• Rating children's drawings.
• I'd just like to say for the record. I Don't Get Furries. I've known quite a few of them over the years, but I Still Don't Get Them.
• I've been sick. I've also not been thinking about Java much recently. I'll get back on track soon, I promise.

The Middleware Company are idiots.

They publish a J2ee vs .NET benchmark, which is quickly determined to be worthless, follow it up with a FAQ acknowledging all the criticism is warranted, and now want to re-do the tests more fairly. But they've already shot themselves in the foot. They're idiots.

There's no two ways about it. The moment they got involved in the J2EE vs .NET benchmark, they were holding a big shotgun pointed directly at their feet, and waiting patiently for somebody to pull the trigger. By all accounts they did this voluntarily. The gun was paid for by Microsoft, but TMC did the rest.

I'm not going to weigh in on the Java vs .NET debate. I don't know enough about .NET to comment. But it's obvious that the comparison presented by TMC in its report was meaningless, and proves nothing but TMC's own incompetence. We all know the benchmark was ludicrous. TMC admit it in their hilarious FAQ/apologia on the subject:

Does these results mean that J2EE is slower than .NET?

No. The results mean that .NET was higher performing than J2EE in this particular comparison. Other comparisons could be conceived where results would be different.

If you read the FAQ, it's a long list of excuses for the ways that they knew the Java implementation of Pet Store was sub-optimal, but they didn't have time to/didn't want to/couldn't fix it. (Meanwhile, the .NET version was built from the ground up for speed, just not at TMC's expense) So what they advertise as a benchmarking exercise, and continue to refer to as benchmarking throughout the FAQ, is an apples-to-oranges comparison with absolutely no practical value. The last question, though, is the clincher:

After reading this benchmark I don't trust TMC's or TSS's advice anymore.

TMC had a lot of heartache seeing the results of this benchmark. We internally debated about whether we should post this or not. In the end, we decided to go forward and publish this report.

The results of the benchmark aren't the problem. The process by which those results were achieved is. If TMC had conducted the fairest test they could come up with and .NET had won, they would still have caught some flames, but they would have been able to keep respect amongst programmers able to see past the stupid advocacy garbage, to the fact that they did the best job possible.

Read the FAQ page again. Clifton Begin cloned the original Pet Store in his spare time in a week, but we are supposed to believe that TMC could not fix the existing Pet Store given team of experts working full time. Pull the other one, please.

Surely, if the comparison were so unbalanced, and they didn't have time to produce a fair comparison, the project should have been abandoned, or further resources sought? TMC had in their hands a test that they should have known had no value as a benchmark, and that was a pure marketing exercise for .NET. And yet they went ahead with the test anyway, and called it a “benchmark”

These reports tend to become synonymous with the company that produced them (remember the Mindcraft Report?), and that's the position TMC are going to find themselves in. Which is a bit stupid if you make a living from selling Java services.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

• Jamie Zawinski has had it up to here with GNOME., considers porting xscreensaver to OS X.
• A Brief Introduction to Writing a Brief Introduction... —a funny-once take on why kuro5hin is such a load of wank.
• An old .sig quote from alt.sysadmin.recovery: “The only thing worse than a user with a good idea is a user with a good idea and a screwdriver.” —Peter da Silva in <6qsme8$7jn@web.nmti.com>
• Dear Sun. By your own coding conventions, it should be arrayCopy, not arraycopy. Bastards.

Thanks to the guys who pointed me towards the XML Pull Parser. It's not quite what I'm after, but it'll provide a good source of material to steal from while writing my own.

Just to state the problem better, imagine a protocol based loosely on Jabber, where each side is sending the other a stream of XML fragments. The parser would be receiving chunks like “<foo:bar baz="quux">Fish</f”, and it'd need to parse as much as it could, trigger any events based on that parsing (in this case an opening tag and a text section), and then save the remainder until another chunk is delivered. The XML Pull Parser wouldn't quite work because you'd call nextTag, and it'd choke on the incomplete end-tag.

Luckily, I can cheat, write a parser that does just enough to divide the incoming stream into separate (but well-formed) XML messages, and farm the rest off to a full-featured parser.

State machines. Joy.

Can anyone help me with a Java/XML parsing problem?

The way the SAXParser works, is it sits around blocking on an InputStream. This isn't a particularly good match for non-blocking IO, as you end up wasting a thread for each stream you're parsing. What I'd like is a SAX parser that works the other way round, by letting me push the raw data into it, chunk by chunk.

Does such a beast already exist? Am I missing something in the standard API that I wouldn't be if I'd got more sleep last night? If not, I expect it'd be easy for me to hack Xerces to work the way I want it to, but I dislike reinventing the wheel.

I'm recovering from another aborted attempt to program in . Just think how much more powerful would be if it'd been written on top of Squeak instead of Frontier.

Mark Pilgrim came across a wav of someone shouting ‘Hey! I'm looking at gay porn!’ in his referrer logs. A co-worker at a previous job once encountered this file in his inbox. Of course, the fates being as they are, he encountered it precisely at the moment the managing director of the company was in an adjacent office.

Soon after this, we discovered a whole bunch of new entries in /etc/aliases. Every incoming mail was being silently redirected to the director's inbox. By the next staff meeting, he had a list of all the distribution- and mailing-lists we were to get off now. Needless to say, that's about when I started looking for a new job. Aside from the issue of having what we thought was private mail silently redirected, we all (well, with one significant exception, but that's a story for another day) worked our asses off, and he wanted to begrudge us the five minutes a day it took to read a few jokes.

Business 2.0: Hasta La Vista, Titanium. It's metal, but you can mould it like plastic. I guess we know what the next generation of Powerbooks are going to be made from.

The alloy's closest relatives -- steel and titanium -- take separate molds each time they are cast, and require additional machining to get them to spec. When Chrysler makes a steel pinion rod in its steering assemblies, 97 machining steps are required before the rod arrives on the assembly line. By contrast, Kang boasts, LiquidMetal scalpel blades would emerge from their molds razor-sharp and ready for surgery, since the metal can be cast with unprecedented accuracy -- to within 1 micron, or a 25,000th of an inch.

