Category: Geek

ORA blog: The last thing we expected when installing Pro Tools 6 on our multimedia lab computers was that it would require us to give normal users administrative privileges… but that’s exactly what happened. We’re fuming.

Just discovered that you can abuse the seldom-used @ syntax for passing user/pass combos into URLs to make your domain look to the untrained eye like it lives elsewhere than it does. e.g.:

http://www.nytimes.com@blog.birdhouse.org/

The browser simply ignores everything prior to the @ sign and carries on. Which means an unscrupulous soul can copy a template from any site, populate it with any content they like, and pass out a URL that will fool many viewers.

I’m not interested in doing this, mind you. Merely a technical curiosity.

I generally applaud judgments against Microsoft — they too rarely reap what they sow, and a little smattering of justice every now and then feels karmically right. But this Eolas thing is out of hand. The suit is targeted at MS, but ultimately affects every browser vendor and every Web developer.

In a nutshell, Eolas has a 1994 patent on the ability to seamlessly pull plugin data into a web browser. Read that sentence again. In the web atmosphere, that’s the equivalent of saying someone has a patent on breathing without assistance.

If the suit is not successfully appealed, web developers will have to retool every instance of embedded Flash, QuickTime, Shockwave, Real, Acrobat, etc. to make the experience not seamless. We may have to launch everything in external players, for example, or throw up a dialog before rich media content is able to play. Right back to 1994, yippee.

Intellectual property is important, but determining how original an idea has to be to warrant a patent is a difficult thing. Once a patent is issued, it’s very hard to recall. No matter how you slice it, allowing one company to retroactively reshape a huge slice of an industry — with a negative effect on innocent users no less — is just wrong.

I can only imagine how much more difficult this would make the teaching of our multimedia skills class.

FileMaker is more than happy to set users up with “value lists,” which coyly store multiple values in a field — a concept that’s pretty much anathema to “real” databases. Values in the list are separated by a weird ascii character. To forge a bridge b/w MySQL and FileMaker, wrote a routine to grab each element in a form array and insert this weird character between each. If all elements were named perfectly, FM would show the proper boxes checked upon data import. In a prior incarnation of this system, data was output from MySQL to a web page, then imported into FM. But now that this weird ascii character is present, we were getting inconsistent results. After much sleuthing, turned out that some browsers (Make 7 Up Yours, IE/Mac) were conveniently discarding the special character, so nothing matched on import. Rewrote the app to write the export to a text file on the server, the offer the file for download, taking browser discrepancies out of the mix.

A couple of days ago the Unix clock — which measures time in elapsed seconds since the epoch (January 1, 1970) — ticked its billionth tick. Planes did not fall out of the sky. What did happen is that computers “paused for a second, then changed to 1 billion and 1 seconds.”

I confess that I used to store “real” date/timestamps in my databases. Discovering the total liberation afforded by reinterpreted Unix timestamps opened several of my projects up like happy oysters.

To celebrate, I bought a Bingo Wacky Wobbler tonight. Bingo, my favorite Banana Split, who was probably conceived right around the time a bunch of bearded Unix weenies were conceiving second zero of Unix time.

You might want to celebrate by defraggling your motherdisc.

Ars Technica has an excellent side-by-side comparison of the nine (yup, nine) browsers currently available for OS X. Interesting to see that Safari is no longer fastest browser available (though it’s a heck of a lot faster than IE). Mozilla edges Safari on speed, by a hair. But Safari still came out on the top of the stack for a host of other reasons.

There was a thread here on birdhouse a while ago in which a few people said they were finding sites that didn’t render properly in Safari. I countered that I was having trouble finding any and hadn’t launched IE in a long time. The next day I did have some trouble using a complex multi-part form in Safari and had to switch to IE to get the job done, but haven’t had trouble since then. The Ars reviewer says virtually the same thing:

The current version [of IE] feels like a quick and dirty port to OS X and has some problems with more complex web pages. It’s a shame that this is still the default browser in OS X installations. … Thankfully, those days are over. I cannot remember the last time I had to launch it to access a web site. There is really no good reason to use this anymore.

My thoughts exactly (I also agree with the reviewer that the Mozilla-based browsers are crash-y and inelegant compared to Safari). After some disagreement at work (my colleagues are unconcerned with speed issues, more concerned that students would be confused by the transition to another browser … whatever) we decided to install both IE and Safari in the Dock and let students choose. So far they seem to be using about 70% Safari, informally measured.

A photo prof wanted to host an online photo auction, Eyewitness I, to raise funds to compensate for this year’s massive budget cuts. There’s open source auction software out there, and plenty of open source image gallery software, but how to combine them? (keeping in mind that I work on zero budget and even less time).

Ended up using Gallery, which allows people to leave comments on images. Altered the default templates (which is way harder than it should be) and then hacked the comments feature to function like an impromptu bidding system. It doesn’t do any fancy auction transactions, just lets the prof and other bidders see what the current high bid is. Everybody’s happy.