afongen

It appears that RSS is not dead. There’s a new article on WebReference, “The Evolution of RSS“, and an upcoming O’Reilly Book: Content Syndication with XML and RSS.

Good. I remember getting caught up in the flurry of RSS activity a couple years ago, activity that seemed to suddenly stop. Sure, developers have been incorporating RSS into their sites by either creating a feed, using a feed, or both, but development of RSS itself stopped dead. Bummer.

You may point out that RSS is dead simple, so what more development did it need? Added complexity would only make it unusable. True. One of the things that makes XML-RPC nice to work with (as compared to, say, SOAP) is that development of the protocol stopped a few years ago, so it’s stable. What was disheartening to me is that I didn’t see a lot of interest in building cool new things with RSS. Maybe that’s changing.

Hoping to buy an extraterrestrial property but not sure where to start? Well, look no further!

A week or so ago a local newspaper published a couple stories about how a too-large number of public school students in Minnesota are being suspended (sent home from school as a disciplinary action). The articles express a justifiable concern that suspension is an unnecessarily harsh punishment for the sorts of behavior for which it’s being used.

I agree. Students are suspended far more often than they should be. Something that has escaped the public debate, though, is that out-of-school suspension is often the only disciplinary option available — because schools do not have the staff to supervise students who are removed from the classroom. Schools have often had to cut those positions because they don’t have money to pay for them. When faced with deciding whether to pay for a study hall / in-school suspension supervisor or a teacher, the districts and schools are correctly choosing to keep their teachers. One school in my local district ran out of money for paper a few months ago. Paper. Should they lay off a teacher, or go without basic school supplies? Schools shouldn’t be faced with this choice, but in a climate where state and local government are more concerned with funding a sports stadium than they are funding education, what do you expect?

What happens when a student needs to be removed from the classroom to cool down for a bit? No one can supervise them, so they’re sent home. What happens when a kid really doesn’t want to be in school but in-school suspension isn’t available? They quickly figure out how they can act out to get sent home.

I think that everyone agrees that suspension is being meted out too often, and that it does no one any good. I don’t understand, however, how the funding issue hasn’t been considered as a part of the problem. There’s a clear causal relationship. Don’t bellyache about how public schools are failing so don’t deserve to be funded: when they fail it’s because we don’t provide the means to succeed.

I’m holding off on working with Flash for a while, ’til I get some other things finished first and until I can buy a copy. I’ve worked with an evaluation copy enough to know that it will be fun and worthwhile to work with, so I do plan on buying it, but first I need to find a way to take advantage of some educational discounts that are available to me. I’ve also worked enough with Dreamweaver MX to know that it, too, is worth owning.

Why am I interested in developing with Flash? A few reasons:

1. See what its new accessibility features really do, find out what it takes to use those features as a developer and as an end user. I’ve been doing a lot of work with accessibility lately, training college & university webmasters in how to improve the accessibility of their web sites. Flash is becoming increasingly interesting and important to them (and to me!), so I very much want to explore its possibilities.
2. Explore ways in which content being delivered through Flash can be made available to those without the plugin. It’s possible for Flash to read XML documents as data sources, so if the plugin’s not available, how can I detect that and make the XML source doc available? I’m thinking of accessibility here, too, not only for the disabled but also for you Unix and anti-Flash users. I would like to come to a point where Flash is just one more means for delivering content. Take some data, generate output formatted as PNG, SVG, XHTML, PDF, RTF, and Flash. Why not?
3. Embed video. This is job-related. A coworker’s been doing a lot with RealVideo and SMIL, synchronizing video, a text transcript, and a series of GIFs (as a slide show). It’s beena royal pain in the ass. I want to see how much easier it would be to work with Flash, and whether we’d get better results.
4. Just play. As I believe that I wrote earlier, I’ve been entranced by the idea of writing a Jabber client in Flash. Just because I can. I know it’s already been done, but this’d be a great way to dig into ActionScript and see what it can do.

All of this will wait a couple months, though, ’til I buy a copy. The evaluation copy has been just enough to whet my appetite. Too, I’ve promised myself that I’m going to take advantage of the summer weather this year, actually get outside and be active. I don’t want to spend all my time in front of a computer. That’s far too easy.

Hey, HTML Tidy’s a Source Forge project. When did that happen and how did I miss it? Cool. Tidy has long been open source, neh, but now has a wider group of developers. I’ll be interested to see what comes out of this.

