Less Wrong

Less Wrong‘s title is a surprisingly good description of its contents. Its more verbose tagline “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” is even more so. Given it’s operated by Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University as you can expect, it’s slightly more intellectual. Anyone with an interest in cognitive science, decision-making, or just human psychology in general will likely find at least half of the posts mesmerizing.

Hot Chicks with Stormtroopers

Hot Chicks with Stormtroopers is also a blog with a very descriptive name. This is one of those websites that you didn’t know there was a need or market until you found it. Now I’m not sure what I would do without it. The mere fact that there is enough content that fits this specific niche to fill a regularly updated blog is in itself just amazing to me. The internet truly has everything for everyone.

Yahoo! Answer Fail

Yahoo! Answer Fail falls in the same family as the more popular FAIL blog but with a specific focus on Yahoo! Answers. I can’t help but read and fear for the future of humanity. I suspect at least half of Yahoo! Answers posters are just jokers, but I can’t help but think that some of these people are really out there. Be warned, if you visit this site you will spend no less than an hour, and likely more reading through some of the saddest examples of humanity out there.

Fast forward to 2009. Yahoo is now in the process of opening up Traffic Server as an Apache project. It’s already in incubator. Yahoo says it’s capable of 30,000 requests per server. Noteworthy is that this runs on generic hardware.

These days most websites use either Squid, Nginx, Pound or Varinish on the open source side. On the proprietary side there’s Citrix NetScaler, Foundry (now Brocade) ServerIron, Zeus ZXTM or F5′s Big-IP. The proprietary side can be either expensive software running on generic hardware or an appliance (which is generally a Intel based server with a custom modified Linux install for low maintenance and top performance).

At this point it’s apparently not 64-bit and doesn’t have native IPv6 support. However it appears to be usable and likely competitive with some of the other stuff out there already. Yahoo has been using it all along, and I hear they are pretty popular (problems aside).

It should be noted that commercial CDN’s aren’t really an alternative for reverse proxy or load balancer since they still require a robust and redundant origin. If anything they will reduce your requirements, not eliminate them.

Given everyone’s interest in scaling computing quickly and cheaply this is pretty noteworthy open source event. It tends to be an afterthought but these applications can be critical. Squid handles 78% of Wikipedia’s requests. Given all their traffic, you can see how it matters.

It will be interesting to see if a community builds around Traffic Server and if it sees adoption.

They claim to offer ways to let websites opt out of their tracking but it’s a true double-edged sword as they don’t play nice with a standard robots.txt file. Take a look at what they are doing here:

The Webwise system observes the rules that a website sets for the Googlebot, Slurp (Yahoo! agent) and “*” (any robot) user agents. Where a website’s robots.txt file disallows any of these user agents, Webwise will not profile the relevant URL. As an example, the following robots.txt text will prevent profiling of all pages on a site:

Rather than use a unique user agent they are copying that of Google and Yahoo. The only way to block them via a robots.txt file is to tell one of the two largest search engines in the western world not to index your site. This seems fundamentally wrong.

There is an email address where you can provide a list of domains to exclude, but that requires intervention and updating a list of domains when you create a site. This obviously doesn’t scale.

Now I’m curious. Is piggybacking off of another companies user agent considered a trademark violation? From what I understand they aren’t broadcasting it, just honoring it. If I were Google or Yahoo I’d be pretty annoyed. Particularly Yahoo since there are websites who will just block Slurm given Google’s dominance in search. Yes there are many user-agent spoofing products out there (including wget and curl), but nobody to my knowledge is crawling web pages for a commercial purpose hiding behind another company name.

robots.txt is a somewhat flawed system as not all user agents even obey it (sadly) though it’s one of the only defenses without actual blocks that exist.

Get detailed reporting within minutes after an action occurs on your website. Quickly identify dips in key site metrics or monitor the performance of new content. Seeing the impact of website and marketing changes immediately makes it much easier to optimize them. Yahoo! Web Analytics also maintains historical data so you can go back at any time to review old data for new insight, or compare the present to the past without any changes to your page tags.

Interesting. I wonder if this will light a fire under Google’s butt to deliver real-time analytics as well. Urchin wasn’t really designed for real-time data. Google’s obviously done a lot of work with it to build Google Analytics. I wonder if that’s the next step for them.

It supports any POP3 or IMAP account similar to Thunderbird, with options for Gmail and Yahoo Plus in the wizard (for those who don’t know what type of email account those are).

My general impression is pretty neat, but the UI needs work. It often has scroll bars to view the contents of a window (just like a webpage). This is normal in a browser, but just feels strange in what is designed to be like a client side application. Even setup has this problem.

