Categories
JavaScript Technology

Sun sells out and there goes Java and MySQL

I guess I will now be looking at how to port my Drupal installations to PostGreSQL, since Sun sold out to Oracle. The Java issue doesn’t impact me, as I saw the writing on the wall as regards to Java a long time ago.

However, support for MySQL will most likely be completely undercut, if not eliminated. Or it will go through that fine Oracle touch, which means you can’t depend on support for the database in the future—not without it being either bloated, or “monetized” in some way. This is how Oracle works.

I can hear it now: But MySQL is open source. Oracle can’t hurt it, because it’s open source!

Being “open source” will protect MySQL. Yeah, right. And I believe I’m Superwoman and can’t be hurt by bullets, so just shoot me now.

I completely forgot about Sun and OpenOffice. I use OpenOffice for all of my writing. Guess I can kiss that good-bye, too.

I’d like to just kick IBM right now, for transmorphing back into the stupid, clumsy Big Blue dinosaur of days of yore. It let itself down, by not buying Sun. And it let the rest of us down, too.

Interesting reading the old post on Sun buying MySQL AB, from last year.

I think Sun is the best possible buyer, because of the following reasons: (Note that this is of course my interpretation)

  • Sun is committed to open source.
  • Sun doesn’t have an database of their own; In other words, no risk of internal conflicts between similar products.
  • Sun understands what it means to be a virtual company where people work from home.
  • Sun has a good understanding of developers needs and there is a good chance that the integration of the two companies will be relative smooth.
  • Sun has said they will let the MySQL developers continue work as before in their own unit and without big changes (except of course changes for the better!).

Of course, the early founder of MySQL left Sun, and started another open source MySQL company. We’ll see where this goes.

Last update, but the original founder of MySQL, Michael Widenius, has posted a note on the Oracle/Sun merger and MySQL.

The biggest threat to MySQL future is not Oracle per se, but that the MySQL talent at Sun will spread like the wind and go to a lot of different companies which will set the MySQL development and support back years.

I would not like to see this happen and I am doing everything I can do to keep this talent pool together (after all, most of them are long time personal friends of mine). I am prepared to hire or find a good home (either at Monty Program Ab or close to it) for all core MySQL personnel.

The man is probably inundated with resumes right now.

Categories
Copyright Writing

My DRM-free self

O’Reilly now has DRM free versions of some of its book available for the Kindle. Among the books are my own Painting the Web, Learning JavaScript, second edition, Practical RDF, and Adding Ajax.

O’Reilly has been offering DRM free versions of the books at the O’Reilly site, but it’s only been lately that authors have been able to provide DRM free books at Amazon. Why is this important? Because all you have to do is change the book’s extension to .mobi to read the book on your Sony or other MobiPocket capable eBook reader. In other words: Some Amazon store books can be read on other eBook readers other than the Kindle, iPhone, and iTouch.

Teleread and MobileRead have started a campaign to make these DRM free books more easy to find. If a book is DRM free, just tag it “drmfree” at the Amazon site. It tickled me to be the first to tag my own books.

My books being offered DRM free doesn’t change how I feel about copyright. I still believe in the importance of copyrights. My books are still copyrighted, at least until the publishers and I decide the time is ripe to release them into the public domain. I am dependent on the royalties I make from my books, and I lose money through piracy of my books. But I have never believed in DRM, which only hurts the legitimate owners.

I’m currently working on my first self-publishing book, which I’ll be releasing as a Kindle, as well as in other formats. Regardless of how I distribute the book, not one version of the book will have DRM.

Categories
Just Shelley

Beauty is in the eye

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

Boing Boing re-published a photo found on Flickr of a hairless male chimp at the Mysore Zoo in India.

hairless chimp

Chances are this chimp suffered from the same hereditary disease that Cinder, the chimp who recently died at the St. Louis zoo, did: alopecia universalis. The condition is rare among chimps, so I’m not surprised that people aren’t aware of what the chimp was suffering from. I was surprised, though at the reaction of the Boing Boing author, a person who is supposedly a science writer.

I am so sorry.

I ran across this image while searching for something to illustrate that last post and just can’t not share it.

Again. My apologies. Rest assured, I’m going to have nightmares tonight, too. We’re all in this together.

I would have expected some discomfort from some folk. After all, Cinder was once featured at Ugly Overload. But I also would have expected a science writer to be more fascinated by the chimp’s physiology, then repelled. Or to note his similarity to humans, as PZ Myers noted. I didn’t expect someone with a scientific background to go, “Ewww. Ugggi!”

I was also a little surprised to read Short, Sharp Science’s take on the photo: that the chimp is suffering from chimpsploitation.

But unless the poor animal is naturally bald, it seems that he is suffering from stress-related hair loss. From the expression on his face (and it is obviously a male) he doesn’t looks like he’s the most well-adjusted of animals. It’s sure to spark more arguments about the welfare of animals in captivity.