Regarding my post the other day: I decided that $400 does not constitute a super-cheap Linux box. I could spend that money at a local shop and get something just as good, if not better.

This led me to my second decision/realization: I would never buy something from Wal-Mart. Shame on me for even considering it. I wouldn’t buy anything from their brick-and-mortar stores, why would I even contemplate doing so online?

A few days ago, NewsForge ran an article on installing Linux on a Wal-Mart OS-less PC. Very favorable review, except one problem: the modem didn’t work. Easy enough to pick up a new modem, but still.

A few days later, the manufacturer of those machines announced that in response to the article and the reaction from the open source community (well, mostly Slashdotters), “Effective 5-7-02, all units will ship with the new hardware modem.” Excellent.

Now I’m really torn: iBook or super-cheap Linux box?

A flaw in Mozilla exposes hard drives. You’re safe if you’re using Release Candidate 1 of 1.0, but only because XMLHTTP — where the flaw lies — is broken. This is a bummer, but at least it’ll be fixed soon, I’m sure. (update: yep, a fix has been checked in.) Here’s a more detailed summary of the problem.

And note, too, a pretty cool little interview about Mozilla-the-technology. Very informative, especially for those unfamiliar with the project.

Macromedia Flash just keeps getting more and more accessible. Soon Flash will support captioning, thanks to an extension that Macromedia bought and plans to release. Actually, I suppose that it already does support captioning, if you know your ActionScript.

I’ve started to learn to use Flash MX. Part of me is feeling a bit guilty, since Flash is a proprietary standard, something that I normally avoideschew. Why not use SVG? For some things, I suppose I could. Especially the presentation slides that I hope to build with Flash. But I also want to embed video in Flash presentations, which so far as I know is not possible with SVG. Being able to supply captioning along with the video is huge.

Besides — honestly, Flash doesn’t really inspire the run-screaming-from-proprietary-satanic-standard reaction in me. It just doesn’t.

There’s a guy at work who loves razzing me for being a Mac user. “Simple machines for simple minds,” he quips. He has yet to explain what’s wrong with making a computer easy to use. Last week, in response to an article on ZDNet explaining how even a Windows guy could love a Mac, he wrote, “I got hung out when OS/2 disappeared. At least if windows goes down I can always learn Linux and still use my HW. If mac goes down it will just suck all those big ole mac heads down with it!”

Yeah. My response:

There are PowerPC Linux distros from Debian, SuSE Yellow Dog. I’ve been running Linux on my Macs for a few years now. It’s a great way to use old Macs that can’t run OS X. Granted, Linux support for brand-new Mac hardware takes a bit longer to develop, but it gets there.

A balanced article by Edd Dumbill: “iBooks Love Linux“.

And again, you can hardly compare yourself to an average user. The average Mac head is no more or less computer-savvy than the average Windows user. In the unlikely event that Windows goes down, what will Windows users do? They’ll be in the same boat as Mac users would be. Digging for old copies of BeOS.

Except, of course, that they would never have heard of BeOS.

Today he points to what turns out to be an interesting article about one reason for the digital divide that’s raising such a furor in the US: “The reason the entire country isn’t on the Internet is that tens of millions of Americans are too old, too young, illiterate, or just plain stupid.”

Good point. And it relates to something I was planning to write about today anyway.

The other day I was talking with a friend who for the first time is really coming to grips with widespread incompetence. For the most part, his whole life he has been surrounded with intelligent, over-competent people. His idea of “average” is skewed. But now he’s coming into regular contact with genuinely average people and is experiencing something like culture shock. I know what he means. If ten years in retail taught me anything, it’s that people are stupid (and that I am no exception to this rule).

Then a bit later I was talking with a teacher in an inner-city school. One of the things that he both loves and hates about his job is the diversity among the students that he works with. Not racial or cultural diversity, though. He’s talking about teaching kids who will grow up to be rocket scientists, and kids who will end up in prison. Forget about incompetence on the job: that’s average. Deal with people who can’t keep a job or will never have the chance. There’s a challenge.

So yeah. That’s part of the reason for the digital divide. I don’t think that it’s insensitive to acknowledge it. We can fight illiteracy, we can try to teach people to use technology. But we’re still going to have to deal with people who either don’t want to or cannot use computers. Something to keep in mind as more and more services are moving exclusively online.