• Mark Pilgrim takes a hard look at the recently released Photocast of Apple iPhoto 6 — which spikes critics from the RSS community, and wondering does Apple do understand the standard?

To sum up, the “photocasting” feature centers around a single
undocumented extension element in a namespace that doesn’t need to be
declared. iPhoto 6 doesn’t understand the first thing about HTTP, the
first thing about XML, or the first thing about RSS. It ignores
features of HTTP that Netscape 4 supported in 1996, and mis-implements
features of XML that Microsoft got right in 1997. It ignores 95% of
RSS and Atom and gets most of the remaining 5% wrong.

• On the other hand, this shows a good rectification of UI improvement on disabling the annoyed MiniStore on iTunes 6.0.2 — the MiniStore is turned on by default, displaying at the bottom panel of your music library.
• Paul Graham: How To Do What You Love. I hit some bottleneck in works lately and been pondering for what I actually want to do. Definitely a must read for me.
• Charles Petzold’s talk at NYC .NET developer group: Does Visual Studio Rot the Mind?
• Code as Design: Three Essays by Jack W. Reeves

I spent a good 3 hours watching and listening to the talk and both parties presented well of their web development framework. Django seem generally suitable for quick setting up of a content-rich websites and come with a awesome admin interface by default. And RubyOnRails is pretty much more towards building up a web application from scratch — where it saves you lots of hassle on initial setup of infrastructure. David has a excellent presentation with the display of stream of Ruby/Rails code.

One interesting common scenario is, both django and rails created out of the hate/tireness/bored with the messy of PHP programming experience they both went through. The argument is PHP really getting developer more tempting to hijack the html code, web flow with tons of PHP code. One would know if you are disclipline enough, you could get the application developed in a certain design with any language. But programming language has its own characteristic, with one having loose syntac and offering much freedom’s language, you get to see many ugly code. Python and Ruby are 2 examples that created with cleaner and higher abstraction syntax in mind. The other common mindset behind the two frameworks are: time is restrict, the framework is developed with the target to shorten development time as possible as it could.

Framework is kind of tool having strong opinion. If you are going to lay your hand on any framework, you have to prepare to adapt the philosophy behind it, breath and swim with it. With that I found Rails is well thought out to get developers fit and get used to the world it provided. Should start to invest more time with this RubyOnRails hype.

1. If you use Symantec (Norton) AntiVirus, beware that it was found having buffer overflow while decomposing RAR file. A properly drafted rar file could attack your antivirus and open your machine for remote access. What’s the work around right now? Avoid it, filtering out rar files for scanning, until they have the fix.
2. Symantec wouldn’t sell or support its product LC5 (a.k.a L0phtCrack, a NT password hash cracker — well, in security point of view, it was named password auditing and recovery tool) outside of US, due to US Government export policy . It’s been years I have never heard news of security-related algorithm export regulartion of US. Wow, it ain’t disappear yet!

Over weekend I found some goodies for my Mac experience and some URL/text for reading:

• Mac OS X
  
  • GrApple : this theme extension made Firefox for Mac OS X looks more Mac-like, just like a Safari without brushed metal.
    
  • Firefoxy : Firefoxy is an application instructing Firefox how it should draw those graphical widgets (text input area, radio buttons, submit buttons…etc). Now my Firefox on Mac looks brilliant. Those buttons and text boxes not feeling a bit too big now.
    
  • RubyOnRails on Mac OS X : Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger by Dan Benjamin. It get all the source code and built up from scratch. Check out RailsOnOSX on rails wiki too. And Locomotive, a one-click solution to get you a Ruby On Rails development platform on Tiger, its default database binding is SQLite. But MySQL and PostgreSQL is ready too.
    
• Palm : I dig out a old Palm m505 from store room, and thinking of a good use of it. At least for light e-books reading.
  
  • Plucker : an offline website reader, used to be famous in the old days. Not sure has it catched up with the RSS reading?
    
  • Speaking of RSS reader on Palm, Quick News looks pretty good. AvantGo used to be the first choice when it come to channel subscribing, headline news reading or offline web reading. But I don’t like its server site channel subscribing kind of setting. I’d like all my RSS list and offline reading all happen just between my desktop environment and the Palm.
    
  • Of course, all the basic and fun Palm app I could recall: SilverScreen, iSilo, Palm Reader, Adobe Reader. There’s no mp3 playing capability in m505, what a waste. May be I should consider the upgrading if PDA is once again get me good life experience.
• Links
  
  • Collection of Lisp Books
    
  • CxxTest User Guide : CxxTest is a JUnit/xUnit/CppUnit like C++ Unit Test framework
    
  • A List Apart, 208, published 28/Nov/05
    
  • Mark Cuban wrote a series of posts of his story: Success & Motivation - Redux
    
  • Jeff Ooi - Screenshooter : The path of Jeff Ooi as the most prominent news blogger in Malaysia. It’s understandable that Jeff is disappointed with Malaysian blogland — where his effort didn’t inspire more bloggers as his kind, where ideally we have Internet as the alternative media — to free more thought, to get government or authorities be accountable. That isn’t what’s happening now, as some M’sian bloggers are either used to treat blogging as their opened diary, or don’t own good writing skills, or simply don’t care too much on news. But that’s why Jeff is so unique, none of others could have his consitency, coverage to achieve what he’s doing in his blog.

