Since the release of the installer for the alpha version of the Nightcrawler edition of RSS Bandit we have fixed a number of bugs. We worked on a number of performance issues related to the responsiveness of the application. We also fixed a number of issues with our newsgroup support including fixing issues with password protected newsgroups. We also think we tracked down the issue that led to some items occassionally showing up in the wrong feeds.

You can download the next iteration of the Nightcrawler alpha at RssBandit.1.3.0.36.Nightcrawler.Alpha.zip.

We aren't ready to release a beta version of the installer because we aren't feature complete yet. There are two features that still need to be completely implemented; downloading of Enclosures/Podcasts and notifications of new comments on "watched" posts.

Also some features need fleshing out. Torsten pointed out this morning that I need to add support for RFC 2047 so that we can handle non-ASCII author names and post titles as part of the newsgroup support. I had hoped to find a free library with code that already does that but it seems that the only ones I can find are for sale. I guess writing that code must suck so much that no one wants to give it away for free. There goes a weekend or two. :)

NEW FEATURES IN NIGHTCRAWLER

  • NNTP Newsgroups support: Users can specify a public NNTP server such as news.microsoft.com and subscribe to newsgroups on that server. Permalinks in a newsgroup post point to the post on Google Groups.

  • Item Manipulation from Newspaper Views:  Items can be marked as read or unread and flagged or unflagged directly from the newspaper view. This improves end user work flow as one no longer has to leave the newspaper view and right-click on the list view to either flag or mark a post as unread. 

  • Subscription Wizard: The process for subscribing to newsgroups, search results and web feeds has been greatly simplified. For example, users no longer need to know the web feed of a particular web site to subscribe to it but can instead specify the web page URL and discovery of its web feed is done automatically. 

  • Synchronization with Newsgator Online: Users can synchronize the state of their subscribed feeds (read/unread posts, new/deleted feeds, etc) between RSS Bandit and their account on Newsgator Online. This allows the best of both worlds where one can use both a rich desktop client (RSS Bandit) and a web-based RSS reader (Newsgator Online) without having to worry about marking things as read in both places.

  • Using back and forward arrows to view last post seen in reading pane: When navigating various feeds in the RSS Bandit tree view it is very useful to be able to go back to the last feed or item viewed especially when using the [spacebar] button to read unread items. RSS Bandit now provides a way to navigate back and forth between items read in the reading pane using the back and forward buttons in the toolbar. NEW!!!

  • Atom 1.0 support: The Atom 1.0 syndication format is now supported. 

  • Threaded Posts Now Optional: The feature where items that link to each other are shown as connected items reminiscent of threaded discussions can now be disabled and is off by default. This feature is very processor intensive and can slow down the average computer to the point that is unusable if one is subscribed to a large number of feeds.

  • UI Improvements: Icons in the tree view have been improved to make them more distinctive and also visually separate newsgroups from web feeds.

 

I've been wondering if we shouldn't just lock down this release and push out the podcasting features to the Jubilee release. What do y'all think?


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

October 24, 2005
@ 04:06 PM

I recently read two posts on the official Google blog about the recent hubub around their efforts to digitize books and make them searchable over the Web. The posts are Why we believe in Google Print and The point of Google Print.

My immediate personal reaction was how different Google is from Microsoft when it comes to blogging. On the one hand Google is quick to fire people who don't toe the party line in their blogs while Microsoft encourages its employees to show their individual voices even if they sometimes disagree with the company's party line. On the other hand, Microsoft frowns on employees commenting on pending legal actions such as lawsuits while Google has its employees blogging their side of the story in an official capacity. The common thread here is "controlling the message". Google is all about that.

The other thing that struck me about Google's messaging around Google Print was pointed out by Dave Winer in his post  A turning point for the Web?

It's time to realize that Google is no longer the little company we used to love. They're now a huge company that pushes individuals around like a lot of other huge companies. They need some balance to their power. And it's ridiculous to blindly take their side on every issue. Sometimes they're wrong, and I believe this is one of those times. It's certainly worth considering the possibility that they're wrong.

