Something from the domain complex.heavybit.com hit my site for almost a whole day, every few seconds, totalling 2106 hits — probably a robot gone haywire. Fortunately, as it kept requesting the index URL for each blog in the site but couldn’t follow the redirection, it didn’t download more than a few bytes in each hit and no damage was done. Nonetheless, I hope it doesn’t happen again.
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With eight days to go before the release date for The Two Towers here, it’s hard to read all those bloggers commenting on it. Please, stop.
This world is full of strange coincidences. Two weeks ago I borrowed two books from the Public Library — both by Morris West. When I finished reading one of them — I don’t remember which, specifically — I noticed that somebody had written a brief text on the last page of the book. In a few lines, that unknown person, a man, told about his love and desire for a woman. He concluded the text saying that she didn’t even seem to notice his presence.
Today, I returned to the Public Library. While I was searching for some books, I came across the place where books by Morris West are located. I opened one of them to read the text in the flaps. To my surprise, in the last page I found a continuation to the text I had read in the other book . It seemed to start exactly where the other had stopped. Apparently, the man had gathered his courage and approached the woman he loved. He found that she was divorced and had two small children. He was enthusiastic with his progress and once again declared his love for the woman, hoping to have his feelings reciprocated some day.
And I can’t help but wonder. Somewhere, in the scores of books by Morris West in the Public Library there may be an end for this man’s saga. Is it a happy end?
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There is no greater frustration than not being understood when expressing yourself, nor higher or stronger barrier to understanding than language itself.
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A security flaw was found in Macromedia’s Flash affecting players in most browsers and platforms. An updated version correcting the flaw is already available.
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O’Reilly Network has an interesting article on the possible uses of RSS in business. A good quote:
“Of course there are already lots of XML formats for publishing business data. But RSS is a no-brainer and the infrastructure is already in place.”
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People are already using Creative Commons licenses in their weblogs. If you need a good explanation of what they are about, the CC team has made an animated presention to explain their purpose.
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Good news in the fight against the DMCA: ElcomSoft was found not guilty on all counts. The company has been cleared of charges that it illegally created a program to disable encryption on Adobe eBooks. They are the employers of Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian developer who was arrested during the Las Vegas DefCon after he gave a talk on the flaws of Adobe’s eBook software.
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The discussion on a new blogging API continues in Sam Ruby’s weblog. Threads to read:
Also, a new mailing list was created to focus the dicussion.
Based on Joe Gregorio’s RESTLog API, Sam suggested that the element the RESTLog API receives on HTTP PUTs could be optionally enclosed in SOAP Body and Envelope elements. Simon St.Laurent didn’t agree with the suggestion on the grounds that such change would pollute the information transfered and make for more complicated implementations without any additional benefits.
I think that the development of a new API is a chance to get things right. Even if such SOAP elements are optional, they represent something that must be supported to achieve interoperability — to the expense of implementors. Moreover, I can’t see how that would be different from the current XML-RPC API, which at least has a well-defined interface. So, Simon is right. No stop energy here to me.
Anyway, Sam pointed what is, to me, a good approach in one of the posts above, saying:
IMHO, the right thing to do is to focus on the bits and bytes that go across the wire. Define an XML message for each interaction. In fact, divide the XML message into two parts — a header which contains “login” information, and a body which contains “post” information. Allow tool specific extensions through namespaces to support “filters”, “actions”, etc…
That’s what I think people should focus on: standardization — regardless of the underlying protocols, as I wrote in previous entry. If we decide to use SOAP, let’s use it. If we continue to use XML-RPC, that’s OK. Only coherence is needed. The most important thing is the method set and how it can be extended in an easy way.
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Jonathon Delacour posted the first part of his conversation with Joe Clark. Interesting reading — especially the part about the need of education regarding valid HTML.
Quoting from the interview:
If we could rid the Web-development ecosystem of life-sapping parasites like these [clueless people] — essentially, everyone who is immature and/or has *bad taste* — then we stand a good chance of making valid, standards-compliant Web development the norm rather than the exception.
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