live page 7 - Dave's Blog

Leaking Information Through Delicious

While re-reading Cryptonomicon I thought about what kind of information I'm leaking by posting links on Delicious. At work I don't post any Intranet websites for fear of revealing anything but I wondered if not posting would reveal anything. For instance, if I'm particularly busy at work might I post less indicating something about the state of the things I work on? I got an archive of my Delicious posts via the Delicious API and then ran it through a tool I made to create a couple of tables which I've graphed on Many Eyes

Kids in the Hall Live in Seattle

Sarah and I saw the Kids in the Hall "Live As We'll Ever Be" Tour in the WaMu theater in Seattle this past Thursday. I'd only ever seen their television show so it was cool to see them live. I thought that them being in a live format on stage would make the show significantly different, but other than having a bad seat and not being able to see very well, and the Kids sometimes ad-libbing or breaking character, it was like watching their show. It consisted of mostly new material with some returning characters like the Chicken Lady, Buddy Cole, the head crusher, etc. Their Facebook page has two videos that they played during the show.

I've been using the best Kids in the Hall fansite with an archive of searchable transcripts since high school. But now days what with all the new fangled video websites I can link right to some of my favorite sketches from the show. Like the Inexperienced Cannibal.

And the meta-sketch The Raise.

Attended Savor Seattle

This past Saturday Sarah and I took the Savor Seattle Tour of various food shops in Pikes Place. Sarah had suggested it at one point and when Jesse and Nicole brought it up again when they came up to Seattle we decided to go. Surprisingly our tour group consisted of mostly locals. Except for the fish market I hadn't been to see any of the places on the tour. I particularly enjoyed the chocolate cherries and the tea. Our tour guide Tim was funny and overall I enjoyed the tour and would recommend it. I've made a map of our tour including what free trials we got at each location. Yum!

Cirque du Soleil in Marymoor Park

Sarah and I went to Cirque du Soleil's Corteo this past Wednesday. Its in Marymoor Park quite near the main Microsoft campus. They setup large circus tents in the park including a gift shop, overpriced concession stands, and long lined porta-potties. Despite all this the show was very entertaining and quite enjoyable. The show is like a circus directed by Terry Gilliam or Tim Schafer and otherwise I'm not sure how to describe it, but I do recommend it.

Visiting College Friends and Vice Versa

Last weekend after Saul and Ciera's wedding, I drove up to Pat, Grib, and Jesse's house to which I hadn't previously been. I got in late and they'd just finished a UFC party. The next day Grib had to travel for work but the rest of us met Scott and Nicole, Jesse's girlfriend at a place for breakfast. After that we went back to their place for some Rock Band which I hadn't played previously and Pat took the opportunity to show off his real life musical skills on the banjo.

This weekend, Jesse and Nicole are up visiting Seattle. On Friday, Sarah and I met up with them at the BluWater Bistro in Seattle which sits right on Lake Union. The view was nice although difficult to see from our table and overall I like the sister restaurant in Kirkland better. They were both short visits but it was fun to see people again.

Saul and Ciera's Wedding

Last weekend while Sarah was up in Canada for a spa weekend with her sister and her sister's other bridesmaids, I went to Saul and Ciera's wedding in Three Rivers, California near Sequoia National Park. I flew into Fresno picked up a rental car and my GPS device navigated me to a restaurant with the wedding location no where in sight. "No problem," I thought, "I'll just call someone with an Internet connection and..." I had no cell reception. What did people do before GPS, Internet, and cell phones?

A waitress in the restaurant pointed me down the road a bit to the wedding location which was outside overlooking a river. Their wedding cake was made up like a mountain with two backpacks at the top and rope hanging down. Ciera's father married them and the ceremony was lovely. The music after included Code Monkey to which all the nerds were forced to get up and awkwardly dance.

Besides getting to see Ciera and Saul who I hadn't seen in quite a while, I got to see Daniil and Val, Vlad, and Nathaniel. Since last I saw Daniil and Val they had a child, Katie who is very cute and in whom I can see a lot of family resemblance. The always hilarious Vlad, Daniil's brother, was there as well with his wife who I got to meet. Nathaniel, my manager from Vizolutions was there and I don't know if I've seen him since I moved to Washington. It was fun to see him and meet his girlfriend who was kind enough to donate her extra male to male mini-phono cord so I could listen to my Zune in the rental car stereo on the drive back.