So far I still think Thunderbird and Apple Mail provide a better desktop experience. But Zimbra’s the new kid on the block, so I wouldn’t underestimate it. It is Open Source. It will be interesting to see who contributes to it.

If anyone else tried it, I’m curious to know what you thought of it.

var httpRequest;
if (window.XMLHttpRequest) { // Mozilla, Safari, ...
    httpRequest = new XMLHttpRequest();
} else if (window.ActiveXObject) { // IE
    httpRequest = new ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP");
}

That’s right, IE 6 didn’t support the native xmlHttpRequest object (more here). This is just one of many examples in JavaScript and CSS. document.all anyone?

The end result of this problem became to be known as the “Web Standards” movement. Simply put it’s an idea that code should follow a standard that results in consistent output across all browsers on various platforms. Write once, run anywhere. While it’s taken years for this to manifest, it’s slowly become a reality. Firefox, Safari, Opera have fairly consistent rendering (at least in comparison to the mess of just a few years ago on the browser scene. IE 6 was fairly poor in terms of modern web development, but IE 7 made progress, and IE 8 is Microsoft’s greatest effort to date to bring their browser up to speed.

Unfortunately, all that “progress” is really catch up and making specs from several years ago work across browsers as the biggest area of problems (CSS 2) become a recommendation in 1998. 10 years and a few days ago. Web sites, and developers want to do new things.

As a result groups like WHATWG and HTML 5 formed with the intent to provide modern features such as 2D drawing (canvas), media playback, drag and drop, offline mode, and storage. All things desperately desired by web developers. Some of this stuff to date has been supplemented by the use of plugins such as Flash which can provide some of this functionality, in particular video. It should be noted the development of standards is a historically slow process since it’s essentially a bunch of geeks arguing until their keyboards wear out. This process takes a long time.

To speed things up, some once again bypassed standards and instead decided to implement things on their own:

• Apple implemented Canvas, which has some notable concerns regarding intellectual property, though can still be standardized (and is still in the HTML5 specs as I’m typing this).
• Google released Gears which originally provided offline support for web browsers, but has since expanded to allow for better desktop integration and running javascript in the background on browsers it supports.
• Yahoo just announced BrowserPlus, which is an API “that allows developers to create rich web applications with desktop capabilities” (that’s verbatim from their page).
• Mozilla added to Firefox 3 Online/Offline events, Web-based protocol handling, which are both part of the WHATWG Web Application 1.0 specs. In addition, APNG and text extensions to Canvas were added, though it’s noted that they are experimental and essentially Firefox only for now.

There are dozens of other little things in various browsers that are specific to them, but I won’t even go into that. These are just the more high profile things at this time.

Does anyone else see the problem here? At the rate things are progressing, it’s going to be pretty tough to build a competitive and user-friendly web application without requiring at least one framework being installed on the client side. This means before a user can enjoy a good web experience they will need to install:

• Standards Compliant Web Browser (may come with OS)
• Latest version of Adobe Flash (essentially the video standard right now)
• BrowserPlus (for some sites)
• Google Gears (for some sites)

This really is starting to feel like another browser-bubble, this one being more of a “browser feature bubble”. People rapidly trying to add features to meet application needs without standardizing. This time instead of building it all into the browser, they are also providing plugins to add the functionality. This is marginally better at best. While it allows for support on multiple browsers/platforms it restricts innovation since not all browsers/platforms are supported.

Google Gears still doesn’t support the iPhone, despite it running in Safari due to Apple’s restrictions on 3rd party software. It also doesn’t run on all portable Linux devices, or Blackberry’s. Not to mention Opera or Camino. It works on other Mozilla browsers that support extensions provided you tell your users to follow these instructions (you can essentially call that “unsupported”).

Yahoo’s BrowserPlus is no darling either. As of yet, it only supports Intel Mac’s running 10.4 or later (sorry PPC millions), and only Windows / Mac running Firefox 2+ or IE 7+. That leaves out millions of IE 6, Safari, and Opera users. Plus all of the mobile users (who are growing in number). Yahoo promises that will improve, but we’ve got to wait for Yahoo engineers to get around to that. If Yahoo is acquired by someone, who knows what that companies priorities will be for this project.

Apple implemented Canvas in Safari, Mozilla implemented it in Firefox. But it’s adoption has been slow from a developer’s point of view since IE doesn’t support it. There are several libraries (including one by Google) that attempt to add support, but they are pretty slow and don’t provide the same experience to IE users (in particular older IE 6 users). APNG is supported in Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5, both not released just yet. APNG degrades nicely, but if your using an animation, you want an animation for all users, not just Firefox and Opera users.

