Transending the dead wood pulp paradigm

I have been expecting for a decade and a half for computer user interfaces to get more photo-realistic 3D in appearance and support direct manipulation with visible 3D effects when responding to user actions.

For the most part, I do not see we have made great strides in that area and I think it is a shame.

I was however very heartened to read that someone else has similar thoughts.

He would like to see the Future of UI on the Web be more 3D based whereas now it is just a 2D based paradigm with a little 2D layering.

Ruptert Murdoch media magnate meltdown makes superior social web subject

While Murdoch's media organization does not strike me as a social web powerhouse, a couple other news media sites do seem extraordinarily adroit at it.  Guardian, the UK newspaper site is one of them.

A lot of social web media seem well-suited to efficiently distribute the latest news of his conglomerate's rapidly melting ass.  It's like an iceberg that has suddenly found itself in a dessert.

Google Docs is being used to track the list of victims, as each one steps forward or is publically announced by the police.

Twitter is being used to call for boycotts.  Evidently, tripping up the police search for an 11-old girl kidnapped by a rapist causes advertisements to work in reverse, when placed in the responsible newspaper's pages.

YouTube already holds a raft of videos showing the management and the mogul himself.  Also, some web pages show Murdoch managers self-contridtory statements strung together.  You can also see Murdoch snapping at his unfortunate Fox News anchor that he will not speak about this matter.

Glenn Beck left Fox week before last. The boycott of his show's advertisers was enacted after he started effecting a lot of Hitlter-like qualities, growing increasingly erratic.

Apparently, there is a motif now where when part of Murdoch's media organization does something unconscionable, consumers undertake steps to boycott its advertisers and then he saws that part off like a gangrenous limb.

Now, the fiasco in the UK is like a snowball growing each day.

It already has Murdoch resembling Conservative's politician's adored icon Richard M. "I am not a crook" Nixon.  Appropriately, it seems like legal investigations will drag out through the summer just as they did with Watergate four decades ago.  People have dubbed this much more large scale espionage operation "RupertGate".

Ironically, whereas Nixon fired US Attorney Generals that intended to investigate him, Murdoch -- possibly realizing the irony as he did so -- has lawyered up by hiring himself an ex US Attorney General.

The RupertGate monicker is particularly fitting also because he and those of his managers who have lately been wrapped up in discussions with the police this week, un-bribed ones this time one hopes -- seem to make a point of expressing very Nixon-ian points of view when a camera is rolling on them.

It is also fitting that while Nixon himself allegedly erased 18 minutes of audio tape which recorded discussions in his White House office, a News International executive reportedly deleted a staggering number of emails to their office.  Then, they were pretty much ordered to report it to police by a data management company.  I guess they did not want to be a party to a Nixon-like cover-up, being kind of illegal to do and all.

The summer long saga is repeating itself.  This time the transgressions are far more sweeping.  It looks like more people were corrupted.  It seems like there were far, far more direct victims this time as well.  Not to mention a whole country betrayed again.

It is clear that modern web features will be used to closely follow, analyze, and report Murdoch's summer-long descent into... well, where big things melt really quickly.  Just this past week, it was announced that there was a good deal more brimstone in the lower atmosphere than was previously expected.

Now we know why.

CNN article posts article that contradicts story that youth do not care about privacy

In New Facebook privacy tip: Super log-off article, CNN points out that actually some people do care quite a lot about privacy and their online persona.

So what they are doing is restricting other's ability to influence the content of their FaceBook page, something that normally happens all the time.  They make it stop by logging off the site.

People who are their friends have to wait until they are logged on, ask permission, before they can put anything on their wall.


So basically, influencing their Facebook page is like coming over to their house.  You have to ask to come in before you can get inside someone's house.  You have to ask permission before putting something on these FB user's page, even if you are their friend.

And one user in the story basically sandblasts her page free of socially posted content from others while she is logged in so that she can prevent "drama".  By that she means fights with others who object to what other people have made appear on her page.

It sounds like a lot of hassle.

Web Game Gone Wrong: Farmville Gains Avid Follower Allegedly at Cost of a Human Life

I was horrified to read as I had breakfast this morning about a death caused by other enthusiastic Farmville-playing.   A young, pretty, blonde 22-year old mother in Florida reportedly plead guilty to shaking her 3-month baby to death.

The reason she supposedly did it was the baby was crying, and that supposedly was distracting her from playing Farmville.

The article I read said the boy stopped breathing.  When he arrived at the hospital, he was found to have head injuries and a broken leg.