If you look really closely at the icon for Omni Outliner files, it's a rendition of ‘All Your Base’

One of the surest ways to get on my nerves very, very quickly, is to touch me. I have this very strong sense of personal space, and strangers touching me just makes me cringe.

I don't mind the normal, incidental contact that's a part of living in a big, crowded city. When the train's full, I'll sardine myself in with the rest of them. But on the other hand, I tend to only shake hands when it's necessary. In family gatherings, I'm the one standing at the back trying to avoid having to hug a thousand people I only see every five years. And I absolutely loathe having a conversation with someone who feels it's necessary to put their hand on your arm to emphasise whatever point they decided to make. It makes me want to crawl out of my skin.

Exceptions are made if you're attractive and female.

Well, the Caesar salad was nice, even if I did get progressively more and more annoyed as the evening progressed.

!joe posted a few interesting things to which I shall reply.

I'm reading The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

That's on my list of books all Java programmers should read.

Do you post things in your blog as a personal reminder?

I never used to. Both and Livejournal, my previous blogging tools, lack a search interface. MT, on the other hand, allows you to search back through entries, so it's easy to look back and say ‘ah, I wrote something about that, what was it?’ and actually find an answer.

Ruby, ugh, another thing to put on the todo list...

When one of my cow-orkers came back from XP Universe last year, he reported that all the luminaries were touting Ruby as the ideal scripting language. So I bought Dave and Andy's Ruby book in hard copy, and I must admit I really like the language. Unfortunately, knowing Ruby is really getting in the way of me learning Python, which is probably a bit more career-friendly.

About six months ago I went through some Pretty Nasty Personal Shit. Don't worry, this post isn't about that, well only in passing, anyway. Women were involved. 'nuff said.

Anyway, around that time, I developed something of a mantra. When I felt like screaming, I just said in a conversational tone to whoever happened to be around, “I am the calm, Zen centre of my world.” And you know what? It worked. It still works. Just a little mantra that puts my mind into a place where I can recover my balance, and move ahead.

The most incongruous part of the sentence is the most important. Not “the world”, but “my world”. Saying this took away any opportunity I had to redirect my problems away from myself. This was my world, I was at the middle of it, and all these things resting on my shoulder had to be dealt with. It's a remarkable way of clarifying your situation, of stripping away all your denials and attempts to evade. I am the calm, Zen centre of my world. This is where I am. I am going to attack this problem with my calm mind, and find the best path forwards.

The Bene Gesserit litany against fear springs to mind, for some reason: “I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”.

I am the calm, Zen centre of my world.

Om.

Sometimes, you just have one of those days. One of those days where you manage to find flow, and stay in it. One of those days where you move from test, to code, back to test, back to code with ease. One of those days when you don't feel like you're fighting the environment (the fact that I didn't have to do any EJB work helped there).

One of those days when coding feels like you've been given a block of wood, and you're carefully carving the edges away, polishing the grain. You may not end up with a big pile of code, but everything that's left serves some purpose. One of those days when you delete a method and smile, because your code is that much more elegant. Every line is justified, and contributes to the beauty of the work.

One of those days when you can stick "Everything below this point is done by magic" in a comment.

One of those days you remember why you got into this fucking annoying business in the first place.

Addendum: Found this quote in the Jargon File entry for hack-mode

...the sensation of being in hack mode is more than a little habituating. The intensity of this experience is probably by itself sufficient explanation for the existence of hackers, and explains why many resist being promoted out of positions where they can code.

Dave Winer has written ETag support for . It's currently in testing and should be released soon. He also did a survey of the feeds he's subscribed to, and over 80% of them already support ETag-based get.

Brent Simmons is likewise working on support in NetNewsWire. (and now he's released a beta.)

Kudos to developers for being so quick to tackle a pretty important issue. These two applications account for about 20% of my bandwidth, and a hell of a lot more of other peoples'

And this kudos goes doubly to Aggie, of course, which did the right thing all along.

Just to show off my complete lack of artistic skill, both The Fishbowl and my livejournal have a k-rad favicon.ico. It took me about 45 seconds to throw together in the Gimp, but hey it almost looks somewhat like it might be a goldfish, right?

I have become vanity site, destroyer of worlds.

Addendum: you know you're in for a really bad day at work, when “BCDIC or EBCDIC?” becomes an important question.

Velcro-assisted dismemberment!

A useful hack for making livejournal emit full-feed RSS instead of the hyper-truncated feeds it produces by default. Only works for paid accounts.

Given the massive confusion exhibited here, I've written a nice, simple guide on how to implement HTTP's Conditional GET mechanism, with regards to producers and consumers of RSS feeds.

Read the rest of this entry…

Lutz Prechelt, An Empirical Comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl. Emphasis mine.

80 implementations of the same set of requirements are compared for several properties, such as runtime, memory consumption, source text length, comment density, program structure, reliability, and the amount of time required for writing them. The results indicate that, for the given programming problem, which regards string manipulation and search in a dictionary, “scripting languages” (Perl, Python, Rexx, Tcl) are more productive than “conventional languages”. In terms of run time and memory consumption, they often turn out better than Java and not much worse than C or C++. In general, the differences between languages tend to be smaller than the typical differences due to different programmers within the same language.

The number one rule for starting an Open Source project. Never, ever, ever start a project without having working code that people can compile, run and play with.

If you don't start with it, you'll never develop anything.

If Linus had posted to the comp.os.minix newsgroup: “I have this neat idea. Let's write a free Unix-like operating system that runs on a 386”, maybe FreeBSD would be a lot more popular these days. Linus didn't, though, he posted working code that could run a variety of Unix applications and could be expanded in lots of different directions.

