June 2004 Archives
I realize this WWDC Day n thing isn't going to scale, as I'm following mainly the QuickTime stream here, and the NDA is rather limiting. However there were a few points I found worth reporting on, all related to the web stream.
The session on best practices in web development gave a nice shot of web standards (XHTML, CSS, DOM etc.) to the audience. It was didactic, not religious, and I found the Safari team pretty pragmatic about this as well as where they are compared to other browsers (at least the worst more prominent one.)
The web API WebKit (on top of which Safari is built, with about 80% of code belonging to WebKit) is extending into web authoring in addition to web rendering. Here too, considering the focus on web standards in WebKit, I expect some interesting developments on the front of better authoring of web standards compliant content.
Dashboard and its gadgets will IMHO push web standards into their limits, and this is good. Gadgets are web pages with a life out of the browser, leveraging the whole WebKit engine (XHTML, CSS, ECMAScript, DOM) and more (Flash, QuickTime, anything that runs within Safari). Evenso they have a plugin architecture (Cocoa code) designed to overcome the limitation of WebKit, I find it interesting that web standards are used for application interface design, because it can only lead to their improvement.
Lastly, I would like to quote Ben Hammersley on Safari RSS:
it occurs to me that the biggest change to be brought about by Apples inclusion of an RSS reader into Safari will be the beginning of the end of the need to provide explicit links to the things. The orange XML logo, the plain text link, the flashy little Subscribe to Me widgets. All gone. I yearn for the day.
I couldn't agree more, but even that RSS button and dedicated search box on Safari will have to go or be renamed before I'll be completely satisfied.
I'm learning my way into being a better San Franciscan. It seems to me that it boils down to this: be a happy onion. Let me explain, starting with the onion part.
I heard once Woody Allen saying that the worst winter he ever experienced was a summer in San Francisco. If you want to survive here, you need to dress with layers. Lots of layers. In short, all San Franciscans are onions.
And happy ones. Actually happiness seems to be a social requirement here if you don't want to end up isolated like a Bush supporter at the Pride Parade. At least that's what my personal usher and best local friend tells me. This trait is much harder for the Parisian I am than dressing in layers -- don't peel a French onion too far or you'll cry ;-). Anyway, here is my first foray into that spirit:
Lanet -- Wanna go to a concert tonight, the Four Seasons? Have you heard them?
Me (the French way) -- Lanet, someone who's not heard les quatre saisons is either deaf or dead.
Me (the local way) -- Honey, I would love to hear the Four Seasons for the 400th time!
If I ever settle here, I'll have to start a village gaulois.
BTW, the concert was great, thanks ;-).
I don't know how I managed to miss this (may be the *cough* shitty *cough* Internet connectivity at the conference) but the WWDC bloggers met yesterday. It's the problem with real-life events, it's a whole different world out there! I mean, being thrown into the real world without a permanent Internet connection is not a life for a weblogger ;-).
Here is a little, sur le pouce, late report from my first day at Apple's WWDC 2004 in San Francisco.
The pièce de résistance was of course Steve Jobs' keynote speech. It's my first time at the Moscone West conference center, and this place is huge! So huge that they had to drop the usual dual projector screens for one screen and two satellites at about half-way from the center stage. The lines at the four elevators were scary Monday morning (Jobs said there were 3500 registered developers in the conference, a 17% increase over last year).
Let's start with the obligatory statistics. In terms of sales, Apple has now 80 physical stores which receives 20M visitors and sell $250M of third-party products per year. The iTunes Music Stores have 62% of the online music sales. There are now 20M Mac OS X users, which is 50% of Apple's instal base, so according to Jobs, the transition is over. He called this the third biggest OS transition in the industry, after Apple II to Mac OS and DOS to Windows 95, and before Windows 95 to Longhorn. There are 12,000 native applications and an interesting list of business software editors are active on Mac OS X: cited were Oracle, PeopleSoft, Sun, Quark, Alias, and Microsoft of course.
