The Tor Browser / file revision

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  <title>ongoing</title>

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/</id>

  <link href='./' />

  <link rel='self' href='' />

  <logo>rsslogo.jpg</logo>

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  <updated>2006-04-26T20:10:25-08:00</updated>

  <author><name>Tim Bray</name></author>

  <subtitle>ongoing fragmented essay by Tim Bray</subtitle>

  <rights>All content written by Tim Bray and photos by Tim Bray Copyright Tim Bray, some rights reserved, see /ongoing/misc/Copyright</rights>

  <generator uri='/misc/Colophon'>Generated from XML source code using Perl, Expat, XML::Parser, Emacs, Mysql, and ImageMagick.  Industrial strength technology, baby.</generator>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/26/'>

  <title>Spring in White on White</title>

  <link href='Spring-in-White-on-White' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/26/Spring-in-White-on-White</id>

  <published>2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-26T20:10:16-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Garden' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Garden' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Most people would generally prefer a climate where it&#x2019;s bright and warm most of the time. But for Canadians and others who live where it&#x2019;s not, there are compensations, and one is the experience of spring.  I have a picture.</div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Most people would generally prefer a climate where it’s bright

 and warm most of the time. But for Canadians and others who live where it’s

 not, there are compensations, and one is the experience of

 spring.  I have a picture.</p>

 <img src="IMGP3247.png" alt="Pear blossoms against cherry blossoms" />

 <div class="caption"><p>The blossoms are pear in the foreground, cherry behind.</p></div>

 <p>After all the months of 50° North Latitude winter—icy-sharp in most

 of Canada, wet and dark here in Vancouver—the soul, the spirit, and the

 libido all spring to life when the sun comes back.  We’ve had a solid year of

 crappy weather, but this last Saturday through Monday were solidly summery,

 bright 

 and warm; and in this season the days are already long and each gets

 longer so fast you can feel it.</p>

 <p>On the back porch, our pear tree’s branches were silhouetted against the

 neighbors’ big wild old cherry; the cherry yields no edible fruit but who

 cares, it’s beautiful

 tree any time of year.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/26/'>

  <title>Scott</title>

  <link href='Scott' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/26/Scott</id>

  <published>2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-26T20:06:50-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business/Sun' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Sun' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>I’ve been watching our internal leadership conference and spending quite a

 bit of time talking in the virtual hallways, and I’ve been surprised at

 the intensity of feeling about Mr. McNealy.  Yes, there are those

 here saying “About bloody time, now we can make some progress” but there’s a

 much bigger group that is genuinely emotional about this transition.

 Maybe it’s a function of seniority: I never met nor corresponded with Scott, and

 he hasn’t been

 much of a presence in the company’s conversation in the time I’ve been here.

 But there are a lot of smart, seasoned, unsentimental people making it clear

 that 

 he’s been a major force in their lives, at a more personal level than I’m

 used to hearing when people speak about executives.  I guess also that to a

 lot of people, Sun’s vision, for which Scott gets some of the credit, was a

 radical and wonderful thing.   I first used Unix in 1979 and quit a nice

 big-company job

 to become a VAX-bsd sysadmin in 1983, so I’ve always kind of

 lived inside that vision.

 But I’ll tell you one thing, what I’ve been hearing the last couple of days

 makes me really regret that I didn’t get to know Scott.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/26/'>

  <title>Jacobs, Pictures, Spartans</title>

  <link href='Jane-Jacobs' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/26/Jane-Jacobs</id>

  <published>2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-26T17:28:59-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Jacobs">Jane Jacobs</a> died;

 the city I live in, Vancouver, is pretty solidly Jacobsian both in its current

 shape and its planning dogma.  By choosing to live here I’m empirically a

 fan.  Oddly, few have remarked how great Jacobs

 <em>looked</em>; her face commanded the eye.  Which leads me Alex

 Waterhouse-Hayward’s wonderful 

 <a href="http://www.alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/2006/04/jane-jacobs-viveca-lindfors_26.html">Jane Jacobs &amp; Viveca Lindfors</a>;

 surprising portraits and thoughts on decoration.  W-H’s blog has become one of

 only two or three that I 

 stab at excitedly whenever I see something new.  For example, see 

 <a href="http://www.alexwaterhousehayward.com/blog/archives/2006_04_01_archive.html#114476408248660848">Sex Crimes, Homicide and Drugs</a>

 and yes, that’s what it’s about.

 Staying with the death-and-betrayal theme, and apparently (but not really)

 shifting back 2½ millennia, see John Cowan’s

 <a href="http://recycledknowledge.blogspot.com/2006/04/war-after-simonides.html">The

 War (after Simonides)</a>, being careful to look closely at the links.

 I’ve

 <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2003/03/24/Herodotus">written</a>

 about those same wars.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/25/'>

  <title>LAMP and MARS</title>

  <link href='Scaling-Rails' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/25/Scaling-Rails</id>

  <published>2006-04-25T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-26T07:24:06-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Sun' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Sun' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>At

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/13/RoR">that Rails conference</a>, when I

 was

 <a href="http://blog.garbledygook.com/2006/04/17/ruby-on-rails-podcast-tim-bray-ruby-on-rails-podcast/">talking</a>

 to

 <a href="http://jroller.com/page/obie">Obie Fernandez</a>, he asked, more or

 less “How can Sun love us?  We’re not Java” and I said, more or less, “Hey,

 you’re programmers, you write software and there have to be computers to run

 it, we sell computers, why wouldn’t we love you?”  Anyhow, we touched on

 parallelism a bit and I talked up the

 <a href="http://www.sun.com/processors/UltraSPARC-T1/">T1</a>; 

 Obie took that ball and 

 <a href="http://jroller.com/page/obie?entry=will_ultrasparc_t1_emerge_as">ran with it</a>,

 saying all sorts of positive things about synergy between Rails’

 shared-nothing architecture and our multicore systems.  Yeah, well, good in

 theory, but I’m too old to make that kind of prediction without running some

 tests.  Hah, it turns out that

 <a href="http://joyent.com/">Joyent</a> has been

 <a href="http://scalewithrails.com/">doing that</a>, and have

 <a href="http://scalewithrails.com/downloads/ScaleWithRails-April2006.pdf">76

 PDF slides</a> on the subject.

