March 2004 Archives

As always we had an excellent time in London, and good weather too (it's always a pleasure to make those statistics and clichés lie ;-). It's just too bad that our last glimpse of London was half the subway commuters holding the Evening Standards (was it its title?) in front of us with this huge black headline: "LONDON BOMBS SEIZED".

Which brings me to an easy exit to shorten this post :-), the Paris and London subway authorities should really get together. Paris would learn how to maintain a clean subway and London how to have a reliable infrastructure. Now that would be a welcome progress on both sides of the Channel -- currently celebrating 100 years of "entente cordiale" (in English I would translate this roughly as a century without fighting each other to death) -- since London is only five subway stations from Paris, n'est-ce pas ?

I'm 38 today.

On Saturday I wrote a long post about how I feel about that. Then I quit NetNewsWire, forgetting about one of its bugs, namely that it doesn't save an entry automatically. Whether it was an acte manqué or not, I'm glad that post never saw the light.

There is only one thing I'll recover from it.

Professionally speaking, I feel like a transitional XHTML page without a stylesheet.

But the stylesheet is coming, and it will be great.

Off to London for a short holiday and less internet.

I was wondering how many hours would pass before this appears in the blogosphere.

French lesson du jour (inspired by Naked Translations: entre chien et loup, the time of day, just before night, when it's difficult to tell a dog and a wolf apart. The limit between the familiar, the domestic comfort zone and the unknown, dangerous, savage universe. The twilight zone.

The Google board falls victim of a Google Bomb dropped on no more than a handful of low ranking web pages. Check here for yourself or type "out of touch executives" with double quotes in Google and hit "I'm Feeling Lucky" (screenshot saved for posterity).

The Register, which reports on this story, writes:

While Google officially maintains that Bombs are harmless, they do show how easily the integrity of the search results can be compromised.

The Register also notes that Yahoo! is prone to the same bombing tactics.

A few months ago in France, to justify an upcoming law on the internet that will force ISPs to filter unlawful content traveling on their pipes and dismiss claims that it would be both technologically unreliable and economically catastrophic, a French MP said that since Google does a very good job at finding pertinent content, anybody can filter texts and images easily. Following this great bit of technical wisdom, I dropped a Google Bomb on his site -- it spread like fire and took 13 days to reach its target -- for the sole purpose of debunking this (almost religious) blind faith in such "superior technology".

Still dreaming of the perfect CMS for my corporate needs, I'm sitting in front of the specifications document for a new site, thinking that Movable Type would be just fine for half of it and Macromedia Contribute 2 would work well for the other half. I might integrate both tools but I wish I had just one system that would do it, not two that go only half way. Because, you know, for those bozos from marketing, one click is ten times better than two ;-).

Recent discussions with CMS gurus have not yet unearthed The Truly Good Thing, and old-school rich text editors are, well, still hanging around with no real relief in sight. My brief hope that Midas could be the one, quickly vanished after a simple look to the tag soup it generates. I keep an eye on Nvu, but Lindows' legal battle with Microsoft notwithstanding, Disruptive Innovations is aiming at a different target (power users) for the first release of their HTML editor.

Almost a year has passed and I'm wondering why there are still new projects popping up for yet another old-school text editor, why it's so difficult for developers to understand that we want our styles in a custom, external CSS style sheet, and how long it will take before all those applets are finally replaced by office tools.

Before developing my point further, I need to describe what is a typical corporate site for me. It's 90% of static content, 9% of seemingly dynamic content and 1% of business logic. The static content is usually comprised of web pages and downloadable PDF files. The dynamic content only seems dynamic in the sense that new content is added on a regular basis and promoted in various places -- Press releases or financial results are the typical examples of this kind of content. The business logic, like registrations, is happily handled with a bit of PHP here and there.

Most CMS get this balance completely wrong. When a system fires 30 database queries and an XSLT transformation, all that through a SOAP gateway, for rendering a page which content will never ever change since its creation, you know that something is wrong and that too many electrons are sacrificed because a programmer found that playing with Java was so much sexier than implementing a cache with -- how disgraceful! -- server-side includes and static files.

