Disqus - Latest Comments for Bas Westerbaan

Re: Text, Audio and Video Blogging

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 13:53:19 -0000

Conclusion: text remains the most efficient way to transfer, and get the information you find interesting.
Stick with the normal text would be the best...

Re: Text, Audio and Video Blogging

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 15 Oct 2004 20:08:05 -0000

Usualy I read the paper in the morning, and watch the news in the evening for I am than already behind the tv ;)

Re: YAML, Because XML is for Wussies

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 30 Oct 2004 18:55:08 -0000

Hehe, nicely done.
One problem with YAML doesn't shock and awe ya with exact defenitions. You'll end up with a lota flavors. Although.. I would prefer that format for config files

Re: YAML, Because XML is for Wussies

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 05:21:14 -0000

Talking about config files, my favourite config file is the Max Payne 2 config file 'script'.

// -------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Max Payne Menu Script
// -------------------------------------------------------------------------

#include "..\database\stringdefines.h"
#include "menuid.h"

#define BG_BITMAP_MAINMENU "bitmaps\Menu_bg_Mainmenu.dds"
#define BG_BITMAP_OPTIONS "bitmaps\Menu_bg_Generic.dds"
#define BG_BITMAP_CROSSHAIRS "bitmaps\Menu_bg_Crosshairs.dds"
#define BG_BITMAP_LOADSAVE "bitmaps\Menu_bg_LoadSave.dds"
#define BG_BITMAP_QUIT "bitmaps\Menu_bg_Quit.dds"
#define BG_BITMAP_HELPSCREEN "bitmaps\Menu_bg_Help.dds"

[General]
DefaultBackground = BG_BITMAP_OPTIONS;

NormalFont = "..\sharedtextures\font_univers.tga";
NormalFontAlpha = "..\sharedtextures\font_univers_alpha.tga";
SelectedFont = "..\sharedtextures\font_univers_bright.tga";

....

// -------------------------------------------------------------------------
// Menu content script
// -------------------------------------------------------------------------

[Menu]
{
[Properties]
Name = "";
Headline = "";
Background = BG_BITMAP_MAINMENU;

[Menu]
{
[Properties]
Name = GCID_HELPSCREEN;
ToolTip = GCID_HELPSCREEN_TIP;
Headline = "";
Background = BG_BITMAP_HELPSCREEN;

[Back]
Name = "";
ToolTip = "";
ID = 0;
}

[Item]
{
[General]
Name = GCID_RESUMEGAME;
ToolTip = GCID_RESUMEGAME_TIP;
ID = MENUID_ITEM_RESUME;
}

....

Re: Textuality

Bas Westerbaan — Mon, 01 Nov 2004 16:50:24 -0000

I love irony ;).

Re: Spice Up Your Life: Don’t Use Smilies

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 10:47:39 -0000

Gee, we are all victims of a culture, where sending instant messages without abbreviations ((in dutch: ) misschien -> mss, een -> 1, schijnen -> schnn etc.), and a load of smilies is deemed to be cold, serious and brutal.
Some people have the habbit of propogating this 'dialect' to emails, and message boards. It's rather annoying...
(Who hasn't seen newbies trying out all the message-board-unique emoticons in their first post. Setting an emoticon limit doesn't stop them but lets them use the excess of emoticons in the following posts after which they vanish in thin air, frustrating..)

Re: Spice Up Your Life: Don’t Use Smilies

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 11:17:23 -0000

And you even forgotten the dot.
Well.. LOL and lol are 2 different things. The not-abbreviation dutch word 'lol' means fun, and can be used in the same context.
However, I've heard enlish people use it. And they say it as if they would say 'Ah', or 'Ok', without any sign of laughing.
Ah well.. as long as people refrain from trying to speak h4x0r or the dutch abbreviations (mss, idd, etc..) it won't destroy this generation unrepairably.

Re: Dear America

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 13:10:39 -0000

See it from the bright side, at the moment Zef is posting slightly more than once a day; most of it is tech, and even without the politcal posts he is posting more than he used to post quite a while ago.

