July 2003 Archives

Dave Pollard has a great piece on the blogging process. If you already suspected that serious blogging is a rather time-consuming and involving activity, you will not be disappointed.

I particularly like Dave's question on connectivity:

Why can't we enhance blog software so it allows a discussion, at the author's discretion, to migrate simply to other, more powerful conversational tools without losing the connection to the initial blog post that provoked it? I could (as lots of bloggers do) add applets and links for chat, IM, voice-over-IP, a webcam, desktop videoconferencing, my forums and groups, and my Ryze and LinkedIn pages. But they still wouldn't be connected, and I'd expect few readers to comfortably jump to the other 'channels' to continue a discussion started by a blog post.

This resonates with my feelings that the commenting systems on the present weblogs are in their infancy. Not that, as Dave points out, comments are the ideal way of interacting with each other, but working for a big systems integrator has reinforced my natural suspicion that integration can go only so far. It is safe to say that comments are now a basic feature of any serious weblog system and that they could be seriously improved to facilitate discussions. This is a less ambitious quest than Dave's one, however a necessary building block and one that is practically feasible because it is an evolution rather than a new integration. Judging from the recurring calls around better comments, it is also an apparent need.

Here is a short and non exhaustive primer, from my mere thoughts, to real improvements to weblogs comments:

Trackbacks are comments, let's integrate them: Simple Comments, CommentsAPI.
Comments are personal voices, let's sign them: comments authentication, Reserved Names.
How do I fix a typo? Editable comments. But then, I do I track updates? Dive into accountability!
Following conversations (including remote ones): threaded comments, with notifications, TrackBack replies to comments.

One day all of this will percolate enough for me to nail it in a comprehensive form, before it will simply appear out of the box on a prominent system and spread through emulation, the latter being what I really wish anyway.

Excellent! From Matthew Haughey.

P'tit Luc (je crois) ce matin sur France Inter dans Le Cri du Coi:

On dit que le rire est le propre de l'homme. Je crois au contraire que le rire est la dernière trace animale qui nous reste de la façon d'exprimer notre joie, tout comme le chat ronronne ou le chien jappe.

Warning, highly geeky stuff ahead:

• extensive review of PHP5 with interesting bits about SQLite
• Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 (Taroon) Beta 1

This is the first definition of the F-word from a lawyer I see. Nothing less than a cultural piece.

Pour les francophones qui ne sont pas à l'aise en anglais, il faut que je retrouve cette perle d'humour de la leçon d'anglais de survie. Ca commençait comme ça : "Si vous ne savez pas quoi dire dites foq. Si vous ne comprenez pas quelque chose dites ouate ze foq." etc.

The EU has created the statute of European company, dubbed SE for Societas Europeae.

An SE will be able to operate on a European-wide basis and be governed by Community law directly applicable in all Member States. The European Company Statute will be established by two pieces of legislation, namely a Regulation (directly applicable in Member States) establishing the company law rules and a Directive (which will have to be implement in national law in all Member States) on worker involvement.

The goal is to provide a uniform ground (legal, financial, administrative) to reduce the operating costs and burden for pan-European companies. Potential savings in terms of administrative costs were estimated to be up to 30 billion euros per year. This statute has yet to be formally adopted.

Jospin a réagi plus vite aux résultats du 1er tour que Bush aux résultats des deux tours.

La suite, c'est chez l'autre Padawan (le petit). Désolé, je n'ai pas pu résister.

Tom Coates wants to balkanise Blogdex:

The last couple of days have seen a Daypop and Blogdex Top 40 that are totally overwhelmed by political articles from the States. If it wasn't for the fact that many of these articles are concerned with the war in Iraq, you could be excused for thinking that nothing else was happening in the world at at all - even perhaps that there was no world outside the US.

The problem lies in the reliance of webloggers on those tools:

Blogdex, Daypop, Popdex, Technorati and the like are no longer simple reflectors of a community's activities - they are also one of our community's best mechanisms for news discovery. To some extent they're gradually becoming one of the most significant ways we find out what's going on in the world around us.

This tends to form an action-reaction system which has a tendency to form closed loops (it would be interesting to measure the amplification power of A-list webloggers, see how many echos of a story they can generate and how long they last).

I love Tom's idea to balkanise those tools. I'd love to be able to apply filters on all those "top-stories" aggregators and immediately filter a language, a country or a region in or out of the picture. What's hot among US webloggers? What's up in the EU? Compare things as viewed exclusively by US sites vs. the rest of us (you name it), would be a very valuable tool to better understand the world or, at least, each other.

Chuq von Rospach about Kottke's donut and coffee guy:

people are honest and trustworthy -- as long as you're watching

Ha, Quantum Honesty! Looks like the classical Quantum Theory measurement problem.

With buymusic.com Windows PC users can now enjoy a new Internet music download service but -- dare I say unsurprisingly -- without the same level of freedom that customers of Apple's Music Store. Wired titles Lots of Music, and One Big Flaw:

BuyMusic founder Scott Blum called Apple CEO Steve Jobs "a visionary, but he's on the wrong platform."

That is to say I am on the wrong platform, along with a good deal of you, my dear readers, as I reckon about 37% of this site readership are Mac netizens.

