Reading John Gruber’s description of the performance gains in the newest iPhone OS version, I realized how revolutionary that is in the industry. Most mobile phones have a pretty short life-cycle:

1. The full-price phase with all the commercials
2. The discount phase, to clear shelves for the next model
3. Trash

HTC even faces a class action lawsuit over the Tilt and still refuses to update. In contrast, the iPhone OS has been updated seven times the first year it’s been out.

Not only is a customer buying the best mobile operating system on best-of-breed hardware, they’re also buying from a company that has integrated the product into the very heart of their business model.

You’re not just getting a warranty, you’re getting commitment. And that’s worth paying for.

Just over HALF of all the support requests we get are about email. Everything else we offer, combined, doesn’t add up to the amount of trouble, expense, use, and effort that goes into “simple” old email.

And that’s kind of funny, because as far as I can tell, almost nobody CHOOSES a web host based on their email features. Everybody’s just looking at how much disk/bandwidth they get, what version of PHP they run, how good their support is, do they have a funny blog, is their CEO really studly, do the data centers have water beds, and so on…

They’ve been conditioned by Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and Gmail to give email no value. I mean, everybody gives it away for free… nobody gives (real) web hosting away for free.

And yet, in the end, the only thing (sadly?) that actually ends up getting used, is that “no-value” email! If a web server with maybe 750 customer sites on it were to go down for even as long as five hours, we’d probably get two angry messages about it. But if email goes down for the same number of customers for just five minutes we’ll have already received 50!

Amazing that people complain more about their obsessions than things costing them money. This came to mind after grumping about all the grousing I hear over Twitter’s downtime.

Visionaries of HTML, CSS and JavaScript have been promoting this change—which they knew about before the rest of the world—with an odd sort of fanfare. Says Zeldman:

What’s really new is that by opting out of Microsoft’s version targeting … you get to skip testing in future versions of IE. If your site works in IE7 today, it will work in IE47, or so Microsoft has promised.

It’s the Microsoft has promised line that raises my hackles. Microsoft is somehow going to port every rendering mode since IE 5.5 into future versions of IE. How long will the cost of backporting IE7′s bugs and quirks to the latest Windows version will be seen as benefiting Microsoft’s shareholders? Methinks it won’t be 40 versions. My guess is two. Tops.

By taking the onus of maintaining sites off of Web developers and onto a fairly untrustworthy party—especially one with a business case for stagnating standards-based development and a means to force it into broad acceptance—we are making a deal with the devil. Version targeting is bad for the Internet.

Who are the unenlightened?

Worse, however, than betting on Microsoft to save us is that Zeldman blames the situation on some theoretical group of unwashed masses that are making bad Web sites:

Zillions of people who don’t know any better do tailor sites to the quirks of IE6. That’s why an improved IE7 “broke” old sites. And it’s why, in crafting a new switch, Microsoft must build its default to protect unenlightened developers.

PPK walks lock-step with Zeldman, using the same rationale as colonial Europe when pillaging Africa.

Noblesse oblige. Since we know more and can do more and better things with web sites, more is expected of us. If our ways are so much better, we should shoulder more responsibilities than those whose ways are wrong. Our shoulders are fit to bear these burdens; [standards-unaware web developers] aren’t.

Both of these articles assume that these unenlightened people are going to magically become enlightened, and not abuse this new property as they do the rest of HTML currently. What seems realistic to me is that these people will start new projects. They’ll want to use new IE features. They’ll use—because they’re not “enlightened”—IE=edge. And Microsoft will have to dream up some other scheme to prevent the Web from breaking, and this hubub will start all over.

We need to stop being elitist. The “problem sites” aren’t just being created by these “unenlightened” developers; they were created by developers—enlightened or not—and have been left fallow. Our industry is flush with hit-and-run agencies and freelancers that throw up a site and then dump it on understaffed, underpaid and under-experienced teams to manage. It’s easy to see that three agency guys might focus on sites created by novice Web developers or existing since the 20th century as the main problems, but I have a hard time believing every Happy Cog site would survive IE8 without some kinds of tweaks. Sites which are not actively maintained, but still have value to Internet users—these are the sites Microsoft is afraid of breaking. A fix is never simple if there is no one to do it.

