Mike Schaeffer's Blog

This is pretty well documented online, but I can never seem to find it when I need it. So, I'm putting it here too.

Internet Explorer defaults to anonymous FTP, when sometimes you need to log in with an explict username and password. One of the lesser known features of URL's is that they allow login information to be specified as part of a web address.

ftp://username:password@hostname/

The :password part is optional, but sometimes necessary. As the Rutgers site points out, there are security issues involved with this, particularly on public terminals. That said, FTP (RFC 959) sends passwords as unencrypted text anyway, so I wouldn't be using my most secure passwords to log into an FTP site.

Also, Microsoft have a Knowledge Base Article that describes this in more detail, including a way to log in from a menu command, if you have the right settings enabled.

I've been playing around with how to map XML to S-Expressions nFor a while, I had been considering a mapping like the following:

From:	<phonebook name="Jenny">867-5309</phonebook>
To:	(phone_book ((name . "Jenny")) "867-5309")

In other words, a symbol for the tag name in the car of the list, an association list of attribute values in the cadr, and then the subelements in the cddr. This seems reasonable, aside from the fact that attributes and tag values are still wierdly disjoint.

On the way to lunch today, I came up with another mapping that might be more reasonable:

From:	<phonebook name="Jenny">867-5309</phonebook>
To:	(phone_book (name "Jenny") :end-of-attribute-marker "867-5309")

This is simpler in that a tag is modeled as a list containing the tag symbol and then all of the sub-items, attributes or not. Data stored as an attribute doesn't get special treatment relative to data stored as a tag value. The symbol :end-of-attribute-marker makes it possible to still distinguish between attributes and tags. If you don't care, a simple call to remove can remove the marker symbol.

It's a subtle design point, but this'll probably end up in vCalc in the XML support... I've had XML for vCalc on the back-burner for a while now, but due to some real work obligations, I might have to make it a higher priority.

For a few years, I used this graphic as the front matter for my website:

This, the logo for my website, is basically just antialiased text rendered into a bitmap. At the time, it seemed like a good idea to render the text as a bitmap because I didn't trust the browser to render it for me. Bad idea.

As it turns out, Internet Explorer rescales bitmaps on high resolution displays. This is a somewhat misguided attempt to make keep bitmap sizing consistent. Bitmaps aren't rendered at 1/1 zoom, they are rendered at screen_dpi/96dpi. On non-96dpi screens, that results in ugly scaling. While scaling can be disabled, that's not the ideal solution. The ideal solution is to do as much of the rendering as possible in the browser: which should know more about the client's display than the server. Therefore, my logo is now CSS formatted plain text. That means it looks the right size on more screens, anti-aliases appropriately, uses ClearType if it's available. The next step is going to be to switch from pixel sizes to 'real' sizes.

I ran across this quote the other day from I, cringely:

The market has stupidly decided that Intel microprocessors are better than Apple's preferred PowerPCs, so Apple will be at a disadvantage trying to sell PowerPC machines into the Intel market. This is what's right now killing Silicon Graphics, which is finding rough going pitting its MIPS processors against Intel. ... Yes, Apple will build computers with Intel processors. Their aim, as in all of these products, is for the high end. Based on Intel's new Merced chip, the new Apple machine will have PCI slots, Universal Serial Bus, Fast Ethernet, IEEE 1394 FireWire, IRDA, DIMM sockets, but no ISA slots and no backwards compatibility to DOS. So this is NOT a PC in the strictest sense, since it will only run Rhapsody, but not System 8 or Windows NT. It will run Mac applications inside Rhapsody. And because Apple is both the author of Rhapsody and the designer of this machine, Jobs believes that more customers will want to buy their Rhapsody wrapped in Apple hardware than not.

Funny thing is... that quote is from October of 1997. A lot has changed since then, but since the core reasoning was sound it probably shouldn't be too much of a suprise that he was ultimately right.

The other interesting bit was that Cringely wrote that piece around 1997, which is when the NDA for 'Project Star Trek' expired. Star Trek was a project in which a few Apple, Novell, and Intel software engineers got MacOS 7 running on PC hardware. I'm not sure what the business story would've been, but it was a nice technical accomplishment nonetheless.