Of course the flaw isn't the platform and Windows users will soon find out why by reading carefully Buy Music's terms of sales:

• Only physical persons "resident in the 50 states of the United States of America, exclusive of its commonwealths, territories and possessions" can purchase on the site. Apple's Music Store is likewise presently limited to U.S. citizens but, hold on, "your computer and other Approved Electronic Devices [...] must all be physically located in the United States". That's right, don't even think of bringing that mp3 player on the plane with you!
• "All downloaded music, images, video, artwork, text, software and other copyrightable materials (“Content”) are sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement." Nice try to redefine what selling and buying means, Buy Music is not about buying music after all.
• "End Users may play the Digital Downloads an unlimited number of times on the same registered personal computer to which the music is downloaded". Contrary to Apple, which authorizes you to upload the music on three computers and transfer those rights to a new machine should you replace one, anything you purchase from Buy Music is linked to one, and only one, computer. Could someone remind us what the lifetime of a Windows PC is nowadays?
• "Different Record Label Companies Permit Different Added Uses Of Their Digital Downloads". Before buying that song, you'd better check if you don't risk prison by transferring it to your mp3 player or burning it on a CD. Apple has a single and consistent licensing scheme that applies on all songs so you don't have to worry.
• Approved Electronic Devices. "[Approved] Portable Devices must support the Windows Media Audio (“WMA”) format [...]. WMAs are not compatible with any Macintosh Operating Systems". No, not that iPod sir. Nope, neither the Windows version. Who said something about being on the wrong platform? Ironical, isn't it, when the iPod is the best selling mp3 player!

But, honestly, I'm neither a U.S. citizen nor a Windows user and Buy Music looks to me like an exemplar monument to mediocrity. So why should I care?

For you reading pleasure, here are a few deserved extra critics that inspired the present billet:

Ars Technica: "the advertising campaign appears to be a total rip off of Apple." They have a good list of flaws.
Textura Design: taking gripe on the iTunes ripoff ads, wishes their marketing team a thousand dotcom deaths.
About their design Ryan notes that a 10-year-old kid who does web pages in his bedroom would know better and that it looks like Snapfish.
The WaSP: Some men you just can't reach, "BuyMusic.com, requires Internet Explorer for Windows. Browser-specific development. How quaint. Did I miss the time-warp back to 1995?"
What Do I Know: "Last night I nearly pulled an Elvis and blew a hole in my TV when a Buymusic.com ad popped up on MTV. [...] Buymusic.com had completely stolen the iTunes campaign - down the smallest detail - and co-opted it as their own.", "[...] launching a public web site that only supports one particular type of browser, and operating system (Mac IE doesn’t work either), is asinine, and astonishingly shortsighted."
Scripty Goddess: "What I can't agree to is bad customer service." She describes five problems she's had with their service and why she won't use it again.
Stereoboy: notes something I missed in additional legal terms: "“we may disclose, sell, trade, or rent your Personally Identifiable Information to others without your consent”.

P.S. one last bit: dontbuymusic.com "Get Wasted" is a funny parody. I tried to find out who's behind it, but so far, all whois servers I have tried pretend that this domain is available. The domain is registered to Finikin Developers.

P.S. 2: I thought I should share this with Mac users. I did visit buymusic.com with Safari before writing this post. I have the debug menu activated in Safari, which helps me set the User Agent to Windows MSIE 6.0 to trump the site browser sniffer. To activate the debug menu in Safari, execute "defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1" in a Terminal window and launch (or restart) Safari. I'm sure I violated several U.S. laws in doing that, and if you try this, you do it at your own risk ;-).

If you are looking for a digital camera, do not miss Phil Askey's Digital Photography Review or you may regret it later. This site is a tremendous reference for all things related to digital photography and Phil's reviews -- objective, comprehensive and very well written -- are a tribute to an art of professional journalism that one has missed lately on big media houses.

I have been testing a few cameras lately, Canon's PowerShot G5 and the EOS 10D. DPR has a preview of the forthcoming Olympus E-1 SLR. Even if you are not interested in any of those, I recommend the article on the E-1 which explains very well the difference in today's cameras sensors and why size matters.

Image ratio and size of sensors

• 24 x 36 mm (2/3 ratio and size of the traditional 35 mm film). Sensors of this size are found on high-end digital SLR cameras aimed at professional photographers (at 10,000€ a pop without a lens!)
• 15.1 x 22.7 mm (2/3 ratio), sensor found on Canon's SLR (D30, D60, 10D)
• 13.5 x 18 mm, aka 4/3" Type or the "four thirds system" in Olympus' marketing jargon
• 6.60 x 8.80 mm, aka 2/3" Type, sensor found on top of the line compacts
• 5.32 x 7.18 mm, aka 1/1.8" Type, sensor found on low end compact cameras

The image ratio governs the shape of images. 2/3 is what you have been used to for a long time with 35 mm cameras. 4/3 is the image ratio of a standard TV or computer screen.

The sensor size, however has several impacts on the outcome.
Smaller sensors capture a smaller circle of light behind the lens. On SLR cameras this translates into a focal length multiplier factor that you need to take into account if you are used to traditional cameras. For example, a 24-70 mm lens mounted on an EOS 10D, which has a multiplier factor of 1.6, will turn into a 38 x 112 mm lens. The main drawback is that your expensive 16 mm wide angle lens is now a 26 mm for twice the price!
Smaller sensors however, because they need a smaller image circle, tend to cut out many of the faults you see in zoom lenses at wide angle (darker corners, distorted parallels). Manufacturers, notably Nikon and Olympus, are trying to build on that benefit by producing smaller and lighter lenses (and with wider angles) specifically designed for the sensors size.