Yes, adoption can grow for canvas, Yahoo and Google can support more platforms and browsers, but that doesn’t fix the root problems here:

• The entire web is waiting on a company to update their enhancements to support a platform/browser. Open sourcing the code doesn’t really fix the problem since distribution is still problematic. Also just increases the chances of forking which makes it even more painful. Installing a browser in bits and pieces sucks. Users shouldn’t be subjected to that.
• There are multiple API’s to essentially do the same thing (drag & drop, offline support, video, etc.).

Does anyone else see this new form of fragmenting to be problematic?

While I agree the features each vendor is adding in are desired, I don’t think this is the right way to do it. One of a few things will happen here:

• After a period of time, one or more of these API’s will become deprecated as one becomes dominant. That’s a major pain for developers who choose the “wrong” one, and an expense for companies who are in that situation. Nobody wants to be in this situation.
• Things will continue to fragment and we’ll be back to the “Designed For Netscape” era, but it will be “Designed for Firefox 3+, Google Gears, Flash 9.0 r124, whatever”. I get a chill just thinking about it.
• Horrifically complicated code that essentially supports multiple products by using a subset of their functionality. This might be the “best” and it still sucks on a massive scale since it increases costs for development and decreases fun. You could use a JS library to abstract functionality to a more platform neutral API, but more libraries add overhead you may not want. Not to mention more code your relying on someone else for.

None of these are a good outcome.

I’m not saying that the standards route is perfect. There’s no binding requirement for anyone to adopt anything, or even accomplish a final spec. There are many half implemented specs, and many that never go anywhere. Perhaps that’s part of the problem. Perhaps it’s that standardization has historically been a closed process, though it’s slowly opening up (thanks WHATWG). Participation is also pretty touch as not many can manage to read all that email.

Browser vendors are not without their faults either. They are historically a slow to fully adopt specs, and generally don’t collaborate on where they will start their implementation. Partial support is as good as no support unless a it’s adopted uniformly across all popular browsers. Perhaps that’s a place that browser vendors can best help developers. By simply agreeing to implement XY.

That said, one could create a plugin that implements a standard. It’s already be done. Adobe released an SVG plugin (prior to the whole Macromedia deal as I’m not sure what the status is considering the Flash business is a closed source competitor), there’s also an XForms plugin for Mozilla browsers.

I really hope some caution is used before we have a browser feature bubble. This is just going to become a mess of technologies that nobody can keep up with. A lot of progress has been made in the past few years to fix mistakes of the past. Is this process of add-ons really the right method of giving web developers what they want?

To be fair, Google’s Aaron Boodman recently blogged regarding Google Gears and standards. And does indicate the desire to become become compatible with HTML5:

Currently, the Gears Database and LocalServer modules are not fully compatible with the HTML5 proposals for the same functionality. This is only because those specs were written after Gears was released, and not because of any desire to be different. In fact, we were involved in the design of both HTML5 specs, and we are currently implementing the proposal for database access.

This is good, but it’s still a moving target on a moving target as Google Gears is in beta and still being changed to match specs which are still evolving.

To avoid any misconceptions, I do think these features are a good thing. I like canvas, offline support, drag & drop integration, and want to implement them myself as well. But I don’t think the process to add them has been successful thus far. I think it’s just asking for trouble later on and will take a long time to repair. This isn’t about Firefox extensions, or javascript libraries like jQuery, YUI or Prototype. I love them and use them every day. This is about having non standard ways to do things that clearly need to be standardized (and are in the process of being standardized), and encouraging other developers to implement a method that’s tied to a particular piece of software.

Who is at fault here? Pretty much everyone. Standards bodies are to slow for a fast moving industry for starters. Secondly browser vendors fail to coordinate their progress on spec implementations. While nobody expects CSS 3 to be implemented overnight, of vendors would agree on milestones in which certain features would be implemented, that would greatly help implementation for web developers. Lastly plugin developers need to ensure what they are offering is widely available, free of any licensing problems that would impede implementation in other products, and are on a parallel track for standardization.

The web wouldn’t have succeeded if you needed to install a plugin for a <a href=""/>, or <img/>.

It gives many great examples on how to implement, as well as suggestions based on what some of the biggest sites on the web are doing (including Yahoo, the authors employer). I found it pretty helpful because it saves hours worth of research on what other sites are doing to improve their performance. For that reason alone it’s a worthwhile book to checkout. For each rule there’s enough discussion to help you decide if you can implement an improvement on your own site or not. Most sites are limited by their legacy systems such as cms, processes (including human) and audience in what they can actually do. Unless you’ve got a serious budget, you likely fail rule #2 (use a CDN) right off the bat. Regardless there’s likely a few tips you can take advantage of. It’s also a very fast book to get through.

