ongoing

Spring in White on White

2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00

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.

- -

The blossoms are pear in the foreground, cherry behind.

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.

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.

Scott

2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00

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.

Jacobs, Pictures, Spartans

2006-04-26T13:00:00-08:00

Jane Jacobs 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 -looked; her face commanded the eye. Which leads me Alex -Waterhouse-Hayward’s wonderful -Jane Jacobs & Viveca Lindfors; -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 -Sex Crimes, Homicide and Drugs -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 -The -War (after Simonides), being careful to look closely at the links. -I’ve -written -about those same wars.

LAMP and MARS

2006-04-25T13:00:00-08:00

At -that Rails conference, when I -was -talking -to -Obie Fernandez, 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 -T1; -Obie took that ball and -ran with it, -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 -Joyent has been -doing that, and have -76 -PDF slides 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. -[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.]

Real-Time Journalism

2006-04-25T13:00:00-08:00

I got email late yesterday from -David Berlind: “Hey, can -I call you for a minute?” He wanted commentary on -a story he was writing 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.

The Transition Explained

2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00

It’s not that complicated, really. -Bloggers are -taking over the world. -Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated.

5✭♫: One More Cup of Coffee

2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00

I’m not really a -Bob Dylan 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 One More Cup of Coffee, from the 1976 album -Desire, can’t be -ignored; wonderful tune, wonderful orchestration, wonderful performance. -(“5✭♫” series introduction here; -with an -explanation of why the title may look broken.)

- -

The Context

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.

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.

My taste in Dylan is a little unusual: once you get past One More Cup -of Coffee, my favorites would be Baby Let Me Follow You -Down (from the Last Waltz soundtrack) and -Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood) from -The Basement -Tapes.

Desire, the record, is hit and miss. Joey, -glorification of the life of some mafioso, is flawed in concept -and unlistenable in execution. Hurricane, whatever you think -about -Mr. Carter, that song -rocks; and Isis hits pretty hard too.

The Music

Is there anything in One More Cup of Coffee 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, -Scarlet Rivera’s -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 really like this song.

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.

Sampling It

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 Desire; it’s a keeper.

Atomic Monday

2006-04-24T13:00:00-08:00

First of all, implementors of anything Atom-related need to spend some time -chez -Jacques Distler; in particular, the conversation that plays out in the -comments. Second, there’s this piece of software called -Planet Planet that allows you to -make an aggregate web page by reading lots of feeds; for example, see -Planet Apache or -Planet Sun. -Sam Ruby decided that its Atom support needed some work, so -he did -it. 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 -NetNewsWire 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 exactly what we went to all that trouble to make it do. -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.

Hyatt on the High-Res Web

2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00

Check out Dave Hyatt’s -excellent write-up on -designing and rendering Web pages so they take advantage of the -higher-resolution screens that may 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 ongoing, 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 -this nifty SVG Atom -logo, 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”. -[Update: -Jeff Schiller writes to tell me that -Opera 9 does SVG (and Opera 8 “SVG Tiny”) too.] -[Dave Walker writes: Though the shipping version of Safari doesn’t support SVG, -the -nightlies do.] -[Dave Lemen -points to -JPEG 2000 as possibly -useful in a high-res context.]

Wrong About the Infield Fly Rule

2006-04-23T13:00:00-08:00

My brother -Rob is really taking to -this blogging medium. Check out his recent -Credo, -and also the only instance I’ve seen of -Anglo-Saxon alliterative poetry -applied to a mini-van.

Statistics

2004-12-12T12:00:00-08:00

Almost every Sunday I grab the week’s ongoing -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. -[Updated: 2006/04/23.]

- -

Browsers visiting ongoing, -percent.

- -

Browsers visiting ongoing via -search engines, percent.

- -

Search referrals to ongoing .

- -

Fetches of the RSS 2.0 and Atom 1.0 feeds.

The notes on usage and source code will return in coming weeks when I get -the cycles to rewrite this whole article.

What a “Hit” Means

I recently -updated the -ongoing software -(but haven’t updated the Colophon I see, oops). -Anyhow, the XMLHttpRequest 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 -Google Analytics -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.

Anyhow, do not 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 no #&*!$ idea how many people look at my feeds.

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.

Anyhow, I ran some detailed statistics on the traffic for Wednesday, -February 8th, 2006.

- - - - - - - - -

Total connections to the server	180,428
Total successful GET transactions	155,507
Total fetches of the RSS and Atom feeds	88,450
Total GET transactions that actually fetched data (i.e. status code -200 as opposed to 304)	87,271
Total GETs of actual ongoing pages (i.e. not CSS, js, or -images)	18,444
Actual human page-views	6,348

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.

It’s amazing that the whole thing works at all.

XML Automaton

2006-04-18T13:00:00-08:00

In December of 1996 I released a piece of software called -Lark, which was -the world’s first -XML Processor (as the -term is defined in the -XML Specification). -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 quite 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. -[Rick Jelliffe -has -upgraded the machine].

Why “Lark”?

Lauren 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.

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 Lauren’s Right -Knee.

How Lark Worked

Lark was a pure -deterministic -finite automaton (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.

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 -yacc, -GNU bison, and -javacc, -usually used in combination with lexical scanners such as -flex 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.

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.