Earlier this year, someone wrote an article asking if a computer program had killed someone. In the back of my mind, I am wondering if this tragic story answers that question.

The game did not kill the baby.  But what did it do to the mother who seemingly did?

For that matter - what did it do for her, precisely?

IE and Windows serve up huge helping of patches for security flaws

Brian Krebs recently pointed out gigantic security update for Windows and IE was released earlier this month (October 2010).  There were 49 holes patched; 10 of them in IE.

Windows IE popularity has dipped and is estimated to be around 1/2 of web usage, some estimate it at just under 50%.  Firefox has about 1/3 of all web usage.  The remaining 1/5 or so is made up of Apple Safari, Google Chrome (which is based on the guts of Apple Safari), and Opera.

Web browser stats are very difficult to measure for a variety of reasons.  One thing seems clear and that is that IE has lost of lot of market share.   It is nowhere close to the 90% figure it commanded for a number of years from the late 1990s to the mid-2000s.  So take these figures with a grain of salt.

tip for troubleshooting Firefox addon problems

There seems to be a conflict between Google Toolbar addon and Firefox Personnas addon, and some other extensions in Firefox.

The solution is to start up Firefox in "safe" mode and disable or uninstall the addons.  I did this and it worked for me.  Until then, some parts of Firefox were not working - including the Addons manager.  Plus, I was getting error messages at start up time and some runaway script messages during use.

All of the problems have now been solved.  Hope this helps someone.

Starting Firefox in "safe" mode is very easy on the Macintosh, by the way.  Simply hold down the Option key on your keyboard while launching Firefox.

amidst debate from Flash fans whether HTML 5 will ever exist Apple shipped it in Safari 5

Flash-based developers got a shock this week when Apple released Safari 5.

It is sometimes funny what people will claim in an argument, or even argue about.

Whether HTML 5 would ever exist was one of those things. Is it not true that 5 comes after 4?  How does one think we got to 4?  We got there from 4.01, 3.2, 2, and the original HTML created by the founder of the web on Steve Job's NeXT OS (now called simply Mac OS X) back in 1989. That version might have been called 1.0, but nobody was assigning version numbers back then.

As someone who has been using the web since the year Mosaic came out back in the early 1990s, I saw a lot of growth, evolution, and change in the web.

Most of it occurred in the 1990s, when Netscape was the dominant player on the web browser scene.  After Microsoft succeeded in "cutting off their air supply" as Microsoft executives put it, according to the antitrust case Microsoft lost, it lost interest in actually improving the web.

IE languished for years, with little more than bug fixes, just like MS Windows did.

Both the IE hemisphere and the Windows hemisphere of the Microsoft leadership brain slumbered through much of the 2000s.

Until Apple shipped the Safari web browser and it got markets share via the Mac, Windows, and iPhones.  Until Firefox sprung forth from the ashes Netscape's Mozilla project.  Until Google showed a tech savvy company could create its own web browser using Apple's WebKit, and offer the browser, just like Apple does - on smart phones and web browsers simultaneously.

Oh, yeah, and then there is the Google-written addon for IE that Google wrote in compliance with Microsoft's own APIs that steps in and takes over the job of rendering an HTML page when Microsoft's programming code notices it really does not know anything but HTML 4 and will probably flub the job.

Google's Chrome Frame tells it, "yes, you can!" and properly does the job for it.  I like the idea.  Lots of pages created for IE6, and IE5, and so forth do not even work anymore in any version of IE. They were not just IE-specific but IE version specific.

This Chrome Frame addon simply gives a chance for real web pages to be shown on the screen in IE.

Those pages do not have to be written as temporary documents for temporary, soon to be retired version of IE.  They can be written for all versions of all browsers because they are written to a standard, W3 HTML standard that is, that mastered backward compatibility far better than Microsoft did and will.

Safari 5 has a ton of features.  It includes a lot of the HTML 5 support that web developers and designers have been clamoring for.  There  are a lot powerful new features that are here now.  This browser works on Macintosh computers and brands of PCs running Microsoft Windows.

