IT

What if the scoring sheets for a squash match used this technology? You could record the progress of the game along with all of the interaction between referee and players. This could be cool!.

The Pulse smartpen captures handwriting and simultaneously records audio and synchronizes it to the writing, so users never miss a word. Pulse is available in two models. Priced at $149, the 1GB model provides storage for over 100 hours of recorded audio. At $199, the 2GB model doubles the storage capacity and provides more flexibility for downloading future applications. In addition to the Pulse smartpen, consumers may also buy Livescribe dot paper and the latest accessories, such as the Premium Leather Case $24.95, 2-Pack of Journals $24.95, 4-Pack of College-Ruled Notebooks $19.95 or 5-Pack of Ink Cartridges $5.95. The Pulse smartpen, dot paper and accessories are also available for purchase at www.livescribe.com. Livescribe :: Press Center.

Ahead of the Curve | Tom Yager | InfoWorld | The view from Microsoft’s Live Mesh and Apple’s .Mac: Shared disks and remote desktop access, no VPN required | April 30, 2008 03:00 AM | Tom Yager

Apple’s .Mac comes close to offering professionals secure shared data and remote desktop access without the hassle of VPN. Microsoft Live Mesh hopes to take it all the way.

Architecture astronauts take over - Joel on Software

It was seven years ago today when everybody was getting excited about Microsoft’s bombastic announcement of Hailstorm, promising that “Hailstorm makes the technology in your life work together on your behalf and under your control.”

Mac OS X Things · Time Machine full system restore

Well, I hosed my printing system. At least it appeared that way. I know - let’s go backwards in time and make like it didn’t happen. Boot from the Leopard DVD. Tell it we want to restore from a Time Machine backup. Wait about 90 minutes for the whole thing to restore. So far, so good.

Ask E.T.: ET textbook, Data Analysis for Politics and Policy: PDF files now available:

The 179-page book is for courses in applied statistics, particularly for policy making and the social sciences. It deals with making causal inferences from statistical evidence, research designs, predictions and projections, linear and multiple regression. All the examples are real, involving serious questions (no regressions of height on weight that are found in some statistics texts). The technical material is at the level of one or two classes in college math. There is one somewhat more technical part, on logarithmic scale transformations and their interpretation in regression and in graphics. The book was written very much under the influence of Frederick Mosteller, John Tukey, and my professor of statistics at Stanford, Lincoln Moses.

Ask E.T.: Executive decision support systems:

(3) For information displays for management, avoid heavy-breathing metaphors such as the mission control center, the strategic air command, the cockpit, the dashboard, or Star Trek. As Peter Drucker once said, good management is boring. If you want excitement, don’t go to a good management information system.

Ask E.T.: Sparklines: theory and practice:

Here are a few pages from the 18-page chapter on sparklines in Beautiful Evidence (2006).

Mariano Belinky’s Sparkline work

Ask E.T.: Excessively hierarchical organization of information:

Excessively hierarchical organization of information is sometimes explained by Conway’s Law: “Any organization which designs a system . . . will inevitably produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization’s communication structure.” So user guides represent Conway’s Law squared, a system for understanding a system; a PP user’s guide, the Law cubed.

Ask E.T.: Interface design and the iPhone

The iPhone platform elegantly solves the design problem of small screens by greatly intensifying the information resolution of each displayed page. Small screens, as on traditional cell phones, show very little information per screen, which in turn leads to deep hierarchies of stacked-up thin information–too often leaving users with “Where am I?” puzzles. Better to have users looking over material adjacent in space rather than stacked in time.

The review is a video. 56MB download, so be patient. Go ahead and read the excerpts from the book while the video is loading.

“Spatial Imperialism”!

Why Emacs Always Wins in the End | Compiler from Wired.com:

Emacs always wins - even if it does do text coloring in Leopard.

Typical Programmer - Why Programmers Don’t Like Relational Databases:

Complaining about relational databases is a staple theme of programmer blogs. Why are so many programmers irritated and frustrated with relational databases? Why do the perceived intricacies of SQL and the “object-relational impedance mismatch” launch so many rants? Why are DBAs more hated than managers? I have some ideas.

