Charl van Niekerk » Blog: November 2004

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Why use Jabber?

I recently spoke to someone from the Netherlands. Apparently 90% of Dutch young people are on MSN Messenger. MSN is outrageously popular these days. I have many (many!) contacts on it.

All of the people in the company I work for still use ICQ, so I'm stuck on that too for the moment (although I've semi-given up on ICQ since I lost my old account).

I hate ICQ because of the following three reasons:

Their automated password recovery system doesn't seem to work.
Their registration system is utterly slow.
It's difficult to remember long ICQ numbers. It's almost as bad as telephone numbers.

But yeah, like I said I must now connect to two different networks. I even used to connect to Yahoo messenger, but thank goodness I've given up on that!

The problem is this: We have various different proprietary instant messaging platforms that simply don't talk to each other. Don't tell me anybody loves having many different accounts on many different networks to keep track of!

That's why we need an open standards-based messaging platform. And it's here: Jabber.

Here are my personal top 10 reasons for using Jabber:

Jabber is non-proprietary; it runs on open standards.
It makes use of XML.
There are many different software clients available (both open source and proprietary). The one I like best is Exodus.
You can (most likely) connect up to a local server. For example, I connect up to jabber.obsidian.co.za which runs in South Africa. This saves some bandwidth when you're taling to other people in the same area as you. You also typically get a faster response time from a good server having enough hardware & enough bandwidth because it's local.
Nobody owns or controls it. Freedom and independance for the masses!
You can run your own server if you like (makes sence when you own a company and rely on IM as a means of communication between your employees like us).
You can link up to the "standard" global Jabber network, or you can create your own network. Again making a lot of sence if you're a company or some organisation/group.
Yes, you do get some open source server software too.
You can extent what's already there, add functionality, create some custom applications, and do all other kinds of interesting stuff that you can't do with proprietary systems.
It's just plain simple cool.

Don't tell me that you're a web standards/open source entheusiast if you haven't even tried Jabber... Ok, just kidding! :-)

But seriously guys, web standards is all about creating cross-platform interoperable stuff. And Jabber is just about that.

The more people we can get to start using Jabber, the stronger it will get. I am very suprised that I have no real contacts on my Jabber list so far.

So, why not download one of the various Jabber-enabled clients out there and register with Jabber today? The more people getting themselves on Jabber, the stronger and more viable this network will become. We've put a lot of work into spreading Firefox, so why not start with spreading Jabber? Write about it on your weblog and get your friends to switch over. MSN Messenger might not be as harmful as IE, but at the end it's the same kind of thing.

So, what about a logo contest?

Oh yes, and if you're looking for some contacts, my Jabber username is charlvn@jabber.org. You're more than welcome to add me. :-)

Go Open - Episode 2

Update: Here is something else they featured - The dullest weblog on earth. I have to agree.

Since I go to gym every Saturday afternoon, I regretfully missed the first episode of Go Open. However, I did manage to get my mom to tape the second one which aired last week.

This time the main topic was about blogging. I don't really know what this has to do with open source, but who cares.

Both Blogger and Bloglines were featured. They interviewed a few of the guys at Jo'blog, a weblog co-authored by some people based in Johannesburg, South Africa. They also spoke about a weblog about open source authored by Alastair Otter.

They talked about Boing Boing as being a very interesting site. It just seems like a bunch of crap to me, but I'll leave it on my blogroll for a few weeks until I can make an educated decision.

Another thing they featured was Workrave. For me, it's more of an absurdity than anything else. But some people might find it useful...

Oh yes, and if you want to be educated about the bandwidth situation in South Africa, you might want to read this. Then you'll understand why some people take desperate measures (when reading this article remember that it isn't that South Africa doesn't have the infrastructure - it's just that charges are simply too high).

Anyway, Jo'blog is now on my blogroll under the new "South Africa" section. I've taken the opportunity to restructure my blogroll a bit and categorise properly. I'll do some more mantenance on it later.

No Software Patents!

I might not be in Europe right now (might be soon), but in the meanwhile Africa always follows example. If this gets legalised in Europe then all hell will break loose. Stop it and protest now!

