Charl van Niekerk » Blog: December 2004

Main

Latest

Happy New Year

My best new year's wishes for 2005 to all my readers!

2004 has seen so many advances that I actually don't even feel like starting to make a list. However, here is my list of top things for 2004 (yes, another one of those...):

George has seen long overdue ADSL rollout.
We got the start-up of the GROSS UG.
Firefox has seen unimaginable success (more than 14 million downloads on the clock at time of writing).
Thunderbird is chasing that success.
Weblogs have become much more popular, and open source has also seen its advances.
The first TV show dedicated to OSS has started to air.

To all South Africans, I just want to say: Mag julle vet, gesond en skatryk wees in 2005!. (That roughly translates to: May you all be fat, healthy and stinking rich in 2005!).

Just keep in mind that being fat is considered by many to be a compliment here in case you think I'm rude. So therefore, I have a different message to all those people overseas: May you all be phat, healthy and stinking rich in 2005!

But make sure you keep those websites compliant, otherwise I might just be forced to take back what I said... ;-)

Feed Reading Habits

I am one of those people who like to read all of my feed items directly from my feed reader. I hate to be forced into opening up the item in a separate tab just to scan through/read it. It's not that I don't want to take the time to open up the person's website and marvel at their design, but we're living in an age where there is a constant information overload.

Currently, I have more than a hundred feeds in my Bloglines account. And it's growing every day. Bloglines is one of the best tools I've ever used, and I use it on a daily basis. I can't even imagine keeping up if it wasn't there to help me speed up my feed reading habits.

Many other people don't feel precisely the same way as I do about reading feeds (or maybe their blogrolls are just smaller). They use feeds more like a notification service - to notify them when a new item arrives so that they can click on the link and go the author's site. That's fine and all that, but not everybody has that kind of time or patience.

On the Internet, this has resulted in a number of different feed formats since the various authors who have their content syndicated all have their own idea of the "perfect feed". Some sites only syndicate titles, others summaries, others no summaries but full bodies, and yet others syndicate separate summaries and bodies.

Since people like to read their feeds differently, at the end it's better to leave this choice up to the user. One of the things that makes the Atom specification so great is that you have two separate elements: atom:summary and atom:content. I would recommend every site to use both elements just like they're supposed to be used. Feed readers should allow the user to configure how they want to read their feeds.

Some sites have multiple feeds, each with their own formats. Like, for example, one feed for "full posts" and another for "summaries". This is probably better than not having an option at all; however this does mean that switching from "summaries" to "full posts" requires the user to find and register to a different feed instead of just flipping a switch in their feed readers. Not very dymanic, powerful and customizable if you ask me (those things being precisely what Atom is for).

The future we want to work towards is definitely one that allows proper, one-feed-for-all syndication and good customization support for all of the different reading habits of users in feed readers. Atom is very powerful, and it is far from being used to its fullest potential at the moment.

Domain Extentions Considered a Pain in the Ass

This whole "considered harmful" movement is getting really boring. I mean, everything is considered harmful these days. What's next? "Life Considered Harmful"? "Oxygen Considered Harmful"? Please, don't breathe, we're gonna die!!!

Anyway, this post will try to deviate from that at least a little by being considered "a pain in the ass" (well, not this post hopefully, rather domain extentions, but probably this post too for many, I don't know).

For my purposes, when I talk about "domain extentions" I collectively refer to all of the following: ccTLDs like .nl and .de, gTLDs like .com and public SLDs like .co.za and .co.uk.

.aero .biz .com .coop .info .museum .name .net .org .pro .gov .edu .mil .int .mobi .crap... What the heck? All of these are actual gTLDs (except .crap of course, but that will probably be the next step - having trash on the Internet is nothing new).

And if that isn't enough, there are doesens of local equivalents. Just look at the list of public SLDs for South Africa: .ac.za .alt.za .bourse.za .city.za .co.za .edu.za .gov.za .law.za .mil.za .net.za .ngo.za .nom.za .org.za .school.za .tm.za .web.za.

Ok, not all of these are so bad. But I mean, you must go look at the descriptions of some of those domains! .ngo.za is exclusively for NGOs (as if .org.za won't do the trick for all organisations), and one domain (.alt.za) is Definition not yet available. No wonder, I would also have had trouble thinking up a definition for that one!

Ok, so what exactly is the big semantic difference between .com and .biz? .com is for "commercial" and .biz is for businesses. So, if I had to go and register a domain for my (international) company, under which gTLD would I register?