Inter-Sections » Blog Archive » How to recognise a good programmer

t’s not as easy as it sounds. CV experience is only of limited use here, because great programmers don’t always have the “official” experience to demonstrate that they’re great. In fact, a lot of that CV experience can be misleading. Yet there are a number of subtle cues that you can get, even from the CV, to figure out whether someone’s a great programmer.

I am right and the entire Industry is wrong - The Daily WTF

I looked at your code. Here is the problem. You are not using frames or CSS to mimic frames. This is not your fault. You were taught not to use frames in your class. There is a lot of misinformation in the information industry. This common idea that frames are bad is a perfect example. With the WWW, from here on out and especially in multimedia WWW applications, frames are your friend. Use them always. Get good at framing. That is wisdom from Gary.

I’m always right, and I never lie.

Amazon’s Dynamo - All Things Distributed

Dynamo: Amazon’s Highly Available Key-value Store

Giuseppe DeCandia, Deniz Hastorun, Madan Jampani, Gunavardhan Kakulapati, Avinash Lakshman, Alex Pilchin, Swaminathan Sivasubramanian, Peter Vosshall and Werner Vogels

Amazon.com

Abstract

Reliability at massive scale is one of the biggest challenges we face at Amazon.com, one of the largest e-commerce operations in the world; even the slightest outage has significant financial consequences and impacts customer trust. The Amazon.com platform, which provides services for many web sites worldwide, is implemented on top of an infrastructure of tens of thousands of servers and network components located in many datacenters around the world. At this scale, small and large components fail continuously and the way persistent state is managed in the face of these failures drives the reliability and scalability of the software systems.

This paper presents the design and implementation of Dynamo, a highly available key-value storage system that some of Amazon’s core services use to provide an “always-on” experience.  To achieve this level of availability, Dynamo sacrifices consistency under certain failure scenarios. It makes extensive use of object versioning and application-assisted conflict resolution in a manner that provides a novel interface for developers to use.

xkcd - A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language - By Randall Munroe Exploits of a Mom - Little Bobby

Quite the humorous cartoon.

If you don’t smile, well…well

Strategy Letter VI - Joel on Software

The C programming language was invented with the explicit goal of making it easy to port applications from one instruction set to another. And it did a fine job, but wasn’t really 100% portable, so we got Java, which was even more portable than C. Mmmhmm.

The prediction is at the end. If you write code for the web (on the client side, but the server side is not immune) you should read this all the way through. If you don’t want to be left behind…

Fancy Formatting, Fancy Words = Looks Like a Promotion = Ignored (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Putting the answer to a typical user’s main question in big red type at the top of your homepage would guarantee high usability, right? Wrong — at least for the U.S. Census Bureau’s homepage, where 86% of users failed to find the country’s current population when it was presented in large red numbers.

Stuart’s Blog: RSS in Plain English

Wayne Brent alerted us to a video called “RSS in Plain English” from a resource called The Common Craft. Right now it is on the homepage to that link. You might go there in the future and need to poke around to find it. I believe the actual link location is http://www.blip.tv/file/205570/ but I can’t verify it because the response time is so bad. It must be the hot item on the Web right now. “RSS in Plain English” seems like a clear explanation about how you can use RSS 1.0 to subscribe to blogs and news sources. Doesn’t get into RSS 2.0, which pushes audio and video for podcasts, but if one gets the gist of how RSS works for blogs and videos, they will make the connection for podcasts.

Banner Blindness: Old and New Findings (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

I’ve been reluctant to discuss one of the findings from our eyetracking research because the conclusion is that unethical design pays off.

This is too important to skip. Please read it.

mobile illuminating dub

Idea Generator

Panic mode | InfoWorld | Weblog | July 31, 2007 | By Jill Terry

By Jill Terry July 31, 2007 Lack of knowledge heat of the moment = bad decisions I started in the industry in the early eighties and worked as a technical salesperson for a local micro-computer company. We had a client that purchased a 286-based server running SCO Xenix to run a FoxBASE application in a multi-user environment … pretty hot stuff in those days. The application had been written by a local consultant — let’s call him Dwayne — who knew FoxBASE in single-user mode on DOS but didn’t know Xenix and didn’t really want to. Dwayne, who was running behind on his schedule to get the application done and fully taking advantage of the multi-user system, hired Herman, a college student, to do some coding for him.

