on my face. Just the thought of this scares me so much that it leaves me breathless. I woke up sweating in more than one nightmare, hearing the menacing drone, feeling them crawling over my eyelids.

Rentokil were called out, a couple of years ago, to a house where it was believed that there was a wasp nest in the attic. When they arrived, they found that the nest was ten feet long and probably contained about half a million wasps, or some other massively unimaginable figure of wasps in one place. They evacutated the house for two days. Personally, I’d have burned the house to the ground, although that might have just left you with a pile of ash and half a million very hot and very very angry wasps, which wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. The BBC had a news article about a man who poured insecticide into a wasp nest the size of a car while suspended from a helicopter, which is an act of either colossal bravery or abject stupidity.

I don’t know if Scott will actually perform his planned guerrilla raid on their nest, but I hope he does. Every wasp that dies makes the world a slightly better place.

—–

Cliff Pickover is running an “ESP Experiment“. It took me some time to work this one out. :)

Cthuugle (via Kam and Lots O’People) — as Kam puts it, that is not dead which can eternally search the web. Wish I knew why the idea of being eaten by a Great Old One is so popular.

—–

Finally, the results of the Consolation Champs haiku competition (see days passim). I didn’t even get in the top 15, bummer. Still, I have the book anyway.

—–

Remixed Propaganda (via jwz) is a selection of anti-war and anti-oppression posters, with specific reference to the American government.

PATRIOTISM MEANS NO QUESTIONS

—–

Hixie goes a bit mental in “One, two, thr-ooooh…” after looking at loads of little Unicode glyphs for too long.

Is it me or are most of those things dingbats rather than any kind of vaguely likely letterform? You get the impression that the Unicode people said, “OK, we used to be limited to 256 characters but now we’ve got loads of space — anyone got any daft little pictures they want to chuck into the spec?”, sniggering as they went. Much like the way that IP ranges are running out so the IPv6 people vastly overspecced the IPv6 range, so every atom in the universe can have a million IP addresses or whatever it is. The legacy of the Y2K problem is that everyone is really trying hard to make sure nothing ever runs out of space ever again.

If I engineer code that I expect to be in use for N years, I make damn sure
that every internal limit is at least 10x larger than the largest I can
conceive of a user making reasonable use of at the end of those N years. The
invariable result is that the N years pass, and fewer than half of the users
have bumped into the limit. (Tim Peters)

—–

I hate Perl.

I’ve ben attempting to hack client pingback into the Movable Type code, and I cannot for the life of me get it working. The CGI just dies, so I get a 500 Server Error. And it dies on all sorts of lines that should make total sense, like “require LWP::UserAgent”, which works fine elsewhere. I really do not understand this.

I hate Perl.

—–

Apparently some has just discovered the Earth’s third moon (via From the Orient). Third moon, huh? Did you know that we had a second moon, which is called “Cruithne”? Don’t lie, you did not. I must pay more attention to astronomy.

—–

Optimoz provides mouse gestures for Mozilla (so you can hold down the mouse button and draw a line from right-to-left to go back, draw a lower-case H to go to your homepage, etc). They’re incredibly useful. I use them all the time at work in Moz. I can’t use them here at home, though, because I can’t get the installation to work under Linux. I’ve read the mailing lists and the big database, tried their suggestions, and it still isn’t working. I want y mouse gestures!

—–

After some sterling work by Hixie, there is a new version of the Pingback spec (v0.9.2).

—–

Python UK conference 2003. Cool. I wanna go.

This is an attempt to test the pingback client. We should ping this post. Ideally.

Hixie describes why you shouldn’t be using XHTML.

—–

Sarabian has been integrating my Pingback MT code into MT 2.2, and it looks like it works. Fantastic!

—–

Courtesy of Mort, there is now a a Spanish translation of the Pingback spec. I’ve mirrored the translation here alongside its English counterpart. Good work, that man!

—–

Aquarion has implemented Pingback in both client and server modes on Aquarionics. Hixie is searching for an excuse to link to Pingback-enabled blogs, so he’s either sending manual pings or he’s got a client-side implementation at the very least. Simon is also pingback enabled, using his own IXR XML-RPC library for PHP, which now has a discussion forum. Mort also has a working client and server implementation (but his server’s not up all the time). (UPDATE 07-09-2002: Mort’s still working on the server implementation, and pretty much has the client side working.)

Maybe soon we’ll be at the stage when I can’t list all the implementations in one post. Maybe soon, too, I’ll get enough time to implement a client-side version for MT and then I can release it. I could release the server code now, I suppose; is there anyone out there reading this, competent in Perl, and running MT2.2 who would be willing to let me now how much of a forward-porting effort it would be? (I’m running, and coded for, MT 2.1 using the Berkeley DB — I don’t know what changes the MySQL stuff made throughout MT.)

—–

Another browser experiment from Stu’s House of Elite JavaScript Weirdness. This time, we present searchhi, a small JavaScript library that you can include in your code and will, if your page is reached through a Google search, automatically highlight the words on the page that the user searched for.

—–

Britain leads the way in eroding privacy from The Times (via Hixie)
“INDIVIDUAL privacy is being eroded in Britain to a far greater extent than in other developed countries, according to an international study of state surveillance in the year since September 11.”
I’ve written about this before. And it just keeps going on. I was ignored by my MP when I faxed her about the EUCD (four weeks, still no reply). Is anything ever going to change?

—–