The only new hardware products announced on Monday are the new Cinema Displays. They're gorgeous and the new 30in display -- "A huge day in the history of big" -- is stunning, not only by their look but more importantly by the quality of the panel. I've heard people around saying that they won't buy a new flat-screen TV but rather one of these. As usual with Apple and its innate sense of lust, you need two DVI ports to drive one screen, and the new video card comes with... four of these, so you can have 8M pixels on two screens if one is not big enough for you.
On the software side, and the biggest subject of this keynote for developers is Tiger, code name of Mac OS X 10.4. Tiger will ship in the first half of 2005, more than one year before Longhorn brags Jobs, and there is a giant poster of a Tiger CD at the entrance of Moscone that reads "Introducing Longhorn" for those who haven't yet understood that Apple is still years ahead of the "copycats" -- "Redmond we have a problem", "Redmond, start your photocopiers". More than 150 new features are promised with Tiger, and Jobs showed a handful of them:
- On the Unix front: 64-bit for any process, ACLs for security (a feature in FreeBSD 5 that gives much more flexibility than the notion of users and groups in the filesystem), built-in Xgrid, finer-grain locking SMP
- "A better Windows citizen", i.e. even more MS protocols built-in
- Live search across the whole filesystem and applications with Spotlight. The concept is a bit similar to the iTunes search function, Jobs gave an interesting demo of such a search built-in the System Preferences (you can search for "WiFi" or "AirPort" or "802.11" and relevant choices will be highlighted and change on the fly as you refine the search). Very fast and much better than the current search
- On the video front (the one I'm here for really): the upcoming codec is H.264/AVC, successor of H.263 and adopted as the standard for HD-DVD. Videos shown looked four times bigger than MPEG4 at the same bandwidth which, if you ask me, is not a particularly big performance considering how old MPEG4 is (read: it's about time). The first interesting fact about this codec is that it supports adaptive bandwidth that scales from HD-DVD down to 3G mobile phones. The second interesting fact is that some company in Redmond will not support it or put up its own special version that will just happen to work only within their monopole (actually I just made that up, but the contrary would be extremely surprising).
- Safari RSS.
Yes, that's its name, as awful as it is for something that marketing will probably rename Safari 2 once they get over itDave Hyatt clarifies the name confusion, the browser name remains Safari, Safari RSS is the name of this particular feature within Safari. Besides the name (what about Atom?), the arrival of RSS auto-discovery and search within mainstream browsers (and that will include IE) is significant, as it will help a lot of people discover what newsfeeds are. This said, the demonstration made me instantly think that newsfeeds aggregators are still much more useful than what Safari RSS currently offers: i.e. a way that is as cumbersome as checking bookmarks to see pages that one can find uglier than their web equivalent (frankly, what's the interest of look at Apple's hotnews in Safari RSS, if reaching this feed means that you're already on the regular web page or that you have to check them manually like bookmarks?) But the demoed version is certainly a very early release and he mentioned several other things such as Personal Clipping Service, stored queries as bookmarks. The RSS search is a good addition, though it also add complexity for most users who already have some difficulty making the difference between the address and the search fields (why do I suddenly think that Google will soon start to compete with Technorati?) - Core Image and Core Video: like Core Audio, abstraction layers which main interest is to leverage the processing power found in today's GPUs. The current graphic cards have a tremendous amount of specialized power, and the traditional IT speed race is never dismissing new ways to grab power wherever power is. Interesting demo, Jobs wants Adobe to integrate this into Photoshop (good luck, I see this coming in iLife first ;-)
- Dot Mac sync: .Mac has 500k subscribers and will become more and more entrenched into the system with many more data synchronization. There will be an SDK for developers to hook to .Mac (something which benefit Apple more than anybody else unless they finally open it on the server side)
- Dashboard and gadgets. Those familiar with Konfabulator will recognize those (and some will scream). Dashboard is "Exposé for gadgets", which are little desktop utilities written in HTML and JavaScript (with some plugin capability to overcome the limits of those)
- Automator: a visual scripting tool, way easier than AppleScript, that allows one to develop some automated workflow without writing a line of code
- iChat AV: chat with up to ten other people in audio and three in video (the "people around a table" metaphor is great)
P.S. I meant to post this yesterday but moved directly from Steve's reality distortion field to Murphy's law, awful connectivity at the conference, server errors on this site for hours yesterday... So, I guess you've seen these news all over the blogosphere already.