Read the sad story. It will make you cringe!

Strategic Developer | InfoWorld | 10 Corollaries of Murphy’s Law: Debugging | July 19, 2007 07:15 AM | By Martin Heller

The debugging tool you need will not be installed on any computer that exhibits the problem. There will be no way to reproduce the problem on the developer’s computer. Proxies, firewalls and NAT boxes will keep you from being able to connect to any computer that exhibits the problem. If you are debugging a Web service client, the service will go down as soon as you have your tools running. Any debugging tool licenses you have will expire before you really need them. If two debugging tools use the same DLL, they will require different and incompatible versions of the DLL. The most revealing trace log statement you write will never be called. The least useful trace log statement you write will be called thousands of times. Any trace logs generated will be too large for your email server to accept. The problem will not be where you’re looking, because you’re looking in the wrong place.

101 Ways To Know Your Software Project Is Doomed Management has renamed its Waterfall process to Agile Waterfall You start hiring consultants so they can take the blame The Continuous Integration server has returned the error message “F*ck it, I give up” You have implemented your own Ruby framework that uses XML configuration files Your eldest team member references Martin Fowler as a ’snot-nosed punk’ Your source code control system is a series of folders on a shared drive Allocated QA time is for Q and A why your crap is broken All of your requirements are written on a used cocktail napkin You start considering a new job so you don’t have to maintain the application you are building The lead web developer thinks the X in XHTML means ‘extreme’

Waterfall 2006 - International Conference on Sequential Development

Industry studies show a clear relationship between the maintainability of code and the expendability of developers. In your rush to deliver working software, there’s always a danger that you might inadvertently introduce code “smiles”. A code “smile” is some aspect of the code that makes other developers smile when they have to maintain it. Common code “smiles” include:

gotAPI/HTML - Instant search in HTML and other developer documentation:

This is neat. I had to have OmniWeb fib about which browser it is, but cool!

(Via Hoffman Labs.)

BI 2.0: Data Visualization Meets Social Networking > > Intelligent Enterprise: Better Insight for Business Decisions

Get ready BI gurus. Are you willing to submit your work to open communities so users can rate and blog about your analyses and suggest improvements? That’s what happens at Many-Eyes.com, an IBM Alphaworks site demonstrated at this week’s Enterprise 2.0 event in Boston.

Google Maps Mobile Rocks!

After catching wind from a Google Blog post about Google Maps Mobile for a specific GPS enabled phone, I decided to investigate further using my handy Palm TX with WiFi and Bluetooth.

Cool - a map application for my phone that actually works well.

Thanks for the pointer.

Simple link to Google Maps Mobile

Help Vampires: A Spotter’s Guide

It’s so regular you could set your watch by it. The decay of a community is just as predictable as the decay of certain stable nuclear isotopes. As soon as an open source project, language, or what-have-you achieves a certain notoriety—its half-life, if you will—they swarm in, seemingly draining the very life out of the community itself. They are the Help Vampires. And I’m here to stop them.

by way of Sam DeVore

Top 15 free SQL Injection Scanners - Security-Hacks.com

Top 15 free SQL Injection Scanners Friday, 18 May 2007 - 15:05 EST  |  Tools, Web Security, Network While the adoption of web applications for conducting online business has enabled companies to connect seamlessly with their customers, it has also exposed a number of security concerns stemming from improper coding. Vulnerabilities in web applications allow hackers to gain direct and public access to sensitive information (e.g. personal data, login credentials).

MySQL LOAD DATA Trick:

I leaned a new trick today with LOAD DATA INFILE. I’m migrating some data from an external source, and the Date Format is not the MySQL required YYYY-MM-DD, it was DD-MMM-YY. So how do you load this into a Date Field.


