Xarg blog Archive

Peter Van Dijck has written an Introduction to XFML.

XFML is a simple XML format for exchanging metadata in the form of faceted hierarchies, sometimes called taxonomies. Its basic building blocks are topics, also called categories. XFML won't solve all your metadata needs. It's focused on interchanging faceted classification and indexing data.

I like XFML, it seems simple enough to actually use. I also think anyone who would link to Cory Doctorow's Metacrap article when describing their own metadata format has a pretty good handle on building something practical. Mark Pilgrim also wrote about XFML and there is a demo of viewing his "Dive Into Accessibility" web tutorial in a generic XFML browser (as a portal or as a search engine).

With the latest Microsoft exploit I sat down to watch the Death Of The Net. I dug out my trusty copy of tcpdump and took a look at the traffic I was seeing. Unfortunately someone upstream was already blocking port 1434 so I did not get to see all the people who thought patching the hole in their MS SQL server just was not that important (the patch has been out since July last year). What I did see was my Mac going out to Apple's NTP server:

17:57:58.002902 core.xorch.net.ntp > media.euro.apple.com.ntp:  v4 client strat 3 poll 12 prec -17 [tos 0x10]
17:57:58.213866 media.euro.apple.com.ntp > core.xorch.net.ntp:  v4 server strat 2 poll 12 prec -17 [tos 0x10]

It is surprising to me that more computers don't come with ntp already configured. It's nice not to have to worry about it.

I set up generating RSS feeds from the CVS log Browser. the full feed is at

http://xarg.net/tools/cvs/rss/

but you can also get a feed for given user, module, or days back. For example:

http://xarg.net/tools/cvs/rss/?user=jeffd&days=10&module=acs-tcl,forums,acs-kernel

Mark Pilgrim's new article, Parsing RSS At All Costs, is up at xml.com.

On average, at any given time, about 10% of all RSS feeds are not well-formed XML. Some errors are systemic, due to bugs in publishing software. It took Movable Type a year to properly escape ampersands and entities, and most users are still using old versions or new versions with old buggy templates. Other errors are transient, due to rough edges in authored content that the publishing tools are unable or unwilling to fix on the fly.

I think using a real xml parser and using some regexp's to fix up common problems might be a better approach although Mark's ultra-liberal RSS parser is short enough that maybe it's a moot point.

Sam Ruby has a great attitude about code ownership...from Rights vs Responsibilities

If somebody copies something that I have done, then generally I am quite flattered. If they chose to give me attribution, I am OK with that as long the recipient takes responsibility for making the copy.

If somebody makes a change to code that I wrote, my first thoughts aren't "what right does he/she have!", but instead, "tag, you're it!".

I have been reading most of my news in an aggregator this week and I realize the short textified descriptions in the RSS are really annoying. I am going to change the code so I send full posts in the RSS.

I am incredibly disappointed that the Supreme Court did not fix what is manifestly a bad law, one that is clearly not in the best interests of the people: The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is unrealistic to expect the court to impose rationality and correct for the failure of congress to do the right thing when confronted by a law that is not unambiguously unconstitutional. From the last paragraph of the majority opinion:

Beneath the facade of their inventive constitutional interpretation, petitioners forcefully urge that Congress pursued very bad policy in prescribing the CTEA's long terms. The wisdom of Congress' action, however, is not within our province to second guess. Satisfied that the legislation before us remains inside the domain the Constitution assigns to the First Branch, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I feel for Larry Lessig given his incredibly hard work and well reasoned arguments. The public has lost here and Justice Breyers dissenting opinion states that quite clearly:

It is easy to understand how the statute might benefit the private financial interests of corporations or heirs who own existing copyrights. But I cannot find any constitutionally legitimate, copyright-related way in which the statute will benefit the public. Indeed, in respect to existing works, the serious public harm and the virtually nonexistent public benefit could not be more clear.

I saw this word somewhere and did not know what it meant. It turns out to be an excellent word for describing a lot of what goes on in online communities.

It comes from Parkinson's Law by C. Northcoate Parkinson. He describes how a planning board will approve spending millions of dollars to build an atomic power plant but if you go to them to get approval to build a bike shed they will argue endlessly. The problem being that the atomic power plant is so large, complex, and difficult to understand that no one can really argue about how exactly it is done. On the other hand, everyone knows what goes into a building a bike shed and so everyone feels qualified to argue about the details.

For some reason, technical discussions seem to be particularly susceptible to bikeshedding. There was a great post by Poul-Henning Kamp on the freebsd-hackers list which describes a particularly virulent attack they had on their list and submits a plea to avoid it in the future. I think just writing the code is a good antidote to engaging in the arguments in the first place. If the functionality is straightforward and easy to implement then just do it rather than argue about it. Most of the people spending their time arguing probably have enough inertia that they are not going to write any code and consequently, if you do have the initiative, the code itself is the most suitable response. As Poul-Henning Kamp said:

I wish we could reduce the amount of noise in our lists and I wish we could let people build a bike shed every so often, and I don't really care what colour they paint it.

