Made a bit of a fool of myself today, mistakingly implying that I was building webpages using brushed-aluminum backgrounds back in 1990 (my actual statement was that I was doing so "about 15 years ago", but I didn't actually think through what that would mean). In reality the date was closer to 1994, where I was building a little PC configuration tool for a retail computer shop (which was a component of a complex corporate structure that included a music store, home theatre equipment, and computer consulting and sales), allowing users to dynamically configure a PC and get a price (the server-side scripting was some innovative completely proprietary script), and then print out their config and bring it in to place an order.

The impetus for the discussion was the implication by an individual that if Microsoft used brush-metal backgrounds, clearly they're ripping off Apple (as Apple fanatics believe that Apple invented everything. I view Apple very favourable, but more times than not they're simply executing ideas better and more beautifully than people before them).

My reply was that brushed-metal backgrounds were some of the first uses of the BACKGROUND attribute: I fondly recall upgrading my PC configuration web "app" to use a classic brushed aluminum look. This was long before Apple started using brushed metals on their desktops. I was hardly an innovator, and such backgrounds were pretty common because they looked like something people could relate to in the real world, yet they could be low contrast and compatible with overlaid text. They are an obvious and inevitable background.

Outside of my chronology problem, what struck me as most disturbing was the impression some have about the state of computers in 1990 - that the ability for brushed-metal graphics to even exist was simply an impossibility. How absurd. In 1990 the Atari ST and Amiga, both very graphically rich PCs, had existed for a half-decade, and were certainly capable of creating and displaying a trivial brushed aluminum graphic. Apple was already up to the immensely powerful Apple IIfx (I lusted over ads for that "Wickedly Fast" PC). Windows was already out for 5 years, and Microsoft was already a billion dollar company. The WWW didn't exist, but a lot of us had been using bulletin board systems, and interconnected message systems (Fidonet, Usenet, and various others) for quite some time. While you couldn't run a Photoshop effect and generate a brushed metal, people would load up long-existing raster graphics programs and plug in the pixels to generate the desired effect.

The point, if there is one, is that Google didn't invent the internet, and Apple didn't invent graphics. This whole "computer thing" has been going on for a while.

I've been a Slashdot member since 1998, demonstrated by my "desirable" 4-digit UID. Papers here have been linked from Slashdot several times*, and I've submitted several stories that have been posted. I've had excellent karma for time eternal, and garner Score: 5 posts at least several times a week (it isn't exactly hard, and takes just a few minutes in an interesting story posting something of marginal interest). I try to add meaningful, well-thought out and grammatically correct comments, and I never "karma whore" (karma whoring is where someone posts with the sole intent of gaining karma, for instance posting an obvious question for further info relating to some part of the article. They don't actually bother researching it, because that would hurt their chances at getting first post, and they have no interest in the answer anyways, but nonetheless that recipe almost always yields Score: 5 (Interesting)).
 
One of the motivations for participating in Slashdot's community, quite honestly, was the quid pro quo PageRank goodness, courtesy of items like a link on your username, or a signature line (the sig is particularly spammy and is generally used for people to link to lame contests or affiliate links, but the linked username is just good form). Everytime I earned a Score: 5, it would go in the archives, autoexpanded, and would get picked up by Google, where my link would give me some ranking goodness in return. It was, in a sense, a marginal form of payment for my contribution to Slashdot. The user moderation system ensured that spam comments would never get expanded in the archives, and thus it shouldn't (depending on how Slashdot served up pages for Google) earn spammers any rewards.

I'm not sure when, but sometime over the past year (I presume), Slashdot switched to adding nofollow on all user outgoing links, so basically even Score: 5 posts yield no benefits outside of nebulous Slashdot karma. This is especially odd because Slashdot is the one site where I have almost never seen comment spam (outside of GNAA/Goatse type stuff). It seems like a pretty irrelevant thing, but suddenly my marginal interest in being involved with the Slashdot community has declined to zero. Ultimately I am selfish (like most humans), and I like to feel like there is some sort of reward for my efforts. If I'm expending efforts for someone else's benefit, I like to think that I'm earning namespace (which isn't really the case when you post on many disparate online sites, with no common user identity), or some other sort of reward. PageRank was a pretty cheap reward.

