Life as an Artificial Lifeform

This is going to be a multipart series on my view on the webdesign process in this day and age with nitty gritty details - to much for most casual readers but not enough for the more professional webbers but just about right to those making websites coming from a more design perspective touching each and every part that touches webdesign as a whole - from the artwork to the programming to the content management to the hosting problems to the philosophies, existing standards nobody cares about nonexisting standards everyone seems to care about. Guaranteed not flash bashing free and guaranteed full of sarcasm. Here is the intro to this never ending saga.

About ten to twelve years ago I got into developing my first website - back then I was neither designer nor programmer but had experience in the latter and was about to study the former. I made this website with a lot of javascript and made the mistake of using images as text as I wanted one font throughout the site. The site looked alright (to me ;) and functioned fine but was unmaintainable for a person who wants to do something else with their time then hacking pure HTML. It had one nice feature so - that was swappable images - something you see nowadays a lot in those fancy iFrame galleries - back then I did not encounter another site that had it. Oh javascript that was something I could identify with as it came so close to BASIC programming which I learned while the east was still the east and the west the bad. "You can´t use javascript, its bad practice - nobody should use javascript ever" was all I got for my month long effort of making a webpage. The site was sitting there for a long long time without any updates and got very stale - at one point - right after the only update it ever recieved -the browsers started to break the site and I decided to pull it.
Since then I have been pondering on making a new site - one with a cool content management system that would enable me to easely update the site, one that is very cutting edge and puts technology to a good use. The longer I pondered the more it became clear that I did not want a website for myself - but rather a framework that could be an umbrella for the myriads of my interests and those around me wanting to produce something cool together with me. On the design end I was still learning and trying to find my style my design mojo. The years went by and the website did not really progress other then in my head. There was a quick attempt at it about 3 years ago that had already an interface designed but that never off the ground because I actually had to finish my diploma and all. Then last years pushed by a lot of different things I actually started to take the plunge - and man if I would have known back then what a journey it would become I would have thought twice about going along, but now 35.000 lines of code and about a year later I am extremely happy with the outcome so far.

Next Part in the next days: Choosing the right Content Management System

Posted by fALk at 20:06 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

You can say what you want but sometimes you get officials that are surprisingly bright - not very often but it happens. So I read today that the german government is considering bringing 50 Mbit/s broadband to every household until 2018 - including remote villages. I was about to close the page with the thought that it might be another scam by the german telekom who is already offering 50Mbit/s via VDSL - which is clearly aimed at broadcasting TV through it and makes the recievers the same couch potatoes they have always been. For me any advancement in internet speed that is not bidirectional can stay where it is. How is 50Mbit/s download going to help when the producers of podcast have to wait for 2 hours to upload their stuff through 1Mbit/s upload speed - the only persons who are capable of broadcasting are again those with money those that are the brainwashers the media elite those that the internet can not use at all if it is to strive - those that are to big to fail but are failing.
Then I clicked on an adjustant link and my eyes almost came out:

Die von der Deutschen Telekom derzeit angebotenen 50 MBit/s via VDSL seien "lächerlich", befand die Regulierungsexpertin am Donnerstag bei einer Anhörung über Next Generation Networks (NGN) im Unterausschuss Neue Medien des Bundestags.

Thats the vice president of the "Bundesnetzagentur" or German Network Agency - regulating our communication networks - saying that a 50Mbit/s VDSL network is laughable and absurd. I could not agree more and that this agency is aware of the scam that DSL and even more so VDSL is, bodes very well for the future of the german internet - now if only the companies would start offering SDSL for prices that are affordable (at the moment SDSL prices are in the range of 3x -20x as those of the high end DSL connections - starting around 60 euros a month for 1Mbit/s up/down). Oh and they finally see the light in putting in empty pipes in the ground when its dug open anyway for future networks with for example glasfibre (different story but here in my hometown they ripped out glassfibre 5 years ago after installing it after the wall came down 15 years ago because they did not want to invest in the backend infrastructure to make internet work over fibre - no joke - that is the German Telekom if you don´t know them yet). What a novel idea - too bad that everyone and their grandchildren already had this idea 15 years ago when you dug up everything anyways.
Anyway its not the worst news you can get in the morning especially since you are investigating how to transmit streaming video from a remote location in the past week.

The quote is from an article in Technology Review and is in german.

Posted by fALk at 11:31 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I have voiced a lot of disdain for the closed source proprietary slow resource wasting crap that is flash. Flash is not good for video playback (for a number of reasons everyone but google would admit too) its also quite dumb to jail images in flash containers - but both of those things are a common practice around the net (flickr, youtube) - both things will be a part of an ugly past once HTML5 hits the street and moves toward a 50% usage point. SVG, video, animation and audio tags are just too cool to pass up on as a developer - and its all open and standard and complient and such.
Yet there was one thing where flash was until recently considered the only viable option: browser based games and interaction projects. Well in the offline world there is a programming language called processing that is used to make games and physics simulations and interaction models and and and. Its a breed of its own when it comes to programming languages - quite easy to learn and follow and very powerfull in what you can create but unless you are a java fetishist there was no way to run processing stuff inside the browser.
Now with the new breed of browsers around the corner - those that will support HTML5 and have advanced Javascript engines that support the canvas element - its is possible to use the processing language inside javascript with the javascript processing library. Just check out the demos (you might have to use a nightly build of your favorite browser to see the demos working) and see the potential. I did test them with the latest WebKit nightly and all demos are extremely smooth fluid and amazing. With these there is absolutely no excuse to use flash anymore. I will be surprised to see one major website with any kind of flash content in three years - mark my word. Javascript and HTML5 and SVG are going to be the solution to all your pain very very soon - and as a good side note it has to be said that there will be so much kick ass content that people with internet explorer will want nothing more then to upgrade to a browserto something modern (and I do not think there is any way for MS to catch up to either the firefox or the safari or the chrome javascript engine and make HTML5 and SVG available in any amount of time).