Re: Spice Up Your Life: Don’t Use Smilies

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 03 Nov 2004 13:13:58 -0000

Actually zef, you (in general) would, you (in general) can even use 'grap'

Quote: "lol
lol is lol, maar lol bleek na een tijdje minder lol te zijn dan lol eerst lol was, grap was grap maar toch was grap lang ni zo lol als lol grap was, dus grap was lol maar lol bleef toch het grapst "

By a 'funny' acquaintance.

Re: I.M.

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 04 Nov 2004 12:18:51 -0000

IM is direct.
When I need a quick answer I use Msn.
When I have a quick thought I use Msn.
Email is nice, but it is too slow espacially when stuff gets interesting.

Re: Test Of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL)

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 13:24:04 -0000

Well.. in any case, good luck.
I'd recommend a lot of coffee, aldi-redbull and sugar.
(Just hope you dont mind staying awake for 5 days straight).

Re: JotSpot

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 09:31:46 -0000

Probably one which would require more moderators then users ;)

Re: Code Formatter I’m Working On

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 12:32:53 -0000

I'd like the parser to be quite 'dynamic', so people can define their own way of formatting stuff. For maybe i would prefer to use [code], instead of :p

Re: Code Formatter I’m Working On

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:10:59 -0000

I hope you are parsing the formatted text as a stream, for when you are doing that it would rely on regognizing certain characters for certain states, pushing every one of those states on a stack, and possibly removing states when canceled _like_when_this_wouldnt_be_italic_. The output stream would have to use an intermediate output, for at certain points it isnt certain whether to use a certain formatting or not, which could be <123>, where 123 is the id for later reference on a certain state instance. When you are doing this a state itself would be an implementation of a state class.
In any way, I guess people should not write whole new code for one silly difference in the way stuff is formatted. Code should ratehr be dynamical enough to be addapted when people need it.
Maybe I'll write such an engine too :p.

Re: Code Formatter I’m Working On

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 18 Dec 2004 13:28:27 -0000

Performing seperate regexes after eachother is an enourmous overhead and could result to strange conflicts. And when splitting up into blocks, wouldn't that cause some formatting to be broken? If that happens and you want to correct that you'd have to parse the file first and identify certain format tags, in which case you should rather use that method anyway. I think your formatting code looks neat, but I would rather see a [[http://blog.w-nz.com/archives/2004/12/18/markup-nah-wysiwyg/]](wysiwyg input tag as a Html standard), which would be way easier to use.

Re: More Advantages of Web Applications

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 11 Jan 2005 07:52:13 -0000

The disadvantages:

- Webapps are because there is one instance when security is compromized all together compromized
- Webapps aren't that trustworthy as desktop apps for on my desktop when using outlook I am more confident that noone will peek into my mails. Google can be trusted, but whether followers can be is the question.
- The best webapps usualy get a monopoly.. monopoly's are like really bad things...
- GMail has a great interface! If they would have put the same effort in a desktop application it would be 10 times nicer. GMail is the exception that confirms that making GUI's is very hard. Try to even recreate GMail. Getting a consistant layout and debugging javascript as they have used is very very hard. Making a neat GUI for a desktop app. is way easier, although often neglected.
- User input is a bit harder.. you just have to be lucky that the webapp maker is dedicated. Also switching from webapp provider could be a pain for it all depends on _them_.

This is just a hype ^^

Re: What’s New in the Comment Spamming World

Bas Westerbaan — Mon, 17 Jan 2005 03:11:18 -0000

I was wondering whether it would be possible to ping a trackback url to check whether that url support trackbacks. When it is a blog it should. When it is a porn site it shouldn't. Should this work?

Re: Moving the Web Application to the Browser

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 25 Jan 2005 16:46:13 -0000

The greatest risk in my opinion is security. Allowing the client to do too much is very dangerous. The fact that sensetive data to get to the client has to be send to the client in the first place via http is dangerous (I am aiming at semi-processed sensitive data)(hackers can intercept simple non secured connections), if the client misuses it by writing a custom client it could get worse.

