/devel

Well, I’ve jumped the gun. It seems IPRED2 has been derailed (at least for a while).

Still, better this than being right.

It seems only appropriate to use this place to announce a talk I’m giving tomorrow at 19:00 at Kiberpipa.

I’ll be talking about degradable javascript and its benefits and the talk should be accessible to all, even javascript newbies. Just to clear any misconceptions, degradable AJAX will be demonstrated, but the point of talk is general javascript use and misuse and not the latest fashionable tricks.

The talk will be given in Slovene unless there’s a wide enough interest to give it in English. I hope you’ll come and stay for a chat and a drink.

See you there.

FSF Europe has prepared a short document describing problems with IPRED2, the new “Intellectual Property” rights directive from European Union. If passed, it could lead to jail sentences for intellectual property violators. Proposal doesn’t distinguish between kinds of intellectual property, but it does limit itself to sadly undefined willful infringement.

Not being a lawyer makes it hard to judge, if FSF’s objections are valid. According to a report from FFII, big IP companies are not happy with it either. Directive’s proposal certainly leaves a lot to interpretation and FSF’s scenario doesn’t seem far fetched. Especially for those of us who’ve seen how difficult it can be for lawyers to agree on anything.

In short, it’s another piece of ill-considered legislation that wants to help entertainment industry in their fight against reality at the expense of almost everyone else.

I wonder if someday people will look at IP legislation of late 20th and early 21st century the way we see now tax on windows (not to be confused with windows tax, which opens gates to completely different discussion).

This year’s first snow fell couple of days ago and while I enjoy it immensely, I’m getting more and more annoyed by our snowplowers. Snowplowing in Slovenia is a state provided service without any business competition and like most such services it sucks. In fact, we relive the same story every year:

• some time in the fall there’s a story published, how everyone is ready for snow this year and there won’t be any problems with our roads
• we get a correct weather forecast a few days before the first snow
• snow falls, plowers are nowhere to be seen and there’s a complete mayhem on slovenian roads
• snowplowers provide some meaningless statistics about resources used and journalists write stories about how they were surprised by the snow

Now, could you treat your customers and users like this? Probably not.

Except if you, like them, are the only provider of vital service. It’s probably still a poor business strategy because even if you are, like telecoms used to be, can you be absolutely sure that this will remain so?

Personally, I’d just like to know how is it possible fo them not to be embarrassed infront of their family and friends.

I’ve been a netizen since ‘93 and I saw web for the first time in ‘94, when a friend showed me Yahoo. I felt dizzy just thinking about possibilities.

I had no idea what was coming, but even though web came a long way since then, I never felt so excited again up until now. It’s hard to predict future and I avoid revealing my stupidity if possible, but it really looks like a no-brainer predicting a vastly different, more open and collaborative web in few years time than we have now.

Feeds were a big step forward. It wasn’t necessary to scrap pages to reuse information anymore. Even more importantly, feeds changed the attitude so sharing and reusing content is now again a normal and good thing.

It seems atom publishing protocol will soon be ratified and with it a standard way of editing web resources. In fact making sharing a two-way street. The final piece was provided by Ray Ozzie and guys at Microsoft. A synchronization protocol for RSS feeds called SSE published under creative commons license that should be really useful for synchronizing calendars, contacts etc.

I’ve read it a couple of days ago and I couldn’t find an obvious defect in it (apart from a small error in the example at point 2.2.2, which I’m sure has been spotted since). Truth be told, I didn’t expect it to.

It’s a simple, easy to understand specification. I wish people would stop using date-time values conforming to RFC 822, but nevertheless SSE shouldn’t be difficult to implement.

It probably really is the easiest thing that could work and it’s up to programmers to show if it might be too easy. There’s always a tension between things you specify and things you leave to implementation. Freedom given can and usually is a point of misunderstandings and until there are enough implementations in the wild, it’s hard to judge the quality of compromise.

I won’t be surprised though if final specification version won’t be significantly different than current one. I’ll try to make our implementation as soon as possible and hopefully by that time there will be others to test it with.