Sometimes I don't believe how dumb some polititians can be... it's like some of the dumbest people sit in government. Everybody knows that they're doing it wrong except themselves.

[ Via Simon Willison ]

MSN Search

The new MSN Search (Beta) has gone some way towards being standards compliant (as previously reported). However, some more interesting things have come to light.

Check out the Site Owner Help page. Here are a few quotes:

Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages.

If you move a page, set up the page's original URL to direct people to the new page, and tell them whether the move is permanent or temporary.

...

Keep your URLs simple and static. Complicated or frequently changed URLs are difficult to use as link destinations. For example, the URL www.example.com/mypage is easier for MSNBot to crawl and for people to type than a long URL with multiple extensions. Also, a URL that doesn't change is easier for people to remember, which makes it a more likely link destination from other sites.

Interesting, yes? Very! (Also note that in the source code of that page, the markup in general appears to be quite neat.)

Ok, so this might only be Microsoft, but who cares. When this search service comes out of beta, it will be used (widely) I believe. And many people will read the guidelines, hopefully steering them into the right direction (although no mention has been made of "web standards" directly).

For me, I still prefer Google, so I'll most likely be sticking around with them for a while. But Google seems to be slowly falling behind.

Another thing, going a little off-topic now, as many people will know I recently translated the Mozilla Start Snippets into Afrikaans. However, at the time of posting this I still didn't see them up on the Mozilla Firefox Start Page hosted by Google. I enquired about this on the MLP mailing list to which they replied that Google needs to upload them first. Some other translations are having the same problems, and it looks to me like Google doesn't seem very motivated to do their bit.

I used to love Google, but slowly I'm starting to get a little agitated by their apparent lack of interest in thorough customer service. But maybe I'm entirely wrong. However, that start page of mine might just change in the next few months after all... but then it's not like Microsoft seems to have much interest in customer service either.

Bramble Hill

My 5-day trip didn't work out, but I did make the super luxury golf course yesterday.

Bramble Hill is a golf course at the Fancourt in George. I didn't really play (although I did hit one or two balls); I mainly just caddied for my mom. But it was definitely worth the trip.

First I have to admit being a little disappointed, because the course itself was fairly ugly. It wasn't a park-style course with lots of trees. However, there were a few nice ponds and streams running through it.

I wanted to take some pictures, but couldn't get hold of a camera.

I'm still alive

Thank goodness cockroaches survive atom bombs, otherwise I would have been dead long ago!

Anyway, despite a serious sinus infection and some network downtime I am still alive and breathing. It's a little more difficult to get rid of me than that!

If everything goes as planned, I will be going on a 5-day trip from tomorrow until Monday next week. As always, details will follow when I get back. :-)

Update: Oh yes, and I'm going to a super-luxury golf course this afternoon. Details will follow. :-)

Firefox going for world domination

Sorry about making so many Firefox posts, but I'm really excited about the "revolution" taking place.

We are already standing at more than 4 million downloads and still climbing. Mozilla usage continues to rise, IE usage continues to decline. Also, since everybody is bragging, take a look at my browser stats.

Open Source TV Show

Sorry, I just have to blog about this.

Yesterday evening, while watching The Apprentice (1st season), I saw an ad featuring Mark Shuttleworth regarding his new TV show titled Go Open.

Yes, you've guessed it. Go Open is the world's first television series dedicated to Open Source software.

If you don't know who Mark is, he is a super rich South African guy. He's got billions in the bank. He owned a company that sold digital certificates to South Africans and Europeans. Because of the timezone differences between us and America, it was difficult to impossible to get a digital certificate from a company like VeriSign, so his business became quite successful.

Eventually, VeriSign bought him out for I don't even know how many billion dollars. Mark was then one of the first people in the world to pay in order to go up into space. He became the first African in space, etc, etc... Quite nice if you have a surname like "Shuttleworth". You know, worth the space shuttle, get it? :-)

Ok, so now Mark has too much money and time on his hands. When he's not developing the Ubuntu Linux operating system, he's busy with advocating open source in general. This seems to have become his life mission now (his first one being going up into space achieved now).

For more information about his new TV show, read this and this. Since I'll be at the gym at the time it airs, I'll just be taping it and watching it later. As far as I know, it will only air in South Africa, but who knows. Will keep you posted.