My guess is that the IE7 update is not the one that fueled the version targeting decision: it was the rancor over Vista. A vast number of applications and device drivers would not function with Windows Vista’s new API’s, and as a result the operating system has had a fairly frosty reception. IE7′s release was a party in comparison. Apparently there exists a hearty core of people that desired to use applications and hardware years after they’ve stopped being maintained. The scripting and CSS updates alluded to with IE8 may bring similar Web sites down, and that’s ill will Microsoft can’t afford to engender.

In other words, updating IE without setting up version targeting to a current browser will break an unknowable number of Web sites which may still contain valuable content but have no means to upgrade and stay current. We need it.

Opting to opt out

Somehow, I’ve got to reconcile this conflict. I’m glad that Microsoft created a way to improve the state of their browser without throwing away the old Internet. That said, I don’t have a very high opinion of that company and am loathe to contribute a spare byte of mindshare to their products by inserting IE crutches in my code. I’m going to let it break. Refusing to use IE’s meta tag will lock their browser to a predictable set of features and bugs—or as predictable as such things will ever be, and for the foreseeable future, IE7′s Web standards support is passable enough for most work, and we’re going to have to support IE7 (the browser, not just the rendering mode) anyway.

I’ve long believed that Web Developers have been, as a group, too milquetoast about dealing with IE’s problems. We tediously work around a cranky browser and then, hypocritically, use buttons that read “this site requires flash,” and “download the PDF viewer.” For me no longer. Any site in beta, any site I develop for fun, and any site without a demonstrable need for IE8 features is going to stay in IE7 mode. At least, that is, until HTML5 is usable.

Notes

1. Mr. Meyer does cite some Web research, but both studies do not prove anything about the current state of Web development. Google’s statistics surveys the entire Internet with no regard to when a page was developed, while Marko Karppinen’s study assumes that validity has anything to do with standards-based design, which it clearly does not. ↩
2. If the IE team truly wanted to preserve the Internet, they’d make version targeting default to IE6 rendering, and not IE7, as IE6 has been actively targeted by Web developers for almost ten years, IE7 a fraction of that. Admitting this, however, makes me die a little on the inside. ↩

I mentioned previously how to set up an EVE Online-focused rails site. After reading through old Riding Rails posts, I noticed this excellent post on iPhone-optimising your rails project. This process is almost exactly the same for sharing views between EVE and a normal browser. In Rails 2.0 all you have to do is register the MIME Type.

config/initializers/mime_types.rb:

Mime::Type.register_alias "text/html", :eve

Then, in your application controller, use a before_filter to adjust the format as necessary.

app/controllers/application_controller.rb:

before_filter :isolate_eve_browser

private
  # EVE-specific data
  def isolate_eve_browser
    if eve?
      request.format = :eve
      request_trust unless trusted?
      end
    end
  end

Now everywhere you want to separate your EVE views from your standard browser views, simply use respond_to.

app/controllers/home_controller.rb:

class HomeController < ApplicationController
  def index
    respond_to do |format|
      format.html
      format.eve
    end
  end  
end

You can then use app/views/home/index.html.erb and app/views/home/index.eve.erb respectively. This means you can also request trust on the appliaction level instead of on the action level as I mentioned previously. Notice that request_trust method above? It should look something like:

app/controllers/application_controller.rb:

private
  def request_trust
    response.headers["eve.trustme"] = (
      "http://#{request.env['HTTP_HOST']}/" +
      "::Your custom message begging for trust."
    )
    render :template => 'trust_me'
  end

The action is rounded out by creating app/views/trustme.eve.erb, which is the template rendered above when the user declines to trust you. Happy coding!

I’ve already got a few ideas on fun things to do with all of this data. The trick is trying to make opinionated Rails play nice with the browser, the API and the Data. To that end, here are the strategies I’m invoking. Comments are, of course, welcome.

