"Out with the old, in with the new!" Isn’t that how the saying goes?

I’ve been thinking about this, and trying to apply it to many different things. For instance, everyone is quite concerned with making computers/linux/the web/etc simple enough for Aunt Tillie to use. (See Eric Raymond, Jon Udell, and I’m sure others…) I admit this is a noble thing. I would like to see these things easier for Aunt Tillie to use, but part of me doesn’t want to worry about it… because time will take care of the problem.

I don’t mean to be rude, but face it, Aunt Tillie is old, and she won’t be around forever, sure she’s got a few good years left, but will she be compiling her own kernel anytime soon? Doubtful…

On the other hand, young people (aka The Youth) seem quite comfortable with technology. They happily use cell phones everyday without a second thought. They even pay to have custom ring tones. Ring tones? Crazy! Well, crazy to me, someone no longer a youth, who didn’t have a cell phone as a youth, and wouldn’t think of paying for a special ring for a phone. And that VCR, who can program those things? As a kid I did, but my mom sure didn’t. Of course today you’ve got a TiVo and it’s pretty darn simple to operate, it’s not even a matter or programming it, it’s more just a matter of using it.

Think about how much easier computers have become in the last 20 years, the last 15 years… Or using the internet? Remember getting on the internet just 10 years ago? Progress is being made, that’s for sure.

Who will benefit from this progress? The youth. My kids will… My oldest daughter is in grade school, and last year she showed one of the teachers how to use the digital camera they had at school. The kids coming out of college now (and in the coming years) use Linux, and they like it. This is one of the reasons I think things like open-source and Linux on the desktop will eventually really take off, because in the future, they won’t be new ideas, they’ll just be “the way it is” to some degree. (Another old saying comes to mind: “Unix is very user friendly, it’s just picky about who its friends are.”)

Kids are accepting of new technology because to them it’s not new, it’s just there. Wasn’t it always there? My kids have never seen a TV without a remote control. There’s a thing in the living room that plays movies, audio CD’s, and shows photos on the TV. Making your own CD for the truck with your favorite songs from a library of thousands is no big deal.

Maybe it’s just me, and I’m getting old. People often ask where their flying cars and jetpacks are, but I think the answer is, they’re all around us. Sometimes they’re just hard to see through those old eyes with poor vision…

Are there IELovers outside of Microsoft? A show of hands:

one of the presenters… …asks: "How many here use IE". A few hands, reluctantly, show. Attendees start to giggle, then laughs. Applause. Presenter looks baffled and a bit hurt. Then he asks "And how many here would want us to fix it, so they can use it". Even less hands.

There is much talk of IE, and how it’ll be improved, and better, and support CSS and PNGs, but let’s actually see something. Working code! A released application people can install and use. Or not. As previously stated, I don’t care if Microsoft ever releases a new version, in fact I prefer if they do not, but it is nonetheless interesting to follow the story of such…

News Flash: Someone Really, Really Likes IE!

Don’t believe me? See: I Love This Browser! for proof:

…what we do every day at work - make Internet Explorer the best way for browsing the web. I realize that statement will cause some people to chuckle based on current press on security issues and perceived lack of innovation, but that is my job.

Well, ok… Perhaps someone loves IE because it’s “their job” and we all know you have to do your “job” else the man has no use for you… Still, I give credit to Scott Stearns for posting this. I also have to give credit to Microsoft for opening up like this, I can’t imaging being given the task of writing for IEBlog. Especially right now.

Many of the comments to this post are stupid and childish, but you can expect such things. Some do make very valid points though, so it’s worth a read.

I personally don’t care if IE gets improved, fixed, whatever, since it’ll only be available for one platform (Windows) it’s pretty much useless to me. I prefer that it “go away and never come back” as Smeagol might say.

People often cite Microsoft Exchange as one of the pieces of the corporate puzzle that open-source has not yet provided a replacement for. Sure, we’ve got good email servers and clients, but there’s always talk of calendaring and scheduling (stuff I really don’t do, and am not familiar with.)

Another piece that might be missing (and again, I’m no expert in this area, so enlighten me if I’m ignorant) is webcasts. In the geek community we’ve got streaming audio, slides in HTML, IRC, etc. but these are geek technologies, and not fit for business-person consumption.

The requirements for webcasts usually cover Windows/IE, and on the Mac it’s… well, IE5 (in Classic!), Netscape 4? Safari? Or… In my little testing over the past few years I’ve had to resort to using old obscure browsers, making sure Java is all set with these old browsers, and other crazy hoop jumping.

