All posts by onlyconnect

adobe, flash, software development

Adobe Flex community at odds over Fx prefix, lack of collaboration

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Some members of the community around Adobe’s open source Flex SDK are fuming at a decision made by Adobe back in October 2008, to prefix the new skinnable components in the forthcoming “Gumbo” release with Fx. This means you can disambiguate old and new components such as Button without relying on namespaces. On the other hand, what is wrong with namespaces? The issue has provoked a lot of debate, partly on the merits or otherwise of the Fx prefix, and partly on the open source development process itself. The Fx decision was announced rather than discussed. Simeon Bateman, who is now all-but proposing an Fx-less fork of the SDK, says:

Creating an open source project is about openness in planning and development. Not just about giving people the right to do with the code what they will. And this part of the Flex project is a complete failure … The current Flex SDK team has about 20 developers and they are fiendishly working on the code for the next version of Flex, version 4 code named Gumbo. And they are doing all that development in private, behind closed doors with nothing but commit logs for us to know what is happening. This is an open source project and we have no idea what is going coming or what the timelines are for milestones. What the hell are the milestones?

Manish Jethani argues that Fx is a sign of haste and corporate pressure:

Even though Flex is an open source project, it is very much run per corporate interests. In a truly open source project like the Linux kernel, there are no deadlines — it’s ready when it’s ready. That’s how research departments work. But Flex is no research, Flex is business. Why, wouldn’t the ‘Fx’ prefix give Flex Builder yet another advantage over competing IDEs? Think about it.

Ben Clinkinbeard has created a survey to allow Flex developers to express their opinions, though as a commenter notes, it is more of an objection petition than a survey.

Adobe responded with an online open meeting to discuss this and other matters which took place this morning – you can play the recording online. It may have been frustrating for those who felt strongly about it, since after presenting the reasons for the change the presenters deferred further discussion to the online forum. As far as I can tell, the Fx decision is unlikely to change.

Well, there is open source, and there is collaborative development, and they are not the same thing. Adobe retains tight control over Flex for the sake of its commercial interests. It is a reminder that although the Flex SDK is open source it is not a community property in the same way as Apache.

Once crumb of comfort for Adobe is that this kind of intense debate shows the high value of Flex to its developers. It would be far, far worse if nobody cared.

Update: you can vote against the fx prefix or discuss it in Adobe’s bug-tracking system here.

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blogging, internet, microsoft, windows

More RSS madness from Microsoft – this time it’s Live Mail

Once upon a time I was enthusiastic about the “common feed list” in Windows. I thought there was all sorts of potential for sharing and synchronizing content across the network. When it was introduced, Microsoft called it the Windows RSS Platform, though it gets installed as part of IE7.

What’s curious is that even Microsoft doesn’t seem to use the platform in the way it was (presumably) intended. I opened up Windows Live Mail 2009 today (I use it only occasionally as a newsgroup reader), and was puzzled to see 6724 unread feed items.

What’s going on? Well, I use the IE7 feed list and access it either in IE7 or in my own home-brew reader, which uses the COM API to the common feed list.

Windows Live Mail had grabbed the list of feeds and made its own copy of all the data. Am I sure? Yes, first because of this suspicious option in Live Mail:

“When deleting a feed here, also delete it from your Internet Explorer feed list” – implying synchronization, not a common database. Note also the jargon; the Live Mail folk clearly think of this as a feature of IE, not a feature of Windows.

I also took a look in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows Live Mail\Your Feeds\

and there is was, a copy of all the entries in X-MimeOLE format. The real common feed list, by contrast, is stored in:

C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Feeds

It is not quite as bad as it first appears. When I chose to sync the feeds in Live Mail, the unread items synchronized with those in IE7. I am also hopeful that the data is only retrieved from the Internet once. though it is hard to be sure. A quick experiment suggests that if you delete a feed in IE7, it stays in Live Mail, though it no longer updates (one or other of these facts could be a bug). If you delete a feed in Live Mail it is deleted from IE7 unless, presumably, the box in the dialog above is checked.

The Outlook team made a similar error, but worse, because the feeds end up messing up your Exchange mailbox as well.

So why doesn’t Live Mail simply present a view of the common feed list, like my home-brew reader? Well, maybe the API is not robust or fast enough. The solution then is to fix the common feed list, not to do all this error-prone synchronization.

The whole thing would make more sense if the feed list was synchronized with the cloud, so that I could also read my feeds on the Web, in the style of Google Reader. Despite the name, Live Mail seems thoroughly bound to the desktop. It is simply an update to Outlook Express.

multimedia, salesforce.com

Comparing digital snaps on a new camera and one five years old

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I purchased a Canon IXUS 400 in November 2003. Good camera (for my purposes); but the battery life has dwindled to the point of nuisance and I figured it was time to replace it. I bought a near-equivalent, the IXUS 80IS, for around half the price the 400 cost 5 years ago. I especially like the idea of image stabilization, since I don’t carry a tripod.