And then, what if I have a local (South African) company? I could register a .co.za, and if I own a registered trademark, I could even go and register a .tm.za.

However, the choice is not only as simple as that. Many South African companies are now registering international domains like .coms. So eventually I would probably end up having to register under all of the following to make sure my clients can find me: .co.za .tm.za .com .biz. Totally absurd, and rather expensive too!

A good example of this absurdity is South African airline companies. To mention a few: SAA, Kulula.com and 1time.aero. And yes, the gTLAs of the last two are part of those companies' "normal" name. Who says the Internet age hasn't arrived in Africa?

SAA went for a .com as flysaa.com, even while they had a perfectly good local domain being saa.co.za. (To make it worse, they have a JavaScript redirect to flysaa.com that doesn't work properly in Firefox, but leaving it at that for now...) Kulula.com also went with a .com obviously as their name suggests, and 1time.aero was "smart" enough to register a .aero!

Not very consistent if you ask me! All three of these companies should probably have chosen .co.zas as their best option, taking into account that none of them can be considered "international" companies AFAIK (although they might fly international, but that doesn't mean they are international companies).

Let's take another example. Say I have a museum called "Old Nonsence", what domain would I register? oldnonsence.com (since the focus of .com has changed somewhat from "commercial" to "general purpose"), oldnonsence.org (because a museum is supposed to be non-profit after all) or oldnonsence.museum (a specialised domain just for museums). Atm, the most semantic option would probably be oldnonsence.museum, but what about the time before that respective gTLD existed? Let's say I registered oldnonsence.org a few years ago, would I now have to change my entire domain and set up redirects just because somebody decided we need .museum?

But let's say I know about a museum called "Old Nonsence", but I don't know the domain. Let's cut Google out of the picture for the moment; what domain would I "guess"? Precisely, I'll have to be guessing around until I land upon the correct domain by chance, because there are simply too many possibilities.

The big problem with the "old" Internet was that there were only three public gTLDs: .com .net .org. Not everybody is a company, a network or an organization. What about a personal website. That's why we needed .name which we luckily got now.

And then what about information-driven sites which are neither specifically profit nor non-profit? Take for example a site where you provide information for free, but to cover your costs and to make a living you ask for donations or you place advertisements on your site. You don't specifically want to call it a "commercial" website, because after all, you're providing the information for free. However, you also won't completely classify yourself as an "organization", because you do this from home on your own as an individual. Anyway, so then we got .info...

Another stupid example. Let's say I have an open source project, and I want to register a domain for it. Obviously the domain will have to be considered "international" in almost all cases. I'm doing this on my own, so there's no "organization" involved. I'm not a company, I'm just doing this for the fun of it (or because I need it and I want to share my efforts with the rest of the world). It's not specifically an information-driven site, so .info won't apply. Now what??? You end up compromising (like most other people) with a .org.

However, now one day I decide that this free-thing is no longer for me. I want to start making money out of it by selling my product, maybe still under an open source license, but yet I want to follow the route of RedHat and SuSE by making it somewhat commercial. So now it would probably be best to switch over to a .com. If I'm lucky, the domain will still be available, and I can register it and set up redirects. If I'm not so lucky, well, go figure...

Ok, so let's say I run a personal weblog like this one, and now I need to host it on my own server, so obviously I need a domain. Which one to choose? I'm South African, so I could choose a general-purpose SLD like .co.za However, .nom.za (local equivalent of .name it seems) would probably fit me better.

However, let's take it as a question of "digital identity", because that is after all what a domain has always been and will continue to be into the future. If somebody from overseas (like America, Europe or Australia) knew my username charlvn, and they wanted to find my new weblog, what would the "obvious" choices be if they were not used to South African domain names? Probably one of the following: charlvn.com charlvn.org charlvn.name or even charlvn.info. And then my fellow South Africans would probably have counted on one of the following: charlvn.co.za charlvn.org.za charlvn.nom.za.

If that isn't bad enough, say I now plan on moving overseas (something which I've not ruled out and is far from unlikely - apparently there's about 350 thousand South Africans in London alone, and we shouldn't forget about other hotspots like Canada, New Zealand and Australia). If I bargained on a South African domain earlier, I'll have to register a new domain, like for example under the .uk ccTLD (if I choose to move to London). That means more redirects and more domains to administer.

Every time I mention "redirects", you must keep in mind that these aren't only a general pain in the ass in most circumstances (remember that Cool URIs don't change), but they can also be costly. I'm speaking about increased hosting fees (for most of us) and increased domain registration fees (the more domains you have, the more you have to pay for).