Here’s a (possibly) crazy idea, build a webcasting application utilizing the Mozilla platform. This is one place I think a rich internet client is needed, and the added benefit of being a multi-platform client is a great plus. These webcasts usually involve someone speaking, sometimes via streaming audio, and sometimes you do a conference call. There’s some sort of slides being show, which requires the server to push the change of slides to the client. There’s also (usually) some sort of chat thingy in the browser as well, for questions. It really doesn’t seem like rocket surgery, but there’s enough little pieces to make it non-trivial.

But will people want to install a specialized app just to take part in a webcast? Well, as mentioned I spent more time screwing around installing plugins, Java, and old browsers, that my answer is “yes” I probably would install a specialized client. You wouldn’t believe how many demos I’ve been a part of where people had some weird issue with something not working, and that includes people using Windows/IE.

It seems like all of the companies doing these webcasts built their platforms at a time (years ago) where betting on Windows and IE was a safe thing do to, and if they had extra time they made it work in Netscape 4. Has there been any progress in the last few years?

From what I remember (and as I said, it’s been a while) WebEx seemed to work pretty well out of the ones I tested. I think they might be more open to other platforms besides Windows…

I was reminded of all of this because Scoble mentioned an MSDN webcast. Of course looking at the FAQ for Microsoft Webcasts we see that they support IE, and Netscape 4.x, and mention you might be able to use Netscape 7, but alas, only Windows is welcomed here.

This seems like it creeps into stuff that Jon Udell might talk about…

Anyone else have insight into this? I’m not expecting some open-source project to pop up out of nowhere to solve this, but I think the possibilities of a company doing it right, meaning working on multiple-platforms with a rich client, or at least working with modern-day browsers (again, on multiple-platforms) could happen. If such company did a demo, and it all just “Magically Worked” I’d be quite impressed…

So I’ve been hacking away at PHP for a while now, and I must say it’s a fairly easly language to pick up. In fact, that seems to be the biggest strength of PHP, besides the fact that’s it’s also easy to install and every host out there seems to have done so.

Still the templating-freak in me feels a bit dirty mixing all of that presentational-html with logical-code. It’s like perl cgi’s in 1998 or something… I know, there’s Smarty and other templating systems, and of course some will tell you that PHP is (sort of) a templating system in itself… Still, that cultural thing…

Kellan, in There Has Got To Be A Better Way, has this bit titled The Impenetrable Importance of Culture:

For me the hardest part in working with languages I’m less familiar with (python, and php for example) rather then those I’m more comfortable with (perl or java) is not syntax questions, its culture. For all of Perl’s much vaunted “There is More Then One Way To Do It”, I know the proper way to do things, the proper tool to reach for, and if I don’t I have ways of finding out, largely through internal calculation based on my understanding of the Perl reputation landscape. Its that information which is opaque to me, especially in PHP where the fast number of practioners are novices.

That’s previously summed up my thoughts on PHP, though I’m still quite open to it, and might change my mind…

(I must admin, PHP is hundreds, if not thousands of times better than dealing with ASP or ColdFusion, at least in my book, and again, this is due to a large degree because of the culture surrounding each of them.)

Recently Tantek said about Mac OS 9 web browsers:

Of course if you’re running OS9 (say, for example, if you’re using a Mac that just either won’t run OSX or doesn’t have enough memory of CPU power to make OSX usable), IE5/Mac is still your best choice - those other choices either don’t exist or exist only in abandoned versions far shy of IE5/Mac’s capabilities.

I agree that IE5/Mac was a very nice browser, 4 years ago… But instead of using a 4 year old browser, you could use a 1 year old browser with many of those modern day browser features, in the form of WaMCom.

WamCom is based on Mozilla, and provides a version which runs on Mac OS 9 (and even 8.6!) which is good, because official Mozilla development of non-Mac OS X apps ended a while back…

Of course Tantek probably has a soft spot for IE5/Mac, so I guess I can’t blame him for liking it. ;)

I was going to mention something about the benefits of open-source, but I’ll spare you this time, as I’ve got code to debug…

See Also: Unofficial Mozilla for Mac OS 9 (Mac OS Classic), Mac OS 9 Web Browsers: A Mini-Review, Mozilla: Old Releases…

There seems to be this debate going on whether “bloggers” are “journalists” or not.

From Dictionary.com, journalist:

jour·nal·ist

1. One whose occupation is journalism.
2. One who keeps a journal.

Ok, so anyone who “keeps a journal” is a journalist, and if we assume a “weblog” or “blog” is a journal, then we are all journalists.

Some people might be referring to that first bit, “One whose occupation is journalism” though, and that’s fine. Don’t think of yourself as a journalist, think of yourself as a reporter.

Hold on, let’s check on reporter:

re·port·er

1. A writer, investigator, or presenter of news stories.
2. A person who is authorized to write and issue official accounts of judicial or legislative proceedings.