There is a Mini right next to a BMW coupé in the Moscone hall at Apple's WWDC. I think that an "iPod your Mini" is in order. I bet on an iPod (Mini)2!
Once again the security qualities of Microsoft IIS shime:
Malicious code is being spread through numerous web sites running Microsoft web servers, automatically infecting Internet users who visit these sites. Affected sites include "businesses that we presume would normally be keeping their sites fully patched," said the SANS Institute, which describes the exploit as a "widespread issue."
The malicious code downloaded from compromised IIS servers is a phishing scam malware.
This time, the proponents of the idea that Microsoft is victim of its market share will have some difficulties to sustain their favorite theory -- i.e. that if Windows has so many security issues it's because it has 95% of the market and if Mac OS X has so few, it's because no one uses it. In June 2004, Microsoft IIS had 21.35% of market share, way below Apache at 67.22%.
Riding the clouds...
approaching ground...
getting close...
even closer...
safely arrived at the hotel, with an interesting view over the MOMA.
The fun referrer pick du jour is this page from Oz selling the Belkin Digital Camera Link for iPod and linking directly to my pick on this product and labeling it as a review. (Screenshot saved for posterity.)
Honestly, guys, have you read my post before linking to it? More importantly, would you buy that thing after reading it?
Well, kudos anyway for having the guts to publish this link on a commercial site. Unless, of course, this was a glitch in the Google Matrix and a marketing droid hasn't quite grasped this weblog thing yet.
For those interested in a real review of this device, here is iPodlounge's take on it.
Guess who's blogging this?
People keep harassing me about a 2nd button on our mice. How annoying. I guess that's why Google has this useless 2nd button on their home page...
More on the faux Steve Jobs' weblog: Just One More Thing.
Ben Hammersley warns about an architectural issue with blocking image theft and online aggregators:
if you publish a full content feed, web-based aggregators wont be able to display any images it might contain if youve set up apache to prevent bandwidth-stealing by people posting your images on another page. Obvious, yes, but significant.
Later this week I resorted to use this htaccess technique to prevent image hotlinking. This didn't prevent the images to appear in my aggregator (NetNewsWire) but I realize it would cause trouble to those using web-based aggregators.
Sophie left me a comment with a better alternative, which consists of specifically blocking the offenders rather than flat out refuse all image hotlinking. That what I implemented today, with these rules:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !hotlinkImage\.gif$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} http://.*pallavoloromana\.it
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG)$ http://www\.padawan\.info/images/hotlinkImage\.gif [R,L]
Ben notes that it necessitates to monitor your logs to find the abusers. This is true, it does need a bit of inspection to find the vilains, but blocking all hotlinking now seems to me an over reaction. I think it's more responsible from me to filter out the few abusers rather than block everyone -- and therefore legit users I didn't think about -- even if it requires a bit more work from me.
N.B.: if you want to reuse this technique, you'll need to create an image that will be sent in lieu of the hotlinked one (in my code, it's located at www.padawan.info/images/hotlinkImage.gif) and of course change the URL to match your own, as well as the list of offending domains (there is only one in this example).
Adding to cities jumping ship, the French State announced its intention to look seriously into free software for its nearly 1 million desktop PCs. The current IT budget is 300 M and the state is looking for a 50% savings.
