Month: July 2004

Categories
Funny Programming

And I was coding… and stumbled upon AI

Well, I decided I would take a stab at AI (Artificial Intelligence). I always found it mind blowing that people are actually trying to do that with technology. Just amazing. So I thought I’d try and simplify AI down to 1 function. Since I believe that essentially life can be made into 1 function.

< ?php
function analyzeReproduction($person) {
  if ((sizeof($person[‘penis’]) < 5) || $person[‘job’] == "programmer"){
    unlink("/usr/local/bin/sex");
    exec("/usr/local/bin/masturbate");
    $resultVar = 0;
  } else {
    exec("set SEXLIVE=true");
    exec("set GREATSEX=true");
    exec("set HOTGIRLS=true");
    exec("/usr/bin/woohoo");
    exec("/usr/bin/ahh");
    $resultVar = 1;
  }
  return $resultVar;
}
?>

Anyone want to guess how it returned when I ran it?

Categories
Mozilla

Happy Birthday

Happy birthday to Mozilla.org! Help them celebrate their birthday by spreading the word and downloading a build of Firefox and Thunderbird.

Categories
Web Development

PHP 5.0 is Released!

The PHP development team is proud to announce the official release of PHP 5.

Some of the key features of PHP 5 include:

  • The Zend Engine II with a new object model and dozens of new features.
  • XML support has been completely redone in PHP 5, all extensions are now focused around the excellent libxml2 library (http://www.xmlsoft.org/).
  • A new SimpleXML extension for easily accessing and manipulating XML as PHP objects. It can also interface with the DOM extension and vice-versa.
  • A brand new built-in SOAP extension for interoperability with Web Services.
  • A new MySQL extension named MySQLi for developers using MySQL 4.1 and later. This new extension includes an object-oriented interface in addition to a traditional interface; as well as support for many of MySQL’s new features, such as prepared statements.
  • SQLite has been bundled with PHP. For more information on SQLite, please visit their website (http://www.sqlite.org/).
  • Streams have been greatly improved, including the ability to access low-level socket operations on streams.
  • And lots more…

Enjoy!
PHP Development Team

Sweet, I’ll have to update Bender this weekend so I can toy around with it.

Categories
Internet

Slashdot again

I made slashdot again with a news contribution.

Robert Accettura writes “Network Solutions has updated its whois interface, giving it an interesting new twist. On top of regular info provided, it shows data that appears to be from Alexa, including a screenshot of the homepage (though not terribly recent), as well as looks up your IP, and displays lots of information on it. It even shows the server type, if it supports SSL, DMOZ, Yahoo listing, traffic ranking, and lock status. This comes right after they announced rapid DNS updates. Perhaps they are trying to win over the geeks before they turn on sitefinder?”

Got to admit, I like the new whois. Lots of info nice and easy to use. Feels good. No complaints. But bring back sitefinder, and they can shove it. I’m sure I’m not alone with that feeling.

That’s all I really have to say.

Categories
Mozilla

WebDAV and Mozilla

I mentioned it briefly the other day. I also commented in a bug regarding the topic. Darin Fisher now is inquiring about WebDAV in the workplace.

I thought I’d take a moment and expand on my thoughts regarding WebDAV:

First a little background on WebDAV. As stated on the website:

WebDAV stands for “Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning”. It is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol which allows users to collaboratively edit and manage files on remote web servers.

It is also the subject of RFC 3744. So now everyone knows what it is.

Why do we need this protocol? Well, simply put, it has some advantages. Since it’s an extension of HTTP, it runs on port 80, which is universally open. As a result, it’s the preferred protocol in the workplace, since no new ports need to be opened to allow it to work. It works with most firewalls. Not every office allows FTP, or SMB. But most allow HTTP. Hence it’s got a sweet spot in every admin’s heart. It also means software developers targeting this market are looking at WebDAV seriously. Since WebDAV means it will most likely work in the office. There’s a reason Apple took WebDAV over FTP as the protocol of choice.

Take for example Stellent. I had the privilege of seeing this during a training last week. They use WebDAV to integrate content management with the desktop.

Now why should Mozilla do what Mac OS and Windows already do? To make Mozilla more diverse of a platform

Look at the strategy: Mozilla is flexible and extendable. Many companies have created products based on WebDAV, adding their own touches to WebDAV for added functionality. They could do so on the Mozilla platform, and run on all operating systems.

Mozilla could publish to WebDAV from products like Composer/NVU, and Calendar.

Mozilla could use WebDAV for remote profiles over HTTP. Allowing you perhaps to use your home profile while on the road.

Composer, Firefox, and Sunbird can all use a WebDAV component to their advantage. GoLive, Internet Explorer, and iCal, their respective competitors already support WebDAV.

So ultimately, we would have a cross platform product that could leverage WebDAV, allowing software developers to use extensions on Firefox to provide the functionality they do right now with Applications for Windows. This potentially has implications for Linux, since the workplace has been PC-zone for some time. This could open things up for platform independence.

Just my $0.02

Categories
Spam

And I Realized I Became A Man

Porn Spam They say there are milestones in every male’s life as they travel on that common journey from being a boy to a man. Well in the digital age, it’s still holds true, but it takes a unique twist.

Spam occasionally does (shocker) get through spam filters, and one got me today. It seems like all of a sudden the legal age for a porn star became younger than me (rather than older, as it has been most of my life). Somehow I never thought about it.

Talk about weird.

Anyway, that’s my random thought of the day. Growing older than porn stars.

Yea, this is pretty silly, but you have to admit, it’s a strange realization.

