Recently in Web Technology Category

I spent some time this weekend working through some projects in Eric Meyer's "Eric Meyer on CSS" to brush up on some CSS techniques, or perhaps more accurately to actually learn how to use style sheets effectively in a Web page.

I found this line particularly amusing:

Although they aren't common, it's surprising just how useful events calendars can be on the Web. A personal site mught use one to indicate when a web log was updated or to show important dates in history. Even more interesting, an organization or community could use a calendar to publicize upcoming event.

Although they aren't common? Ah, yes, times seem to have changed a bit since 2002.

Recently I've been experimenting with writing an Apache module, mostly to get a deeper understanding of how the server works. I've been intrigued by the concept of the APR portable runtime for a while, and with the recent release of Apache 2.2 and some of its more interesting features (like the Event MPM and the mod_dbd database manager), now seemed as good a time as any for a little exploration.

Writing modules in C can be hard, not so much because C is an intrinsically more difficult language to use but rather because there aren't as many cohesive, readily accessible libraries and frameworks available for modern Web 2.0-ish development. That means if I'm ever to have any hope of getting real applications written, I'll need to fall back on my trusty Ruby on Rails.

Running Rails means FastCGI. And so I download the FastCGI developer kit and install it on my server. No problems so far. Then I download mod_fastcgi to let Apache communicate with my Rails apps and...it won't even compile. It seems that this module hasn't been updated in a number of years. It works well enough with Apache 1.3. You can get it to run with Apache 2.0, although at the office we downgraded back to the older server after experiencing occassional unexplained problems. The support for Apache 2.0, it seems, relied on some compatability code to mask some of the rather substantial changes in the API. This compatability layer, however, was removed in the Apache 2.2 release and so the module no longer works at all.

There's an alternative module: mod_fcgid. I grabbed the source and was able to compile the module! After fussing around with build tools for a while (it seems the GNU libtools applications were installede without shared object support) I got the module built and installed. Unfortunately, bringing up the web server is rewarded with an immediate crash. After looking around on the web for a while, I discovered that the solution was to go back two releases of the module and then patch the code to supply a missing header file. Finally I was able to bring the server online, but by that time I was ready to fall asleep, too tired to see if I could actually invoke a FastCGI script.

Is this any kind of indication of the quality of open source software???

I suppose I could switch to using Lighttpd as my web server, which does come with a functional FastCGI interface. But then I wouldn't have access to Apache for my other experiments or for things like installing a Subversion source code repository.

The popular solution to this dilemma seems to be to configure Apache to run as a proxy in front of Lighttpd. But why would I want to do that? In addition to the extra performance overhead and increased risk of failure due to the increasingly complex number of moving parts, doesn't this just subject me to all of the weaknesses of both products?

I've been relatively unhappy with the performance of Firefox on my new Intel iMac. The Rosetta technology is a great tool for moving PowerPC apps over to the new platform, but for something as big and bloated as a web browser, well there's really no choice but to go native.

I was surprised that Firefox has not yet come out with a universal binary version of the browser. At the Apple WWDC developer conference last year one of the sessions on porting apps to the new platform featured a live demonstration of the very minor changes needed to get Firefox to build.

I just discovered that there is a test version of the browser that is built as a universal binary. OK, so it's still alpha software but I need the extra speed. Besides, this isn't anything new for me. I first started using the Netscape Navigator browser at some sickening low version, 0.89 I believe, back in the day when you could get almost daily releases of the app.

So this post is now being written with the "Deer Park" browser. Wow, this thing is fast. I can't believe how fast pages are loading now. Even our top secret LOB site is rendering pages at breathtaking speed. I guess this shouldn't be too much of a surprise. After all, the old PowerBooks that we all have at work are aging machines.

This weekend I have been enjoying the Pandora music player that Scoble has been gushing about all week.

This has been a surprising amount of fun. Type in a random artist or song and get a stream of similar songs. Right now I'm listening to the "Lindsay Lohan" station.⁽¹⁾

I haven't done too much customization to the playlists. You can add additional songs or artists to the station, or ask for more or less songs like the currently playing song. I wonder what kind of an impact this would have on the playlist, and whether or not it will be used as input to some sort of collaborative filtering system to supplement the data from the Music Genome Project.

I also don't really get the "community" features they are trying to expose, such as sharing stations. Since you can't select future songs, what does it really mean to share a station when your friends just create their own station with the same inputs?

Still, it is really nice to be able to tune into a stream of music, without commercial interruptions or annoying DJ's, selected to complement whatever mood I happen to be in. Although there are some obvious choices, I've been enjoying a lot of music from groups I had never heard of and, without the service, most likely never would have heard. I haven't been compelled to click on the "buy from iTunes" or "buy from Amazon" links, but you never know....

On a final note: mild rhythmic syncopation rulez!⁽²⁾

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⁽¹⁾That was probably too much personal information. Sorry about that.

⁽²⁾I don't think I have yet heard Pandora play me a song that hasn't had mild rhythmic syncopation as on of its characteristics. I guess my musical tastes must be fairly limited.