Coffee & Gems

In my current pet project I do a fair amount of parsing of rel-tags (the microformat spec for "tagging"). At first I got a bit agitated how many occurrences there are where the spec is not implemented correctly. But I have come to realize that the spec is simply broken. There are two ways I can think of a spec to be broken: If it's internally inconsistent or inconsistent with other specs. If it's somehow useless. The rel-tag is almost 1.), which makes it a little bit of 2.). Here's why: the spec says that this tag <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">fish</a> denotes "tech" rather than "fish." This means that this microformat restricts the URL space on your server. You need to have the "tag" folder and in it there must be a file "tech" - unless you link to another site which is not a solution to the problem. Being able to control my own URL space is one of the pronciples of the ...

By pure chance I found a useful feature on my iPhone: when you play music but have another application in the foreground double-clicking "the" button will bring up a mini iPod control. That's nice e.g. for skipping a song without having to leave the app in the foreground. Related news from the Macworld: Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard

I'll scream if I read the word "pluggable" once more... I mean, seriously, how hard can you make simple things? Don't know what I mean? Dig this: Think about it this way: JDOM ships with the Apache Xerces parser. That parser isn't part of JDOM, but is used by JDOM, so it's included to ensure that JDOM is usable out of the box. The same principle applies for JAXP, but it isn't as clearly publicized: JAXP comes with a parser so it can be used immediately. However, many people refer to the classes included in Sun's parser as part of the JAXP API itself. For example, a common question on newsgroups used to be, "How can I use the XMLDocument class that comes with JAXP? What is its purpose?" The answer is somewhat complicated. First, the com.sun.xml.tree.XMLDocument class is not part of JAXP. It is part of Sun's Crimson parser, packaged in earlier versions of JAXP. So the question is misleading from the start. Second, a major purpose of JAXP is...

OK, here's a rant: 10 years of Google. And it's beginning to treat its customers(*) like MS. Today, I wanted to mail myself(!) a zip file as a backup. Gmail wouldn't let me, though, because the zip contained "an executable,... blah, security". Well, yes, there was a .bat in the zip. But this sure reminded me of long-gone days when my employers forced me to use Outlook (which did not not allow to open received executables unless you really really wanted to and hacked the registry). When will we see a GMail Clippy? Btw: if you ever wondered what happened to MS's Clippy: From: http://blogs.msdn.com/officeoffline/archive/2008/05/27/do-not-go-gentle-into-that-good-night-part-3.aspx (*) yes, I am a paying customer. I bought storage space.

Today, I gave a talk about development of applications within social networks at the Internet Briefing in Zurich. It was mostly about marketing aspects, rather than technology. Find the slides (in German) below (or download them here ). Socialapps View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

Ever got an email from an Outlook user only to get an "email recalled" message afterwards (cf. Eternal September )? I just found out out that this is just a elaborate way of grabbing your attention. Hmm, I should do a Thunderbird plugin that sends fake recall mails... (this is from: http://blogs.msdn.com/officeoffline/archive/2008/08/29/rubber-necking-2-0.aspx )

There is a bug in the Flash player that makes it impossible to implement a RESTful architecture with a Flex or Flash backend. In essence, it is a buggy implementation of an http client - the client cannot get to the response body unless the reponse code is 200.. This is really bad. But what is an embarrassment for Adobe is that: That bug was opened more than a year ago It is marked as priority C only It was closed and had to be reopened after the community complained Adobe engineers suggested as a workaround to purchase LCDS Server So, lessons learned (actually: lessons that proof in practice what was clear beforehand ): It does not matter too much if Flex is open-sourced as long as the Flash player is not It does not matter at all if Flex or Flash are open-sourced if the community cannot apply patches and get them into the deployed player Flex being open source is completely irrelevant.