Re: Buttons, Scroll-bars, Drawers and Windows

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 29 Jan 2005 13:17:34 -0000

:) hehe.

Re: SQL Injections Suck

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 06 Feb 2005 15:38:35 -0000

SQL Injection isn't as bad as it can get. Code injection is even worse.
PHP BB has a leak in the 'highlight=' parameter in viewtopic.php; i found several bots which work as a ssh proxy so I could login into the php user and possibly root on malconfigured systems if I wanted to.

The best way to avoid this is to put ALL your input in a seperate array and perform escaping on all of them, and only use unescaping when you want it, instead of escaping when you want to, this really helps.

Re: Computer Law

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 09 Feb 2005 14:22:32 -0000

Now you made us eager, please share some

Re: Double Blogging Anniversary

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 07:02:19 -0000

Happy anniversary

Re: Flu

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 19 Feb 2005 12:01:26 -0000

Beterschap

Re: Let It Snow

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 02 Mar 2005 12:20:56 -0000

We in Gelderland only got about 2 cm`s...
life isn't fair.

Re: Web-Application Plugins

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 08:36:07 -0000

I guess the best way to do this is to allow a SOAP based user interface allowing a program as much access as the user. Then putting the plugin on your own server and letting gmail put new menu items at the left and allow external content it would just work out fine.

Plugins are a lot easier when you maintain the app itself.. although web based apps are just too slow and stateless to have plugins. For every page view you'd have to reload all plugins (see some of my speeches about it on my blog :-/ you'll get the feeling)

Re: A Wasted Day

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 10 Mar 2005 17:04:08 -0000

Even worse than just don't working again is slowly getting worse.
I reinstalled Windows Server 2003 on my computer for it was using before the reinstall 340 mb default. When starting something like a browser I couldn't do a lot for the next few seconds than hearing the Harddisk crunch on the page file :-p.

Just found it it were those stupid driver control panels (http://blog.w-nz.com/archives/2005/03/08/selfis...)

Anyways I enjoy reinstalling for it forces me to change things like ordening that I wanted to do before but I was to lame to do it. Well ok.. I don't have an important presentation, neither do I have those reinstalls often.

Re: Martin Fowler on Dynamic Typing

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 17:18:09 -0000

you should make 2 versions; one normal one, and one with additional 'helps' for people not capable or not wanting to analyze irony.

you should make 2 versions; one normal one, and one with additional 'helps';) for people not capable ;) or not wanting ;) to analyze irony ;).

Re: Interregional Software Development Week, Day 1: Overview

Bas Westerbaan — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 12:52:58 -0000

Day 7:How it _does_ work in reality

-or-

Day 7:How it can go really wrong

Re: Interregional Software Development Week, Day 3: Communication

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 15:45:03 -0000

Well.. the problem with the good old phone as with IM is that when people come form other continents they usualy aren't online at the same time. Although a normal person sleeps just 8 hours it isn't that much of a problem for there are still 8 hours left to talk; although this is when you are about to go to sleep and just woke up.

Re: MS Word easter egg

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 15:00:51 -0000

I bet it is a dev. feature and an easter egg and people found it usefull so ms kept it in there...

so you *can* call it an easter egg

Re: Interregional Software Development Week, Day 4: File Exchange

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 24 Mar 2005 17:57:02 -0000

Word is Html based (assumed from API available for plugins) - it -should- be able to be merged in case saved as 'word-ish html'. It also uses stylesheets (there is a nice 'Aa' button left to the texttype combobox - I use it for it is a lot easier than changing every little bit by hand).

Re: Interregional Software Development Week, Day 6: Collaborative Editting

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 26 Mar 2005 07:49:15 -0000

Sounds cool and fun..

But when would you want to edit the same text file during development?

