Charles Miller: Hacking Radio by Charles Miller

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Microsoft Java Tactics

The Register: Microsoft Restores Java to XP. Here's the anatomy of Microsoft's decision-making.

In an effort to cut off Java's client-side air-supply, Microsoft removes their JVM from XP.
Sun milks every drop of publicity out of this. Anyone who finds an applet they can't use is able to download Sun's JRE1.4 Java plugin, which supports all the latest APIs, and has nifty (but as yet unrealized) features like Java Web-Start
With this, plus Netscape/Mozilla's out of the box support for the modern Java plugin, Applet technology starts looking like it might finally be able to escape the doldrums caused by the fact the major browsers never upgraded to Java2.
Microsoft realises they made a mistake, and re-packages their ancient not-quite-JDK1.1 plugin, making it look like they've capitulated to Sun's whining, but actually restoring the old nightmare, and creating new inertia against modern Java applications.

Replacement Radio Aggregator, part 1.

Step one: a replacement Radio aggregator that remembers when you've un-checked a story, and doesn't check it again. This hack will only be useful for people who have this preference turned on..

License: This code is provided for free. It is derived from the aggregator code within Radio Userland, I thus retain no rights to it. It is UNTESTED CODE, and is provided WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND. If it corrupts your data, crashes your computer, erases your hard drive, sleeps with your wife and performs satanic rites on your dog, don't come crying to me.

Instructions: Put the root file somewhere Radio can see it. Edit www/system/pages/news.txt and replace the macro call with one to aggregatorCategoriesSuite.viewNewsItems (). The aggregator should behave pretty much like it used to, it'll just remember when you uncheck boxes.

Note: What I did could be accomplished with about five lines of changes to radio.root, rather than an entirely new tool. The reason it's a tool is that this is the first small step in a pretty big overhaul of the aggregator, I'm just releasing it now because it's doing something useful already.

The aggregator might run a little slower than before. I did a lot of refactoring of the Userland code and moved a bunch of logic around in order to separate the "select which stories to display" code, the "handle the user request" code and the "draw the page" code.

Seven tricks that Web users don't know

developerWorks: Seven tricks that Web users don't know. About what developers assume non-technical web-users will know, but they really don't.

Found in radio.html.viewNewsItems:

(local flSkip = true)
if adritem^.url == xmlUrl
- flskip = false
if flskip
- continue

flskip isn't used anywhere else. I am now officially afraid of reading Userland code. :)

Dave Winer responds, but his response makes my head hurt. We seem to use one definition of "journalist" when talking about professionals, and another definition when talking about webloggers, but this proves webloggers are journalists. Back when I did Philosophy 100, this was called equivocation.

If declaring your interests up-front is a valid way out for webloggers-as-journalists, then it must be for journalists-as-journalists. Otherwise, we have to declare the two to be fundamentally different ideals.

Journalism for self-interest is called publicity. Perhaps we're not journalists, we're self-publicists.

Radio News Aggregator features I want, in order of importance:

Multiple categories for RSS feeds, each with its own aggregator page
The ability for news items to remember that they'd previously been marked "don't delete", so I don't have to keep un-checking their delete boxes as I go through the rest of the list
The ability to navigate past the first page of items

The first is the most wanted. Categories in the aggregator would make my life so much more pleasant, and make my news-reading much, much more efficient.

I am subscribed to about 20 news sources of varying volumes, and the news still gets on top of me. With the three features above, I could probably subscribe to an order of magnitude more.

Matthew Thomas indirectly poses a question.

Assume most "tech bloggers" are employed. This puts them in a position to have detailed knowledge of the field in which they work, including the goings-on within their employer, and the exact position of the competition in their market. This also puts them in a position to be in really big trouble if they disclose that information. If part of the definition of a journalist lies in the editorial freedom to criticise one's employer, can bloggers be journalists?

For example, you work for vendor X. Your employer has published benchmarks, but you know the truth, your product does X and Y better than anyone else (and you're proud of that), but people probably shouldn't use it for W and Z. This is information that really should be given to the Real World. And devotees of the Cluetrain Manifesto (or at least that subset of it that I agree with wholeheartedly) would tell you that making the knowledge public would only increase peoples' confidence in your product, because they finally had some obviously honest advice.