Dealing with Data

I can’t even begin to wrap my brain around the cool things you can do with EVE data. A number of desktop applications exist for character tracking and skill planning, but that’s only a very shallow bit of what’s possible. Getting the data into manageable form, however, is a bit tricky.

I wanted to keep my EVE data separate from my game data. Presumably EVE’s data will change over time. Ideally a new dump will come out and I can just swap it with my current one–no fuss, no muss. I downloaded the Trinity 1.0 SQLite3 dump. And dropped it into db/ of my Rails application. Then I had to make sure to point all EVE data to the correct database.

config/datbase.yml:

eve_development:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/trinity_1.0_sqlite3.db
  timeout: 5000
eve_test:
  adapter: sqlite3
  database: db/trinity_1.0_sqlite3.db
  timeout: 5000
eve_production
  adapter: mysql
  database: *******
  username: ********
  password: ********
  host: *******

and

app/models/eve_data.rb:

class EveData < ActiveRecord::Base
  establish_connection "eve_#{RAILS_ENV}"
end

Now any model that subclasses EveData will point to the correct database and key:

app/models/race.rb:

class Race < EveData
  set_table_name :chrRaces
  set_primary_key :raceID
  has_many :careers, :foreign_key => :raceID
end

The tedious part of this is setting up all of the associations, as EVE data does not conform to rails column naming conventions (although it’s not unimaginable that one could fix this with an elegant script).

One last note: if you generate any sub-classes of EveData using the built-in generators, be sure to remove test/fixtures/<subclass>.yml as it will cause you tests to die horrible deaths.

API Wrangling

Rails has a lot of built-in API magic, all of which is absolutely worthless with EVE. Consuming the EVE API requires a lot of anonymous XML parsing. Boooooring! Luckily, Lisa Seelye has an excellent wrapper module for the EVE API. So long as you’re okay with her clear-as-mud license, Lisa’s work will be a great benefit.

Managing the EVE Browser

Update: I’ve written up a slightly better way to target the EVE Browser in Rails 2.0.

The EVE Online browser stinks. I got only halfway through the HTML 4.01 test suite before quitting out of frustration. I’m pretty sure it can’t even render GIF images. I’d love to see them bundle WebKit instead. One thing the browser does, however, is provide custom HTTP headers (without the required X- in front, of course) for in-game EVE data. Custom headers are available to the controller in the request.env collection. I made them available to all controllers and views with the following:

app/controllers/application.rb:

class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base
  ...
  # Provides access to views
  helper_method :eve?
  helper_method :trusted?
  helper_method :eve_data

  private
    def eve?
      !! request.env['HTTP_EVE.TRUSTED']
    end
    def trusted?
      request.env['HTTP_EVE.TRUSTED'] == "yes"
    end
    def eve_data
      if trusted?
        {
          "name" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.CHARNAME'],
          "id" =>  request.env['HTTP_EVE.CHARID'],
          "alliance" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.ALLIANCENAME'],
          "region" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.REGIONNAME'],
          "constellation" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.CONSTELLATIONNAME'],
          "solar system" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.SOLARSYSTEMNAME'],
          "station" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.STATIONNAME'],
          "corporation" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.CORPNAME'],
          "role" => request.env['HTTP_EVE.CORPROLE']
        }
      end
    end
end

The eve? and trusted? methods return booleans and eve_data a hash of the character’s current location in-game. They allow me to write helpers such as

app/helpers/application_helper.rb:

def character_image_tag(id, size, options = nil)
  if eve?
    o = { :src => "#{src}:#{id}", :size => "#{size}" }
    o.merge!(options) if options.is_a(Hash)
    tag(:img, o)
  else
    o = { :width => "#{size}", :height => "#{size}" }
    o.merge!(options) if options.is_a(Hash)
    image_tag("http://img.eve.is/serv.asp?s=#{size}&c=#{id}", o)
  end
end

Guessing by the speed of the browser, using in-game resources instead of external will save the user a lot of time.