Photodiodes count and size

You may have noticed that digital cameras marketing focuses a lot on how many millions of pixels there are on the sensor. The more is not necessarily the better, especially in the low end market of compact cameras. A very important factor is the size of each photodiode, which has a direct impact on the sensitivity and the noise. A small photodiode captures less light than a bigger one and therefore has a lower sensitivity. Noise is generated by many factor, notably the influence of photodiodes on their neighbors, and is also bigger with smaller photodiodes. This gives strange situations in the marketing war, like with the Olympus 4040 and 5050 models. The former has a 4M pixels sensor with 3.1µm photodiodes pitch, the latter 5M pixels at 2.8µm pitch. The trouble is that both sensors have the same size and therefore, capturing the same amount of light in the same conditions, the supposedly better (and more expensive) model at 5M pixels shows actually less sensibility and higher noise than its predecessor at 4M! Another issue with tiny photodiodes is that the lens must be of excellent quality to resolve details at such a small resolution. Digital SLRs have all both bigger sensors with bigger photodiodes pitch, hence improving sensibility and reducing noise.

You can probably sense by now which system I prefer. After much deliberation and despite the bigger size and weight of SLR cameras, I find them way better than the current compact ones. I was used to the SLR, and in addition to the indisputable difference in quality and versatility, I just can't get myself used to look at a ridiculously small LCD screen to compose a picture, shoot in strange positions, and pray that the camera has got proper focus (something you discover only once you've dumped the file on your computer, far away from your subject). If only they were not so outrageously expensive...

The French Telecommunications Regulation Authority (ART) has published today new rules regarding public and private use of WiFi networks in France:

• Private use: no authorization required
• Public use (only in the 2.4GHz band):
  • Access points connected directly to an already authorized network: no authorization required
  • Creation of a network to link the access points: simple declaration

Experiments are encouraged and require a simple declaration.

Both private and public networks must follow the technical constraints, which limit the power depending on the region (Metropolitan, DOM, TOM), whether the use is indoors or outdoors and which band (2.4 or 5GHz) is used.

All 13 channels in the 2.4GHz are authorized. Outdoors usage of the 5GHz band remains forbidden, pending the adoption of a new law.

[Source: GeeBlog]

Side note: Apple has modified its AirPort and AirPort Extreme hardware shipped to France since July 1st (July 7 for the AirPort Extreme station), to allow the use of all the 13 2.4GHz channels. Owners of old AirPort HW (cards and stations) as well as AirPort Extreme cards shipped in the PowerBook 17' prior to that date are out of luck as the manufacturer will not update or upgrade those. Since chances are that the vast majority of public networks in France will operate out of the tiny band that was previously authorized (10 to 13), you won't be able to connect your PowerBook to them, and that hurts. [Source: GeeBlog]

John Gruber has an excellent deconstruction of Apple's market share as usually seen by the PC industry analysts:

The idea of overall PC market share, as currently conceived by IDC, is not so much like overall automobile market share as it is like overall motor vehicle market share. It’s like counting everything from golf carts to tractor trailers as a single category, thus making the “overall market share” look worse than it is for a company that only makes actual passenger cars.

Bien vu.

Continuing on the thread, I'd like first to bring back an older proposal: PGP-signed comments from pb/onfocus.com (demo) and a follow-up by Ben Trott on a possible implementation of PGP signature verification within MT (hat tip: Anil Dash). Ben notes the trouble with the key distribution and I'd like to mention that PGP is far from being a killer application that has a strong chance to survive, unless it's easy enough for Mom. I also caught this proposal building on Foaf: FoafIdentityAssurance (CamelCase warning: you are about to enter a Wiki!). This last one fails to compute at the moment, or even what we should always be conscious in our thinking: the more extra steps it requires compared to good-old-way commenting, the more chance it has to fail.

Back to the two main proposals of the week.

Simon has setup a prototype for comment authentication. His method consists of placing a link reference in your home page header, register against an authentication server (which you can run on your own) and get a bookmarklet that you can click to fill in all the necessary information on a page that supports authenticated comments. I haven't succeeded to sign a comment on his weblog though, as the bookmarklet doesn't work (yet) on either Firebird or Safari on Mac OS X. Actually, as much as I like Simon's method, I have a real gripe on the bookmarklet thing. It does make you dependent on both a physical computer (the one that has the bookmarklet) and a browser that can run it (what if my browser of choice doesn't? Will I switch browsers just for the pleasure of signing comments? No.)

We must factor another constraint: do not require more than what's needed for blogging and commenting today: an Internet access and a standards compliant browser. Keep it simple.

I wish I had the knowledge to hack Movable Type and prototype my own method, which is a slightly modified TrackBack, works with any computer and browser, does not require a third party such as an authentication server nor the registration of any more information than needed for the initial setup of your own site. It also brings the added benefit of keeping track, on your own weblog, of the comments you make on sites that support this extension of TrackBacks. An extension of TB, that is exactly how I see it. The beauty of TrackBacks is their transparency, you don't really have to think about them to use them. TB driven comments would be as easy to do as posting something on your weblog, really.