I thought it would be interesting to compare the image quality, so I took a snap across the study (without a tripod). It’s difficult to compare like with like, as the newer camera supports higher resolutions. In the end I decided to use each one at its best resolution. The books in the image are around 3 metres (10 feet) away. Here’s the IXUS 400, image enlarged to match the size of the other:

and here is the IXUS 80IS:

Note that this is a very small detail; the old camera is not that bad. Still, a big difference.

Incidentally, I posted my first picture to Flickr earlier today – a snap of the Foo Fighters at Dreamforce last year. Taken with the old Canon, of course.

microsoft, silverlight, software development, web authoring

Microsoft showing Silverlight 3 at Mix09

Looks like Mix09 (March 18-20) is the stage where Microsoft will reveal details of Silverlight 3 (is it really 3 already?). On the session list is:

What’s new in Silverlight 3 (Joe Stegman)

What’s new in Silverlight 3 media (Larry Olson)

Deep Dive into Silverlight graphics – come hear about the Silverlight 3 rendering pipeline (Seema Ramchandani, Marshall Agnew)

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security, software development, web authoring

Why are web sites still storing passwords? Monster, USAJobs blunder highlights the risks

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Sophos informs us that job sites Monster and USAJobs (an official US Job site) have been hacked. Messages on Monster and USAJobs confirm this. I’d like to draw attention to the fact that passwords were stolen:

We recently learned our database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including Monster user IDs and passwords.

says Monster. And USAJobs says:

We recently learned that the Monster database was illegally accessed and certain contact and account data were taken, including user IDs and passwords, email addresses, names, phone numbers, and some basic demographic data.

Same wording – because Monster is the “technology provider” for USAJobs.

Sophos observes:

There is even more potential for danger, however, because passwords have been stolen. We know that too many people use the same password for every website that they access.

Right. But why is Monster even storing passwords? It is not necessary. All you need store is a one-way password hash, so the site can verify a password without recording it. This is easily done in every web platform out there.

There is a disadvantage. It means the site cannot email your lost password. Instead, it must reset your password. Since email passes in plain text, emailing passwords is a bad idea anyway, and I hate to see sites doing this; it’s a useful alert though that the site places a low value on security.

Any site can get hacked, but what isn’t stored can’t be stolen.

Technical blunders like this can be costly; there’s no excuse for it that I can think of.

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adobe, eclipse, microsoft, php, web authoring, windows

Microsoft Expression Web causes PHP error

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I ran into a strange and surprising PHP error today. I’m working on a little PHP application which has a login page. The login script calls session_start() to start or resume a PHP session. It was working OK so I decided to decorate the page a little (I was working in Eclipse). I like to try a variety of tools, so I ran up Microsoft’s Expression Web, added an image, then re-ran the script to see how it looked.

The answer was not good, because I now had an error:

Warning: session_start(): Cannot send session cookie – headers already sent

I puzzled over this for some time. The error was in line 0 of my login page. I couldn’t see anything that was different from before, except the static image that meant nothing to PHP.

Eventually I worked it out. Eclipse (running on Windows) created the PHP files using ANSI. On saving, Expression Web silently changed them to UTF-8. That in itself was no bad thing – it’s usually a better choice – though I reckon it should ask. The bigger problem was that Expression also added a BOM (byte order mark) to the beginning of the file. This is actually optional for UTF-8, and most non-Windows editors do not add it. It happens to flummox PHP, which interprets them who-knows-how and sends some output to the browser, preventing session_start from working.

This is particularly painful to debug since most editors do not display the BOM; they simply use it to confirm the character set in use. So you can have file A which works, and file B which does not, and they are character-by-character identical.

One way to see and remove the BOM is to open it with Edit.com, which does not understand it at all:

I guess both Expression and PHP could do better here. The bit that puzzles me is that I can’t be the first to run into this. Doesn’t Microsoft know that its UTF-8 BOM breaks PHP files, at least on the two versions I tried (XAMPP on Windows and PHP 5.2.1 on Linux)? I can’t even see a preference in Expression that would prevent it being written. And if you remove it, and then re-edit in Expression, it carefully writes it back. Unlike Adobe’s Dreamweaver, which leaves well alone.

PS if you want to know all about BOMs, see here.

Update: See comments – apparently this was fixed in Expression Web 2.0. Tina Clarke discusses the problem here.

cloud computing, internet, microsoft, silverlight, software development

Office Ribbon in Silverlight – amazing stuff from divelements SandRibbon

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I blinked when I tried the live demo of SandRibbon for Silverlight, from divelements. It looks remarkably like Office 2007:

The control is in beta, and promises:

All the commonly-used functionality of the Office 2007 UI is made available for you to use with this product, and most of the less common functionality too. Customers who have used SandRibbon for WPF will find the API familiar. The visual constructs used are compatible with all other Silverlight controls, both built-in and third-party.

