October 2003 Archives

Java, or write once, crash anywhere... My kingdom for a good CMS written in PHP! Or Python. Even Perl would be fine (and that speaks volume from me). Anything but Java.

A tabs dump is when I have so many tabs left open in Safari because I thought I might blog about a page, that I can't see the new ones opening. Here it is, telegraphic style:

• The Death of the Webmaster (via Ron Lusk) -- some good points and many wrong ones. For one, the webmaster is far from being dead (am I?), only those who rely on being the technical bottleneck to keep their job will disappear. But contrary to what the author claims, things such as usability, information architecture and how to purpose content towards the web and search engines require skills (e.g. those of a webmaster) and are not taken care of by technologies. We obviously have not the same definition of a webmaster (who, to me, is not reduced to the HTML techie this guy is depicting.)
• Linked from the previous article, Personal knowledge publishing and its uses in research by Sebastien Paquet -- way less simplistic, isn't it?
• Linux Style: Geeks on the Half Shell 2.0: Cruising the New Dominion with Linus and Friends -- geeky indeed.
• MT-Blacklist 1.5 -- I haven't got any spam since a few weeks ago but, er, I haven't installed MT-Blacklist yet!
• Roland Piquepaille, Write Once, Publish Anywhere -- from HP's vision of multi-channels publishing Write Once, Publish Often. If you're interested in everything XML/XSLT, don't miss HP's Formatting Objects Authoring code.
• CNet, Group lobbies for domain buyers' privacy -- Why do I feel they are wrong? You wouldn't believe how many times I had to resort to WHOIS to find out who is behind a domain when tracking spammers or domain squatters. I strongly believe that no one should be permitted to buy an Internet domain anonymously nor hide their details from public scrutiny.
• Nvu, A complete Web Authoring System for Linux -- backed up by Lindows.com and starting from the code of Mozilla Composer, why do I feel that Daniel Glazman has something to do with this? He does! Have fun Daniel, keep up the good work. And since it's open source, may be one could compile a Mac OS X version ;-)

Building on the example of the Scobleizer weblog (Robert Scoble works for Microsoft and blogs with the explicit assent of its employer), Edward Cone at Baseline offers an article about corporate blogging, The Scobleizer Versus Cerberus the Hound of Hades:

The most powerful piece of software inside Microsoft may be the $40 application from a tiny vendor called Userland that Robert Scoble uses to write his weblog.

The author reckons that among the barriers to adoption, "[u]sing weblogs means trusting your employees to speak honestly and openly". I think there is a stronger pre-requisite to that: it requires accepting the idea of speaking honestly and openly in public. If the management has a problem with that idea, then no matter how hard they try, they will never get anything out of corporate weblogs. It is also a pre-requisite for them to be able to explain the idea of corporate weblogs to their lawyers and keep them from killing what they will, in most cases, consider as a business risk.

But can they hold it forever? Scoble is particularly positive about the future of corporate weblogs:

Can managers stop worrying and learn to love the blog? As the payoff becomes apparent, more companies will open up. When one doesn't, its customers are going to want to know what the company is hiding.

Says Scoble of corporate blogging, "I think it's unstoppable."

Let's do a flashback to the bubble-era where, among the then-running hypes on how to survive the e-revolution and the 101 Dinosaur's Adaptation Rules to the E-Economy, was the absolute, urgent need to "build a community with our clients". As seen many times before, unreasonable amounts of time and money were spent in technologies that were supposed to sort that out. A few years later, we find ourselves with free (or ridiculously cheap) technologies that even dinosaurs could use, confronted with the ever embarrassing reality that no community can form without conversation, and that no conversation can be sustained if not based on honest and open speech.

Weblogs are particular in the sense that they allow to easily cut the fat out of content. If, after reading a few posts, you cannot get a feeling that the tone and content are right, then the weblog is probably not worth your time (or does not deserve to be called a weblog). In supporting weblogs, companies will not be able to skip what is my favorite question when I assess a web project: where is the beef?