Ok, I think we can cover that first one. Plenty of bloggers have presented news stories, that seems undeniable.

I remember years ago, when I knew somebody who screamed for a band saying they weren’t really a singer, and I told them that was ok, because while they may not have been a “singer” they were definitely a “vocalist” - yeah, I know, if you look those two words up they sort of point to each other in a circular motion, but the point is, if the word in use doesn’t match up to the expectations of the word in people’s eyes, find another word.

In other words, confuse people, and viplos bimcus!

Panic: dynamic SQL (? placeholders) are not supported by the server you are connecting to (Damn you Microsoft!)

The above bit is the message I got when using Perl’s DBD::Sybase module to talk to Microsoft SQL using FreeTDS, whch technically, is a feat all in itself, but anyway, I’m all for database abstraction in applications and code. Jeremy thinks abstraction layers must die, and if I was someone who was an expert in one database, and got to choose to always use that one database, I might agree. Actually he goes on to say:

The author uses an argument I hear all the time: If you use a good abstraction layer, it’ll be easy to move from $this_database to $other_database down the road.

That’s bullshit. It’s never easy.

In any non-trivial database backed application, nobody thinks of switching databases as an easy matter. Thinking that “the conversion will be painless” is a fantasy.

Ok, the use of “non-trivial” makes this true depending on your definition of trivial, but some things might be considered trivial, and still be quite useful. Some systems can easily swap which database they use very easily. I’ve managed to switch things between MySQL, SQLite, and Microsoft SQL with ease. Now granted, none of these things were enterprise-level, make-or-break application (I’m not at Yahoo!) but they’re important to me and the people who own the data.

Database portability doesn’t have to be a myth. It’s all data, right? Moving it from one system to another should not be a nightmare.

See Also: Database Abstraction Considered Harmful

We continue to hack away at our aggregator, originally based on Feed on Feeds, it doesn’t quite resemble it anymore and my changes aren’t exactly neat little patches. (I’m considering calling it “thehomer” but we’ll see.)

So these are some of the features it has today, or I’ve been thinking about trying to add:

• Per-feed poll frequency, variable depending on the feed itself
• Per-feed purge times, some items I want to save forever, some I want just a few days
• Ratings, similar to iTunes, so if I was in a hurry I could just choose to read the feeds/items designated as 5 *’s
• Thumbs up/down rating system for items
• IM notifications, alert me via IM (Jabber or AIM perhaps) about certain events/things/etc…
• XFN, so I could do interesting things based off of the feeds/items from people I have some relationship with
• del.icio.us integration, currently I can add an item to del.icio.us with one click. There’s more to do here of course, like doing an md5 on the url, and hitting del.icio.us to see who else links to it…
• Technorati integration, currently I can do a Technorati Cosmos search with one click
• Google integration, currently I can do a Google “realted” search and find items Google thinks are related to an item. Eventually I’d like to do something a bit more advanced with the Google API)
• Click counts, which keep track of how many times I click on something leading to another site.
• Temporary subscriptions, so when you add a feed you can choose how long you’ll be subscribed to it. (Great for comment feeds!)
• blo.gs integration, I’m currently using Phil’s PHP Blogroll to pull in data, as well as providing a live link to blo.gs update list. (Still contemplating tighter integration here, possibly for marking things as read after visiting a site)

I’ve read through some of the ideas that l.m. had (see "Info Freako, or who’s already past arguing about syndication formats?") as well as stuff Rogers had (see "Wanted: Gluttonous RSS Feeders") and looked at the feature sets of a number of existing aggregators. There’s a lot of good ideas out there!

I’ve also grabbed SimpleAggregator, Andrew’s Feed Reader and Auto-Blogroll, and should read up on Temboz while I’m at it too!

I guess when it comes down to it, the aggregator is becoming a Total Information Portal, to some degree, and maybe Knowledge Management is more where things are heading. I’m really not sure, but I find it quite fascinating.

Recently a friend of ours got a new computer. It was running Windows. After four days of owning it, they had a virus.

Now, I won’t even go off on how crappy Windows is and all that, because the bottom line is really that you install software from sources you trust, right? Right. (Except in the case of your crappy software vendor’s browser installing things without your permission, but I won’t get into that either.) So, since many people know I’m a “computer guy” I got enlisted to help.

(BTW, it confuses many people when you tell them that you indeed are a computer guy, but you really don’t use Windows. Try it sometime.)

It was all quite exciting, since the last time I dealt with a virus was the Autostart worm of 1998, which was extremely easy to deal with. Since I don’t really use Windows, I don’t worry much about the virus problem. So here I was, attempting to kill a Windows virus on someone’s 4-day old PC… What next?

