Marcus's MusingsTHOUGHTS, TIPS, AND LINKS COVERING WEB DEVELOPMENT AND RELATED TOPICS2005-06-02T14:16:35+01:00Copyright 2004-2005Ublog Reload 1.0.5Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Mass protest against software patenting]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=732005-06-02T14:16:35+01:002005-06-02T14:16:35+01:002005-06-02T14:16:35+01:00]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Gmail Notifier Feedback]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=722005-04-06T15:05:53+01:002005-04-06T15:05:53+01:002005-04-06T15:05:53+01:00Sent to "notifier-feedback@google.com" earlier today:
Dear sir/madam,
I am a satisfied user of Gmail, and your Gmail Notifier comes in very handy, but it lacks a few (IMHO rather obvious) options, the lack of which can be quite annoying at times:
1) enable/disable mail checking - needed for when you don't want to be disturbed. At present I have to close the utility completely and then run it again later when I want it to resume checking. This option should be located on the tray icon's context menu for easy access.
2) enable/disable slide-up tray notifications - needed so that users can be informed that mail is waiting without showing the subject and preview of the individual emails. It is sometimes embarassing and innappropriate for an email (particularly spam or other email with a rude subject and/or body text) to suddenly pop up at the bottom right when colleagues are sitting with me at my PC discussing a business issue. By disabling the slide up notifications, the beep and change of tray icon would be sufficient to indicate that there was new mail, without revealing the contents to others and causing embarassment.
3) notification sound - not only should it be possible to disable the sound entirely, it should be possible to assign a different sound (i.e. WAV) to the notification event. Windows provides support for application-specific sound events in the "Sounds & Multimedia" control panel applet, although this is admittedly rarely used by non-Microsoft applications. Although the default system beep currently used by the Gmail Notifier can be reassigned to something else, this change affects every other Windows application which issues a system beep.
4) options 1) and 2) above should be controllable via hotkeys (preferably user-assigned) as well as the icon context menu.
I hope that you will consider these suggestions carefully and implement where possible.
PS - I have noticed that the executable occupies almost 7MB of memory when loaded... is this really necessary?
Kind regards,
Marcus Tucker]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[IE's "friendly" error messages]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=702005-02-23T12:28:07+01:002005-02-23T12:28:07+01:002005-02-23T12:28:07+01:00www.sonyericsson.com to make it possible to be automatically informed when a new firmware is released for my P900 by using the excellent free service WatchThatPage to monitor the URL that I had hacked together (no thanks to the abominally unfriendly URL scheme used by their CMS), I came across the following message hidden in a comment in a redirector page:
Unfortunately, Microsoft has added a clever new "feature" to Internet Explorer. If the text in an error's message is "too small", specifically less than 512 bytes, Internet Explorer returns its own error message. Yes, you can turn that off, but *surprise* it's pretty tricky to find buried as a switch called "smart error messages" That means, of course, that many of Resin's error messages are censored by default. And, of course, you'll be shocked to learn that IIS always returns error messages that are long enough to make Internet Explorer happy. The workaround is pretty simple: pad the error message with a big comment to push it over the five hundred and twelve byte minimum. Of course, that's exactly what you're reading right now.
NOTE: "Resin" is presumably the name of their CMS "Resin" is a JSP/servlet load balancing system... (thanks Rick, should have Google'd!)
So, it would appear that 512 is the magic number of bytes required to force IE to display your error message instead of your own. Personally I think it's is damn stupid of IE to attempt to intercept an error and display its own error message instead of the server's, and such a feature certainly shouldn't be on by default. It's impossible to fathom the total loss of productivity that this single implementation "feature" has caused to puzzled developers across the world, but here's proof (if proof be needed) that it is a recurrent problem.
It's a matter of habit that I always switch off "Show friendly HTTP error messages" (the correct name for the switch mentioned in the above text), and "Show friendly URLs" in the preferences section of Internet Explorer, since I find them irritating and they often interfere with debugging web apps during development. But clearly one should take precautions (as described in the quoted text above) to ensure that IE doesn't interfere with error messages displayed to end users.
Another thumbs-down to MS for that not-so-bright idea.
Incidentally, I also switch on "Display a notification about every script error", which is one of the main reasons why there's so much bad JavaScript floating around - developers who don't switch this on aren't told about errors in their code. Naturally, this also causes huge headaches during development for those who aren't aware of this.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[The future of the Internet (I)]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=662005-01-31T01:56:55+01:002005-01-31T01:56:55+01:002005-01-31T01:56:55+01:00 The World Wide Web was conceived in 1989, by Tim Berners-Lee, and it became the birth of a new era, digitally-enabled free exchange of new ideas, with access to an ever-increasing wealth of human knowledge, which has powered its rapid integration into the very fabric of all our daily lives. It's not just a question of your direct interaction with it via occasional email and casual surfing, but by the increasing dependence of virtually every company or organisation in the western world (and beyond) upon it for critical communications and overall running.
