Two weekends ago it was actually sunny and kind of warm so Sarah and I went down to Spud Fish and Chips and Juanita Beach Park. We ate fish and chips on the dock. I took a few pictures and this
time actually put some geographical information on Flickr so now I've got a map of my tiny fish and chips journey. On the map click on the floating marks to view the associated photos.
Flickr provides access to the geo data associated with your photos via GeoRSS feeds. And Google Maps displays GeoRSS feed content on their maps allowing you even to edit the data but doesn't appear to let you easily export the GeoRSS. Live Maps does the inverse, allowing you to create and export GeoRSS data but not import it. I'd like both please. Oh well.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available now. I can finally talk about some of the stuff I've been working on for the past year or so: activities. Activities let you select a document, some text on a document, or a link to a document and run that selection through a web service. For example, you could select a word on a webpage and look it up in Wikipedia, select an address and map it on Yahoo Maps, select a webpage and translate it into English with Windows Live Translator, or select a link and add it to Digg.
IE8 comes installed with some activities based on Microsoft web services but there's a page you can go to to
install other activities. However, that page is missing some of my favorites that I use all the time, like del.icio.us.
Accordingly, I've put together a page of the activities I use. MSDN has all the info on creating Activities.
Activities are very similar to other existing features in other browsers including the ability to add context menu items to IE. There's two important differences which make activities better. Activities have a preview window that pops out when you hover over an activity, which is useful to get in place information easily provided by developers. The other is that the interface is explicit and takes after HTML FORMs and OpenSearch descriptions. Because the interface is explicitly described in XML (unlike the context menu additions described above which run arbitrary script) we have the ability to use activities in places other than on a webpage in the future. And because activity definitions are similar to HTML FORMs, if your webservice has an HTML FORM describing it you can easily create an activity.
This post is about creating a server side z-code
interpreter that represents game progress in the URI. Try it with the game Lost
Pig.
I enjoy working on URIs and have the mug to prove it. Along those lines I've combined thoughts on URIs with interactive fiction. I have a limited amount of experience with Inform which generates Z-Code so I'll focus on pieces written in that. Of course we can already have URIs identifying the Z-Code files themselves, but I want URIs to identify my place in a piece of interactive fiction. The proper way to do this would be to give Z-Code its own mimetype and associate with that mimetype the format of a fragment that would contain the save state of user's interactive fiction session. A user would install a browser plugin that would generate URIs containing the appropriate fragment while you play the IF piece and be able to load URIs identifying Z-Code files and load the save state that appears in the fragment.
But all of that would be a lot of work, so I made a server side version that approximates this. On the Web Frotz Interpreter page, enter the URI of a Z-Code file to start a game. Enter your commands into the input text box at the bottom and you get a new URI after every command. For example, here's the beginning of Zork. I'm running a slightly modified version of the Unix version of Frotz. Baf's Guide to the IF Archive has lists of IF games to try out.
There are two issues with this thought, the first being the security issues with running arbitrary z-code and the second is the practical URI length limit of about 2K in IE. From the Z-Code standard and the Frotz source it looks like 'save' and 'restore' are the only commands that could do anything interesting outside of the Z-Code virtual machine. As for the length-limit on URIs I'm not sure that much can be done about that. I'm using a base64 encoded copy of the compressed input stream in the URI now. Switching to the actual save state might be smaller after enough user input.
I signed up for the pre-release beta and purchased a Chumby last year. Chumby looks like a cousin to a GPS
unit. Its similar in size with a touch screen, but has WiFi, accelerometers, and is pillow like on the sides that aren't a screen. In practice its like an Internet alarm clock that shows you photos
and videos off the Web. Its hackable in that Chumby Industries tells you about the various ways to run your own stuff on the Chumby, modifying the boot sequence (it runs Linux), turning on sshd,
etc, etc. The Chumby forum too has lots of info from folks who have found interesting hacks for the device.
When you turn on the Chumby it downloads and runs the latest version of the Chumby software which lets you set alarms, play music, and display Flash widgets. The Chumby website lets anyone upload their own Flash widgets to share with the community. I tried my hand at creating one using Adobe's free Flash creation SDK but I don't know Flash and didn't have the patience to learn.
Currently my Chumby is set to wake me up at 8am on weekdays with music from ShoutCast and then displays traffic and weather. At 10am everyday it switches to showing me a slide-show of LolCats. At 11pm it switches to night mode where it displays the time in dark grey text on a black background at a reduced light level so as not to disturb me while I sleep.
I like the Chumby but I have two complaints. The first is that it forces me to learn flash in order to create anything cool rather than having a built-in Web browser or depending on a more Web friendly technology. The second complaint is about its name. At first I thought the name was stupid in a kind of silly way, but now that I'm used to the name it sounds vaguely dirty.
When throwing together an HTML page at work that other people will view, I stick the following line in for style. Its IE's error page CSS and contaits a subtle gradient background that I like.
This uses the res URI scheme. You can see the other interesting IE resources using my resource list tool.
IPv6 address syntax consists of 8 groupings of colon delimited 16-bit hex values making up the 128-bit address. An optional double colon
can replace any consecutive sequence of 0 valued hex values. For example the following is a valid IPv6 address: fe80::2c02:db79
Some IPv6 addresses aren't global and in those cases need a scope ID to describe their context. These get a '%' followed by the scope ID.
For example the previous example with a scope ID of '8' would be: fe80::2c02:db79%8
IPv6 addresses in URIs may appear in the host section of a URI as long as they're enclosed by square brackets. For example:
http://[fe80::2c02:db79]/. The RFC explicitly notes that there isn't a way to add a scope ID to the IPv6 address in a URI. However a draft document describes adding
scope IDs to IPv6 addresses in URIs. The draft document uses the IPvFuture production from the URI RFC with a 'v1' to add a new
hostname syntax and a '+' instead of a '%' for delimiting the scope id. For example: http://[v1.fe80::2c02:db79+8]/. However, this is still a draft document, not a final
standard, and I don't know of any system that works this way.
In Windows XPSP2 the IPv6 stack is available but disabled by default. To enable the IPv6 stack, at a command prompt run 'netsh interface ipv6 install'. In Vista IPv6 is the on by default and cannot be turned off, while the IPv4 stack is optional and may be turned off by a command similar to the previous.
Once you have IPv6 on in your OS you can turn on IPv6 for IIS6 or just use IIS7. The address ::1 refers to the local machine.
In some places in Windows like UNC paths, IPv6 addresses aren't allowed. In those cases you can use a Vista DNS IPv6 hack that lives in the OS
name resolution stack that transforms particularly crafted names into IPv6 addresses. Take your IPv6 address, replace the ':'s with '-'s and the '%' with an 's' and then append '.ipv6-literal.net'
to the end. For example: fe80--2c02-db79s8.ipv6-literal.net. That name will resolve to the same example I've been using in Vista. This transformation occurs inside the system's local
name resolution stack so no DNS servers are involved, although Microsoft does own the ipv6-literal.net domain name.
MSDN describes IPv6 addresses in URIs in Windows and I've described IPv6 addresses in URIs in IE7. File URIs in
IE7 don't support IPv6 addresses. If you want to put a scope ID in a URI in IE7 you use a '%25' to delimit the scope ID and due to a bug you must have at least two digits in your scope ID. So,
to take the previous example: http://[fe80::2c02:db79%2508]/. Note that its 08 rather than just 8.
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