This is where I think both MT and Contribute have an advantage, in their own way.

MT has a quite unique (in the weblog world) way of generating content. It generates static files using templates and a smart algorithm that will create or modify files only when and where needed. It is also completely agnostic in terms of other server-side technologies, so I can carry my business logic as usual. For those press releases and alike, MT is very attractive because, in terms of workflow, I see absolutely no difference between them and weblog posts (add one, create a new page, list it on the home page, move old ones down one notch and update the archives). Its main caveats, for me, are the lack of a good rich text editor, better handling of file uploads and inflexible data model -- on which I'm not really entitled to complain, as Six Apart does not (yet) brand MT as more than a weblog tool. The last point, basically that all content for MT is a weblog post, makes it not very attractive for my 90% of static pages and documents.

Here comes Contribute. With it, Macromedia is the only vendor I know of which has a cross-platform, good-enough wysiwyg and CSS-savvy HTML editor with advanced functionalities such as file uploads and versioning (for reasons that I might rant about explain later, I have not tested Adobe GoLive Co-Author, a competitor product to Contribute). Contribute is tailored for managing static web pages and documents and, as a desktop application, has a much better user interface than anything you can expect from a browser or so-called RIAs. Caveat: Contribute is tailored for managing static web pages and documents. This means that adding a new press release to a site with Contribute is a cumbersome manual process involving so many steps and as many chances to screw up some important pages such as the site home page that, as the webmaster, I'd rather not let the boz marketing folks touch. Contribute is missing a way to trigger processes on the server, or talk to a database to cascade changes automatically.

Now someone finds a way to integrate Contribute and MT, with the former as the user interface and the latter as the back-end template system, and I'm the happiest webmaster on earth. Until I switch my sites to web standards that is, but that is another story.

For some strange reason, that I forgot before starting this post, I was headed to Orkut. After five attempts to login, it finally let me in (a chance I remembered my login and password, since the "forgot password" function never sent me anything back).

I can't remember when was the last time I went there, and my messages center was filled with 68 messages (some will say it's ridiculously low, but I'm a member of only three communities and I find that way too many to handle with this ridiculous webmail interface). The vast majority of these messages could easily be ranked as spam, except for an occasional bit of humor. Like this one:

			3/6/2004
from:		Lukas
to:		friends of friends
subject:		Hetero community
message:		Hello, I'm delighted to invite you to the heterosexuals community. There we can discus the merrits of being heterosexual. http://www.orkut.com/Community.aspx?cmm=25719

That said, I still can't see what to do with Orkut. Except, may be, learn for once the merits of being heterosexual?

Apathy is lethal is a campaign from the United Nations Foundation for the prevention and action against the spread of the AIDS epidemic to children. I can't prevent myself to think of this name as a direct copy of "silence = death", a message that the non profit organization Act Up has been shouting to the face of the world for 17 years now.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining, on the contrary. It's good to see influential people acting against AIDS. It's just sad that it takes so long for certain messages to reach certain brains. Especially in this case, because we're still far from seeing the end of this epidemic, because it took decades for certain people to accept the idea that one dollar spent today in prevention is ten dollars saved in medical assistance later (I still can't write cure). This goes against the current financial "wisdom" which values one dollar of prevention spent today as one dollar, and ten dollars spent tomorrow as no dollar spent today.

John Robb quotes an article in the WSJ (registration req.):

Using cellphones to detonate bombs remotely.  This isn't a new technique but it has now gone mainstream. The simplicity and power of the technique promise extensive use in the future.

Terrorists in last week's attacks in Spain apparently hooked up bombs to cellphones, which theoretically could have allowed them to detonate the explosives from the other side of the world. Hooking up a phone to a bomb also provides the option of using an alarm clock in the phone to detonate the explosive, which is how it appears one unexploded device was set up.

Which reminds me that the RATP (the Parisian Transport Authority) has invested massively to provide GSM coverage on most of Paris subway, and is now investing to provide Wi-Fi coverage as well. Why use cumbersome phones, that require one to steal smart cards to operate them, when you can just use the Internet and hide like a vulgar spammer? How long before we see an IP-enabled bomb?

