When I was starting this site and designing the software that powers it I decided that I didn’t want to use raw HTML for writing posts. After 10 years of authoring HTML I still find it visually obtrusive, and somewhat distracting when trying to focus on writing. I considered both Textile and RST but ultimately settled on Markdown. The implementation I use is Michel Fortin’s PHP Markdown, which has worked flawlessly.

I find that, as advertised, Markdown is great for writing text (and hypertext). The source is very readable – which makes the writing process a lot easier, especially for longer posts – and I almost never need to write straight HTML.

Some recent news is giving me flashbacks to 1995, when Unisys sprung their GIF patent surprise on the young World Wide Web. We got quite angry and some enterprising people even built a replacement for the beloved GIF.

Are we going there again? Forgent, a Texas company that “develops and licenses intellectual property and makes scheduling software” (it makes me feel dirty just to type that) is suing 40 companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo, for infringing on JPEG-related patent No. 4,698,672.

The innovative online music label Magnatune (which I mentioned once before) does things differently. They offer unrestricted streams of all their music (not just snippets), have a voluntary sliding price scale, and offer DRM-free downloads in multiple formats including patent-free Ogg Vorbis and FLAC. It’s easy to love this as a consumer, but to many business analysts it sounds untenable. Today I came across an academic paper that validates the Magnatune model:

The paper analyzes the behavior of customers of the online music label Magnatune… We develop a model that is based on reciprocal theories of social preferences pioneered by Rabin (1993) and extended by Dufwenberg and Kirchsteiger (2004)… The predictions of our model are empirically tested with the field data we obtained.

Apple customers have a long tradition of griping about Apple’s silly naming policies. But I take it all back after going over this Kaypro timeline from the ’80s. Let’s see, in chronological order starting in 1982 we have:

• Kaypro II (the first model, so naturally we call it “II”)
• Kaypro IV
• Kaypro 10
• Kaypro 4 (totally different from the “IV” of course!)
• Kaypro 2 (totally… never mind)

This madness continued through several more models until the Kaypro 1 was released in 1986, at which point the company completely imploded, possibly due to a logic vacuum deep in its core or a breach in the space-time continuum.

The recent posting by Ben Bangert entitled “Best of breed Controllers for MVC web frameworks” is interesting reading. (Also see his followup with corrections.) Rather than trying to stage a showdown, he’s noting significant similarities between the controller styles in CherryPy, Myghty, Bricks, Aquarium, Ruby on Rails, and Django. The implication I take is that this (mostly independent) convergence might be telling us something about smart web application development.

The post is worth reading for the comment thread alone, with posts from core Zope, CherryPy, Django, and TurboGears developers (among others) and a great little discussion of the history of object publishing on the web.