Here's where the point about controlling the message shows up. By any measure, Google is multi-billion dollar, multinational corporation. However whenever its executives speak, they do an excellent job of portraying the company as if it is the altruistic side project of a bunch of geeky college kids. I don't just mean their corporate slogan of "Do No Evil" although it is one manifestation of this strategy. Better examples are Sergey Brin's comments at the recent Web 2.0 conference  where he states that their motives for creating the Google AdSense program was to help keep content-based websites stay in business. Of course, syndicating ads now brings in about three quarters of a billion dollars in revenue for them a quarter.

So what does this have to do with Google Print? Well, I personally don't buy computer books anymore thanks to the Web and search engines. The last book I bought was Beginning RSS and Atom Programming and that's only because I wrote one of the forewards. The only time I've opened a computer book in the past year was recently when I cracked open the reference section of Dynamic HTML when looking for some JavaScript minutae. If I had a good Web-based search engine for content within the book I wouldn't have needed the book. Also, I've been wanting a cheap or free Integrated Development Environment (IDE) for JavaScript for quite some time. If I'd found an ad for a JavaScript IDE while searching for content within the book in my 'hypothetical book search engine' I definitely would have clicked on it and maybe purchased the IDE. My 'hypothetical book search engine' would wean me completely off of needing to buy computer books while probably making a tidy sum for itself by selling my eyeballs to software companies trying to sell me IDEs, profilers, debuggers and software training. 

My point is that Google Print will likely make the company a lot of money and could cost certain publishes a lot of money in lost sales. Even if it doesn't, the publishing industry will likely cede some control to Google. That's what these lawsuits are about and from that perspective I can understand why various publishers have initiated lawsuits with Google. To frame this as 'the evil publishing industry is trying to prevent us from completing our corporate mission of making information more accessible to users' is disingenuous at best and downright manipulative at worst.

Markets are conversations, to succeed in the marketplace you have to dominate the conversation and control it to suit your needs. Google is definitely good at that.


 

Categories: Current Affairs

October 24, 2005
@ 03:07 AM

The official XBox website recently announced the My XBox service which offers seamless integration between Xbox 360, Xbox Live®, and Xbox.com. The announcement contains the following excerpt

Clinton: Once you've created your gamer card, we give you all kinds of ways to show it off. It'll appear next to all of your posts in the forums, plus you can pop it into your personal Web page or blog, and even display it on your active Windows® desktop.

TriXie: Very cool! I heard a rumor that we'll be able to get some cool Xbox® functionality with MSN Spaces.

Clinton: That's true. When the new version of MSN Spaces launches—around the time Xbox 360 hits store shelves—you'll be able to use Xbox 360 themes on your Space, plus drop in new Xbox modules like your gamer card and your games list.

TriXie: Wow, you guys have thought of everything. I can't wait to get my hands on all these great My Xbox features! Thanks Clinton.

We definitely have some holiday gifts for our millions of users in the next version of MSN Spaces. It is very exciting to think that in the near future millions of people will be using the features I worked on to better express themselves and share content with their friends and family online. As Mike mentioned on his blog, "You can blog on MSN Spaces, but MSN Spaces is not just a blogging service."


 

Categories: MSN

October 21, 2005
@ 03:35 PM

As I mentioned in my previous post on Understanding Web 2.0 the "web 2.0" meme isn't about technology or people, it's about money and hype primarily geared at VCs and big companies looking for small companies to buy so they look hip. The recently launched Flock web browser is one of example of a "Web 2.0" product which looks like it's creators just played a game of buzzword bingo when deciding what to do with their millions in VC funding. It is built on Firefox (bing), integrates with del.icio.us (bing) and Flickr (bing), plus it comes with blog posting (bing!) and RSS reading features (bingo!).

I have to agree with Joel Spolsky's claim that the Architecture Astronauts Are Back when he wrote

I'm starting to see a new round of pure architecture astronautics : meaningless stringing-together of new economy buzzwords in an attempt to sound erudite.

When I wrote my original complaint about architecture astronauts more than four years ago, it was P2P this and messaging that.