Posted by fALk at 12:28 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Alex Dragulescu is making automatically generated architecture - his data input are spam emails. Keywords in these spam mails are used to generate planes in three dimensional space.

Posted by fALk at 8:34 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The world is changing indeed. I have been now working on our website for over a year and at one point I ditched support for Internet Explorer in favor of coding standard compliant XHTML. I wanted a website for the future and not for the past. I am only testing in Firefox but foremost in Safaris Webkit (the developer nightly builds of Safari) because by all that I can see it is just the most standard compliant browser out there - so if stuff looks good in there and validates you have good code. Now I am still looking at browser statistics and pander if ditching IE was such a good decision because its still at 75% browser market. Then along comes a blog entry and the world just get a different face. After Google incorporating WebKit in their Google Browser Microsoft thinks about following along with a future generation browser of their own that uses WebKit. I don´t know if you can understand what that means. But that would put Safaris WebKit in the number one browser spot quite instantly surpassing Firefox. That also means the world is left with only two competiting browsers but both of those try to be standard compliant as hell. (Hey I am not counting Opera - who as the total underdog browser still does not seem it necessary to have a standards compliant rendering engine). Heck Firefox and Safari both push CCS3 out the door and SVG is at least in Webkit working very well to the point where you can start animating in it. That means standard compliant moving vector interfaces with custom fonts - together with the audio and video tags that are coming as well this means not only bye bye Internet Exploder but also bye bye Flash... Oh happy days.... Of course the whole thing is taken with a grain of salt as there is nothing official about it - but one can dream right?

Steve Ballmer said:

"Open source is interesting," he said. "Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8."

Posted by fALk at 11:42 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I am a fierce opponent of Captchas from the day they have emerged because I understood from day one there is no solution to the spam problem that involves more barriers and more walls - walls never work over the long term. I also believed that if a human can solve a captcha then a computer can too at one point down the road - as so many other spam fighting systems that were sold to the masses as "the perfect solution" have been tricked. Also I hate captchas myself and recently some of them have become undecipherable even for a human. Some want you to even learn some code to decipher it - something I am not willing to do when I just want to post a quick comment or such. Captchas are one step to take the bidirectional out of the internet.

But all that is mood when there is a huge industry that earns its money solving captchas with human power instead of machine power - and that is apparently already happening in India. For $1,50 you get 1000 human solved captchas - that is a lot for a little. If someone wants to flood a captcha "secured" site with spam - and I believe captcha secured sites do not have more barriers as they are captcha believers - then then for $150 they get 100000 accounts - that is probably something that makes them a profit (as the 3% rule of spam states - thats 3000 people buying some overprices viagra or fake rolex watches).

Matt Mullenweg founding developer of wordpress has phrased it greatly:

"Ultimately Captchas are useless for spam because they're designed to tell you if someone is 'human' or not, but not whether something is spam or not. Just because something came from a real human being doesn't mean it isn't spam...."

Read the full article at zdnet its highly interesting.

Posted by fALk at 7:29 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gosh I don´t own one (and unless they are getting smaller and the dataplans cheaper it will probably stay that way) but I love the iPhone for that it shackles up so many traditions and morphes us closer to a 21st century society - also it starts to save trees which is all and about a great thing. How? Well there are starting to appear comics on the iPhone that would have been printed on dead trees beforehand. Given that especially in Japan the throw away cheap comic culture is huge this might even have a measurable environmental impact at one point. But comics coming to the iPhone is even cooler. I have noticed the rise of webcomics lately but I find reading them in a regular browser takes a away a bit of the magic that happens when you dive into a paneled layout without distractions all around it that blink and try to draw you into a different universe - you know what I am talking about if you have ever seriously used a computer. A comic on the iPhone would is different - you have the screen and the comic fills it - yes it would break with the traditional panels on page layout and is instead only serial panels scrolling but you could even mimic the move from panel to panel which sometimes goes left to right sometimes top to bottom and sometime just quirky - depending on the content - by sliding the panel out/in to the corresponding side. You could even give a "page" overview on how the panels would be arranged for every virtual physical page. Quite general I love the idea and I think with the rise of epaper readers and the iPhone and the current attention deficit society comics become a much stronger medium in itself.

Japanese Manga Comes To The iPhone (Mike Cane)
The Future Is Almost Now (Publishers Weekly)

Posted by fALk at 6:45 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

There has a plethora of new search engines around the web lately all trying to dethrone google but none has really fully amazed as something that could even compare to google. Yet today I came across TinEye (gosh this reads like an advert - but wait for it - its not its real). It is a pure picture search (no audio, video or text search) and it has a unique but seemingly working take on it

With TinEye you either upload a picture or tell it a webadress of a picture and then it looks for the picture or pictures that look like the picture all over the net. Its database is now at something like half a billion pictures (that 400 Million and something and probably counting upwards by the minute). Well I thought I test so I registered (grumpy bumby why do they all want a phony web adress from me? you really think I am going to give out a real one that I actually use?) and put some photos in personal and not so personal and I got a success rate of 8 out of 10! That means for 10 photos I tried I got 8 that gave me a result that was absolutely spot on. Heck I could even ease my mind with finding out about that rocky impossibly balanced house I posted a couple of weeks ago (its a photoshop ffs. fooled me. from now on I never believe any photo that looks awesome anymore). Anyway the engine is straight forward and works well is incredibly fast - as fast as google so it has to do so much more then google one would think (I think I am having this commercial voice again - sorry but I am quite amazed). Now there is one huge implication this will have -> copyright. If you have copyrighted images on your site and a photographer, artist or whoever who actually enforces their copyrights expect to get nasty letters very soon (that reminds me I still have to write this copyright embed research blog post that has been hovering on my computer for some time).