Will Slashdot die because I don't contribute? Probably not. But in my heart of hearts Slashdot is dead.

*- The oft feared "Slashdot Effect" isn't even remotely as intense as many people imagine. Basically the only reason some sites fall over is because they're 100% dynamic, generating everything on the fly from databases, going through transformations, etc. These sites often can't serve even a dozen users over a couple second period without falling over. This site, yafla.com, is almost entirely static (just as I chose my blogging software based upon it being static), and where it is dynamic it uses intelligent caching. Even on a low-end shared server this can easily facilitate a Slashdot influx.

For whatever reason, the neuron cluster in my brain where I store my mental perception of Apple is also used to store my mental perception of Sony. When I see commercials for Apple products, I regularly either verbally say that it's a Sony (such as "That's the new tiny Sony mp3 player" when referring to a recent Nano commercial), or I at least think the same in my brain. The reason, I think, is that Apple is a better Sony than Sony is - When I was young lad, Sony represented technologically innovative, stylish, high quality products. Apple of course followed in Sony's footsteps, so much so that it Out-Sony'd Sony.

So I beseech Steve Jobs and Howard Stringer - please merge to save me the confusion. Thanks.

Microsoft tries, and fails, to recruit open-source guru. In reply, Eric Raymond ridicules the offer: "I've in fact been something pretty close to your company's worst nightmare since about 1997." [Computerworld News]

How utterly juvenile. 

Eric S. Raymond still seems to live in a world where he believes himself to be much more important than actual reality would imply. Microsoft's worst nightmare? With all due respect to Mr. Raymond, himself and Mr. Stallman have probably been the two greatest impediments to the adoption of Linux, putting a quack, cult-of-personality face on what is otherwise a technological tour de force (it is remarkable how much more earthed and pragmatic Mr. Torvalds is about the OS in contrast). I have never met Eric personally, but I always got the impression that he was terribly overrated (I read the Cathedral and the Bazaar and found it trite and unpersuasive).

I could just imagine some random Microsoft recruiter doing blog searches and noting some ESR guy, and offering him a probing offer, only to get this sort of nonsense in reply. It's very Junior High-esque.

[UPDATE: I haven't been following Slashdot as much as I used to, but this was discussed there. One of the comments linked to a hilarious graphic as well]

Today's hike was at Rattlesnake Point, a great little conservation area, again featuring the Niagara Escarpment. Rattlesnake Point is located in the Halton Region Conservation Area , just North of Dundas on Appleby Line, North of Burlington, and has trails that attach it to the Bruce Trail (and to other conservation areas). You can see the satellite map here. If you're driving North on Appleby to get there you'll be treated to one of the most interesting roads in the flatlands of the GTA (it's very Italy like, with too narrow of a road twisting and curving at amazing gradations).

The ropes you see there are evidence of the rock climbers who scale this face, one of the few natural opportunities to do so in this region.  A couple more pictures from today's outing can be found here. This area is a great little day outing, and is absolutely beautiful as fall rolls around.

Mozilla offers temporary fix for Firefox flaw. The patch protects against exploitation of a serious flaw by disabling the browser feature that contains the vulnerability. [CNET News.com]

If you run Firefox, which many of the visitors here do, you need to protect yourself against this vulernability in the way Firefox handles International Domain Names. This isn't the first time IDNs have been the root of a security problem (they still have a critical issue in the ability of nefarious agents to use IDNs for phishing purposes). Firefox is no longer a fringe browser, and has enough of a user-base that it is a likely target for criminal hackers.

The CNET article above appears to give a bogus link. Instead go to the source directly, at https://addons.mozilla.org/messages/307259.html.

It's an oldie but a goody, but if you've ever had the need to do any sort of performant querying on branches of a tree, take a look at my article on SQL Hierarchies. I've gotten a lot of great feedback regarding it, and it still seems to be serving a lot of people's needs.

Of course SQL Server 2005 brings Common Table Expressions, which offers a syntactically easier method of querying hierarchies, but it still relies upon recursive looping to build its set, whereas the technique I detail can build a response set using a very high performance index backed operation.