NBML – Not Bunk Markup Language (Okay the name might change.)

How long have we been staring at screens full of XML and not complaining? Have a look at a typical chunk of XML – it’s all noise.

[Joe’s Jelly]

I thought the whole point of XML was that it allowed machine-parseable data to remain human readable. Don’t tell me they could have achieved that goal without all the angular decoration? Could they? That would be like a technically superior video format being beaten by a lesser one that was just better marketed. Oh wait, that happened…

Lots of bloggers are suffering from spam it seems. One of the ahem, benefits of having a visible web presence I suppose. I recommend SpamAssassin to anyone who’s:

• Using a linux/BSD/etc. system
• Can insert the aforementioned into their email path

There is also a windows outlook plugin version that costs money, plus several other methods of integrating it (perl scripts and the like – details on the site).

With regard to my second point, one option that occurs (and I haven’t tried this yet as I’ve just thought of it) is to have a ‘public/private’ email pair. Publish the public one freely on the web, subscribe to mailing lists etc, and have all the mail retrieved using a FreeBSD / Linux machine running fetchmail -> procmail -> spamassassin. Save the other one for sending messages to individuals. Procmail can be made to forward messages after they’ve been filtered, so you can still have all your email delivered to the same place. It does require that you have a reasonable degree of access to a connected unix box though.

I did start to write about a sort of interface-implementation separation for email, but I realised it would only be one-way: while it would be fine to have a public email you told everyone to use to contact you that was then bounced to your ‘real’ address, there is no easy way to make this work in reverse. Any mail you sent would have your private address in it. There are ways to work around this, using anonymous remailers or services like anonymizer.com or you could run your own mail server. None of which are entirely transparent unfortunately (you can’t just hit ‘reply’ from your favourite mail client).

While idly clicking through my blog stats, it quickly became obvious that I have a rather specific type of readership. Can you guess what it is yet?

Browsers

1. Netscape 6.x: 50.0%
2. Internet Explorer 6.x: 28.6%
3. Internet Explorer 5.x: 18.6%
4. Netscape 7.x: 1.4%
5. Opera 6.x: 1.4%

Operating systems

1. Windows 2000: 33.3%
2. Windows XP: 23.2%
3. Linux: 17.4%
4. Windows 98: 13.0%
5. Windows NT: 11.6%
6. Mac OS: 1.4%

57.1% of browsers report a resolution of more than 1024×768, and exactly 50% report True Colour.

It seems I’m generally viewed on high end systems running the ‘IT professionals’ choice of browser, Mozilla. And nearly a fifth of readers are using Linux. Cool.

Yes, its official. I’m a tech-head, and so is my readership. Greetings.

One question. Netscape 7? Did someone release Mozilla 2 when I wasn’t looking?

Just checked out Erik’s
weblog. I like the groovy icons. Very nice. Oh, and the content is good
too 🙂

Wikify…. I like wiki. But… its too hard. I want to be able to wikify my entire website, so that if… [development]

I believe that snipsnap attempts to meld blogging with wiki. Might be worth a look.

Deriving backtracking monad transformers.

[Lambda the Ultimate]

Am I alone in thinking ‘Huh?’

Party like it’s 1993.

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

1993 was also when I first heard the word ‘Linux’, which, because we were British, was pronounced ‘Line-ux’. One of my Uni acquaintances showed it to me. “Look, free Unix on a pc”. “That won’t go anywhere”, I thought… This rates alongside my other great predictions such as, ‘Netscape are having an IPO, should I invest? Naa, they probably won’t be worth much’. And Yahoo, and Redhat… I console myself that I was a poor student and didn’t have much to invest at the time anyway. Wouldn’t have had enough money to get rich, just enough to have had one whale of a time at Uni.

I couldn’t unplug…. But I’m going to be brief tonight. It’s 11:19 p.m. I want to be off the computer by 11:30 (maybe 11:45’s more realistic).

-Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook]

Russ, if you’re reading this and its NOT just after you got up on thursday morning, switch off. Now. 🙂

Fed my book-buying habit today with the acquisition of the O’Reilly BEEP book. Build your own network protocol. Cool. BEEP looks very interesting as an alternative for all the contortions distributed application developers have to go through to make them work over HTTP. It provides a framework where most of the complex low-level stuff is done for you, and you just have to build your application-specific stuff on top of it. So the developer gets to decide whether the connection should be pull/push or both, stateless or stateful, pipelined or multiplexed etc. And security appears to be pluggable too.

I seem to remember Paul Hammant mentioning something about writing a BEEP module for AltRMI, which sounds like a great idea, especially for doing asynchronous callbacks. Must read more in case I’m totally wrong…

…you’ve replaced sendmail as your default MTA (in my case with postfix). Oh my word. Talk about stressful. At one point I thought I’d just obliterated a whole day’s worth of incoming mail because I kicked off fetchmail (thinking I was ready when I wasn’t), and postfix threw a wobbly. Thankfully it kept all the undelivered messages so after a few frantic minutes skimming the docs, hacking the config and one ‘postfix flush’ later, all my email reappeared. Phew.

I flatter myself that I can usually puzzle my way through most techie things, but email delivery systems are way more complex than I ever imagined. I had no idea what I was getting into when I started. Its still not working as I expected but I appear to be able to send email, so I think I’ll leave it until my palms stop sweating.