"That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic, utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!"

Now it's tagging and folksonomies and syndication, and we're all supposed to fall in line with the theory that cool new stuff like Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Del.icio.us are somehow bigger than the sum of their parts. The Long Tail! Attention Economy! Creative Commons! Peer production! Web 2.0!

The term Web 2.0 particularly bugs me. It's not a real concept. It has no meaning. It's a big, vague, nebulous cloud of pure architectural nothingness. When people use the term Web 2.0, I always feel a little bit stupider for the rest of the day.
...
Not only that, the very 2.0 in Web 2.0 seems carefully crafted as a way to denegrate the clueless "Web 1.0" idiots, poor children, in the same way the first round of teenagers starting dotcoms in 1999 dissed their elders with the decade's mantra, "They just don't get it!"

I'll do my part. I hereby pledge never again to use the term "Web 2.0" on this blog, or to link to any article that mentions it. You're welcome.

I feel the same way. I am interested in discussions on the Web as a platform and even folksonomies (not tagging) but the marketplace of ideas has been polluted by all this "Web 2.0" garbage. Once again, I've flipped the bozo bit on Web 2.0. Like Joel, you won't see any use of the term on my blog or in items I link to from now on. 


 

Categories: Web Development

It seems some folks at TheServerSide.com have started bashing AJAX because they see it as a threat to Java. This has led to fairly ridiculous posts such as this one entitled But most of all samy is my hero which states

The story is, a myspace user named samy wanted to be popular. He wanted to make his page do things that others couldn’t and in the process devised a cross system scripting (XSS) attack that managed to add his profile to more then a million other users of the system. To do this he used a combination of AJAX and JavaScript.

It is not the intention to make samy even more famous but he has exposed a serious weakness in the AJAX security model. All samy did was figure out how to upload some JavaScript into his profile and this was despite myspace’s best efforts to limit this type of activity.

With respect to security, the web is already a hostile environment. Will a move to use AJAX and JavaScript further enlarge the security holes that already exist? Could myspace have done more to prevent this type of attack and still afford their users the flexibility to manage their pages as they do now?

Even though I haven't looked at the code of the exploit, I think it is fair to say that this issue has little to do with "the AJAX security model" as implied by the author of the post. Any system that accept user input has to worry about how they scrub the data due to malicious users. Not properly scrubbing input data leads to all sorts of security problems including buffer overflows and cross site scripting attacks.

I'd suggest that some of the folks on TheServerSide need to read up on some of the FAQs on cross site scripting attacks before blaming AJAX for problems that have nothing to do with it.


 

Categories: Web Development

October 20, 2005
@ 02:55 PM

A couple of recent stories in the news remind me that there still a ways to go for race relations in America.

From the story A Polling Free-Fall Among Blacks in the Washington Post

In what may turn out to be one of the biggest free-falls in the history of presidential polling, President Bush's job-approval rating among African Americans has dropped to 2 percent, according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.

The drop among blacks drove Bush's overall job approval ratings to an all-time low of 39 percent in this poll. By comparison, 45 percent of whites and 36 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Bush is doing.

Thanks to Jonathan Marsh for that link. This reminds me of a skit on the Dave Chappelle show where a game show host asks a black guy, "Why didn't black people trust Ronald Reagan?" and he responded "I didn't know we were supposed to trust him in the first place". Of course, it was the right answer.

From the story NBA's dress code blasted in the Miami Herald

The NBA has announced that a dress code will go into effect at the start of the season. Players will be required to wear business-casual attire when involved in team or league business. They can't wear visible chains, pendants or medallions over their clothes.

Jackson, who is black, said the NBA's new rule about jewelry targets young black males because chains are associated with hip-hop culture, and he said the league is afraid of becoming ''too hip-hop.'' In protest, he wore four chains to the Pacers' exhibition game against San Antonio on Tuesday.

Philadelphia's Allen Iverson also was critical of the new rule, which the NBA enacted Monday.