Most steps are pretty quick to implement provided they are feasible in your situation. Overall one of the best “make it better” tech books I’ve seen regarding web development. One of the few that actually appeared worth purchasing (and I did). The majority of the tips require a somewhat tech savvy approach to web development, the book isn’t oriented much towards web designers (with the notable exception of reducing the # of requests by using CSS and better use of images) or casual webmasters. It’s important for those who understand the importance of HTTP headers, but could use some help deciding on best practices, and those who want to know how the small things can add up.

Interestingly enough, I learned about the book by trying the YSlow extension which essentially evaluates a page against the rules suggested in the book. Interesting from a marketing perspective I guess. Overall this blog evaluates ok (about as well as it ever will considering I’m not putting it on a CDN anytime soon). Though I guess I could add some expires headers in a few places.

These projects could include a wind farm in India or a small-scale run of the river hydroelectric project in Brazil. We’re also looking to invest in emerging clean technologies.

Interesting. I wonder if we will see things like carbon neutral VoIP, carbon neutral bandwidth, carbon neutral data centers / colocation / hosting?

…we looked for those searches that were very popular in 2006 but were not as popular in 2005 — the explosive queries, the topics that everyone obsessed over….

It always proves to be an interesting bit of year-end data to look at. Yahoo on the other hand keeps things a little more up to date with the Buzz Index, also a very good read. For example the impact of President Ford’s death in searches. Very cool data. Hopefully one day Google will do something similar. I’d love to see how their audiences compare on current events as they happen.

• Need To Sign In To Get Correct Listings – Before I didn’t need to be signed in, it just saved a cookie with my prefs. This keeps my account more secure (separate sign-in) and still lets me quickly glance at my listings. I noticed for the past month or two even that wasn’t working very well. It seemed to forget my settings. Now I need to login or stay logged in (or get generic listings).
• URL’s Should Be Forever – If they live short of that, use a redirect. The listings used to be http://tv.yahoo.com/grid it’s now http://tv.yahoo.com/listing. Breaking bookmarks is taboo on the web. Especially big pages like that which are very bookmarkable.
• Abuse Of AJAX – It feels as if ajax was used only because it looks cool and trendy. It’s unnecessary. They should load the whole grid at once. Each section of the grid seems to be 8 -10 channels long. And one request for each section. The ajax response isn’t slim either, it’s raw html (likely inserted with innerHTML for performance reasons as DOM is typically slower). Now to scroll to channel 63, I need several of these requests. It’s slows things down despite being ajax and technically asynchronous.
• Hard To Tune Navigation – The time navigation is hard to accurately pinpoint, making the old pulldown list of times in :30 intervals much easier to use. This is driving me nuts. I want 8:30!
• More Clicking, Less TV Watching – Clicking on a link does this drop down effect. Only then can you get full show info (unless you open in new tab/window). 2 clicks where it used to be only 1.
• “Info” Page Is Like A Splash Page – That info page is also very slow, unlike the old one which was very lean and fast. Rather than have upcoming episodes of the show listed as well as credits (good for seeing guest stars on The Simpsons), it’s filled with a lot of useless info (show ratings, reviews, link to buy DVD, promo photo’s, news related to the show). To get the good stuff (detailed info on show, credits, upcoming episodes)… yea all separated onto individual pages now. Lots of clicking.

I also hear of browser issues (Safari), but haven’t tested myself so I won’t go into that.

Now this doesn’t make much sense. They presumably went to ajax to make common tasks require less pageloads and increase usability and fluency of the site (click show title for more info), but instead I think it causes users to load more pages to view info they are accustomed to. The side effect on all this is that it’s slower for users who want some info on what’s on. I understand the need to monetize the pages, but at least make it worth clicking on.

Apparently they are working on things, and even addressing feedback and they deserve serious credit for that. It would be wrong to not credit them for this effort.

By the way: I wouldn’t mind turning off the “Record To TiVo” buttons. I don’t own a TiVo. Perhaps ask for the users pref when getting their TV listing info? Maybe that’s just me.

There does seem to be alternatives. TV.com and Zap2it.com as well as my employer’s site ShowBuzz (see, I do disclose relationships).

Needless to say, as a web developer and a TV addict, this redesign was very interesting from my perspective. I’ll be keeping an eye on it.

Disclaimer: Obviously, this post is my opinion only and does not in any way reflect the opinions of my employer.