Who knows, if you write enough code we might even end up with an atomic power plant (or for you greens in the audience, a lovely old growth forest).

I added a stylesheet for printing. Of course my new favourite browser (Safari) ignores it completely. It seems to work well in Mozilla, although IE is printing the PNG's as black blobs. It does now print with a serif font which I find much more pleasant to read. I also really like the css href printing trick I found in CSS: Going to Print at A List Apart:

#content a:link:after, #content a:visited:after {
   content: " (" attr(href) ") ";
   font-size: 90%;
   }

#content a[href^="/"]:after {
   content: " (http://www.alistapart.com" attr(href) ") ";
   }

I looked at Textism hoping to find a good example of how to do it and was surprised that Dean Allen did not have a print stylesheet. I guess for a lot of bloggers who work at getting their CSS right (and it really seems to be people with blogs who provide most of the good CSS) don't really think their work is going to be printed so don't make a huge effort to get things to print nicely.

Now that I have a Mac I am trying out NetNewsWire from Ranchero Software. I like it a lot. The planned features for the Pro version sound good (especially the Metaweblog/blogger integration so you could post to your weblog from NetNewsWire). I do wish it had a way to display the unread entries from all subscriptions in one headline browsing window (currently it does not do anything sensible when you select multiple subscriptions other than let you mark them as read).

I have also been using Safari. It is really, really fast and with the exception of a couple sites like dive into mark seems to work great (and on dive into mark it fails to display the right links which I never really use anyway). It has spell checking built in which in my mind is an absolutely great feature and something it amazes me took so long to show up. One great thing to see is that they are contributing the code back to khtml. Another is that they are really listening to what the community says (every software vendor should have someone like Dave Hyatt out there). If they keep listening and keep working I have no doubt that Safari will end up being insanely great.

I saw this in the CUPS HOWTO by Kurt Pfeifle and it really struck a chord:

Please be very hesitant to write mails to private adresses of people you know answering questions in public forums. Don't expect them to react dutifully on unsolicited personal mails. Start asking in the suggested public forums and only send material to private mail addresses if asked to do so. Asking on a public list will enable everybody to learn from the given answers. It increases your chance to get a quick response, as there might be different people watching the list fit for giving advice. Remember, this is a volunteer service. Sometimes people are tired to answer. Can you imagine that someone might feel molested by receiving 20 - 30 personal mails per day, asking the same questions about printing over and over again? It is OK to ask the questions -- but keep it voluntary for your advisors, as it is the case, if you ask in the following public forums or on mailing lists:

One corrollary to the LazyWeb idea is that there is tremendous value in public dialogue, which personal email definitely is not. Mailing lists plus a search engine are pretty potent way to store the wisdom and hard work of the people actually solving problems. Of course, the other trick is that the people answering questions need to make an effort to get the answers out into a public forum as well. I still go to google first when I have a problem (and to Usenet really, rather than the web).

There are some tricks to making answers more valuable. One is to provide a little context along with the answer. Another is to make sure that if there is an error message that shows up when the problem manifests then quote it along with the answer (since a lot of people will just search with the text of the error message to try to find solutions). Also, if someone asks the same question again try to point them to the canonical answer so that if someone provides a better solution or your answer is wrong it's more likely people will end up with the best solution.

I love the snow. When we were flying back from California we were watching 101 Dalmations which is filmed around where we live. I told the kids that it does not really snow like that very much in London, that it was only a movie...well, I am a big fat liar. I think I have seen Cruella on King's Road a few times. Dalmation owners better watch out, no telling what might happen now.

We are back in London and I am playing with my new powerbook. It is a lot of fun and I am generally impressed with how wonderfully it all fits together. It's not without it's bumps (although many are just me unlearning old habits from other platforms). The iApps are pretty cool. I love iPhoto but I can see it will not scale very far (I have about 1000 pictures in it and it's already dragging), on the other hand, I transfered my whole cd collection to iTunes and it is lightening fast. I do miss having a graphical version of emacs though.

Naturally, my website looks wrong in IE on the Mac so I will have to strugle some more with the <li> based menu bar again. It's funny that the Mac version of IE would have problems that the windows version did not have (at least at this level). It probably springs from the same place as other inconsistencies in Microsoft software as described by Adam Barr in a recent Kuro5hin article:

Furthermore, some Microsoft groups have always had a bit of a bias against having too many dependencies. The idea was get it done and don't worry about other people in the company. That's why different applications wrote their own Print dialogs, and why networking between Windows NT and Windows 9x isn't a seamless as it could be. That attitude helped shipped some products sooner, but it permeated outside the company too.