Having something that works gives you three important things (because all lists must have three parts)

• People can work on the feature that interests them the most, and not worry about all the un-interesting-to-them things that might have to be done to get it to work. And since everybody finds different things interesting, you'll expand in lots of directions.
• The person who wrote the original code is the project's natural leader. You get a natural respect from bootstrapping the project, even when everyone else's code starts to outweigh yours. And small projects need a dictator.
• The base architecture of the project is already laid out, so you don't need to spend six months arguing over interfaces and coding standards.

The code doesn't have to be perfect. If your VM handler sucks, somebody interested in virtual memory will rewrite it. But if you don't have a VM handler at all, the guy who wants to make your scheduler better is going to look for somewhere else to exercise his talents.

You know you're in trouble when someone asks you to help with an Open Source project, and your first reaction is: “Gah! They're not running JIRA?”

</shameless-plug>

After a thread on the webappsec mailing list, I spent some of yesterday coming up with a guide to password recovery practices for public web applications. It's still under development, of course, so any suggestions are welcome.

It's available as a PDF, and to fulfil my obligations under the GNU FDL, as LaTeX source

The kind folk at Google have also saved me some effort by caching the document as HTML.

The KLF: The Manual: (How to have a number one the easy way). Annoying lack of capitalisation from the original:

be ready to ride the big dipper of the mixed metaphor. be ready to dip your hands in the lucky bag of life, gather the storm clouds of fantasy and anoint your own genius. because it is only by following the clear and concise instructions contained in this book that you can realise your childish fantasies of having a number one hit single in the official u.k. top 40 thus guaranteeing you a place forever in the sacred annals of pop history.

other than achieving a number one hit single we offer you nothing else. there will be no endless wealth. fame will flicker and fade and sex will still be a problem. what was once yours for a few days will now enter the public domain.

I was reading this thread on www-html about the possible addition of contentEditable to HTML. (found via manero.org), and specifically this post by Christian Hujer:

Forms are not the task of HTML anymore. They are the task of XForms. Why should only HTML contain forms, but not XSL:FO, SVG, SMIL, MathML, DocBook? So XForms will be the pluggable language to add forms to content.

This really sums up the situation with HTML as far as the W3C is concerned. HTML4 is dead. XHTML1 was just a transition from a monolithic SGML format to a modular XML format. The as-yet-unfinished XHTML2 is the only way forward for the standardized web. Thus, any improvements we might want to make to the specification must end up in, and conform to the goals of, XHTML2.

For those not following the game, XHTML2 is most notable for the fact that it is incredibly backwards-incompatible with HTML. Where XHTML1 just required you to remember to close your tags in the right order, and maybe replace one or two attributes, XHTML2 does some pretty radical things like get rid of the <img/> tag in favour of <object/>, and completely replace HTML forms with XFORMS, which is about twice as complicated.

Add up the three years it's going to take for the standard to be acceptably implemented in browsers, and the three years after that until the majority of users have got around to upgrading. And even then, it's going to be even harder to convince web authors to use XHTML2 than it was to convince them to use XHTML1, because it's such a radical change to what they were used to. HTML4 is going to live a very long time.

(As an aside, if you haven't yet, go read Ian Hickson's description of why we shouldn't even be using XHTML now, because browsers don't properly accept text/xml documents)

So, as far as the W3C are concerned, if we want any new, standard features, we're going to have to wait six years for them, and we're going to have to dive into the XHTML 2 Brave New World in order to use them. This leaves the browsers in an interesting position. The browser vendors want to deliver nifty things that users like. With the standards as they are being in this time-warp, and the average web-hacker most likely to want to stick with the moribund HTML4, seeing no reason to switch to something more complex and less forgiving, it is inevitable that the browsers are going to extend HTML4 in weird directions out of the control of the W3C.

The W3C, on the other hand, can't really go back to adding things to the old SGML-based HTML, because that would undermine the efforts of the push towards XHTML, an important effort that is being done for all the right reasons.

It's a tough one, innit.

In a previous life, I was a Unix system administrator. Before that, I did tech support. So it was vaguely satisfying to have all these various nerd-skills come together while explaining (command by command) to somebody over the phone how to recover an old JSP from my backup CVS tar-file.

The Wayback Machine found something I'd forgotten about. Once upon a time, back in 1998 or so, I kept a list on my homepage of things that I wanted. On it was “A life. Preferably in a metallic blue, or maybe dark green.” Soon after, Lonita sent me this:

In The Daily Adventures of Mixerman, a sound engineer keeps a diary of his life making an album, the names being changed to protect the guilty. The whole thing may very well be an invention, but its an entertaining one. It gives a lot of insight into how a band with a $2 million advance, an incompetent drummer and a producer who doesn't even show up the first week might make an album.

Or fail to make one. (Link found via RockNerd)

Mobius
Russell Beattie, on the whole “Microsoft pays for bloggers to attend a conference, bloggers don't mention it&rdquo; saga:

I really only have one thought about this: WHEN THE HELL IS SUN GOING TO SEND THE JAVA BLOGGERS OUR TICKETS TO A SIMILAR GIG?!?!?!?

Sun! Get on it! I have no scruples! I promise I won't mention ANYTHING about you're paying for a flight back to San Francisco for me!

Dear Sun. I also have no scruples. If you pay for me to fly to San Francisco, I will blog whatever the hell you want me to.

I found the winners of the 2002 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest via RageBoy's weblog. First, the contest itself:

An international literary parody contest, the competition honors the memory if not the reputation of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton (1803-1873). The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels. Although best known for The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) and the phrase, "the pen is mightier than the sword," Bulwer-Lytton opened his novel Paul Clifford (1830) with the immortal words that the "Peanuts" beagle Snoopy plagiarized for years, "It was a dark and stormy night."

The Winner...

On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained.

...who last year won the ‘Detective’ category with:

The graphic crime-scene photo that stared up at Homicide Inspector Chuck Venturi from the center of his desk was not a pretty picture, though it could have been, Chuck mused, had it only been shot in soft focus with a shutter speed of 1/125 second at f 5.6 or so.

