Potato I have

Andrew Orlowski at the register has an article about David Rosenthal’s LOCKSS (lots of copies keeps stuff safe) project. It’s big with libraries who are very familiar with, and concerned about, how to keep digital stuff around for a long time. “LOCKSS is both a web cache and a web crawler,” and addresses persistence (even in the face of attempts to remove or damage); it doesn’t address obsolescence nor proprietary formats.

From the LOCKSS homepage:

Libraries haven’t had an easy way to build digital collections, nor had any assurance that a digital collection - once obtained - would remain accessible to future generations. Publishers are being asked to assure persistent access to content - a function well outside of their core mission. The LOCKSS Program addresses these issues.

and:

Simply put, LOCKSS provides for Jefferson’s “multiplication of copies,” but with an electronic twist.

Is it good for us too? “Rosenthal said he would expect it to be several years before it filtered down to the DIY level.”

David Strom at Tom’s Hardware interviewed Mitch Kapor; a few quotes:

Re: usability and sophisticated installs:

Eventually, the uses of metadata (emerging from today’s rapidly evolving baby steps of XML, RDF, tags, microformats and the like) will become sufficiently sophisticated. [Software] programs will be constructed [to have] automated dialogs and high-level configuration wizards for advanced users, which will tame the beast. This is a vision and dream, not imminent reality, but I am impressed with recent developments. The year 2005 might be the year of metadata.

Re: Microsoft and proprietary software development:

The biggest weakness is that [Microsoft does not] have a business model that is well-suited for the coming era. […]
I think ultimately such [proprietary] moves will fail, as the collective power of openness and the superiority of open source economics is too great. See the paper Coase’s Penguin by Yochai Benkler.

Re: the rise of the browser:

I expect that the trend of UI improvements for the browser is going to continue to accelerate to the point of parity with desktop UI for many classes of application. It will simplify application development a lot, and this is a good thing.

All the stuff on the IDN thing intro’d me to punycode; here’s a wikipedia def. Okay, it took me a minute to see the pun. And another to see the irony of punycode making longer urls. Can’t use tinyurl because then you’re obfuscatin’ again.

Wikipedia quickly became my primary definition database: the quality is excellent, I’m usually finding what I want, it’s pretty to look at, and I get to spend a few more minutes in wikiland each day. I’ve even got direct location bar wikipedia searching using firefox keywords: I hook the ‘wp’ keyword to ‘http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=%s’ in bookmarks. Now at any time I can ctrl-l to the location bar, and

wp punycode

to the wiki page.

I’m putting some energy into wikis the last few weeks, but wikipedia’s own mediawiki needs php/mysql which is more than I want to do just now. Instead, I’m using moinmoin for the work wiki experiment, and just starting with the ruby instiki for my personal wiki. Ever closer to a dive into ruby–if I can’t quite tool up yet, I can at least sit next to it.

ExtremeTech does a roundup that introduces me to the IE rendering Maxthon, reminds me of Avant (also IE rendering), confirms my suspicion that Netscape is just a bad Mozilla, and gives me little reason to go see the latest from Opera. They let us know that 35% of their own hits are giving firefox user agents, but say nothing about the other alternatives.

The penultimate (Ms Bogart are you still out there?) page comments on browser security, and rightly highlights behavior; for example, the firefox extension mechanism, while super-powerful and a great differentiator, does scare me a bit. A lot of this is up to us. Following ET’s advice (but not reading the issues themselves nor comparing numbers for other browsers), I went to Security Focus and found 40 issues for firefox, dating back as far as last May.

Finally, I’m disappointed by the touting the advantage of using IE’s rendering engine. Standards are important, way more important than special features in MSN Spaces or some corporate intranet function. And the reviewer completely misses the obvious answer for me: it’s not either/or but and. Why not use the strong, light browser platform that is firefox, extend (or not) as and when you like, but do install the IEView extension. Whenever you do hit a page that seems to prefer the other guy, simply right-click the page itself to open it in IE. When done, close it and continue in firefox. And I’m surprised now how seldom I need to do this.

Lots of stuff out about the IDN exploit that is in firefox and lots of other modern browsers but not yet in IE; the register has a good short intro here.

As I’ve had adblock since the beginning, I can solve this by simply adding a short regexp to my block list; here’s the complete procedure for those who don’t have the extension installed yet.

And here is a handy test page.

It’s curious to see anyone use this case to defend IE. The relative openness and configurability of firefox enables a number of workarounds that aren’t there for a blackbox like IE. Downloads are available as soon as fixes are in; if it takes some time this time, it’s because IDN needs a rethink and not because of the development model. Curious minds can read the code and submit a patch if they like. I’m not one of Bill’s new red-scare commies, but on this kind of issue I don’t see how closed source proprietary dev models can ever compete.

From Dave Thomas’ blog, an excellent short entry illustrating what containers like Spring do with dependency, and how to improve on the problem of too much magic with “dynamic constants”.

Barebones examples are in ruby and needle.