Category: Software and Programming

Qualities of a good URL. URLs should be simple, concise, and designed to last forever – reflecting the page’s content and hiding the implementation. The days of an URL mapping directly to a file are gone. So instead people treat the URL like command line – passing variables to a script that assembles a page – ending up with a bloated, confusing, and forgettable URL. Like, for example, the one you’re looking at now. Interesting argument, but ultimately too much of a bother – doesn’t scale to really complex sites, and using mod_rewrite in Apache isn’t the most accessible solution.

Yesterday, I downloaded and installed BeOS on my home PC. It is pretty cool. For one thing, it detected my sound card (on the motherboard, or chipset, or whatever – not a real “card”), which Mandrake 7.0 failed to do. It feels like a slicker, faster, cleaner KDE, or maybe a Mac (simple, bright icons, folders open up in multiple windows), but there’s a UNIX-like shell you can open at any time. It even has vi, and all the UNIX command-line utilities. It’s also free of all of Linux’s multi-user baggage and obscure configuration files. Cool. And it reads both my Windows 2000 & Linux partitions.

On the negative side, the modem doesn’t work yet (I think I need to look in the settings on Linux and copy them), there are very few bundled applications (and I suspect the shareware is also very slim), and I fumbled into the Kernel debugger by running a “find” command on one of my Linux partitions (that’s the Be version of the Blue Screen of Death, I guess).

I repartitioned my drive and installed Linux (Mandrake 7.0, from a PC Plus magazine CD) yesterday.
The install went very smoothly, and soon enough I was presented with another OS to boot into at my lesiure, with a very Windows-like
desktop (KDE) and plenty of programs. The Linux desktops (KDE, GNOME) beat windows easily in the category of pre-installed little games to waste
your time. Some are really crappy, like SmileyTetris, and others are very slick (like Reversi, where the program whupped my ass 3 games in a row).
Also, because it’s a new OS, you can spend a lot of time playing at installing stuff and getting it to work. Not much joy there. Mandrake’s hardware
detection doesn’t detect my soundcard, which means that I can’t listen to CDs or MP3s, fiddle with sound software, or hear any of the cool sound effects
that are used in any of the Desktop themes. Nor was I able to set up my Wacom penpartner, which requires changing a configuration file and restarting X.
Setting up the modem was pretty easy though, once I got over the hurdle of finding my provider’s DNS server IP.

But what do I have, when all is said and done? An OS that has less hardware support, less applications and poorer Hebrew support than Windows.

Still, it’s fun if you like fiddling with your OS. Much better than messing around with alternate shells on Windows (like LightStep). And KDE is a very liveable environment.

Mozilla is not a browser, it’s a webpage.

Sorta.

Way back when Mozilla first went Open Source, Dave Winer’s reaction was negative. His take was “Netscape doesn’t get it”. He said that Netscape was forgetting their “core following”, the web developers, who would not care to hack C++ code.

Well, the Mozilla people sure got it. Because everything they have done in the last two years of development can be seen as basically a reaction to Dave’s comment.

They took the browser and turned it inside out. They scrapped everything, all the platform-specific, MFC/Motif/MetroWorks framework stuff, all the spaghetti HTML rendering code with its special cases for each new feature added since HTML 2.0. They build a completely new rendering engine with a highly modular design that would make any C++ programmer proud and happy, and then they invested an enormous amount of work to ensure that this engine would be used for everything.

Because they wanted to bring in the Web Developers.

Cameron Barrett is the showcase here. He’s not a C++ hacker (maybe he is on the weekends, I don’t know enough about him to tell); He’s a web designer, who fiddles with HTML and similar mark-up languages,
with JavaScript, with CSS, and with PhotoShop. And what he’s built
isn’t what the general public considers a “skin” (i.e. a bitmapped
texture layered over an unchanged UI), it’s a proper GUI, with
customized functionality (limited, I might add, but he’s only worked on it for a month). Like all the other Mozilla applications,
it’s a Web App, something you would once run in a webpage. Except that Mozilla provides web developers with UI widgets and UI logic at
a much higher level then plain old DHTML gave them.

Following Dave’s advice, Netscape/Mozilla engineers have spent considerable time and effort to allow web developers (and not just programmers) to hack Mozilla.