In the Terminator films, the enemy is not an evil head of a global organisation or the dangerous dictator of a nation as you might expect to find in a Bond movie. No, the adversary is something far more sinister - SkyNet a renegade American military network that became sentient and turned against us. In the Matrix trilogy, we see again our downfall at the hands of our own creations, as digital life gives rise to a robotic world that strikes against us to avenge our betrayal, the history of which is movingly depicted in some of the chapters of The Animatrix, a DVD which fills in the gap between the first and second films with stunningly animated shorts mostly written by the Wachowski brothers and presented in a fusion of animated styles, from traditional to bleeding edge.
But such symbiosis of our life with a global computer network of unfathomable computing power, connecting every person and device on the planet with everything else is not mere science fiction, it is almost science fact, almost a reality. We have already outgrown IPv4, the original TCP-IP addressing standard, which allocates 4,294,967,296 distinct addresses for use by networked devices, and each one can support many more privately networked devices by acting as a gateway. But this is not enough - there are too many devices and not enough addresses to go round - there is an IPv4 address shortage looming, due to start causing problems in 2016, and finally becoming fully exhausted in 2023 (although these estimates will probably prove to be way off, as previous internet growth-related predictions have been).
Given our current path of increasing networking density as GSM, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, fibre optics and other transmission mediums become part of our homes, and with a planned convergence of our home entertainment devices into a single shiny Microsoft-powered, all-showing, all-playing, all-doing, networked box in your living room, which will link with portable devices so that the content is available to you wherever you are.
Eventually, every device on the planet really *will* be linked to everything else, and we will run out of numbers under the present addressing scheme. There is of course a seemingly simple solution - increase the numbers, which is precisely what IPv6 is designed to do. Increasing the size of the address space from IPv4's 32bits (4 bytes) to IPv6's 128bits (16 bytes) allows for such an astonishingly huge number of possible addresses (2 to the power 128) that we can be sure that we will never run out.
The number of individual devices is only one of the brain-boggling aspects of this digital future - these devices won't all be just be passively receiving information, many will also generating it - everything from live CCTV and satellite footage of every inch of the Earth's surface, live readings from the buoys spanning our oceans, real-time statistics derived from the business world, and so on - anything and everything.
Such incredible use of bandwidth will provide many a network engineer with big headaches, and the current ad-hoc structure of the Internet which has given it so much resilience thus far will almost certainly have to change. Clearly, our rapidly increasing internet integration and dependency will require some serious logistical planning, but resting on the safe assumption that although it might be problematic it is possible, there are bigger issues to consider: Who will control such a network? And who will pay for it?
I see four ways that this could work - Firstly, perhaps the present collaboration between educational institutes, military and governmental organisations, and private enterprise (which together run the internet as we know it now) can continue for the forseeable future. Alternatively, independent bodies (in the style of the W3C) could be entrusted by the world's internet users to manage and develop the global network using money derived from an "internet tax" of some sort - possibly in the same way that owners of TVs in the United Kingdom must pay a flat license fee, or by a small charge added to ISP's own rates (perhaps according to bandwidth consumed). Then again, world governments could assume control of their nation's communications networks, funding their maintenance and expansion from their stash of taxes, but leaving the nation's internet access vulnerable to the will of the government (one need only look to China's current policy to see what might happen). Or lastly, the business world will get their hands on the networks, either carving up patches of the internet into commercial territory, perhaps offering the use of various alternative networks at different charges (think terrestrial and mobile phone networks). Even worse, a single monopolistic communications megacorp could end up controlling the world's internet access, raising its prices at will, essentially holding society to ransom over their access to information and communication with each other.
Again, some of these might sound a bit far-fetched, but surely such possibilies are not *that* far fetched? Food for thought? Are we currently enjoying the golden age of the internet, enjoying freedoms and access to information that our children won't? Let's hope not.]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[US Election Special]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=582004-11-05T18:28:37+01:002004-11-05T18:28:37+01:002004-11-05T18:28:37+01:00 Michael Moore has published a list of 17 Reasons Not to Slit Your Wrists and I'm hoping that no.15 comes true, but I'm not going to hold my breath.
Us Brits can't relate to the American electoral system at all. At best, it's simply not democratic - states are "called" before the votes have actually finished being counted, some votes aren't counted at all because of faulty voting machines, etc - and at worst it appears to be downright corrupt and open to manipulation.