 If you care about big-system scaling issues, read the whole thing; a little

 long, but amusing and with hardly any bullet lists.  If you’re a Sun

 shareholder looking for a pick-me up, check out slides 40-41, 49, and 52-74.

 Oh, I gather that the T1, Solaris, and ZFS are OK for Java too.

 <i>[Update: The title was just “SAMR”, as in LAMP with two new letters.  

 Enough people didn’t get it that I was forced to think about it, and MARS

 works better anyhow.]</i></p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/25/'>

  <title>Real-Time Journalism</title>

  <link href='Talk-With-Berlind' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/25/Talk-With-Berlind</id>

  <published>2006-04-25T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-26T06:40:19-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Journalism' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Journalism' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Syndication' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Syndication' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>I got email late yesterday from

 <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/bio.php#berlind">David Berlind</a>: “Hey, can

 I call you for a minute?”  He wanted commentary on

 <a href="http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=2906">a story he was writing</a> that I

 think is about the potential for intellectual-property lock-ins on RSS and Atom

 extensions.  I say “I think is about” because the headline is “Will or could

 RSS get forked?”.  After a few minutes’ chat, David asked if he could record

 for a podcast, and even though I only had a cellphone, the audio came out OK.

 The conversation was rhythmic: David brought up a succession of potential

 issues and answered each along the lines of “Yes, it’s reasonable to worry

 about that, but in this 

 case I don’t see any particular problems.”  

 Plus I emitted a mercifully-brief rant on the difference between protocols,

 data, and software.

 On the one hand, I thought David could have been a 

 little clearer that I was pushing back against the thrust of his story, but on

 the other hand he included the whole conversation right

 there in the piece, so anyone who actually cares can listen and find out what

 I actually said, not what I think I said nor what David reported I said.

 I find this raw barely-intermediated journalism (we

 talk on the phone this afternoon, it’s on the Web in hours) a little

 shocking still.

 On balance, it’s better than the way we used to do things.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/24/'>

  <title>The Transition Explained</title>

  <link href='CEO-Transition' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/24/CEO-Transition</id>

  <published>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-24T16:49:05-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business/Sun' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Business' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Sun' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>It’s not that complicated, really.

 Bloggers are

 <a href="http://www.sun.com/2006-0418/js/index.jsp">taking over the world</a>.

 Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/24/'>

  <title>5&#x272d;&#x266b;: One More Cup of Coffee</title>

  <link href='One-More-Cup-Of-Coffee' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/24/One-More-Cup-Of-Coffee</id>

  <published>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Music/Recordings' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Music' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Recordings' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Music/5 Stars' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='5 Stars' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>I&#x2019;m not really a <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan'>Bob Dylan</a> fan.  A voice like that, and a tunesmithing talent like that, come along only a few times per century, but he&#x2019;s still kind of irritating. That aside, the song <cite>One More Cup of Coffee</cite>, from the 1976 album <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_%28album%29'>Desire</a>, can&#x2019;t be ignored; wonderful tune, wonderful orchestration, wonderful performance. <i>(&#x201c;5&#x272d;&#x266b;&#x201d; series introduction <a href='/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music'>here</a>; with <a href='/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music#p-1'>an explanation</a> of why the title may look broken.)</i></div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>I’m not really a

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan">Bob Dylan</a> fan.  A voice

 like that, and a tunesmithing talent like that, come along only a few times

 per century, but he’s still kind of irritating.

 That aside, the song <cite>One More Cup of Coffee</cite>, from the 1976 album

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desire_%28album%29">Desire</a>, can’t be

 ignored; wonderful tune, wonderful orchestration, wonderful performance.

 <i>(“5✭♫” series introduction <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music">here</a>;

 with <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/01/23/5-Star-Music#p-1">an

 explanation</a> of why the title may look broken.)</i></p>

 <img src="Desire.png" class="inline" alt="Desire, by Bob Dylan" />

 <h2 id='p-1'>The Context</h2>

 <p>Nothing I can possibly write will add any wisdom to the

 millions of words, some 90% of them in excess of needs, written on the subject

 of this particular person.</p>

 <p>A personal statement: Bob Dylan has long irritated me for, during the first

 thirty years or 

 so of his career, never having given a straight answer to a straight question,

 and for writing songs with dozens of boring verses.  But they’ll still be

 listening 

 to lots of his performances long after I’m dead, and in recent years he’s

 become a better, more direct, interview.</p>

 <p>My taste in Dylan is a little unusual: once you get past <cite>One More Cup

 of Coffee</cite>, my favorites would be <cite>Baby Let Me Follow You

 Down</cite> (from the <cite>Last Waltz</cite> soundtrack) and 

 <cite>Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood)</cite> from

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Basement_Tapes">The Basement

 Tapes</a>.</p>

 <p><cite>Desire</cite>, the record, is hit and miss. <cite>Joey</cite>,

 glorification of the life of some mafioso, is flawed in concept

 and unlistenable in execution.  <cite>Hurricane</cite>, whatever you think

 about

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubin_Carter">Mr. Carter</a>, that song

 rocks; and <cite>Isis</cite> hits pretty hard too.</p>

 <h2 id='p-2'>The Music</h2>

 <p>Is there anything in <cite>One More Cup of Coffee</cite> that’s not

 perfect?  Well yes, in the verses, the

 lyrics on occasion drag (“He oversees his kingdom / So no stranger does

 intrude / His voice it trembles as he calls out / For another plate of food”).