To progress further, I have tried to summarize the main critics that touch both methods.

They merely authenticate one's site URL, not one's name or email.
That is fine with me, because on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog. Where is the proof that this site is operated by François Nonnenmacher anyway? OK, there are a few readers of this weblog who know me in person, but for the vast majority here, the only piece of information that has some permanence is this site URL, padawan.info (ahem, besides its content, or so I'd like to believe).

They do not prevent me to sign in your name.
True, but you wouldn't be able to fake my site URL. It brings the importance of design in making clear that only the URL is certified (look at Simon's example, it reads: [signed: http://simon.incutio.com/]). There are other design implications (*). It obviously keeps out people who do not have a website (another critique seen around) but none of these techniques are exclusive of existing comments systems, it would simply add another gradation on a scale that currently goes from anonymous comments to something no better than IAmNotADog@disney.com with a URL -- note that usually the URL is correct as the purpose is to attract visitors on it, like with the two spammers who left their greedy traces on this very site in the past 24 hours (a first since this site inception by the way).

If at this point you are not yet convinced that the URL is the name of the game, then you should check Robb's law.

(*) It's getting late and I've managed to lock a vertebrae in my backbone, painkiller and sleep is what my brains need right now. But if you look around, you should find a change in this weblog, i.e. the fusion of comments and TrackBacks (much stealing from the impressive Mark's templates). Hint: TrackBacks are comments. See the loop? OK, bed time.

The Gutemberg Bible is the first book printed with movable type. It is offered online by the Ransom Center through their Digital Gutemberg Project.

The teaser in me says that they missed the opportunity to publish it with Movable Type. The malcontents will say that in today's world of Google washing, it is a true miracle that Gutemberg still manages to appear on the first page of a search on movable type (even if, ironically, it ends on an orphan page from some obscure software company).

Our true and only Jakob Nielsen issues a fatwa against PDF, unfit for human consumption (he forbid us to eat pork too). Adobe's Robert McDaniels rebuts Nielsen criticisms. And of course each time one of these comedies happens, you have the traditional parody, which I warmly recommend, CARS: Unfit for Human Transportation.

My trusted comments post has generated a few conversations and I'm already starting to miss the ability to easily track them when that happens in such a distributed way (four active places in 24 hours, including yours truly, but the A-list blogger gets it all ;-):

• Adrian Holovaty: Reserved comment names. Where it started (Cosmos)
• Simon Willison; Signing comment on blogs (Cosmos)
• Bill Kearney: Weaving a rich comment path (Cosmos)

Bill has a pick that is similar to my initial idea, which is twofold: signing comments and bringing them back to my weblog. Signing, IMHO, is merely claiming that the URL (and possibly the email address) I have left along with a comment is mine. Bringing the comment back serves two different purposes: helping me to keep track of the comments I make on other sites and add another feature to my weblog in displaying some of them on the side bar (see the discussions I'm involved in that I find interesting, on other weblogs). I mean this feature as a better way to foster discussions than TrackBacks.

Speaking of which, I have at least one out of my two working neurons that keeps sending signals that TB are worth digging into. There is one handy feature in MT called TrackBack autodiscovery. If, in a post, I link to a page that sports the relevant meta data, my MT server will automagically find that metadata, send a ping to the remote site, and create the TB without me having to do anything else. Suppose that in addition to the current TB metadata, there is one piece of information that says "trusted comment autodiscovery". To comment on that page I would simply login on my weblog (here comes my authentication), click on the "remote comment" button, paste the remote URL I want to comment on and submit my comment. My weblog would then send something resembling to a TB, which the remote weblog would display as a trusted comment. And my own weblog would then have all the information necessary for the tracking/display of that comment on my own weblog.

I think this would be less complicated than implementing solutions based on cryptography or handshakes between servers since most of the mechanic is similar to the existing TrackBack. It also would satisfy my reluctance to rely on a third party.

Noting the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, I wrote a few days ago that:

[...] it will take more than good programmers to help the Mozilla breed to fight competition, and I hope we will soon see some efforts towards a better communication to the grand public because coding to the very best standards is nothing if you’re your only user.

This is chose faite with the launch of the Mozilla Marketing Project. A "baby-steps" launch actually since it is currently reduced to a mailing-list and what is called the marketing Bugzilla repository. And that's where it gives me the creeps. This thing, which aims at collecting ideas, is run under Bugzilla!

Bugzilla is certainly a respectable bug tracking system and an art-piece representative of the design and usability skills of C++ developers, but in today's world of weblogs, forums and zen-like design, this is repellent. If we forget about design, even a Wiki would be better than Bugzilla. Guys, you must know better.

Would someone with a marketing background be kind enough to give a little help to the Mozilla developers, please?

I am still tracking a weird behavior of MT that has been bugging me for months now. My weblog permalinks are setup to reflect the post main category and title like /category/post_title.html (in a classical web fashion of a typical old-fashioned webmaster, I can't stand cryptic URLs). Somehow, some entries are missing the category value and end up published at both /category/title... and //title... My web server root folder is full of these double, unwanted pages.

Following my previous post, which seems to have attracted some attention, Simon has referrer links displayed on this page that clearly shows people coming from http://www.padawan.info//trusted_comments.html (while the "normal" URL is http://www.padawan.info/web/trusted_comments.html).