''I feel like if they want us to dress a certain way, they should pay for our clothes,'' he said. "It's just tough, man, knowing that all of a sudden you have to have a dress code out of nowhere.''

Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce agreed that the new rule targeted young, black players.

''When I saw the part about chains, hip hop and throwback jerseys, I think that's part of our culture,'' Pierce said. "The NBA is young black males.''

I guess it's OK for the NBA rosters to be dominated by blacks as long as they don't dress or act "too black". 
 

It's been over a month since we shipped the alpha version of the Nightcrawler release of RSS Bandit. Since then we've fixed a number of annoying bugs and polished a number of our features. An example of the kind of polish we've added since the alpha is shown in the screenshot below.

There are three main classes of subscriptions we now support in RSS Bandit; feeds (Atom or RSS), newsgroups (NNTP) and search results. We made search results a first class subscription type because I suspect that subscribing to search results especially on various blog search engines is only going to increase in popularity. The process for adding a new search engine is still too "techie-focused" for my liking. I'd love it if our users would just be able to add the URL of their search engine of choice and then we check if it supports Amazon OpenSearch, if so then we add it as one of the choices for the Search Results subscription wizard. The current process for adding a search engine whose results can be subscribed to involves users adding a URL showing the query string format of the engine (e.g. http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q={0}&format=rss where {0} is a place holder that shows where the query string should be inserted).  

I should investigate how many search engines provide an OpenSearch description documents file. If enough of them do, it may be worth the while for our users if we went ahead and supported it. That way they can just add 'http://search.msn.com' to their favorite search engine list and we autodiscover the rest.

The Newsgator API has been a source of mild frustration for me since I added support for it. The existing synchronization features in RSS Bandit involve uploading/downloading a single file containing the state of the application. The Newsgator API assumes that any application using it for synchronization is also using it as a source for RSS feeds. From my perspective this seems to be a very big assumption to make but is understandable when one considers that the original purpose of the API was for their in-house applications. This assumption manifests itself by requiring that to synchronize the state of a feed I'm subscribed to, I need to fetch its feed from Newsgator online. This means that if I'm subscribed to 100 feeds in RSS Bandit, then I might need to download up to 100 feeds from Newsgator Online as part of the synchronization process each time I sync. This makes the synchronization process a lot slower than I expected. I'm now wondering whether we should rethink the user flow for our synchronization step since currently we lock the UI while syncing to prevent users making changes while we are syncing. With synchronization to Newsgator this could take several minutes as opposed to a minute or less with our other synchronization methods. I did make some performance improvements since we shipped the alpha but it still does take a while longer than I like. :(

The winner of the RSS Bandit New Logo design contest has been announced. Congrats to Eric Winchester.

Old Logo:

New Logo:

I'd like to thank all the folks who took the time to submit entries and those who voted for their favorite logos. We greatly appreciate your support.

It is quite likely that Torsten and I will ship a 'refresh' of the alpha installer this weekend. The reason it isn't a beta is that we are not yet feature complete. The code for downloading enclosure/podcasts still isn't all there and I haven't started on my idea for 'watching' posts for new comments. With any luck we should have all this done in the next few weeks.

After the beta, we'll focus primarily on performance issues. We've already fixed a number of issues that were causing lots of CPU usage but our memory consumption still higher than I prefer. I expect that the final version of Nightcrawler will ship during the holiday season.


 

Categories: RSS Bandit

A recent comment on the Groklaw blog entitled Which Binary Key? claims that one needs a "binary key" to consume XML produced by Microsoft Office 2003. Specifically the post claims
No_Axe speaks as if MS Office 12 had already been released and everyone was using it. He assumes everyone knows the binary key is gone. Yet Microsoft is saying that MS Office 12 is more or less a year away from release. So who really knows when and if the binary key has been dropped? All i know is that MSXML 12 is not available today. And that MSXML 2003 has a binary key in the header of every file.
...
So let me close with this last comment on the fabled “binary key”. In March of 2005, when phase II of the ODF TC work was complete, and the specification had been prepared for both OASIS and ISO ratification, the ODF TC took up the issue of “compliance and conformance” testing. Specifically, we decided to start work on a compliance testing suite that would be useful for developers and application providers to perfect their implementations of ODF. Guess who's XML file format was the first test target? Right. And guess what the problem is with MSXML? Right. It's the binary key. We can't do even a simple transformation between MSXML and ODF!

