BadMagicNumber

Omar Shahine has a great post about FireAnt, Microsoft's AJAX toolkit which they are using for the Hotmail rewrite.

It sounds fairly similar to DWR in the Javaworld, which I have raved over before.

Speaking of AJAX, I came to the sudden realisation this week that AJAX programming can actually be easier than conventional web programming. It's true that tool support for AJAX still sucks, but that is sometimes compensated for by the fact you get to ignore the traditional problem with webapps: the lack fo state.

Transitions between the two programming models are the tricky bit – for instance if you want an AJAX control to be in a particular state when a page loads then you either need to setup defaults for it (which is nasty if the defaults have to change depending on the state of the application), or have an page-load event to trigger updates to the control. Neither option is particularly elegant.

PWNtcha stands for “Pretend We’re Not a Turing Computer but a Human Antagonist”, as well as PWN capTCHAs. This project’s goal is to demonstrate the inefficiency of many captcha implementations.

http://sam.zoy.org/pwntcha/, via BoingBoing.

It still can't solve the Yahoo captchas, though; as it says the Yahoo captcha is “A very good captcha, but not always human-solvable.”

While the complaints against Captcha systens are valid it is unfortunate that there doesn't seem to be a better spam solution at the moment.

The new version of Google Desktop is a beautiful piece of software.

While the features are nice, it is the little things that make it a joy to use. For instance, the animation it uses when scrolling though the extended displays of mail messages or news items is the kind of thing one would have previouly expected from Apple.

The included aggregator is Google's best effort yet (better than www.google.com/ig, anyway – I don't have the GMail aggregator turned on), although I think I'll still be sticking with Bloglines (at least until Findory get its Feed Reader to import subscriptions).

One hint: if you think using it as a sidebar will take too much room set it to AutoHide. Then you get the benefits of both the sidebar and the extra space.

Google Earth has finally added high resolution pictures of Sydney Harbour. They haven't propagated to Google Maps yet, though. You can zoom in quite a lot more than in the picture below – close enough to see the shadows of people out the front of the opera house.

A few responses to my Legacy RDF post.

Firstly:

What this suggests to me is that in the world of open-source software, a world where everything is free, it’s not necessarily the technology that is most important: instead, the community is key.

http://boakes.org/feel-the-community#more-446

I agree with this to some extent. However, there is not doubt that the RDF community is strong and full of very smart people. I think that the RDF community == the MIT/Stanford style of design. That isn't a bad thing, but I think history is repeating itself.

Secondly:

Next time you see someone questioning RDF (once you’re sure they know what they’re talking about ;-), just look and see if they assume that fans of RDF don’t know about XML and other markup, relational databases, worse-is-better arguments and so on. Most of the people I know that are using RDF are doing so because it's a better fit to the task, generally after they've considered the alternatives. That's better as in better, not worse.

Danny Ayers

I have some doubts with this one. I was on the mailing list when RSS 1.0 was defined. Making that RDF was a mistake.

Finally:

If I was coming to RDF new, I'd be reading this stuff and going “oh, well, even if RDF's great, I'll never be able to get any support from the community, they sound like real nutcases. I'd better use OPML instead.”

Phil Wilson

Oh dear.. I don't want to get into the whole W3C vs DaveLab thing ;)

In JDK 5 apparently you can set the java.net.useSystemProxies to true and Java will pickup and use the proxies set in Windows (or Gnome). That's a great feature! (From Kohsuke Kawaguchi)

I get to chat a bit with Ben Adida who, having been left with my legacy of using RDF for Creative Commons found himself chair of the RDF-in-HTML task force (quite possibly the worst job in the W3C — I should ask him how he did it sometime) and, now discovering that overnight a major competitor (Microformats, pushed by Technorati) has arisen, is trying to get them to convert. I've been friends with the Technorati guys and I take their position, telling Ben that it's a hopeless endeavor. Ben is a little shocked at this — I was the one who got him on the RDF train after all — and pushes back. And eventually he manages to convince me that it wouldn't require hardly any additional work from the Microformats guys to be RDF A-compatible.

Aaron Swartz

I'm currently working on a metadata related project, and I find RDF the most annoying thing to work with. Every time anyone dares to question RDF the RDFites assume they don't know how it works. That's why it is good to see former RDF proponents like Aaron beginning to realize that perhaps the worse-is-better argument applies in the XML formats vs RDF field as well as in most other areas.

It is interesting that Tim Bray is getting rid of AdSense essentially for the same reasons that I complained about earlier.

He says:

I’m not surprised the revenue is low, the ads are lame and uninteresting, I wouldn’t click on ’em either.

which is exactly how I feel. It seems many people are annoyed at the “blogging” ads appearing on their blogs: perhaps Google could allow publishes to specify their own stop-word to avoid being targetted by those ads.

Anyway, my own targetting software is working as well as AdSense now. For instance, on my Computer Science Gansta Rap entry I'm getting ads for books about LL Cool J and Run DMC. On the other hand my ROME sightings entry is generating links to every book and DVD about Rome (the place, not the Java library). I'm not sure how I'd fix that one..