Symphonious

Probably the most commented on experience from Mac OS 9 was the fact that once one application crashed, they were all in trouble; generally, you were in for a complete system reboot. At last OS X came along and solved all that, finally providing protected memory and the ability to force quit one application without affecting the others. People rejoiced as they left their computers running for days on end without needing reboots and uptimes soared.

Of course, deep down everybody loved OS 9 - even those who'd never used it. Everyone longed for the opportunity to sit back and relax while everything rebooted. They'll never admit it, most of them don't even realize it, but nearly everyone runs an OS 9 emulator on an almost daily basis. Not a complete emulator, but it reproduces that critical "me time" preserving feature of having everything in the same memory space. What is it? Your browser.

That's right, your browser has it's own OS 9 experience built right in. You get to load up all these different applications, email, word processing, spreadsheets, encyclopedias, music players and photo software - all living happily in harmony. That is until one of them hits a browser bug. Then they all just go away in the blink of an eye and you have an excuse to go get another cup of coffee and slack off for a while.

You might think that web sites can't crash your browser - that would be a security risk right? At least a denial of service, if not a possible remote exploit. Of course it's a security risk, but that doesn't mean it doesn't happen or even that it only happens rarely. The fact is, browsers are fickle things and when you combine that many different web sites doing all that stuff inside one process even tiny little bugs or small, rarely triggered memory leaks really start to build up and cause problems. That's why operating systems moved to protected memory models and as more and more things move to the web, browsers are going to have to do more and more work to make sure that web applications, including long running web applications, are clearly separated from each other. It's not even enough to make sure that the slate is wiped clean when a new page is loaded because so many applications sit on the same page working away for days on end now.

Browser makers are certainly thinking about these problems and gradually making progress towards solving them, but it's certainly not there yet. I've simply not found a browser that can keep running as long as my OS can (OS X or Windows) without crashing, gradually slowing to a crawl or starting to show erratic behavior. In short, if the browser is the internet OS, it's about on par with OS 9.

Two very interesting things I've learnt today:

1. Ousted is a real word.
2. Suneth has a blog.

Apparently Andy discovered him within a few hours. By the time I got back to reading feeds this morning both he and Brett had ousted him. Of course, I've now added him to Planet Ephox.

Opensource projects tend to have a well-earned reputation for being poorly documented. Originally this was caused by the fact that most of the people who knew the codebase were developers who didn't have the skills or interest in writing the documentation. With opensource becoming more mainstream and more people getting involved I think that reason, while still having an effect, has become less of a problem. Despite that the quality of opensource documentation hasn't improved - if anything it seems to be getting worse. More and more projects don't even have half-decent reference information and just a few scraps of information on where to start.

It seems that documentation is now the way that people get paid for opensource. More and more projects are recommending one or more books instead of providing documentation for free. Perhaps having a paid form of documentation improves the quality but it doesn't matter much. There's simply not enough free documentation available to let you decide if the project actually does what you want and will meet your needs.

Not everyone who writes books about opensource is "holding out", a number of them are contributing documentation improvements back to the project, but the give away the code, sell the documentation is a disturbing trend that limits the benefits of opensource. We need to start realizing that the documentation is just as important as the code itself - if we insist on the code being free, we should expect the same of the documentation.

Where is it? Clearly I'm missing something here. There's a wiki with some good getting started overview stuff and some other chicken scratching but I'm yet to find an actual reference telling me what's actually allowed in struts.xml. Shouldn't that be pointed to in a big neon sign? The struts.xml page on the wiki isn't exactly comprehensive and while the DTD is listed on the examples page it's not exactly commented..

Oh and did I mention that wiki's are a horrible way to write documentation?

Robert Scoble posts about saving Pandora:

…Tom talking about how the business of Internet Radio is under pressure due to coming changes in how the music industry wants Internet Radio stations to pay for the distribution of music (basically the costs will triple, if the proposed changes go into effect). After we talk about the challenges that Pandora’s business faces if the fee changes go through Tom gives me a preview of their new Sprint/mobile service.

I got a pretty neat summary of the issue from Tom not too long after they recorded that interview (at least I think I got that timing right). I asked, how the new licensing fees affect pandora, Tom's response was basically "we're stuffed". They can't even drop the big record company music and stick to indy artists who'd love the opportunity to get that exposure because the licensing fee is mandatory.

It's a real shame too, after meeting Tom it occurred to me that I should go back and use Pandora again while I was in the US - I'd tried it out quite some time ago and found it good. That was my only source of music while I was over there - it just kept finding interesting music that I liked. Now I can't even go back to get the list of songs I'd given the thumbs up because Australian IPs are blocked, so I guess I won't go buy that music now.

On the plus side, Tom seemed to have a fair bit of hope that political pressure could save them just because so many people like internet radio and are writing to their political representatives. So all you US people, please get writing… and Tom, any chance of adding my IP to the allowed list?? I promise I won't blog about it.