Bloomin’ Nora!

Posted: December 10th, 2003 Comments Off on Bloomin’ Nora!

File under Too Useful To Miss: SystemRescueCD – a free Linux distro containing loads of stuff to do what it says on the tin. Bootable from CD or USB key. Also see the Trinity Rescue Kit and the security/forensics-focused Plan-B. (Via this Slashdot thread)

File under Too Useful To Miss: SystemRescueCD – a free Linux distro containing loads of stuff to do what it says on the tin. Bootable from CD or USB key. Also see the Trinity Rescue Kit and the security/forensics-focused Plan-B. (Via this Slashdot thread)

“Flossie, buy information pills
the prettiest sheep in the world, first lady of Llamasoft passed on today into a field that is forever green, where the skies are always blue and there is a never-ending supply of McVities.”

(Context references: Don Park, this Diego Doval)

I’ll say from the outset that I don’t consider myself in either camp, ophthalmologist as it were; I’m an external developer who wants a decent standard to code to, doctor and these are my observations.

The questions that I keep seeing thrown around this discussion are:

1. What can Atom Feed do that RSS 2.0 can’t?
2. Why don’t Blogger and MT use RSS 2.0?
3. Now that RSS 2.0 is under a CC licence, why not just make a fork that fixes its problems for Atom?
4. Why is the Atom development model so slow and messy?
5. This is all about politics, isn’t it?

1. What can Atom Feed do that RSS 2.0 can’t?

As has been previously pointed out in various areas, the point of Atom Feed is not so much to provide new features as to provide a feed format with considerably fewer areas of doubt and uncertainty than RSS 2.0 has, while still providing carefully-defined but still open room for extensibility in the vein of other well-behaved XML formats.

However, since you ask, here’s one particular feature that Atom’s developers would like:
To be able to specify dates in the most popular and widely-used format within the XML world, namely Dublin Core format.

And therein the whole problem lies.

I don’t really know why this is such a sticking point, since RSS has a date format already and it seems relatively unambiguous. On the other hand, anyone implementing a reasonably full-featured RSS consumer already has support for parsing dc:date, since RSS 1.0 uses it, and it’s much more widely-used in the XML world, thus providing an easy compatibility route with existing XML-consuming code that then wants to consume RSS.

The wish to use dc:date unearthed more problems with RSS 2.0 and that led to Atom.

According to the spec, RSS 2.0 lets you use dc:date instead of pubDate. Except, apparently, it doesn’t let you do it. Or it does, but it’s bad. In fact, I have yet to find a clear answer on whether using dc:date in an RSS 2.0 feed is valid or not. (This is one of those areas of doubt and uncertainty that I mentioned earlier)

2. Why don’t Blogger and MT use RSS 2.0?

I have no idea about Blogger, but MT has supported RSS 2.0 from the word go, as far as I can tell. There’s an RSS 2.0 feed template and it appears to validate just fine. However, the creator of RSS says that MT does not support RSS 2.0 properly. Eventually, after much handwaving and detective work (rather than, say, actually explaining from the start, which might have avoided some of the political problems that RSS and Atom are mired in), it transpired that this was due to its use of dc:date, despite this being valid according to the spec.

In short, the answer with regard to MT is one of the following:
a) MT supports RSS 2.0 in a valid manner and always has done.
b) MT does not support RSS 2.0 in a valid manner despite being considered valid according to the RSS 2.0 specification and therefore there is a problem with the specification as it stands.

(Update: In the comments to Diego’s post, Dave Winer clarifies: “Sure, their optional RSS 2.0 feed validates. It’s valid. You’re right about that. But it’s not supportive.” – using “supportive” in terms of RSS as a project rather than a spec.)

3. Now that RSS 2.0 is under a CC licence, why not just make a fork that fixes its problems for Atom?

Because it’ll break RSS 2.0 for everyone else. Putting a standard under a CC licence and thereby making it open for random rewriting does not fix a standard’s problems, it just makes them worse by encouraging people to change the standard a billion different ways, thus making the life of developers like me utter hell.

One of the (highly-admirable) aims of RSS was overt simplicity, encouraging users to look at the format, understand it instantly and reproduce it accordingly, in a similar way to HTML. Unfortunately, as anyone who has to implement an HTML consumer will tell you, doing it in a way that can comfortably parse even 50% of the web’s pages is damn hard work. RSS isn’t anywhere near as complex a problem, but inviting liberal rewriting and ambiguous interpretation of a spec takes things in a dangerous direction.