Firefox's outrageous success

Sorry for two posts in one day, but there's just too much to blog about!

Not even a week has passed since the official release of Firefox 1.0 and already more than 4 million downloads have been done.

Obviously, not every download guarantees a new user. However, some downloads will guarantee many users. For example, a university downloading it once from the web and then distributing it internally to its various computers.

I only have one small problem - where oh where has my little button gone?. :-)

Update: Don't worry, made a plan with the button issue...

Keeping domains consistent

Since I have also been meaning to post about this, read www or not? - the j-blog and also see my comment if you're still using multiple domains without proper redirects.

Also, for some .htaccess code and other info you might also want to take a look at no-www.org.

Yes, I personally opt for having no www at the start of a domain, but this all depends on your personal preference. Just as long as you don't have duplicates.

Recent Work and WiFi

I have been busy with a number of (rather small) projects recently. If it isn't translating the Mozilla Start Snippets into Afrikaans, it's creating some documentation for Translate (the South African localization project).

Apart from that, I actually want to blog about WiFi. Yes, everybody must have heard about this new "movement" by now. This is flourishing in America already (I don't know about Europe, Japan and other countries). And wireless telecommunications is the thing for Africa.

Firstly, it's getting quite inexpensive. Secondly, it's more difficult to take monopoly of. Thirdly, there's no cables involved - excellent if you're living in a country where the public telephony system's copper cables are being stolen almost by the day. Fourthly, if you have decent equipment and the right landscape it provides great coverage over large areas.

In areas like Johannesburg and Pretoria, WiFi is already flourishing. In George (where I live), there are more WiFi networks popping up every day. It has actually been a hot topic in the local IT community for the past couple of months.

As regular readers will know, I'm involved in the GROSS User Group (being the webmaster and all). Since the User Group is a section 21 organisation, it's easier to get sponsorships and such. The User Group also want set up its own WiFi network in the greater George area.

Just this morning, I have been in a meeting with two other people just about wireless. Everybody wants to jump into this now. The big thing catching attention is VoIP. Obviously, a WiFi network would be a limited carrier for this kind of service. The reason why this is so big is that in South Africa, our telephone charges are calculated on a per-call basis (in America apparently it's fixed rate). That's all fine and so, but relative to the rest of the world we are paying some of the most expensive telephone charges on earth. And that in Africa! Incredible.

If you're calling from George to Knysna (about 50-60 KM away) you're paying the same amount of money per minute than you would be calling to Johannesburg (more than one thousand KM away).

So hopefully, if we can get a proper WiFi network going, it will at least cut down on local call charges. And if we are lucky enough to have this network expand, it opens up unlimited possibilities.

Possibilities of providing Internet access is also another great attraction to wireless. In South Africa, if you want ADSL you have to pay R800 (about 114 US$) per month for a 512 Kbps download / 256 Kbps upload speed account with a 3 GB monthly traffic limit. Ok, it could have been worse, but compare that to the fact that in The Netherlands, you get an account with the same speed with a 10 GB traffic limit for €20 or less per month.

Ok, you can't compare South Africa with The Netherlands directly, simply because in The Netherlands they have a much higher population density. So yes, costs will be more in South Africa, but according to most people, not to that extent. And remember, one US$ or Euro is probably worth far more to your average South African than to your average American/European. (Why do you think South Africa is one of the world leaders in implementing open source solutions?)

So well, I'm just going to really stick my head into WiFi and see what can be accomplished. Future plans for now is simply to do some more research first and then get all of the interested parties in George together for a big presentation ASAP. :-)

X-Philes Revalidated

First of all, sorry for not posting for a while. I'm breaking my tradition of frequent postings simply because I'm getting too busy. If it's not translating, it's spreading firefox, or some other thing.

Getting back to the post, Evan Goer has revalidated The X-Philes.

Quite a few X-Philes have been lost in the struggle of war. However, luckily most of them remain. My two sites are still there of course (see #45 and #55).

In the comments on Evan's post, some people of course wished that they never were on the X-Philes in the first place. Unluckily, I still can't completely share that sediment; however, what do I have to say, this site is HTML 4.01 too these days you know!