So here is a video explaining TinEye but try it out yourself I know you love it - its a new way to search (also for yourself if you have lost it ;)

Posted by fALk at 9:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ever since I entered the code behind the internet I have been a big fan of Javascript. While there was a time when Javascript use was seen as something only those who had no clue did todays thinking has changed and you can probably not get around the modern web these days with your Javascript turned off and have a pleasent experience. But I always knew that Javascripts capabilities have been greater then just pulling some data from some server and presenting it interactively in a glossy interface (so I am always trying out new stuff look at the moving logo up this site - based on code I wrote in 1997!). Well with the SquirrelFish engine in the nightly build of Safari and Firefox 3 things are getting mighty speedy in the Javascript world and things are possible that seemed impossible before. Like recursive mathematics f.e. I stumbled upon a site that makes recursive beautiful organic pictures totally with javascript and totally inside your browser - no plugins needed - all open standard nice Javascript. I am genuinely exited.

So download WebKit Nightly (the developer version of Safari) and start tinkering with the following site:

http://darknoon.com/organics/render.html">

Posted by fALk at 17:00 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Hmmm.... Twitter or "microblogging" is a very strange technology that I dismissed then discovered then dismissed again with the thought that it might be useful for short announcement for bigger project that involve a lot of people with little time. Then Twitter is a freaking company again that controls my dataflow and we all know how I stand with other companies/groups controlling my dataflow and time and energy. So I was delighted to read today that there is now an opensource microblogging tool called laconica and a twitter like service that builds upon that tool called identi.ca.
The tool is heavely in beta and requires the absolute newest php (5.2.1) and the pearl library (which my isp won´t install because of security reasons) and it has no automated database creation script yet - which means you must know how to create a database table by yourself. All this is a bit over my head at the moment but maybe someone integrates that code into drupal and I can integrate it then in our bigger site (note to myself - drupal probably can do stuff like that already).
Anyway moving the datastreams of the world into OpenSource Creative Commons open protocal territory is a very good thing.

http://identi.ca - a service based on laconica
http://laconi.ca/Main/HomePage - the locanica wiki with downloadable source code

Posted by fALk at 13:20 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ICANN has approved the relaxation of the top level domain rules. That is normally a very welcome development because it means we could finally get rid of the stupid .com .de levels and everyone can register a .whatever. In theory that would be a great way to level the playing field and reset the internet sort off. In reality so what ICANN has done is sell the internet to the 1Mio+ corporations because a new top level domain under these new rules costs 100.000 dollar upwards (not quite clear if that is per year or a general fee) meaning that only the companies or persons with a 100.000 grant to spare can register their own TLD (which still needs to be approved by ICANN). Now that means for the first time since I am using the internet I can not afford a basic service - one that is poised to become a "trademark" for success. The playing field has just tilted heavily toward big corporate greed - this rule change has "lobby" written all over - after the big companies failed to make sure that their trademarks are "protected" with the TLDs as they are now - they ask for becoming an exclusive club of the rich owning a very special TLD is such a strong marketing standpoint that NOT doing for a company would be likely branding suicide - small companies, startups people with innovation will now either use a lot of their startup capital to get the branding benefits of a TLD or just suck it up and use the "old ones" which they will become known not too much in the distant future and everyone will see which company has "made it" and which hasn´t - this is a really sucky development and will haunt the net for the years to come. ICANN either you make the DNS flat or you don´t - the new state is on par with loosing net neutrality as it creates a two class internet society in the long run.

Posted by fALk at 10:36 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry to bore the ones not so into Web/OSX technologies but the news trickling in after the WWDC this year are FAR more revolutionary then any iPhone tech ever was (in my not so humble opinion that is of course). Today I learned about sprout core - an Objective C framework for webapplications. Well I am coding a webapplication since roughly six month now and I am quite deep into the matter. For a webdeveloper you have the following options:
Go the PHP/Perl Javascript route - the most open most supported most ugly most cumbersome most diy route there is.

Go the $insertLanguageofChoice on Rails or on other drugs with a 10MB Javascript framework that works 10% of the time route you do it once and in 4 years the on rails hype has ceeded and your $insertLanguageOfChoice is not supported in a webserver anymore and your javscript framework has so many bugs incompatibilities with the code you have written 4 years ago and you are forced to upgrade because the version you where using has about 1000000000 security holes.

Go the Silverlight/AIR/Flash route - very good controlling how your output looks like in the end - quite easy to learn and follow through - total lockin with one or two companies that could get no worse already (you would think)

Apparently there is soon another route.
SproutCore is an Javascript framework developed by Charles Jolley. Mr. Jolley enjoys a position at Apple working for the .Mac team nowadays. Sprout Core has native drag and drop and a full Model View Controller like Rails. The development on SproutCore is very much like Cocoa development on the mac. You can build complex applications without doing much. Now tie this together with some other developments at Apple like the gene engineered SquirrelFish Javscript engine that by my own account is about 3000% faster then anything out there (purely subjective me running my own stuff on Safari4 without NDA) + add a bit of WebObjects love - the backend webtech that is actually reallyreally awesome just was never usable due to interface problems and years of neglect (they did pick up development a couple of years ago, made it free and I even think partially open source and included - wait for it - javascript support) you are getting somewhere where you might have the best of all worlds - lets hope if it works out like this it is open as hell.

Now this is not just a rumor or some rambling - no I have some real juice to proove how awesome something like this could be.