Were Atom to fork RSS as encouraged, it would merely be exacerbating the problem. Plus, there are no assurances that this would fix any of the disagreements that begat the Atom project in the first place.

4. Why is the Atom development model so slow and messy?

Because that’s what Internet standards development tends to look like. It’s not for nothing that the IETF has become known as The Organisation For Building The Internet Agonisingly Slowly. And just because the spec is still 0.x doesn’t necessarily indicate a massive problem, since RSS 0.91 was an active standard too.

However, Atom is going far slower than developers such as myself would like. If the spec doesn’t reach initial recommendation level soon and Blogger still uses it then it may end up having the same forking problems as RSS now does. I don’t take part in Atom development so I’ve no idea why it’s going so slowly, nor why Diego’s contributions were not used, and both of these disturb me.

5. This is all about politics, isn’t it?

Certainly, there’s far more ugly mud-throwing from both sides than is remotely necessary. This posting will probably be taken as mud-throwing too, though I certainly don’t mean it to be, as I don’t know any of the people involved personally, I’m sure they’re all quite lovely and I have no wish to offend anyone.

So, in order to state my own position in this I’d better go ahead and offend both sides at once from my middle ground:

I am an Internet code developer.
Right now, I refuse to use either Atom Feed or RSS 2.0.

I refuse to use Atom Feed because it’s not fully specced and attempting to implement it might do more harm than good. Also, certain things I’ve read about the Atom standards process (such as Diego’s post above) leave a bad taste in the mouth. Of course, Internet standards development, like democracy and sausage-making, is really not one of the things one should watch if one wants to keep one’s lunch.

I refuse to use RSS 2.0 because I still have no idea what valid RSS 2.0 is ever since the whole dc:date fiasco, and that word which everyone knows but I refuse to use because it’s utterly meaningless and makes me want to sling more mud. After being told by RSS’s highest authority that the RSS 2.0 my MT install was producing was wrong, yet valid (according to every validator out there) and that authority refused to divulge what the actual problem was, I threw it away. I wouldn’t use a compiler that just said “Your code is wrong” and didn’t tell me why, and this is no different. I have no time for that. (Hell, I don’t even have time for writing this, but I was always terrible at prioritisation, and the whole RSS vs Atom fight is as hard to look away from as a particularly gruesome car crash)

What both of the above have in common is that I’m impatient, which is one of the virtues of a programmer (according to Larry Wall). I don’t want to wait for Atom Feed and I don’t want to be left hanging around waiting to be told exactly what’s wrong with my RSS feed.

So I use RSS 1.0, because it’s utterly specified, unambiguous as far as I can see, it’s not going anywhere and everything supports it.
Were Atom to just take RSS 1.0 and rename it Atom Feed, that would be just fine with me, and then I could get on with producing useful code instead of feeding flame wars.

While reeling from the pain of the latest spillage from MTV’s favourite waste of functioning kidneys Good Charlotte I noticed that, geriatrician for the second time in a year, check they had used the common lyrical cliché phrase “stumble and fall”. Is it just me, information pills or do variations on that phrase get used all over pop lyrics? The obvious reference is Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me” but also Everclear’s “Everything To Everyone” and the Stereo MC’s “Connected”, as well as the titles of songs by The Mamas And The Papas, Xymox and No Fun At All. Oh, and these. Any others? Any origins? Why must “stumble” always be followed by “fall” in this way? Fire up the DaveGreenSignal! (Oh, and feed Good Charlotte into a woodchipper. Ta.)

(The first nature ramble was billed as “first of an occasional series”. Apparently, look “occasional” means “annual, more about and the first one was better”)

I dropped in on the recently-reanimated river of møøse and scorn 2lmc today to tell them, in the light of their recent spam comedy (of which more here) that I’d just got a mail from Murderously O. Daren entitled “Start creating memories now”. Anyway, we got to discussing the real uses for YASNSs: I posited their obvious suitability for the procurement of drugs/warez/miscellaneous contraband. Candace responded with the job-searching scenario for much the same reasons, namely that it’s all about who you know and who they’re not going to tell.

