Internet Alchemy

An excellent article about building a web server. Covers several different hardware combinations and moves on to identifying bottlenecks based on the type of content being served followed by a discussion of the performance of the different threading models used by web servers.

Simon St. Laurent has written a layman’s guide to understanding how the W3C’s works and why it does what it does. It’s still an early draft but it’s worth reading now.

According to this report in Federal Computer Week, the

Defense Department’s information networks continue to be plagued by serious
security flaws and weaknesses that have opened up almost every area
of the department to cyberattacks and fraud

Scary.

When Sun bought StarOffice a couple of weeks back it wasn’t for the current office
suite but for StarPortal, the thin client version of Star Office. According to this report Sun are planning to demonstrate StarPortal accessed via a Java enabled palm pilot. They’re squarely aiming the softare at portals such as Yahoo that already offer online applications. They’ve also announced a new sales model for the software. Basically if you sell it you have to give Sun a cut but anyone is free to redistribute it for free. It’s an interesting angle but it’s going to hit the smaller resellers who are struggling to make a living from distributing free software hardest.

Vincent Partington has announced that he has ceased development of GNUJSP,
the open source Java Server Pages implementation. A new project
has been kicked off to pick up where Vincent left off but it remains to be seen whether
the Jakarta code will cover all of this anyway.

W3C have moved the XHTML spec onto proposed recommendation status, which means
it has about a month left for comments to be submitted, including
the namespace debate currently raging on the XML-DEV mailing list.
A new working draft has also been put fowrad for XHML Extended Forms, which
aims to enhance form support in (X)HTML. New enhancements will include
forms split across multiple pages, real data entry grids, secure submission
and persistent forms tha the user can save for completion later. I think now is definately
the time to start moving towards converting sites into XHTML - this one
could be a good first candidate since it’s already valid HTML 4.

W3C have certainly been busy - they’ve issued an updated version of HTML called
HTML 4.01 which fixes some broken bits of the previous spec but more importantly
adds back in some support
for bits they left out such as the name attribute for images and forms!

Well the time has come to shut down RSSMaker. Don’t worry though cos
all the old RSSMaker channels have been moved to StartsHere.
Previously StartsHere had been picking up the RSSMaker channels and parsing them into
the database. Obviously it makes more sense to skip the RSS creation stage and pump the headlines
straight into the database. You can still access all the channels as either RSS 0.90 or RSS 0.91
at their old locations - I’ve added the appropriate redirects. But if you want
more channels check out the StartsHere channel list. We’ve added
a lot of new unique channels that would previously been added to
RSSMaker and you can get any of the 214 channels as RSS (see the backend for details)
so you can add them to your favourite channel viewer or use StartsHere as it is.

By the way there are some other sites with channel listings that have more than 214 channels
but all of the ones on StartsHere are checked regularly and are known to be working. To prove
the point we also have 120 channels in the databasethat you don’t see because their XML is
bad or the files are unavailable when we check them.

Well, when i wrote that it was a bad week for Microsoft, I didn’t think
it could get any better, but now they’ve excelled themselves. They’ve
just released a fix for
a bug in their virtual machine for Java which allows Java code to
circumvent the sandbox and execute abitrary code on the client. Good
old Microsoft, leaving no hole unopened as usual.

Milestone 9 of Mozilla is now available featuring the new Necko library. Read the release notes because there ars some changes that you ned to make before running this build such as renaming your prefs50.js file back to prefs.js. The proxy support is still broken.