Fernanda Viégas from the MIT publishes a weblog survey on Expectations of Privacy and Accountability. Summary of findings:

• the great majority of bloggers identify themselves on their sites: 55% of respondents provide their real names on their blogs; another 20% provide some variant of the real name (first name only, first name and initial of surname, a pseudonym friends would know, etc.)
• 76% of bloggers do not limit access (i.e. readership) to their entries in any way
• 36% of respondents have gotten in trouble because of things they have written on their blogs
• 34% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in trouble with family and friends
• 12% of respondents know other bloggers who have gotten in legal or professional problems because of things they wrote on their blogs
• when blogging about people they know personally: 66% of respondents almost never asked permission to do so; whereas, only 9% said they never blogged about people they knew personally
• 83% of respondents characterized their entries as personal ramblings whereas 20% said they mostly publish lists of useful/interesting links (respondents could check multiple options for this answer). This indicates that the nature of blogs might be changing from being mostly lists of links to becoming sites that contain more personal stories and commentaries
• the frequency with which a blogger writes highly personal things is positively and significantly correlated to how often they get in trouble because of their postings; (r = 0.3, p < 0.01); generally speaking, people have gotten in trouble both with friends and family as well as employers
• there is no correlation between how often a blogger writes about highly personal things and how concerned they are about the persistence of their entries
• checking one’s access log files isn’t correlated to how well a blogger feels they know their audience
• despite believing that they are liable for what they publish online (58% of respondents believed they were highly liable), in general, bloggers do not believe people could sue them for what they have written on their blogs

The findings in this survey suggest that blogging is a world in flux where social norms are starting to flourish. For instance, many bloggers reveal the names of companies and products when they blog about them, except when they write about a company for which they currently work or have worked in the past. More bloggers are becoming sensitive about revealing the full names of friends on postings as well. But for all of the careful publishing guidelines that are starting to evolve, bloggers still do not feel like they know their audience. For the most part, they have no control over who reads their postings. The study also shows that bloggers usually have some idea of their “core” audience (readers who post comments on the site) without really knowing who the rest of their readers are – in many cases, this latter group makes up the majority of their readers.

When confronted with questions of defamation and legal liability, respondents in this survey paint a conflicting picture. In general, they believe that they are liable for what they publish online. However, bloggers in this study were not concerned about the persistent nature of what they publish – which tends to be a major aspect of liability – nor did they believe someone would sue them for things they had written on their blogs. Moreover, 75% of respondents said they have edited the contents of their entries in the past. Even though most respondents explained that they usually edit typos and grammatical errors, 35% of respondents said they had edited for content as well: entries they decided were too personal, entries they thought were “mean”, some respondents mentioned having gone back to entries to obfuscate names of people. These results reveal a certain naiveté in how most bloggers view persistence and how it can operate in networked environments such as the net where information is being constantly cached and where there is ample opportunity for the misuse of personal information. As blogs become more pervasive and their audiences grow, defamation and liability issues linked to the ever-persistent nature of entries are likely to become even more of a burning issue.

Six Apart prepares the launch of Movable Type 3.0 and is about to launch a beta test version. On the menu for this new version (I'm quoting Mena, I've not seen any of these features):

• a new set of default templates that will implement more of the best practices from Movable Type and TypePad
• a significant change to the existing interface that embraces web standards, usability and localization
• a centralized authentication service called TypeKey
• TypeKey's open nature will enable developers to build applications upon the infrastructure, utilizing its authentication hooks
• a comment registration system that will fit the needs of different types of webloggers, and will encourage registration and open communication
• support for the Atom API and syndication feeds will allow Movable Type users to utilize the richer content model offered by the new format, including the use of clients that communicate through the API.
• many new hooks into the application, allowing plugins more control over data, configuration, and user interface

I'm looking forward to the next upgrade ;-).