 But apart from that, the sentiment is compelling,

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarlet_Rivera">Scarlet Rivera’s</a>

 violin is beautifully scored and played, the tune is to die for, and the

 backing vocals are by Emmylou Harris, who you can bet is going to be here in

 the 5-✭ series one of these days.

 And while there’s not much middle ground on the subject of Dylan’s singing, if

 you like it, you’ll <em>really</em> like this song.</p>

 <p>Listen to the choruses: Bob and Emmylou veer wildly around the rhythm, then

 coalesce on the beat when it matters, and they’re making it

 up as they go along, they’re wholly inhabiting the moment, and it’s

 quite, quite perfect.</p>

 <h2 id='p-3'>Sampling It</h2>

 <p>Oh yeah, it’s out there.  And there’s a live version too; but the smart

 thing  would be to go buy the un-compressed un-DRM’ed shiny round silver

 version of <cite>Desire</cite>; it’s a keeper.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/24/'>

  <title>Atomic Monday</title>

  <link href='Atomic-Monday' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/24/Atomic-Monday</id>

  <published>2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-24T00:44:06-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Syndication' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Syndication' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Atom' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Atom' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>First of all, implementors of anything Atom-related need to spend some time

 <a href="http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/000793.html">chez

 Jacques Distler</a>; in particular, the conversation that plays out in the

 comments. Second, there’s this piece of software called

 <a href="http://www.planetplanet.org/">Planet Planet</a> that allows you to

 make an aggregate web page by reading lots of feeds; for example, see

 <a href="http://www.planetapache.org/">Planet Apache</a> or

 <a href="http://planetsun.org/">Planet Sun</a>.

 Sam Ruby decided that its Atom support needed some work, so

 <a href="http://www.intertwingly.net/blog/2006/04/23/Adding-Atom-support-to-PlanetPlanet">he did

 it</a>.  Now, here’s the exciting part: he pinged me over the weekend and said

 “Hey, look at this” wanting to show me his cleverly-Atomized

 Planet Intertwingly feed. 

 I looked at it in

 <a href="http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/">NetNewsWire</a> and was puzzled for

 a moment; some but not all of the 

 things in the feed were highlighted as unread, even though this was the first

 time I’d seen it.  Then the light went on. 

 This

 is Atom doing <em>exactly what we went to all that trouble to make it do</em>.

 NetNewsWire has good Atom support and, because Atom entries all have unique

 IDs and timestamps,  it can

 tell that it’s seen lots of those entries before in other feeds that I

 subscribe to.  That’s how I found Jacques’ piece.  This is huge; anyone who

 uses synthetic or aggregated feeds knows that dupes are a big problem, showing

 up all over the place.

 No longer, Atom makes that problem go away.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/22/'>

  <title>Hyatt on the High-Res Web</title>

  <link href='High-Res-Web' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/22/High-Res-Web</id>

  <published>2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-23T17:12:18-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Presentation' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Presentation' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Check out Dave Hyatt’s

 <a href="http://webkit.opendarwin.org/blog/?p=55">excellent write-up</a> on

 designing and rendering Web pages so they take advantage of the

 higher-resolution screens that <em>may</em> be coming our way. 

 I emphasize “may” because I’ve seen how slowly we’ve picked up pixels over

 the years. The first really substantial screen I ever worked on was a

 1988-vintage Sun workstation with about a million pixels.  The Mac on my

 lap right now, which has 125 times as much memory as that workstation, has

 only 1.38 million pixels.

 Anyhow, Hyatt has some smart things to say on the issues,

 which are trickier than you might think.  I suspect that sometime in a couple of

 years, if I still care about <span class='o'>ongoing</span>, I’m  going to

 have to go back and reprocess all the images so that higher-res versions are

 available for those who have the screens and don’t mind downloading bigger

 files. 

 Anyhow, Dave’s piece may be slightly misleading in that he talks about SVG

 as though 

 it’s something coming in the future.  Not so, check out

 <a href="http://zcorpan.1go.dk/sandbox/svg/atom/.xml">this nifty SVG Atom

 logo</a>, which works fine in all the Mozilla browsers I have here.

 Load it up, resize the window, and watch what happens.  Then do a “view

 source”.

 <i>[Update:

 <a href="http://blog.codedread.com">Jeff Schiller</a> writes to tell me that

 Opera 9 does SVG (and Opera 8 “SVG Tiny”) too.]

 [<a href="http://www.freeke.org/ffg">Dave Walker</a> writes: Though the shipping version of Safari doesn’t support SVG,

 <a href="http://nightly.webkit.org/builds/Latest-WebKit-SVN.dmg">the

 nightlies</a> do.]