Categories
Apple

Apple and the Internet

Anyone still not reading David Hyatt’s Blog should start doing so ASAP. If you read this blog, and find anything relevant, you will most definitely find his relevant. He’s a browser guru with his hand in many things. A definite site to bookmark. A few comments on this whole Safari/Dashboard thing…

Personally, I wish it were done in XUL, and XUL were fully implemented on Mac OS X via Web Kit. Would have been really neat. Personally I find XUL based interfaces to feel quite natural at this point. Even Mac OS X’s Firefox is feeling good. With Apple’s concentration it would have been great. But they did go with the second best (and still good) option of HTML, with lots of standards support. And that’s still a good solution, though not my personal favorite.

I’d also like to make note of a good quote here:

We have a phrase we like to use here on the Safari team, and that’s “real-world standards compliance.” What that means is that where possible we attempt to be fully compatible with the W3C standards, but we also want to support the real-world standards, i.e., extensions that for better or worse have become de facto standards. If you really do believe we should not have implemented contenteditable, then you are simply out of touch with reality.

Hyatt does say something that makes me feel really comfortable with Apple’s approach on standards:

finally we have submitted all of our extensions to the WHAT-WG for review. The slider in particular is already in the Web Forms draft. It is our hope that these HTML extensions will ultimately be standardized by a working group, but I wanted to emphasize that we are working with other browser vendors such as Opera and Mozilla to ensure that these extensions are implementable in those browsers and that these extensions can be standardized. We are not simply off “doing our own thing.”

This I’d really like to see happen. I’d ideally like to see these things work on multiple browsers, just like the new plugin system coming around. Perhaps Mozilla can be setup to allow these new Widgets to work? Would be nice to see Apple, Mozilla team up.

Lastly, regarding namespace…

Webkit is looking to use:

http://www.apple.com/2004/xhtml-extended/

IBM adapts HTML and uses:

http://www.ibm.com/data/dtd/v11/ibmxhtml1-transitional.dtd

I kind of perfer the /dtd/ and have a documented DTD available, so my ideal solution would be:

http://www.apple.com/dtd/1.0/xhtml-extended.dtd/

holding the format dtd/version/item.

Just my $0.02.

Categories
Blog

MT 3.0 upgrade

Upgraded to MovableType 3.0 tonight. So far, smooth.

I’ve got one question though:

Anyone know of a hack to get MT to correctly encode HTML entities? Hence making & &amp;? I’d appreciate any help. It’s an essential little hack if you expect any page generated by MT to validate.

Other than that, seems good to go. Post any issues you might have.

BTW: It’s not required yet, but signup for TypeKey. If Spam continues, I might eventually require it. But for now, I’ll leave it off, and see how we do.

For the curious, the upgrade took about 1hr in total for all the installing, playing, config etc.

Much faster performance. Especially posting/rebuilding.

That’s all, good night.

Categories
Mozilla

Features of the future

Well, I thought I’d sit down and be a visionary for a moment, and think about what it would take for Mozilla Thunderbird/Firefox to become the ultimate product for me. A few are bugs, a few are in the process, and a few are wishful thinking. Here’s what I came up with:

Firefox

  • Take Livemark’s to a new degree. I’m thinking personal portal. As users install livemarks, and visit sites, Mozilla’s internal start page puts things in priority (machine learning). Making my start page totally feel perfect for me. It learns what I visit, harvests those sites, and makes things work just like I would work.
  • WebDAV is awesome, but Mozilla doesn’t have it. We could really leverage it’s power by supporting it. Corporations love it because it uses port 80 (don’t need to ask the networking group to open some obscure port). So no open holes, just regular HTTP. Some Asset management software already supports it, other products are starting too. One thing some have done is ‘extend’ WebDAV to support their own unique filesystems (versioning etc.). So in our case, a company could write a firefox extension to add their own stuff to it, making Firefox ideal for the workplace. WebDAV is increasing in popularity, it’s a sweet solution to an old problem.
  • Patch updates – that’s right. No more ‘download the whole release’. But the ability to download what’s changed, and install through the updater UI. We need it, badly. It would save some serious bandwidth for Mozilla.org to update a .1 release without users downloading the whole client. Especially when not every file changed. Such as 0.9 to 0.9.1 would have been an ideal time for such a situation. Download in the background, and ask to install when the user quits. Simple and they didn’t even feel it.
  • ‘Add Engines’ needs to use update.mozilla.org
  • Pressing the spacebar with ‘find as you type’ enabled, shouldn’t cause the new search bar to open. It should just scroll down the page.

Thunderbird

  • Calendar Integration – This will be big. Really big
  • PalmSync in the installer
  • MAPI bugfixes (this is a long process I bet)
  • With Calendar integration needs to be some sort of ‘landing’. Similar to what Outlook does (but without the sucking). I see something a little like for Firefox (mentioned up above). But with Mail&News taking priority, as well as Calendar integration into the system. Tell me whose contacting me, what I need to do, and make it easy.
  • Bring back ‘open in new tab’ if Firefox is the default browser.

Both

  • Firefox and Thunderbird are both moving to take advantage of things like RSS, and Atom feeds. But they are separate Apps. When users use both Apps, they should be smart and keep in sync, so I can have it all available in both Apps. If I add it in Firefox, it goes to Thunderbird, and vice versa.
  • GRE

If something here isn’t a bug, feel free to file a bug, feel free to provide bug numbers, feel free to implement one of these. cc me on any bug that’s relevant to the above list. Have more things? Let it out. It’s the only way the best thigns make it into Mozilla, is when people say what they need. Support an idea? Say it, don’t like one? Say it!

Categories
Mozilla

+1% for Mozilla

That’s right. Pretty interesting read actually.

Go Mozilla. If we can do 1% every 2 weeks, that means in 18 months….

Ah… sweet bliss.