Straight from the webblog of The Fat Man, Viva La Resolution.  Funny, funny stuff.  Read the story, listen to the song, live the moment…

There’s been a bunch of long term planning going on at work recently – lots of good stuff has come out of it but I’m going to skip most of it here.  Most of the responsibility fell to the managers in the company which leaves me to actually get some work done and push our products forward.  One thing I did pick up though is the responsibility to ensure that Ephox eats it’s own dogfood.  Henceforth I am on a mission to cram our products into every conceivable place and by any available means (we use a number of hosted solutions which we can’t directly integrate our products into but JavaScript hacks are a fun pass-time so I’m sure I’ll find a way).

For some reason this morning I felt compelled to publish the list of RSS feeds I subscribe to.  Thus, on the right hand side over there (or over here if you’re reading via my RSS feed) is a blogroll.  There’s currently no process to keep it up to date and it might still contain a couple of internal URLs that won’t work for everyone but it should give the morbidly curious a pretty good idea of what sources I’m following.

So this CEO walks into an engineering department and asks about setting up the news section of the company’s website to use a blogging system instead of updating it by hand.  Great idea.  Now given that the company’s website is hosted on an IIS server with MS SQL 7, ASP, ASP.Net and PHP available – what software does the intelligent engineer recommend?

If there was a very significant benefit, a subdomain could be used for news and pointed to a Linux server with MySQL, Apache and PHP (and for which root access is available) but that’s a lousy option due to the extra overhead of having to maintain that server entirely ourselves and the difficulty caused by splitting our website over multiple servers etc.  It would have to be one heck of a big advantage to make it worth the trouble.

While the buzz surrounding the release of OS X 10.4 continues to build I’ve found it amusing how Microsoft have been desperately pushing Longhorn in the last couple of weeks only to receive criticism about it and then desperately try to point out that all the cool stuff just isn’t there yet, but it will come soon – honest!

I’d say more but I think Crazy Apple Rumours summed it up perfectly.

So apparently Safari now passes the Acid 2 test (or at least the CVS version does).  Excellent work.  What’s more impressive though is that the patches needed are all available so the KHTML developers should be able to integrate the fixes themselves reasonably quickly.  I have however heard reports that the KHTML team refused to accept a large amount of Apple’s patches for various reasons so the code bases may be far enough diverged now that merging is problematic – anyone know for sure?

So now there’s adsense for RSS feeds (or at least an early beta of such).  It raises some interesting issues.  I hate ads so I’ll quite happily unsubscribe from any feed that has ads in it, but what about the various planets that I subscribe to?  What if one person who’s syndicated through those planets adds advertising to their RSS feeds, would I unsubscribe from the whole planet?  Possibly.  What if a few people did?  Probably.

I have to give another congratulations to the NetNewsWire team – I just realized I’d been taking advantage of a very simple but very clever piece of user interface design.  The contextual menu in the NetNewsWire browser has two “Reload” menu items in it, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Regardless of where you click on the page and whether or not the contextual menu pops up or pops down from your mouse cursor, the reload item is always right next to your cursor so it’s easy to hit.  Now you might think that it would be better to just detect which way the contextual menu popped and move the refresh menu item to that end, or even flip the entire menu so that the distance to all the items is unaffected by how the menu pops.  The downside of doing that though is that it makes it much harder to find the items because they keep moving around.  With the duplicated item, the menu is always the same so it’s very quick to identify which way it popped and then move to the item while still keeping the most commonly used item close at hand.

The engineers at work are starting to find reasons to have an news feed aggregator running on their machines at work, mostly so they can keep track of changes being made to the wiki, but it provides a convenient mechanism to push content out to the entire team without being too intrusive.  For some reason RSS feeds seem to be able to handle more information flowing past before it all becomes to much to sort through.  As we get more of the engineers with RSS aggregators running, there’s a much lower barrier to entry for new information feeds and a much higher pay-off for developing them.  For instance, when I get a few free moments I’d like to set up an RSS feed for CVS commits (this is harder than it seems since somehow we wound up using CVSNT instead of just putting the CVS repository on one of our Solaris boxes).  If I’m the only one subscribing to that feed it’s probably not worth setting up, but if half the engineering team is subscribed then it can really start to increase the chances of stupid mistakes or missed scenarios being picked up.

I finally got around to purchasing a full copy of NetNewsWire and am very happy with the decision.  I never thought I’d like opening web pages in NetNewsWire instead of in Safari (it’s a configurable option) but I’m really starting to like it.  It makes it easier for me to keep pages open for a long time while they wait for me to get a chance to read them while still allowing me to get on with work in Safari without winding up with a million open tabs and not being able to find anything.

I haven’t had a chance to read everything that’s been going around about Jonathan Schwartz’s latest comments about the GPL but I wanted to pick on David Jericho for a moment because his response irked me a little.

The problem with attacking something like the GPL is that it makes the attacker generally look stupid.

And the problem with defending something like the GPL is that it makes the defender generally look like a zealot.  There are multiple valid viewpoints for this argument, suggesting that the GPL is infallible and beyond criticism (which is how I would interpret David’s statement) is a pretty tough argument to sell.  The key difference here is one of philosophy, the GPL was explicitly created to force software to be open and kept that way.  It was created on the belief that all software should be free.  If you agree with those principles the GPL is very clearly a fantastic license and probably is from your viewpoint, infallible.  If however you happen to believe that intellectual property should be leveraged to make money and that this process fosters innovation then you probably think the GPL is bad for innovation or bad for the economy.  Neither side can be clearly proven to be right or wrong at this stage, and it’s quite possible that there will never be a definitive answer.  There are however plenty of opinions going both ways, but they are just opinions.  There are also case studies supporting both sides.  David mentions India and China as examples of the GPL doing wonders for the economy, I’d mention the current economic super powers as examples of traditional intellectual property approaches doing wonders for the economy.

Hadley Stern raises a bunch of questions about how much time kids should be spending in front of computers (and TV and video games etc).  I’m not sure why this is such an issue for people.  Growing up I spent a huge amount of time in front of computers and I’m (at least reasonably) normal.  The key element isn’t so much restricting a passion for computing or even TV and video games, it’s more about encouraging other activities.  Kids won’t enjoy other activities much if they do them because they are no longer allowed to be doing what they really wanted.