The Desktop Fishbowl
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Wednesday, 5 June 2002

A quick huzzah to my TiBook. Her name is epiphany (or 'epi' for short). I just upgraded to OS X 10.1.5, and must reboot. According to 'uptime', my last reboot was 29 days ago, also occasioned by an OS upgrade. Not bad for a laptop, eh? Of course, my desktop W2K box has a similar uptime. And my Linux box has been up 70 days now. This is why I tend to stick anyone I see who says "I tried [Operating System], but it crashed all the time!" in the this-person-is-full-of-shit basket. (for modern values of [Operating System]). 3:53:11 PM

A post by David Hyatt about web standards reminded me of this rant that's been circling in my head for a while. Last year, I ranted on mozilla.general about web standards and the W3C. I mean, what's with the W3C? CSS2 was released in 1998 as a standard, and I can count on the toes of one hand how many compliant browsers have been released, three years later. So what are the W3C doing about it? Yes, they're off working on CSS3. Their own HTML showcase, Amaya, doesn't even support CSS1 properly. Wahey! The closest we have to an implementation of this three year old standard is Mozilla. So it's not really "W3C CSS2", it's Mozilla CSS2, because nobody else has bothered with more than a third of it. It may be W3C DOM, but it's an incompatible subset of what people are really _using_ out there. A follow-up replied to mention that Mozilla is closely involved with the W3C, and you could consider it to be the reference implementation if you want. However, my sentiment stands. A standard should not be given the name "standard" until there exists a real-world implementation. Until something concrete exists that demonstrates the standard, it's just a good idea that might some day work. Without an implementation, a standard is unproven. There may be significant, vague edge-cases. There may be outright self-contradictions. There may be things missing that people really want to be able to do (text flowing between columns, anyone?). There may be things that nobody really wants to do, but that catering for adds 10% to the running time. Until there's an implementation, nobody knows. Publish a standard without an implementation, and you leave those vague edge-cases and self-contradictions to be worked out by the implementors. You'll have competing implementations of the same standard that don't behave the same way. Have a reference implementation, and you can say "It has to look like this" Anyway, enough ranting for now. 3:43:01 PM

Davezilla: These are the Daves of our Lives. "Everyone knows a Dave or three. Daves are always dependable, competent, rather silly and the jack-of-all trades in most offices. Dave is always the guy who can fix the copier, jumpstart your engine or make that noisy dog calm down."  [Scripting News] When I started working for my current employer, the company had five Davids (including two of the three company directors). Which wouldn't be too surprising, except that there were only around ten people in the company. 2:44:15 PM

A pretty well-written Salon article on eXtreme Programming. As an aside, I've been on a couple of projects that used (or tried to use) XP. When you can get the buy-in of customer and programmers, and you're not scared to fix the bits of it that don't work for you personally, XP works really well. Just, whatever you do, don't try to do XP without the full involvement of the customer. If you do that, you're doomed. As another aside, Salon is the one website I've actually paid to subscribe to, purely because I believe it deserves to exist. 2:07:50 PM

A link that might be useful to web-designers, from Mark Pilgrim: Adrian Roselli: A Simple Character Entity Chart. Both entity names and entity numbers are listed, along with the representation of the character (so you can test for compatibility by loading this page in your browser). 2:04:32 PM