The Ethics of Leopard’s Web Clippings
One of the best features of Leopard is Web Clippings - it’s the ability to save an area of a web page to your computer’s Dashboard where it’ll be constantly updated, so for example you can monitor the latest football score without having to keep visiting the site with your browser or relying on an RSS feed.
This is really cool! It’s a great example of what the net does best - the accessibility and sharing of information. A smile was brought to my face the first time I saved a web clipping as Safari followed my mouse highlighting different DOM elements (very much in the style of FireBug) showing me what I was about to save… XHTML in action!
BUT… and there is a but… a lot of sites (if not most commercial sites) are funded by adverts and I can’t help but think that they wouldn’t be too keen on me putting load on their servers getting their content without looking at their ads. I can see this one being raised at the next ABCe ITG meeting…
Should we count traffic from Web Clippings? That’s not worth getting into here (but I’m pretty sure the answer will be that it’s covered by existing metrics) but I will say that Apple has given the Dashboard/Web Clippings its own user agent so that it could easily be tracked, blocked or discounted by concerned content owners (until someone figures out how to change its user agent…)
Adding the following to a .htaccess file would do the trick:
SetEnvIf User-Agent "WebClip" isBanned
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from all
Deny from env=isBanned
It’s worth pointing that I haven’t done any research into other more legitimate browsers that might have “WebClip” in their user agents - so I’d check that you don’t need a narrower net before implementing the above solution.
So in conclusion: Sharing stuff good. Stealing stuff bad. Where have I heard that before?
Leopard’s Blue Screen of Death
After deciding to spend Friday night in the pub, rather than in a cue outside the Apple Store, I decided to head into town yesterday with Rob and Sean to get my own copy of the much anticipated Leopard (aka. Mac OS 10.5) Having battled through a crazed Apple Store I managed to get home with the software and have a huge shock.
I’d heard that there was a Window’s bashing blue screen of death easter egg in Leopard but imagine the shock when I rebooted after the install only to be presented with an aqua blue screen and a perpetual busy curser. Oh the irony.
Fortunately I still had a spare laptop and with the help of Google I found out what to do. A quick boot into Single User mode, a fsck, a mount and a few rm -rfs later and the offending framework was removed and I was up and running again… it reminded me very much of an OS 9 extension conflict, only without an extension manager to do the disabling easily!
So all in all I wasn’t very impressed! The experience has very much soured my impression of the new OS… Although, I’m already dependant on cover flow in the Finder for navigating files, I’m not sure how I’ve ever managed without it - so rolling back isn’t an option!
I know I’m not alone in having a bad Leopard upgrade experience and I’ve heard a lot of other grumbling about the new OS from other people… Let’s hope 10.5.1 will make Stacks vaguely useful and sort out the Vistesque menu bar.
Directory Globbing in Perl
Today one of our developers started leaning Perl and was having some problems with an example she’d found on a web site. She called me over to look at her code and I noticed two things right away…
Firstly, the example she was copying from was missing the rather crucial inclusion of the Perl module the example was demonstrating… has fail!
Secondly, I noticed she’d gone straight to the abstracted module rather than using ‘pure’ Perl to open the directory, loop through the files checking them against her own regex and then closing it again. I guess in many ways this is the better way of working - it’s certainly less code and there is less to go wrong… I just hope the module is supported on IRIX.
Here’s the code for any one interested:
#!/usr/bin/perl
use Data::Dumper;
use File::Glob ':glob';
my $path = '/Users/dk0/Desktop/';#your path here!
my @files = <$path*.{pdf,xml}>;
print Dumper(@files);
foreach (@files) {
print $_ . “\n”;
}
Ceros Media Alternatives
Today I was trying out Yahoo!’s new Search Assist feature and was rather amused to see that as I was typing in Ceros Media
one of the suggested searches was Ceros Media Alternatives…
Searching for it didn’t actually return any relevant results of course… as there aren’t any! 
So if you’re looking for a platform to publish your own digital editions, then head on over to www.cerosmedia.com!