But if you say so in your weblog, marketing is going to nail your ass to the wall.

Bloggers' employers are generally not media companies, and so are not at all pre-disposed to grant employees any leeway for public criticism. A journalist may get away with writing that their boss lost a few million dollars in a stupid deal, a programmer wouldn't.

On top of that, I've lost count of the number of NDA's I'm subject to at the moment. Every project I go on, I'm under some kind of non-disclosure agreement, so if I were to start blogging about things that were happening at work, I might be open to serious liability.

There's a reason I don't name my employer in my blog. I'll disclose that we're a small IBM business partner doing Java development in Sydney, and that we're home to a large number of Davids. You may work out who we are from that, but if you do, you probably know me already.

Ick. Whenever I try to go to my prefs page, Radio crashes.

The Weblog FAQK

Brunching Shuttlecocks: The Weblog FAQK

Gosh Jesus no! Weblogs cover a wide range of topics, such as other weblogs, what the mainstream media are saying about weblogging, new weblogs, advances in weblog publishing, books about weblogging, the future of weblogging, and that one naked guy painted up like Spider-Man.

The worst bug in Mozilla 1.0

Matthew Thomas: the worst bug in Mozilla 1.0.

Reserved domain names

A quick note for anyone writing documentation, or filling in default values in the configuration file for an application.

The domains example.com, example.net and example.org are reserved for use in documentation. Thus, if you use bob@example.com in your default configuration file, you can be guaranteed that the address will never exist, and thus there will never be a "Bob" who is annoyed at your stupid choice of example domain names.

Addendum: The authority for this comes from RFC 2606, which also reserves the following top-level domains for the various, obvious uses: .test, .example, .invalid and .localhost.

A quick huzzah to my TiBook. Her name is epiphany (or 'epi' for short). I just upgraded to OS X 10.1.5, and must reboot. According to 'uptime', my last reboot was 29 days ago, also occasioned by an OS upgrade. Not bad for a laptop, eh?

Of course, my desktop W2K box has a similar uptime. And my Linux box has been up 70 days now. This is why I tend to stick anyone I see who says "I tried [Operating System], but it crashed all the time!" in the this-person-is-full-of-shit basket. (for modern values of [Operating System]).

Davezilla: These are the Daves of our Lives. "Everyone knows a Dave or three. Daves are always dependable, competent, rather silly and the jack-of-all trades in most offices. Dave is always the guy who can fix the copier, jumpstart your engine or make that noisy dog calm down." [Scripting News]

When I started working for my current employer, the company had five Davids (including two of the three company directors). Which wouldn't be too surprising, except that there were only around ten people in the company.

A Simple Character Entity Chart

A link that might be useful to web-designers, from Mark Pilgrim:

Adrian Roselli: A Simple Character Entity Chart. Both entity names and entity numbers are listed, along with the representation of the character (so you can test for compatibility by loading this page in your browser).

More on the Browser Wishlist...

Web browser feature I want:

I hate keeping bookmarks. Often, I'll find myself having visited a site a lot through links from other sites, but never remember its URL because each individual time I visited, the site wasn't important enough to remember. I want the web browser to keep track of what sites I visit frequently, and put them in a list for me. And I want the feature to be smart enough to work without me having to perform any configuration, or maintain any lists manually.

The bookmark paradigm hasn't really changed substantially since Mosaic was the Cool New Thing. Considering how central the concept of "remembering where we've been" is to the whole web experience, you'd think the bookmark/history tools would have evolved a little more than they have.

Windows Update Sucks

While at work, I use Windows 2000. This it not by any choice of mine, it's based entirely on a choice made by IBM several years ago to never finish fully functional Linux version of their Java IDE, VisualAge for Java. (The replacement for VAJ, Websphere Studio Application Developer, is available for Linux. We still have a lot of projects tied up in VAJ, but once we stop working on them, it's bye-bye Windows.)

Today, I got around to doing what all computer users, regardless of OS, must do. I had to install the latest set of patches. When I got to WindowsUpdate, I discovered that there were three "critical updates" that I had to download, or be faced with ruin and damnation. The problem was, you couldn't install all three. You had to download one, install it, reboot, download the next, install it, reboot, download the third, install it, and reboot.