I stumbled accidently over the site 280slides.com. And instantely thought "wow here something else is going on". What the site is or does is basically the Apple Keynote application on the web. I see you all shudder in despair "WEBAPP"?!?!. Yes Webapp - but at least in Safari 4 I can see no speed difference with this "webapp" and keynote on the same computer - I would even venture to say it feels almost snappier. And the interface is as close as you can get without floating palletes and the stuff. Yes you can change fonts on the fly type stuff inside the slides and present it share it on the web. When I originally stumbled upon it I thought "Flash - this must be done in flash". I looked at the source code which is an astounishing 50 lines long and does not have any flash files in it - the most important line was the following:

 script type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8" 
src="Frameworks/Objective-J/Objective-J.js"

oha. Wow. Now go try the webapp - use the webkit nightly build to get the squirellfish javascript engine. Its a revelation - its a bend in the space time continuum - you will witness computer history - and I am not exaggerating.

Roughly drafted Daniel Eran Dilger has more indepth information on the whole matter and he comes from more of a programmer site so he has the real juice if you like more...

Little Update: I should do more research before I post - so apparently the 280slides is not based on sprout core but on Objective-J a framework by 280North - three guys - two of them former apple employees. I still think that this might just be another name for the same thing. For the real sproutcore framework presentation visit a .mac picture gallery (soon mobileMe gallery) - like this one (no that not mine - I never put any pics on the web)... So call it what you want Objective-J SproutCore or a mix of it - it surely seems powerfull as hell and the apps its churning out are fast, pretty and beautiful.

Posted by fALk at 16:31 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Clay Shirky just said that the death of Soap Operas/Sitcoms on TV is freeing up 2.000 wikipedia worth of contribution time... Soap Operas are of course just as on thing of the epic battle between the distraction media vs. the contribution media. I still found the original comment (boingboing.net) a bit "lush" so I looked at a talk from him and its a very refreshing organized view on things that I deep down understand but couldn´t communicate. Here are some Quotes from the talk:

- "Social Lag"
- "Social Capability has not transformed society at anything like the rate as other applications have launched "
- "Groups are natively conservative"

- "It is curiously the moment when Technology becomes boring that the social effects become interesting"

The 4 step ladder of which a participatory internet society is going through...
"1. Sharing, 2.Conversation, 3.Collaboration, 4.Collective Action"

We seems to be past 1. 2. and 3. and apparently approaching number 4 fast. Now with 2.000 wikipedias worth of time freed up the possibilities of collective action that transforms us into a new kind of culture - a free open source culture perhaps - are imminent? This guy thinks so. Listen to his catchy fast worded speech on the Harvard - Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Posted by fALk at 8:00 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today I got the third invitation for a new "Web 3.0" applications "private" "beta". This one was for a service called twine and is basically a way to organize digital stuff - as wide as you want to describe stuff.
It has made me thinking why I am reluctant to spend more then 20 minutes with these services, why I don´t have a flickr account, why am not contributing to wikipedia and I have a conclusion that any of these companies should take to heart because I sincerely believe that I might not be the only one with this thought.
In a time where time seems to be the most important resource a person can posses I want to spend time so it benefits my future - and with that the future of the planet as well (because without it I wouldn´t have one). I love collective wisdom (as in wikipedia) I benefit greatly from it every day, but I have also been around the net long enough to know that spending hundreds of hours on forums, wikis etc. is a lost cause if this information you give out does not stay in your control. I don´t mean that I want to control the flow of this information, also I don´t want to control its death but I want to stay in control to keep it alive. I have been using the net in some form or another for about 13+ years now and I have seen a lot of the information I gave to it disappear forever into some unknown electric universe. Now companies are craving to organize not just my words but my pictures, videos, pfd documents - basically my knowledge - so that others can access it and find it easily - the so called web 3.0 or the semantic web. I applaud that thought as it will ultimately lead to a greater collective wisdom, but I also have shivers down my spine when I think that in the future I collect all my information on somebody elses machines. As I have just layed out companies on the web tend to diy sudden death, or swallowed up by corporation that have ill intends (yahoo->microsoft f.e. where delicious hosts tons of my precious links I collected over the years) or a change of leadership makes the wrong decisions, or they have a failed backup plan and all data is lost (just happened with a big internet provider in the US who lost mails from about a million mail accounts). Its just too much trust I would have to give out my most precious resource - time - to someone I don´t know, someone who could morph into someone else, someone who could become evil that I don´t want to be affiliated with. So I don´t think the solution for me is called twine or powerlabs or whatever - I think the solutions has to look different.
I want to have control over the longlevity of my information - yet I still like the idea of a collective organization of all knowledge in the world. So I see a decentralized structure of knowledge sharing as the better way forward. You know all that is needed is a standard that would put all the knowledge on my servers out in the open - to be freely harvested by semantic web engines. I can then keep my internal organizational structure, use tags or hierarchies or groups or whatever to let the outside world know what these documents mean and then the web 3.0 companies can just take this and put it in pretty easy to use interfaces and connect with information with other people. If one of those companies goes bust you still have not only the information but also the organization of this information and a different service can come along and use it all. Its sort of like the Open Social platform that tries to do exactly this with social networking (again I want to be in control to whom the time goes that I spend without a lock in and without a feeling that I loose everything).
So for Web 3.0 to really kick off you need something like an OpenSemantics framework that can be implemented into just about any information collecting tool out there (blogs, wikis, even forums). Something that helps you tag, organize, auto-organize your information and makes it available to others out there. It has to be an open source standard that is extendible to a lot of information carriage formats and probably it has to be pushed by something like the W3C to give it enough traction to gain any footing against these thousand of new "web 3.0" startups.
Until then I refuse to give out more time to any of these things no matter how many "private beta" invites they send me.

Posted by fALk at 9:02 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

OMG. Its so relieving that I am not the only person on the planet who thinks that flash video is the most stupid invention since - well - proprietary internet plug ins in general. Apples Steve Jobs said in its press conference yesterday:

" the technology doesn't meet his company's performance standards for video."

