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Not sure about the security benefits, but I love this idea of adding a hash= attribute to any html element that can take a href= or src= attribute. The hash= value is "a base 32 encoding of the SHA of the object that would be retrieved." This would be good for caching, as the article suggests, but I'm more interested in the reverse - it would help with the problem of old objects already in the cache being used instead of updated objects on the server. In this case the hash values wouldn't match so it would force the browser to fetch the updated object.
My friend recently bought a MacBook. It really comes pretty set up right out of the box. There are just a couple things I would do for a new machine, and here they are
I just finished a project which basically amounted to fixing a blog based website that had been originally built by one person, and then much later "fixed" by someone else. Except here "fixing" was equivalent to "badly breaking". Nothing worked anymore. MySQL errors all over the place if you even tried to sign into the admin back end. Anyway, it's a strange hell to dive into someone else's code. I certainly wouldn't wish mine on anyone. But this was much worse than I could have imagined. Obviously it was originally done by someone with a little HTML knowledge and almost no PHP. And then "fixed" by someone who knew even less. Still, it worked out in the end and even made me look pretty good in the eyes of the guy who brought me in to do the work.
But the reason I'm posting this is because the site used TinyMCE to give the textarea posting boxes more full fledged word processing ability. You get a control strip across the top of the box and you can click to make bold, italic, insert links, make lists, etc... I've seen it before, and from reading it seems like TinyMCE is the best solution at the moment.
But, uh, wow. It's just really bad I think. Especially the way it was implemented on this site: with absolutely every option turned on. It's ridiculous. It's ugly. And it just seems to fight you every step of the way. Is it so hard to learn that a couple HTML tags? Well, yeah, I guess some people just don't want to do that. So as if in answer to my struggles this morning I found Markitup!, a much lighter weight solution. This looks really nice. It doesn't hide the HTML from you, but it does give you a bare minimum of tastefully designed short cut buttons that will insert the tags so at least you don't have to remember the exact syntax. I'll definitely be using this one in the future. Nice job.
Google on Monday said it has a plan to have American consumers from Manhattan to rural North Dakota surfing the Web on handheld gadgets at gigabits-per-second speeds by the 2009 holiday season.
Epic battle with qmail today. I believe I am victorious.
From the links you hope to never need department: recovering from an rm -rf on an ext3 file system. Very interesting as this is widely reported to be impossible - most notably by one of the ext3 developers!
Youtube.com has released a javascript player API for controlling its embedded movie player on a webpage. You can even customize the player with your own chrome, user controls, custom playlists, and menus. Very nice. When do the mandatory ads before every video begin?
For my reference: tai64nlocal will convert the weird qmail log timestamp format into something readable. Takes input from stdin, so:
cat current | tai64nlocalto read the 'current' log file with readable datetimes. Wish I knew that before.
Also I added the mtrack script which also makes reading /var/log/qmail/send/current/ *much* easier (it groups message ids together so you can actually see what is happening in there.) I renamed it qmailsendlogreader.pl, so combined with tai64nlocal we can read the logs much easier using:
cat current | /usr/local/sbin/qmailsendlogreader.pl | tai64nlocal
iPhone media event going on right now. We should hear word about the SDK (software development kit - will allow 3rd party applications to be built for the iPhone.)
I'm sort of cheap, so I've been using browsershots.org to do my cross browser testing. It's not fast, but it's free. And there is a good selection of browsers. But litmus just announced pay as you go pricing. $18 for unlimited use during a 24 hour period. I'll probably give it a shot on my next job.
Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 has been in the works for some time now. And there has been quite a bit of debate over it. I've been following along, of course, but it's just been too tedious to report on. The basic gist was that IE 8 makes great strides toward standard compliance. Yay. But you were only going to get the standards compliant version of IE 8 if you specifically requested standard compliant rendering in your web page - otherwise IE 8 would just render your HTML in the same slightly screwy way that IE 7 did. WTF? It's like reverse quirks mode.
Microsoft's position was that if they suddenly made IE 8 standard compliant then all those web pages specifically authored to work in IE 7 (or worse, 6) would suddenly break when viewed in IE 8. And they didn't want to "break the web." I guess I see their point, but I just wish they'd do it right so that everyone could eventually move on and stop having web design be such a complete mess.
And low and behold, today Microsoft announced they are reversing themselves, and IE 8 will now render in standard compliant mode by default. You can optionally request IE 7 mode if you want, but if not you get the new rendering engine. This is going to break a lot of pages but it is a very good thing for the web in general. Way to go Microsoft. Truly a great day.
Looks like Ray Ozzie is having a good impact up in Redmond.