Firefox Marketing

Firefox 1.0 has just been out for about a day, and already it's on just about almost every single standards weblog and news site out there (outside of the usual suspects of course). And don't forget to keep an eye on Bloglines. So have a ball and enjoy the freedom! Just don't get too lovesick ;-)

Well done, people! Get the word out! :-)

It's quite pesky that the Mozilla site is getting overloaded; however that is good to a certain extent, because it means that there's many people that are interested!

Up until now, I preferred my homepage to be set to about:blank, but that all changed now. It's very interesting (and good) to see that this page is hosted on Google, because Google is probably the world's #1 search engine right now, and getting this kind of "recognition" from them may add to some trust in the brand.

It's almost like Donald Trump (you must have heard about The Apprentice by now). Apparently some real estate agents are saying that simply having the word "Trump" on a building can add about 30% value to it. Hopefully this will be a similar case with a Firefox and Google (the page is hosted on google.com after all)!

Well, I'm going to watch the next episode of The Apprentice on South African TV tonight (it's at 19:30 on SABC 3 on Wednesdays (local time) in case you're South African); maybe that will give me some interesting marketing ideas for Firefox. ;-)

Firefox 1.0

At last, Firefox 1.0 is out. Get it!

Header Image

Ok, I'm posting this from Flickr. Many thanks to Dali Rau for referring me.

Flickr uses standard HTTP upload; therefore I don't have any firewall issues.

So if this works, then I'll have my header sorted out. :-)

Update: There are actually a few glitches. Firstly, when you post from Flickr, the markup inserted is totally invalid (or at least from a HTML 4.01 Strict perspective). Secondly, the PNG is converted to a JPG, so the transparency is totally messed up. Maybe there's a setting somewhere.. I'll browse around later.

Miscellaneous

Yes, another one of those posts...

I never realised it, but I think I'm turning out to be a little patriot. Follow this thread (it's in English btw) if you want to know why. :-)

The Dutchmen had another meeting. It's a pity that I could't be there, but who knows... :-)

GMail is full of crap, and doesn't want to let me in half of the time... Those growthpains! Well, it's still in beta...

And you know what, I'm "disslekseek". Yes, I can barely spell "growthpains". First it was "grothpains" and then it was "groathpains". Eish, this English spelling! No offense to the Englishmen, but we should rather stick with Esperanto as a world language...

And oh yes, I sent a bug report to somebody at SpreadFirefox. When you're using 800x600 as screen resolution (yeah, I know...) the logo and the "Spread the word" button overlaps. Thus, if you click on the middle or towards the top of the button, you actually click on the logo and you go to the homepage instead of to the "Spread the word" page.

Two interesting articles on that site though:

About the last article, it's interesting that some webmasters really care and other simply don't. But remember, it's also about the way you send your letter.

So send those reports, but do it in the right way (in otherwords, kind and professionally - as demonstrated in the article). Wise words for us all.

And lastly, as you will probably notice, I'm in the middle of a kind-of redesign right now. I want to move away from the Blogger template, and create my own "online identity"! You can see that the menus in the sidebar are looking a little different. I've basically just reorganised the order in which the subsections appear.

Also, if you have JavaScript enabled, you will notice that they now retract/expand when you click on them. Feel free to look at my source code if you like. Also note that my markup is largely unaffected by this (although I did need to put a onload attribute on the body element, but I'll make a plan with that later). And also note that when you have JavaScript disabled, everything still works perfectly (or at least it ought to).

As you can see, by using :before and :after the sidebar headings now look like markup tags. (I thought that would be appropriate taking the subject of this weblog into account.) Notice that this is all done in the stylesheet and the markup is still left intact (sucks to IE). I actually plan on making these tags "open" when their respective menus expand, and to "close" them up again when they retract. That will have to wait for another day or two though.

And if you were wondering what's up with those Japanese characters in my header, they will be part of my upcoming redesign. They mean something in the lines of "open standards". Currently they are in Unicode form, but since they are (very) ugly I will hopefully be replacing them with an image soon (well, not actually "replacing", I'll still have them in the alt attribute).

