Posts tagged: RANTS

I run my own mail server. I don’t consider myself an especially skilled administrator, so I shouldn’t point fingers. However, in recent weeks I’ve had the following experience more than once.

1. A delivery-failure message arrives from an unfamiliar host.
2. The (quoted) orginal message is nothing I ever sent.
3. The recipient is unfamiliar to me.
4. The “sender” of the original message is an email address I control, but not one I ever send mail with.
5. OK, so this is backscatter.
6. I email the postmaster suggesting they learn how to avoid sending it.
7. The message to the postmaster bounces back because of some server misconfiguration.

Argh! Nothing spoils the catharsis of a good complaint like a bounce.

This began as a quick reply to a discussion on the Well about a recent posting from John Gruber which links to a hit list from Crackberry.com about the iPhone. Gruber focuses just on the keyboard issue, about which I found I had this to say:

With the built-in spelling correction, I can type close to 30wpm on my iPt keyboard. This is faster than I ever was with Graffiti, which I used for about 8 years and was pretty good at if I say so. Most of the stuff I do with the device doesn’t involve the keyboard, and then I’m really happy not to have a hard keyboard.

I’m generally a big fan of Steve Yegge’s rants. See this earlier post for links and quotes from some of my favorites. His writings were a significant influence in my decision to seriously look for a new language to learn in 2007 – I even bought Programming Language Pragmatics on his recommendation, piecemeal reading of which has definitely expanded my thinking (as well as dredging up parts of that Compiler Construction course I took back in 1989…).

In the 1990s Nicholas Negroponte wrote a back-of-the-book column in Wired. When I started reading it, in 1993, I found it exciting and mind-opening. But as the years wore on, the ideas seemed less interesting. Maybe he just ran out of new things to say, or maybe I became jaded. In any case, I hadn’t paid much attention to him since. But this bit from a recent AP story on the One Laptop Per Child project absolutely kicks ass:

E-Scribe is not, strictly speaking, a standards organization. However, I think the time is right to release this draft document on an important Internet standard. The document is presented inline here for convenience; however, the preferred permanent reference is: http://e-scribe.com/stfu

Recent trends in internet-based application development have
fostered the rapid spread of asynchronous, Javascript-based techniques
known by the umbrella term "Ajax" and by related terms such as "AHAH",
"POX", and so on.

This brief paper argues for a plaintext, synchronous alternative style
with some compelling advantages, one of which is (naturally) a catchy
name.

Synchronous Text/plain For User-agents -- STFU -- is a content-
delivery standard offering simple, reliable, high-performance routing
of content to Internet end-users. Implementation is orders of
magnitude faster than for typical Ajax applications, with a
corresponding drop in defect rates.

It's that simple. STFU.

  * well-tested
  * cross-platform
  * highly scalable
  * enterprise-ready
  * supports Unicode!
  * compliant with Section 508 Accessibility Requirements

One prominent adopter of STFU technology is the Internet Engineering
Task Force, which uses it for the dissemination of their most
important documents:

  ietf.org/rfc/rfc-index-latest

STFU also sidesteps technical quandaries related to markup formats,
such as those summarized here:

  hixie.ch/advocacy/xhtml

It's no accident that the author of the above (widely cited) document
chose to deliver his important message via STFU. 

Sometimes the debates over emerging standards and technologies become
wearisome, and pragmatic individuals find themselves wishing for a
magic phrase that might quiet the true believers and allow all
involved to move on to more productive activities. May we recommend:

STFU!

If you are already using STFU, you are welcome to display this PNG badge:

David Brin, in a piece at Salon.com entitled “Why Johnny Can’t Code”, complains:

almost none of the millions of personal computers in America offers a line-programming language simple enough for kids to pick up fast

Maybe Apple’s marketshare is so small that they equal “almost none,” but all OS X Macs come with Python and Ruby among other options. But wait, Brin seems to have heard of some of these newfangled scripting languages:

Despite their adoption of Big Green Download Button technology, SourceForge still has an absurdly cumbersome download process. I know it’s annoying to just gripe (I try to see the positive side too); I’m just surprised that it’s still this crufty. According to the OSTG site, “SourceForge.net hosts more Open Source development products than any other site or network worldwide.” But if the pace of modernization doesn’t pick up, I’m afraid that won’t be true for much longer.