That is great to hear and I can fully agree with that. I can not see why a codec(1) in a container format(2) in an interactive container(3) in a plug in(4) in a browser(5) on an operating system(6) is any good idea (thats 6 levels of abstraction! six levels of security problems, six levels of performance problems and that with something that is already the second most performance hungry technology for consumers). And it seems that Apple agrees on the point - now the only thing Apple needs to do is to bring Quicktime into the 21st century - because after all - quicktime still sucks (so not as bad anymore as it used to) when it comes to creating inbrowser motion webpages that have custom controls. But at least apple is going the javascript route with their integration and therefore the open standards route - as they do with open MPG4 containers (that can be played by anything not just quicktime). It feels very good that I am in good company with my thoughts on flash video and that I have made right choices in the past for the future :)

Posted by fALk at 7:18 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Well I have been eying the use of Quicktime together with javascript for quite some time now but was very afraid to actually shun the build in controller in favor of a custom designed controller. This is not a problem anymore. Apple as of today (coincidence that I went over there) has published the DOM events to attach event listeners to the quicktime plugin and therefore make it possible without too much hackery to take over control of the movie. It seems Apple fears the flash competition more then ever when it comes to online video distribution and this step - adding eventListeners (and documenting them) - will get them a bit of webcredibility again - especially since now you can control you embedded quicktime object better then a flash movie through javascript (standards nonproprietary scripting language etc etc). Together with the CCS3 animation properties (soon to be standards, nonproprietary) introduced in the latest build of safari and the only superb SVG (standard, nonproprietary ) support in Safari Apple is posed to be a real threat to Flash again (and by now it must be clear that I do not like Flash in any flavor).

Get the Quicktime DOM Events documentation here.

Posted by fALk at 18:46 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I do not like code from untrusted sources reside on my harddrive so I dislike cookies in all its forms and flavors, yet if you want to do clever javascripting for your website you need to hold data in memory that transports across pages and does not necessarily needs to get stored on the server. A clever hack uses the window.name to store up to 2 MB of data - heck safari and firefox can even hold up to 64MB of data in that field (after which they crash - security problem? Opera has a 2MB limit set). The window.name is kept as long as you have the same window open so across page loads - just what you want if you need transistions of colors from one page to another for example. No word if Internet Exploder 6 is supporting it (I guess yes it should, but probably crashes after 100kb and you can only save M$ approving data ;)

read more about this cookie killing hack here: Session variables without cookies

Posted by fALk at 9:52 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As predicted on my first article on the subject, Flickr users are less then happy about a Microsoft takeover and have started the microsoft-keep-your-evil-grubby-hands-off-our-flickr pool.
But the more I think about it the more I see that this takeover is extremely vital to Microsoft and that it will go through no matter what because the offered money is to much to reject it with good faith on Yahoos part. Its not only about the advertising money coming from search engines, not only the very vocal on the frontline user groups of Flicker, delicious and Yahoo Groups it also the access to dynamic web services behind those groups and a way to push nonstandard microsoft standards down the internet users throat and - and I think this is much more a major deal then anything else - push Silverlight into the internet limelight and take on Adobe and Google at the same go - thats something Microsoft would be just too happy to accomplish.
Why? Because Flickr was the defining moment in internet history that got Flash out of the "don´t make any more stupid moving interfaces that take up the users time" into the "Flash is probably the only viable means to make interactive Webapplications with multimedia content". Its why Macromedia just a year later got bought by Adobe and its why YouTube came into existence in the first place. Now microsoft has been developing this "flash killer" that nobody has used anywhere on the web - if Flickr was to use Silverlight that would give Silverlight a proper boost and put it on the agenda of webdevelopers and Microsoft would not have sunk another project that was geared toward the web - or so is the management thinking probably. That this is all faulty thinking and that the only thing that would happen if Microsoft started pushing Silverlight onto Flickr is that Flickr would soon die - but thats not stopping Microsoft from trying - watch it.
I actually HOPE this is happening as this would definately make the animated vector graphics on the web race open again and put in SVG as a viable nonproprietary option much sooner then when it would need to just compete with flash on its own (no media attention no adoption). As said this is gonna be the grant internet soap opera for the weeks, month years to come - get a tea sit back relax. Its putting fire under google, its putting fire under adobe its putting fire under microsoft (trying to make something out of it) and the web has a chance to overcome old things (like Flickr itself) and create something new and hopefully more open more nonproprietary and better leaner meaner in the meantime.

Posted by fALk at 9:14 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

When I heard about the two major internet backbone carrying cables cut on the coast of Egypt I was already a bit on alert. It has not happened before that two cables were severed in one accident ever before. Since I have no clue how close the cables are layed together on the ocean ground I thought it could have been an accident. When there was reporting on a 3rd cable cut on the coast of France I believed nothing anymore. It has never happened before that three major internet backbone cables have been cut at the same time by an accident - nonetheless by the same type of accident (an anchor of a boat drags through the cables and cuts them in half). When there was report that a fourth backbone had been taken off the grid and the affected region was again similar (middle east) I thought to myself that there is something more at play here. First reports had the fourth cable also cut by an anchor - in the Persian Gulf on the coast of Quatar.
Then yesterday there came in reports of internet outages numbers. And while all the mainstream media reported that India had a 40% network loss, Egypt a 50% not a single news organisation actually reported that the only country with a 100% network loss is Iran. Thats right after the fourth cut cable Iran is now an internet island with not outside connection to the world until the cables are fixed.
Now today come i n reports that the Quatar cable is actually intact but that a power outage caused the trouble there - now isn´t Quatar the command center for the US of As army operation in the middle east?
What about the cables in Egypt? Well the radar records of the region at the time of the cutting show not a single ship in the area and the Egypt authorities say that the area is a nautical no go area - mainly because of its important infrastructure. So no ship equals no anchors equals something has cut them that was undersea not visible to radar.

This all comes at the same time the US of A is conducting an Cyber Attack exercise that is also geared against all evil bloggers trying to tell the truth.
So now I find it strange that exactly the four cables had accidents that connected Iran with the rest of the world. Don´t you?

