Entries Tagged 'Web related' ↓

Simon’s “posting”:http://simon.incutio.com/archive/2004/05/22/tbl on Tim Berners Lee’s “document”:http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/TLD about TLD(Top level Domains) got me thinking: how did the current system come about?

I mean, why not a system similar to Usenet:

bc. com.uk.mapledesign
com.int.amazon
org.int.sendcard

Maybe extended further:

bc. com.uk.mapledesign.www
com.uk.mapledesign.ftp
com.uk.mapledesign.mail

and so on.

That seems to provide a much more structured way of finding what you want. In a way it’s like having the “ODP”:http://www.dmoz.org in the domain name (although not to such an extreme level). There’s still the problem of trademarks. Here my take is: “If the company has a registered trademark in that country they are eligible to claim the domain; otherwise anyone else can take it.” Those that have the domain before someone registers the trademark in their country cannot have it taken from them - they could be bought out. Yeah, still problems, but it seems fair to me
I tried “Google”:http://www.google.com to find how the current system came about but had no luck - can anyone enlighten me?

[Credit: my thoughts on alternative organisation of domain names were inspired by something I read in "Tim Bray's":http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/ site many moons ago - and can't find now]

I just ran across this while wasting time (instead of of doing a calculation on residual reflection intensity with imperfect antireflection coatings - uugh).

AOL’s explanation of home networking (requires REAL player) brought a big smile to my face - but if you’re not British you may not find it funny. I can’t think what it reminded me of - Wallace and Gromit? [Answers in a comment please]

I loved the line: “If you live alone with one computer and a chinchilla for company, you don’t need a home network”.

Well done AOL (and I think that’s the first time I’ve ever congratulated them for anything!)

While on the subject (sort-of anyhow), does anyone know if it’s possible/how to save a realmedia video/audio stream for later offline listening/watching?

Surely my friends and myself can’t be the only people who wish that a messaging client had support for rendering mathematical formula? Say we could enter (for example) TeX commands that were rendered on the other user’s screen, it would make it so much easier for the other person to understand what was being described than the current ascii formulae (which look like ==’<rho(ac)>=<rho(dc)>(1-i)’ or ‘1/m* = 1/h<bar>^2 * d^2E/dk^2′== - readable, but they get worse…).

Having said that, here are my thoughts on how I might try to implement it, if no one more competant than myself does it:

* If *I* have to write this program, if *I* want it ready before I graduate I’ll have to use “Python”:http://www.python.org/ - I know no other language (although I’m sure others are a lot more suitable).
* As I cannot find a self-contained Tex renderer, I would probably use itex2mml and then a MathML renderer (again, not found one, but I know that I could use a small browser window for the display, which would work with IE or Mozilla). I’m thinking of doing the coding in “Python”:http://www.python.org/, using “wxWindows”:http://www.wxwindows.org/, and the wxIE component (OK, windows only, but it will render MathML). No ideas how to update the display or anything like that.
* I envisage using Jabber for the communication

Other features that would be very useful:

* Basic drawing capabilities. Even if it’s just the equivalent of Paint’s Paintbrush, it would allow us to sketch graphs.
* A visual formula composer (like “Lyx”:http://www.lyx.org has, or EquationEditor for Microsoft Word) so we don’t have to remember all the commands.

_Disclaimer: this is a work in progress entry, things may change!_

I’ve been using “blo.gs”:http://blo.gs to maintain an OPML file of weblogs of interest (as used in the blogroll). However, I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated with the service offered. It refuses to verify my login in Opera 7.23, and the fact that it won’t add to the blogroll unless the URL in the database is identical to the page’s URL is very frustrating, and often means i can’t add using the bookmarklet, but must visit the main site (I submitted a patch for this nearly 2 months ago as I found it to be a great pain, but I’ve heard nothing back).

So can anyone recommend an alternative service?
Thanks!

With a rather temperemental internet connetion now working in the house (due either to our hardware or the ‘phone line - “Zen”:http://www.zen.co.uk hasn’t decided yet) and the ability to _download_ files, I decided to give “Firebird”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/ 0.7 a go. Previously I’d used 0.6 and not thought much of it.

So I installed Firebird from the .zip file and started using it. I was impressed enough to make it my default browser on Windows instead of Internet Explorer, something that Opera’s never managed to make me do (despite being much better in many places than both Firebird and Internet Explorer, I find it confusing and complicated to use). However, the basic tabbed browsing annoyed me compared with Opera’s sophisticated stuff.

Which led onto what seems to have been my nemesis: Firebird’s extensions. I went to install the “tabbrowser extensions”:http://white.sakura.ne.jp/~piro/xul/_tabextensions.html.en and ended up installing 2 other extensions as well - the “newsmonster aggregator”:http://newsmonster.org/ and another one to “save the open tabs”:http://www.pikey.me.uk/mozilla/ (not realising that tabbrowser could do this). After this all kinds of strange things seemed to start happening. The browser kept on freezing; the ‘Options’ window wouldn’t open, and the close button for the main browser window wouldn’t work on first click.

