I note with interest that a (really old) lawsuit from Xerox has finally compelled Palm to dump Graffiti in favor of the Jot writing system. I wonder what changed to make Palm switch over. Do they feel like Xerox is on the verge of winning, or has something convinced them of the superiority of Jot. Either way, Xerox is pressing forward with the lawsuit.
I have a bunch of ideas about things I want to write about here, and some code that I want to write to make this site better, but I have had no time to work on it, because I’ve been finishing a book project. Nearly all of the book work I’ve done over the past four or five years has been behind the scenes – rather than writing whole books from scratch, I update other people’s books, or write chapters when people fall behind and can’t finish, or do tech edits to make sure that books are technically accurate. The projects are less gruelling than concieving and writing entire books, and I’ve spent most of the past three years really honing my Java skills, so I haven’t been ahead of the curve enough to write anything really interesting. In any case, the project I’m finishing now is a revision of a pretty well known and venerable HTML book. It has three new chapters in it, and the one I’m particularly proud of covers laying out pages with CSS, because I learned a ton more about CSS while writing it and I think it’s well done. Anyway, I’m just about done with it now and will soon be off to other things, like making some improvements around here. ...
Andrew Leonard reviewed James Ledbetter’s Industry Standard post mortem on Friday. How sweet it must be for Salon, survivor of more near death experiences than I can count to be commenting on the death of a one time juggernaut like the Standard. Leonard gets some great digs in, too: The lack of excitement isn't Ledbetter's fault. The story itself is the culprit. In 1999 and 2000, to those who lived and worked in it, the dot-com explosion and its attendant media frenzy seemed like a huge, world-changing story, whether one was a fan or a detractor. But in retrospect, while the rise of the Internet was truly earth-shattering, the economic frenzy that surrounded it was just so much froth, an excuse for public relations companies and advertising agencies to suck from the venture capital teat. The fact that the Standard sold 7,000 pages of ads in 2000 to a horde of companies that didn't even exist a year later isn't a tragedy, and it isn't even a farce. So true, so true. How glad you readers must be that rc3.org is utterly immune to the ravages of the boom/bust/bust/bust/still busted cycle. Heck, if I lose my job, things will probably only pick up around here. ...
MPEG LA is mad at Microsoft for coming up with a better video codec than they offer (MPEG-4), and then licensing it more cheaply than they do. Microsoft of course wants to crush MPEG and turn every video device around into a revenue producer for themselves. Consumers lose either way.
Either the RIAA site has been hacked yet again, or they’ve finally surrendered to common sense. Of course it’s the former, given this paragraph: We will also stop lobbying politicians to impose draconian copyright laws on the American people. Last June, Rep. Rick Berman, who received more campaign donations from the entertainment industry than any other Congressperson, proposed legislation that would exempt rights-holders from anti-hacking law in order that they might exact vigilante-style justice on file-sharers. Initially we were thrilled at the display of the political might of our money, but later were sickened as we realized the implications for democracy in America. Morally, we cannot continue this manipulation of the political system. My assumption is that somebody has hacked into their content management system and can post fake press releases at will. ...
John Gruber’s comments on Safari and review of the application are definitely worth reading if you have an unhealthy obsession with Web browsers (or you’re a Mac user). Me, I have an unhealthy obsession with Web browsers. Reading about Safari brings me back to the days when the Mac was the computer to use of you used the Internet. You know, back in the early nineties when not many people used the Internet. Back then, the suite of Mac Internet applications was incomparably better than any other platform. It looks like we might be headed in that direction again, especially considering all of the Unix applications you can use on the Mac these days. ...
FCC chairman Michael Powell discovered what everybody who owns a TiVo already knows, which is that it’s God’s machine. He received a TiVo for Christmas and seems to be a rapid convert. Hopefully FCC rulings will reflect how nice it is for consumers to be able to watch programs at a time of their own choosing.
North Korean diplomats are meeting with the governor of New Mexico to discuss what happens next in our ongoing standoff. The governor happens to be Bill Richardson, a former Clinton administration official who successfully negotiated the return of an American helicopter pilot with the North Koreans in 1994. I’m not sure whether this is embarrassing for the Bush administration or not, but given that it was the North Koreans who asked to meet with Richardson, it certainly seems like they’re out to embarrass the Bush administration. I think the gravity of the situation is apparent given that the Bush administration actually went for it. What’s next, Saddam Hussein asking to meet with the mayor of Dallas? Oh, and now North Korea has ditched the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. They’re the first country, out of 187 that ratified it, to dump the treaty. They’re playing chicken with the United States, and they’re winning. ...
For people who watched The West Wing last night: Prayer, Noetic Studies Feasible; Results Indicate Benefit to Heart Patients.
It seems to me that the Mozilla project’s stock has been falling since Apple announced Safari and people realized it was based on KDE’s KHTML and KJS rather than Gecko. It’s important to remember that there are more reasons that Apple might have chosen to use KHTML than the most obvious Gecko bad/KHTML good dichotomy that seems to be rapidly ossifying as the conventional wisdom. KHTML is an HTML rendering library written to work with Qt. It is, by its very nature, infinitely simpler than Mozilla, which just by virtue of being cross-platform takes on a lot of added complexity. I haven’t looked at the source code for KHTML or Gecko, and even if I did, I wouldn’t be able to judge which would suit Apple’s needs better. It’s important to remember that people start a project (like Safari) with specific requirements. The judgement that’s made when pulling in outside components is which of them best fulfills those requirements, not which of them is better on some absolute scale. Emacs is a great editor, but you wouldn’t choose it if you needed to add a text editing component to a Windows application. And the thing is, we still don’t know whether Apple made the right choice in picking KHTML to power Safari. Is Apple going to commit to the level of standards adherence that Mozilla has worked toward? If not, does that set us behind as Web developers? We’re finally getting to a point where you really can write pages that validate to an actual spec and have them work for just about everybody. I really hope Apple doesn’t move us away from that. ...