...more recent posts
Video of a talk Brian Cox gave at TED on the Large Hadron Collider. Fairly understandable given the subject matter.
Funny (because it's true) article about problems with CSS. I agree with all 10 points, but this afterthought really hits home for me:
Oh and while I'm complaining, can someone make an HTML form file upload capability that doesn't look like it escaped from a Borland Turbo Jaquard Loom application circa 1645?
Wow, those MySQL indexes really work</understatement">
Not sure what I'm going to use it for, but I was surprised to find the domain frictionlessplane.com available so I bought it. Does that phrase have meaning to people, or is it just me? Of all the stupid domains I've bought and then never used (well, okay, not that many) I'm most excited about this one. Now to just find a use.
I've been immersed in pChart - a PHP Class to build charts - for the whole day. Wow, what a package. Very powerful and very well made with great documentation. What's not to like? I made a surprising amount of progress and I now have the traffic logging part of geneva almost done. This was the last big piece (have you heard that before?) Anyway, this is making me quite happy because it was a real struggle to figure out a way to do this that wouldn't completely kill the server once a site had a ton of historical data. But I think I have it worked out. And then with pChart on the front end I can actually output some great looking line charts rather than just a boring table of numbers. I think this is going to be very important. Site owners want to see their traffic stats!
Google launches a browser: Chrome. Somewhat strangely there is a comic to go along with the launch that explains what it's all about. It's based on Webkit which is the open source project behind Safari. In short: yet another browser isn't that interesting, but this isn't that. More thoughts when I collect them.
Wine Disorder launches. This is the first bulletin board running on Geneva. Funny bunch of guys - their FAQ is really good I think.
I'm seeing lots of weirdness in the server logs connected to this sql injection attack. Not sure what to make of it. Don't think it can be doing anything to my servers. Maybe it's just the result of other sites having been hacked. In any case, I'm getting requests with this query string tacked on the end:
';DECLARE%20@S%20CHAR(4000);SET%20@S=CAST(0x4445434C41524520 [...snip...] C655F437572736F72%20AS%20CHAR(4000));EXEC(@S);
This Week in HTML 5, episode 1. Looking forward to this series.
MobilMe, Apple's online services that are a rebranding of their .Mac services and which was launched in conjunction with the iPhone 3G, has had a rocky start. To put it mildly. This is a dangerous situation for Apple.
They have the hardware (iPhone, iPod, Macs, and MacBooks) and the software that runs the hardware (OS X,) but in this increasingly networked world, they also need a third piece that glues all your devices together. In the old world this meant syncing, like when you plug your iPhone into your Mac, say, all your contacts are updated. In the new world this means some variant of what people like to call "the cloud." Syncing becomes not just an intermittent event, but a constant operation. All devices are connected, in real time, to each other and changes made in one place show up immediately in all other places. The internet is the medium over which this takes place, and in Apple's case the whole bundle of software - running both on each device, and on servers in Apple's datacenters - is called MobileMe.
The story is that Apple didn't get it right. There were massive problems on launch (including not only the complete failure of certain services, but also worse things like people losing all their email,) and big problems still remain today. This is a massively difficult thing to get right, but Apple should have been able to do it. And to reach their goal they'll have to get it right. This is the last hurdle - one they'll either clear leaving competitors too far behind to catch up, or stumble over giving someone else the chance to take the lead (Microsoft? Google?) Or, to be less abstract, if Apple can get it right then their devices will be so easy to use - and so easy to use in conjunction with each other - that there won't be any way for a competitor to offer a similarly complete experience. They will have control of all the oxygen in the personal electronics marketplace.
For more details on Apple's infrastructure problems and the internal reorganization aimed at fixing them, here's an interesting post from someone with inside experience at Apple. It's a generally hopeful look at the situation, but it makes sense to me. The iTunes store does work, and does appear to prove that Apple can do infrastructure on this level. Now we'll just have to see if that knowledge can be applied to MobileMe. I just hope they hurry. They've gained a lot of traction with their message of making products that "just work," but customers, especially the coveted first time "switcher" customer, are at least for the moment having a more difficult experience. They won't get many chances to fix this.