 [<a href="http://www.davelemen.com/archives/2006/04/is_it_time_for_jpeg_2000_to_go_mainstream.html">Dave Lemen</a>

 points to

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG-2000">JPEG 2000</a> as possibly

 useful in a high-res context.]</i></p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/23/'>

  <title>Wrong About the Infield Fly Rule</title>

  <link href='Wrong-About-the-Infield-Fly-Rule' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/23/Wrong-About-the-Infield-Fly-Rule</id>

  <published>2006-04-23T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-23T15:02:41-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Family' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Family' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>My brother

 <a href="http://takingalongview.blogspot.com/">Rob</a> is really taking to

 this blogging medium.  Check out his recent

 <a href="http://takingalongview.blogspot.com/2006/04/credo.html">Credo</a>,

 and also the only instance I’ve seen of

 <a href="http://takingalongview.blogspot.com/2006/04/ode-to-96-chevy-lumina.html">Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry</a>

 applied to a mini-van.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2004/12/12/'>

  <title>Statistics</title>

  <link href='BMS' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/12/12/BMS</id>

  <published>2004-12-12T12:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-23T10:10:02-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Publishing' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Publishing' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Almost every Sunday I grab the week&#x2019;s <span class="o">ongoing</span> logfiles and update my numbers. I find it interesting and maybe others will too, so  this entry is now the charts&#x2019; permanent home. I&#x2019;ll update it most weeks, probably. <i>[Updated: 2006/04/23.]</i></div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Almost every Sunday I grab the week’s <span class='o'>ongoing</span>

 logfiles and update my numbers.

 I find it interesting

 and maybe others will too, so 

 this entry is now the charts’ permanent home. I’ll update it most weeks,

 probably.

 <i>[Updated: 2006/04/23.]</i></p>

 <img src="Browser-Market-Share.png" alt="Browser market shares at ‘ongoing’" />

 <div class="caption"><p>Browsers visiting <span class='o'>ongoing</span>,

 percent.</p></div>

 <img src="Browsers-via-search.png" alt="Browser market shares at ‘ongoing’, visitors via search engines" />

 <div class="caption"><p>Browsers visiting <span class='o'>ongoing</span> via

 search engines, percent.</p></div>

 <img src="Search-Engines.png" alt="Search engine market shares at ‘ongoing’" />

 <div class="caption"><p>Search referrals to <span

 class='o'>ongoing</span> .</p></div>

 <img src="Feeds.png" alt="RSS and Atom feed fetches" />

 <div class="caption"><p>Fetches of the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds.</p></div>

 <p>The notes on usage and source code will return in coming weeks when I get

 the cycles to rewrite this whole article.</p>

 <h2 id='p-1'>What a “Hit” Means</h2>

 <p>I recently

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/02/07/Thumbnail">updated</a> the

 <a href="/ongoing/misc/Colophon"><span class='o'>ongoing</span> software</a>

 (but haven’t updated the Colophon I see, oops).

 Anyhow, the <code>XMLHttpRequest</code> now issued by each page seems to be a

 pretty reliable counter of the number of actual browsers with humans behind

 them reading the pages.  I checked against

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2005/12/04/Google-Analytics">Google Analytics</a>

 and the numbers agreed to within a dozen or two on days with 5,000 to 10,000

 page views; interestingly, Google Analytics was always 10 or 20 views

 higher.</p>

 <p>Anyhow, do <em>not</em> conclude that now I know how many people are

 reading whatever it is I write here; because I publish lots of short pieces

 that are all there in my RSS feed, and anyone reading my Atom feed gets the

 full content of everything.

 I and I have <em>no #&amp;*!$ idea</em> how many people look at my feeds.</p>

 <p>By the way, this was the first time in weeks and weeks that I’d looked at the

 Analytics numbers, and they showed almost exactly zero change from the report

 linked above.  So I’m going to turn them off; they’re a little too intrusive

 and I think may be slowing page loads.</p>

 <p>Anyhow, I ran some detailed statistics on the traffic for Wednesday,

 February 8th, 2006.</p>

 <table cellspacing="3" cellpadding="2" class="wltable">

 <tr valign="top"><td>Total connections to the server</td><td align="right">180,428</td></tr>

 <tr valign="top"><td>Total successful GET transactions</td><td align="right">155,507</td></tr>

 <tr valign="top"><td>Total fetches of the RSS and Atom feeds</td><td align="right">88,450</td></tr>

 <tr valign="top"><td>Total GET transactions that actually fetched data (i.e. status code

 200 as opposed to 304)</td><td align="right">87,271</td></tr>

 <tr valign="top"><td>Total GETs of actual ongoing pages (i.e. not CSS, js, or

 images)</td><td align="right">18,444</td></tr>

 <tr valign="top"><td>Actual human page-views</td><td align="right">6,348</td>

 </tr>

 </table>

 <p>So, there you have it.  Doing a bit of rounding, if you take the 180K

 transactions and subtract the 90K feed fetches and the 6000 actual human page

 views, you’re left with 84,000 or so “Web overhead” transactions, mostly

 stylesheets and graphics and so on.

 For every human who viewed a page, it was fetched almost twice again by

 various kinds of robots and non-browser automated agents.</p>

 <p>It’s amazing that the whole thing works at all.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/18/'>

  <title>XML Automaton</title>

  <link href='XML-Grammar' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/18/XML-Grammar</id>

  <published>2006-04-18T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-23T08:25:56-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/XML' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='XML' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Coding' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Coding' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>In December of 1996 I released a piece of software called <a href='http://www.textuality.com/Lark/'>Lark</a>, which was the world&#x2019;s first <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-xml-proc'>XML Processor</a> (as the term is defined in the <a href='http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/'>XML Specification</a>). It was successful, but I stopped maintaining it in 1998 because lots of other smart people, and some big companies like Microsoft, were shipping perfectly good processors.  I never <em>quite</em> open-sourced it, holding back one clever bit in the moronic idea that I could make money out of Lark somehow. The magic sauce is a finite state machine that can be used to parse XML 1.0. Recently, someone out there needed one of those, so I thought I&#x2019;d publish it, with some commentary on Lark&#x2019;s construction and an amusing anecdote about the name. I doubt there are more than twelve people on the planet who care about this kind of parsing arcana. <i>[Rick Jelliffe  <a href='http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/04/xml_in_xml.html'>has upgraded</a> the machine].</i></div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>In December of 1996 I released a piece of software called

 <a href="http://www.textuality.com/Lark/">Lark</a>, which was

 the world’s first

 <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/#dt-xml-proc">XML Processor</a> (as the

 term is defined in the

 <a href="http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-xml/">XML Specification</a>).