Then I had a file called Lark.jin which was really a Java -program that used the state machine to parse XML. The transition “events” -in the machine were mapped to case labels in a huge -switch construct. Then there was a horrible, horrible -Perl program that read the Lark.jin and the automaton, -generated the DFA tables in Java syntax, inserted them into the code and -produced Lark.java, which you actually compiled -to make the parser.

So while Java doesn’t have a preprocessor, Lark did, which made quite a few -things easier.

There were a lot of tricks; some of the state transitions -weren’t on characters, they were on XML character classes such as -NameChar 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 .class -file size.

What Was Good

It was damn fast. James Clark managed to hand-craft a -Java-language XML parser called -XP 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.

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 -billion -laughs attack.

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.

What Was Bad

I never got around to teaching it namespaces, which means it wouldn’t be -real useful today.

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 (' or -"), it would scream and claim you had a busted XML document.

That Automaton

What happened was, -Rick Jelliffe, who is a -Good Person, was -looking for -a FSM for XML and I eventually noticed, and so I sent him mine.

There’s no reason whatsoever to keep it a secret: -here it is. -Be warned: it’s ugly.

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 NameChar and -NameStartChar and so on. A 64K byte[] array takes -care of that, each byte having a class bitmask.

As a result of all this jiggery-pokery, the DFA ends up, believe it -or not, constituting a short[227][128].

Here’s a typical chunk of the automaton:

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

This state, called StagGI, is the state where we’re actually -reading the name of a tag, we got here by seeing a < followed -by a NameStart character.
-Line 1 is a comment.
-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.
-Line 3 says that if we see a valid XML Name character, we just stay in this -state.
-Line 4 says that if we see an XML space character, we move to state -InStag and process an EndGI event, which would stash -the characters in the start tag.
And so on.

Other Hackery

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.

An Evil Idea

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.

I bet if I went through and simply removed support for anything coming out -of the , 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 -expat, 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.

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.

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

Just A Kid

2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00

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 whole bin 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 all the way -over. 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.

Goddess

2006-04-22T13:00:00-08:00

That would be my wife -Lauren. After -I b0rked 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?

Routing Around Spotlight

2006-04-21T13:00:00-08:00

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. -[Update: The LazyWeb is educating me... these are moving targets.]

My problem is that whereas Mail.app will search my To/From/Subject -lines (slowly, and with a -really irritating GUI), -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.

It turns out I had never really figured out the -print0 and --0 idioms that a lot of the shell-command stalwarts now have. -Thanks to Malcolm Tredinnick for raising my consciousness.

This lives in $HOME/bin under the name -mailgrep:

#!/bin/sh
-find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx' -print0 | \
-  xargs -0 fgrep -i $@

Isn’t xargs 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.

This lives in $HOME/bin/mailview:

#!/bin/sh
-find $HOME/Library/Mail/IMAP* -name '*.emlx'  -print0 | \
-  xargs -0 fgrep -i -l -Z $@ | \
-  xargs -0 open

The first cut of this dodged xargs and used an -incredibly-inefficient and slow chain of -exec arguments to open -the files one at a time with -view (aka vim), to work around -a well-known vim misfeature; it complained about the input -not being a terminal and left my Terminal.app keystrokes borked.

But Malcolm, confirming my belief in the broken-ness of vim, -said “Oh, *that* ‘view’. I thought it was some sexy Mac ‘view my email’ app”. -D’oh, of course; the magic OS X open command does just the right -thing. -Erm, you might want to run mailgrep before you run -mailview; I’m not sure what would happen if you asked OS X to -open three or four thousand email messages at once.

FSS: Pink Flowers

2006-04-21T13:00:00-08:00

Friday Slide Scan #28 is two Eighties florals, one interior, one -exterior. With a confession.

First some spring flowers fallen from a tree, just as now in our front -yard, at dusk.

- -

I’m not sure what these are, but look at the light in the center. Rewards -enlarging.

- -

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 -big -screen. -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.

Images in the Friday Slide Scans are from 35mm slides taken between 1953 -and 2003 by (in rough chronological order) -Bill Bray, -Jean Bray, Tim Bray, Cath -Bray, and -Lauren Wood; 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.

Spring Pix

2006-04-20T13:00:00-08:00

Three pictures around Vancouver; one of a fresh green springtime tree, two -of rotten old buildings being torn down.

There’s nothing quite as fresh as just-sprouted deciduous leaves; -another few weeks and this tree will be just a tree.

- -

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.

- - -

Totten’s Trip

2006-04-20T13:00:00-08:00

Michael J. Totten 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 -having fun in -Istanbul 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: -I, -II, -III, -IV, -V, and -VI. -

The Cost of AJAX

2006-04-19T13:00:00-08:00

James Governor -relays a -question 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 ongoing 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 ongoing, 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. very -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. -ongoing 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 -argued elsewhere -that AJAX can be a performance win, system-wide; but that argument too is -contingent on context, lots of context.

Hao Wu and Graham McMynn

2006-04-18T13:00:00-08:00

Graham McMynn is a teenager who was kidnapped in Vancouver on April 4th and -freed, in a large, noisy, and -newsworthy -police operation, on April 12th. -Hao Wu is a Chinese -film-maker and -blogger 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 -here, -here, and -here. -Making noise about it might 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”.