I recently spent a happy afternoon over at folklore.org - Andy Hertzfeld’s superb oral history of the Apple Macintosh. The recent excitement about Xara’s decision to Open Source Xara and this interview with Charles Moir has got me thinking that there really should be a similar site to capture the early history of Acorn Computers.

Wikipedia has a fairly good outline of the Acorn story and quick Google throws up plenty of resources for but, as far as I’m aware, nobody has captured the anecdotes, the recollections of people who made it happen.

So if you were there - or you know somebody who was - please point them this way. I’ve set up a mailing list to kick off a discussion about how we might proceed.

The folks over at Sory Electronics have taken my T shirt design and run with it. The result: soryelectronics.com - a call to boycott Sony. Just do it.

In related news Cory Doctorow is reporting over at BoingBoing that Sony have issued a ‘non-apology’ - way to go Sony. You know Sony really should be taking this a bit more seriously - after all Cory seems to be the hardest nerd.

Er, sory.

I’ve been playing with Google Analytics. It promises some pretty sophisticated looking server log analysis. I’m a sucker for web logs - tail -f access_log is one of my favourite TV shows - so I’m always excited about new log analysis tools. Unfortunately I haven’t yet experienced the thrill that only a tidy looking pie chart can provide with Google Analytics. I’ve added five sites to my profile and placed the required tracking code on them; I’ve verified that Google sees the tracking code and yet, some 30 or so hours since I added the first site Analytics can’t draw me a graph.

Admittedly the reason why I didn’t see any stats in the first 20 hours was because I was using Safari. Eventually I found a well hidden fragment of help text that explains that the reports don’t work with Safari. Cool that a service which identifies users’ browsers as one of its functions can’t identify my browser and tell me it’s not supported.

Switch to Firefox and I get a little further - now I get the graphs but they’re all saying there have been no hits at all on my site. Maybe I’ve offended somebody?

Bear in mind that this isn’t the usual perpetual Google beta; this thing is supposed to be ready for prime time. I suppose it’ll work eventually but it certainly doesn’t work as advertised. One thing I do like: even though they’re not supporting the Mac’s native browser they have paid a back handed complement to Cupertino by ripping off OS X’s little progress spinners. So that’s nice.

Update: Peter Strand has instructions for configuring Firefox so you won’t be tracked by Google Analytics here. Slightly ironic then that he’s using Google Ads (essentially the same technology) on his page.

Another update: This just in from Google Analytics Support:

From: "Analytics Support"
To: andy
Subject: Re: Tracking has not been validated or added…

Hello,

Thank you for your email and your patience.

We have received your report regarding the problem with the "Check Status" alert update. Our engineers are currently working to solve the problem and hope to reach a resolution shortly. This will not affect data collection or report generation if you have already tagged your website with the Google Analytics Tracking Code.

Additionally, I understand that you aren't seeing data in your reports, even though your tracking code has been set up for over six hours. We apologize for any inconvenience. We have collected your data since you installed the tracking code on your site, and are continuing to collect this data throughout the day.

We are currently in the process of creating reports from your data. You should be able to see your reports populated with data later today. Please note that this reporting delay is associated with unexpected demand for Google Analytics. Under normal circumstances, the data in your reports will be at most six hours old.

For additional questions, please visit the Analytics Help Center at http://www.google.com/support/analytics. If you're unable to find an answer to your question on our site, please feel free to reply to this email.

Sincerely,
Analytics Support

Summary: we’ve been swamped by the demand. From poking around in the tracking Javascript and information that’s revealed by the error messages I’ve seen I’d guess that they haven’t yet migrated the service to their legendary server farm. Maybe it doesn’t scale that well yet? You’d have thought Google - of all people - would have braced themselves for the traffic, no?

So the geeks are up in arms about Sony’s ill advised Root-Kit-as-DRM approach to hoarding their treasures. If by any chance you’ve missed any of the saga I’m not about to rehash it here - there’s a timeline of the whole debacle on Wilcohol.com.

Mighty though the geek hordes are we should really be thinking of a way to get everyone else - normal people fired up about this. Otherwise the danger is that it’ll all blow over in a couple of weeks and then before we know it they’ll be back with something equally intrusive along with a bunch of spin to explain how it reduces the risk of cancer, promotes democracy and involves no cruelty to animals.

To that end I’ve knocked up a T shirt design (find V1.0 on Cafepress) which I hope might prompt questions that will allow the wearer to explain why we shouldn’t be buying Sony’s products right now.

Disclosure: if you buy a shirt from that site I’ll get a couple of bucks. I’m quite happy though for people just to take the design and use it. The artwork is here if anyone wants it. Or better yet remix that design or produce one of your own. If you do tell me about it.

Update: Cory Doctorow has a piss boiling timeline of the whole thing over on BoingBoing.

John Edwards has a piece in the Washington Post today in which he expresses (what sounds like) sincere regret at having voted for the war in Iraq. A cynic might suggest that he’s trying to surf the rising tide of public disapproval for the war but even if that’s his game the novelty of a US politician saying “I was wrong” and “I am sorry” stands in such stark contrast to the arrogance, complacency and deceit of the Bush administration that I can’t help but find this article significant.

Irrespective of his motives the fact that ’sorry’ sounds incongruous from a politician tells us how far the administration has strayed from decency.

Link here (Washington Post)

Learn how to identify the value of mailing list contributions by the shapes of the threads here.

Next someone needs to turn it into a heuristic and embed it in a mail client. It’d save me about three hours a day…

I found these just a few hundred yards from where we live. The guy who’s garden they’re in seems to have a real thing about this green and pleasant land: he’s also built a couple of four foot high replicas of Big Ben and a tiny version of an archetypal English village in his garden. More pictures light allowing - it seems to be dark about 23 hours a day round here at the moment.

As I write the iTunes DTD (which is required to strictly validate any RSS feed that refers to it) is broken. Instead of returning the DTD

http://www.itunes.com/DTDs/Podcast-1.0.dtd

is redirecting to the iTunes home page. The DTD is typically used for podcast feeds.

It’s all a bit rubbish. If you publish a DTD it’s pretty important that you make sure it’s always available. At least if it was returning a 404 Not Found error validating XML parsers would be likely to report the correct problem; at the moment the ones I’ve tried are reporting that the user’s RSS is malformed.

Presumably by the time you read this it’ll be fixed.

Update: It turns out that this isn’t actually ‘broken’ behaviour; according to w3c.org

The namespace name, to serve its intended purpose, should have the characteristics of uniqueness and persistence. It is not a goal that it be directly usable for retrieval of a schema (if any exists).

So it’s validators that rely on the namespace name being a URI that are broken. I’ve just given myself a crash course in XML namespaces; it seems this issue has been the subject of a heated debate which I managed to miss in its entirety. Still, now I know all about XML namespaces :)