After years of reasonable happiness with FireWorks, I'm reaching a peak of frustration with FireWorks MX 2004. Actually I don't know if this is particularly due to the last version of this otherwise fine couteau suisse of the webmaster, but I've spent days fiddling with it, trying to produce a decent web version of our new logo, which source file is an Illustrator 9 file, to produce nothing half-way decent. And I think I've found more bugs and annoyances today than in the past five years, things like its inability to keep a group of objects retain their respective distances when they are moved together, strange anti-aliasing of fonts, changing two unrelated parameters when you want to change only one...

Tonight, after only one try with Photoshop CS, I came with something significantly better than the best FW could do. As we say here, il n'y a pas photo ! It's still not perfect, but very refreshing after so many lost hours and dead ends. Now if only I could get a white background for the canvas instead of this grid... I'm so ignorant about Photoshop.

Jay McCarthy: A Vision of Next Generation Blogging Tools

Dave Winer posed a question on the BloggerCon site for discussion, perhaps at BloggerCon II.

Premise: We've reached a plateau in blogging tools. There haven't been a lot of changes in the last two or three of years. The growth continues, lots more weblogs, and we've got better tools for reading (aggregators).

Question: What's next in writing tools for weblogs? If you could influence people who are making the tools, what feature or features would you want? Think as big as you like, or as detailed as you like. What bug is most in your way. Ramble, please. Is there one thing you'd kill for? Or perhaps you're satisfied with the tools as they are. I hope your comments are on the record so I can assemble a quote sheet as the beginning of a conversation that I hope will yield better tools for all of us.

I am attempting to summarize some of the discussion that was generated by this, as archived in the comments and the TrackBacks.

Lots of good ideas. I'm a bit uncomfortable with the conclusion though:

Jason Fried thinks that the discussion is too focused on features. He says that the problem with blogging is not that there are key features missing, but that people don't "get it" and it needs to be simpler.

A note from me on Fried: Perhaps the discussion should be split in two: How to make blogging more accessible to more people, and how to make blogging more featured for the "experts." Basically some people need to work at getting what we already have to the masses, while others look at what's next...

Simplifying things is something IT is good at, but I'm not sure that "the masses" will ever embrace weblogs, even if they end up being a no-brainer. It is a very demanding activity, not every one can/want/has the time to produce content that fits a weblog. Sure, more and more people will "get it", but the masses? May be I'm too pessimistic in thinking that there will always be a huge imbalance between consumers and producers of content.

Babak Nivi via Emergic.org, The Next “Killer App” Will Be Developed on Apple’s OS X:

There’s good reason to suspect that the net’s next “killer app” will be developed on Apple’s OS X operating system. Among many computer developers, there is a strong movement from Linux to OS X.

Why? First, OS X combines a open-source Unix core with the world’s best GUI and best-of-breed applications like iTunes and iPhoto. Rumors also indicate that Apple is going to be “integrating” Linux with OS X in their 10.4 revision.

To be taken with the necessary amount of salt. The Linux integration, it would make sense as FreeBSD does it already (in a very interesting way, it's not an emulation, it's a direct binary compatibility).

The Voice and video over IP are definitely plausible:

If VoIP and Video-oIP are the next killer apps on the net, Apple already includes truly turnkey VoIP and Video-oIP in OS 10.3. They will sell you the hardware (an iSight plug-and-play auto-focus video camera) that integrates Video-oIP directly into AOL Instant Messanger’s namespace. Watch for them to extend it to the PC platform like they did with the iPod.

This one, I would love to have figures to back it up:

Among many computer developers, there is a strong movement from Linux to OS X.

Personally, I'm hearing from several Java developers that their PowerBook with Mac OS X is the best workstation they've ever seen (which makes me happy, since I made them switch ;-). But they switched from Windows, not Linux. If Mac OS X 10.4 brings them Linux à la FreeBSD, they'll love it I think.

You're not forced to believe me and I know this depends on what you want to achieve, but for me, Mac OS X is hands-down the best computing platform on the market today for many, many applications.

The cowardly attacks perpetrated this morning in Madrid made 192 dead and 1,400 wounded. While officials remain cautious about the perpetrators, hints point to the terrorist group Al Quaeda.