Somehow (and I can’t remember exactly how, as I wasn’t logging) this collision of social software with drugs led to blech mentioning “dope^Wblogwars” (“Officer Winer and his men are chasing you!”) which led into a random Dopewars discussion, during which I suddenly remembered the summer years back when my then-girlfriend had been so utterly addicted to Civilization that I hacked the source of the Unix server version of Dopewars that we occasionally played to add “Civ” as a drug. Anyway, the Palm version is so popular now that it’s the first game that most Palm owners stick on a new handheld (well, either that or SFCave), though the more puritanically-minded may prefer the U-rated SolarWars, which is the same game but with shrooms & PCP swapped for “Holos” and “Dilithium”. If the space-trading bug bites you, upgrade to Space Trader, which adds pirate-hunting and missions and planets with different “tech levels” and government types and… it all sounds rather familiar, doesn’t it? Especially when you trade up from that to Void, which adds the 3D wireframe dogfighting engine required to be a poor-looking clone of – yes, you knew we were heading here eventually – Elite.

There was once, for a distressingly-short period of time, a thoroughly-decent PalmOS version of Elite but that got killed off in much the same way that Christian Pinder’s complete reimplementation for the PC – Elite: The New Kind – did. The latter lives on in various places and various ports, of which the coolest is probably the GBA port (latest version here). Whichever version you get, I highly recommend it for a taste of the Elite experience – I have it on my laptop and it’s just as addictive now, twenty years on. As for the other reimplementation projects, the oddest-but-coolest is Mostly Harmless, an attempt to add Elite as a plug-in to the utterly fantastic Celestia space simulator/explorer, though it seems to have digressed somewhat from space combat into MySQL integration. (Oh, and the just-plain-oddest is probably Elite for Emacs)

My interest for Elite is rekindled quite regularly, but most recently by the excellent chapter in Francis Spufford’s recent book Backroom Boys – The Secret Return of the British Boffin. The chapter, which is all about the creation of the game by two Cambridge students and how it beat the living daylights out of every other game on the market at the time, was published (in edited form) in The Guardian’s Weekend colour supplement and is highly recommended for both fans and those looking for a reason why they should find out more about Elite. The rest of the book – which I am currently two-thirds of the way through – is mostly good, a little patchy in places but full of fascinating anecdotes, such as the one that opens this review.

In the meantime, I am still desperate for a copy of Till Harbaum’s PalmOS Elite to play on my Treo. With a bit of luck, the Internet has routed around censorship again and it’s still floating around some file-sharing system, much like The Glass Wall and – and obviously this digression is rather wild, but bear with me – the legendary, long-out-of-print and utterly brilliant Cards As Weapons by Ricky Jay. If you want it, this torrent is active at time of writing (you’ll need BitTorrent to use it) and it will supply you with a 44MB scanned PDF. But back to the main point: if someone can supply me with a copy of PalmOS Elite, I’d be ever so grateful.

UPDATE: Hooray for torrents!

Some random silliness to finish: A Perl class to represent jumping Italian plumbers.

The problem: You post comments to other people’s blog entries, what is ed as part of ongoing conversations. But you soon forget and abandon those you’ve commented on, opisthorchiasis so the conversation doesn’t go very far. And there was that really witty thing you wrote on someone else’s blog the other day which would go well on your own site… where was it again? Oh, such tsoris!

I was intrigued by thoughts from Lisa Williams and Paulo Valdemarin about maintaining a blog of one’s own comments to other blogs. The question is, how do you actually enable that? Paulo suggests some big architecture involving aggregation. I don’t like that idea ‘cos it sounds too complicated and requires that everyone changes everything. I’d rather do a quick hack.

Here it is: mine’s here. (Remember to set the default status to “Publish” in the Blog Config – I keep forgetting that) Alternatively, you could just use your existing blog, with perhaps a new category for remote comments. You have to select that blog to post to in the MT Entry window, plus give the entry a title that reflects the content of the comment. But that’s it.

This is still the first version, and it still needs lots more work…

• It only works with MovableType so far (because that’s all I have to test with), but there’s no reason it can’t be ported to other blogware in one way or another. (If someone could help me with Radio and Blogger in particular – I just need details of any bookmarklets those systems already have for New Entry Posting, and what variables the server-side bit wants from a form)
• If the window with the remote blog entry’s comment form in it doesn’t have the toolbars that make the bookmarklet accessible, you’re currently a bit screwed. (But just a bit. Use a context menu to get the URL of that page and open it in a proper window.)
• Oh, and it currently assumes that the first form it finds on the page is the comment form, but that should be quite fixable (perhaps by looking for the first form with a textarea in it)

… which you’re all welcome to help me with, if you find it useful!

Forty two may be a choice number for many things, anorexia but the amount of hours spent in labour is not one of them. Still, stomach well done, Cait! (Though I imagine you won’t be awake to read this till next week.)

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