The W3C presents the US PTO with evidence invalidating Eolas patent:

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the global standard-setting body for the Web, has presented the United States Patent and Trademark Office with prior art establishing that US Patent No. 5,838,906 (the '906 patent) is invalid and should therefore be re-examined in order to eliminate this unjustified impediment to the operation of the Web. The W3C is urging US Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property James E. Rogan to initiate a re-examination of the patent because the critical prior art was neither considered at the time the patent was initially examined and granted, nor during recent patent infringement litigation.

One wonders how far this can go through the management of an organization that delivers as many patents as it can because it makes money out of it, and lets the courts sort out the resulting mess. Granting what the W3C is asking would mean recognizing a big mistake, if not their incompetence. One also repeatedly wonders how come a company equipped with top notch lawyers and an unimaginable amount of cash has not been able to action this prior art card in front of a court (note to self: revise mental model of the US court system, it can happen that the richest one doesn't win.)

Prior coverage of evidence invalidating the US PTO can be found here, here, and here.

[source: Jeffrey Zeldman]

Marc Canter tries to summarize Avalon, a forthcoming user interface technology in Microsoft's next OS Longhorn:

Avalon is an entirely new rendering model baked deep into the OS.  It's  Flash killer, HTML disintermediator.

Not that I doubt for a second that Microsoft is working on a Flash killer, but does anyone else see something deeply wrong here? How something that is baked deep into the OS could possibly be compared with technologies that are, basically, OS-agnostic? Shall we see this as yet another proof that those technologies are, indeed, a serious threat to the Windows OS monopoly?

Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the French minister of Culture, said last Saturday that he had to write to Jack Valenti (the Hollywood majors' man) to remind him his promise to stop fighting against Europe's support to cinema:

Jack Valenti answered me that this was a misunderstanding. His office sent me a letter that showed its interpretation of the minister tagline: "M. Aillagon, minister, company Liberté, égalité, fraternité"...

We told you that culture is an exception. And we want to keep it on this side of the Atlantic ;-).

Following a first case, Louis Vuitton is suing Google France for trademark infringement. And according to the AP, it's only the beginning:

An official at France's Software Protection Agency, which gathers evidence for court hearings on piracy and trademark infringement, said several major companies are preparing cases against Google. The official spoke on condition of anonymity.

IANAL, but since trademark infringement is way more complex than stepping on one's exact trademark, Google may not get out of trouble by just a technical counter-measure such as not selling registered trademarks. Google France said they would appeal the first decision, but appeal in this case doesn't suspend execution of the ruling.

[source: The Trademark Blog]

Ah! Ah! very funny, but I'm trying to get some serious work done here. Dear Macromedia, if you could try to be less creative in your FTP stack than you are with your error messages, may be it would start to be reliable. None of the command-line ftp I've used have ever got in my way like this.

Webmaster tip: when Dreamweaver starts spitting strange FTP errors messages, disconnect and reconnect to the server or check the passive mode in your FTP connection preferences.

Three months ago, I was happy to see the creation of the Mozilla Marketing project, but dismayed about its repelling design and weird use of Bugzilla (a bug tracking system) to call for ideas. Their home page, apparently, hasn't changed a bit and the discussion seems to have stopped one day after its launch.

Contrast it with Steven Garrity's Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0. There's hope.

I don't know if this is a technical glitch or a an editorial issue, but The Register ran a story on Egg slashing 70 jobs this morning, which, I think, never made it on the front page. I saw it through their RSS feed. The plot thickens now that this same article has been removed from the feed. I was able to retrieve it through the search engine (you know, this nasty feature that editors always forget and do wonders to unearth hidden content.)

No big deal, but it is always funny to see Vulture Central, so critic about weblogs, burning its feathers while playing with common blogosphere technologies.

Jeffrey Zeldman announces a brand new A List Apart. To borrow the man's style, it sports an aesthetics that we love and content that we value. The new ALA now comes with an XML feed in three flavors. Did we say it's rich?