URI Fragment Info Roundup

Information about URI Fragments, the portion of URIs that follow the '#' at the end and that are used to navigate within a document, is scattered throughout various documents which I usually have to hunt down. Instead I'll link to them all here.

Definitions. Fragments are defined in the URI RFC which states that they're used to identify a secondary resource that is related to the primary resource identified by the URI as a subset of the primary, a view of the primary, or some other resource described by the primary. The interpretation of a fragment is based on the mime type of the primary resource. Tim Berners-Lee notes that determining fragment meaning from mime type is a problem because a single URI may contain a single fragment, however over HTTP a single URI can result in the same logical resource represented in different mime types. So there's one fragment but multiple mime types and so multiple interpretations of the one fragment. The URI RFC says that if an author has a single resource available in multiple mime types then the author must ensure that the various representations of a single resource must all resolve fragments to the same logical secondary resource. Depending on which mime types you're dealing with this is either not easy or not possible.

HTTP. In HTTP when URIs are used, the fragment is not included. The General Syntax section of the HTTP standard says it uses the definitions of 'URI-reference' (which includes the fragment), 'absoluteURI', and 'relativeURI' (which don't include the fragment) from the URI RFC. However, the 'URI-reference' term doesn't actually appear in the BNF for the protocol. Accordingly the headers like 'Request-URI', 'Content-Location', 'Location', and 'Referer' which include URIs are defined with 'absoluteURI' or 'relativeURI' and don't include the fragment. This is in keeping with the original fragment definition which says that the fragment is used as a view of the original resource and consequently only needed for resolution on the client. Additionally, the URI RFC explicitly notes that not including the fragment is a privacy feature such that page authors won't be able to stop clients from viewing whatever fragments the client chooses. This seems like an odd claim given that if the author wanted to selectively restrict access to portions of documents there are other options for them like breaking out the parts of a single resource to which the author wishes to restrict access into separate resources.

HTML. In HTML, the HTML mime type RFC defines HTML's fragment use which consists of fragments referring to elements with a corresponding 'id' attribute or one of a particular set of elements with a corresponding 'name' attribute. The HTML spec discusses fragment use additionally noting that the names and ids must be unique in the document and that they must consist of only US-ASCII characters. The ID and NAME attributes are further restricted in section 6 to only consist of alphanumerics, the hyphen, period, colon, and underscore. This is a subset of the characters allowed in the URI fragment so no encoding is discussed since technically its not needed. However, practically speaking, browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer allow for names and ids containing characters outside of the defined set including characters that must be percent-encoded to appear in a URI fragment. The interpretation of percent-encoded characters in fragments for HTML documents is not consistent across browsers (or in some cases within the same browser) especially for the percent-encoded percent.

Text. Text/plain recently got a fragment definition that allows fragments to refer to particular lines or characters within a text document. The scheme no longer includes regular expressions, which disappointed me at first, but in retrospect is probably good idea for increasing the adoption of this fragment scheme and for avoiding the potential for ubiquitous DoS via regex. One of the authors also notes this on his blog. I look forward to the day when this scheme is widely implemented.

XML. XML has the XPointer framework to define its fragment structure as noted by the XML mime type definition. XPointer consists of a general scheme that contains subschemes that identify a subset of an XML document. Its too bad such a thing wasn't adopted for URI fragments in general to solve the problem of a single resource with multiple mime type representations. I wrote more about XPointer when I worked on hacking XPointer into IE.

SVG and MPEG. Through the Media Fragments Working Group I found a couple more fragment scheme definitions. SVG's fragment scheme is defined in the SVG documentation and looks similar to XML's. MPEG has one defined but I could only find it as an ISO document "Text of ISO/IEC FCD 21000-17 MPEG-12 FID" and not as an RFC which is a little disturbing.