I just recall that, as usual when I post from NetNewsWire and link to Joi Ito's weblog, the TrackBack autodiscovery will fail on Joi's site, which is notoriously slow to rebuild, and cause NNW to hang up. This invariably results in a post that has no category assigned (I think it is because NNW posts first, wait for MT to acknowledge then assigns the category).

Of course Mr Murphy being a good webmaster, my RSS feed and the side links all sport the wrong URL :(

You will be happy to learn that this doesn't happen with TypePad, but only because 1. there does not seem to be a TB autodiscovery (yet?) and 2. TypePad does not allow you to customize the URL! It remains reasonably cryptic though. That's all folks, I'm not supposed to spill the beans ;-)

But if someone has a cure for my // URLs, I'm listening!

[Update] Gosh, and even if NNW posts OK, it sends out TrackBacks with the wrong URL. A misconfiguration of my MT?

Adrian Holovaty adds a new weblog feature to his homegrown weblog: reserved comment names:

Now, every time you see a comment by "Adrian," you can be assured that I wrote it. Why? Because, simply, I'm the only person who can post comments with that name. Likewise, you may not post a comment as "Adrian H." or "Adrian Holovaty," although I will never use those names. If you attempt to use one of those names, you will be notified, pleasantly, that you may not.

What Adrian has done protects his name on his own site. I would like to see such a tool that allows me to claim the comments I make on others' sites. How can we trust identities in an exceedingly digital world?

As much as I like the idea that I can comment on someone's post, I have always been uncomfortable with the possibility that a troll can impersonate someone in a prominent weblog. A somehow provocative example pops to mind: someone could easily pretend to be Dave Winer and say something on some pro-Atom site then something radically different on some pro-RSS site. Of course Dave could approach the sites authors and ask for the comments to be removed or amended, or at a minimum disclaim them through the very same comment system. But, in a weblog world that is tackling at accountability, what is likely to happen is that some of the audience would not trust Dave anyway!

It would be great to see trusted comment names as a common feature in weblogs. This should be as simple as possible to use for the commenter and not require anything from the reader. It should not rely on a central server (this is not Passport for weblogs!). PGP could be one answer, but it requires software and is not easy enough to use (unless it is embedded in the weblog system? I am not familiar enough with PGP). Digging in TrackBack is tempting -- TB is precisely a way to throw your two cents in a discussion with a hard link to your weblog but the point is to foster discussions on weblogs, something comments are better at doing than TBs.

Thinking out loud, here is a tentative pick for yet another use of TrackBack:

1. when a comment is submitted with my weblog URL, the host weblog sends a TB to my weblog with the comment text and a permalink to the commented entry
2. my weblog notifies me via email
3. if I validate the ping, my weblog then pings the source weblog which can display a sign that the comment has been claimed by its author
4. at my choosing (at the above validation step), and using the TB information, my weblog displays a list of recent comments I have made on others weblogs. That would be the easiest part and take out the burden of keeping track of all the comments one can make around the blogosphere (this is not on topic but an interesting by-product feature)

Of course, considering that TrackBacks are not implemented on every weblog, this is far from being a universal solution. But who said weblogs are mature?

What is your pick on this subject?

[Update] Simon Willison has a good solution. I would simplify it by not requiring the use of a bookmarklet (see my comment on his post) and perhaps use a one-time password that I would generate through my weblog just before commenting. For weblogs that support TB, I would still fancy to receive a TB with my comment information so I can list it on my site.

If you were looking at this in any browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer, it would look and run better and faster.

The Door is Ajar, a must read text from Tim Bray. Graphic from Bryan Bell.

This is the best piece on knowledge management I have seen since Apple's Knowledge Navigator. So far, everything KM I have been exposed to have made me glad to work more on Internet sites than on intranets. We aren't safe from hype and errors, but it is far more difficult to hide stupid theories and mediocrity when you are working in public.

Do not fly British Airways with a funny button, or make sure it reads "Hooray for Tony Blair". [source: Boing Boing]

And this is the logical conclusion of the RIAA vs. Verizon case.

From Joi Ito:

Dave Winer moved the RSS 2.0 spec from Userland to the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike license. There is now an advisory board.
[...]
I think we should call a cease-fire at this point...

More on this:

• Dan Gillmor: RSS Moves a Step Forward
• Jon Udell: An announcement about RSS
• Brent Simmons: RSS Spec Moves to Berkman, Advisory Board Formed.

Brent is the author of the news aggregator NetNewsWire, and answers on that post the question of supporting other formats:

Do you still plan to support Echo (now Atom) when it's ready?

Yes.

Being a member of the RSS advisory board doesn't mean that now I'm a soldier in a war. I advocate and support RSS -- but my software will support other formats too.