A week ago on my French weblog, I was digging around the future of content management, writing that I don't see a bright future to Content Management Systems that are based on browsers and applets that mostly work only on IE/Windows. At best can we expect to see a good cross-platform editor which works with XML and external, custom CSS. To me, those tools are like a webmail access, they are useful in some situations, but will not match a good desktop application.

Macromedia, with Contribute, seems to follow that path, although this software is only a small step from a classical HTML editor towards a complete content management suite.

Olivier Meunier is dreaming about a CMS where OpenOffice would serve as the editor coupled with transformations done on a server. That could actually serve as a rather powerful document management system, open-source and based on open standards.

I wrote then that Microsoft would eventually produce a complete suite combining its proprietary software MS Office + Content Management Server + SharePoint. This is where they are going now. And it makes perfect sense.

You cannot displace office tools in a snap, especially the omnipresent MS Office suite. They are here to stay because they fulfill a real need. In a business, those are the tools that are used, and will continue to be used, by the people who create and manage content (the "knowledge workers" in trendy corporate jargon). By focusing on open standards and remaining open to the proprietary formats of Microsoft, open-source projects such as OpenOffice.org have the potential to offer a credible alternative and foster a much-needed innovation in the content management field.

Now if the developers would understand how pregnant the office tools are and that the world doesn't need yet another old-school WYSIWYG editor or one that spits out inline style -- which is frankly the same content+presentation tag soup as before, only one that happens to validate against a more "modern" XHTML flavor -- content management would take a leap forward.

Pro: Euan Semple loves weblogs, "Through this blog I have got to know and meet some wonderful people." [via Sébastien Paquet who obviously agrees]

Con: Ignatius Reilly hates weblogs, it's a Cyber-Confederacy of Dunces!

The Trademark Blog and Zdnet UK report that Google France has been charged of trademark infringement because of its technology AdWords. The owner of two companies, named "Bourse des Voyages" and "Bourse des Vols" and owning those names as registered trademarks, has successfully sued Google France because a search on those trademarks trigger ads from competitors. Google was condemned to pay 70,000 euros ($81,200) in damages, plus 5,000 euros ($5,800) in fees and 1,500 euros ($1,700) per infraction materialized one month after the judgment has been notified. The sentence is enforceable, even if Google France appeals.

Some facts about the court which judged this case:

• it formally accepted evidence written in English (I don't think this is usual, and Google France tried to have some of those evidences rejected on the basis of language)
• it judged that Google France was fully responsible for the service sold in France to French companies (Google France tried to reject responsibility to the US mothership)
• it made a clear separation between the search engine and the ad service
• it rejected Google's defense that since those trademarks are composed of generic words (bourse = market, vols = flights) and its customers bought those separate words, it couldn't prevent the association of those words to trigger the same results. The court judged that Google did not prove that it couldn't verify and exclude an exact expression
• it said that Google couldn't hide itself behind its own technology, nor could prove that the technology cannot be modified to prevent such abuse

On the last point, it interesting to see that Google provides its AdWords customers with a facility to find keywords related to the ones they want to purchase (see this screen capture).

Just when one thought the EU would have more important things to worry about, a British EU official wants to rename Waterloo Station and Trafalgar Square.

EU says science backs its beef ban:

The European Union (EU) says it now has scientific evidence to support its ban on imports of beef raised using growth promoting hormones.

A European Union spokeswoman says it can prove that growth promoting hormones used by cattle farmers in some countries can cause cancer and should therefore be banned.

Roquefort is better for your health :-) [via Edouard]

I guess that if Andrew Orlowski continues his compulsive, almost monomaniac (he sometimes writes about useful stuff) bashing of weblogs, the blogosphere's will move from weblogging about weblogging to weblogging about Orlowski's rants about weblogging.

His latest rant, titled Blog noise achieves Google KO, is yet again about how weblogs seem to disturb Google.