It’s true that hairless chimps are rare, but a single search of “hairless chimp” in Google returns thousands of references to our Cinder, and other hairless chimps. We need to be careful about reading our biases into interpretation of photos, particularly so if we call ourselves “scientists”.

For instance, as to the charge of chimpsloitation of this hairless chimp, The Mysore Zoo in India is one of the oldest in the world, and the most popular in India. It did have problems a few years back, when a new Zoo administration eliminated corrupt practices, and several employees exacted revenge by poisoning several animals. In addition, the training of some of its personnel can be deficient, the result of which cost the life of a tigress and another female elephant. However, it is not a “bad” zoo, if we think of bad zoos as those miserable roadside attractions that occur all too frequently in the US. The Mysore Zoo just reflects the multi-cultural environment that makes up today’s India.

I am glad to have seen these stories, as I’ve been trying to track other hairless chimps. I wish, though, that people would see beyond the “difference” of these hairless chimps—to admire their musculature, and accept our common heritage. And to answer another frequently posted question about hairless chimps: chimps are born with pale skin that tans to a darker shade as they are exposed to the sun.

Categories
Social Media Web

My abbreviated self

I discovered that a URL has to be less than 30 characters, or Twitter automatically creates a Tinyurl version of the URL. This, even if the entire message is less than 140 characters.

There’s no way I can create URLs that are less than 30 character and still maintain my subdomain designations. Therefore I’m not going to try, and will most likely be removing any short URL stuff here. With all the recent “one million followers” foo flah, including the breathless designation that one person achieving one million Twitter followers is equivalent to landing a man on the moon and space flight, in scientific importance, I would just as soon stick with stodgy old weblogging.

Weblogging, where no one really knows how many people are following you, most people don’t care, we can actually communicate complete thoughts, and do what we want with our URLs.

From today’s WhatWG IRC:

hsivonen: I can imagine all sorts of blog posts about evil HTML5 raining on the rev=canonical backpattery parade

svl: Mostly (from what I’ve seen) it’s been “let’s all use this en-masse, so html5 will be forced to include this”.

Of all the items in contention with the HTML5 working group, the use of rev=canonical is not high on my list. Why? Because there’s no real argument for it’s use, and a lot of good arguments against its use, and it’s just as easy to use something else.

This all came about because Twitter was built first, designed later. One of the difficulties to keeping a message to 140 characters is that URLs can take 140 characters, and more. Yet there is no URL shortening mechanism built into Twitter. Not only is there no URL shortening mechanism built into Twitter, Twitter, itself, uses another, 3rd party, service: tinyurl.com.

Now, all of a sudden, people are in a dead cold panic about using a service that may go away, leaving link rot in Twitter archives. I hate to break it to the folks so worried, but it will probably be a cold day in hell before anyone digs into Twitter archives. Most of us can’t keep up with the stream of tweets we get today, much less worry about yesterday’s or last week’s.

But there are a lot of other problems associated with using a 3rd party service. Problems such as the recent Twitter follies, otherwise known as Twitter Been Hacked, that ended up being a not particularly fun Easter Egg this weekend. When you click on a Tinyurl URL, you don’t know what you’re going to get, where you’re going, or worse, what will happen to you when you get there. Even Kierkegaard would have a problem with this leap of faith.

There’s also an issue with search engine link credit, not to mention everyone using different URL shortening services so you can’t tell if someone has referenced one of your posts in Twitter, or not. This didn’t use to be a problem, but since everyone does most of their linking in Twitter now, it gets mighty quiet in these here parts. You might think, sigh, no one likes what you’re doing, only to find out that a bunch of people have come to your party, but the party’s been moved to a different address.

So I think we can agree that third party URL services may not be the best of ideas. I, personally, like that we provide our own URL shorteners. Not only would we get the search engine credit, it should encourage the use of the same URL in Twitter, which might help us find the party we lost. Plus, wouldn’t you rather click a link that has burningbird.net in it, then one that has dfse.com? Implementation of our own short URLs should be simple in this day and age of content management systems. All we need to do is agree on a form.

Agree? Did someone say, agree?

As I wrote earlier, I’ve heard too many good arguments against rev=canonical, including the fact it’s too easy to make a typo and write rev=canonical, when we mean rel=canonical, and vice versa. In addition, rel is in HTML5, rev is not, and I’m not going to hammer a stake in the ground over rel/rev. I’m keeping my stakes for things that are important to me.

Note to HTML5 WG: she has a hammer. And stakes.

As for what attribute value to use with rel, whether it’s shortlink or shorturl or just plain short, I don’t care. I took about five minutes to implement shortlink in this space. I implemented shortlink, because this is the option currently listed in the rel attribute wiki page. However, it would only take about a minute to change to shorturl. I even added the short link to the bottom of my posts, which can be copied manually and used to paste into a Twitter post, if you’re so inclined. See, I don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval; I am empowered by Happy Typing Fingers.