• HTML 5 forms validation
• HTML 5 offline storage
• HTML 5 tags for writers/authors/reporters: article, section, header, footer, aside, etc.
• HTML 5 tags for designers/developers: nav
• HTML 5 canvas tag
• HTML 5 video tag
• HTML 5 audio tag
• HTML 5 draggable attribute
• HTML 5 contenteditable
• HTML 5 sandboxed iframe tag (nice to see someone thinking of security for users)
• WebSocket
• EventSource
• web workers
• Ajax history
• page history search by words in title not simply the leading characters of the URL
• closed caption support for video tag (nice to see someone remembering the handicapped)
• Extensions Builder that packages HTML, JavaScript, CSS and other resources into a redistributable self-installing file you create easily by editing a visual template (now we know why Adobe screamed about HTML 5; the future was too simple/easy and free)
• Web Inspector which lets you understand the innards of your HTML page, measure/visualize the time it takes each respective file used by it to download and render, investigate the DOM (no, not the Godfather, silly) and work out kinks in your scripts and your page rendering
• Hardware acceleration on Windows (something Microsoft has not promised until at least 2011 which is sad because it is their own OS)

It seems really likely we will soon see a comparable release of Google Chrome application for Windows & Mac, Chrome Frame addon for IE, and eventually for some versions of the Android operating system.

It is almost certain we will see this Safari 5 browser's HTML 5 features pushed into iPhones, iPods, and iPads sometime during this month.

Mozilla, which is probably already running at flag speed to get more HTML 5 features in its well endowed web browser will probably redouble its efforts, encouraged by Apple's success. It is not only doable but more worthwhile than ever to have a Firefox with major HTML 5 support included.

The amount of critical mass composed of the latest versions of Firefox and Safari combined is huge.  IE users rarely update their browser, their plugins, or their operating system for that matter - much to Microsoft's chagrin but probably to no ones surprise.

Plus, the latest statistics for one of the most popular web drive by attack hackers toolkits show that IE 8 users are getting infected at more easily than IE 7 users.

Crazy, but true, and not at all inconsistent with IE's mounting problems.  Not the least of which is that it takes forever to get critical security flaws fixed. Both the ones just hackers know about and the ones that everybody knows about and knows hackers have been exploiting for months.

So IE 8 was not the way to go in many respects. Trends do not look encouraging that IE 9 will avoid succumbing at a high rate too when exposed to modern web malware.  In fact, it looks like on that front, IE is deteriorating, not improving like your intuition claims it should.

The web is improving this year.  In fact, now it already has.

Windows zealots will hardly go screaming into the streets that "you cannot use HTML 5 unless you buy a Mac".  For one thing, it is not true.  For another thing, all the Microsoft sales execs would have coronaries if they heard that being shouted.

In fact, you have lots of options to experience, use, and develop HTML 5 web pages right now.  The fact Safari 5 runs on Windows and Macintosh both already is the first that leaps to mind.  Firefox 4 is coming along and the current release of Firefox 3.x also includes some of the major HTML 5 features.

Web pages these days already accommodate a different set of capabilities from different web browsers. There are tons of ways they go about this.  They usually do not pick all of them, but here are a few they usually pick one or more of to get the job done:

• JSP (for Java servers) or ASP (for proprietary Microsoft servers)
• SSI (server side includes for Apache web servers)
• brower/version sensing/sniffing of request headers and URI-rewrting
• custom DHTML (JavaScript code involved with making changes to the DOM)
• open source DHTML/Ajax frameworks like Dojo or libraries like jQuerry
• XSLT
• alternative CSS depending on which browser is used
• Java applets, JavaFX, Silverline, and Flash being used as components on the page

Now, obviously, the last category above is not HTML content.  So they prose a lot of problems from security standpoint, forward compatibility standpoint, web searching/indexing standpoint, archiving standpoint, copyright/licensing standpoint, etc.  So I think it should be used judiciously when it has to be used, and be accompanied with fallbacks. Or, actually, maybe be the "fallback of last resort" itself.

Flash, Java applets, Silverline, etc. all seem to strain the performance+reliability of the web browser and be the preferred way for hackers to break into a computer from web sites they have already infiltrated.  That is not to say they will not trick IE by putting the wrong type of content in an audio or video related HTML tag attribute and confuse the heck out of the browsers poorly integrated security manager.

But in general, the heavyweight components that are used to create RIA components are creating a big headache at the moment.  They were never more powerful and more dangerous, it seems.

Cross site scripting (XSS) is another longtime favorite way of cyber criminals to confuse any brand of browser.

JavaScript never envisioned web based distribution of information and scripts across different sties on the web, the way that Java does. So, it has been an awkward process to maintain backward capability while at the same time adding protection for users and flexibility for developers & publishers.  It is nice to see HTML 5 taking a standardized approach to securely interoperating scripts.