If you're one of my RSS readers and haven't visited the main page of my weblog, you won't have noticed the ‘story lists’ in the right-hand sidebar. I've been going through my archives marking certain more significant posts as stories, and also bringing over those stories I wrote on my Radio weblog. They're also conveniently divided between the nerdy and the personal, although since I am personally a nerd, the line blurs somewhat.

The five most recent in each category show up on the homepage. There are also index pages for the nerd stories (which readers of my Radio blog might be familiar with) and personal stories (which readers of my livejournal might be familiar with)

Prior to writing in my journal and weblog, I also wrote stuff on my CharlesObservations page, I might move that over here some day.

Wired: IBM Promises Muscle for the Mac:

The chip promises to goose Macintosh clock speeds, which right now trail Intel's Pentium line significantly. Pete Sampson, IBM senior PowerPC architect, says that the PowerPC 970 will reach clock speeds of 1.8 GHz and will also be able to do a lot more with each processor cycle. Current G4 CPUs can issue three instructions per cycle; the PowerPC 970 will issue eight.

Supposed to come out late 2003. I guess the rumoured move to Intel is forcing a bit of a fightback on the PowerPC side.

Russell Beattie asks, “What were you doing in 1993?”

In 1993, I was going through the first year of Arts/Law (a degree I was destined not to complete) at the University of Western Australia, having finished high-school the year before. I studied (or attempted to avoid studying) Contemporary English Literature, Philosophy, Psychology, Contract Law, Criminal Law, and The Legal Process. I actually got quite good grades in them, except for Legal Process which had lectures very late on a Thursday afternoon, and to which I (and several others) would inevitably show up drunk.

I spent most of the year hanging around with people who I knew from school but didn't particularly like, because at least it avoided the hassle of trying to meet new people. Big mistake. Other interesting things that happened that year mostly involved me being thrown out of the University tavern for being underage, and having my eyebrow shaved off at someone else's 18th birthday party.

I had not yet discovered the Internet.

I am even considering taking the drastic measures of learning Objective-C and starting to program native OS X apps!

Drink the kool-aid, Anthony. Even though I don't get the chance to do it very often, having very little in the way of copious spare time to play with things, I really, really enjoy Cocoa programming. There's something about the way the GUI stuff all fits together that is a pleasure to work with.

I am the number two Google result for Janie Porche Naked!

In other news, Rogers Cadenhead has done a particularly scary dossier on our favourite Switcher, documenting her run-in with the law at college, her letter to Wired, and even her golf score. It's a trifle disconcerting to think how long your past sins are remembered by search engines.

“ELECTRONS!!! I love them! I am going to marry a tall dark hansome electron one day. I hope it is soon!!! I will worry about the sexual side of our relationship later...” —Janie Porche

I expect most of you have read this before, but Terry Bisson's They're Made out of Meat is always worth a read. Or like I did just now (thanks to Lonita) popping back to and re-reading after a few years of forgetting it was there.

Is it just me, or is the media rushing a bit too fast towards blaming Al Qaeda for the bombing in Bali? I'm suddenly reminded of the Anthrax scares in late 2001—which sort of dropped out of the news after it was realised it had nothing to do with the Middle East at all, and was probably being perpetrated by home-grown American lunatics.

• Al Qaeda have the resources. If they wanted to blow up a bunch of Aussies, they could have done it in Australia.
• Al Qaeda's issue: American “occupation” of Saudi Arabia.
• Al Qaeda's recent targets: US embassies in Africa. A US warship in Yemen. The World Trade Centre in New York (two attempts). <edit>The Pentagon</edit>. A Bali nightclub?
• The most likely outcome of this attack, economic problems for Indonesia as the tourist trade in Bali goes down the hole, just doesn't fit into what we know of their motives.
• Indonesia: 88% Muslim.
• Al Qaeda need to do something big against the USA to show they haven't been hurt by the war in Afghanistan. However many casualties there were, blowing up a nightclub in an out-of-the-way country does not fit the bill. If it were them, it would make them look weak, unable to stand up to their real enemy and looking for easier targets. That's an appearance they would desperately want to avoid giving.

I may be entirely wrong. But I think there's more than enough reason to keep our minds open, and not immediately write this off as just another Al Qaeda attack. It's much more likely a home-grown local issue, just like the Anthrax was in 2001.

From RFC 2616

The Referer[sic] request-header field allows the client to specify, for the server's benefit, the address (URI) of the resource from which the Request-URI was obtained (the "referrer", although the header field is misspelled.) The Referer request-header allows a server to generate lists of back-links to resources for interest, logging, optimized caching, etc. It also allows obsolete or mistyped links to be traced for maintenance. The Referer field MUST NOT be sent if the Request-URI was obtained from a source that does not have its own URI, such as input from the user keyboard.

Could authors of news aggregators please stop putting the URL of their product page in the referer header? It is in no way the “resource from which the Request-URI was obtained” and as such It's a clear violation of the RFC. The place to identify the client is the User-Agent header.

New idea for a book, suggested by a cow orker:

Pair Programming with Tyler Durden

Why I'm not hanging out for handwriting recognition any time soon:

A useful security link: TruSecure's Hype or Hot sorts current security alerts by the real danger they present. What's surprising (but probably shouldn't be) is how 80% of the list seems to be Windows email worms. Warchalking is listed under ‘hype’

Russell Beattie writes:

Anyways, I've since seen the value of UML, but not as a programming aid per se. I need to see that in practice with my own eyes, because I don't see it helping all that much. But what IS nice is when you're trying to communicate process flow on the whiteboard, or in a document and having a common graphical vocabularly to use.

Me too. I know about enough UML to draw pretty sketchy class, state and interaction diagrams. UML works very well as a common vocabulary for communicating design between developers, or for documenting critical parts of a design. There's nothing magical about UML, though, and sometimes it's possible to go overboard and spend more effort drawing the pictures than you get value out of them.