$ echo “02-FEB-07″ > /tmp/t1.psv
$ mysql -umysql
USE test;
DROP TABLE IF EXISTS t1;
CREATE TABLE t1(d1 DATE);
# echo “02-FEB-07″ > /tmp/t1.psv
LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE ‘/tmp/t1.psv’
INTO TABLE t1 (@var1)
SET d1=STR_TO_DATE(@var1,’%d-%M-%y’);
SELECT * FROM t1;
EXIT


The trick is to bind the appropriate column within the file being loaded to a variable, @var1 in my example and use the SET syntax to perform a function on the variable. Rather cool.

A good tip to know.

(Via Planet MySQL.)

This is sweet!

Archival Issues Following is the complete text of George Wedding’s open letter to “them” about storage/archival issues Read the rest of this entry »

Apple 2.0: What a Multitouch Computer Screen Might Do:

What a Multitouch Computer Screen Might Do A full-size virtual keyboard is the least of it. The 2004 patent Apple (AAPL) filed for a “multipoint touch screen” covers not just the iPhone screen, but a touch sensitive display that can respond to as many as 15 imputs at once. (See Inside the iPhone Screen Patent here.) But you don’t need 15 fingers to do some pretty amazing things, as NYU’s Jeff Han demonstrated  at last year’s TED. The 9:30 video of his demo is available on You Tube. I’ve pasted a link below. Save it for when you have a few minutes to spare.

It’s an interesting 10 minutes.

Life-Long Computer Skills (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Life-Long Computer Skills Summary: Schools should teach deep, strategic computer insights that can’t be learned from reading a manual. I recently saw a textbook used to teach computers in the third grade. One of the chapters (”The Big Calculator”) featured detailed instructions on how to format tables of numbers in Excel. All very good, except that the new Excel version features a complete user interface overhaul, in which the traditional command menus are replaced by a ribbon with a results-oriented UI.

Seven steps to remarkable customer service - Joel on Software

One: it’s crucial that tech support have access to the development team. This means that you can’t outsource tech support: they have to be right there at the same street address as the developers, with a way to get things fixed. Many software companies still think that it’s “economical” to run tech support in Bangalore or the Philippines, or to outsource it to another company altogether. Yes, the cost of a single incident might be $10 instead of $50, but you’re going to have to pay $10 again and again.

Survey says 70 percent of Web sites are begging to be hacked: My expert’s $1,000 says that percentage is a crock. | NetworkWorld.com Community

I forwarded the release to my go-to guy on all security matters, Joel Snyder, a stalwart in the Network World Lab Alliance and senior partner at Opus One in Tucson, Ariz. “This is just sensationalist nonsense, not credible on its face, and dishonest in its goal of inspiring fear,” Snyder says. And he’s willing put his money behind his mockery.

Usability in the Movies — Top 10 Bloopers (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

10. “This is Unix, It’s Easy” In the film Jurassic Park, a 12-year-old girl has to use the park’s security system to keep everyone from being eaten by dinosaurs. She walks up to the control terminal and utters the immortal words, “This is a Unix system. I know this.” And proceeds to (temporarily) save the day.

No, really, it’s easy

Social context for data analysis | InfoWorld | Column | 2006-12-13 | By Jon Udell

I’m a huge fan of the CAPStat (formerly DCStat) program. At InfoWorld’s recent SOA Executive Forum this fall, I taped a video interview with Dan Thomas. His innovative efforts led to the Web release of a set of data feeds from the office of Washington, D.C.’s CTO, detailing information about such areas as real estate, reported crime, licensing, and service requests. Earlier I published a podcast and a column on this topic. But despite my cheerleading, the hoped-for citizen-led mashups haven’t yet materialized in a big way.

How to select the first/least/max row per group in SQL - Xaprb

Here are some common SQL problems, all of which have related solutions: how do I find the most recent log entry for each program? How do I find the most popular item from each category? How do I find the top score for each player? In general, these types of “select the extreme from each group” queries can be solved with the same techniques. I’ll explain how to do that in this article, including the harder problem of selecting the top N entries, not just the top 1.

