Pomme::TAB

Firefox users have been able to use microformats-enabled web sites (like the schedules on Upcoming or BBC Programmes) for a long time thanks to a couple of extensions (Operator and Tails Exports).

Now coming alongside the release of Safari 3.1, there’s a new Safari plugin that allow the parsing of microformats for integration in various Mac OS X applications (Adress book, iCal).

For Mac OSX users, the integration with Address Book and iCal could make Safari a better microformat reader than Firefox. I cannot test the plugin myself as I don’t have Leopard which is a requirement.

Alternatively the latest version of my feed reader NetNewsWire can also parse microformats but it requires you (obviously by the very definition of microformats) to render the web page in Netnewswire not just the summary.

Safari 3.1 is available for Tiger and Windows though.

A funny but familiar comic strip

Your Company’s App: “Company’s”

(Via Daring Fireball.)

I’ve started to miss making blog posts with fancy diagramme, mind-blowing pie charts.

The Open letter from Opera’s CTO published in The Register has given me the opportunity to drawn this blog under the total wisdom of yet another pie chart as buried in the comments to the article, I found this:

You’ll notice it’s in the same vein as that one from last year

Recently, I’ve been working on a Rails project for the first time.
It’s a nice change after years of perl.

There are quite a few little things that I knew how to do in perl, that I didn’t have clue on how to do it in Rails. Also I run into issue peculiar to Rails or ruby.

I solved all these issues so far and the links below give pointers to some helpful information.

I’m quite annoyed at Microsoft’s bid to buy Yahoo!

I’m a happy user of several Yahoo services but given the services overlap between the two and what Microsoft wants Yahoo! for, I fear for future of the Yahoo services (I’m a paying customer for some of them).

I fear because I’ve chosen to use them and for the way I go about online things, I feel they are superior to the competing offerings from MS, Apple or Google (in areas like user experience, platform agnosticism, integration between services and use of open standards).

After some grumpy start following Yahoo’s ingestion of Flickr, I’ve actually started to like Yahoo! integration between web services and I like their openness (use of microformats, restful apis, recent adoption of OpenID).

Most importantly though, I’ve got quite a few former colleagues and friends working at Yahoo! and I can just imagine how p**ed off they are at the moment.

I think, in my humble opinion, part of Yahoo!’s troubles comes from not having played the openness card in all their areas of business. I’m thinking about Instant Messaging where they slept with Microsoft and Search where they stood alone. That way they let MS think that there are “synergies” possible or a common vision can be shared.

It would be different, if say, Yahoo! were part of a cloud of interacting open APIs with liberal licensing between coo-petitors, partners, clients.

Elsewhere, Daring Fireball is making a layman’s translation of a Yahoo! memo about the subject.

Also, Roughly Drafted has an article about Microsoft’s intention and why everyone is going to loose if the bid goes through. The article is interesting as it’s full of background and historic information.

In another part of the web, the TechCrunch blog proposes a solution for Yahoo! (or the new entity) to survive in the Search market.

Finally, Yahoo! has rejected (for the moment) Microsoft’s offer.

Technorati Tags:
yahoo, microsoft, search

If you’re not sure what’s the difference between a controlled vocabulary, a taxonomy and a thesaurus, this blog article is quite good at clarifying the above concepts and more.

What’s not covered are tags and folksonomy.

Interesting article on Boing Boing about Google image labeler and how to entice the mass into a dull job by the means of a game challenge…

It’s a clever way to do retrospective tagging. Organizations with large archives of data are likely to do more of this in order to open access to their “long tail”.

In a non-digital world, an analogy could be the way the BBC organized national “treasure hunts” to retrieve long missing archive material, except they were one-offs.

Google has found a way to harness the power of the mass (and no, this has nothing to do with what happens to humans in the Matrix trilogy, although …)

Ars Technica has an excellent write-up about the evolution of KHTML, an open-source web browser layout engine.

The story is fascinating as it talks about the forking of the project which is a normal occurrence in the open source world.

Also revealed is the tumultuous relationship between the open source community and the big software companies, in this case Apple who forked HTML to build WebKit (used in Itunes, Safari) and Nokia who forked WebKit for its smart-phones.

The most interesting bit in the article to me is the unforking of the above projects which is a rare event and usually means good things for the developers who can be confused between what to choose as both platform are related but different.

Xkcd is at it again and produced an imaginative map of online communities:

When you hover the original small version on XKCD, you’ve got a nice comment from the author.

I’m mainly a perl programmer, but last week I’ve decided to explore the python language.

To keep my motivation high I’ve decided to use python for something useful to me: download every day my favorite web comic into the Pictures directory of my home directory on Mac OS X and keep it uncluttered by removing older episodes.

In the working of the project I’ve learned how in python to scrap web sites, parse XML with DOM, handling exceptions, manipulating the filesystem, doing time calculations, using regular expressions, …

Python is quite cool, and I’m planning to further improve the application.
I’m still using the default Mac OS X python, the 2.3.5 without readline
I’ll try to install a more recent version with readline support.
Python 2.5 is tempting by I don’t know if it is well supported yet by Trac, an open-source python project I’m intending to hack at some point.

I’ve added in my del.icio.us bookmarks a bunch of links that I’ve found helpful.