Regardless of what we do, I agree with Aristotle: way too much effort on something that should be easy to decide, quick to implement, giving us time to worry about things that are important in HTML5. Things such as SVG, RDFa, and accessibility.

Other discussions related to rel/rev/tiny:

And that’s my 4424 character take on tiny URLs.

Another reason tiny URLs are getting attention is because of the evil new DiggBar. Goodness gracious, people, why on earth do you use crap like this?

Categories
Browsers

A browser is more than script

Chrome released on Linux, and IE8 released from beta. Now people are beginning to question Firefox’s increasingly bigger piece of the blogger pie. Case in point, PC World.

Mozilla have several grand aims, and there’s much to be admired, but they’ve forgotten how to make a decent browser. I feel plenty of loyalty for them, because they’ve done more than anybody else to further the cause of open source software in the real world. But when I tried Chrome, as incomplete as it was, I realized I’d found a replacement for Firefox. As soon as it gets to beta under Linux, I will switch to Chrome. No question. It’s just infinitely better. It’s like when we all switched from Alta Vista (or Yahoo!) to Google back in the early noughties. The king is dead! Long live the king!

I was asked my opinion about the future of JavaScript applications this week, especially in light of the blazingly fast Chrome. I was rather surprised at the emphasis on JavaScript, because a browser is more than just a machine to consume script. A browser must also render a web page, as the designers built her; must display photographs accurately, hopefully using any photographer supplied profiles; to render the more complex SVG, in addition to the simpler Canvas; to handle complex file types, including video files, not to mention supporting different markups, such as XHTML in addition to HTML; to provide the utility to enhance the user’s experience, up to and including any extensions, such as the one I use to collect a page’s RDFa. Why, then, are we reducing the browser to nothing more than a device to to render HTML and JavaScript?

Firefox is working on its scripting engine, but it’s also been improving its graphical rendering engine, including adding in built-in support for color profiles, as well as improvements in support for CSS3 and SVG. Chrome has no support for color profiles, it’s graphical rendering engine sucks, as can be seen if you look at CSS3 curved corners in the browser, and it regularly fails my SVG tests. Try this SVG file in Chrome, but don’t blame me if your CPU spikes. Luckily, it seems that Chrome just aborts SVG files it can’t handle now, rather than fry the CPU. Then try the same page in Safari or Firefox; though both render the page slowly, they do render it—Chrome only rendered the file the third time through. It aborted the page the first two times. And the quality of the rendering? Well, see for yourself.

Look at my photos at MissouriGreen. Most use a color profile. Now, the photos look relatively good in Chrome on Windows, because I’m favoring a sRGB color profile to ensure maximum coverage, but if Chrome is ever implemented in the Mac, the photos will look plain, and washed out, as they do now with Opera. Not so the latest Firefox, and Safari.

Lastly, look at this site, or Just Shelley in Chrome, as compared to Safari, or Firefox, even the latest beta of Opera. I make extensive use of box and text shadows, as well as CSS3-based curved corners. No browser is perfect in its implementation of CSS3 curved corners yet, but the anti-aliasing in Firefox and Safari is vastly superior than what you’ll find in Chrome. I have noticed, though, that Chrome has improved its text and box shadows: it doesn’t plaster them half way down the page, now.

Why, then, do we talk about how “superior” Chrome is? And how Firefox is dying? When one looks at all of the browsers from an overall web experience, only IE8 is worse than Chrome.

I apportion blame for an over-emphasis on fast script over everything else equally between Google and the current HTML5 effort. I found it telling that, at the same time people are lambasting Firefox for “slowing” down, and praising Chrome for “speeding” up, Douglas Bowman is leaving Google primarily because the company relies on engineering practices, at the expense of fundamentals of design. One doesn’t have to stretch one’s intuition in order to see that the “machine” is also the emphasis in Chrome. But the same could also be said about the HTML5 effort: an emphasis on mechanistic aspects, such as client-side storage and drag-and-drop, at the expense of a more holistic environment, such as including support for SVG and ensuring continued support for accessibility—though I think this week, at least, client side storage has been pulled for inclusion…elsewhere.

Speed is important in a web browser, speed and efficiency, and Firefox isn’t perfect. Newer versions have been locking up on my Leopard machine, to the point where I now prefer Safari on the Mac. If I had to take a guess, Firefox has threading issues. It also needs to work on isolating extensions to the point where they can’t harm the overall browsing experience—or at least put something in place so that one knows certain extensions can adversely impact on browser performance.

At the same time, Chrome desperately needs to improve its graphics rendering capability. As this occurs, and as Chrome gets loaded down with extensions, I don’t think we’ll see the same fast speeds when rendering pages we see now.

It’s all a question of balance—the best browsers are the most balanced browsers, and sometimes this means slower page loading in support of better page rendering. As it is, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera are all giants towering over the anemic and disappointing IE8. If we want to talk about a browser “dying”, I have a better candidate in mind than Firefox.