I’ve decided to change the name of my blog. The old name, “What did you learn at the office today?” always seemed a bit clunky and I was never very happy with it.
The new name, “Multithreaded” seems to describe my life these days much more accurately. I’ve got a number of different things going on at the moment and need somewhere to keep track of all the threads.
Joel Spolsky makes this insightful, erm, comment on allowing comments to blog posts or not. I have to say, I have a lot of sympathy for his view, where he is in agreement with Dave Winer, of not allowing comments to blog posts.
It is interesting for me that on this blog (not the most popular or active in the world, for sure) one of the most popular posts has been my rant against Orange for their disgusting broadband service. To date there have been 104 comments from similarly frustrated and dissatisfied Orange customers and it has become something of a forum for people to not just express their emotions on the issue, but to keep people informed of the progress they are making in the fight against a totally broken customer service situation, and, in some cases, to announce their final victory.
However, this kind of post may be unusual in its nature. Joel and Dave make the point that their blogs are where they can express their, possibly unpopular, ideas and if anyone wants to comment on them they should do so in their own public forum (i.e. blog) and not as a comment (possibly anonymous). Joel also makes the good point that comment threads often rapidly descend into bun fights, especially for just those controversial issues that he feels blogs are best suited to and the trackbacks should ensure that all the posts are linked together.
So, with that in mind, I have disallowed comments on this post. If anyone is actually reading it, and wants to comment, you know where and how to do it.
Hey, we got an entry on KillerStartups!
In my spare time I’m doing the video editing for Intruders.tv. Having great fun learning all about digital video formats and how to use Final Cut.
I’ve just watched a political speech by Nicolas Sarkozy at the Le Web 3 conference. I have very mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, this was clearly a political speech (Sarkozy is a strong possible presidential candidate) and was delivered in French with simultaneous translation. Sarkozy came on, gave the speech, and was out the door before Loic could even deliver his ‘thank you’ piece. It seemed to me that what he said was basically “these are my policies, presented in a format that has a bit of relevance to the subject of your conference”. I would have been much happier if he’d stuck around to answer questions or join a forum.
On the other hand, I believe it is useful to have input from people who’s focus is not necessarily the same as ours. It is easy to get wrapped up in the ideas and technology of the web and forget how to relate it to the rest of the world and to be reminded that a lot of what we are doing is changing the world and that those changes have effects on the lives of a lot of people.
Not sure it’s actually a meme, but in this post Scott Eric Kaufman sets out to see how far and fast he can propagate his idea.
I’m in, if only to see how fast we can bring down his blog with all the trackbacks that come in :-)
I’ve updated the theme on my blog to introduce that quintessential web 2.0 feature, rounded corners and I thought I’d share some of my thoughts on this.
For guidance I referred to chapter 3 of Andy Budd’s excellent book, CSS Mastery. I first tried the “flexible rounded-corner box” approach. This wraps three layers of div around the content and uses four images to provide the corners by placing them appropriately as background images. The basic technique is to create images with the correct background colour and use a “sliding window” technique so that as the content size grows or shrinks (say by changing the font size), more or less of the left top and left bottom images are exposed. Since these are of a constant colour the user sees it as the corners moving.
The concept is straightforward so I fired up Photoshop and dived in. My first realisation was how annoying it is to generate the right images with photoshop/image ready (remember, I’m a programmer not a designer). After figuring out that I needed to use Image Ready instead of Photoshop to get the rounded rectangle marquee tool, and searching for several minutes before finding the option to change the radius of the corners, I finally created a nice rounded-corner rectangle. Then I had to chop it up into gifs for each of the four corners, a tedious process.
My assumption had been that I would just need the corners and I could rely on the background colour of the content to fill in the rectangle but after installing the images and CSS I realised this isn’t the case. The top left and bottom left images need to be large enough to fill out the content no matter how tall or wide it gets. I don’t like this as it puts a maximum size on the content box unless I use very large images. I don’t like that kind of constraint. Also, this approach requires that I make different corner image sets for each colour box I might have so I moved on to the next section of the book.
This is entitled “Mountaintop Corners” and takes the “opposite” approach. Instead of filling in the corner, this technique uses gifs to mask off the corner. Basically, I created four images where the outside of the corner is white and the inside is transparent so that the content colour can show through. This is much more flexible in that it can be used on any box on the site regardless of the content colour. The limitation is that I would need to create a different set of corners for each background colour I might be using. In my case, the background is always white so I can get away with one set of corners.