 It was successful, but I stopped maintaining it in 1998 because lots of other

 smart people, and some big companies like Microsoft, were shipping perfectly

 good processors.  I never <em>quite</em> open-sourced it, holding back one

 clever bit in the moronic idea that I could make money out of Lark somehow.

 The magic sauce is a finite state machine that can be used to parse XML 1.0.

 Recently, someone out there needed one of those, so I thought I’d publish

 it, with some commentary on Lark’s construction and an amusing anecdote about

 the name.

 I doubt there are more than twelve people on the planet who care about

 this kind of parsing arcana.

 <i>[Rick Jelliffe 

 <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/xml/blog/2006/04/xml_in_xml.html">has

 upgraded</a> the machine].</i></p>

 <h2 id='p-1'>Why “Lark”?</h2>

 <p><a href="http://www.laurenwood.org/anyway/">Lauren</a> and I went to

 Australia in late 1996 to visit her mother and to get married, which we

 did on November 30th.  Forty-eight hours later, Lauren twisted her knee

 badly enough that she was pretty well

 confined to a sofa for the rest of our Australian vacation.</p>

 <p>So I broke out my computer and finished the work I’d already started on my

 XML processor, and decided to call it Lark for <b>La</b>uren’s <b>R</b>ight

 <b>K</b>nee.</p>

 <h2 id='p-2'>How Lark Worked</h2>

 <p>Lark was a pure

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_finite_state_machine">deterministic

 finite automaton</a> (DFA)

 parser, with a little teeny state stack.

 Some of its transitions were labeled with named “events” that would provoke

 the parser to do something if, for example, it had just recognized a start tag

 or whatever.</p>

 <p>DFA-driven parsers are a common enough design pattern, although I think

 Lark is the only example in the XML space.

 There are well-known parser generators such as

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yacc">yacc</a>, 

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_bison">GNU bison</a>, and

 <a href="https://javacc.dev.java.net/">javacc</a>,

 usually used in combination with lexical scanners such as

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flex_lexical_analyser">flex</a> so that

 you can write your grammar in terms of tokens not characters.

 Also, they handle LALR langauges, so the parsing technique is quite a bit

 richer than a pure state machine.</p>

 <p>I thought I had a better idea.  The grammar of XML is simple

 enough, and the syntax characters few enough, that I thought I could just

 write down the state machine by hand.

 So that’s what I did, inventing a special-purpose DFA-description

 language for the purpose.</p>

 <p>Then I had a file called <code>Lark.jin</code> which was really a Java

 program that used the state machine to parse XML.  The transition “events”

 in the machine were mapped to <code>case</code> labels in a huge

 <code>switch</code> construct.  Then there was a horrible, <em>horrible</em>

 Perl program that read the <code>Lark.jin</code> and the automaton,

 generated the DFA tables in Java syntax, inserted them into the code and 

 produced <code>Lark.java</code>, which you actually compiled

 to make the parser.</p>

 <p>So while Java doesn’t have a preprocessor, Lark did, which made quite a few

 things easier.</p>

 <p>There were a lot of tricks; some of the state transitions 

 weren’t on characters, they were on XML character classes such as

 <code>NameChar</code> and so on.

 This made the automaton easier to write, and in fact, to keep the class files

 small, the character-class transitions persisted into the Java form, and the

 real DFA was built at startup time.

 These days, quick startup might be more important than <code>.class</code>

 file size.</p>

 <h2 id='p-3'>What Was Good</h2>

 <p>It was <em>damn</em> fast.  James Clark managed to hand-craft a

 Java-language XML parser called

 <a href="http://jclark.com/xml/xp/index.html">XP</a> that was a little faster

 than Lark, but he did that by clever I/O buffering, and I was determined to

 leapfrog him by improving my I/O.</p>

 <p>This was before the time of standardized XML APIs, but Lark had a stream API

 that influenced SAX, and a DOM-like tree API; both worked just fine.

 Lark is one of very few parsers ever to have survived the

 <a href="http://www.securityfocus.com/archive/1/303509/2002-12-13/2002-12-19/0">billion

 laughs attack</a>.</p>

 <p>Lark was put into production in quite a few deployments, and the flow of

 bug reports slowed to a trickle.

 Then in 1998 I noticed that IBM and Microsoft and BEA and everyone else

 were building XML Processors, so I decided that it wasn’t worthwhile 

 maintaining mine.</p>

 <h2 id='p-4'>What Was Bad</h2>

 <p>I never got around to teaching it namespaces, which means it wouldn’t be

 real useful today.</p>

 <p>It had one serious bug that would have been real work to fix and since

 nobody ever encountered it in practice, I kept putting it off and never did.

 If you had an internal parsed entity reference in an attribute value and the

 replacement text included the attribute delimiter (<code>'</code> or

 <code>"</code>), it would scream and claim you had a busted XML document.</p>

 <h2 id='p-5'>That Automaton</h2>

 <p>What happened was,

 <a href="http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/au/1712">Rick Jelliffe</a>, who is a

 Good Person, was 

 <a href="http://www.stylusstudio.com/xmldev/200604/post30110.html">looking for

 a FSM for XML</a> and I eventually noticed, and so I sent him mine.</p>

 <p>There’s no reason whatsoever to keep it a secret: 

 <a href="/ongoing/code/lark/com/textuality/autom.txt">here it is</a>.