I'll happily admit that I probably get a thousand technical details in my diagrams wrong. That's cool because I'm only using them to communicate a pretty broad intent—I don't even expect the code to be 100% faithful to the diagram. That's another advantage of whiteboards, you can wipe the pictures into oblivion when they're no longer useful, and they don't leave confusing artifacts behind.

If you're doing enough detailed UML that you can take advantage of those tools that generate code from the diagrams, you're doing far too detailed up-front design in my book.

Disclaimer: I'm slowly moving this weblog from its rather soupy default templates to correct markup, but I generally can't play with HTML for more than about fifteen minutes at a time before getting bored. Do what I say, not what I do. :)

Dave Winer, What Is Tag Soup?

The Web is tag soup. People use blockquotes to indent. Even though the REST folk argue that it's anti-Web to do RPC, people do RPC anyway. There's a never-ending list of complaints, but they can be resolved. That's why I'm writing this little essaylet. [...] You can't put the genie back in the bottle. Only by making your world very small can you fail to see the enormity of getting everyone to see it your way. Better to adapt your thinking to their way, and see how you can make your vision fit into what is.

No.

The most significant cause of Tag Soup has been the fact that the tools we have to work with are always catching up with what we want to do with them. The reason people use <blockquote> for indenting (as they used <ul> before it) is because not long ago it was the only way to indent text without using really complicated tables or spacer images. Now that the technology to indent text using CSS is widespread, we developers can migrate to more correct, and more reliable ways to indent.

The tools aren't there yet, of course. The standards don't support everything we want to do, and the browsers don't support all the standards that do exist. We've got years to go yet, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be moving in the direction of semantically correct web-pages.

The movement is already happening. Like all good Internet movements, it started in the hands of the technical practicioners, shown by the proliferation of weblogs that are moving away from table-based layouts and towards CSS styling. Any web designer who shows pride in their work will want to use the tools correctly. If there are two ways of doing something, the correct way and the hacky way, a professional will want to do things the correct way.

Wired has shown that a professional publication can follow the same route.

There are three things that, if we continue to do them as a community, may not eliminate tag soup, but will ensure everyone knows it's a bad thing, and at least tries to avoid it:

1. Continue to improve both the standards and the browsers. Wherever web designers are doing something the hacky way because there is no way to do it correctly, provide a way to do it that doesn't break the semantic structure of HTML
2. Continue to evangelize the correct way. Continue to let designers and page authors know that there is a correct way, and there are good reasons to adopt it.
3. Write applications that take advantage of the benefits of correctly structured web pages. Nothing would speed up the adoption of standards more than a killer application, the function of which applies better to valid pages than it does to invalid pages.

Dave Johnson on the price/quality curve:

Let's talk about you. What do you think? Is there any truth to my theory? Am I totally wrong about this? Is there any insight here, or am I just being petty? Does the ROI of the big expensive enterprise software make it the most valuable of all, quality be damned?

Big expensive enterprise software occupies a completely different sphere of existance compared to consumer products such as Photoshop or Visual Studio. Since I've previously used Websphere as an example, and my employer sells Websphere, this time I'll pick a completely different product to talk about that I've dealt with, but have no financial interest in: SAP.

SAP qualifies as being really big, expensive software for which you need a team of consultants just to install. It doesn't hold a lock-in position on the market, but people continue to use it. There has to be a reason that this doesn't matter, otherwise SAP would have a competitor with a one-click installation procedure. That's how the market works. SAP requires a similarly big team of consultants to customize, but there has to be a reason this is necessary, otherwise SAP would have a competitor with an easier customisation system.

The answer is that there is no way that SAP could possibly, ever come up with a product that could fit even a single business. SAP isn't an application you can just plug in to a business. It's not like Quicken or MYOB, which are sold to companies small enough to be able to mold their business processes around their accounting software. While SAP (arguably) delivers a very valuable framework into which you can encode business processes, in order to get SAP to do anything worthwhile for your business you are going to have to do complicated things with it. And as programmers, witnesses to a thousand failed attempts to “dumb down&rdquo programming, we know that in order to do complicated things, you need to employ skilled people.

If you're going to have to employ very skilled people to get your appserver, e-commerce suite or ERP package to fit in with your business, then the additional overhead of having said people perform installation, and deal with the niggly annoyances of the product's user-hostility is only a very small fraction of their total cost. If you're hiring these guys for six months, and it'll take one of them two days to set up the software right, it's not really a competitive advantage for another product to have a really simple installation procedure.

Crappy development tools, on the other hand, I could rant about for a long time. If you have development tools that suck, you move from your expensive developers losing a small, fixed amount of time on the inefficiencies, to losing a proportion of every day you're paying them for wrestling with the product. At that point, I start wondering what the hell is wrong with some people.

A co-worker emailed this to me—the Complete Pasta Theory of Software:

The ideal software structure is one having components that are small and loosely coupled; this ideal structure is called ravioli code. In ravioli code, each of the components, or objects, is a package containing some meat or other nourishment for the system; any component can be modified or replaced without significantly affecting other components.

We need to go beyond the condemnation of spaghetti code to the active encouragement of ravioli code.

I've been making tweaks to the look of my weblog ever since I put it up, gradually adding the various bits and pieces required to make it work. (For example, until this morning it didn't contain any reference to my real name, which confused at least one reader, and could possibly get me in trouble with the (ISC)2 code of ethics¹). As I go, I've been testing it with all the browsers I have lying around: Chimera, Galeon, an obselete beta of OmniWeb, lynx, Internet Explorer 5 for Mac, and Internet Explorer 5.5 for Windows. It seems happy with all of them, although IE5 Mac refuses to display the title graphic.

That is, until a friend looked at the page in Internet Explorer 6, and asked why it was the text on the right hand side kept vanishing?

I found a machine in the office that had IE6 installed, and easily replicated the problem. Now I don't pretend that my site even comes close to validating as correct HTML, but that's no excuse for a browser to be so flaky as to have things randomly appearing and disappearing as you scroll up and down the page.