Re: Code Indentation: Tabs vs. Spaces

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 14:16:46 -0000

The problem with tabs is that they when having a different length do not outline properly...

int[] a = int[] example{ 1, 2
3, 4};

Some people like to have the 1 and 3 in one column for a better layout.. with tabs this can't be done properly

Re: Code Indentation: Tabs vs. Spaces

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 17:57:33 -0000

@Thomas
The issue isn't having to add spaces, for that is what has to be done, but they won't align anymore when tabs are of different width on another setting ;-)

Re: Is Google the Next Netscape?

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 16:24:48 -0000

Google still produces superior results. But more importantly people are still convinced that google produces better results. Also the hyped GMail with a _lot_ of users makes google popular.

Why you need to intergrate google in the OS if google is in your applications for which you have to make effort you can be proud of eventually to install ?

Re: New Pope

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:30:39 -0000

You shouldn't be catholic if you are against his points of view for these are the ones of the believe or at least will be interpreted to be them ;-)

Re: New Pope

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 14:44:10 -0000

And the others are 'left' in the dust.

Re: New Pope

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 16:18:48 -0000

They are indeed signing their own deathwarrent by staying conservative.

Re: New Pope

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 17:05:16 -0000

He is german.. and a pope...

(dutch:)"Bedankt voor de stranden"

Re: Google and MySQL?

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 21 Apr 2005 10:47:56 -0000

they don't neccessarily have to use mysql conventionaly
they could use their own database file system and the query engine of mysql ;-)

Re: Shining Ruby: Extending Classes

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:29:43 -0000

Well.. I guess it would get pretty tricky surrounding performance and conformance.. also it would get tricky getting the type defenitions in some cases synchronised.

I'd rather see 'wrapper' like abilities...

So you'd define a class which 'wraps' another class and then you'll be able to cast that existing class to that new wrapping class.

Then you'd use something like:

((IZefTimeSayZefable)(100)).zefSayZef()

Although dynamic languages could see that cast automaticly..

although this makes me wonder whether ruby uses this kind of a wrapping already... :p

Re: Shining Ruby: Extending Classes

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 20:47:24 -0000

It couldn't totaly be I realised...

Re: Zoo: A (Still) Imaginary .NET Scripting Language

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 01 May 2005 11:14:26 -0000

It probably is quite fun but it isn't as quick as it could be. When you would nativly implement such dynamical features in the JIT it would have the same performance as the normal way which it certainly won't have when using wrappers :p.

Re: Zoo: A (Still) Imaginary .NET Scripting Language

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 01 May 2005 12:57:48 -0000

Really? :p Kaja's px jit is coming along quite nicely (some code can be found here: http://entertheunknown.net/px/code/)

Re: Hitting It With a Music Baton

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 19 May 2005 10:23:30 -0000

Matt Belamy is a genius.. And Origin of Symmetry is in my opinion their best album.

Anyways, I filled mine out
http://blog.w-nz.com/archives/2005/05/19/music-...

Re: Hitting It With a Music Baton

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 20 May 2005 13:55:35 -0000

You`ll get a lot of mails and people asking the same questions about your personal music preference :-p

Re: A Better Diff/Merge

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 31 May 2005 11:29:20 -0000

It wouldn't be too hard to use the existing attributes exposed by subversion to attach mime types, and if not known they are guessed by either extension or filetype flag (if present). This usualy will guess everything properly.

Btw, subversion supports binary diffs. You can create diffs of two binary files. Actually.. subversion uses the same diffs for lines and binary files :-)

Re: Zef, BSc.

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:01:35 -0000

"Drs. Z. Hemel" looks cooler than "Z. Hemel, BSc"

Stupid 'wanna be international people'

Re: Zef, BSc.

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 17 Jun 2005 16:06:32 -0000

Ok, ignore last comment.. really stupid

Drs. was what Master is now..

Bachelor has always been like this as far as I know..

Stupid me

Re: I Got In!

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 01 Jul 2005 16:19:30 -0000

Congratulations!

Re: London Attacks

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 07 Jul 2005 10:40:40 -0000

At least it seems a lot calmer in London. I haven't seen people in hysteria yet, although it must have been horride.