Posted by fALk at 7:37 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Its official - after about 3 years in the rumor mill Microsoft made public today that they wanna swallow yahoo for some whopping 44.6 billion USD - Yahoo will probably go along as it looks like as of today. That a lot of cash but what Macrosoft does not see yet is the user exodus this will likely cause. For me the rumor has come 3 years ago almost exactly on the day I wanted to start using Flickr. This rumor back then was enough to reconsider putting my time and energy into that service - and my intellectual property because I read the fine print for Flickr and I did not like it (using all pictures for their own purpose whenever they want wherever they want - don´t know if that changed over the years). Now Macrosoft will have the rights that Yahoo had and therefore the rights to Flickr. I don´t know if there are any similar services out there but I am sure if there is even one that offers similar functionality as Flick user will start swarming away.

But the bug ain´t stopping there. del.icio.us is also part of Yahoo. Now I have extensive amounts of links on del.icio.us. but during my research for the podcast I stumbled across Ma.gnolia.com and guess what? It imports your del.icio.us links fully intact looks more pretty has more functions is easier to use has more possiblities to sort - its just A LOT better then del.ico.us - I switched in a heartbeat and it was perfect timing as it seems - no one knows how long you are allowed to export your del.icio.us bookmarks ones M$ ownz it all - and mostly reads it all as well and stores it and judges them - any pornlinks, warezlinks and similar darknet links to be removed very soon so they are clean MSN search compliant.

Then there is Yahoo Groups - one of the biggest mailinglist services out there. Again its one of the bussinesses Yahoo bought in over the years (and merged it with their own unsuccessful version). My old University runs their official mailinglist on there (something I initiated way way way back when nobody even knew what a mailing was) - well since mailinglists are not used that much anymore this is not a big loss, but a lot of communities might still want to reconsider if they want to open up their communication to microsoft who likes to work with governments.

Oh and then there is yahoo mail - expect your email address if you have on there to end as "msn.com" soon - no its not gonna happen but then again how would you feel if Microsoft has direct access to all your mail? Googlemail just looks sooo much more attractive.

I think M$ partially wants the groups that yahoo has created - lots of groups with diverse interests, groups that make art, collect links and just talk about diverse things. They also want the 10% search market share that yahoo has left (has anyone really ever used Yahoo search? I have and it sucked) in general I think Microsoft does not do itself nor Yahoo nor the internet a favor if it goes ahead (that still an incredible amount of money even for Microsoft) but since when does M$ think ahead? Generally its a grand Soap Opera unfolding in front of the internet users eyes and I am pretty sure like 10 years down the road it might end in big crocodile tears for Microsoft....

A bit more on the topic on Saturday in the radioPrototypen podcast (will be in german so)...

Posted by fALk at 19:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft seems to be on the path to figuring out how to scare away the last two content developers they still have left. Instead of going the IE7 route of a standard compliant and a quirks mode they add a standard compliant quirks mode that has to be enabled on all websites and only then it renders the ACID test as reported earlier (or any standard compliant site as it should). Not only was it already not so pleasant to learn and understand how to make IE7 render pages that IE6 would not but not use IE6 hacks to do so in a way that didn´t really work in the first place -
no - Microsoft "invents" another totally new metatag and expects everyone to go over their pages and include it. Really what the freak are they smoking? Break the fucking backwards compatibility and finally make everyone just abandon IE6 - its a freaking dead horse that was born in the internet dark ages - and don´t pull along the stupid non working code - I am totally utterly sick of it. I hope this will further alienate developers from IE to the point where IE has MUCH less market share then the other browsers that are actually standard compliant from the get go and don´t need no freaking quirks mode to operate properly. The metatag is designed to be able to destinct .0x releases of all browser so that designers can create pages for every .0x release of every fucking browser out there or what?

Read more about the "new" metatag at A List Apart

Posted by fALk at 18:05 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This starts to become an ongoing series I guess since the space.com hack two weeks ago I come across another major hacked site - this time its much more subtle BUT its also a MUCH bigger fish.
I am talking about the CSS3 specification blog entry on the official W3C.org - that is one of the most important sites on the net that hosts all interweb standard document.
The thing that makes this hack so scary is that it is NOT a standard "defacement" as the space.com hack where everyone just knows what is going on but a subtle "I paste two lines of text and a link inside the normal document". If the guy would have done this in english instead of spanish I would maybe have not noticed it. Its mostly a harmless "poker spam" BUT there is someone out there who can change text on the official W3C.org site - means this person can also change specifications. Every webdesigner, browser programmer and anybody else who wants to make something standard conform on the web visits W3C.org and just a small error on one of the pages can replicate and threaten to kill a lot of man hours of work around the world. I find it pretty serious - lets see how long it takes this story to float to the top.

the link to the affected article is here:

http://www.w3.org/Style/CSS/Planet/

Update: I just got the following reply:

Thanks for the heads up. It appears W3C wasn't hacked, but CSS3.info
was. I've forwarded your message to the CSS3.info guys; if they don't
fix it soon, I'll temporarily suspend them from the Planet feed.

~fantasai

Posted by fALk at 8:51 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I stumbled upon one of the most annoying bugs ever in Firefox and had to wade through a list of comments just to find out that there is no bugfix for Firefox1 and Firefox2 but there might be one coming for FF3 whenever that is released. This is a serious interface bug that makes the use of forms almost unusable as the cursor (caret) just does never appear when you have a certain kind of relative/absolute positioned layout with divs overlapping. For my scenario none of the suggested workarounds work. As said in an earlier post I am not recoding things just to work in certain browsers if the code is valid and verified. What really pisses me off is the arrogance in the Firefox team toward this specific bug - which I see as deep red serious - a bug that has been first reported almost two years ago and has consequently been neglected. Read this comment from a FF developer to see what I mean. If you have people posting over and over that a bug is a BIG problem for A LOT OF PEOPLE the last thing you want to do is piss them off more - especially if your browser has stiff competition and this is a obvious bug that has not been fixed for more then two years and you are not even planning to backport the fix to an earlier version of your browser.