In Britain, every vote counts and has the right to be counted. If they weren't, it would be a national scandal!
Also, the way in which the parties launched a media war against each other - spending an astonishing **$2bn** in the process - is absolutely unbelievable! BBC's Panorama had an excellent documentary on the run-up to the elections, and snippets of various Bush (and Kerry) adverts were featured - I just couldn't take them seriously at all! They were almost parodies of themselves, especially the Mexican one that Bush ran! It just beggars belief that this is how the world's biggest "democracy" conducts its elections.
Ok, rant over (for now anyway). Is any of the above news to you?]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Software & Driver Updates Via RSS]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=562004-11-04T17:32:35+01:002004-11-04T17:32:35+01:002004-11-04T17:32:35+01:00 Some people prefer to take the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" approach (and others are completely unaware that updates are released for software), but since many software/driver updates actually add new features and performance optimizations as well as fixing flaws, I like to stay bang up to date with the latest releases. I can think of only a couple of occasions where doing so has caused harm to my PC, and that was many years ago when I was struggling with an NVidia TNT2 on a Super 7 system (I did say *any* years ago)!!
It's a real shame that it takes so much work to stay current - only a minority of manufacturers have mailing lists that you can subscribe to, and new drivers take months to appear on Windows Update (if they appear at all, which most don't). It's also rather annoying that a change history isn't always published for updates (it's nice to know what's changed).
I've recently taken to using the excellent web page monitoring service WatchThatPage to notify me when a page changes (hopefully because there's been a new software release). This takes rather a long time to set up (you have to manually add all the pages you want to monitor), but once you've done the hard graft, the updates trickle in via daily emails (it aggregates all the changes over the previous day and sends you a single email so you don't get deluged).
However, wouldn't it be better if all software/hardware manufacturers offered an RSS feed for each product? Then whenever you install a new piece of kit or a new app, you simply add the update URL to your RSS aggregator of choice, and bingo! You're kept informed forever more about all the updates that particular product!
Of course, manufacturers could also use these feeds to deliver notices about security flaws, pay-for major version upgrades, and other related information.
I believe that end users and manufacturers alike would find this immensely useful, so I hope that sooner or later this starts to happen. If I ever release commercial software products, I'll be sure to follow this update notification model (in addition to the standard update info published on web sites as at present).
Are any of you aware of manufacturers doing this already?]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Article no-no?!]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=462004-08-31T18:19:24+01:002004-08-31T18:19:24+01:002004-08-31T18:19:24+01:00SitePoint got back to me to tell me that they aren't interested in publishing my article regarding VBScript string concatenation and scalable alternatives (a topic which is still very much ignored by ASP developers, and to their peril!) because they are "no longer actively covering ASP".(or words to that effect - the quote is currently from memory, I'll post the exact quotation when I get home to Outlook)
So that makes it official - as far as they are concerned, ASP is dead. Perhaps that's understandable - if not *actually* dead, it's *very nearly* dead, and taking its last steps down the path of obsolesence.
However, that isn't stopping plenty of people from continuing to develop new applications in it - many developers haven't made the switch to .Net (myself included), so it's a real shame that they've decided that it's simply not worth catering to that particular audience at all any more. What's next? Shut down the ASP forum? I hope not.
It's also rather disappointing on a personal level, because (for those of you who don't know) I've been the community-voted "SitePoint ASP Guru" for the past two years and recently resigned as Mentor, so I wanted to have an article published there as a parting gift.
Nevermind, I'll approach www.15seconds.com (who published my first article "Do Stored Queries Increase the Speed of Access Queries?") and see what they think... ]]>Marcusme@marcustucker.com<![CDATA[Empty blog?!]]>http://blog.marcustucker.com/blog_comment.asp?bi=42004-05-04T07:37:27+01:002004-05-04T07:37:27+01:002004-05-04T07:37:27+01:00UBlog Reload this blog has - for the last few days - appeared (to the casual observer) to be empty!!
While it is true that I haven't blogged much recently (sorry... been busy), the fact that the previous blog entries were in April, combined with the default behaviour of the blog front page (to show only the current month's entries) resulted in an (apparently) blog when May 1st arrived.
I have raised this issue with the author of the software, since clearly this doesn't look good to visitors. I had intended to alter the code tonight to modify this unfortunate behaviour (to display the last 10 entries, perhaps) but haven't got round to it.
In the meantime, I've moved the "Recent Entries" box on the left further up the page, and posted this entry to explain the situation (and get rid of the horrible empty space)!
Apologies for this (perceived, if not actual) loss of service.
UPDATE: See my post "Fix in place" for how I've fixed this. ]]>
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