Taking one example, a search on OS X Panther Discussion that returns the trackback pop-up window of a default, out-of-the-box Movable Type installation, Andrew is now throwing TrackBacks altogether as another plague to Google.

Fear not TrackBacks my friends. Fear bad faith.

Finding a set of keywords that will return nothing interesting from Google is not particularly difficult, especially on something brand new like discussions on a product that hasn't appeared on the market yet. If you take something that has been around for some time already, like Andrew Orlowski discussion, then you can get a good deal of rather interesting results.

Also, bragging about empty TB pages is dangerous. By the time of this writing, his article is already obsolete, since the first two results now return non empty pages. The web is a living thing, weblogs are a pretty active part of it and Google like nothing more than fresh content. May be one can complain that Google is too quick in indexing fresh content (like articles that have been written just a few days ago, like in this case), I personally find it very useful, as, unlike Andrew, am able to figure out what those pages mean and that it's not the end of the world that an article written yesterday has not yet fueled a raging discussion.

Blame not weblogs, blame Canadabad design.

Sure, getting a blank page is not necessary interesting, although in this case I discovered new weblogs that are discussing the subject. If you really want to blame something here, blame the default design of MT weblogs. Displaying TBs and comments separately, and using popup windows to do that are, IMHO, two bad design decisions. But MT is not to blame, the technology allows a much better way. This kind of "blank page" would not appear on this very weblog, because I'm not using MT pop-ups for comments. I'm not even displaying Trackbacks on their own, they are treated as comments and displayed along with the article for Google to index a much more meaningful page. I wouldn't be surprised if Six Apart would fix their default templates to something similar in a future release (*).

Much ado about nothing, and certainly no license to call TrackBacks a catastrophe.

Another demonstration that Andrew Orlowski has some difficulty grabbing the weblog concepts. I wish he would return to more interesting reporting, because he knows better.

(*) P.S.: it didn't take them long. It's all about context!

I mentionned Mailinator in the previous post. May I suggest two links for your reading pleasure?

Paul Tyma, who developed it, explains why mailinator works for him:

I've left many registration webpages on my screen right at the point where I was supposed to enter an email. My internal thought process weighed putting in my real email versus creating a fake yahoo one. Eventually, my lazy butt decided it wasn't worth registering for either option. [...]

You can sign-up for a Yahoo account in about 4 minutes. But you know what, its not about the 4 minutes, its about the context switch. By the time I finished the Yahoo account, any excitement I might have had for the original registration might be gone. [...]

Mailinator removes that problem (for fake emails anyway) because you can invent that email in your head in an instant. You don't need to context switch. Once your done signing up (which was step 1), you can go check your email at mailinator (which is step 2). With a fake Yahoo account I would have needed to do step 1a, then signup at yahoo (step 2a - which as we discussed really has about 15 individual parts), then 1b, and 2b.

Adrian Holovaty points that Mailinator is changing the '1 e-mail per person' mentality. He likes it but also weights the idea from a content provider standpoint:

I love the idea. I think it's brilliant, and I admit to using Mailinator half a dozen times since I learned about it last week. In certain situations -- like the other day, when I needed quick access behind a news site's registration wall and didn't trust it with my real e-mail address -- it makes perfect sense. We live in a world where privacy policies are either too long to read or too short to trust. [...]

But the honest online-content provider and Web developer in me don't like what's happening here. Requiring a unique, valid e-mail address is a convenient way to limit the use (or misuse) of certain legitimate Web applications. Typical Web bulletin-board software, for instance, allows only one person to register under a single e-mail address.

Like Adrian, from a personal then from a content provider standpoint, I have used Mailinator already and can appreciate its convenience, but I realize how fragile the notion of valid email address can be.

Mailinator is one of those things that one can love and/or hate but that will leave very few people indifferent.

Six Apart communicates about Comment Spam, at last! They are still working to find a solution, they dismiss registration (upcoming feature but different usage), as well as comment moderation and image comprehension technology, and point to MT-Blacklist as a solution.

