Yeah, and Google could develop some voice id'ing software that constantly monitors the surveillance mics. Since your address book will contain a voice id of your friends, you could query google to find where a friend is, or at least where someone that sounds like your friend is talking.
I think that if time travel were possible, we'd already have had a someone from the future appear, bringing us the message "you must stop google".
Seems like these big companies glomming onto open source make a lot of their money by selling you consultants and support. So, it seems like it's not in their best interest to make the software easy to setup and work out of the box. Though in all fairness, open source software often sucks for completely non-commercial reasons.
It is good to have had this shakeout of dated and poorly written software. Time zone / daylight saving time rules have and will continue to change for various reasons. It doesn't matter whether it's a questionable political act (US DST 2007) or some other reason (Australia changed time during the Commonwealth Games in 2006). Software needs to expect the rules to change. Keeping track of (human) time is something computers should be able to do.
A real HDMI output on my computer would come in handy with my Samsung 40" LCD television. I have my Mac connected to it (DVI => HDMI cable) just fine, but the problem is it plays the sound from my *other* HDMI input (cable box), I guess because there is no sound coming from the computer connection.
It's insane that he is getting in this much trouble, myspace should instead be thanking him for making their site more secure.
His explanation of how he overcame a series of lame myspace.com attempts at security (http://fast.info/myspace/) should be mandatory reading for anyone writing a web application.
I'm glad Apple is shaking up the mobile market, but they deserve failure if they lock users out of their own phone. The mobile is the most personal computer there is, we must have control over what we are able to run on it.
Yeah, like Google Maps for Mobile, Mobile GMail is a really great mobile (j2me/JavaME) app. Very fast, even over a (relatively) slow mobile Internet connection, and very easy to use even with mobile's limited interface.
Are XHTML and CSS really forward progress? If our industry has been working on these standards for 4 years, if we are all running browsers that have been updated within the past couple of weeks (to fix security bugs), and yet we still can't get good simple page layouts without much hackery, are we sure we're heading down the right path?
and am very annoyed that despite the fact that it uses the latest and greatest standard (XHTML, CSS), parts displays ugly in my Firefox 1.5 (text runs over graphics) and printing it causes Firefox to print a single page, truncating most of the article for some reason. And IE6 chops the last several characters in each column.
That's progress?! CSS is too complicated and subtle to be a good standard.
That's funny though, I never noticed until that guy mentioned it that most of the sample styles do have really poor readability because of the choice of font and background colors. This is the most readable version: http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/.
Is CSS good technology? I guess, yeah separating data from presentation is good. But it sure seems like CSS is overly complicated if it takes this many committees, standards revs, and browser versions to make it usable.
Maybe if our industry cared as much about separating code (javascript) from data (html), Web Tew Oh wouldn't be so insecure.
In an ideal world all email would be signed, so that we know that it is from the address in the From: line. But even then, you don't really know it was sent by your friend -- it might be the result of a virus that got on their system, or their encryption keys were stolen. And even if it was really sent by your friend, you don't really know that the program is "safe".
The root problem is that operating systems / browsers / mail readers don't tell you enough about what "opening" an attachment or clicking a link/button is about to do, and they don't let you "open" that attachment or click that link in a sandbox. They need to let you choose the resources (directories on my machine, cookies, authentication info, other sites) that it will have access to. It doesn't have to be a mess of verification dialogs, it can be more subtle, use default safe behavior, remember selections, etc.
The browser/operating system already knows, or should know, all these things: will opening that attachment just show me a harmless picture? Does it open an external program that has full access to my machine? Does it open an HTML page in a sandboxed browser? Does that HTML page access outside resources (IMG SRC)? Does that HTML page contain executable code (javascript), does that code have access to outside resources? I expect pressing a form button to send information to the site I'm on -- is pressing this button sending it somewhere else?
I guess letting user's "in" on these kinds of browser decisions and actions is what IE's "zones" is trying to do, but that interface is horrible for regular users, and not transparent enough for technical users.
Yup, I've been using the previous version, Google Local, for a while now. It sure is a beautiful (simple, useful, usable) J2ME app, really shows how powerful that little networked computer in your pocket is.
