Sky’s Blog

I was reading an InfoWorld article on the benefits and features of HTML version 5, which isn’t a formal standard yet, but many elements of which are already incorporated into browsers.

Media: A major benefit for all of us will be that embedding media (videos particularly) will become standardized and greatly simplified, so the web developer won’t have to worry so much about plug-ins, players and compatibility.

Geo-location: But more fun perhaps than that, there is a geo-location feature built into HTML5, and it’s available today on some browsers (Chrome, Safari, Firefox). In this article Dive into HTML5 — You are here (and so is everybody else), there’s a cookbook for creating a web page that locates you and displays a Google map centered on your coordinates. My page will figure out where you are located and display the Google map — but only if you have an HTML5-compliant browser, sorry. Mobile browsers are particularly good for this because they know your location quite precisely.

I took an hour this morning to build the page, and subject to some debugging (and figuring out that the whole process is asynchronous), I had it working. Clearly if you’re at a wired location, Google is using your IP address and maybe some routing information to locate “approximately” where you are, but on my iPhone it gets much closer to the real location. I used the “You are here…” article, plus some advice from Google code.

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I love Joi Ito’s advice about startups. Mostly he is talking about understanding risk. I particularly focused on one section just after 9 minutes into the video where he talks about how it’s folly to spend a lot of time building a business plan when it’s so inexpensive to go ahead and develop your product iteratively and develop the plan after you’ve seen how your customers are reacting to the product. Here’s the video:

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Is security dead on the Internet? Yeah, it probably is—as long as we rely on software other people have written^[1]. Unless you’re capable of writing all of your own software, without any errors, and keeping it isolated from software written by anyone else, you’re never going to have a secure digital life^[2].

But there are things you can do to protect yourself. NGO-in-a-box has developed Security-in-a-box, a set of tools and tactics for your digital security. Worth taking a look!

It’s often said that “if we can envision it, we can create it,” but in the world of computer (and network) software this is only partially true. We can attempt to create it, but it will always have bugs in it. And those bugs are the chinks in the armor that allow malware to work and cyberwarfare to succeed.

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[1] That’s because I can write a perfect program with no bugs, but nobody else can.

[2] See also The Social Graph of Malware, my site where I explore ways in which social engineering is used by the bad guys to get malware onto your computer.

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In searching for a solution to embed a particular font in one of my games^[1] at YBCA, I spent dozens of hours experimenting with the @font-face cross-browser^[2] CSS technology. It’s a technique that allows your browser (like MSIE or Firefox, right?) to read a TrueType (.TTF) or OpenType (.OTF) font file from a server and then use it to render type on a web page. The headlines on my blog are rendered using this technology^[3]. I’m really happy with the results.

The idea is to give the designer of the web page the ability to select exactly the font he or she wants to see on the finished page!

But, even with this great tech in place, Microsoft is playing its game of insisting on its own solution—they propose it as a “web standard” but in real life it’s implemented by nobody except Microsoft (using their .EOT file format). So there are two competing and incompatible ways of adding fonts to a web page—the open-source method, and the Microsoft method.

Initially I was able to devise a solution that works except for FireFox (it failed both on Mac OSX and on Windows and Firefox represents about 40% of my users so I really need it to work)… and then, by accident… (continue reading…)

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