‘Pump-and-Dump’ Spam Surge Linked to Russian Bot Herders

The recent surge in e-mail spam hawking penny stocks and penis enlargement pills is the handiwork of Russian hackers running a botnet powered by tens of thousands of hijacked computers.

Finding Great Developers - Joel on Software

The corollary of that rule—the rule that the great people are never on the market—is that the bad people—the seriously unqualified—are on the market quite a lot. They get fired all the time, because they can’t do their job. Their companies fail—sometimes because any company that would hire them would probably also hire a lot of unqualified programmers, so it all adds up to failure—but sometimes because they actually are so unqualified that they ruined the company. Yep, it happens.

Nerd Vittles » HOW-TO Bonanza: 50 Great Summertime Projects for You & Your Mac mini

Well, it’s that time of the year again. The Nerd Vittles staff will be taking a breather for a bit to recharge our batteries. But, in the finest college tradition, we’re leaving you lots of homework. Here’s a listing of what we’ve built thus far in our Mac mini ISP-In-A-Box project.

Sheeri Kritzer » Blog Archive » Semi-Dynamic Data - My-ess-queue-ell vs. My-see-quell One day, I clicked on the page and got the dreaded “blank” PHP page.

Statification - MySQL-dump Statification is the process of putting your content generation code into a 404 page handler and have that handler generate requested content.

OReilly Network — MySQL Federated Tables: The Missing Manual

One of the most exciting features introduced in MySQL 5 is the federated engine. The ability to access data from a remote server without the constraints of replication tickles every programmers fancy.

Pay very careful attention to performance and indices.

Need Some Space?:

In this case, MySQL dutifully creates copies of the table’s .MYD and .MYI files in the new location, then replaces the originals with symlinks. Hey, presto! You’ve just moved all the bulky bits of the table. And if the path points to a location on a different disk, then you’ve just freed up a chunk of space on the original drive.

(Via Planet MySQL.)

An Avatar Is Born - Electronic House Magazine

What can you expect from an Electronic House Home of the Year grand prize winner? For starters, it has to be a great house—one whose occupants don’t like leaving and always look forward to returning. It must have innovative home technology.

The Microsoft Invincibility Myth

According to proponents of this myth, Microsoft’s expertise in building software platforms ensures that everything that Microsoft does will turn to gold. This supposed invincibility is used to prove how Microsoft will eventually dominate all new markets, from online music stores to the iPod, and how advances by Linux and Apple’s Mac OS X will never make any significant impact on PC desktops. They’re wrong, here’s why.

Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows: Windows Vista February 2006 CTP (Build 5308/5342) Review, Part 5: Where Vista Fails Where Vista Fails

YouTube - BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype

Watch the video - interesting ways to manipulate things.

Then watch a real implementation Real World BumpTop

The standings for the current Arizona State Championships are available online, but for some reason my poor machine seems to take forever to display them, and switching back and forth between apps is a bad idea.

If any of you know this already, stop reading now.

Crystal Report Viewer. Got me some tab-u-lar data to report on… Read the rest of this entry »

ONLamp.com — Generating Database Server-Side Cross Tabulations

If you are a DBA or a database programmer, your manager may have asked you to prepare a breakdown of employees by location and department, or a breakdown of products by category and provider. If your boss is a techie, instead of a breakdown she might have mentioned a pivot table, or, if she likes to use “the right words,” a cross-tabulation.

MySQL AB :: MySQL Wizardry

Cross tabulations are statistical reports where you de-normalize your data and show results grouped by one field, having one column for each distinct value of a second field.

A List Apart: Articles: How to Plan Manpower on a Web Team

It can be tricky to identify the right levels of manpower for a web team. Indeed, many organisations badly underestimate the amount of work required to keep their sites operating smoothly—they perhaps imagine that once a website is put live, it magically looks after itself. As a result, only the barest bones of proper staffing are put in place.

Running an older version of Mac OS X Server

Want out of the Apple update cycle

Want to (possibly) convert all the software to DarwinPorts versions

Want to have a dialog?

