Last Thursday I saw a bunch of college friends that I hadn't seen in a while, despite all of us working at Microsoft, and Saul and Ciera who were visiting. We had dinner at Typhoon! which I haven't been to in quite a while. Daniil and Val brought their cute child. I got to see Charlie and Matt who I'm not sure I've seen since my 25th birthday. There was much nerdiness. I need to remember to organize such a night myself sometime in near future so I don't have to wait another year to see them.
On the weekend Sarah and I went out to dinner at Carnegie's, a former
public library in Ballard, Seattle that's now a restaurant. I saw the restaurant's website in Matt's delicious links and thought it looked interesting. The exterior and entryway look like a public
library, but just inside its redone as a sort of modern version of french classical with a bar and two dining rooms. No pictures since my replacement camera only arrived today, but there are
photos available. They serve french cuisine which was good and
not as expensive as I would have expected. An interesting place, although its a bit of a drive and I'm not sure if we'll be going back soon.
Sarah asked me if I knew of a syntax highlighter for the QuickBase formula language which she uses at work. I couldn't find one but thought it might be fun to make a QuickBase Formula syntax highlighter based on the QuickBase help's description of the formula syntax. Thankfully the language is relatively simple since my skills with ANTLR, the parser generator, are rusty now and I've only used it previously for personal projects (like Javaish, the ridiculous Java based shell idea I had).
With the help of some great ANTLR examples and an ANTLR cheat sheet I was able to come up with the grammar that parses the QuickBase Formula syntax and prints out the same formula marked up with HTML SPAN tags and various CSS classes. ANTLR produces the parser in Java which I wrapped up in an applet, put in a jar, and embedded in an HTML page. The script in that page runs user input through the applet's parser and sticks the output at the bottom of the page with appropriate CSS rules to highlight and print the formula in a pretty fashion.
What I learned:
As noted previously, my page consists of the aggregation of my various feeds and in working on that code recently it was again brought to my attention that everyone has different ways of representing tag metadata in feeds. I made up a list of how my various feed sources represent tags and list that data here so that it might help others in the future.
| Source | Feed Type | Tag Markup Scheme | One Tag Per Element | Tag Scheme URI | Human / Machine Names | Example Markup |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| LiveJournal | Atom | atom:category | yes | no | no | , (source) |
| LiveJournal | RSS 2.0 | rss2:category | yes | no | no |
technical(soure) |
| WordPress | RSS 2.0 | rss2:category | yes | no | no |
, (source)
|
| Delicious | RSS 1.0 | dc:subject | no | no | no |
photosynth photos 3d tool(source) |
| Delicious | RSS 2.0 | rss2:category | yes | yes | no |
domain="http://delicious.com/SequelGuy/">(source) |
| Flickr | Atom | atom:category | yes | yes | no |
term="seattle"(source) |
| Flickr | RSS 2.0 | media:category | no | yes | no |
scheme="urn:flickr:tags">(source) |
| YouTube | RSS 2.0 | media:category | no | no | no |
label="Tags">(source) |
| LibraryThing | RSS 2.0 | No explicit tag metadata. | no | no | no | n/a, (source) |
| Tag Markup Scheme | Notes | Example |
|---|---|---|
|
Atom Category atom:category xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom"
|
|
term="catName"
|
|
RSS 2.0 category rss2:category empty namespace |
|
domain="tag:deletethis.net,2008:tagscheme">
|
|
Yahoo Media RSS Module category media:category xmlns:media="http://search.yahoo.com/mrss/"
|
|
scheme="http://dmoz.org"
|
|
Dublin Core subject dc:subject xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
|
|
humor
|
Update 2009-9-14: Added WordPress to the Tag Markup table and namespaces to the Tag Markup Scheme table.
The Goodwin family, except for Michelle who is taking a class trip to Washington DC and New York, was in Seattle this week. Sarah and I met up with them for dinner last night at the Icon Grill. I enjoy the Icon Grill in general and last night was no exception especially having dinner with the Goodwins which was a lot of fun. It was particularly cold and at one point snowed. The Goodwin's are seeing all the classic tourist attractions in Seattle some of which are depicted in the following 1962 Seattle's Worlds Fair postcard. The postcard is featured on Paleo-Future and unsurprisingly the 1962 Worlds Fair favored Seattle's Space Needle and monorail.
![[Icon Grill front. Licensed under under Creative Commons. By Troy B Thompson]](http://farm1.static.flickr.com/17/22461595_7fb7e702c4_m_d.jpg)
![[Seattle's Worlds Fair Postcard]](http://bp0.blogger.com/_sGYULzoQCgA/R7NOl8B8s2I/AAAAAAAABX4/0gPURFTR4X4/s400/Seattle_Fair_Olympia_Brewing_PC_001.jpg)
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.
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.
I wanted to give a brief update on what's been going on for me this weekend and the previous two.
"This is the first blog from the IE team that I have found rigorous and informative. I skipped to the bottom to find it was written by one of the TA's from my first class at Cal
Poly."
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