The Desktop Fishbowl
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Wednesday, 7 August 2002

This is the Strangest piece of spam I have ever seen. It's so weird I can't describe it. It sounds very much like they're selling marajuana, except they arent, but, it... you just ahve to go read it for yourself... it's is realllly strange. [weblog.masukomi.org] That is truly whacked. Bet they were smoking their product ... [Brett Morgan's Insanity Weblog] This is TheWeirdestSpamIEverReceived. It's very long, so I'll just paste the first three paragraphs here. Follow the wiki-link for the rest. Hello Later this year - prophecy will holdtrue, you will see. For it is written in the eyeinthepyramid... The Entity does not want to be caught out! In fact right now, the Entity is doing everything in its power to get you to discredit this emailcommunication. The Entity is a ForeignInstallation that sits inside your consciousness and lies to you and dis-empowers you, robbing you of your essence, and aims to weaken you and bring you into pain and suffering. 10:55:47 PM

How do I stop Radio inserting HTML into my posts where it's not welcome? I had to jump through some pretty stupid hoops in the last post just to let me do multi-line pre-formatted text. 10:14:10 PM

Tag Soup Forever. What's new in XHTML 2.0 (via diveintomark): Forms is replaced with XForms (http://www.w3.org/TR/xforms). Events are replaced with XML Events (http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-evens). Frames (not in 1.1 at all) are implemented via XFrames (http://www.w3.org/TR/XFrames when it is published - might not be there yet). [Some points elided -cm] Tables has a more normalized content model. Applet is gone - use object. Img is gone - use object. My prediction of the day. XHTML 2.0 will be the HTML's dead-end. In five years time, people will still be writing tag soup in HTML4 transitional, because thanks XHTML's march into complexity, the option to move to something cleaner will just not be there for them. Modularity is wonderful. In theory it allows you to only concentrate on the bits of XHTML that you need to know about. But the simple fact is, to write a web-page you're going to need to use something like 14 of the 16 modules in XHTML 2.0, plus XForms, so what's the point of splitting them up again? And, of course, once you start splitting the spec up like that, tracking HTML versions is going to be a big game of mix and match. (That said, my weblog is HTML4 transitional tag soup because I'm too lazy to write my own template) 10:09:32 PM

Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote a post about the perennial Open Source debate. If you haven't read that, read it first or this will be way out of context. Probably the best response you'll see to open source has come from Apple. Open Source does infrastructure very, very well. Take the infrastructure, and build something on top of it that Open Source doesn't do well at all - a consumer operating system, populated with fantastic, original applications. IBM's done the same. It's not supporting Linux just because it likes penguins. It's using it as a cheap platform to stick really big expensive things like DB2 and Websphere on top of. JIRA's another good example. An open-source base (WebWork, OFBiz, and it can run on the major open-source appservers), topped with a slick user-interface, and very responsive support. Open source is great for commoditising things that deserve to be commoditised - the implementations of standards and protocols, areas of computing where innovation has slowed or stopped, and the building of tools that can be used to build other tools. Even Microsoft recognise the value of open source, which is why you'll find the BSD license reproduced in your Windows 2000 licence booklet. Dave Winer is a trifle disingenuous, because even Userland benefits from programmers working for free. Radio may not itself be open, but Userland has a very liberal policy on allowing people to post patches for it or add-ons based on Radio code. Because there's no competing Radio clone, everyone who creates and distributes a free add-on for Radio (under the open-source principle that it's easier to share than to hoard) is improving the Radio application, and making it more valuable to Dave Winer. Closed source vendors could also learn a lot from open source. They're mostly Cluetrain-style lessons. The first lesson would be "Don't lie to your customers". Keep an open bug database. Let people know early what you're working on, and when their pet problem is likely to be fixed. Don't just shovel new releases into the trough under a cloud of hype. Maybe if they'd learn that lesson, there'd be a lot less crap released. 6:28:34 PM

Spam subject-line of the morning: LOOK~ You need Extreme Colon Cleanser 6:51:57 AM