Ryan VanderMeulen 2007-11-06 08:32:43 PST
What about comment #100 is unclear? The fix is on the trunk and relies heavily
on other changes which were made on the trunk as well in order to work.
Backporting it to Fx2 isn't going to happen because it would require way too
much developer energy and be extremely regression prone. Plain and simple, it's
not worth the resources when Fx3 is already nearing its first beta release.

In the future, please follow the etiquette guidelines before deciding to spam
bugs with yet another "me too" comment and forcing everybody who's CCed to it
to read your thoughts on the matter. I assure you that most of us on the CC
list really don't want to hear them.
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/page.cgi?id=etiquette.html

Its is freaking worth the resources as this keeps webdevelopers happy and recommend your browser - this is no small bug and the error is clearly as not seeing it as a serious bug while it is and has been seen by the countless of comment saying how important this is. Pointing me to an etiquette is more insult to the wound. I leave the site as it is and don´t care if it shows up correctly - meanwhile I am not recommending Firefox anymore - use Safari on Windows and Mac or Konquerer on Linux to see a webpage like it is supposed to look like.

Posted by fALk at 15:40 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Just stumbled across the space.com website and find it hacked. Funny guys the script kiddies arabian 1337 h4x0rz,

Posted by fALk at 19:54 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems bitching on a blogs comments has for once done something - or so the official Internet Exploder Blog claims. The new upcoming IE8 passes allegedly the famous ACID2 test to test browser compatibility regarding CSS2.1. That comes about four days after a lot of people did a lot of Microsoft bashing for them announcing the browser name but no other information. This bashing was about the loudest Microsoft bashing I have heard since five years when longhorn was first delayed. Some peeps - including me - have written that they abondon each and every browser hack out there whenever possible and just adhere to Webstandards as written in the W3C standards pages and checked with the CSS and HTML validators. Yesterday they responded with a "we are listening" post and a picture allegedly showing a IE8 browser window with a functioning ACID2 smily on it.
My first reaction "Yeah I believe it when I see it"
My second reaction "did all the bashing for once really achieve one of the greatest gift to the internet since the birth of the browser?"

IE8 is supposed to go into public beta next spring.

That means - No feeling guilty if you doing standard conform websites because in 3 years they will just work on any major browser :) if not then microsoft looses its last bit of credibility that they might have.

Oh Microsoft ACID2 passing comes about 4 years after Safari and 1 year after Firefox -just for the record.

Microsoft Blog Entry about IE8 passing the ACID test

Working ACID2 test to test your browser

A couple of comments on the blog over there

re: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 4:01 PM by Victoria
Awesome, so you'll finally be standards complient when IE8 launches in 2012?

Great news.
--------------

e: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 4:13 PM by Robbo
passing a test case is one thing - working flawlessly in the wild is another very different thing ...

---------------

re: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 4:23 PM by Chris
Finally.

I'm happy IE8 is finally taking steps toward this. The browser is years behind.

---------------

re: Internet Explorer 8 and Acid2: A Milestone
Wednesday, December 19, 2007 6:41 PM by Aleksey V lazar
I see a smiley, but I'd like a running build to test this and other things by myself. I can make this smiley image in two minutes :)

Really, one must be naive to buy into this sort of PR/marketing nonsense and to think anyone at Microsoft (at least decisions makers) gives a damn about web developers or web standards. What they care about (by definition) is market share and share price. None of this would occur if it wasn't for other browsers chipping away at browser market.

Posted by fALk at 10:56 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

and any nonstandard complient bullshit.

I am fed up. I am a single person webdeveloper who just wants to present some work that is normally not even netcentric. The hours I spend to make everything I program work on every browser can be counted in the thousands by now (and I am truly not exagerating). All I will do from now on is program W3C specified code. I do not care if it looks not good in every browser out there - as long as it works in lynx(pure text browser) and gets through css and html validators 100% and looks good in my reference browser - which is WebKit (Safari). My browser statistic show a huge market drop of Internet Explorer to the point where Firefox has taken over the lead (30:50 the rest beeing Safari and all others under 1%). But its not only Microsoft its also Firefox who will suffer. The only browser that consistently shows the result I want when program to strict W3C guidelines is Safari - there is no but and everyone trying this out should notice this. Firefox with its stupid moz- tags can go to hell to. I program once and that is for a standard compliant web and I would urge every developer out there who is able to to do the same. Make the browser vendors make THEIR product work with us not us work with their products. There is now enough competition out there that the market should decide and once half the webpages look strange with a certain browser the market share will drop like a lead ball into a cream cake.
Seeing that Microsoft is probably off 2 years from Internet Exploder 8 (the major announcement was that it is called IE8 - not that it is finally standard compliant) and that Firefox just completely fucked up a layout that I created over two day through an update from 2.0.0.6 to 2.0.0.11 (textarea not accepting em input like it should). I stick to Safari as this has shown the most consistent in standard conform over the years and is the only browser who passes the ACID test and is the only browser who can perform almost any standard javscript function how its meant to.
I am not saying that my websites won´t work in Internet Explorer (or Firefox) - they certainly will - but they won´t look as pixel perfect.

Oh and I forgot to mention Opera - I hate this 1% market share browser with its own 100% quirks and I will not even test any future site in it. If you do a 3rd party browser make damn sure its 100% standard compliant because except for geeks noone will do you the favour anymore.

