The new netiquette

It used to be that netiquette was all about TURNING OFF THE CAPS LOCK, making sure that the subject matched the content, that you didn't go off the wall if someone didn't reply to your e-mail in a few minutes, that sort of thing. In fact, this (RFC1855) sort of thing. But now there are different netiquette requirements, and no obvious guidelines, nor seemingly any common practices. Now I'm just the kind of person who thinks that some de facto ruleset would be useful, so that everyone knows what to expect from everyone else.

For instance, take social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook. How well do you know someone before you 'add' them as a friend? Once met at a conference, once read their blog, cohabited for two years? Do you talk to them first, to let them know who you are and that you're not a crazy stalker? If someone adds you, and you don't know who they are, do you accept or reject by default? Do you ask them who they are? If they claim to have met you at $conference or in $pub, do you accept that, ask for a photo, or what?

A bit late for that, isn't it?

Just won the above-linkied item on eBay: the Amiga SDK :-) I'm probably slightly late to make any money out of Amiga development, but I'm glad I finally get to tinker. Might have to crack open the AROS if I get sufficiently involved...

I could probably write a three-page rant about how great the Amiga was and how badly Commodore stuffed up. But of course, none of it would be new ;-).

Apple and Google sitting in a tree, f-i-g-h...erm...t-i-ng

This really came out of a throwaway comment I made on Daniel, but it seems popular to pick apart every last iota of Steveness from the WWDC keynote, and I'm nothing if not popular. So here we go.

What is WebClip? In fact, that's not really the question I want to be asking. We know what WebClip is; it's a technology which lets users see only the bits of web pages that those users want to see. The real question is what does that mean? Well, I know which bits of a web page I usually want to see; they're the bits which aren't adverts.

I'm going to go out on a bit of a limb, and guess that the way WebClip works (I'm not a WWDC bod so I don't have any more access to the new stuff than anyone else; in fact I haven't even downloaded the Safari 3 beta) is by observing which DOM elements are within the clipped region, and downloading only media relevant to those elements. If that's the case, then you can ignore the fact that the ads on the page don't get seen; they don't even get downloaded. Therefore if I'm reading, say, the Dilbert strip in a WebClip, I'm effectively getting free Dilbert, even more free than the free website because I'm not upping their ad impression count.

One thing I noticed about the various sites that Steve clipped is that as far as I can remember, none of them features 'Ads by Google'. It would be quite embarrassing for Apple's CEO to demonstrate how to reduce revenue for one of Apple's most prominent board members in a world-broadcast keynote talk. As over 99% of Google's revenue is from online ads, and Eric Schmidt (CEO of Google) is on the Apple board, that is exactly what Steve was showing us, though. There'll be a doughnut fight back at Infinite Loop over that, I expect.

Miniwindows

Maybe it's just me who gets annoyed by teeny-tiny miniaturised views which are completely illegible. Even so, I've just uploaded an article I wrote on Miniwindows which can be used in any OpenStep implementation such as Cocoa or GNUstep. It's based on the Hillegass TypingTutor example, but doesn't really use any code from that and isn't (I hope) otherwise reliant on that context, so it should be possible to see what's going on even if you haven't read Hillegass. Which you should ;-)

Moving on

There has been some cat-escaping-bagness, which is mainly my fault, but now that it's all official I'm going to 'announce' it myself: I've got a new job! From the end of July, I'll be working at Sophos as Senior Software Engineer, Mac (the post is still up at the linky in the title, for the moment).

This looks like being an exciting time - I've been enjoying the ObjC hacking I do with Brainstorm and this will be an opportunity to do even more of that, and the move from services to user-installed apps will bring its own changes and new experiences.

Erm, that really is all for now. More info as it becomes available, and all that.