This isn't the first time I've had problems like this with Internet Explorer and CSS. Not by a long way. In a normal competetive environment, a browser that behaved so flakily the moment you tried to do anything complicated would lose market-share to its more able competitors, and be forced to improve its rendering. However, once a product attains the near-monopoly position that IE has, a reality distortion field comes into effect. It's no longer IE's fault that my page doesn't display correctly, it's my fault for writing a page that triggers one of IE's bugs.

This is not a good state of affairs.

¹ While it doesn't appear on that page, in order to enrol for my CISSP exam, I had to sign a form stating that I had never gone by any alias online that wasn't identified with my real identity.

Joel Spolsky notes the release of the second edition of Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference. This is the only HTML book I've found more useful than the original specifications. It's as comprehensive as the specs, while also including a lot of important information on Java cross-browser compatibility, and cross-referencing between the four different standards that make up web pages (HTML, DOM, CSS and ECMAScript).

Memo to myself from the “I keep reinventing this particular wheel myself, why not use someone else's?” department. commons-threadpool. (from James Strachan)

There are two important things to note first-off about last night's performance of Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw at the Sydney Opera House. Firstly, the number of seats that were full in the first act, but empty after the intermission. Secondly, the fact that it was an absolutely brilliant production.

The Turn of the Screw is not a melodic opera. You don't walk out of it humming the arias, in fact there aren't any arias to speak of. Much of the music is atonal, with awkward syncopations. This isn't an opera to tap your feet to, but it does draw you in to the claustrophobic world of Henry James' story, in which a Governess encounters two spirits who may be ghosts out to corrupt her charges, or who may be tricks of her own mind.

Read the rest of this entry…

Britten was once asked to identify the difference between his new opera, The Turn of the Screw, and his opera of 1946, The Rape of Lucretia. ‘The title is different, and the story’, replied Britten. ‘Oh yes, of course, but the music, Mr Britten – what would you say was the difference between the music of The Rape of Lucretia and The Turn of the Screw?’ ‘The notes are the same, but they are in a different order.’

Ned Batchelder owns up to a heinous sin:

Brent's Law of CMS URLs is simple: the more expensive the content management system, the longer and uglier the URLs they produce.

This resonated with me, both because I have experienced these impossible-to-use URLs as a web surfer, but also because I helped make some of them, by being one of the developers of the Domino Web Server.

Domino produces URLs that look like this: http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/sandbox.nsf/ 85d5b6903071400e8525676d0079b3ae/ 6bcca234153471348525689a0070bc43?OpenDocument

As someone whose job involves frequent visits to IBM's website, I am intimately familiar with those kinds of URL. Sir, I hereby pronounce you evil, and sentence you to a year with only Jakob Neilsen for company.

Ask Slashdot: What Would You Do With a New Form of Encryption?: “I have come up with a new form of encryption that's better than a one-time pad. Should I patent it?” Or, “Dear Slashdot editors. April 1 was six months ago.”

Some guy comes up with a claim that any reader of Crypto-gram would know is laughable, and then uses it to push Slashdot's hot-button on patent issues. Ten points out of ten for trolling audacity, minus several million points to Cliff for posting it.

Ask Slashdot always makes me laugh, though. Who in their right mind, when confronted with a problem, would think “I know! I'll ask Slashdot readers!”

You only get five. by Heather Hamilton, found via diveintomark.

And let me just take a moment to explain the Five Fame Fuckers list for those of you who don't already have one: if you're in a committed relationship, you're allowed to compile a list of five people you'd like to sleep with, but the people on the list not only have to be celebrities, they also have to be celebrities you don't know or wouldn't ever happen to bump into, even in the most remote social situation. To make things fair, the person you're in the committed relationship with gets to compile his/her own list. So, if you don't have one, please do us all a favor and get one.

Well, I'm not in a relationship, but if I were in one then my list would be: (in no particular order) Sarah Michelle-Gellar, Nicole Kidman, Alyson Hannigan, Katie Holmes, Kelly Macdonald.

Shelley Powers has a strange brain.

Today, though, the group was quiet, much quieter than usual, because one of their members, PHP, was not its usual cheerful self. In fact, one could say that PHP was in a true funk, if one had a mind to say something like that aloud, or within the hearing of one's boss. Or doctor.

Why the blues, PHP, the other languages asked. All the languages that is but C, because all C ever said was "bite me", being a rude language and hard to live with, but still respected because it was such a good worker.

Exhibit A, your honour. An options list from a website's registration form containing 341 different salutations, including “Honourable Judge”, “Senator”, “Dpty. Commissioner”, “Kepala” and “YB Dato' Paduka Bijaya Di Raja”, but shamefully missing ‘Mademoiselle’.

It was mailed around the office by a cow-orker. The fact that this was found on a real website is truly, truly scary. The fact that another cow-orker replied with a similar example from a completely different site is even scarier. You'd think at some point, someone would have thought “Hey, let's just use a text field.”.

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Click Me

I just looked at my weblog homepage in Netscape 4.78 for Linux. If you get the chance, you should try it, it's really funky. It looks like William Burroughs cut my page up and pasted it together in random blocks.

full-size...

Mark Pilgrim talks about evolvable formats, specifically the mess that is RSS 0.9x/2.0:

The problem with that list of RSS deficiencies is that it is also a list of necessities—RSS has flourished in a way that no other syndication format has, not despite many of these qualities but because of them. The very weaknesses that make RSS so infuriating to serious practitioners also make it possible in the first place. (Pilgrim)

Exactly how many times are we going to rewrite Richard Gabriel's The rise of “Worse is Better” in our lifetimes? While it's great to strive for perfection, it's inevitable¹ that when you sacrifice perfection for convenience, you're far more likely to succeed.

From Worse is Better we have the “correct” approach:

• Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
• Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
• Consistency-the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
• Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

vs the approach that inevitably succeeds:

• Simplicity-the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
• Correctness-the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
• Consistency-the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency.
• Completeness-the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

The original essay was about C vs Lisp, and played very hard on the computational efficiency side of the argument, but “Worse is Better” holds true across the board. Just look at Java vs Smalltalk, or RSS vs RSS.

