Quite a lot of decades actually

I know we've been repeatedly burned by predictions that x many telephone numbers, IP addresses, kilobytes of memory, etc. will be enough to last for y zillion years, and then they suddenly run out after three weeks.  But the BBC's willingness to concede only that "IPv6 will create 340 trillion trillion trillion separate addresses, enough to satisfy demand for decades (sic) to come," seems to take conservatism too far.

The heart of a geek

(With apologies to P G Wodehouse.)

Susan Harper is writing a wonderful funny-sweet-honest-painful series on geek dating.

Trying out Windows Live Writer

First impressions are that the current Windows Live Writer beta is rough.  Very rough.

Second impressions are that it's not so rough after all, but man, those first impressions were grim (see below).

Nice things:

• Autodetection.  During setup, I had to enter the URL of my site, and my username and password.  Live Writer figured out everything else from that.  No need to dig out the XML-RPC endpoint from the Typepad docs, or anything like that: just "here's my weblog, get on with it."  I assume it has equally seamless support for services like Wordpress, Blogger and LiveJournal.
• Web Preview.  Shows you what the post will look like on the site: that is, with all the chrome (titles, navigation, etc.), and alongside the other posts on the home page.   It even includes the article under construction in the navigation bar.  That's pretty clever.
• The "save local draft" feature.  No annoying file dialogs, it just appears in the "drafts" folder.  Clean and simple.  And it has an "autosave every x minutes" option.  Sweet.

Nasty things:

• The text editor.  It gets basic things like cursor movement and selection wrong, particularly around the post title.  So my first experience of Live Writer was entering a post title and first paragraph, and then struggling to get the cursor into the right place to edit them.  It seems to settle down when you get into normal text flow, but this was a disastrous first impression.  (Update: Nope.  It still sucks.  Looks like keyboard selection breaks if anchored at the end of the post.)
• The WYSIWYG edit mode.  Live Writer is obviously using the site CSS to show me the post using the right fonts, colours, etc.  This is actually quite nice.  Unfortunately, because the white space and navigation bar are specified in the CSS , Live Writer faithfully replicates the layout, and I end up with an editing area maybe three or four words wide:
  
  I can get around this using "normal" view but then I don't get the WYSIWYG look.
• "Blog this" (what Typepad calls QuickPost) requires you to install the Windows Live Toolbar and use Internet Explorer.  For me, this means Live Writer is suitable only for writing articles, which I hardly ever do nowadays, not for commenting on things I read (not that I do much of that either of course).  (Update: Looking at the SDK, they do deliberately providing ways for applications to invoke Live Writer for 'blog this' functionality, so hopefully a Firefox plugin is not far away.)
• The generated HTML is quite hard to read (no whitespace), and random spaces get turned into nonbreaking spaces for no readily apparent reason.
• The local save format is some weird binary thing and is therefore not usable with other tools.  Possibly this is some packaging thing but in that case why not use a zip file like the new Office formats?
• "Insert picture" mangles PNGs.  The screenshot above used to be reasonably sharp, and where the huge bloated blurred linked version came from I have no idea.  I certainly didn't ask for it.
• Questionable EULA: "In using the service, you may not... use the service in a way that harms us or our affiliates, resellers, distributors, and/or vendors (collectively, the 'Microsoft parties'), or any customer of a Microsoft party."  This seems to imply that I'm not allowed to write, "You guys should all buy Macintoshes," or "Such-and-such a Wintel OEM sucks," lest anyone listen to me and take their custom away from Microsoft or their resellers.  That's surely not the intention, but the phrasing of the EULA is a bit too broad.

Parodies I wish I'd thought of, number 704

molesworth i dreme of hoggwarts: "Befor skool dinner of super sossages, pies mash potatos dougnuts pork chops trifle jely roast sucking pig ect ect, all new bugs must attend Sorting ceremony where there FATE is decided. Tremble tremble chiz the battered and frankly unsavory hem-hem sorting hat is lowered upon my beetling brow and after a pregnant pause (coo-er posh prose molesworth) it SPEKE: 'Huflepuf. Also you hav a face like a squished tomato.'"

Brilliant error message

Error message from a Web site outage at fish4: "Unfortunately the fish4 Web site is unavailable due to the failure of a very expensive piece of Sun hardware. A Sun engineer is at the data centre but didn't think to bring the replacement part with him."