I'd like to suggest an additional option: simple comment authentication. It works like this:

1. a visitor to your weblog leaves a comment along with an email address (mandatory) and an optional URL
2. the comment is displayed immediately but any URL it contains is either turned into non-clickable text or replaced by a placeholder (like [*]), rendering spam for GoogleRank ineffective
3. an email is sent to the email address provided, asking the visitor to click on a confirmation link to authenticate the comment and activate URLs (if any)
4. once the weblog receives the confirmation, it activates any URL present in the comment. The confirmation page may offer to the visitor the option to save a cookie to allow for "One-Click Comment™" ;-)

This system has the following advantages:

• it provides a comment authentication feature that does not require a complex system nor anything beyond your weblog system
• it effectively ensures that visitors leave a real email address. One issue though: john.doe@mailinator.com may require a blacklist of names that cannot serve as valid email domains
• compared to a registration system, it is significantly easier (requires only one click, no name, no password) and less "in your way" (the comment is immediately displayed for the sake of synchronous conversation, just without clickable links)
• it scales, the (small) burden is entirely left on each visitor commenting
• it can add bonuses, such as offering the visitor to subscribe to a notification email and receive all other following comments by email (great for keeping trace of comments left on others' weblogs)
• it can work along with other anti-spam features (such as IP banning, URL blacklists, etc.)

The reasoning beyond this system comes from my quest for simple comments authentication and precisely the fact that, considering that my weblog is not a public space but a personal space that I open to others, and that I do not publish anonymously, I have little or no interest in receiving anonymous comments.

There seems to be a significant increase in comment spamming on weblogs. Just over the past 24 hours, I have removed 12 comments, some coming from bots, some posted manually. My IP banning list has now 19 sub-nets and I'm actively looking for an automated solution. Needless to say, I am looking forward Jay Allen's forthcoming MT-Blacklist which is supposed to make its grand appearance this Monday.

I am also looking for a solution to auto-close comments after some delay, since for reasons that still escapes me, spammers usually target old entries. Because of this, I have refrained from publishing a list of the last comments on this weblog home page, which is too bad because that would be a good addition.

And I am starting to get impatient about seeing Six Apart get serious about comment spamming and release a new version of MT that is more foolproof to this new plague.

Life isn't made for 'whys,' it's made for 'why nots.'

Lance Arthur, weblogterview. Read. Then just write.

Mena Trott, meeting with Howard Dean, explains how the use of communication technologies by the candidates helped her to regain interest in politics:

I respect the fact that the campaign is using technology wisely and they're providing a variety of online options to create a message that sticks with different types of online users. They've tapped into a valuable resource, one that will be instrumental in shaping the direction of this election.

I appreciate that, notably how it makes things easier for a stranger overseas like me to watch the U.S. presidential election from the start, but this frankly will have to be reevaluated in a year from now, precisely because the "online users" are not representative of an entire country.

On the fun side, I noted this:

I support Dean not because he uses our software (there are other presidential candidates using Movable Type)

Indeed! Fresh from today:

Interesting, Nokia now produces the perfect phone for terrorists. Scary.

I thought .Mac was not for me, but Apple strongly disagreed. More on this later.

First, after seeing the comments I got from my previous post on the subject, let me precise that I never said that .Mac was useless. My evaluation is strictly personal and tied to my needs. It offers a real service with noticeable quality, in which I particularly appreciate:

• an email service that is fast, reliable and packed with all modern comfort: SMTP, POP, IMAP and the best webmail site I've ever seen
• a convenient online disk, transparently integrated in the Finder and accessible from a Windows PC as well. Helped me during a few travels
• iSync to synchronize my office desktop Mac and my PowerBook
• Backup, although I always hated that I can't use it with a recent and genuine Apple DVD-Ram on my G4

What I need that .Mac does not provide is the ability to host a MT weblog, do some PHP, have a MySQL database, that sort of hosting which is, for me, fairly "standard". I know that iBlog is free for .Mac users but this is not the tipping point for me. My real expectation with .Mac is that Apple extends the concept of connected applications (something Macromedia dubbed Rich Internet Application) like iTunes is to its Music Store. The missing link is a weblog application as a full member of the iLife suite, with the look & feel of a Mac OS application.

