afongen

Google’s opened a SOAP API. There’s been some talk about this on a Ruby list somewhere, and I think on the SOAP::Lite list, but now that it’s actually here I am almost apoplectic with excitement about the possibilites. Maybe my enthusiasm is somewhat enhanced beyond normalcy because I’m in the middle of typing up notes for a presentation on web services.

Either way. Cool. Check it out.

I got this bizarre spam yesterday that has me idly puzzled. Check out the HTML comments in the message. Why in the world would someone do this?

Apache 2.0 is officially released. 2.0.35 is now the recommended version.

So now I really have to find a way to set up my own server. Until I have a broadband connection so I can run a server at home, I’m tempted by virtual FreeBSD or Linux servers. Any recommendations? Someone here in the Twin Cities PHP Users Group uses WebPipe quite happily and I admit that it does seem pretty sweet. I’d very much like to be able to do more with mod_perl, especially AxKit. And now I’d really like to tinker with Apache 2.0. We shall see.

Mozilla 1.0 is on the way. Looks like a release candidate may be available next week. Yay! Of course, as a day-to-day browser it’s already damn fine.

Many criticisms of the Mozilla project for not yet releasing a version 1.0, while Microsoft continues to release major version after major version of IE, are unjustified. Mozilla is about so much more than the browser. Version 1.0 doesn’t mean that at last we’ve got a kick-ass and pretty bug-free browser/mail client/news reader/chat client/whatever. We already have that, as far as I’m concerned. As I read the Mozilla 1.0 Manifesto, 1.0 is a signal that at last we have a stable set of APIs to start building on.

What I’m waiting for is the next major release of Netscape 6. There is such a massive difference between Netscape 6.2.2 and the Mozilla 0.9.9 — not to mention the ever-so-improved nightly builds. At work, the standard browser is Netscape 4.78. Ugh. Thankfully there’s no interest in switching to IE, but until Netscape 6.3 or higher is released, I don’t want to start pushing for a Netscape upgrade. The day it’s released, though, I’m gonna start hammering away to get a decent browser on everyone’s desktop.

Pindar Johal writes to say that Enigmail lets one use PGP within Mozilla mail. It doesn’t seem to work with the nightly builds, but as far as I can tell works fine with 0.9.9, the latest milestone release.

I just downloaded last night’s Mozilla build to take a look at the cleaner context menus mentioned on Blogzilla. What should I also find but support for email return receipts. That’s pretty cool, even though I don’t know that I’ll use it. This is not a well-supported feature.

I also see that they’ve added a “Security” button to the toolbar, which lets you digitally sign a message. Pity that Mozilla uses S/MIME and not PGP. I wonder if there’s a PGP plugin for Mozilla yet.

I know that I haven’t been posting a lot recently, for which I earnestly apologize. I’ve had much to say but little time. You may recall that we moved a week or two ago, and much of my time has been spent dealing with that: unpacking, sorting, sleeping.

We’re house- and dog-sitting for my mother-in-law. Introducing her yellow lab to our two cats has been a lot of fun. The dog is quite excited about these new playmates. Our 16.5-pound Maine Coon runs and hides, but our little 8.5 pound tabby is very interested in meeting this rambunctious creature. He walks right up to the dog, sniffs her, and thwacks her nose when she gets too close. Guess we know who’s boss.

I’ve also started to get really busy again working on a couple XML presentations that a colleague and I are doing at a conference in two weeks. It’s pretty cool, the presentation slides themselves are XML files that we’re converting to PDF using AxPoint. XHTML versions will also be made available, probably generated with XSLT. Much as I try to confine that activity to work, it does spill out occasionally. It happens when what I do for work and for fun are pretty much the same thing. AxPoint is marvelous. And now it supports SVG! Wow.

This is especially useful because I refuse to learn how to use PowerPoint. I like to learn about most things, but there are two areas of knowledge in which I would like to go through life remaining blissfully ignorant: how to score bowling and how to use PowerPoint.

Oh yes, through all this I’ve been trying to read a lot. Been wanting to highlight Steven Johnson’s Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software. Wonderful book, I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Someday soon I’ll say more about it. For now, let me just say that I enjoyed the book so much that I will send a copy to the first person who asks for one. Seriously. Anywhere in the world, as long as it can be shipped there. Drop me a line.

Update:The book has been claimed. Thank you for playing.

Break out your broadband connection and your Flash plugin. The San Francisco Symphony Kids web site makes it all worthwhile.

I clearly haven’t been paying enough attention to web sites built for kids. Until now, the only one I ever looked at was Webmonkey for Kids. Sites like SFS Kids and the BBC‘s CBeebies are just great fun! A whole world that I haven’t explored. I wonder if Google will come up with a kids version, like Yahoo! did with Yahooligans!

I like to read stories like this. Sun donated some hardware to search.cpan.org. A big thank you to Sun!

On a similar token, Pair, the hosting service that I use for this very site, donated hosting to The Perl Review. One of the reasons that I like to use Pair.

An interesting thread on the NANOG list: 1024-bit RSA keys in danger of compromise (the message that kicked it off was first posted in Bugtraq). This may be a good time to point to a little something I wrote a year or so ago, a “Brief Introduction to Digital Signatures.” Just cuz you may find it a useful introduction. I keep finding people who look at me funny when I ask if they use PGP.