As someone who's used the XML features of Excel and Word, I know for a fact that you don't need a "binary key" to process the files using traditional XML tools. Brian Jones, who works on a number of the XML features in Office, has a post entitled The myth of the Binary Key where he mentions various parts of the Office XML formats that may confuse one into thinking they are some sort of "binary key" such as namespace URIs, processing instructions and Base64 encoded binary data. All of these are standard aspects of XML which one may typically doesn't see in simple uses of the technology such as in RSS feeds.

Being that I used to work on the XML team there is one thing I want to add the Brian's list which often confuses people trying to process XML; the unicode byte order mark (BOM). This is often at the beginning of documents saved in UTF-16 or UTF-8 encoding on Windows. However as the Wikipedia entry on BOM's states

In UTF-16, a BOM is expressed as the two-byte sequence FE FF at the beginning of the encoded string, to indicate that the encoded characters that follow it use big-endian byte order; or it is expressed as the byte sequence FF FE to indicate little-endian order.

Whilst UTF-8 does not have byte order issues, a BOM encoded in UTF-8 may be used to mark text as UTF-8. Quite a lot of Windows software (including Windows Notepad) adds one to UTF-8 files. However in Unix-like systems (which make heavy use of text files for configuration) this practice is not recommended, as it will interfere with correct processing of important codes such as the hash-bang at the start of an interpreted script. It may also interfere with source for programming languages that don't recognise it. For example, gcc reports stray characters at the beginning of a source file, and in PHP, if output buffering is disabled, it has the subtle effect of causing the page to start being sent to the browser, preventing custom headers from being specified by the PHP script. The UTF-8 representation of the BOM is the byte sequence EF BB BF, which appears as the ISO-8859-1 characters "" in most text editors and web browsers not prepared to handle UTF-8.

I wouldn't be surprised if the alleged "binary key" was just a byte order mark which caused problems when trying to process the XML file using non-Unicode savvy tools. I suspect some of the ODF folks who had problems with the XML file would get some use out of Sam Ruby's Just Use XML talk at this year's XML 2005 conference. 


 

Categories: XML

I've been using MSN Virtual Earth for a while now and like it quite a lot. However there is definitely room for improvement and I'm glad to see that the team is soliciting feedback from users on what features they consider most important for the next release. In the post Suggestions for Virtual Earth Release 2? they write

The VE team is rolling on the next release and is interested in your feature requests. Lets make it interesting - You have 10 bucks to spend on features. How would you spend 'em? Post your comments here. My shopping list might look like this -
 
4  Street maps for Italy
3  Driving directions integrated in the application and not linked off to maps.msn.com
3  improved WiFi coverage for the Locate me feature in rural areas.
 
You get the idea. Go ahead, buy your features. Just remember to stay within your budget :-)

If you use VE and have some features you'd like to see in the next release, go ahead and post a comment with your requests. Here's how I'd spend my $10 on features; $2 to expand the Virtual Earth API to include conversions from physical addresses to latitudes & longitudes (aka geocoding), $3 to integrate driving directions into VE as opposed to being linked to http://maps.msn.com as is done today, $4 to add the ability to store my favorite locations in VE, and $1 to add maps of Canada to the service.

So how would you spend your dollars on VE features?


 

Categories: MSN

October 17, 2005
@ 04:51 PM

Every week or so I get a complaint from someone using Safari on Mac OS X complaining about the fact that my blog looked wacky in their browser. I finally got around to fixing the templates used by my blog and now it should look fine in Safari.

The following sites were helpful in showing me what my site looked like in Safari; http://www.danvine.com/icapture/ and http://www.fundisom.com/g5/. Thanks to Martin Dittus for pointing me out to these sites without which I wouldn't have been able to confirm my changes.


 

Categories: Ramblings