If you ask me, it's all a plot. Think about it... Many companies are prompted to register more than one domain under all of the relevant (and even some irrelevant) domain extentions, both local and international, simply so that other companies can't register them and take part of their business from unexpecting clients that get the domain wrong (not that we can blame the end users with all of the various domain extentions floating around these days - even technical people that work with this kind of stuff daily can get confused). "Stealing" domains away from other companies are nothing new - just think about microsoft.org until Micro$oft themselves bought it over.

Eventually, it all comes down to the money. Create a new gTLD or public SLD and make companies feel obliged to register under it, just for the sake of preserving their name.

As far as I understand it all, the situation the W3C is trying to work towards is this: You have one path to a specific document or other file. Let's say for example, http://www.somecompany.com/somefile. Content negotiation will take place, and somefile will be served to the user agent in the best matching language and file type (of course you should be able to override that too, but that's a different topic). Then, stylesheets will take care of the media-dependent presentation. Very cool.

Domains like .mobi are blatantly evil because it encourages device-dependant domains. ccTLDs are often used in an evil way too by serving language according to domain (just think Google with google.nl, google.de, etc). I'm just glad that we haven't dropped to a level that we start serving file type according to domain. :-)

At the end, it all comes down to URI semantics. I don't really see the point with domain extentions; are they supposed to give some extra semantic value to domains? Is this actually useful in the first place, and if so, to what extent? The current situation is that these semantics are abused, not only by the various gTLDs and public SLDs, but also by the people that register domains under them. We have for so long looked at markup semantics, however aren't URI semantics and more specifically domain semantics just as important?

In modern times, more and more companies are starting to do business internationally, and less individuals feel the need to "bind" themselves to one specific country. I think certain individuals at the ICANN will have to do some serious rethinking about some things...

Merry Christmas

I hope you have a very merry foxxy Christmas and a prosporous open-sourcy, web-standardy new year!

No, I'm not dead (yet)

Update: I have added Bloglines subscription links too to make it easier for Bloglines fanatics like myself to subscribe.

Ach, I'm barely hanging on here between all of the work. Sorry for not posting.

Ok, first of all. If you like open source, subscribe to this feed [bloglines] (that's Atom obviously, I'm not even going to bother linking to the RSS feed, but if you look on the site then you'll find a link) because from now on there's where most the open source posts are going. Also, if you want to keep yourself updated with Fidelis, why don't you just subscribe to its Atom feed [bloglines] too.

I'm going to start work on the Fidelis website now since I'm finally getting a bit of free time again. I am still very busy with the Firefox 5 Minute Challenge, a little project for Spread Firefox that I'm helping Lachlan with atm, but luckily I'm almost finished with that! I'll keep you updated.

I have a few interesting rants coming up, including one about all of these funny new (and old) TLDs and one about IE, XHTML, and this whole W3C thing with the mime-types.

Also, watch Lachlan's Log, he's got the one superb post coming out now after the other. It's all about Unicode, technical terms, and other things. Finally, there will be no excuse for ignorance anymore. After this, expect to be flamed, snarled at, joked about, and what not if you don't know your stuff. ;-)

If you ask me, we need more of this. At first, when very few people knew anything about web standards, we used to have a bunch of people instructing the masses on the basics through their weblogs. Now, most of the people that care already know the basics, so now we are fighting about the finer details of what we already know instead of progressing into the more advanced areas. Please people, let's get out of this. Let's say what must be said and move on! Everybody will have their own version of perfection, so let's instruct them and leave them to make their own decisions, if we agree with them on everything or not.

Go Open Episode 5

The term "Southern Smile" refers to a group of developing countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) that are working together to implement open source software.

India has its Hole-in-the-Wall project, and now South Africa has its Digital Doorway project. This allows the community access to a computer which is safely locked away. Apparently it has drawn huge success in both countries so far.

They interviewed John "Maddog" Hall from Stanford University in Frankfurt. Obviously, "in Frankfurt" describes John (at the time of interview) and not Standford. He spoke about open source and stated that the largest computer in the world with more than a hundred CPUs (used for processing weather) will apparently be running Linux.

Mark Shuttleworth talked about Live CDs. The term "Live CD" typically refers to a CD that allows Linux to be booted straight from the CD without the need to install first. This is extremely handy in demonstrating Linux, and is also nice because now you can first try it out to see if it will run on your system before actually installing.

Knoppix is probably the most popular live CD, and Ubuntu also has a Live CD version. You can also find a list at Frozentech.