AJAX. AJAX websites have used fragments as an escape hatch for two issues that I've seen. The first is getting a unique URL for versions of a page that are produced on the client by script. The fragment may be changed by script without forcing the page to reload. This goes outside the rules of the standards by using HTML fragments in a fashion not called out by the HTML spec. but it does seem to be inline with the spirit of the fragment in that it is a subview of the original resource and interpretted client side. The other hack-ier use of the fragment in AJAX is for cross domain communication. The basic idea is that different frames or windows may not communicate in normal fashions if they have different domains but they can view each other's URLs and accordingly can change their own fragments in order to send a message out to those who know where to look. IMO this is not inline with the spirit of the fragment but is rather a cool hack.

Warm Weekend

It was warm and lovely out this past Saturday and Sarah I and went to a new place for lunch, then to Kelsey Creek Park, and then out for Jane's birthday. We ate at Cafe Pirouette which serves crepes and is done up with French decorations reminding me of my parent's house. We got in for just the end of lunch and saw the second to last customers, a gaggle of older ladies leaving. I felt a little out of place with my "Longhorn [heart] RSS" t-shirt on. The food was good and in larger portions that I expected.

After that we went to Kelsey Creek Park and Farm. The park is hidden at the end of a quiet neighborhood, starts out with some tables and children's jungle gym equipment, then there's a farm which includes a petting zoo, followed by many little trails going off into the forrest. There weren't too many animals out and the ones we did see didn't seem to expect or want the sun and warm weather. We followed one of the trails for a bit and turned back before getting sun burned. You can see my weekend photos mapped out on Live Maps.

That night we went out with some friends for Jane's birthday. Eric was just back from the RSA conference and we met Jane and Eric and others at Palace Kitchen in Seattle located immediately adjascent to the monorail's route. The weather was still good so they left the large windows open through twilight and every so often you'd see the monorail pass by.

Search and Archive of Dave's Things

I now have search and an archive available for my site. I previously tried to setup crappy search by cheating using Yahoo Pipes and now instead I have a slightly less crappy search that works over all of the content that I've produced on my blog, uploaded to flickr or youtube, or added to delicious.

You can now read my first LiveJournal blog post or, for probably much more entertainment value, view all the photos and videos of Cadbury by searching for 'bunny'.

The search is only slightly less lame because although it searches over all my content, I still implemented it myself rather than getting a professional package. Also, the feed supports the same search and archive as my homepage so you can subscribe to a feed of Cadbury if you're so inclined and just skip all this other boring stuff. My homepage and feed implement the OpenSearch response elements and I've got an OpenSearch search provider (source) as well.

Gmail integration with Internet Explorer 8

With the new features of IE8 there's several easy ways to integrate Gmail, Google's web mail service, for mail composition, searching, and monitoring that I enjoy using.

Composition

I made a Send via Gmail activity that allows you to select some text, a document, or link and via the activity menu open a new tab to compose a new message with the selection. Go to my activity page and click "Send via Gmail" (source) to install it. I found info on the gmail composition URL in the comments of this gmail howto article and used that in the activity. I talked about activities previously.

Search

I've made a search provider that searches your gmail account. See my search provider page and select 'Gmail' (source) to install the Gmail search provider. Search providers aren't new to IE8 but this fits in with Gmail integration in IE. Again in the comments of another howto I found information on a Gmail search URL.

Monitor

New to IE8 is authenticated feed support and favorites bar monitoring which combined with the Gmail inbox feed means you can see when you get new mail in your favorites bar in IE. To do this, navigate to the feed https://mail.google.com/mail/feed/atom, click 'Subscribe to this feed', then click on the Add button in the upper left (the star with plus icon) and select 'Monitor on Favorites Bar' to add this as a monitored item in the favorites bar. Next, right click on the new item in your favorites bar, open the properties dialog, and enter your Gmail username and password into the new username and password fields. Now when you get new mail the Gmail feed item will shine and bold and you'll be able to get to new messages in the dropdown. I described monitored feed items previously.

Now using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to host deletethis.net

I've switched from using my own home web server of which one of the harddrives died, to using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET, an actual real live web hosting service. So far I'm very happy with them and they give me almost exactly what I had on my own home server: ssh access, vim, php, java, etc. etc. The only notable things they don't do are (1) cron jobs which I use currently and (2) SSL which I don't use currently. I can replace my cron job usage and I suppose I'll have to reevaluate my web hosting if I ever need SSL. At the moment many of the server side things like Vizicious will be unavailable. I'll work on getting those working again at some point.