So I deleted the Firebird directory from @C:\Program Files@ and also the Phoenix directory from @C:\Documents and Settings\Application Data@. I then reinstalled Firebird using the unofficial Windows installer.

Yet funny things still occurred. The ‘Options’ dialog and download dialogues were the same size as my screen (or slightly bigger). The browser’s also become much slower.

Has anyone found any instructions as to how to clean your system (XP in my case) to do a brand new installation? Or any suggestions as to what the problems can be?

Sterling Hughes is “phasing out email”:http://www.edwardbear.org/blog/archives/000238.html.

I wish him well in his endevour. I’ve signed off many of my mailing lists, but it still takes ~ half an hour a day just to communicate with clients via email.

But I don’t think that email is a terrible form of communication. No doubt uber-geeks would like to improve the protocols used, but for me they work well.

There are two problems with email:

# The tools we use can’t cope with the way email is used today.
# We don’t treat it right.

Point one has been “touched on”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/most_email_clients_are_obsolete.html before in this weblog, so I’ll only expand on point two.

Email is _not a discussion format_. It was designed to enable the exchange of information. I prefer to see email as an instant postal service, rather than a textual-chat format. So in general as much thought should go into writing an email as into writing a letter. I think the problem with email is that it’s too easy to send a message, so there’s no barrier to make you stop and think if a message is necessary.

Would I want to be without email? No. I find it very useful to converse with people. I’m getting better at managing the email I receive, and usually don’t get round to writing replies to messages I receive, which cuts down on the time required
Can it be improved on? Definitely. But until something better comes along, I’ll keep on using it.

I’ve reached the stage where I need a tool to help me manage my bookmarks. Posting all the links I find to a private MT weblog isn’t the best solution, as I need hierachical folders and a better search.

I’ve started looking at desktop solutions. I only need the tool to work on Windows. Features I’m looking for:

* The ability to assign bookmarks to multiple categories
* A decent search tool
* A field allowing me to comment on the link.
* A web export option. So that
## I can still see my bookmarks when using a University terminal
## I can share them with others.

Looking at the last two points, maybe a web based solution would suit me better. I’d forgotten about University.

I’d like to be able to make some links public as I post them - I like the comments I get in this weblog on some of the entries, as they point me to unknown useful solutions.

With regard to desktop tools, I’m currently trying:

# “Powermarks”:http://www.kaylon.com/power.html - works well, but _no categories/folders_
# “Compass”:http://www.softgauge.com/compass/ - quite nice, but hasn’t been updated for 2 years and doesn’t make any mention of Mozilla. Also didn’t auto-detect my Opera hotlist (it didn’t know where Windows XP stores it), unlike Powermarks.

The other thing I hate is having to enter keywords so i can find it later. Here’s a few ideas:

* Get the keywords from the description I add (most tools do), but use a stemmer so that if I search for the singular or pluaral they will both match.
* Use something like “Pile”:http://pile.codewhore.org to link together related bookmarks. Maybe this could pick up relations I’d miss by searching.
* How about analysing the web page I’m bookmarking and building an index of the words it contains? This is probably difficult to make relevant (impossible?) due to the way authors ramble on about unrelated stuff on the same page. So probably not a good idea.
* Could AI be used? I know I’m rather star-struck by the Bayesian classification of email, but surely there’s a similar technique for information management?

I know I keep on banging on about Knowledge management tools (such as in “[most] Email clients are obsolete”:http://peter.mapledesign.co.uk/weblog/archives/most_email_clients_are_obsolete.html), but I can’t be the only one experiencing problems, so someone out there must either know of a solution, or be writing one

On “mezzoblue”:http://www.mezzoblue.com there’s a post asking about “free and standards compliant textarea replacements”:http://www.mezzoblue.com/cgi-bin/mt/mezzo/archives/000229.asp. Some useful links in the comments - I like “HTMLArea”:http://www.dynarch.com/htmlarea/ (which I’ve seen before) and the docs for “netWindows”:http://www.netwindows.org/ make it look good.

HTMLArea disappoints me though because it puts styles inline, rather than giving you a drop-down box to select the style from.

From a forum:

bq. I can’t be the only user out here who doesn’t give a fig for XHTML, is perfectly happy with font tags, and thinks CSS is an enormous waste of time. We’re just not as vocal as the proponents of the well-formed Web.

Just what do you say to someone with this viewpoint, that will convince them that CSS isn’t a waste of time? Especially when, untill all browsers have decent support for CSS, it is a PITA(Pain In The AR**) to write sometimes, and we can’t deny the fact (try viewing this site in Opera to see a problem or two…)

_(Disclaimer: this is written by someone who knows nothing about RSS!)_

RSS aggregators are great, but there needs to be some more advanced method of tracking the comments made. Comments are half the attraction of weblogs, and so for many posts I read in the aggregator, I still have to visit the website to see if there are any new comments/read the comments. This wastes my time, and the bandwidth of the weblog.

So what could be done? Well, the easiest solution would be to have a comments tag with each story, and store the number of comments there. That gives me an easy way of seeing if new comments have been posted. It won’t stop me having to visit the weblog if there are new comments, but at least it’ll save wasted trips.