Month: December 2004

Joi Ito has some interesting comments on George Tenet’s madcap Bush Cabal lunacy on limiting net access.

Hey now, this is the kind of thinking we don’t need.

Spent all day in bed.

Now before you go off the deep-end and start saying how decadent, you have to realize that I spent most of the time unconscious, sweating, and having very unusual vivid dreams. It was actually kind of nice to have vivid dream again; I don’t have them very often, as a result of the Paxil/Seroxat I take.

On the whole, it was a truly unpleasant day. Managed to crawl out of bed long enough to help put the boys to bed, and I am functioning mainly with the help of Advil (Curse of the CNS AGAIN!).

Samantha has hit her Holiday Season stride, and is slapping up "Canadian Pine" garlands, lights, bows, and pine cone highlights around the Embassy. I am settled in the command chair, knowing full well I better be healthy by Monday, or the whole trip to West Coast will be in question.

Ugh. Nice disease.

On a happy note, I sent my first 419/Nigerian Scam mail to spam@uce.gov. Seems that someone wants to hear about these things.

Tristan Nitot and Eric Meyer comment (Tristan : Eric) on the seeming resistance by Microsoft to move MSIE towards a greater degree of W3C Standards support.
As a hack and slash Web developer, the presence of standards is a necessity for me. I can read the W3C description of the <div> tag and it’s child attributes and be able to implement it on my site.
The interesting that is not mentioned in the this is that MSIE lacks support for a number of HTTP-level standards as well. I know that most designers only worry about the screen results, but us Web performance wanks have to worry about the performance repercussions of a new browser release.
The most stunning example of this is continued resistance in some camps to the use of compression, and the utter lack of support for HTTP pipelining in MSIE.
Resistance to compression is a result of broken compression algorithms in older versions of MSIE. If you are actually still using one of these browsers, or an OS that does not support a new version of MSIE, the Web is mostly broken for you anyway, so compression is just another headache.
HTTP Pipelining is supported in all of the browsers…except MSIE. HTTP Pipelining is the ability to request multiple objects simultaneously across the same TCP connection. As most Web objects are small, the immediate impact to Web performance is astounding.
MSIE 6 is a vast improvement over the previous generations that have come out of Redmond. However, it would be interesting to have Microsoft on the side of Web performance as a major provider of server and client software.
Now, if we could only get the Mozilla.org folks to “liberate” the Netscape Enterprise/SunONE Web server code and bring that dinosaur into the modern age, we would all be a happier lot.

A couple of comments on the new MSN Spaces site.

1. Your web server headers for the main page are basically not helpful, especially the Caching ones:

   Cache-Control: no-cache
   Pragma: no-cache
   Expires: -1

   "-1" is not a valid Expires entry — jest set it to the current date. "Pragma" is a client-side header ONLY.

2. No compression? CSS, JS, and HTML file compression could save you some bandwidth and speed up the site.

The one site I looked at from an MSN staff member was an incredibly busy wild mess. But usability and site design are only things that I comment on.

Be interesting to see this try and evolve. Steve Rubel has a link to some of Steve Ballmer’s comments. He also links to a previous article that discusses the "Pearl Harbor" email in 1995 when BGates discovered the Web.

I think that this is a bit far-fetched on Mr. Rubel’s part. Unlike 1995, Microsoft does not carry the goodwill and universal support that followed it’s release of MSIE. Even if they get it right in version 3.0, Google, TypePad and other players will not allow them to dominate. They may be able to release a blogging product that integrates into IIS (oh wait! what database will it use…you need a license for SQL server too!), but that will only allow other companies to open in competition to the Spaces offering.

Yes, the MSN move may move blogging to a more mainstream audience, but the other players in the field will just move-in.

My thought is that 2005 will be the year of corporate consolidation in the blogosphere. Yahoo will acquire one of the major services (TypePad and Radio Userland come to mind), and Blogger will become more tightly integrated with the other Google offerings. It will be like the portal wars all over again.

Will be fun.

Tom Peters nails a comment on the comparison of food from the source versus distant interpretations.

I can’t wait for the delight that they call a Pancho Villa burrito next week — one of the benefits of going back to Silicon Valley next week.

Jakob Nielsen’s site is a great source for Web usability information. Too bad he doesn’t have a feed; I might visit his site more often.

His column — Alertbox — is an often scathing look at how Web sites use and mis-use design to drive their users mad.

Jakob, RSS isn’t that hard! Get a feed or be lost in the noise.

Interesting comments on how Microsoft is cranking up the FUD to handle Firefox.  Looks like Firefox is a credible threat to their core development platform.