Atom (formerly known as N-echo, formerly known as Echo, formerly known as Pie) is a project to create a common syntax for syndication, archiving and publishing an API for weblogs. If the Wiki is too hard to swallow, you can follow the project from this weblog. The motivation for Atom specifically states that Dave Winer has a too tight hold on RSS that made this spec "untouchable". In the new situation he still has a share on it but along with two other people (initially Jon Udell and Brent Simmons, cited above) who will decide with a majority vote. It is not clear yet how this move will impact Atom, which scope is much more than re-doing RSS and which now becomes free to reuse the RSS 2.0 format according to its new Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

More browsers war victims? Tantek Çelik, software development lead of Microsoft's HTML engine for the Mac and primary representative to W3C CSS working group and HTML working group, commenting on Eric Meyer's options after AOL killed Netscape, hints us on his own fate at Microsoft:

Eric added yesterday that he has to decide whether he will accept the position into which he was reassigned, turn down the reassignment and look for another position within AOL or decide to take the severance package and leave AOL altogether.

I've been presented with a similar, albeit less clearly delineated, set of choices.

Tantek also comes back on the end of IE/Mac:

Just over a month ago I found out about the End of development for Mac Internet Explorer (which, as I've clarified to folks, does/did not mean the end of development for the Tasman rendering engine, at least not yet, which has been largely developed in a string of TV related groups outside the Mac Business Unit since shortly after IE5/Mac shipped).

At least not yet? Let say it does not suggest the death of everything HTML on Microsoft's Mac software, but frankly, reassigning a key developer and W3C representative does not suggest a clear commitment to innovate on the HTML front from Microsoft. And that is my point, where is Microsoft regarding browser innovation?

Recent weblog frenzy about using MT as a Content Management System:

Matt Haughey: Beyond the Blog
Douglas Bowman: Rebuilding a Portfolio, and Adaptive Path's MT Setup
Brad Choate: Doing your whole site with MT
Scott Andrew: Relative Paths in MT

And previously on this weblog, you read about the MT-driven Boxes and Arrows here and about CMS and weblogs here. Sorry for the shameless plug, it's just that I'm amazed to see that there can be some original content, sometimes, on this very site.

[English summary below]

Une initiative de la Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Gallica propose un accès à 70 000 ouvrages numérisés, à plus de 80 000 images et à plusieurs dizaines d'heures de ressources sonores. Cet ensemble constitue l'une des plus importantes bibliothèques numériques accessibles gratuitement sur l'Internet.

Comme d'habitude avec les sites de la BNF, on a droit à un catalogue de toutes les mauvaises pratiques de design web (frames et pop-ups à gogo, difficile de faire un bookmark ou d'envoyer une simple URL et en général au bout de trois clics on ne sait plus où on se trouve). Mais le contenu vaut le détour et, en prime, sa reproduction est libre pour un usage strictement privé. On ne va donc pas bouder notre plaisir.

Gallica is a site from the Bibliothèque Nationale de France proposing 70,000 digitized books, more than 80,000 images and several hours of sound materials. This is one of the biggest digital libraries freely accessible on the Internet. It focuses (although not exclusively) on the francophone culture. If you are not afraid of French and bad web design (frames and lame navigation) the content is worthy and you can reuse it freely for personal use.

Fun fact du jour: the best-seller book this month in France is, as one might guess, Harry Potter and the order of the Phoenix. The really funny fact is that it is the English version.

And some say the French are bad at foreign languages.

Wired: Mozilla Wants to Rumble With IE, quoting Mozilla Foundation president Mitchell Baker (emphasis is mine):

People say there's no innovation in the browser space, but that's only if you're using IE. We want people to know that there's a better product out there.

The new foundation is chaired by Mitch Kapor, who made a personal contribution of $300,000. Kapor was the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, and currently chairs the Open Source Applications Foundation. Other contributors cited are AOL (which gave $2 million in cash and other resources to facilitate the transition), Red Hat and Sun Microsystems. See the press release from Mozilla.org.

Mozilla has an interesting range of software (Mozilla, Firebird, Camino, Thunderbird) that are indeed, with others, pushing the envelope far more than their contender, a browser so monolithic and monopolistic that it can afford to retract rather than innovate.

AOL and Netscape marketing machines could not save the Netscape browser from failing down to a ridiculous market share. However, it will take more than good programmers to help the Mozilla breed to fight competition, and I hope we will soon see some efforts towards a better communication to the grand public because coding to the very best standards is nothing if you're your only user. The new Mozilla.org home page is a good step in that direction, but quite frankly, this (and all the aforementioned Mozilla products pages) could use a redesign as well.

Update: I wrote the above post before reading this:

[...] techno-utopians tend to get lost in their fabulous daydreams, sometimes. They forget that these browser things are just tools, and browsers are just windows onto the web, so a graceful XUL framework means diddly-squat to the innocent punter. Creating a neat C++ framework when what the world needs a non-Microsoft browser is nothing but a deriliction of duty: a piece of vanity code.

Zeldman: AOL Kills Netscape.

mozillaZine: AOL Cuts Remaining Mozilla Hackers.

Daniel Glazman:

Netscape hired me three years ago, AOL laid me off today (technically, having a french contract of employment, I am still employed; we don't throw away people in ten seconds here. We take thirty seconds, that's cleaner). AOL axed Netscape by the same time. People, it's over. Netscape is dead. Nothing to see here.

The Netscape servers division was dissolved into Sun a few years ago. Now that the client part is dead, there is nothing left from Netscape. Sad story indeed. Netscape est mort, vive Mozilla!

My brother didn't find what to bring for l'apéritif, so he brought:

• a Château Malescot St Exupéry, Margaux, 1990
• a Château Trotte Vieille, premier grand cru classé, Saint-Emilion grand cru, 1990

Pure silk on your tongue. And those names! Thanks Rémy.