The World Is Not a Desktop - Weiser

Our computers should be like our childhood: an invisible foundation that is quickly forgotten but always with us, and effortlessly used throughout our lives.

Mark Weiser’s home page

Long-term backup [dive into mark]

So, to my illustrious audience, I throw out this question: how do you back up 100 GB of data per year for 50 years?

The comments are worth the journey.

O’Reilly Radar > Database War Stories #2: bloglines and memeorandum

In Monday’s installment, Cory Ondrejka of Second Life said “flat files don’t cut it”, but Mark Fletcher of bloglines and Gabe Rivera of memeorandum.com apparently don’t agree.

Gabe wrote: “I didn’t bother with databases because I didn’t need the added complexity… I maintain the full text and metadata for thousands of articles and blog posts in core. Tech.memeorandum occupies about 600M of core. Not huge.”

The Gripe Line Weblog by Ed Foster

Six Predicted Gripes for 2006Frankly, I’ve never been that great a prognosticator, but, you know, I’ve noticed that the track records of the serial crystal-ball gazers in this business don’t tend to be any better than mine. So here are my predictions for the six likeliest news stories of 2006 that will raise the ire of my readers.

These are amusingly evil.

Costs, Ease of Use, and Diseases of UIs

If there is more room on the display given over to icons than to the user input, then there is a UI design problem. Unless you have the same target audiece as Fisher-Price, of course. (This is my Fisher-Price rule of UI design.)

Weebles Wobble

PBS | I, Cringely . October 20, 2005 - Seeing Is Believing

Let’s imagine some typical numbers. In the U.S. alone, according to Nielsen/Netratings, we have approximately 202 million Internet users, each of whom is eligible for a free Gmail account with two gigabytes of storage. Since my mother uses less than two gigs and I use more, let’s do our rule-of-thumb estimate with that number, making the potential Gmail storage obligation 404 million gigabytes or about 400 petabytes. That’s 400 times the current capacity of the Internet Archive, but it is also probably a tenth or less the total capacity of our PC and DVR hard drives today, so I think it is a very fair number to play with.

Users Good

Groupware Bad

If you want to do something that’s going to change the world, build software that people want to use instead of software that managers want to buy.

NPR : Podcast Directory

NPR Podcasts include selections from Morning Edition, All Things Considered and other award-winning programs from NPR and partner organizations.

Forms vs. Applications (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

Forms work when there’s not much to do beyond plain data entry. Just stack up the text boxes and have the user type away mindlessly. A few decision points might be acceptable, such as the traditional question as to whether shipping and billing addresses are the same or different. Even here, a small amount of interactivity improves usability. You might, for example, gray out the billing address area unless the user unchecks the box for “billing address is the same as the shipping address.”

DATABASE DEBUNKINGS TO LAUGH OR CRY:

TO LAUGH OR CRY LINKS    07/01/05 4 Developers and a DBA or “Just a couple of tables”   07/01/05 The Church of XML   06/24/05 Prevayling Stupidity

Technology’s 10 most inexcusable failures | Perspectives | CNET News.com:

As a former lab director, I was part of a testing and reviews team that lauded great products and raked the poorly done ones through the coals. Despite bad reviews, it was possible to lose sight of where technology was not only failing us but also doing so inexcusably.

Online Features - On-Demand Dreaming - Online Features - Darwin Online for Informed Executives

I’ll believe it when I see it. And, obviously, I will want to see it when it suits me, i.e., on demand. If this happens, on-demand may really become in demand.

A Totally Non-Techie Explanation of What You Need to Know About RSS:

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is neither really simple nor really syndication. It is a powerful marketing tool. Like any new technology, it’s not without caveats. Here’s a completely non-techie, plain English explanation of what marketers need to know about RSS.

TidBITS#766/14-Feb-05

Podcasting: The People’s Radio by Andy J. Williams Affleck Few buzzwords surrounding Internet technologies have moved into the mainstream more quickly than “podcasting,” but because of this speed and an only tangentially related name, few consumer-level technologies have engendered more confusion. So what is podcasting?

This goes along with the 4 minute video.