 Be warned: it’s ugly.</p>

 <p>Fortunately, there were only 227 states and 8732 transitions, so the state

 number fit into a 

 byte; that and the associated event index pack into a short.

 To make things even tighter, the transitions were only keyed by characters up

 to 127, as in 7-bit ASCII.

 Characters higher than that can’t be XML syntax characters, so we’re only

 interested whether they fall into classes like <code>NameChar</code> and

 <code>NameStartChar</code> and so on.  A 64K <code>byte[]</code> array takes

 care of that, each byte having a class bitmask.</p>

 <p>As a result of all this jiggery-pokery, the DFA ends up, believe it

 or not, constituting a <code>short[227][128]</code>.</p>

 <p>Here’s a typical chunk of the automaton:</p>

 <pre><code>1. # in Start tag GI

 2. State StagGI BustedMarkup {in element type}

 3. T $NameC StagGI

 4. T $S InStag !EndGI

 5. T > InDoc !EndGI !ReportSTag

 6. T / EmptyClose !EndGI</code></pre>

 <p>This state, called <code>StagGI</code>, is the state where we’re actually

 reading the name of a tag, we got here by seeing a <code>&lt;</code> followed

 by a <code>NameStart</code> character.<br/>

 Line 1 is a comment.<br/>

 In line 2 we name the state, and support error reporting, providing the name

 of another state to fall back into in case of error, and in the curly braces,

 some text to help build an error message.<br/>

 Line 3 says that if we see a valid XML Name character, we just stay in this

 state.<br/>

 Line 4 says that if we see an XML space character, we move to state

 <code>InStag</code> and process an <code>EndGI</code> event, which would stash

 the characters in the start tag.<br/>And so on.</p>

 <h2 id='p-6'>Other Hackery</h2>

 <p>An early cut of Lark used String and StringBuffer objects to hold all the

 bits and pieces of the XML.  This might be a viable strategy today, but in

 1996’s Java it was painfully slow. 

 So the code goes to heroic lengths to live in the land of character arrays at

 all times, making Strings only when a client program asks for one through the

 API.  The performance difference was mind-boggling.</p>

 <h2 id='p-7'>An Evil Idea</h2>

 <p>If you look at the automaton, and the Lark code, at least half—I’d bet

 three quarters—is there to deal with parsing the DTD and then dealing with

 entity wrangling.

 A whole bunch more is there to support DOM-building and walking.</p>

 <p>I bet if I went through and simply removed support for anything coming out

 of the <code>&lt;!DOCTYPE></code>, including all entity processing, 

 then discarded

 the DOM stuff, then added namespace support and SAX and StAX APIs, it would be

 less than half its current size.  

 Then if I reworked the I/O, knowing what I know now and stealing some tricks

 that James Clark uses in

 <a href="http://expat.sourceforge.net/">expat</a>, I bet it would

 be the fastest Java XML parser on the planet for XML docs without a

 DOCTYPE; by a wide margin.  It’s hard to beat a DFA.</p>

 <p>And it would still be fully XML 1.0 compliant.  Because (snicker) this is

 Java, and your basic core Java now includes an XML parser, so I could simply

 instrument Larkette to buffer the prologue and if it saw a DOCTYPE with an

 internal subset, defer to Java’s built-in parser.</p>

 <p>I’ll probably never do it.  But the thought brings a smile to my face.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/22/'>

  <title>Just A Kid</title>

  <link href='Just-a-Kid' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/22/Just-a-Kid</id>

  <published>2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-22T13:37:58-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Food and Drink' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Food and Drink' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Last weekend, Lauren felt like cooking up home-made Easter eggs, so

 the shopping list included “chocolate chips (large bag)”.  I was heading down

 the bulk-foods aisle and realized one of the vertical acrylic bins was full of

 them.  Someone had been sloppy, and there was a little heap of chocolate chips

 on the shelf underneath it.  For a second, I flashed into pure eight-year-old

 mode, thinking “Holy cow, there’s a <em>whole bin</em> full of chocolate

 chips, and more just lying there!”  I popped a few in my mouth and they were

 excellent; semi-sweet, dark, strong, and firm.  I was still in the state that

 Buddhists don’t mean when they say “Child’s Mind”, thinking “I

 can get as many as I want!”  The list did say “large bag” after all, so I put

 a bag under the spout and gleefully jammed the lever <em>all the way

 over</em>.  At home, Lauren said “You went overboard, a bit, didn’t you?”

 and now we have a plastic canister-full in the pantry which should last us

 into 2007.  It’s a good feeling.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/22/'>

  <title>Goddess</title>

  <link href='Goddess' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/22/Goddess</id>

  <published>2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-22T12:25:59-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Family' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Family' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Microsoft' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Microsoft' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>That would be my wife 

 <a href="http://www.laurenwood.org/anyway/">Lauren</a>.  After 

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/16/Mad-at-Microsoft">I b0rked</a> our

 Win2K gamebox, I tried re-installing the OS and eventually reduced it to

 complete brick-ness, it recognized neither the video adapter nor the network

 card.  So Lauren brushed me aside and started wrestling with the problem, and

 to make a long story short, it almost completely works again.  At one point

 she seemed nearly infinite in her capabilities, sitting in front of the

 computer wrangling software updates while knitting baby stuff and looking up

 words in a German dictionary for the kid’s homework.  Some of the German nouns

 and muttered curses at the Windows install sounded remarkably like each other.

