Yes, I’m probably the last person on the planet to try and, and yes, it may well be the spawn of Satan. In fact, I think it’s likely society will collapse due to desktop tower defense addiction.
Oh well. I’m not going to worry about that until after I’ve had just one more go (Whatever you do, DON’T CLICK ON THAT LINK)…
Updated: I’ve written a short Desktop Tower Defense Strategy Guide.
So I’ve been quite interested in the work TheyWorkForYou have been doing in the UK. It seemed like a good idea to do something similar for Australia – after all we have an election due soonish, and what’s another project to add to my list?
I figured that a good thing to start with would be to create some kind of API to give access to Member of Parliament’s financial interests. After all, it was only a few months ago when the former Federal Minister for Aging Santo Santoro had to resign over his financial dealings.
I was hoping I’d be able to find a page on the Parliament website which I could screen scrape and use as a data source for an API. After quite a lot of searching I was forced to send an email asking for help.
From that inquiry I found that neither the Senate nor the Representative’s Register of Pecuniary Interests is available online, or in any electronic form at all. The only way to see it is to physically go to Canberra, make an appointment and then copy the it which interest you.
As tempting as that sounds, I think I might start somewhere else….
Yes, I’ve moved my blog (again), this time to WordPress. If you are reading this then all code to redirect feeds has worked. Visits to posts on mackmo.com should be redirect here, too.
I’ve been blogging since early 2003 (although I lost the dates for everything prior to June 2003 in a small domain-name related accident). It’s pretty amazing how far blogging tools have come in that time.
Now all I need to do is use these wonderful tools a little more often than I have been.
I'm something of an ideas person – I'm always full of great ideas to change the world (well – I think they are great anyway). For once, a few other people agreed that one of my ideas was worth pursuing, and it's actually looking like it might be implemented.
The thing I'm finding difficult is letting go – now my idea is out there and people are grabbing bits of it and discarding others and it's morphing into something that isn't quite what I thought up anymore.
It is an interesting process – I realize that logically some of their ideas are good, too, and I know that I can't do it all myself so I need their help. But…. letting people tamper with my idea is sometime painful. Hence I'm writing this entry to remind myself that what people are doing is good!
I often find myself in discussions with people who seem to truly believe that web standards somehow have an intrinsic value beyond the idea that they are a starting point for developing an application.
It can be quite a hard argument to make, since I'm not arguing that web standards are a bad thing in themselves, only that trying to support them at the expense of functionality is a mistake because simply supporting a web standard doesn't actually give any benefit in itself.
I was reminded of this argument today by Alex Russell of the Dojo toolkit who said:
Not accepting errors is suicide, and for too long the web standards community has confused validation and correct markup (things that reduce the number of people who can play in the sandbox) with the value created by agreement on how things should behave (things that increase the number of people who can use things that anyone creates).
His succinct way of phrasing that made me think of how I feel when I'm trying to make the same argument and hence the title of this post: I feel like making this argument is tilting at windmills, and yet those same windmills are being run over and swept away by the huge momentum of websites which actually work without any special effort in standard compliance, and by efforts like WHATWG who are following a much more pragmatic approach to standardization.
Random stuff:
Totally unrelated to anything I normally talk about here, but has anyone else noticed how the “debate” about Nuclear Power in Australia has followed almost exactly the stages outlined by the Overton Window?
Dave has done some great work getting the ROME 0.9 release out. There's also a new release of the ROME Fetcher.
I did an interesting fix for an ROME XML based security vulnerability in this release. I plan to blog about it in some depth later, but for the moment it's fair to say that the problem is somewhat obscure, but you probably should upgrade if you care about security. I also submitted patches to fix the same problem in Jakarta FeedParser, and Kevin's Tailrank version of FeedParser. A quick code inspection indicated that Informa is probably vulnerable, too, but I haven't got around to doing a patch for that.
Nelson (who pointed this out to us) has said about 3/4 of the XML applications he's encounted are vulnerable to this problem. After the lengths I had to go to fix it I'm not surprised – insecure by design is how I'd describe the XML APIs.
If you are an experienced XUL developer interested in working on a new, open source and potentially high profile Firefox 2.0 extension I'd be very interested in hearing from you. Realistically you are going to need to be located in Australia, and ideally in Adelaide.
Knowledge of accessibility and/or standards based web development would be an advantage.
To make it clear: This is a paid development position, but is only open if we can find the right person within the next few weeks
Interested? Contact me: nlothian at apache dot org as soon as possible.
It was Alex's first birthday party last weekend, and I made a cake.
I'm quite proud of myself – not only did it look roughly like a fire-engine, it was actually edible!