As players fly around EVE, the application has the ability to detect a location change and refresh the page, updating the location information. Applications could work in EVE from only one URL, even without JavaScript. In order to do so, however, the application must do some header-gymnastics as well. My take on this is something akin to:

app/controllers/foo_controller.rb:

class FooController < ApplicationController
  def index
    # Tell the client your content will change
    # Not necessary, but correct and future-proof
    response.headers["Vary"] = "eve.trustme"
    if ! eve?
      # Do something to the regular browser
      render :action => "external"
    elsif ! trusted?
      trust_me
      render :action => "trust_me"
    else
      lookup
      render :action => "lookup"
    end
  end

  def external
    ...
  end

  def trust_me
    # Send the trust header
    response.headers["eve.trustme"] = "http://#{request.env['HTTP_HOST']}/::Trust me."
    ...
  end

  def play
    # Send the auto-refresh header
    response.headers["refresh"] = "sessionchange;URL=#{url_for(:controller => 'foo')}"
    ...
  end

end

Each action will then have its own view file and its own logic, but the same URL. Be careful where you send the auto-refresh header: create, update and delete actions should not get them. Note too that the trust_me action should end with render => :nothing or similar. This does not work. The EVE browser requires a text/html file to trigger the trust prompt.

And that’s it! You’re on your way to a Rails-powered EVE application. Please send me any questions, critiques or issues. I’ll post more often with other quirks I pick up.

UPDATE: Modified the database set-up to use my database.yml for EVE data and connect EVE data to my environments. Also moved establish_connection into the model where it should be. I also added a note on fixtures that took me a silly amount of time to work around.

Notes

1. I haven’t been able to find a license for this data. Although I’m guessing it’s Creative Commons Attribution-DontDoAnythingStupid. ↩

Turns out it doesn’t work with AT&T’s EDGE service. GPRS and 3G were great, but EDGE was zero, zip, nothing. Not a big deal in Detroit, but in LA it was like trying to get service on the Moon. I toughed it out until after CES and MacWorld, but with Android and OpenMoko still a gleam in some Linux geek’s eye and the iPhone stuck with out 3G, GPS access or third-party apps, I figured now was a good time.

Meet the AT&T Tilt, a.k.a. the HTC TyTN II or Kaiser. It’s essentially the Oxford-educated younger brother of the Trinity. The same feature-set I mentioned above, combined with a slide-out keyboard and shamelessly good reception by comparison. This phone, however, is more than just a texting-friendly version: HTC has refined the details a bit as well. For example, the unit ships with a screen protector that fills the full screen width, and music applications don’t stop playing when the screen is turned off.

The tilt isn’t without its issues though. At almost seven grams it’s a beast in your pocket, and the slide-out-and-tilt mechanism feels ready to snap at any minute. The Tilt also stores your SIM card on the back edge of screen–visible when open–which makes SIM theft a very real danger.

Paperless Geocaching

The holy grail. Finally. With a flurry of supporting apps, you can view, manage, and track geocaches.

Learning about the cache

Locating the cache

Seeking the cache

Logging the cache

Add-ons

In addition to the phone, I also have an earbud-style wired headset which is both louder and more clear than the on-ear bluetooth headsets I’ve tried. I also picked up a car charger, as TomTom Navigator is a major battery hog. These accessories were all targeted to the Trinity, but since HTC uses a USB-compatible plug, they work fine in the Tilt as well.

The real victor was the 8GB MicroSD card. iPhone hard drive, eat your heart out.

Software & Mods

Windows Mobile is probably the largest cash sink I’ve encountered in a while. There tons of applications for it, but the good ones are rarely free or open-source. It’s $10 – $30 a pop for every little bit of functionality. A few I’ve found worthwhile:

GPS Tuner

A haus of a GPS application, it’s excellent for foot navigation (trails and geocaching), and can download Google Maps data in order to help you set your bearings. It’s not great for driving, though, as the maps don’t adjust in real time.