It's too bad phones lag so far behind in supporting new J2ME features/APIs (eg, file storage, bluetooth, contacts). Imagine the possibilities if this, and other J2ME apps, could take full advantage of modern mobile phones. I think J2ME (renamed yet again recently to "Java ME") is at fault here. It's a mess of JSR's and confusing acronyms, no test suites, no easy certification of phones. It's ironic that the "write once run everywhere" language is such a compatibility mess on mobile phones. But until Flash Lite gets on more mobiles, or Windows Mobile / Palm / Blackberry take over the mobile market, J2ME is the only game in town.
I sure wish Google would open-source this thing. It'd be even cooler if they made their AJAX toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/), where you write your app in Java and it generates Javascript, have the option of spitting out a J2ME app. I wonder if that's where they're heading, they could be "the" mobile platform/API.
I started seeing those "New Graphic Site" emails a few days ago. They were sent to _lesbianpics@yahoogroups.com or something like that. Nice to see being gay actually protected me from getting a virus. Well, I guess being on the Yahoo Mail Beta did it.
Btw, Yahoo Mail Beta is slow as hell, especially to open, and it makes firefox.exe chew CPU. Don't know why they are trying to mimic the Outlook ui.
Did Yahoo Mail developers really not escape javascript in HTML email? We keep making the same stupid mistakes in software. Is security ever going to improve, or is it inevitable that every new technology is going to have exploits like this?
Does gmail do better with HTML email/javascript security? Gmail is a faster more usable mail client.
Yup, it really worries me that we're fighting a losing privacy battle, at least in the US. Let's face it, most people would implant an RFID chip that broadcasts their social security number for a 10%-off coupon at Wal-Mart.
We have to educate people about what it means to provide information to a corporation that can be used as a key into other databases.
Too bad the link is down, I'm curious what the article says about Paul Barresi. He is a gay porn star (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0056947/bio). Google him and "Travolta" and you'll find he sold a story to the Enquirer about how John Travolta picked him up in a gym sauna and they had an affair. The story was later retracted by Barresi, likely because he was paid off by Travolta or Scientology.
Weird, can't seem to find much online about him, and no pics. I remember he was a very good looking, masculine guy. While Travolta has bad taste in movie ideas and religion, he has great taste in men.
Travolta must have some strong riders for interviews, because I've never seen the issue discussed. I think it's funny how Travolta talks about Kelly Preston in interviews, when everyone on the set must know he likes hairy Italian stallions. I guess Hollywood has always been that way, though.
So were Scientology's and/or Barresi's lawyers causing problems for the article?
Yeah, that Bertrand guy always seemed like a prick. Funny that he hated C++ so much and spent so much energy arguing against it, but Java is what has taken over. Of course, Java won't last much longer (as the language that most new projects use). Developers always want something new, something that fixes the crap that has grown on top of any development system, something that gives a feeling of a fresh start.
But, sorry, it won't be Eiffel. I don't know what is the answer to software engineering's problems, but it sure as hell isn't yet another language.
Tron had a really interesting message about openness that is very appropriate today. I remember seeing it again last year and thinking alot of the things it said about the freedom of programs to interact directly with their users could be applied to the Internet and the importance of everyone on the Internet being able to be a server and everyone on the Internet being able to talk directly to each other, not go through an MCP.
"To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to read it all, much less understand it. He wants to rapidly find the place to make his change, make it and get out and have no unexpected side effects from the change.
He views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything. "
Yeah, Google Maps is cool, but isn't it funny that after a good 30 years of GUI research and development in the computer sciences and software industry, this Javascript/browser mess is the state of the art? Code just keeps getting uglier and uglier.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30517
Potential Baldness Cure Leads Man To Reverse Position On Stem-Cell Research
March 31, 2004 | Issue 4013
Yeah, and Google could develop some voice id'ing software that constantly monitors the surveillance mics. Since your address book will contain a voice id of your friends, you could query google to find where a friend is, or at least where someone that sounds like your friend is talking.
I think that if time travel were possible, we'd already have had a someone from the future appear, bringing us the message "you must stop google".
Then send the wordpress developers this link:
m l
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.ht
The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
It should say "Registered Hex Offender".
Seems like these big companies glomming onto open source make a lot of their money by selling you consultants and support. So, it seems like it's not in their best interest to make the software easy to setup and work out of the box. Though in all fairness, open source software often sucks for completely non-commercial reasons.