The company already has a sandcontrol control for WPF. However, the Silverlight control shows how well you can replicate the look and feel of a desktop application in a cross-platform browser application. Now, put this together with the automatic online/offline synch in Live Mesh, and you could have a version of Office with seamless online and offline support. Microsoft may deliver something like this in the web versions of Office 14, though it is going to have one eye on its lucrative desktop sales and I doubt whether it will really exploit what is now possible.

adobe, drm, microsoft, sony

DRM-protected epub a good buy?

Someone considering a Sony Reader from Waterstones (a UK bookseller) asked me what I thought.

I haven’t tried the Sony Reader yet – it would be an interesting thing to review and I’ve heard good reports of its usability and readability. The snag for me would be that I’m already device-laden when out and about, and the last thing I want is yet another one. In principle, I’d rather use a multifunctional device – the iPhone is apparently good for reading, or maybe a laptop or netbook. Battery life is an issue on laptops, but I can usually plug in on the train now.

But I digress. What about the content, is an epub from Waterstones a good buy? I took at look at the site. Waterstones has done a deal with Sony and gives the impression that you must buy a Reader (£224) in order to purchase and read its ebooks, though as far as I can tell you can read them on a PC or Mac without buying a Reader. The help page is a model of unclarity. It presumes I already have a Reader. Then it says I have to install Adobe Digital Editions and sign up for an Adobe ID. It seems rather convoluted, that to buy a book from WaterStones and read it on a Sony I have to sign up with Adobe.

It is all about DRM of course. I took at a look at Adobe Digital Editions. This is the software for reading an epub protected with DRM delivered by Adobe Content Server 4, which I presume is what Waterstones is using. I installed it and saw dialogs just like the ones I remember from the failed Microsoft Reader and its lit format:

I can “activate” up to six devices on which to read my ebooks. A few other things caught my eye. System requirements show Windows and Mac but not Linux. The faq says Digital Editions does not connect behind ISA server – that would hit me, as I use ISA, the Microsoft firewall – and explains bad scenarios. For example, if you don’t authorize your computer, maybe because you don’t want to give your personal details to Adobe, the books are locked forever to that one computer. I presume you couldn’t even transfer them to a Sony Reader.

Surprisingly, the faq says that the only supported device is Sony Reader PRS-505, though it adds:

Adobe is actively working to support other platforms and devices. Further developments will be announced when available.

No iPhone (Stanza). No Amazon Kindle. Won’t work on my Windows Mobile devices, or any phone as far as I can tell.

The reader itself worked fine. I downloaded a free book from Feedbooks and added it to the library – no DRM, phew.

As for Watersones ebooks, right now, there are several things to dislike. First, if I’m going to buy an ebook, I do want to be able to read it across all my devices – a specialist reader has its place, but other mobile devices are also important. I wouldn’t consider it without that. Second, the DRM is a nuisance. Third, the prices strike me as too high. For example, I can buy John Le Carre’s A Most Wanted Man for £13.99, which Waterstones tells me is a discount of £5.70 from the list price of £18.99. However, the same book is on offer in hardback for £12.50. So I am paying a premium to get the ebook.

Software books definitely have advantages. They are weightless, green, searchable, you can vary the type size. However they have disadvantages too. You need a device to read them; you can’t sell them on; you have no physical backup; there is no smart cover; and you don’t get the sensual pleasure of turning over crisp new pages. Further, the publisher is saving manufacturing cost, and the retailer is saving storage and carriage costs: shouldn’t those savings be passed on?

These factors, combined with the DRM nuisance and the format wars, would make me cautious about investing in Waterstones ebooks at the moment.

There is a political aspect to all this. Amazon is expected to launch Kindle in the UK at some point. It needs wireless support for direct content download, which may be holding it up. However, UK publishers seem solidly behind epub and Sony/Adobe. The Bookseller observes:

There may be a collective strategy about this: no-one—least of all Penguin, HarperCollins, Hachette, Macmillan or Random House—wants to see Amazon in possession of the dominant e-book device, and by consequence become the only e-book retailer.

Of course the publishers can support multiple formats. My guess is that Amazon will be a significant player with Kindle, even though it is late arriving.

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microsoft, windows

Microsoft Small Business Server 2008 too expensive for hardware, market

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When Microsoft introduced Small Business Server 2008, it upped the price of the base package and reduced the cost of client access licenses.

That’s OK for the, umm, larger small business; but it’s made the product expensive for those tiny setups who only need 5 or 10 CALs.

RIght now, ebuyer.com is offering SBS 2008 Standard for 835.49+VAT and an OEM version for £535.55+VAT.

By contrast, you can get the old SBS 2003 Standard OEM for £275.90+VAT.

Suitable servers on the other hand are now at rock-bottom prices. If you are lucky you can pick up an HP ML110 for around £200+VAT (try Amazon). Of course you have to add some RAM and probably a second hard drive for RAID, but neither is particularly expensive.

The 2003 edition was better value. This has also made Linux more attractive for those with the skills to look after it, and businesses that are not saddled with Windows-only software that has to run on the server.

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