 Why would anyone not marry a geek?  The only problem is that Win2K won’t

 auto-switch resolutions to play games any more, it gets the frequency wrong

 and the LCD goes pear-shaped, you have to hand-select the frequency and

 switch into the right resolution first.  LazyWeb?</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/21/'>

  <title>Routing Around Spotlight</title>

  <link href='Routing-Around-Spotlight' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/21/Routing-Around-Spotlight</id>

  <published>2006-04-21T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-21T23:16:25-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Mac OS X/Gripes' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Mac OS X' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Gripes' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Herewith two hideously ugly little shell scripts for use when Spotlight refuses to search your mail. Spotlight is a flawed v1.0 implementation of a really good idea and will, I&#x2019;m sure, be debugged in a near-future release. <i>[Update: The LazyWeb is educating me... these are moving targets.]</i></div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Herewith two hideously ugly little shell scripts for use when Spotlight

 refuses to search your mail.

 Spotlight is a flawed v1.0 implementation of a really good idea and will, I’m

 sure, be debugged in a near-future release.

 <i>[Update: The LazyWeb is educating me... these are moving targets.]</i></p>

 <p>My problem is that whereas Mail.app will search my To/From/Subject

 lines (slowly, and with a

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2005/11/20/UnTiger">really irritating GUI</a>),

 the “Entire Message” option just doesn’t work, it returns instantly with no

 results.  Yes, I’ve read the hints about making Spotlight re-index,

 but it just flatly refuses to work for me.  Mind you, I have a lot of

 email, but still, it should at least try.</p>

 <p>It turns out I had never really figured out the <code>-print0</code> and

 <code>-0</code> idioms that a lot of the shell-command stalwarts now have.

 Thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for raising my consciousness.</p>

 <p>This lives in <code>$HOME/bin</code> under the name

 <code>mailgrep</code>:</p>

 <pre><code>#!/bin/sh

 find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx' -print0 | \

   xargs -0 fgrep -i $@</code></pre>

 <p>Isn’t <code>xargs</code> a funny command?  I’ve discovered that it’s nearly

 impossible to describe what does, and then why what it does is necessary, but

 there are just a whole bunch of places where you’d be lost without it.</p>

 <p>This lives in <code>$HOME/bin/mailview</code>:</p>

 <pre><code>#!/bin/sh

 find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx'  -print0 | \

   xargs -0 fgrep -i -l -Z $@ | \

   xargs -0 open</code></pre>

 <p>The first cut of this dodged <code>xargs</code> and used an

 incredibly-inefficient and slow chain of <code>-exec</code> arguments to open

 the files one at a time with 

 <code>view</code> (aka <code>vim</code>), to work around 

 a well-known <code>vim</code> misfeature; it complained about the input

 not being a terminal and left my Terminal.app keystrokes borked.</p>

 <p>But Malcolm, confirming my belief in the broken-ness of <code>vim</code>,

 said “Oh, *that* ‘view’.  I thought it was some sexy Mac ‘view my email’ app”.

 D’oh, of course; the magic OS X <code>open</code> command does just the right

 thing. 

 Erm, you might want to run <code>mailgrep</code> before you run

 <code>mailview</code>; I’m not sure what would happen if you asked OS X to

 open three or four thousand email messages at once.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/21/'>

  <title>FSS: Pink Flowers</title>

  <link href='Dracon-Help' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/21/Dracon-Help</id>

  <published>2006-04-21T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-21T17:19:27-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Friday Slide Scan #28 is two Eighties florals, one interior, one exterior.  With a confession.</div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Friday Slide Scan #28 is two Eighties florals, one interior, one

 exterior.  With a confession.</p>

 <p>First some spring flowers fallen from a tree, just as now in our front

 yard, at dusk.</p>

 <img src="0506.png" alt="Fallen pink treeflowers on grass at dusk" />

 <p>I’m not sure what these are, but look at the light in the center.  Rewards

 enlarging.</p>

 <img src="0713.png" alt="Flowers in shadow with light in background" />

 <p>Here’s the confession.  Sometimes on Fridays when I’m feeling kinda

 burned-out, I knock off work and do these slide scans in the office, because

 this is where I have the

 <a href="http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2004/04/14/MineIsBigger">big

 screen</a>.

 Blowing these pictures up to mega-huge, picking away at the old-slide crud and

 scanning artifacts, tinkering with the colour balance, and listening; I never

 play music while I’m writing or coding seriously, but I play it real loud while

 photo-editing.  It’s all pretty well pure pleasure; you just can’t imagine

 how good that second one above looks at near-native size.

 It reconstitutes the part of my mind that I earn my living with; that’s my

 story and I’m sticking to it.</p>

 <p>Images in the Friday Slide Scans are from 35mm slides taken between 1953

 and 2003 by (in rough chronological order)

 <a href="http://www.textuality.com/BillBray/">Bill Bray</a>, 

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2004/08/11/MomsGarden">Jean Bray</a>, Tim Bray, Cath

 Bray, and

 <a href="http://www.laurenwood.org/anyway/">Lauren Wood</a>; when I know

 exactly who took one, I’ll say; in this case, at least one is by Cath Bray.

 Most but not all of the slides were on Kodachrome; they were digitized using

 a Nikon CoolScan 4000 ED scanner and cleaned up by a combination of the Nikon

 scanning software and PhotoShop Elements.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/20/'>

  <title>Spring Pix</title>

  <link href='Spring-Pix' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/20/Spring-Pix</id>

  <published>2006-04-20T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-20T23:07:10-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Places/Vancouver' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Places' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Vancouver' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts/Photos' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Arts' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Photos' />

  <summary type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>Three pictures around Vancouver; one of a fresh green springtime tree, two of rotten old buildings being torn down.</div></summary>

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Three pictures around Vancouver; one of a fresh green springtime tree, two

 of rotten old buildings being torn down.</p>

 <p>There’s nothing quite as fresh as just-sprouted deciduous leaves;

 another few weeks and this tree will be just a tree.</p>

 <img src="IMG_4656.png" alt="Sunlit fresh young leaves" />

 <p>I have a thing about demolition.