N.B.: Mr Dutreil who's quoted by Reuters as saying "Open-source software -- uncopyrighted software which has no license cost -- like Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Apache, MySQL and Evolution -- was 'very credible,'" was reported by Reuters France as saying "les logiciels libres, de type Linux, OpenOffice, Mozilla, Apache, MySQL, Evolution, constituent aujourd'hui une 'solution très crédible'".
Translating logiciels libres as either Open-source software or, worse, uncopyrighted software, instead of free software (or software libre), is a very stupid mistake from Reuters.
This guy put a Sun E450 in his trunk and uses it as an MP3 player. How handy, now I know what to do with my obsolete E450. No, wait! This seems way better ;-).
The third biggest German city, Munich will replace Windows with Linux on 14,000 desktops. Norway's second-largest city, Bergen, announced it would be following in Munich's footsteps and opting to run Linux to replace Windows and proprietary Unices for 100 schools and 32,000 users. Paris, capital of the universe France, is evaluating a move to Linux for 17,000 PCs and 400 servers.
It's definitely going to stick on the radar for quite some time and serve as in vitro tests for the viability of Linux vs. Windows on all fronts (servers and desktops). Expect fights, tears, blood and casualties along the journey.
Sorry for the lack of interesting posts lately, so for your entertainment I found this really funny one.
Six Apart has announced pricing and licensing changes to Movable Type. In short there are now more license types:
Introductory prices become the permanent prices. Only the free personal edition remains unchanged and limited to one author and three weblogs. All the other licenses allow for an unlimited number of weblogs and prices vary according to the number of active authors. The commercial license also offers a per-site option if the per-seat one is not suitable. The upgrade path is clearer (one time fees except a 20% annual maintenance fee for some commercial licenses, minor updates are free, major upgrades come with a rebate for paid customers.)
Removing the limit on the number of weblogs is smart because: 1) you can assemble many weblogs into one site for advanced uses of MT as a CMS -- which is good news for MT users -- and 2) the more weblogs, the more likely the number of authors is to grow (in the non personal uses) -- which is good for Six Apart.
I'm happy to see that I was not completely off base one month ago ;-), so it's not a surprise that I like the new licenses a lot more.
At last, Apple opens iTunes in the UK, France and Germany. We barely waited ;-).
The whole subway in Paris has been taken over by giant ads for the iPod, I crossed a dozen of them in my journey this morning. No coïncidence, and a nice doublé with la fête de la musique on June 21.
The prices for the songs are a bit odd, France and Germany will enjoy a fairly reasonable conversion rate at 0.99 a song and 9.99 an album, when you don't forget that nearly 20% VAT is included. On the contrary, the UK prices are much higher at 0.79£/7.99£. We've seen Apple playing with odd price policies before, but this time I can't prevent myself to think that the UK should better join the Euroland than remain isolated.
I can connect fine to the French iTMS through iTunes, but all Apple websites I've tried to contact at the moment are down, which is a bit weird since they're using a robust combination of delivery networks (Akamai and Speedera for the curious.) I guess it's a bit telling about the rush that is probably going on at the moment on the servers in Cupertino.
I'll give it a try once I get a chance.
On a side note, I think there is currently a rush on www.apple.co.uk from a flash crowd who mismatch this illustration agency with Apple's UK website. And the fact that they're greeted with a Microsoft .NET error message (screenshot) with code showing lots of variables names containing "Artists" in them are likely to endure a severe shock believing that Apple has given up to the dark side ;-).
P.S.: Akamai is at it again, so the unavailability of Apple's sites may not be related to a flash crowd after all.
Important update: this entry has been revised with a much better alternative!
As some people think they can hotlink images from anywhere without giving me credit and stealing bandwidth, I had to resort to a little trickery to prevent this to happen.
For the curious, it involves the following piece of code, placed in a .htaccess file within my /images directory. I simply manage it from within MovableType via a template module linked to a file at images/.htaccess with the following module body:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www.)?padawan.info(/)?.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(gif|jpg|jpeg|png)$ - [F,NC]
N.B.: if you want to reuse this code, don't forget to replace padawan.info by your own domain. Obviously, this will only work on Apache or those web servers that use the same .htaccess mechanism.