TomTom Navigator 6

I couldn’t have apartment hunted in L.A. over a single weekend without this app, nor could I have made it across the country without getting lost.

SPB Time

WinMo’s clock interface is terrible. Alarms difficult to create, time zones are hard to change, and the display is simply ugly. SPB Time has a full-screen analog clock (although not this cool). It also lets me pre-set timers for green, black and herbal tea.

Vidya ScreenCapture

There’s actually a bunch of screen capturing utilities, one of them free. This one lets you specify the save location and map the functionality to a hardware button. Plus it’s captures are actual double the size of the screen, or easier cropping. Strangely, their Web site, vidyasmart.com, became one of those sleazy parked sites a week after I purchased it.

Opera Mobile

I’ve got a demo version right now, and I’m unsure if I’m going to buy it. It’s got more features than Internet Explorer, but IE is the only mobile phone browser it’s possible to play Travian on. Opera might be a nice back-up, as none of the browsers I’ve tried get every situation right.

Pocket Music

Also demoing. With that 8GB of memory, I really resent AudibleAir demanding I download only low-quality versions of their audiobooks. PocketMusic brags about being able to play Audible files, and if I can get it to work I’ll be able to sync the phone just like my iPods and not have to worry about Audible’s second-rate software.

There is some freeware available as well.

Google Maps

When you’re just looking up something quick, or need to grab an address or phone number, the Google maps application is great. Since it tracks your position with GPS as well, this can suffice as a poor-man’s TomTom, although it’s better as a compliment than a replacement.

GPX Sonar

This tiny app is a geocacher’s dream. It allows you to view a geocache’s information page from the downloaded GPX file, create field notes and manage travel bugs. It’s not perfect, but the price is right. The original site is no longer available, and the current download page is in German.

PTT_Fix_4Tilt

The Tilt comes loaded with a ton of AT&T shovelware, and a hardware button that launches a screen saying simply, “Push To Talk charges will apply, do you wish to continue?” No, thanks. AT&T’s configuration does not let you re-route this button to another feature as you can the other hardware buttons. This script was developed buy the good folks at XDA-Developers, and let’s you reprogram the button without doing your own registry hacks.

Notes

1. The Wi-Fi Positioning included in the maps feature doesn’t count. Although I haven’t played with it, it seems like it would be pretty clueless where you’d need GPS most–the middle of nowhere. ↩
2. With the Tilt’s AD2P support, I’d love to get a bluetooth stereo headset for it, but the major flaw I’m seeing with bluetooth is the need to constantly re-pair whenever you want to switch devices. I wouldn’t chip for this without being able to switch devices on-the-fly.↩
3. Only once did TomTom fail me. On the way to Zion National Park, TomTom suggested it take a scenic route along the back of a farm and down a two-track that ran up (quite literally, up) the side of a mountain. ↩
4. XDA Developers is a true hacker community. Not one of those 1980′s hollywood depictions, either. These developers explore, disassemble and otherwise make full use of the hardware they have purchased. They take a very strong stance, however, against warez, and greatly respect software developers.

In other news, my WordPress install was blog reactions have gone positively nutty. Of course this might be a general problem with their system if technorati’s entire support network is backed up. I think I’m ready to submit Rule 35: “If you build it, they will spam”.¹

With Travian in its final throes—go WG—I’ve been dragged into another online addiction to sate me when this one ends. EVE Online is like a septuagenarian in Webernet terms, and I’m no fan of MMO games. One cool thing though is that the game as an in-game browser and decent data API. I’ve written a very quick EVE In-Game Browser Emulator that should help me and possibly others develop in-game tools.

I am increasingly fascinated by all the places you find a browser, and the very cool stuff that Web Standards are allowing these days (more on that later).

1. Dammit. I thought I was the first to think of that. Oh well, I’m close.↩

Download here: EVE Online Character Tracker Widget.