Addendum: Mark's essay on RSS is adapted from Clay Shirky's essay on HTML/HTTP, which is really just more evidence for the underlying conclusion. Worse is better.

¹ This was originally the typo ‘ineviable’, which I am convinced was a Freudian concatenation of ‘inevitable’ and ‘unenviable’

From Joe's Jelly:

Booo. XML is designed for representing data. Programming languages are designed for representing behavior. Have a look at the examples of oXML and try writing them out again in a dynamic OO language like Python or Ruby. The XML versions are massively overcomplicated and very hard to read (XML has a noisy syntax). Remember, machines have no problems reading code, it's humans you need to think about.

I can not agree with this enough. XML is a great language for structured data, terrible for programming anything more complicated than a simple series of instructions (à la ant). This is also one of the many reasons I detest XSLT.

Lego renditions of Escher prints. Found via Jamie Zawinski

For anyone who is annoyed by the fact that my index.rdf only contains excerpts of posts and not the whole post, I now have two new RSS feeds: http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/allfull.xml is an RSS 0.91 feed that contains the entire post in the description tag, just like used to do it. http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/nerdfull.xml is the same as allfull.xml, except it only contains those posts I make to my “nerd” category, and will thus most resemble the kind of posts you were getting from The Desktop Fishbowl.

So in summary (and I'll put a permanent list of these somewhere, once I have all the category pages working and such):

• http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/index.rdf RSS 1.0 feed, with excerpts.
• http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/index.xml RSS 0.91 feed, with excerpts
• http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/allfull.xml RSS 0.91 feed with full posts
• http://fishbowl.pastiche.org/nerdfull.xmlRSS 0.91 feed with full posts but without pictures of my cats.

As an aside, creating these feeds in MT was slightly easier than falling off a log.

Dear .Mac Member,

We hope you haven't been greatly inconvenienced by the two .Mac network outages we've experienced in the past two weeks (including this morning) and we sincerely apologize for any problems you've experienced. The outages were the result of equipment failures, and since the equipment vendor has not been able to persuade us that the problem will not occur again, we've already begun installing new equipment from a different vendor.

I sincerely hope these weren't the problem. *grin*

Warning, I've had a few beers and I'm rambling.

So. Why did I move? A combination of reasons really. The general clunkiness of . The inability to update unless I had my laptop with me. The insuficient access logs from Userland's server. The annoyance of being “0100190” instead of using the domain I've owned for five years now. The artificial separation of my two weblogs. Inertia.

But I'm here now. I have given up what is a pretty influential position with Google, even after the update, to forge out under my own name.

Movable Type looks bloody good so far. It seems very full-featured, very easy to use, and it didn't take very long to set up at all (although I'm not sure how that would translate to someone who hadn't once made a living as a Perl programmer and Unix sysadmin). The instructions are comprehensive, and the interface is very elegant.

I need to write my own page templates, though. I'll probably base it on my livejournal template, but that's a job for next weekend.

Exporting from Radio took a while. I found a tool that would do the job for me here, but whoever wrote it (a) knows nothing about localisation, and (b) got it wrong anyway. I made a huge number of false starts because the MT importing format wants dates to be mm/dd/yyyy, but the exporter writes them out (at least on my machine) as d/m/yy. Also, MT expects a newline between BODY: and the body of a post, but the exporter doesn't deliver. Luckily, that's all the sort of thing that can be solved with regular expressions.

Exporting from Livejournal took a lot less time. I wrote the first part of a Java library for talking to Livejournal in January. On top of that, the exporter was only 130 lines of code. It was fun watching STDOUT as my journal was exported. I commented to Lonita that it was “like watching your life flash before your eyes in fast-forward”

So The Fishbowl is a merging of The Fishbowl Diaries with The Desktop Fishbowl. I'm not sure how merging my personal and geeky writings is going to work out. It works for Mark Pilgrim, but he's quite a bit more eloquent than I am. In the near future I shall create categorised RSS feeds, so people can subscribe to what they're interested in, and no more.

Edit: This was my last real post to Radio.

Are there any instructions anywhere for exporting your blog from Radio, and importing it into Movable Type?

The last time we had dinner together was probably 1984, which would make me nine years old. Miraculously, and possibly for the first time in my life, I survived a social gathering without ending up the holder of the “most tactless comment” award.

Two important things I learned this week:

1. It is very unfashionable to drink Chardonnay
2. Thursday is the new Friday, except in London where Wednesday is rapidly becoming the new Thursday.

Bastards.

To anyone working in a software company. My computer is my own. You do not make assumptions as to how I want to use my computer, nor do you make assumptions as to how much I want to use your product, just because I happen to be installing it.

The worse culprits in this kind of thing are probably Real. Real seem to have an entire marketing strategy focused on annoying the fuck out of their users until said users refuse to ever install a Real product again. I know that's the state I'm at, and so are quite a few of my friends. When there's a site that says “requires Real Player”, my reaction is “Oh well, I can't hear that”.

I had a very nice spaghetti marinara last night, but I felt really guilty eating it. devilfish is a bad influence.

My most common mistake in Java is typing StringBugger. The F and G are right next to each other.

[Joe's Jelly]

I find I rarely make mistakes like that while coding Java—I use autocomplete for anything longer than three characters anyway. On the other hand, when pair-programming on a Java 1.1 project, and I was dictating code for my pair to type, I used to say things like “enumeration dot nextElephant”to see whether I could get him to type it by mistake.

Any sufficiently advanced beauracracy is indistinguishable from magic. Complete with the strange incantations and sacrifices.

Quoth Mike

In the office all our machines are named after Muppets (Gonzo, Scooter, Beaker, Bunsen, Cookie, Grover etc), our servers are all named after Greek gods (Zeus, Bacchus - son of Zeus etc).

At my university, the servers were all named after composers (Mozart, Liszt, Handel etc).

What wacky naming schemes do you have?