Well, enough. I should back to work.

However, on the application’s project main page, I was always confused with the green bar “Download xxx” — it doesn’t look like a link to me. There’s 4 out of 5 times when I intend to download an application from its main page, I clicked the links under “Latest News” instead of the green Download bar.

Well, I don’t know about others, probably I just need time to get used to it.

Nowadays I am getting used to trust more on server-based storage. It means I stored the emails at Gmail, have my bookmarks at delicious, post my thought on my blog, have the code at some SVN/CVS servers.

Why would I still have posted the links here? Is it because I am not organized enough? At times when I got some ideas I do simply wrote and send email to myself, and at times I surf through some good URL — I bookmarked at Firefox. That’s probably kind of die hard work habit. But I realized it’s more because I think my blog belongs to mine, but del.icio.us isn’t.

It’s thorough introduction to guide you to create the error page for your site. Why bother? Because people come to the wrong URL links at your sites/blogs mainly because:

• wrongly typed URL
• faulty referral from other websites
• out-dated links from other websites, or search engine
• moved or deleted pages (moved pages have to return with code 301 — moved permenantly)

You aren’t going to let them just leave away, are you? So it’s better to have some guide on your 404 page.

I didn’t actually following the guide, but just simply create a page to advice the visitors to:

1. Do a site search for what they original come for
2. Go to Home page
3. My English blog or Chinese blog

Think that’s good enough for this little personal website.

An Example

So, how could it effectively notify most of its customers, who most of them probably didn’t go online and not notified of the heat event?

When a Sony customer play his/her XCP player, it would send message to Sony’s connected.sonymusic.com — which reply a null message with a reference to nobanner.xml (http://www.sonymusic.com/access/banners/nobanner.xml). Ben’s idea is to replace this nobanner.xml with a proper notification message to show on its player — hence alerting its customers. Read the details here.

read more | digg story

So it’s Encyclopedia in your PC if you know how to setup up mediawiki and load the dump file. Or you might want to print it out (who would want to do that?). Or if you are creative enough, there’re lots of things you could experiment with the XML files. Have fun.

Diggdot.us is Digg, Slashdot and del.icio.us/popular/. It browse through the 3 famous web channels constantly, cycle after cycle, and shows up the news list in unified format.

Well, here’s it. Bruce Schneier’s complete overview of the whole Sony rootkit saga. He sum it up well, excellent article. Go read it!

Some highlights:

Sony claimed the rootkit didn’t phone home when it did. On Nov. 4, Thomas Hesse, Sony BMG’s president of global digital business, demonstrated the company’s disdain for its customers when he said, “Most people don’t even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?” in an NPR interview. Even Sony’s apology only admits that its rootkit “includes a feature that may make a user’s computer susceptible to a virus written specifically to target the software.”

This drama is also about incompetence. Sony’s latest rootkit-removal tool actually leaves a gaping vulnerability. And Sony’s rootkit — designed to stop copyright infringement — itself may have infringed on copyright. As amazing as it might seem, the code seems to include an open-source MP3 encoder in violation of that library’s license agreement. But even that is not the real story.

read more | digg story

• User submitted story (geek stuff)
• User decided what to be show on home page
• Cleaner style of comments (some might not agree)
• One click post to your blog

Well, I couldn’t really describe it clearly why Digg stand out of Slashdot. Probably it’s the digg feature, the users place their vote on the article they valued or liked. It’s always the minor feature that keep the users stay with the software, you click here and there, seeing the number changed, articles floating upper.….then you are satisfied, you feel cool, and then you like it!

Further reading:

• Digg Just Might Bury Slashdot
• Digg Gets Kiss From a Rose
• Digg temporarily downed by ‘success’
• Digg Secures $2.8 Million fund
• Tagging the news you want to use
• del.icio.us/tag/digg

• Setup the SSH server to use keys for authenticationSetup the SSH server to use keys for authentication
  Great, so with proper public/private key-pair then I don’t have to type the password everytime.
  
• How to getting start with Ruby
  
• Personal Fedora Core 4 Installation Guide
  
• Fedora Core 4 tips and tricks
  Well, something you got to do each time you install the Fedora Core. It looks like it’s better to install the kernel-module-ntfs via rpm instead of yum, especially after upgrading the Linux kernel, then have to repeat finding the exact matched version of ntfs kernel module.