The Freedom League is a compagne to get geeks to install open source software on practically any computer they can lay their hands on. And if you do your job well, you'll be rewarded with some free merchandise and tools to help you continue your mission in promoting open source and in liberating the computer world.

I was quite pleasantly suprised to see an inset about the CSS Zen Garden. They also featured the Linux Gazette, another excellent resource.

All of the people that has been using computers for a long time now will know the game called Tetris. It sounds like a virus, and in some cases it is. Steinsoft has released a special christmas version of the game (also open source) for those with too much time on their hands (count me out).

Don't forget to visit the go_open website for more info.

In related news, the guys at Translate referred me to the Xfce Desktop Environment as being an excellent desktop for Linux. Apparently it is very fast. I haven't had the time to try it out for myself yet, but hopefully I'll be getting around to it soon.

State of Roads in George

The article below sums it up nicely:

State of Roads in George

This article was taken out of the George Herald (2 December 2004).

Since George is a pretty small city, I walk down some of the main roads on a daily basis watching these people "hard at work".

I can understand that people want to take a break from time to time, but somehow a "break" often seems to mean half the day here!

GROSS UG Newspaper Article

This article is so old, I am truly ashamed to only getting around to uploading it now. This article was about the GROSS UG and featured a few months back in one of the local newspapers, the George Herald (can't find online link - I don't think they're "enabled" yet).

The Article

Sorry, no text transcription yet (I know, terrible).

There's also an online article available (totally different thing).

Go Open Episode 4

I watched the fourth episode of go_open this weekend. I couldn't make this post because I forgot to bring my notes that I made during the show yesterday, but today I realise that I don't need them because all of the info is on their site anyway.

Copyright was the main topic this week. They interviewed Prof Lawrence Lessig [blog] from Stanford University in California about Creative Commons.

They also spoke to a number of people, including some from Creative Commons South Africa, regarding Intellectual Property (IP) in the 21st Century.

And guess what. Wired Magazine came with a cover CD full of music distributed under a Creative Commons license! More.

Other stuff they talked about was how MWeb, one of South Africa's major ISPs, are fighting spam using open source software such as SpamAssassin which makes use of heuristic programming (a simpler form of AI). More.

Thunderbird was also featured as being a great tool for fighting spam.

Mark Shuttleworth spoke about The Gimp, an free open source graphic manipulation package. I have used it for a few years now, and it's not too shabby for my purposes.

Two other interesting websites they featured was the Wikipedia (everybody should know this one by now) and the Open Photo Project, a great place to get photos placed under a Creative Commons license.

HTML versus XHTML

Ok, it is about time I make this post. I could never make up my mind - do I want to go HTML or XHTML? So after a discussion on IRC and much thinking I have now decided to make a dicision and clean up my act once and for all.

These are the reasons why I like XHTML:

You can combine namespaces and add cool functionality.
It forces you to write neater code.
It makes for more reliable, faster, and simpler parsing.

The first point is quite valid - you can now use all kinds of stuff such as MathML, embedded SVG, RubyText, etc. However, most people don't need these, and if you want to stay compatible with IE, well, go figure...

About the second point, XHTML only forces you to write neat code, but you can write equally neat (or even neater) code in HTML if you really like.

Regarding the third point, it is important to remember that valid HTML is probably just as reliable to parse as XHTML. XHTML does indeed parse faster than HTML, however on today's PCs you won't really notice the difference. You will only see the advantage when you're parsing large and complex documents on a small handheld device (something that you definitely shouldn't be doing anyway). But as handheld technology is progressing, even that isn't really such a major issue anymore.

Simpler parsing, oh yes. You can write your own tools much easier to work with XHTML than with HTML.

Note that for all of these advantages I'm now talking about XHTML under application/xhtml+xml, not under text/html.

The problems with XHTML are typically:

IE doesn't support XHTML under the correct mime type.
Search Engines don't either.
HTML can be made to be more compact than XHTML.
There's a bug [via] in Mozilla that keeps XHTML pages from rendering as-they-load.

The first point is only valid if you care about IE - I don't.

The second point is quite a big problem, but again, I like to give them the same treatment as IE for their retardedness.

HTML is indeed more compact, however I don't think that will make much of a difference on most sites.

The last point, the fact that Mozilla has a bug is a problem with Mozilla, not with XHTML. However, it is still a practical problem. But this will (hopefully) be fixed soon.

Now, what is wrong with sending XHTML under text/html?

What's the use?
What's the use?
What's the use?
What's the use?
What's the use?
What's the use?