I like Apple, therefore I am demanding. Qui aime bien châtie bien. I will never stop analyzing and criticizing them and their products, because I want them to continuously improve and stay ahead of the IT crowd. Don't confuse critique and rant.

That said, I was really going to let my .Mac account go. I went on my account a week ago, discovered that there was an option set to auto-renew (which I disliked but I can understand that it's probably better to have it on by default rather than discovering that all your files and emails are gone one day). I unchecked that option and submitted the form. What I did not realize, is that due to an incorrect expiration date on my credit card, that single change was not saved. I did not notice the tiny error line on the next page, which showed the box unchecked suggesting that my preference had been saved. So, yesterday, to my surprise, I received a thank-you note from Apple for renewing my .Mac account! With incorrect credit card details! I guess I have to wait until the credit card company acknowledges the transaction to be sure. That's the joy of giving away your credit card information, and I really, really dislike that kind of selling practice.

VeriSign's clumsy, unilateral attempt to hijack the DNS space through its SiteFinder wildcard service (and its goofy FUD-filled management statements since) proves that profiteering decisions can -- and do -- endanger the Internet more than any hacker or computer attack. It also proves once again that the Internet community -- ISPs, developers, engineers, and other experts -- can come together to effectively and quickly counter corporate, not just criminal, attacks on the network infrastructure - and we owe them our thanks.

Guess who wrote that? Richard Forno, who is no less than the former Chief Security Officer at Network Solutions (now owned by VeriSign), in a must-read piece about Spinning SiteFinder: FUD, brought to you by VeriSign.

For an explanation of FUD, see The Newbie's Guide to Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

The Register reports that Apple, Intel and AMD are testing an on-chip water cooling technology capable of dissipating 1000W/cm², four times more than the best passive system. For Apple, such a cooling technology -- solid-state, i.e. silent and without moving parts -- would allow fan-less G5-powered PowerBooks. Add fuel cells to that, and the future notebooks will continue to offer both a comfortable autonomy and impressive performances.

How nice and informative! And how much time until we see ads, virus or other nasty malware using the same exact dialog to fool the users?

More on this madness:

• Dave Shea: eolas fallout
• Ethan Marcotte: The Eolas matter

An interesting comparison between Windows vs. Unix (Linux, Mac OS X) viruses viruses at The Register.

I'm about to abandon my .Mac account. My hosting needs being satisfied already, it does not provide me enough value to put up 100€/year when what I really use out of it is email. And since Apple has made it impossible to change an existing full membership to a simple email account (10€/year), here you go, I'll just drop it altogether and all the spam I get at that address.

If it's not already the case, I guess that third-parties services that provide the backup/iDisk facilities will flourish at more competitive prices. Apple needs to realize that asking for 100€ upfront then giving back 20€ in Apple Store coupons later (or The Sims, a game that landed many years ago!) is much less attractive than reducing its price to 80€ (or even less, but you see the idea).

I might change my mind with Panther. Or when Apple realizes the potential it has to bring the weblogging user experience to the same level as its iLife suite, i.e. simple, intuitive and smartly connected.

I must confess something. I delayed posting as much as possible. To enjoy the holiday break as long as possible.

Ouch.

While going out of the subway back from the office tonight, a strange idea crossed my mind. You see, holidays are supposed to help you get a break from weblogging.

Er, from work!

What a freudian slip.

No, seriously, it's been good to make a break from both. I have published about 400 posts in the past 300 days (plus about one post per day on my French weblog in the last two months), it's almost a second job.

Ah, not thinking about something intelligent or just worthy to write about everyday!

Not that I ever did it before, mind you. Thinking, I mean. I think only when I'm on holiday. Or when getting to bed.

Ahem, that must be the jet lag. Sorry for this, the regular program should resume soon.