I hear more and more webdevelopers being fed up with the nonstandard compliant bullshit that is out there and I hope this turns into a tide that makes all developers of browsers listen and make damn sure their product is W3C standard compliant inside out. This is much more important then to supply 100+ plugins, interface skin hooks or activeNIX controls. Gets the basics done first and add nice stuff later - WebKit is the only browser platform that seems to adhere to that rule. Together with the new Debug Tools that come with Safari this is also the nicest platform to develop for (sorry FireBug you just lost a advocate as the new nightly builds of Webkit allow you to edit your source code right inside the browser!)

The great thing about going standard compliant is that once the browsers are getting standard compliant your webpages magically start looking better ;)

Posted by fALk at 10:04 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

As noted before Movable Type has been put under the GPL (Gnu General Public License) which means its open source and free as in speech and the bare bone version also free as in beer. We have used Movable Type from the beginning and just couldn´t - wouldn´t want to to migrate to a different platform as it always seemed to much hassle. Also we coughed up the small fee for a multisite blog (that was a point where we almost switched). This is all past us now and it seems we have bet on a long distance horse with our blogging software. Now I think a company developing the software and having their business model not to sell the software but to sell distributions and support will be the business model for all software rather sooner then later (quote me in 10 years). Because with a truly open source approach you have tons of helping hands in your code to make it better more stable faster secure and saturate it with plugged in feature at no cost. You as a company are still the ones who know the software best (you coded it from the start) so you are probably the best to help big corporations to install it - meanwhile the free nature of your software allows anyone to get used to and train them self to use it, generating a legion of enthusiast who in return will advocate your software over closed source alternatives giving you company a sustainable income - everyone is happy. This approach is also in my opinion much better then the all non leader community approach of free software (for example wordpress) with no real direction and to many side roads leading to stagnation or confusion among users (drupal is also one of those beasts, buts thats about to change to).
As said I think sooner or later most of the software industry comes around this business model. I am very happy that I don´t need to think about migrating the two active blogs.

Posted by fALk at 8:15 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While I am all for open standards and great free technology there is one piece of the "open source" world which I do not support and never will. Its the OGG container format and its accompanied video codec Theora. The open sourcers are pushing this standard so vocally that you would think their life depends on it. I have never understood this passion because there are obvious quality shortcomings in the standard and also its not as open as it seems - a company made them couldn´t make money off them (because they are just not up to snatch with modern codecs/containers) released them to the public for free opened the source code - but kept the patents just in case.
Now the only thing that does not apply for OGG are the royalties to pay for encoding and that you can have a look at the source code. That OGG was to be included as the recommended audio/video standard in HTML5 is a new to me but I am so much happier that this bid has been dropped (by pressure from Nokia and Apple mostly).
Now I wouldn´t care less if that would not be one of the areas that is vitally important to me. Video quality is really important and Theora falls short on every test I did compared to MP4/H.264. Its bigger has less quality temporal has less quality interframe its generally more blurry. This is why it has failed as a closed source codec and there is no reason to use it just because its open when it is actually a step backward. So I think the decision to leave the video format war open for the time beeing is a good one.
Now can they put a flash video ban in the HTML5 spec please - because even with the inclusion of H.264 its still a plugin in a plugin in a browser playing a resource hungry video - a total waste of processor cycles and something that keeps out 50% of the computers (even a core2 duo with dedicated graphic card chokes on some of the newer highdef flash videos on the net - I don´t even want to know what a 2 year old computer does)

"Ogg's video codec is Theora, which was proprietary. On2 developed it as its closed competition to MPEG-4's H.263 (DivX) and H.264 (AVC) codecs, alongside other competing proprietary codecs from Real and Microsoft (WMV). The winner to shake out of all that competition has been the MPEG-4 standard, which includes both a container and different sets of codecs. MPEG-4 is open and supported by lots of companies, and is also supported by FOSS (x264 is among the best implementations)." - DECS

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/11/1339251

The official discussion

Posted by fALk at 7:24 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Everyone knowing me knows I am a Flashhater since day one. I saw flash as a dying species when it first came out as the arcane nonstandard scripting language (why not use javascript or python?) never appealed to me, neither did the "plug in to the web" approach instead of an "open standard" open code open everything approach. Also I did not like the interface mentality of macromedia (and a recent look at firework cs3 has gotten me those flashbacks) so I never felt good working in Director or Flash or any other macromedia app - except for freehand (which I used before it was a macromedia product - Aldus anyone?).
But I do like vectors and especially do I like fonts - especially crazy nonstandard fraktur fonts. So the ability to include fonts into Flash files and make a layout that playes exactly as the author intended on all computers is an appealing one. My hatred for Flash has trumped the need for alternate fonts and true vectors to this day and will likely into the long long future.
Then about a couple of years ago (1999) Adobe System proposed a standard to the W3C - so did Microsoft to break the Flash supriority on the web with an open standard - both standards fused in t one and became SVG. SVG sounded good back then and still does - true open documented XML document format, truly open source of the generated files, and backed by the W3C - easy to generate with just a text editor if you are so inclined. I was dancing on my chair back then when I remember correctly.

There was two major problems - no easy way to generate content (other then a text editor) and no browser compatibility.

Adobe themselves tried to eliminate the first problem by putting out the ill fated program "flame" or whatever it was called. It sucked - it sucked hard - and it wasn´t for the mac. Then there was years and years of silence until there was an obscure "export to svg" menue point in illustrator in CS1 (I think)

On the browser side it didn´t look better - Adobe did offer an SVG plugin - but this eliminated one of the biggest superiorities over flash. Neither first incarnation of Firefox could play SVGs neither did Safari do a good job using SVGs (so it did at least recognized it in some sort or form without putting out horrendous errors all over the place) - Internetz Exploder I have no idea but my guess that it does not even know what an SVG is to this date without the adobe plugin.

Then Adobe bought Macromedia and one of the biggest reason for the takeover was Flash. Adobe must have seen that not being