Here’s the result:
Okay, not the most amazing of boxes I’ve seen (hey, no gradients, drop shadows or even anti-aliasing) but somewhat nicer than the rectangular look I had before, I think. Plus, it only took the most minor of tweaking to get it all looking good in FF 1.5, IE 6, Opera 9 and Safari, which is a bonus. All in all it took about an hour to do.
But all this raises the question in my mind as to when CSS will start to include things like rounded corners as native features. It seems bizarre to always be having to jump through these kinds of hoops to get visual tricks like this up and running.
One of the great things about Web 2.0, compared to the dot-com boom, is how much of it is happening in Europe. Living in England in the late nineties it often felt as if dot-com was something that was happening elsewhere. This time around, much more innovation and development seems to be going on in Europe, for example sites like NetVibes, Plazes and others. In addition, Europe is hosting quite a number of Web2.0-related conferences such as dConstruct, Flash on the Beach and, Le Web 3. We also have the Future of Web Apps coming up in London in February and Ajax World Europe in Amsterdam in May.
It seems to me that at least part of the reason for the level of activity in Europe is the difference in financial model for Web 2.0. The dot-com boom was all about investing a lot of money, developing fast and then going for IPO. Burn rates for dot-coms were legendary and the capital was available on the basis that the investors would reap huge rewards on flotation. This, of course, meant that access to the much more flexible and willing US stock markets was very important.
Web 2.0 seems to be going about things differently. Companies are starting up on shoestring budgets and the exit strategy seems to be to be bought by Google, or some other cash-rich survivor of the last boom. The hardware and software necessary to get an idea off the ground is now trivially cheap in comparison to six years ago so the major cost is people. That means that two or three people who are willing to invest their own time in developing an idea can come up with something innovative and viable in a few months so access to a lot of liquid capital is not as necessary.
This is reflected in the changes in capital funding. I am reading that traditional VCs are having a hard time finding places for their moneys. Business angels are much more dominant. These are people who will put up much smaller amounts of money than VCs but not demand nearly so much equity in return. It seems a startup is more likely to go for a couple of hundred thousand pounds rather than a couple of hundred million.
What it boils down to is that it is good news for those of us in Europe (or at least on the edge of it in England) who want to participate in this wave of innovation.
Technorati Tags: dconstruct06, Web2.0
I’ve just spotted this article on The Register which describes a critical security flaw on all versions of Windows apart from Windows 2003. Secunia list this as an Extremely Critical vulnerability and note that it is being actively exploited by hackers. Microsoft have posted this advisory notice about it and one of the recommend workarounds is to disable the affected ActiveX control.
That control, it seems, is in the XMLHTTP 4.0 ActiveX control. Sound familiar? It’s the control which provides XMLHTTPRequest in IE. Unless I’m missing something, disabling it would mean disabling Ajax behavior.
Normally, a serious flaw like this in IE, common as they are, would have the ‘other browser users’ making the usual noises about how insecure IE is and everyone should switch to <insert your favourite browser here>, few people would actually change and life would go on as usual.
The impact of this on Ajax applications, however, could be quite disastrous if the result is that a very large percentage of IE users turn off the XMLHTTP control in response to this alert. All of a sudden, Ajax has become dangerous and that is a big setback for all of us, IE users or not, since the benefit of Ajax really comes from widespread adoption and acceptance.
Here’s an interesting proposal from Doug Crockford at json.org that would allow javascript apps to connect to sites other than the one they were loaded from in order to retrieve data. He is appealing to browser makers to incorporate it into future versions.
XMLHTTPRequests, and in fact any form of HTTP request, to sites other than that from which the page was loaded are forbidden by browsers as they pose a security risk. HTTP requests carry the cookies from the original site which means that requests to other sites would be able to see those cookies.
The proposed JSONRequest would not send cookies and can only send and received JSON encoded data. JSON is an IETF RFC that specifies a subset of JavaScript that only allows data to be encoded, not functions, so there is no danger in eval()’ing the returned data. The only downside I see with this is that if you want to get data from an authenticated connection on the originating server then you have to use XMLHTTPRequest which makes access a bit inconsistent. It would be useful if JSONRequests to the originating site included the cookies, but requests to other sites did not.
I have used JSON since I started working with Ajax since it seems much more logical and a lot simpler and faster than passing XML around and parsing it. There are good libraries available for many languages that make it easy to process on the server side and on the client side it is just a matter of running eval() on the JSON string to get a JavaScript object.
Technorati Tags: javascript, json
Wordpress.org have announced the availability of Wordpress-mu which allows multiple blogs on the same installation and scales to hundreds of thousands of blogs on a reasonable-spec machine.
At some point I will be converting this blog over to using it so that I don’t have to support separate installations for each gsl.com user.
Technorati Tags: Web2.0, wordpress
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