Et voilà, no more hotlinking on images from this site.
Unless I specifically say otherwise, if you want to reuse an image from here, please ask first then host the image on your site.
Still preoccupied with multiple CMS endeavors, I recently found something related to my dream of an integration between MovableType and Contribute.
In Authoring Content with WebDAV and FTP, Jeffrey Shell illustrates how a dynamic system can fake the behavior of an FTP or WebDAV server to make an editor such as Contribute believe that it is talking to a plain old filesystem.
This is a slightly different idea than what I had in mind, however it fills an interesting void. Nothing shall get in my way against WYSIFUC ;-).
I have a question for the Mac OS X and mobile phones users out there. I need to buy a mobile phone that works in both the U.S. and Europe, mine (a Motorola Accompli 008) works only in Europe. Can you advise on a model, provided it has the following features as a minimum:
- GSM tri-band (800/1800/1900 MHz), preferably GPRS, must be unlocked (I'm sticking with my current provider but I'm reluctant to be forced to)
- Bluetooth
- Fully compatible with iSync or provide a mean to synchronize address book and calendar with Mac OS X. Better if capable of synching with Entourage, although I can live with just iSync plus iCal and Address Book
- Good autonomy (the Accompli needs a refill everyday and it's a bit painful)
- Excellent reception (I live in an area that's not very well deserved and only one among three GSM providers has a 1800 MHz GPRS signal that works in my appartment)
Nice to have but absolutely not a selling point to me is a built-in camera, in which case it also must provide synching with the Mac.
I have an additional question: for those who use "traditional" phones with a numeric keypad, how convenient are they to enter contacts and events? I'm asking because I'm used to the smartphone (PDA/phone) combination with the Accompli which provides a keyboard on its sensitive screen that allows me to enter long texts, and I don't buy Steve Jobs' argument that you don't need a keyboard since you can use a Mac to enter those information. I'm constantly in situations where I'm fully autonomous with my Accompli and don't need to have the PowerBook with me just to take quick notes, update my agenda or send SMS, and I'm dubious of the usability of most models with a traditional numeric keypad.
I've done a quick assessment yesterday and found a few potential candidates, such as the Sony Ericsson T610, Z600 or P900 (the P900 looks like a very powerful, and expensive, replacement for my smartphone). I didn't dig the Nokia world so far.
Also if you have positive or negative experience on a model used in conjunction with a Mac, I'd be happy to hear the details from you (no "brand X sucks" without a legible explanation, please ;-).
Thanks!
It seems that I'll be able to attend Apple's WWDC 2004 in San Francisco in addition to a few business meetings, in which case I'll be there for approximately two weeks around end of June to early July. If anyone wants to catch up there, please let me know!
And at least I'll have something to write about after Steve Jobs keynote ;-).
Update: so it's confirmed. I'll be in SF between June 24 and July 7, staying at the Marriott.
It's a funny read that this Wi-Fi hotspots simply too expensive in El Reg:
Wi-Fi hotspots will only meet the needs of small customer groups and for the majority of hotspots there will be little or no return of investment. So says the Scientific Institute for Communication Services or WIK, Germany's leading research and advisory institute for communication services.
[...]
The institute believes that hotel chains and cafés will eventually offer hotspot services for free or at very low prices, while most start-up enterprises will abandon the market because of problems with billing, roaming, security and high transaction costs. WIK also believes there will be little or no competition from UMTS. UMTS provides ubiquity and mobility, which Wi-Fi hotspots cannot offer.
That's a usual thing in top management -- and something the IT consultancies profit a lot from -- you need to pay a few suits big bucks to regurgitate you clues that the little guys have been telling you for free and for quite some time. That's business life, and I have to admit that I had to resort to that kind of tactic to push some bitter pills down a few reluctant throats.