I remember when I first installed Win2k and was amazed how few times I had to reboot to set the machine up. What happened to those good old days?

Even if I were to accept that I had to reboot, I still take offence at this disgusting waste of my valuable time. One of the whole points of computers was supposed to be the automation of repetitive tasks. There is absolutely no technical reason why I should not be able to download all the updates I want, and then hit a button to tell Windows to just keep rebooting itself until they're all installed.

No technical reason, but a significant practical one - Microsoft just don't give a shit that my time, and my employer's time, has to be used up playing nurse-maid to their incompetent update system.

Oh, and while writing this, I discover that I have to reinstall the first update I downloaded. It reappeared in the list of critical updates, presumably because it was trashed by one of the other patches. The software should have known this was going to happen, and told me to install them in the other order.

The computer should be serving me. Not vice versa.

Slashdot and RealNames

Slashdot talks about the RealNames "Blame Microsoft" game, making the long post I was going to write on the subject completely redundant.

A company whose business plan solely consists of maintaining a single contract is doomed. A company whose business plan consists of maintaining a contract with Microsoft, notorious for only ever looking out for number one, is doubly doomed. That RealNames got investors at all is another example of the dot-bomb lunacy writ large.

Yeah sure, whatever

Today's "yeah, right" quote comes from page 4 of Programming Web Services with SOAP by Snell, Tidwell and Kulchenko (O'Reilly)

Every business issue will have a software-based solution

Yeah sure, whatever.

Sets, sets, sets. That's all you ever think about.

Google Sets look rather interesting. Go to the sets page, and type in "Dave dee" and "dozy" into the first two boxes. Click the "small set" button, and the set is filled out to include "Dave Dee", "Dozy", "Beaky", "Mick" and "Titch" (who are an obscure 60's band)

Type in "Kennedy", "Lincoln" and "Reagan", and get a list of 13 other presidents' names. I tried putting in random terms, but it seems that "fish", "Elvis" and the "Magna Carta" don't have quite enough in common to form a set.

At this particular moment I have no idea what use this technology will be put to, but it's still a really good example of the cool things that you can do when you've got such a gigantic store of data, and a lot of smart people looking for new things to do with it.

Fun with Fingerprint Readers

From Bruce Schneier's Crypto-gram

Matsumoto uses gelatin, the stuff that Gummi Bears are made out of. First he takes a live finger and makes a plastic mold. (He uses a free-molding plastic used to make plastic molds, and is sold at hobby shops.) Then he pours liquid gelatin into the mold and lets it harden. (The gelatin comes in solid sheets, and is used to make jellied meats, soups, and candies, and is sold in grocery stores.) This gelatin fake finger fools fingerprint detectors about 80% of the time.

Radio Annoyance.

On OS X (I haven't checked on Windows), a modal dialog box in Radio-the-desktop-app will completely freeze Radio-the-desktop-website. This causes a problem, because when I turn Upstreaming on or off from the Dock, I never actually see the dialog box that pops up to confirm it, and then I run around in circles wondering why the website has stopped responding entirely.

I'm offline right now, this post is mostly a reminder to myself to post the same point to the discussion group when I get home.

Sometimes it's not Microsoft's fault.

At last. After a week of reading everyone else's apologia and Microsoft-blaming on the RealNames collapse, Joel Spolsky bluntly points out the facts.

Mike Cannon-Brookes

It may be just my newbie-ness - but does Radio sometimes duplicate news (or bring back deleted news) in the Aggregator?

It's a side-effect of the way RSS works.

Most likely, you're seeing the result of someone editing an old entry. If someone modifies a weblog post, the aggregator will show it to you again, as there's no way of it knowing that you've read something similar before and deleted it.

This can get particularly annoying with Doc Searls, who doesn't divide his daily weblog into different entries, he just edits a single entry in place. Every time he updates, you get Yet Another Copy of his really long post in your aggregator, and you have to try to work out what changed.

On the other hand, it's quite possible that now and then Radio might forget you've already seen something, and show it to you again. In this case, I'll give it the benefit of the doubt. :)