I'm devastated and disgusted. I hope that humanity will eventually overcome all extremism, notably those which have no respect for human life and know nothing but destruction.

P.S. I find this post from Diego particularly moving: how long must we sing this song? (via Erik.)

The iPod made another victim last week. While visiting the Apple Store in Soho, I fell for the iPod 15GB.

The iPod mini, while cute et tout ça, didn't attract me. Firstly I did not find it that small compared to its upper brother, secondly I had a terrible experience listening to one of them in the store (the headset would start making loud hissing noises each time I triggered the menu), thirdly my better half is already equipped with a regular iPod (that's where I caught the virus) and we can share one dock, cables and other iPod equipments together, and fourthly I find the Inox/white combination of the regular iPod more aesthetic and classy than the monochrome anodized aluminum -- this is strictly subjective of course, repeat with me: des goûts et des couleurs, il ne faut point discuter. That said the mini is cute and, although the screen is really small, its interface feels better than the regular iPod because of the real buttons. Apple would do a smart move in applying the iPod mini interface to the regular line.

I now enjoy almost my entire CD collection on this amazing little thing. Certainly the best way I've found to hold Domenico Scarlatti's full clavichord anthology (555 sonatas by Scott Ross, 1.4 days of continuous music according to iTunes). I'm not quite used to listen to baroque music with the random mode on (granted, you can randomize by album, I don't belong to the 99 cent-a-song culture), but it's helping me revisit CDs that I was too lazy to fetch and place in the living-room CD player.

This made me realize that I won't buy any new CD for some time, as long as I can enjoy the rediscovery of those I already have. Certainly one less point to those who claim that the iPod locks people to only one source of music!

Meanwhile in France, SACEM (our local RIAA) is threatening to sue Apple France if the company doesn't pay the levy tax imposed on hard-drives (from 10 to 20€ depending on the size). The music industry lobby is powerful enough here to levy taxes on just about anything that has a remote chance to sport music, it also includes blank CDs and DVDs and they're now lobbying to levy a tax on all Internet uploads via the ISPs. If they continue to consider everybody as a potential pirate and treat them as such, there will be no consideration left for the value of artists' works. I don't pirate music. But if I'm taxed by Universal each time I post my own content on my weblog, this will doubtless weaken my moral obligation to pay premium price for their catalog.

Via the BBC, the EU parliament today passed the Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (dubbed as the European DMCA) by 330 votes to 151.

No need to look to far to find the usual suspects:

The European law was shepherded through the European Parliament by MEP Janelly Fourtou, wife of Jean-Rene Fourtou who is boss of media giant Vivendi Universal.

Hopefully, the EU directive has been amended so that action should not be taken against consumers who download music "in good faith" for their own use.

EU members will have 18 months to implement the directive in their local law. Knowing that directives usually have room for interpretation by the members, and in the light of the controversial interpretation by the French MPs of the e-commerce directive, this is doubtless another one that will require close citizen scrutiny when it'll come to our respective parliaments.

This proves that Orkut is definitely funnier to watch from the outside.

What is your grammar aptitude? "You are the grammar Fuhrer." Führer, idioten !

Which male celebrity are you going to marry?

You are going to Marry Josh Hartnett. He is really
shy, but don't let that fool you. He is really
outgoing and sweet with those he loves and will
be loyal to them for the rest of his life.
Congrats!!

MacCentral announces BlogStudio for .Mac by LittleHJ, a tool for .Mac subscribers to build their own weblog on their .Mac Homepage:

Blog Studio integrates with iLife 04 and iSight, allowing you to mix text and images, create slide shows and music albums, movie albums and file sharing. Twenty templates are included along with 11 photo frames. Keyword searching is supported, RSS 2.0-compliant XML feeds can be generated, as well as calendar views.

Now watch the power of weblogs. Five months ago, the padawan who happens to be a very demanding customer of Apple, wrote this:

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.

We're getting close ;-).