Let's see. My personal machines are named after states of religious enlightenment, because I started running them back at Uni halfway through an Eastern Philosophy course. The desktops are satori, nirvana and gnosis, while the laptop is epiphany. That last one is a very obscure religious joke that nobody has ever managed to get without an explanation.

At the ISP I used to work for, all the servers were named after casino- or card-games (hearts, craps, lotto, keno, baccarat, poker...) Late in my employment there, we started running out of names, so one of the Cisco RAS boxen got stuck with the name ‘genting-wheel’.

One morning at that job I got a phonecall from my brother, who is a journalist for the West Australian newspaper. Apparently, the ISP across the road (to whom we supplied all their bandwidth by running an ethernet cable under the street, and who were constantly getting us on the MAPS RBL by hosting spammers) had been hosting an illegal online casino. Because our nameservers were called “keno” and blackjack, we had to spend a lot of time explaining that no, we weren't involved.

When I moved across in the ISP to do web conslutting, I got to name the servers, and I chose to name them after characters from Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy This was done purely for the amusement value of having a host named “Slartibartfast”.

At my current employer, all our boxen are named after heavenly bodies—generally stars, planets or constellations. However, I maintain that calling my next box “Sarah-Michelle Gellar” would fit perfectly into the naming-scheme.

Blondes ‘to die out in 200 years’. Get one while you still can!

Jamie Zawinski talks about the joys of computing:

And -- let me emphasize -- I do not enjoy this! Oh sure, you say, why do you keep doing it? I don't know. I think I still enjoy writing software, usually. But what I end up spending almost all of my time doing is sysadmin crap. I hate it. I have always hated it. Always. If you made a Venn diagram, there would be two non-overlapping circles, one of which was labeled, "Times when I am truly happy" and the other of which was labeled, "Times when I am logged in as root, holding a cable, or have the case open."

Fish are funny, he says, in a way dogs and cats are not. “There is just something about fish. And their silly names. Halibut.” And haddock? “Haddock is very, very funny.” Pilchard? “Hilarious.”

Read the rest of this entry…

Dave Winer thinks that because he's not ranked where he wants to be, “Google's algorithm is quirky, or the implementation is buggy, or both.” I've also noticed that I'm no longer the first non-Apple search result for Janie Porche, and I've even fallen to third-place on naked desktop people (although amusingly enough, the top two are Ugo Cei linking to me).

Google must be in a tough situation. When they started out, PageRank was a really neat idea, and worked very well. What it wouldn't have counted on was the huge increase in small, insular communities who do nothing but link to each other every day. Look at the Java-blogs community, for example. Half the entries I read are links to other blogs I'm subscribed to. (Which is a good thing, each post accretes a little more information, a pearl solidifying around an irritant in the blogosphere)

While there are a lot of weblogs, we're still a tiny percentage of the population of the web, and even ‘popular’ weblogs still only have a few thousand visitors a day. Thus, Google are probably doing quite a lot of work behind the scenes to reduce the inordinate influence blogs have on their page rankings.

And more power to them.

Writers will write because they can’t not write. Repeat that over and over to yourself until you get it. Do you know someone like that? Someone who does what they do, not for money or glory or love or God or country, but simply because it’s who they are and you can’t imagine them being any other way?

They're a bunch of gutless pricks.

In web pages, as in many other pursuits, anything that is ‘nifty’ will become less so with each viewing, and will probably become annoying in the end. Elegance, on the other hand, never gets old.

From Bryan Dollery on the Extreme Programming mailing list:

If business leaders were interested in money then they'd use JBoss overWebSphere or WebLogic. The three products are, for most uses, identical -but JBoss is free while Web* can cost around $50,000 per processor. If money is that important, why do these products sell?

I make a living as a Websphere consultant, so I'm going to put my devil's advocate hat on. Please note that I really do like JBoss, I just don't get paid to use it. I don't want to start a ‘My Appserver is better than yours!’ battle, I just want to demonstrate that there are reasons that Websphere and its ilk exist in the marketplace, even though its free (or at least orders of magnitude cheaper) competitors are generally more up-to-date with the standards, easier to use and faster.

I can't speak for Weblogic, having never used it in anger, but as far as Websphere goes:

• Trust is an asset (1). In the J2EE Container Shootout, JBoss's Marc Fleury said that of his competitors he'd either choose Orion because it's superior technically, or Websphere “because IBM will be around for ever and ever - it is always a safe choice.” As good as Open Source support generaly is, a support contract is a far more tangible asset.
• Trust is an asset (2). JBoss is around the same place Linux was five years ago. It's the same Catch-22. To be trusted, it has to be seen running critical applications, but to be deployed in critical applications, it needs to be trusted. Linux managed that through two prongs, firstly by being deployed in thousands of Internet providers who didn't want to pay for commercial Unices any more, and secondly by system administrators sneaking Linux boxes in while nobody was looking, so a year later they could say “Yeah, we run Linux, it's been delivering your mail the last twelve months without a hitch.”
• Scaleability. Clustering is a very new feature in JBoss, and it's hideously under-documented. I'm told it's very good, but all I can get from the JBoss site is “We have clustering, but to find out anything about it you have to buy our book”, which doesn't fill me with confidence.
• Documentation. Giving away the product and then hoarding the documentation is just plain stupid, not to mention being very anti-GNU. Remember, software is only free if your time has no value, and the time of most IT contractors is very valuable indeed. Hiding information on how to use your product adds a high hidden cost to its use. Contrast the JBoss clustering book with the Workload Management Redbook for Websphere 3.5, free for download, and 600 pages long.
• Bundling. This is the biggest reason. Most people who buy Websphere don't buy it in a vacuum. They're buying a package deal of hardware, software and consultancy. The cost of the individual Websphere licenses generally become part of a big lump-sum that covers the entire project from conception to post-deployment support. That big sum gets negotiated, and divided up internally, but to the customer it's only really the big number that matters. And bluntly, if it weren't for the software margins, the programmers would be far more expensive.