The shock effect seems a lot less as with the other attacks, if it has an effect, it most definitely makes the English more determined to get revenge upon those terrorists.

Re: SPTP: Decentralized Single Sign-On

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 13:02:57 -0000

It can be done way easier and way more secure:

Everyone should have their own RSA-like keypair.
The only thing that has to be done to authenticate you is to challenge you to prove that you got the private key alongside the public one.

Re: SPTP: Decentralized Single Sign-On

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 13 Aug 2005 14:23:43 -0000

I guess that every user has their own username on the final application like a message board. But their identity would be a public key; and best would be combined with an username@keyserver, which is easier to work with.

Re: SPTP: Decentralized Single Sign-On

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 12:24:26 -0000

You don't have that problem, when - as i suggested already - use public/private RSA-like keypairs and you just challenge someone with a random string that can only be decrypted by you (the owner of the private key). There wouldn't be any login box required - as we know it.

Re: SPTP: Decentralized Single Sign-On

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 17 Aug 2005 16:18:41 -0000

The problem is how to implement it with HTTP and HTML when a client-side RSA computation is required. Javascript isn't really an ideal language to do a RSA computation in. It would require activeX, flash or Java.. which isn't really 'complient'.

Re: Off to Dublin Soon

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 02 Sep 2005 11:30:37 -0000

Good luck.

Re: Computers: Avoid

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 20 Sep 2005 12:40:41 -0000

And I thoughts I modest connection with 4Mb/1Mb ^^

Re: LINQ Goes Beyond Databases

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 23 Sep 2005 15:56:56 -0000

Almost all new features of C# 3.0, including LINQ are C# only features. They won't appear in the .net assembly when compiled.

A query is translated into something like this:

example.OrderBy ( x => x . k1 ).ThenBy ( x => x . k2 ).Select ( x => x . v )

It is a nice new abstraction, which could be implemented by any object.

Although I guess there won't be a lot of checking about column name for instance for it is an interface LINQ uses, and _shouldn't_ know about the implementation.

But I like it anyway, but you could do better without it.

Re: The Terrors of Fame

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 28 Feb 2006 12:59:39 -0000

I opt in! :-D

Re: Your Life On Google

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 12:50:27 -0000

Google needs competition.

Good for us, they aren't as monopololistic as they could've been.

If I wouldn't like gmail, I'd use another e-mail provider.
If I wouldn't like gtalk, I'd use gaim.

I'm not forced to use google`s.

Well ... (*** looks at gmails` interface)

not directly in any case.

Google needs a serious competitor.

Re: Moved to DreamHost

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 12 Mar 2006 09:11:21 -0000

It looks a bit too extreme to be true. Although if they cleverly allocate resources and overcommit them, it wouldn't be a problem at all.

Re: SINP and Google Authentication

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 08 Jul 2006 16:58:21 -0000

OpenID is different. For instance the most obvious difference is that your identity is an URL.

Also OpenID doesn't support any kind of 'Identity Document', you can't store information about yourself with OpenID.

Re: Innovation in Photos and Videos Online

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 22 Aug 2006 16:54:59 -0000

Interactive television isn't a novell idea. It's build into DVD spec. The problem though, is that there aren't a lot of people that really seem to want to make an interactive movie/television/etc.

There sure will be some, I guess.

Re: Who Da Man?

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 17 Dec 2006 07:37:27 -0000

Congratulations!

Re: JSON vs XML

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 18:47:58 -0000

Key-Value pair tree?

Re: OpenID, baby!

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 14:32:18 -0000

It's tempting to suggest (in my opinion improvements) borrowed from SINP to OpenID, but I'm afraid they are already too big for drastic changes (they'd loose users) and not big enough to cope with that.

It's tempting to work on SINP again, but SINP hasn't got any momentum at all. (Ok, I'll be honoust. I really didn't work on it anymore)

Jabber has got this really great thing that are called gateways. You can chat with someone using msn via a gateway server with jabber. Maybe it would be nice to implement this for SINP/OpenID. (and all those others)

Re: OpenID, baby!