Reported by Ben Hammersley:

This could be tremendously interesting: ShareID and Zopto. ShareID is a single sign-on and authentication system built around FOAF and the Atom API, while Zopto is the companion Social Networking system, again built around FOAF. All come from the dastardly mind of Ben Nolan.

I really like the idea of single sign-on, as anything that can facilitate an otherwise annoying process of authenticating. Also, I like the idea that I control my personal data by sharing a file sitting on my own site. ShareID also provides a log of one's activity, such as tracking comments one leaves on other sites (something I also wrote about in the same vein).

The only thing that I dislike is the idea of a third-party server reliance (and they already hint that the service will not be free for all).

I need to play with it to check if it passes mustard on this simple principle I already pointed out on comment authentication: the more extra steps it requires compared to good-old-way commenting, the more likely it will fail.

MacWorld UK reports that iPod mini drives are cannibalized for cameras, since 4GB PC-card drives alone cost twice as much as the iPod mini itself. The article hopefully warns punters that such drives may not work outside the iPod since they are specifically built for it and not for use as a removable storage media. I've seen numerous stories that corroborate this and, so far, none of a successful reuse of an iPod drive in a camera.

Side reading: Slashdot points to an article by Richard Menta on how Apple rescued the Microdrive technology after IBM sold it to Hitachi. I'm not sure the Microdrive would have sunk without Apple but the iPod will surely boost its sales! One can expect to see 4GB drives becoming standard gear on the digital cameras mid/high-end market soon.

Reported by the WaSP Buzz:

In what hopefully will be the last time we ever have to hear the name, Eolas is in the news again. The US Patent Office has heeded the call of the W3C and invalidated the patent. Eolas has 60 days to appeal, but we'll keep our fingers crossed that they know when they're beat.

Good. Now can someone put SCO out of their misery?

Our offices are in the Ernst & young building on the right. Brand new building but exactly the same boring grey cubicles as in the old one (the Grace building, two blocks away.)

I'm flying to New York tomorrow morning for a three days business trip. I'll try to catch a few shots if the weather is with me.

Among otherwise valid points about the ease of porting Unix applications amongst Unices, Dan Benjamin slips on what is, IMHO, a common mistake about Apple (his emphasis):

Apple is a hardware company, not a software company, as evidenced by the real way that Steve Jobs saved Apple: Powerbooks, iBooks, and the iPod.

The initial Mac was not just a computer. It shipped with a set of software, by Apple, that made a huge difference at the time. I'm lucky (or may be not) enough to remember MacWrite, MacPaint and MacDraw. When Jobs took over Apple again, the company software was non existent (if you except the spin-offs FileMaker and Claris) and the hardware line was a mess, no logic between models and, most importantly, absolutely no entry level computer. His way to save Apple was to simplify the product line and, obviously, to reintroduce an entry model: the iMac. This was simple and doable, for a company in bad shape, both financially and spiritually, that couldn't do everything at once.

In the past years, Apple has rediscovered its true nature: it is not, dare I say, just a hardware company. It's a platform company. It excels at designing products, be they hardware or software or service, provided it can design the whole experience.

As for the claim that Apple is not a software company, I oppose: QuickTime, Safari, iLife (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes and GarageBand), iSynch, iCal, Final Cut Pro (which it bought from Macromedia but greatly improved) and Express, etc. without forgetting Mac OS of course.

Apple is always at its best when it remembers that it isn't just a hardware company.

Enough said.

Real Obnoxious:

Real Player, most prominently, is a small application with inferiority complex and delusions of grandeur, not too different from Napoleon.

The best description of Real Player I've seen so far. And I'm lucky to use the Mac OS X version, slightly less annoying than its Windows counterpart. I can't remember when was the last time this player looked and performed like a simple video player and not a marketer's nightmare come true.

If you're looking for options:

• Real Alternative
• The BBC version of Real Player (skips the annoying download "jeu de piste" at Real.com

While I used to provide three video formats (WMP, Real and QuickTime) I tend to produce a different set today: a WMV (monopoly) and a standard MPEG4 which can be read indifferently by QuickTime and Real players. The new kid on the block is FLV (but it must be embedded within a Flash movie).