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November 30th, 2005
Replying to Eran’s post about SSE (because real man don’t comment, real man trackback):
Calendar data? Easy. Contacts? Easy. Just use hCalendar and hCard to represent those. What did you just get? Is this a feed of your events that also serves as your calendar? Amazing! And importing contacts into your favorite PIM application is as easy as applying a XSLT? Magic! Synchronization can be done as per Microsoft’s schema or, since we’re just dealing with XHTML here, use any existing solution. How about DAV?
I wouldn’t put DAV and simple in the same sentence without some form of negation.
DAV is good, but DAV is designed to update a resource, one resource at a time. So a week worth of calendar with 20 events is 20 DAV updates. DAV doesn’t handle conflicts, protocols that use DAV do (SVN is a good one). SSE is updates for lists of item, and that’s actually a perfect fit for microcontent, you’re updating a lot of small items in one message. And I buy the conflict resolution algorithm.
SSE doesn’t decide whether you use iCal or hCal, that’s really between who’s sending and who’s receiving to decide, and quite frankly, we’re talking about synchronization here, stuff you don’t want to see, just make it happen. (X)HTML may not win here for simplicity. I don’t care what my calendar uses to talk to your calendar, as long as it works.
But before it sounds like I’m hyping SSE, I’m just trying to correct some assumptions. I just don’t find the comparison to DAV relevant, and if I’m updating in multiple places, I don’t want to do the right-order deadlock avoiding imports, I want the software to take care of that.
SSE is really just SyncML reincarnated. SyncML, at least in theory, is great because it solves a real problem, one I’d pay money for. Go ask any CrackBerry user. It has the promise of Palm/WinCE/Desktop synchronization, but extends to cell phones, Web services and, well let’s just say more than just Outlook.
Except SyncML never happend. Well, you know what they say: if at first you don’t succeed, brand it Web 2.0 and try again. Better yet, call it Really Simple Something. Don’t confuse Really Simple with really simple. I should post about that in English 2.0.
So what do I like about SSE? That maybe finally someone will solve the synchronization problem, and this time include my blog, and my phone, and upcoming.org and killer here: Thunderbird.
What don’t I like about SSE? Everything I hate about XML, plus I’d like to stay away from anything Really Simple. It makes life really simple.
Correction: real man upgrade their blog software regularly to fix trackback and other glitches, and don’t misspell trackback. I will now retire to bed in shame.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 29th, 2005
Security expert: More sophisticated attacks likely
That’s what the InfoWorld headline reads. Security experts want to warn us of more sophisticated attacks to come, but not really, only maybe, depending on how the weather turns out.
The thing is, you have to be logical about security, you can’t just hide behind words. So let’s review what our future holds:
- Peace on earth, everyone lives in harmony, no more security attacks, free wi-fi for all.
- Everyone switches back to Windows 95, making life easier on virus writers, and every script kiddie can hack your bank account.
- Better, more secure software comes out, public awareness, faster response time. Crooks up the ante by staging more sophisticated attacks.
Now, we have no proof that world peace will never happen, we just can’t take that as a safe assumption. And who’s to say that no. 2 will never happen? So really, the best we can say about option 3 is that it’s “likely”. It just all makes sense.
And in unrelated news, deaths from car accidents in 2006, likely …
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 29th, 2005
Just because I’m feeling silly today.
Get yours here.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 26th, 2005
Quietly wondering if I can use JSON as a lightweight protocol for sending messages from one application to another. It’s simple to write for, painless to debug and doesn’t require a massive infrastructure like you know who. I found one Ruby implementation, but it’s under GPL, and there’s still a matter of easily mapping objects to JSON.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 26th, 2005
Talk about easy. The new release (1.1.0) adds two new method to your controller. Use queue to create a new Queue object for putting/getting messages in queue, or topic to create a new Topic object. Here’s what it looks like in action, a simple action that puts the message ‘Hello world’ in a queue:
require_gem 'reliable-msg'
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
queue :my_queue
def index
my_queue.put "Hello world"
render :text => “Put message ‘Hello world’ in queue”
end
end
And if you’ve just noticed, the new release adds topics for pub/sub style of messaging, and new and improved selectors.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in ruby
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November 23rd, 2005
There’s a lot more uses for UUIDs than reliable messaging, so I figured it would be best to spin the UUID generator into its own Gem. I just made a Gem you can install from RubyForge:
UUIDs (Universally Unique Identifiers) are primarily used in distributed applications to generate identifiers that do not conflict.
This UUID generator is based on RFC 4122, and uses the time-based format, allowing for up to 10 million unique identifiers per machine per second.
A 48-bit node identifier prevents identifier conflicts between machines. The setup script automatically discovers a node identifier from one of the network cards MAC address on your machine.
More information here.
As I was double checking the Gem, I found out another developer interested in UUIDs. So now you have to UUID gems to choose from. How about that for building distributed applications in Ruby?
And if you’re still not sure what UUIDs are good for, go read this article by Paul Dix:
Some of the key concerns when designing this solution are how to select primary keys that will avoid collision and how to keep relational data in tact when syncing data from one database to another. The method I follow for this is to use a UUID or GUID as the primary key for every table, just like Active Directory. When I initially looked at Rails for this project this was a major concern. ActiveRecord ties an auto-incrementing integer as the primary key for all tables/models and I was worried about my ability to override that. Well with a little searching, reading and a tiny amount of effort I was able to get Rails to do exactly what was needed.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in ruby
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November 23rd, 2005
From the Strongspace blog:
I’d like to laugh a little more when reading my dog of an inbox. So, I offer a prize to the most amusing, yet still functional and informative (judged purely by myself) SVN commit message between the start of Strongspace, and the day we go live with 1.0.So far, the clear clear CLEAR leader is Marten with #431 “I parse it myyyyy waaaaaaay.â€
Follow the link if you’re able to take the geek humor. Oh, and while you’re there, you might want to check their seriously cool backup solution.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 22nd, 2005
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 22nd, 2005
Have you ever wondered about the brilliant design of the iPod whitebuds, that allows them to instantly tie up in a knot the moment you place them in your pocket? that no matter how nice you coil them, they will evolve into a tangled knotted mess that takes minutes to unravel? that out there someone must be making money from all that lost time?
Turns out Apple added a little piece of plastic to the whitebuds of recent iPods, so it’s just a matter of switching and you get a slightly better, slicker experience. Actually, it still knots up every so often, just not as neurotic as before.
Thanks to Andy for this tip.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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November 21st, 2005
Just upgraded from WordPress 1.6 alpha to 1.62.0 beta. Yep, WordPress, like the rest of the Web, has gone 2.0!
The alpha did have some odd management issues that seem to be gone, though I’m still not receiving e-mail notifications of new comments. The beta includes two new plugins, Akismet and WordPress Database Backup plugins. Akismet found 65 spam comments that I didn’t see before! There’s also an import option for Blogger (~cough~tara~cough~) and RSS, and buried in the code imports for MT, TextPattern, LJ, GreyMatter and B2.
Unfortunately, the Flickr image browser is no longer working … I liked that feature! And the WYSIWYG editor seems to eat up paragraphs once in a while, or at least I don’t remember it acting out that way before. I also noticed the same problem with WordPress.com yesterday. But overall a 10 minute upgrade, definitely worth doing.
Posted by Assaf
Filed in general
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