 The first is a rotten dingy old one-story on Main Street near 23rd, the second

 is an unlovely grey mid-rise being torn down to build still more condos at

 Homer and Helmcken.</p>

 <img src="IMG_4665.png" alt="Demolition site on Main Street, Vancouver" />

 <img src="IMG_4671.png" alt="Demolition site at Homer and Helmcken, Vancouver" />

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/20/'>

  <title>Totten&#x2019;s Trip</title>

  <link href='Totten-on-Iraq' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/20/Totten-on-Iraq</id>

  <published>2006-04-20T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-20T21:05:22-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Places/Middle East' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Places' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Middle East' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p><a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/">Michael J. Totten</a> is a

 journalist and blogger who’s back and forth to the 

 Middle East and writes about it, quite well in my opinion; he supports this by

 freelancing and with his blog’s tip jar.  He gets lots of

 link love from the right-wing blogosphere, which is puzzling because Totten is

 balanced and clear-eyed and doesn’t seem to have any particular axe to grind.

 Recently, he and a friend were 

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001117.html">having fun in

 Istanbul</a> and, on a random drive out into the country, decided on impulse to

 keep going, all the way across Turkey and into Iraq; into the Kurdish

 mini-state in Iraq’s north, to 

 be precise.  It makes a heck of a story, with lots of pictures, in six parts:

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001119.html">I</a>,

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001120.html">II</a>,

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001121.html">III</a>,

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001124.html">IV</a>,

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001126.html">V</a>, and

 <a href="http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001127.html">VI</a>.

 </p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/19/'>

  <title>The Cost of AJAX</title>

  <link href='The-Cost-of-AJAX' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/19/The-Cost-of-AJAX</id>

  <published>2006-04-19T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-20T00:37:46-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology/Web' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Technology' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Web' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>James Governor

 <a href="http://www.redmonk.com/jgovernor/archives/001526.html">relays a

 question</a> that sounds important

 but I think is actively dangerous: do AJAX apps present more of

 a server-side load?  The question is dangerous because it’s meaningless and

 unanswerable.  Your typical Web page will, in the process of

 loading, call back to the server for a bunch of stylesheets and graphics and

 scripts and so on: for example, this <span class='o'>ongoing</span> page calls

 out to three different graphics, one stylesheet, and one JavaScript file.

 It also has one “AJAXy” XMLHttpRequest call.

 From the server’s point of view, those are all just requests to dereference

 one URI or another.  In the case

 of <span class='o'>ongoing</span>, the AJAX request is for a static file less

 than 200 bytes in size (i.e. cheap).

 On the other hand, it could have been for something that required a

 complex outer join on two ten-million-row tables (i.e. <em>very</em>

 expensive).  And one of the virtues of 

 the Web Architecture is that it hides those differences, the “U” in URI stands

 for “Uniform”, it’s a Uniform interface to a resource on the Web that could

 be, well, anything.

 So saying “AJAX is expensive” (or that it’s cheap) is like saying “A mountain

 bike is slower than a battle tank” (or that it’s faster).  

 The truth depends on what you’re doing with it. 

 In the case of web sites, it depends on how many fetches you do and

 where you have to go to get the data to satisfy them.

 <span class='o'>ongoing</span> is a pretty quick web site, even though it runs

 on a fairly modest server, but

 that has nothing to do with AJAX-or-not; it’s because of the particular way

 I’ve set up the Web resources that make the pages here.

 I’ve

 <a href="/ongoing/When/200x/2006/02/14/AJAX-Performance">argued elsewhere</a>

 that AJAX can be a performance win, system-wide; but that argument too is

 contingent on context, lots of context.</p>

 </div></content></entry>

 <entry xml:base='When/200x/2006/04/18/'>

  <title>Hao Wu and Graham McMynn</title>

  <link href='Hao-Wu' />

  <id>http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2006/04/18/Hao-Wu</id>

  <published>2006-04-18T13:00:00-08:00</published>

  <updated>2006-04-18T22:00:40-08:00</updated>

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Places/China' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Places' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='China' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='The World/Politics' />

  <category scheme='http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/What/' term='Politics' />

 <content type='xhtml'><div xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml'>

 <p>Graham McMynn is a teenager who was kidnapped in Vancouver on April 4th and

 freed, in a large, noisy, and

 <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/story/news/national/2006/04/12/bcabduction060412.html">newsworthy</a>

 police operation, on April 12th.

 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hao_Wu">Hao Wu</a> is a Chinese

 film-maker and

 <a href="http://beijingorbust.blogspot.com/">blogger</a> who was kidnapped in

 Beijing on February 22nd in a 

 small, quiet police operation not intended to be newsworthy, and who has not

 been freed.

 Read about it

 <a href="http://spaces.msn.com/wuhaofamily/">here</a>,

 <a href="http://ethanzuckerman.com/haowu/">here</a>, and

 <a href="http://rconversation.blogs.com/rconversation/freehaowu/index.html">here</a>.

 Making noise about it <em>might</em> influence the government of China to

 moderate its actions against Mr. Wu, and can’t do any harm.

 Mr. McMynn’s kidnappers were a gaggle of small-time hoodlums, one of whom was

 out on bail while awaiting trial for another kidnapping (!).

 Mr. Wu’s were police.

 In a civilized country, the function of the police force is to deter such

 people and arrest them.  A nation where they are the same people?   Nobody

 could call it “civilized”.</p> 

 </div></content></entry>

 </feed>