When
· Naughties
· · 2006
· · · June
· · · · 14 (3 entries)
Blogging Cam: Almost Right · Via Niall Kennedy (who’s been very good lately): Microsoft cameras that have one-button publishing to MSN Spaces. This is so wrong. I don’t want to see a future in which your camera is LiveJournal-enabled or Facebook-ready. When I get a computer or a mobile device, it’s either Web-ready or not, it doesn’t have to be MSN-enabled or Yahoo-blessed. This is why we need the Atom protocol. If your phone or your camera or your anything is Atom-enabled, then it will work with any publisher who supports the protocol, no special deals required. Coming soon.
OpenSolaris Is One · That was quite a launch, this time last year; hundreds of bloggers, hundreds of thousands of words. I think it kind of worked. As of now, geeks choosing a server-side OS for geek reasons have a handful of choices: Linux, Solaris, one or two of the BSDs. I care about the geeks and I don’t care that much about the CIOs, because during the first decade of my career, while the CIOs were talking about MVS and VMS and Tandem Guardian and AS/400, the geeks were quietly saying “Unix” and generally Getting Shit Done. If we can give hands-on people good technical reasons to use Solaris, they will; otherwise not. I still want a GNU/Solaris userland, please. Want Dapper Drake on Solaris? Done. [Update: That Nexenta Alpha 5 is now out, with Dapper, OpenSolaris 40, 11,800 packages, JDK via DLJ and tons of other juicy Gnu + Debian + Ubuntu goodness.]
Title Pain · James Holderness, a guy who really knows his shit about syndication tech, has been doing some torture-testing; see Encoding RSS Titles, which shows that if you want to do something as obvious as mentioning “AT&T” in your title, you’re in deep RSS doo-doo. (Did I say torture test? James blogs at www.詹姆斯.com; the boy’s got attitude.) Anyhow, James establishes that there’s essentially no safe way to do this. Quoting him: “Clearly if you want to support Firefox or Internet Explorer you’ve got no choice but to use the single encoding option. For certain strings, though, that would mean losing support for at least twenty other aggregators.” Yow. So I emailed James, asking “Would it be oversimplistic to say: ‘Thus, use Atom 1.0?’” He wrote back “Somewhat. While Atom doesn't have the ambiguities of the RSS spec, it has all the same problems with buggy clients.” Fair enough. But I think that James proved that, with RSS, you can’t solve the problem even in principle. With Atom, you can. Which seems like a decisive argument, to me. [Update: Oh hell, James’ Chinese URI broke something in the ongoing front-page generator... until I’ve fixed it, use this.]
