Wandering Thoughts archives

The quote of the time interval, on XML

From an article by Henri Sivonen:

Draconian error handling creates an unstable equilibrium in Game Theory terms—it only lasts until one player breaks the rule. One non-Draconian XML5 implementation in a key client product and the Draconian XML ranks would break.

(Discovered through Mark Pilgrim, specifically his firehose.)

Applications to XHTML are left as an exercise for the reader.

Link: XML on the web summarized

The link of the time interval comes from the online comic strip Bonobo Conspiracy, which neatly summarizes the reality of XML on the web in today's strip.

Link: you are what you code

From Robert Brewer comes You are what you code, which has given me something to think about. I'll quote the opening:

Hey, you. Do you realize what you're writing? The long-standing IT joke is that you always end up coding your own job out of existence. But what are you coding yourself into?

(From Planet Python, where his blog is aggregated.)

Update: I apologize to my readers for putting a link here that doesn't work without an extra, annoying step (see the comment).

Update2: the situation has now been fixed.

QOTD: There are three types of authentication

There are three types of authentication:

They are:

1. Something you've lost,
2. Something you've forgotten, and
3. Something you used to be.

The full entry includes an illustrative story and bonus comments (and, unfortunately, a certain amount of comment spam, at least right now).

(From Richard Johnson of river.com.)

Link: Why the ease of installing Java matters

In Java in The Land of Make Believe, Ryan Tomayko unloads a righteous rant about why Java's license matters and what effects it has in the Linux and *BSD worlds, with great bits like:

If you want to get on the bad side of software developers and system admins, the fastest route is to waste their time.

Amen. What he said.

(The good news is that Sun GPL'ing Java may finally be changing all of this mess, which Tomayko happily acknowledges.)

(From many places, but I saw it originally on Planet Python, as Tomayko's blog is syndicated there.)

Link: Peter Gutmann on PKI

Everything you never wanted to know about PKI but were forced to find out [PDF] by Peter Gutmann is a set of slides about just that: a pile of the warts and issues with PKI in general and the SSL model in specific. If you're interested in the whole field, his home page has links to enough additional papers to keep you reading for some time.

(From Chris Samuel, and that in turn from Russell Coker.)

Link: Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library

I've already linked to this in passing, but I'm going to rerun it as an explicit link. Threads Cannot be Implemented as a Library by Hans Boehm makes the argument in its title:

We provide specific arguments that a pure library approach, in which the compiler is designed independently of threading issues, cannot guarantee correctness of the resulting code.

There is also a discussion of this paper at Lambda the Ultimate that may be interesting reading. On a quick skim of the LtU discussion thread, this Usenet article jumps out as a useful summary of the entire volatile and multiprocessor programming issue, ending up with the conclusion that using volatile is both unnecessary and harmful in shared-state concurrent programming.

Link: OpenBSD spamd

OpenBSD spamd - greylisting and beyond is a presentation by Bob Beck of the University of Alberta about the OpenBSD's spamd system, how spammers react to it and similar systems, how you can exploit this, and the University of Alberta's experiences with spamd, complete with interesting numbers. I'm sadly jealous, as local feelings insure that I'm not going to get to deploy this sort of technology any time soon.

(Also from Richard Johnson of river.com.)

Link: varnish, a HTTP accelerator

Varnish - the http accelerator [PDF] is the slides for a presentation about a HTTP accelerator for dynamic websites/CMS systems (its website is here). Slide three made me laugh out loud, and I have to say 'what he said'.

(From Richard Johnson of river.com.)

Link: A lovely summary of the XHTML issue

On the WHATWG mailing list, Henri Sivonen put together a marvelous and concise summary of the whole problem with XHTML in today's world, and why XHTML advocates usually irritate me. I'm not going to quote anything; just read the whole thing here.

(From Sam Ruby, who linked to an Ian Hickson WHATWG mailing list message that quoted Henri Sivonen's message.)