Given the audience I thought the phrase “considered harmful” might be a bit opaque. I wasn’t ready to utter the incendiary phrase “the browser must die”. I chose the more thoughtful “web browsers should disappear”.

I believe that as soon as we present our information (a view of data) in a browser we have fundamentally limited our capacity to “dream about the data” (thanks Christine!).

Why should we dream about data? How else do we synthesize?

I will add to this - I promise!

definition of considered harmful in computing dictionary - by the Free Online Dictionary, Thesaurus and Encyclopedia.:

considered harmful - Edsger W. Dijkstra’s note in the March 1968 “Communications of the ACM”, “Goto Statement Considered Harmful”, fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form “X considered Y”. The structured-programming wars eventually blew over with the realisation that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke.

The ever helpful “A List Apart” - “Forgiving” Browsers Considered Harmful

by J. David Eisenberg Apologies to Prof. Dr. Edsger W. Dijkstra for the paraphrase of the caption of his famous letter. Current browsers are very forgiving; they quietly correct or gloss over many common HTML errors. This makes it easy for people to experience the joy of creating their own web pages with a minimum of frustration – if a page displays correctly, then it’s “right.” Unfortunately, by hiding the need for structure that the web will require as it moves towards XHTML and XML, these forgiving browsers have helped create a world of structural HTML illiterates. As long as browsers continue to parse and display HTML that isn’t well-formed or valid, we will never learn the right ways, and we will never get to a structural web.

Sabotaged by the browser The expansive forgiveness of the current browsers had defeated my efforts to teach the next generation of HTML to the next generation of designers. We need an unforgiving browser that adheres strictly to the letter of the XHTML law in order to move forward to the future. Let’s take a philosophical turn and examine this in greater detail.

Are you a Browser, Seeker, or Engager? From a completely different place I found this discussion of the “dimensions” of an activity. Knowledge: The Essence of Meta Data: The Fourth Dimension of User Classification

The Doc Searls Weblog : Friday, February 11, 2005

On the one hand, John makes the best case I’ve seen yet for something I still don’t plan on doing: accepting advertising on my blog. Clearly, advertising will become as integral to blogs as it is to every other periodical publication. On the other, I hear the sound of Agent Smith in my head saying, Hear that? That is the sound of inevitability.

molly.com » Standards in Tucson?

Yes, Molly. Please elaborate on the desired disappearance of browsers…. Comment by Guy — 2/09/05 @ 8:56 pm

That’s my statement. I need to elaborate I will do that - now in my queue

I’m busy trying to “free the data” from a canned application that uses the web to allow people to find what they want to know - it is not pretty. It does not work. “But it’s available to any web browser” is what they say. Useless.

Napsterization

User Developer Relations: What are The Social Norms So yesterday’s post is still raging down there in comments. I’ve been thinking about the larger issues, beyond my own loss of data on NetNewsWire. I got very upset about the loss of my data and posted a rant that was too harsh. But I would say that this is what a lot of users feel like when they run into system or software failure, especially if what it lost it very important to them for some reason. I also realize that developers work very hard to structure and code their systems, and I respect that.

I need to formulate a response - I certainly don’t intend to write my reply in the web form provided - what a horrible interface to record possibly cogent thought.

Dear IE, I’m leaving you for good:

Dear Internet Explorer: It’s over. Our relationship just hasn’t been working for a while, and now, this is it. I’m leaving you for another browser.

Developers Wiki - attentionxml

Attention.XML is an open standard, built on open source (see XOXOSampleCode) that helps you keep track of what you’ve read, what you’re spending time on, and what you should be paying attention to.

Principles of data processing seem as incontrovertible as gravity

What Didn’t Happen

Ralph Kimball

Our data warehouses are filled with data telling us what happened in our businesses. Frequently the lowest level of each of our data marts is the most atomic data we can gather from our production systems. Each button click, transaction, and product sale is a record. When an event takes place, we make a record.

It turns out that this is the kind of task I’m working on with Joel at the moment.

Added a “reading” class to the stylesheet.

Need to track down MINUS and MySQL.