Hope that unlike the HTML/Javascript/CSS soup we have now, this technology is designed from the ground up with security in mind.
l anguage.html
I guess Flash/Flex/ActionScript/whatever the heck this stuff is turning out to be, is the Next Big Language? http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/02/next-big-
I just hope it works on mobile phones, it has to be a better solution than Sun's J2ME/JavaME mess. Is OpenLaszlo going anywhere?
It is good to have had this shakeout of dated and poorly written software. Time zone / daylight saving time rules have and will continue to change for various reasons. It doesn't matter whether it's a questionable political act (US DST 2007) or some other reason (Australia changed time during the Commonwealth Games in 2006). Software needs to expect the rules to change. Keeping track of (human) time is something computers should be able to do.
A real HDMI output on my computer would come in handy with my Samsung 40" LCD television. I have my Mac connected to it (DVI => HDMI cable) just fine, but the problem is it plays the sound from my *other* HDMI input (cable box), I guess because there is no sound coming from the computer connection.
It's insane that he is getting in this much trouble, myspace should instead be thanking him for making their site more secure.
His explanation of how he overcame a series of lame myspace.com attempts at security (http://fast.info/myspace/) should be mandatory reading for anyone writing a web application.
I'm glad Apple is shaking up the mobile market, but they deserve failure if they lock users out of their own phone. The mobile is the most personal computer there is, we must have control over what we are able to run on it.
Yeah, like Google Maps for Mobile, Mobile GMail is a really great mobile (j2me/JavaME) app. Very fast, even over a (relatively) slow mobile Internet connection, and very easy to use even with mobile's limited interface.
Are XHTML and CSS really forward progress? If our industry has been working on these standards for 4 years, if we are all running browsers that have been updated within the past couple of weeks (to fix security bugs), and yet we still can't get good simple page layouts without much hackery, are we sure we're heading down the right path?
C 9A-4B12-A064-143924EBD3F1.html
E.g., I just happened to be reading this site:
http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/Q4.06/F68E528C-D
and am very annoyed that despite the fact that it uses the latest and greatest standard (XHTML, CSS), parts displays ugly in my Firefox 1.5 (text runs over graphics) and printing it causes Firefox to print a single page, truncating most of the article for some reason. And IE6 chops the last several characters in each column.
That's progress?! CSS is too complicated and subtle to be a good standard.
That's funny though, I never noticed until that guy mentioned it that most of the sample styles do have really poor readability because of the choice of font and background colors. This is the most readable version: http://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=/.
Is CSS good technology? I guess, yeah separating data from presentation is good. But it sure seems like CSS is overly complicated if it takes this many committees, standards revs, and browser versions to make it usable.
Maybe if our industry cared as much about separating code (javascript) from data (html), Web Tew Oh wouldn't be so insecure.
gaybuntu.com: "Ubuntu is to operating systems; what Louis Vuitton is to man-bags."
That's funny. Would make for more some colorful Mac vs PC ads to include a Gaybuntu character.
Wouldn't mind making John Hodgeman switch...
Yeah, I love John Hodgman. The Mac guy isn't very likable. I thought this was really funny: http://www.technewsology.com/macvspc.html
In an ideal world all email would be signed, so that we know that it is from the address in the From: line. But even then, you don't really know it was sent by your friend -- it might be the result of a virus that got on their system, or their encryption keys were stolen. And even if it was really sent by your friend, you don't really know that the program is "safe".
The root problem is that operating systems / browsers / mail readers don't tell you enough about what "opening" an attachment or clicking a link/button is about to do, and they don't let you "open" that attachment or click that link in a sandbox. They need to let you choose the resources (directories on my machine, cookies, authentication info, other sites) that it will have access to. It doesn't have to be a mess of verification dialogs, it can be more subtle, use default safe behavior, remember selections, etc.
The browser/operating system already knows, or should know, all these things: will opening that attachment just show me a harmless picture? Does it open an external program that has full access to my machine? Does it open an HTML page in a sandboxed browser? Does that HTML page access outside resources (IMG SRC)? Does that HTML page contain executable code (javascript), does that code have access to outside resources? I expect pressing a form button to send information to the site I'm on -- is pressing this button sending it somewhere else?
I guess letting user's "in" on these kinds of browser decisions and actions is what IE's "zones" is trying to do, but that interface is horrible for regular users, and not transparent enough for technical users.
Yup, I've been using the previous version, Google Local, for a while now. It sure is a beautiful (simple, useful, usable) J2ME app, really shows how powerful that little networked computer in your pocket is.