Jour de la prise de la Bastille, 14 juillet 1789. France's fête nationale, or -- as others call it ;-) -- Bastille Day.

When the King invited you in his Château de la Bastille, you knew it would not be for a partie de plaisir. Embastillé became a synonym of "thrown in jail".

Some more or less funny and ironic facts about la Bastille:

• its construction started between 1367 and 1371
• its architect, Hugues Aubriot, became its first "host" after he was disgraced for trying to force all the unemployed parisians to work on the building site
• it became a state prison in the 17th Century, under Richelieu
• one would be embastillé after an order of the King, not after a judgment.
• prisoners were criminals, spies, traitors, disgraced aristocrats or writers who displeased the King. Some famous hosts: le Marquis de Sade, Voltaire or the mysterious homme au masque de fer (an unknown man wearing an iron mask, rumored to be the twin brother of Louis XIV). When Voltaire was released in 1717, after nearly a year in la Bastille, he received a financial compensation from the King and joked about it: "I thank his Royal Highness for taking care of my food but I wish he would stop taking care of my lodging."
• there were only seven prisoners left on July 14, 1789
• the rebels who took la Bastille were seeking firearms and ammunitions. The taking of this symbol of the King's total tyranny is more of a consequence of the foolish resistance of the local guards. July 14th ended in a blood bath.
• Demolition started on the 16th

On the 14th, Louis XVI, who didn't take anything during his daily hunt in Versailles, wrote in his personal diary: "14 juillet : rien" (July 14: nothing). He goes on sleep, then is awaken by La Rochefoucault-Liancourt and the famous dialog follows:

-- Sire la Bastille est prise, le gouverneur a été assassiné, on porte sa tête au bout d'une pique. Sire, la Bastille has been taken, the governor has been murdered, his head is displayed on a stick.
-- Mais, c'est une révolte ? But, this is a revolt?
-- Non, Sire, c'est une révolution ! No Sire, it is a revolution!

Links:

• A painting of la Bastille just before the demolition
• Bastille Attacked and Captured: Shopkeepers and Tradesmen Defeat Swiss Guards
• La source de cet article, en français : L'histoire en ligne, quartier de la Bastille

If you visit Paris and come at la place de la Bastille, take the rue du Faubourg Saint-Antoine (on the West, towards rue de Rivoli) and look down near rue Jacques Coeur, for stones that delimit one of the old castle towers. There is also a sign, visible underground in the subway line 1, that marks the foundations of the same tower.

bBlog is putting TrackBacks on steroids:

bBlog is the first blog system to enable trackback replies to comments, and comment replies to trackbacks, so this is uncharted waters but it's pretty simple. Basically, there is a trackback url for every post, and every comment. If a trackback is received for a comment it is handled like a reply to that comment in the database so displays threaded. Additionally, you can click reply to a trackback and post a reply to it - on your turf, not theirs.

Here is an example -- which is somewhat intricated now that I have pinged both the article and one of the comments, but you see the idea.

More ideas for enhancing weblogs conversations: Self-TB to automatically notify follow ups to past posts. Threaded comments, with notifications. Feel free to comment and TB at will to add more examples and ideas.

From a user perspective, all these should be integrated and displayed as conversations (which the padawan and his terrible lack of design skills is preaching but not doing at the moment on this weblog). The differences between in-site comments and off-site TBs matter more to the webloggers -- the "your turf, not theirs" thing -- than to their readers but there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Hyperlinks are the mamelles of the Web, weblogs favor the creative types, conversations help weaving good content together and make your journey in discovering new thoughts, things, places and people way more enjoyable than using Google.

And this is just the beginning.

When a business treats people like cogs in a machine the people then treat the business in return like a machine.

My coup de blues du jour.

You wanted an open source alternative to MS Exchange, here you are with OpenGroupware.org:

Gary Frederick, Leader of the OpenOffice.org Groupware Project: "Just to be perfectly clear, this is an MS Exchange take-out."

The FAQ sings a slightly (but more interesting) song: "OGo is something between a mixture of Exchange and SharePoint portal server. It focuses on groupware and collaboration instead of messaging..."

Oh, oh, it's easy to see that after pop-up blocking, we'll eventually have sound blocking in some browsers near us.

Douglas Bowman writes about his redesign of the Adaptive Path web site using web standards. If my memory serves, this site was already using standards before, but the new one goes even further in perfecting the technique. He gives very interesting highlights into the resulting design and benefits.

Besides another worthy read about web standards, I noted that they are using Movable Type to drive parts of the site. Another example of the fuzzy frontier between weblog and content management systems.

Listing new features of MySQL, Jeremy Zawodny points to a deal between SAP and MySQL. SAP is a giant in the enterprise software arena (they say "collaborative business solutions") competing with no less than Oracle, PeopleSoft, Microsoft, Siebel and a few others.

The deal is slightly different than what Jeremy reports. SAP has developed its own open source database, SAP DB, which MySQL AB will include in its MySQL product line before this year end. Both companies will provide support for this new database engine. They are also partnering to join their respective technologies to produce a new database engine aimed at the enterprise market. This engine will surely be the top-of-line one in the MySQL range and offered through the existing dual model, i.e. both through GPL and through a lawyer-friendly commercial license.