Well, I first tried the anti-virus software, which did not fix the problem. I tried to update the anti-virus software. It didn’t help. I had no idea what I was doing since the last time I used anti-virus software was probably around 1994 when System 7 was totally awesome. So I then managed to track down the scumware and attempted to delete it. I could not delete it all. I tried killing the process, no good. Tried logging in as another user and killing it, no good. Tried combinations of all of those things while standing on head. No good. It was cool to see all of the files suddely appear in the directory. The virus seemed to be self-repairing software. Neat!

I ended up recommending a complete re-install of system. Friend did that, but afterwards reported that virus was still there, and I realized that a re-installation did not whack it, but probably would have if we wiped the disk. I don’t know how to do that in Windows.

So ends my brush with a Windows virus.

As for the “Daddy, what’s a virus?” title, that’s what my daughter asked me that night. She’s been using computers for almost 7 years, and has probably never heard the words “computer” and “virus” in the same sentence at our house. We runs Macs and we run Linux. The only windows around here are made out of glass and let the sun shine in…

I finally got around to writing some browser zeitgeist code. It takes data from Analog and does some funky calculations, and presents it textually/graphically. Sort of. Idea stolen from everyone else who has done this, who I would credit if I could remember…

(Oh, if the Browser Zeitgeist display appears somewhat unreadable, just reload and it should redisplay.)

I’m finding the aggregator space more interesting nowadays than the weblog software space. Years ago a lot of people wrote their own weblog software, and people would come up with ideas, and others would implement the ideas in their home-brewed weblog software. There wasn’t really the commercial end of it that there is now. It was a feature-race, but with a friendly face attached to it. Hmmm, maybe it’s just me…

Anyway, the aggregator landscape seems to be changing on a weekly, if not daily, schedule. I’ve been using aggregators since 2000 or earlier. Not counting the Netscape and UserLand offerings (or my own aggregator named poorly enough “channels”) I’ve toyed with AmphetaDesk, NetNewsWire, Bloglines, a few others I’ve forgot the names of, and more recently Feed on Feeds.

As mentioned previously, I’ve been hacking at Feed on Feeds a bit, molding it to what I want for an aggregator. I’ve been taking ideas from the aggregators I’ve used in the past, and some ideas from other places (like AmphetaOutlines) and my own crazy ideas.

I’ve already made a bunch of UI and functional changes to Feed on Feeds, so that it’s not quite Feed on Feeds anymore, and really needs a new name.

I’ve added clickcounts, so it’ll keep track of how often I follow links to the original site. Of course some of the feeds are full entries, and some are just abstracts, still, this might show how often I follow a link to a site.

I’m working on creating a per-feed update schedule, since some feeds I want updated once an hour (favorite weblogs) and some I don’t care if they get updated once per day (like search results for keywords, top new stories, etc.) I could even allow some to update every X minutes (5, 10, whatever) if it’s coming from my own systems and frequent polling is an OK thing.

I’m interested in using the data from Technorati, Feedster, blo.gs, and del.icio.us in interesting ways. I might try to use Phil’s PHP blo.gs blogroll to see how I could tie blo.gs’s site update polling data into things. I’m more than happy to find other people’s code to glue together, as this has also become a PHP learning project for me.

I think what I’ve gotten out of this so far is that aggregators still have a long way to go, and that’s not to say they aren’t very good yet, that’s just to say that I see incredible possibilities in this space. Good Luck, aggregators of data!

One more Feed on Feeds hack before I’m outta here…

Below is what you would normally see. Well, ok what I would normally see when using Feed on Feeds:

My last modification was to make the feeds with unread items bold, and put how many unread items after the name. (This is how Bloglines does it.) Notice the addition of a link titled ’show unread’ at the top.)

The new way, after clicking on that ’show unread’ link:

Clicking on the ’show unread’ link reloads the list with just the feeds with unread items, hiding those that are already read. This might be handy for people who are subscribed to a zillion feeds.

What I’m really liking about Feed on Feeds is the hackability, even though I’m no PHP expert. (Imaging if I did know PHP!) Bloglines is still very nice, and I’d recommend it to anyone who doesn’t get that hacking itch, but for those of us who always need to tweak things along the way, Feed on Feeds is great.

Mozilla is the happy :) - IE is the sad :(

Says Wired, Mozilla Feeds on Rival’s Woes:

Downloads of Mozilla and Firefox — an advanced version of Mozilla — spiked the day CERT’s warning was released, and demand has continued to grow. According to Chris Hofmann, engineering director at the Mozilla Foundation, formed last July to promote the development, distribution and adoption of Mozilla Web applications, downloads of the browsers hit an all-time high on Thursday, from the usual 100,000 or so downloads on a normal day to more than 200,000.

(See Also: Vulnerability Note VU#713878)