An honest, meaningful, comprehensible error message. Truly, the End Times are upon us.

A changed landscape

Dave Winer: "The goals have been accomplished. Billions of Websites now no longer seems an outrageously ambitious goal. We're pretty close to a billion, I suspect. The goal was also to create tools that would make it easy for everyone to have a site... That's done." I don't use Dave's tools (tried them, they didn't work for me), but I don't doubt that without his contributions I still wouldn't have a Web site and nor would I find the Web half as useful as I do. "Content management for the rest of us", together with the ecosystem-enabling protocols and formats that underlie it, has opened up the Web as decisively as Visual Basic opened up the Windows desktop. There's a long way to go -- too many of the tools and platforms are tied into the today's straitjacketing chronological structure -- but the underlying concepts and protocols are now there, it's just a matter of finding the right content structures and realising them in code. That's what the so-called Web 2.0 apps seem to be pioneering -- content structures aligned around photography, calendaring, etc. instead of diarising.

Fetch the brains

Somehow this evening's game turned from a discussion of zombie movies, and in particular Mash's plans for escaping the zombie hordes both at home and at work, into a challenge to my scripting skills. I'm not sure whether I really want to post any real content apropos of said challenge, since after all any content would only fall victim to the voracious zombies, but then again, I'm not entirely comfortable posting waffle like this. Oh well, done now I guess.

At last, an explanation for 'Web 2.0'

Paul Graham: "The 'trends' we're seeing now are simply the inherent nature of the web emerging from under the broken models that got imposed on it during the Bubble."

Structured blogging

Scoble: "The idea is to make a movie review look different from a calendar entry."

This is a misleading way of putting it. To human readers, movie reviews might still look like book reviews, calendar entries, Flash games about fighting bananas or any other kind of Web page. What is useful is to provide internal structure and metadata that allows programs to organise the reviews more effectively. Enabling programs to break down a movie review into (say) title, cast and body content enables new, movie-centric applications, just as RSS' enabling programs to break down a Web page into stories enabled aggregation, syndication, etc.

What I'm interested in is less new presentation than new navigation. I want to post book reviews to my site and have them navigable by author and title, rather than by date. (So instead of seeing a calendar over on the right, you'd see maybe a couple of A-Z grids, which would take you to "all authors beginning with A." Or something.) I want the author's name to be a link that takes you to all my other reviews of books by the same author. I'd like to be able to make a link which takes you, via Technorati or the like, to a list of other reviews of the same book. Oh, and of course I want to make it easy for you to buy the book, unless it's The Da Vinci Code of course.

By the way, TypePad's TypeLists are a primitive implementation of this kind of feature. As well as some possibilities (such as linkage to Amazon), they show up some of the difficulties in the whole idea. Do I really have to provide a star rating for everything I review? What if the metadata authorities decide that a book review must specify genre, a concept I loathe, despise and will have no truck with? How much flexibility can we offer authors before the schema becomes so general as to be useless? (In the current draft, the simple-review schema makes everything optional except the title of the review. Consumers can't even rely on finding the name of the book or movie being reviewed. Conversely, there's no optional field for series or hero, so I can't subscribe to "all reviews of Stephanie Plum books.")

Now, none of these questions are new. The SGML folks have been battling with them for decades and have won limited victories such as Dublin Core. I was unable to find any reference to such efforts on the structuredblogging.org site, which I found rather alarming. I'm not proposing DCMI or OASIS or whoever as an arbiter of structured blogging standards -- they're too slow-moving and too centralised for the weblog world. But these are smart people confronting similar questions and trade-offs to the structured blogging issue, albeit in a different environment: you gotta think we could learn a great deal from their experiences (both positive and negative) and decisions.

Structured blogging is a tough problem, especially given the decentralised and fiercely independent nature of webloggers and communities. But it opens up a world of exciting applications based around tailored, fine-grained metadata, just as we already have a range of applications based around the coarse-grained metadata of RSS. It's a problem well worth cracking.

I love America

I ordered some CDs from the US recently and many of them came with a Dreadful Warning from no less an agency than the FBI:

Gotta love a country where CDs merit a Dreadful Warning but guns don't.