I find the deal quite interesting for a few reasons:

• it gives a boost to MySQL and even more credibility as a corporate solution


• it shows the interest of yet another high profile software editor for open source


• it suggests that SAP is really serious about cutting the chord from its database suppliers, reducing its dependance from those who are becoming aggressive competitors


• it is a logical answer to the pursuit of small and mid-sized businesses that where traditionally left out by the big solutions makers, but are courtisé by everybody now


• SAP has a reputation of reliability that can only profit to MySQL. To those who think their respective culture is too different I can only point to the fact that Apple is using SAP as its back-office solution, and that was a cultural shock ;-)
  

I think that Microsoft will acquire Siebel or another competitor in that field, further consolidating this market around three top commercial databases: Oracle, IBM's DB2 and Microsoft's MS SQL Server. The first contenders will, IMHO, be open source solutions such as Compiere, growing from the small business to the mid-sized business fields.

Some -- who write that "the medium isn't the message" without much clue -- say Internet is shit. Sometimes, one may wonder. But fear no more, for Tom Coates, who is a living proof that Internet is anything but shit, tells us, indeed, that Internet is not shit.

I am currently diving into two unrelated but quite time consuming activities:

• installing FreeBSD to prepare for an upcoming server switch
• doing this beta test

Back sooner or later, may be with something more or less interesting to say about these or anything else.

AOL is about to launch its own weblog platform, dubbed AOL Journals. Reports here and here (and here too). Still missing in the picture (or have I missed something?) are Microsoft and Apple, as well as Macromedia as an outsider. IMHO, this not a matter of if but when they'll follow suit (in the case of Apple, that would count as a good addition to an otherwise largely overpriced .Mac service).

Private joke: after a journey from Blogger to B2, I'm looking forward into seeing Tristan and his StandBlog jump ship to AOL Journals ;-).

Dave Hyatt is asking for feedback on Safari problems, so here is my candidate: Safari and proxies.

My ISP uses dynamic proxies that cache content and whatever technology they're using, it doesn't like Safari, or Safari doesn't know how to talk to those proxies to force them to refetch content. Here is what happens, and it has been happening since the first beta:

• I browse my blog home page with Safari
• I update my blog by adding a new post
• I reload the home page on Safari: the new article doesn't show up
• I clear Safari's cache and reload: the old page will still appear, because it is served from the ISP cache. I have tried everything reasonably feasible, Safari will never display the update page at this point
• I check the page using Mozilla or Firebird: it will first show up as the old version
• I reload the page with Mozilla or Firebird: the updated page will appear (at this point, I think Mozilla or Firebird is sending some information that the ISP cache picks up that makes it refetch the page)
• Only once I have succeeded to display the updated page using a different browser will Safari display it

So I decided to dig deeper into the headers info (through this service via my ISP):

Request Headers from Safari:

Request Method: GET
Request URI: /java/uacheck/requestheaders.jsp
Request Protocol: HTTP/1.1
accept: */*
accept-language: en-us, ja; q=0.21, fr-fr; q=0.86, fr; q=0.79, de-de; q=0.71, de; q=0.64, nl-nl; q=0.57, nl; q=0.50, it-it; q=0.43, it; q=0.36, ja-jp; q=0.29, en; q=0.93, es-es; q=0.14, es; q=0.07
connection: keep-alive
cookie: JSESSIONID=471230170955EC664B35265E7003CD3F
host: dhtmlkitchen.com
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/85 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/85
via: 1.1 celsius (NetCache NetApp/5.3.1R2DEBUG12)
x-forwarded-for: 81.65.233.253

If I check the same service using Firebird, and reload the page, here is what I get:

Request Headers from Firebird:

Request Method: GET
Request URI: /java/uacheck/requestheaders.jsp
Request Protocol: HTTP/1.1
accept: text/xml, application/xml, application/xhtml+xml, text/html; q=0.9, text/plain; q=0.8, video/x-mng, image/png, image/jpeg, image/gif; q=0.2, */*; q=0.1
accept-charset: ISO-8859-1, utf-8; q=0.7, *; q=0.7
accept-encoding: gzip, deflate, compress; q=0.9
accept-language: en-us, en; q=0.5
cache-control: no-cache
connection: keep-alive
cookie: JSESSIONID=E1911608FE7E830D77AACBD0D30B7520
host: dhtmlkitchen.com
pragma: no-cache
user-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030516 Mozilla Firebird/0.6
via: 1.1 celsius (NetCache NetApp/5.3.1R2DEBUG12)
x-forwarded-for: 81.65.233.253

Apart from the lack of accept-encoding, note the two additional headers, which appear only when I reload the page with Firebird:

• cache-control: no-cache
• pragma: no-cache

Safari never sends these headers, which are the keys to force any cache to get out of my way.

Here you are Dave, it's not really a sexy bug so it may not get into your top ten, but it just prevents me to use Safari to verify my blog, so it is pretty annoying to me.

Seen on Joi Ito's webblog this deserves a bookmark: How To Become An Alpha Male in 18 Easy Lessons. You may want to follow suit with the Morning News' Men Fashion serie.

Call me a beotian, but the only remarkable thing about the 4th of July is that pretty much all the Americans are taking some time off. So why are they always astonished when we do the same? Because we'