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 11:29:08 -0000

Hm. Having multiple _single_ signons would be a bit of a contradiction.

I think I'll first write a SINP server that also acts as a OpenID server. And a client library which works via SINP or openID.

(When I got time :))

Re: WebFS: a Web of Data

Bas Westerbaan — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 10:37:54 -0000

The problem with those FUSE drivers is that they aren't supported by the services themselves. Therefore they miss out a lot on functionality.

Just as the VFS itself misses a lot of functionality.

One grand unified filesystem would be nice.

Re: Twitter: the New Communication Platform?

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:38:57 -0000

Basically twitter, when adding the @ feature, would be another instant messenger.

Jabber has got everything twitter has and more except for one little thing: history of status-messages.

Although that could be easily achieved by a server that just watches everyone's status.

It isn't really the stuff it uses and all the API along with it, it's for what and how it's used.

Someone interested in making a twitter like jabber (or any other IM) status message tracker website?

Re: Useful Python Trick: Interpreter Code-Complete

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:16:16 -0000

Thanks!

Re: FireGPG, Finally!

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 15:24:36 -0000

And honestly, if you would send business critical PGP encrypted contracts and stuff, would you really send it from Gmail? Come on.

Yes, if you must, you can do that with PGP, safely. PGP makes the unsafe safe.

I do agree though that excessive use of PGP is terribly annoying.

Re: Google Desktop for the Mac

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 11:54:21 -0000

They said they didn't need a new search engine either when the two founders went to search for investors.

Maybe their search results are more relevant?

Anyway, I got a desktop search app too on my desktop (Beagle, which sucks too much memory) and I use it occasionally when I need to search a document somewhere in my ~/doc or ~/school folder of which I forgot the name.

Seems I am not that organized.

Re: FireGPG, Finally!

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 04 Apr 2007 11:58:39 -0000

I didn’t mean it wouldn’t be safe sending encrypted e-mail from Gmail, I meant it wouldn’t look that professional (myawesomecompany@gmail.com?).

True. But not only companies need to sign stuff. When I want to order a new domain I just have to send my webhoster a signed email, for instance.

Re: Django: Naming URL Patterns

Bas Westerbaan — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 06:47:20 -0000

Cool!

Re: All Estonians Get OpenID

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 26 May 2007 04:52:31 -0000

Too bad that the protocol of OpenID itself isn't that secure.

But smartcards! That's way better than that silly DigID pin-code.

Re: AJAX Reality Check

Bas Westerbaan — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:44:33 -0000

I think it's the best that Apple can do at the moment for a phone.

I suspect that the GSM and other phone carriers stacks are relying highly on security by obscurity and it's part of the deal that Apple just doesn't allow third parties to take a snoop.

Re: AJAX Reality Check

Bas Westerbaan — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:12:34 -0000

I suspect the GSM et al procotols are not very safe and implementations need to be kept hidden. (That's why the opensource phone of Trolltech has got two full cpu stacks, one open and one closed)

Java and other languages for that matter would indeed be effective in sandboxing, but it comes at a cost. It does take quite some space on the device to implement script and, I think even more important, it takes quite some effort to maintain an implementation.

Maybe the iPhone applications will be local websites, as the widgets on mac os x are written with html/css/js too or as in the same way as the who UI of firefox is too (actually, that's not completely true). They must have a browser with js support anyway (otherwise they wouldn't be able to support google maps) so it's all win for them.

Re: AJAX Reality Check

Bas Westerbaan — Sat, 16 Jun 2007 17:03:28 -0000

I completely overlooked that! That makes a way more plausible explanation. It's strange though that Apple didn't try to find a provider that doesn't try to lock in for the inevadable. Looking at the current trends it seems that internet via the mobile network is getting cheaper and cheaper.

Lets see what happens after the initial 4 year (?) contract with AT&T.

Re: Coding Perl with Vista’s Voice Recognition

Bas Westerbaan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:39:46 -0000

Indeed hilarious.

On a sidenote, wouldn't it be nice to have a syntax specifically made to be spoken?