It's too bad phones lag so far behind in supporting new J2ME features/APIs (eg, file storage, bluetooth, contacts). Imagine the possibilities if this, and other J2ME apps, could take full advantage of modern mobile phones. I think J2ME (renamed yet again recently to "Java ME") is at fault here. It's a mess of JSR's and confusing acronyms, no test suites, no easy certification of phones. It's ironic that the "write once run everywhere" language is such a compatibility mess on mobile phones. But until Flash Lite gets on more mobiles, or Windows Mobile / Palm / Blackberry take over the mobile market, J2ME is the only game in town.
I sure wish Google would open-source this thing. It'd be even cooler if they made their AJAX toolkit (http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/), where you write your app in Java and it generates Javascript, have the option of spitting out a J2ME app. I wonder if that's where they're heading, they could be "the" mobile platform/API.
I started seeing those "New Graphic Site" emails a few days ago. They were sent to _lesbianpics@yahoogroups.com or something like that. Nice to see being gay actually protected me from getting a virus. Well, I guess being on the Yahoo Mail Beta did it.
Btw, Yahoo Mail Beta is slow as hell, especially to open, and it makes firefox.exe chew CPU. Don't know why they are trying to mimic the Outlook ui.
Did Yahoo Mail developers really not escape javascript in HTML email? We keep making the same stupid mistakes in software. Is security ever going to improve, or is it inevitable that every new technology is going to have exploits like this?
Does gmail do better with HTML email/javascript security? Gmail is a faster more usable mail client.
Yup, it really worries me that we're fighting a losing privacy battle, at least in the US. Let's face it, most people would implant an RFID chip that broadcasts their social security number for a 10%-off coupon at Wal-Mart.
We have to educate people about what it means to provide information to a corporation that can be used as a key into other databases.
Too bad the link is down, I'm curious what the article says about Paul Barresi. He is a gay porn star (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0056947/bio). Google him and "Travolta" and you'll find he sold a story to the Enquirer about how John Travolta picked him up in a gym sauna and they had an affair. The story was later retracted by Barresi, likely because he was paid off by Travolta or Scientology.
Weird, can't seem to find much online about him, and no pics. I remember he was a very good looking, masculine guy. While Travolta has bad taste in movie ideas and religion, he has great taste in men.
Travolta must have some strong riders for interviews, because I've never seen the issue discussed. I think it's funny how Travolta talks about Kelly Preston in interviews, when everyone on the set must know he likes hairy Italian stallions. I guess Hollywood has always been that way, though.
So were Scientology's and/or Barresi's lawyers causing problems for the article?
Yeah, that Bertrand guy always seemed like a prick. Funny that he hated C++ so much and spent so much energy arguing against it, but Java is what has taken over. Of course, Java won't last much longer (as the language that most new projects use). Developers always want something new, something that fixes the crap that has grown on top of any development system, something that gives a feeling of a fresh start.
But, sorry, it won't be Eiffel. I don't know what is the answer to software engineering's problems, but it sure as hell isn't yet another language.
Tron had a really interesting message about openness that is very appropriate today. I remember seeing it again last year and thinking alot of the things it said about the freedom of programs to interact directly with their users could be applied to the Internet and the importance of everyone on the Internet being able to be a server and everyone on the Internet being able to talk directly to each other, not go through an MCP.
Here's a funny guide about how to write unmaintainable code. Here's a link to the documentation section:
m l
http://mindprod.com/jgloss/unmaindocumentation.ht
and here are the general principles:
"To foil the maintenance programmer, you have to understand how he thinks. He has your giant program. He has no time to read it all, much less understand it. He wants to rapidly find the place to make his change, make it and get out and have no unexpected side effects from the change.
He views your code through a toilet paper tube. He can only see a tiny piece of your program at a time. You want to make sure he can never get at the big picture from doing that. You want to make it as hard as possible for him to find the code he is looking for. But even more important, you want to make it as awkward as possible for him to safely ignore anything. "
I used to love that song by by Juno Reactor, with the sample of a woman saying "high energy protons invading the atmosphere".
0 003Z7J/002-1930525-3256854
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B00
Yeah, Google Maps is cool, but isn't it funny that after a good 30 years of GUI research and development in the computer sciences and software industry, this Javascript/browser mess is the state of the art? Code just keeps getting uglier and uglier.