Also, Apple requires me to place this paragraph here as instructions:

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger is required. If you’re using Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it. If you’re using a browser other than Safari, click the download link. When the widget download is complete, unarchive it and place it in /Library/Widgets/ in your home folder. show Dashboard, click the Plus sign to display the Widget Bar and click the widget’s icon in the Widget Bar to open it.

“Breakfast Meat!”

Meat designed for only one meal? This could not be! I pressed him, and he repeated himself. I checked the fridge, and sure enough an oblong tin cheerfully announced itself as breakfast meat. Something was off. I refused to eat it. What animal did said meat come from? The can did not say, and my father only hazarded guesses.

Hence my war with spam began.

A List Apart just published an article on some pretty graceful e-mail obfuscation, which is pretty impressive (although a bit encumbering). The author’s major problem: he encodes the “@” and “.” of addresses with a plus-sign, stating:

e-mail service providers typically don’t allow user to create addresses that contain a plus sign

And right he is! Gmail, however, allows you to use The Magic Plus™, as do any procmail-using Web hosts (like these jokers). You haven’t met him? Here’s how it works.

The Magic Plus

It’s quite simple. Your e-mail address has two parts, the user and the domain. Spiffy mail servers, however, allow you to add a third part to the address, specified by a plus:

user@example.com

becomes

user+tag@example.com

And the important part is that both go to the same place! So next time you’re being hassled for an e-mail address for your Kroger card and you’re afraid they’re going to sell your address to angry spam monkeys, simply give them user+kroger@example.com and you’ll know!

Spam.la is voodoo Magic

And if you have to sign up for a really shady place, use spam.la. Great for forums that you need an e-mail to register with. Anything sent to that domain shows up right on their home page.

What do you do, Ryan?

Using my Web designer wizardry, I brazenly post my email right on my homepage. “What?” you gasp, “this goes against all Web designer principals!” You should be employing some kind of crazy javascript hack! The problems with this, however, are numerous, namely:

• The effect of such hacks on devices are unclear
• The usefulness of Microformats and other Web 2.0 goodness is seriously limited.
• Philosophy an d ego: if I let spammers dictate my markup, the terrorists have already won.

So flying right in the face of Zeldman’s advice, I just filter it. Twice. Dreamhost has this fancy pants procmail thing that goes through my spam filter, to a magic Gmail address, and then back to my inbox. Amazing!

1. Install MySQL

MySQL isn’t installed by default, so I went to the MySQL web site to download MySQL 5.0 for OS X. I just use the binary package, and installed the prefpane as well (silly me).

2. Start MySQL

Unfortunately, the MySQL prefpane doesn’t exactly work in Leopard. I had to look up how to start MySQL from the terminal. It’s a simple:

ryan$ sudo /usr/local/mysql/bin/safe_mysqld

It looks like MySQL’s socket file exists in a different place than most applications expect. One workaround just symbolically links the previous location to the current one. I’m no expert, so that might be a bad idea.

3. Enable PHP

The initial configuration of Apache 2 does not enable PHP by default. Luckily, Tyler knows how to enable PHP5 in Leopard: in the apache configuration file, /private/etc/apache2/httpd.conf, uncomment the line

LoadModule php5_module     libexec/apache2/libphp5.so

4. Change default MySQL socket

If you haven’t used Angry Fly’s workaround mentioned above, you have to change PHP’s default MySQL socket to it’s actual value. Do this by changing the line in /private/etc/php.ini to

mysqli.default_socket = /tmp/mysql.sock

5. Enable .htaccess

Finally, you have to enable .htaccess files again. The instructions for Tiger work fine, except that Apache’s configuration file is no longer in /etc/httpd, it’s in /private/etc/apache2.

6. Modify the default WordPress htaccess file

Everything was going swimmingly until I tried to enable friendly URLs in WordPress 2.3.1. I’m still not sure why this is an issue, but I was getting 403 Forbidden errors after WordPress created a .htaccess file. This page provided me the (somewhat spookey) answer.

And amazingly, I was rolling. Well, I will be rolling, as this information seeking exercise and the requisite blog post have now kept me up far past my goal turn-in time.