Dali Rau has created some (very nice) images for me, but I still need somewhere to upload them, but as soon as I can get my firewall trouble sorted out, I can upload them via Hello (too lazy to find the link now...).

And also, if you were looking for a free PHP/MySQL webhost, why not give 35MB.com a try (no, they're not paying me...) Apparently they put popups on your pages, but that won't bother you if you're using a proper browser anyway. :-)

Ok, that's all for now (finally). Cheers!

What on earth?

It seems like everyone's doing it, so here goes:

What a waste of time... still interesting though!

[via]

Fidelis CMS

Slowly but surely we are getting there!

We have decided that the name for our CMS will be "Fidelis CMS", or for short, "Fidelis". A project has been registered with SourceForge.net, and we have a devblog for the project too.

Standards Compliant CMS

In case you haven't been following what was going on, read the this post.

Here is a list of aims we should work towards:

100% Valid XHTML as application/xhtml+xml to compliant user agents.: Validation matters, if you like it or not. Period. All input should be validated before being posted up on the site, meaning that it should be practically impossible to invalidate the site.
100% Valid HTML 4.01 Strict as text/html to outdated user agents (including IE).: For backwards compatibility. I don't really (personally) care about IE, but many people still do, and of course for commercial sites (at least in the near future). We want this system to become commonly used.
100% Valid CSS: For the templates, at least.
Compliance as far as possible to the WCAG.: 100% conformance will, of course, be quite hard to force down on users, but we should try our best to make the default templates as accessible as possible, and to enable users to add accessibility tweaks to their site.
Content Validation: Like I mentioned earlier, all input must be validated first, and the system must refuse somebody to publish invalid markup onto the site, as far as possible.
Completely Unicode-based.: Starting with UTF-8 and working towards UTF-16 and even UTF-32 eventually. Simply for easy internationalization, and because it is the future. :-)
ISO-8601 Dates: For unambiguous internationalization. (Apparently the official standard currently in South Africa, just out of interest's sake.)
Clean URIs: Yep, logical and clean web addresses for all!
PHP: I propose that we try to code the system exclusively in PHP. If some components are not in PHP, then they should be optional. My reasoning for this is that PHP is mostly (completely?) cross platform, and it is still the most commonly used server side scripting language available currently. Most other CMSs are also written in PHP.
Usability: Of course, this system must be as usable as possible. Usability seems to be a big problem with most of today's CMSs, so we must keep the system as usable as possible, but we should be very careful not to throw away functionality.
Secure: Security is a big issue with some CMSs of today, especially with PHPNuke and even PostNuke which is supposed to be the secure version of PHPNuke. We will just have to put our thinking caps on and make sure this system is secure. Failure is not an option on this respect IMHO.
Visual Appeal: We will have to get a good graphic designer in sometime to do some good templates to help us show off our stuff. I know that this might seem pathetic to some people, but it's all about marketing (winning public approval).
Spam: Although this is not first priority, we should eventually try to build in the bayesian spam filter into the commenting system to try and nail these spammers. :-)
Innovation: We want innovation. Nothing is too weird here for us! CMSs are still only at the beginning of its evolution, and I think we should be pioneers in the industry. Therefore, think different! Whoops, that one has been used too many times before. :-)
Have Fun: Lastly, but most importantly, we should have fun doing this!

For some reason this post just doesn't feel complete. If you have any comments/suggestions or you notice any mistakes, please comment. And of course, if you have more ideas. We want ideas! :-)

Also, we are still looking for more developers. So far, it seems like it will be Lachlan Hunt and me. The most important thing is that this should not be another one man project. We already have enough of those.

So, if you are working on another one of those one man projects, please consider joining us. One man alone can't accomplish much, together we can build a great (the best?) system!

Also read Lachy’s Log: World’s Greatest CMS and (if you have time) The perfect weblog system <Anne's Weblog about Markup & Style>

TumTum has written quite an advanced system in this direction already. It's looking very good, so it seems like we will be joining him with work on his system.

TumTum currently calls his system Iwaku, a Japanese word meaning to say, to reason, pretext, history, past, story. That sounds like an interesting name to me, far better than what I could come up with. I think we should stick to that name, but TumTum says that if somebody can think up a better name he wouldn't mind to have it changed.

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