Okay, so I’ve converted my WordPress install to use Atom 1.0 and (I think) made using it as the default1, but I’ve got one warning left that I just don’t get:

line 8, column 86: Same-document reference: http://www.symphonious.net/2006/08/13/those-who-still-need-classic/ [help]

... /08/13/those-who-still-need-classic/" />

Now I get that the two URLs are pointing to the same place, but why exactly is this a problem and what URL am I supposed to put in there? Should I just make up a new base URL so that it’s clearly not the same document? The URL is absolute so the xml:base shouldn’t affect it.

Chris Adamson talks about the disappearance of classic support now that Apple has switched to Intel. It’s true, pretty much everyone has moved on from using classic apps, but there was one place I knew I could turn to find people still waiting for their favorite app to be updated: the HyperCard mailing list. Even there though the number of questions about intel are pretty light on as nearly everyone has moved on to HyperCard alternatives or just moved on to something else altogether.

The XP process allows so much flexibility in getting things done but this comes at the cost of focus. I’ve previously talked about how product managers have to be careful they don’t abuse the flexibility in XP, but recently Ephox has discovered the huge benefit that being focussed can be, even when you’re doing XP.

We’ve come up against a very tight, very important deadline for a really big, really difficult new feature and at the same time we lost our entire support department so all support fell into the engineer’s laps. Support is just one of those things you have to do as a software company and our first impression was that the extra support load would reduce our velocity but we’d be able to share the load around the team, get the day’s cases out of the way and get back to developing. What actually happened was the entire engineering team wound up doing support all day and development stopped. Worse still, the team felt drained and tired all the time. We should have been able to get support out of the way faster and get developing, but for some reason we couldn’t.

I found it rather amusing that while filling out my census online it asked me:

Question 59: Can the internet be accessed at this dwelling? To be fair, the options provided to answer included a description of what type of connection you had so the question couldn’t just be assumed, but it’s funny none the less.

I haven’t paid a great deal of attention to the WWDC keynote details – just sampled the various discussions going on. I was however interested in a comment by Ted Leug that Apple were including DTrace in Apple’s performance tools.

I wonder what Sun think about this. DTrace was a key Solaris feature and now it’s coming out for OS X and I seem to recall mention of projects that are porting it to Linux. As a developer it’s nice to see your code become popular so the DTrace team are probably thrilled. As a company though, it’s hard to leverage the benefit of your investment when everyone else is reaping the benefits. Even if Sun get improvements back from Apple, where’s the benefit for them? Apple and everyone else have those improvements too. The ubiquity argument of Java doesn’t seem to apply here, you don’t build on top of DTrace, you use it as a debugging tool. The support business model probably doesn’t pan out either – Apple will be providing support for it themselves and they’re the experts on DTrace on OS X, not Sun.

Mitch Tulloch raises a concern over how large enterprises would react to Microsoft moving to more regular, iterative releases. The answer for large enterprise who can’t handle releases coming out more often than once every six years or so is to only update when they are ready instead of every time there’s a new release.

With Apple, this isn’t a great option because Apple don’t have very long support periods for older OS’s, but that’s not the case with Microsoft – a legacy of the fact that they deal with large enterprise and Apple in general does not. Companies that were running Windows 95 would only have reached the point of having to upgrade, what, a year or two ago? That’s easily more than the required six years between upgrades.

It seems that the world of Java on Mac is always full of drama and gnashing of teeth and Chris Adamson has just the article to really kick it into full gear: Mustang for Mac PPC… any point now?

Sadly, I’m inclined to believe that Chris may well be right – the Java 1.6 release for PPC is likely to be a less than wonderful release as Apple focuses it’s efforts on the Intel release. It’s a given that the Intel release will be better than the PPC release just due to the fact that they now get all Sun’s optimizations for free.

Jason Calacanis’ entry on Wikipedia considering adding a WYSIWYG editor to make it easier for people to contribute strikes a chord close to my heart. The argument that a WYSIWYG editor will cause more work for administrators is quite valid – making it easier for people to contribute will mean more contributions that need to be reviewed and checked. On the other hand though, the benefit of a WYSIWYG editor isn’t just that more people will contribute, but that domain experts in fields other than computing will be able to and be more inclined to contribute. For Wikipedia, that’s a pretty huge benefit – the people who know most about a subject will be more likely to actually be writing the Wikipedia article on that subject.

It’s census time in Australia and for the first time this year, you can complete the census online. Surprisingly, the eCensus is actually very well done. It supports Windows 95 and above and Mac OS 8.5 and above on IE, Netscape or Firefox – and that’s just the official specs. I didn’t think to run it through the HTML validator but I’d assume it would work quite well in pretty much any reasonably modern browser and a whole bunch of not so modern browsers.

A while back it was pointed out that the cool little footnotes plugin I wrote was always using the same ID names to link back and forth. It incremented the number of each footnote in a post, but started again from 1 for the next post. The problem with this of course is that on the main page all the posts are combined together and the footnote links wind up jumping to the wrong place.

I just stumbled across something interesting that I probably should have realized before. With TDD, the first thing you should do when you get assigned a bug to fix is write a test that reproduces it. This morning I was good and did just that, but surprisingly the test passed.

Now normally when your test passes straight off, it means you didn’t write it correctly and you need to fix the test. In this case though I could confirm manually that the bug simply didn’t happen – a classic works for me. Drop back into bugzilla and mark the bug WFM and I suddenly realized I could prove that it works correctly by pointing to the test.

So Scoble’s looking for a wiki, seems to have gotten a few popular suggestions. Since he wants it hosted I can’t really offer anything – I don’t have the server space or sysadmin knowledge to handle something of Scoble’s popularity. Despite that, can I recommend that you make the quality of the editor your most important criteria? It will make a huge difference to the adoption rate of the wiki. I’ve discussed this before: Wiki Syntax Considered Harmful and Making Wikis Work.