Enough said.

So, what to send to the user? XHTML or HTML? XHTML is the choice if you need to use cool stuff like MathML/Rubytext/etc. However, if you don't need to use them, use HTML. If you ever want to convert to XHTML later, use HTML Tidy. If the user needs XHTML to parse for some strange reason, they can use it too.

So, should we use content negotiation?

What's the use?
What's the use?
etc, etc...

Currently, this weblog is in HTML 4.01 Strict. Would I ever switch to XHTML? Yes! Because I want to be able to use all of that cool stuff (and other things that will most likely be coming out into the future). But only if it was sent under the correct content type to all browsers (no content negotiation and no XHTML under text/html) and if that bug in Mozilla is fixed first (I have some pretty large pages over here...).

But don't I care about IE? What the heck, this site doesn't work in it anyway!

Firefox and Thunderbird

Hear the Thunder... Feel the Fire!

It's one day to the 30th day after the release of Firefox 1.0. They are still aiming for the 10 million download mark, and they are up to more than 9,2 million downloads already. I don't think they'll make it, but who knows!

For those that haven't noticed the new Thunderbird logo (replacing the Firefox logo) in my sidebar, Thunderbird 1.0 has been released a few days ago. Go get it!

Go Open - Episode 3

Update: Sorry, left two things out. Added them in at the bottom.

I watched Go Open Episode 3 this past weekend.

The Freedom Toaster is a brilliant idea. They put down a box with three CD-writers in a public space. You select which distro to burn, and there you go. Currently there is only one in Cape Town, South Africa.

Dirk Willem van Gulik (Amsterdam) from the Apache Foundation was interviewed about the Apache webserver.

The Tux Labs Project aims to implement computer centres at schools in the Western Cape, South Africa.

Open Office and FreeBSD were mentioned.

The Happy Penguin is an open source games site for Linux. One of the games they featured is Pingus.

Tectonic.co.za - See what's happening on the South African open source front. Bloglined!

Switched2Firefox? Now Switch2Linux!

Yesterday, I installed Ubuntu Linux on my PC at work. Today, I continued to configure it. I now run Firefox, Thunderbird, X-Chat (for IRC), and GAIM (for instant messaging on ICQ, MSN & Jabber) on top of Gnome on it.

Mozilla is usually installed by default in most Linux distro's. However, with Ubuntu, Firefox 0.9.3 is. (Note that the latest version of Ubuntu was released before Firefox 1.0). It normally isn't very smart to officially distribute software that is still considered to be in the development phase, but this does show that these people are forward-thinking guys with a focus on usability and simplicity. Nobody wants that cluttered ugly Mozilla interface (even Anne switched).

The default install of Ubuntu comes with a very neatly organised Gnome desktop. All of the programs are under the "Applications" menu, and the system functions are under the "Computer" menu. Gnome is a little different from Windows, so a little ajustment time is necessary. However, when you first come to know it, Gnome can be set up to be much simpler and better organised than Windows. And then those themes... I feel simply inspired!

One of the things I really like about open source software is how configurable it is. Just look at my gorgeous desktop. Don't even try to tell me your Windows desktop looks better! :-P

Well, all I need now is a good code editor. Please feel free to recommend one if you can. As soon as I have that, I'll probably be Linuxed for good!

Ubuntu Linux

I got my Ubuntu Linux CDs in the mail today. This is the flippin best Linux distro I have ever seen in my entire life!

Ok, so not everybody will go mad for it. However, for me it is ideal. Here are my top 10 reasons (yes, here we go again...):

It ships with Firefox, not with the Mozilla suite like most other distro's.
Gnome is the default desktop environment, not KDE. I don't like KDE because it is too complex and Gnome is nice and simple.
It's small and fast.
It comes with a load of nice apps.
You get two CDs in the Intel x86 edition: One live CD (almost like Knoppix) and one install CD.
Two additional versions are available: one for the AMD 64-bit processor and also one for the Apple Mac platform (like anybody with OS X wants to install Linux...)
Ubuntu is committed to remain free and derives from GNU/Linux (a.k.a. Debian).
It is developed and administered professionally by a company - so you don't get that mess you get with GNU/Linux.
It's extremely easy to use - that is one of the focuses.
It's greatly South African (ok, excuse the nationalism..)

The only thing that will put many overseas people off is the name. But that's just too bad for them. :-)

Well, don't be afraid to download and try it. It's definitely not everything for everyone, but for me, it fits my personal taste perfectly!

Main

Latest

Archives