This weblog will remain in silence for the next two weeks, I'll be away at Barranconi/Sardegna. No notebook, no cellphone, just some good books such as "Empire and the Sun" by Alex Soojung-Kim Pang and "Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology" by V.Braitenberg.
A remote farm, mountains made for mountainbiking, the beach, the sun, the books.
See you in August!

Microsoft released a little update for IE6 fixing GZIP decompression, quite some time ago. This is pretty cool, because our flashy Flash GUIs can now communicate with PHP on the server side like this:

Request

POST /xmlrpc ..  HTTP/1.1

x-flash-version: 7,0,19,0

Content-Type: text/xml

Authorization: Basic dW5kZWZpb.... 

Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)

<methodCall>... 




Response

Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 12:29:13 GMT

Content-Encoding: gzip

Content-Type: application/xml+rpc

99a ...

This is pretty cool (and has worked with Mozilla for ages), because this makes the Flash↔XMLRPC↔PHP approach more feasible at last. The inefficiency of sending "large" XML documents hasn't been a showstopper (obviously, we did it anyway), but now it makes even more sense than before: open standards, high debugability, and acceptable speed due to the compression turned on when the system goes productive. and, of course, we don't have to reload the entire page on every interaction as do classic html-based applications.

Stefano Mazzocchi (Mr. Cocoon):

"The Semantic Web has a serious problem: the XML people don't understand it."

He therefore wrote a short guide to Semantic Web specs for XML people (Part I)", explaining RDF, RDF/XML, N3(!), RDFS and OWL in short words and selected examples.
Great resource, I already wonder what will be in Part II.

The software making this weblog run has recently been "crossgraded" from a stale (and hacked) to a stable (and official) version. You might have noticed some changes. Now the blog sports a WAP/XHTML-mobile version for mobile devices, like all Kaywa blogs do.
Any feedback from people with appropriate devices is very welcome.

SlideML is great. If you followed this blog a bit, you know I'm writing all my presentations with it, in order no having to wrestle with tools like evil PowerPoint & Co.
SlideML only lacks a bit of tool support.. but now, as part of a publication not yet to be named, there is the WYSIWYG SlideML-Popoon-BXE Environment, gluing together BXE and Popoon (exaggeratory named "Cocoon for PHP) along with a syntax highlighting engine. An impressing PDF output pipeline remains still to be added, but Chregu and I just had that one day. We didn't even have to time to chat with Harry we coincidentally ran into.
I should say you'd better ignore the content of the demo presentation, by the way, due to the lack of quality it wasn't actually meant for publication. But if you want to try editing: Just browse the presentation and press the edit button.
I do like it the environment a lot, still I think I'll keep on writing my presentations the old-school way, directly hacking the XML. Much more comfortable than never-to-be-trusted WYSIWYG, to me at least. The entire package is open source (Apache-style), you can fetch it from the SVN repository. If you do, please fix the still numerous bugs :)
Oh, and by the way: the not-to-be-named book I mentioned promises to be pretty interesting, I think :)

[ via Roberto ]

EPFL (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) is offering free weblogs for all their students and staff members. The blogs do not have all the features you might expect from today's blogging software (trackbacks for example), and they all look exactly the same, but still this is a great move by the renowned Federal Institute of Technology. The lack of features might be due to the fact that they run a self-made blogging software ( at least "<generator>polyblog</generator>" suggests this), so they might very well offer more features soon.
I guess we can expect a lot of interesting content flowing out of that school, the only problem I see is that you don't have any kind of overview what's going on those blogs, there isn't even a list of all the blogs. Some advanced aggregator portal like the soon-to-be-finished Portalog would certainly add a lot to their infrastructure and its potential impact.
Admitting the Suisse Romande being an weblog aggregation cluster, this all fits together pretty well. :)

The invasion of Fribourg has started. The alien invaders have chosen a promising strategy: first conquer the central library, pictured above.

Yesterday the first organized DENG developer chat (log) took place. DENG, if you don't remember, is renders large subsets of XHTML, XForms, SVG, SMIL and other formats, styled by CSS2 and 3, written in pure Flash/ActionScript.
Besides the active developers and some interested thirds, M. Dubinko (XForms Essentials and S. Pemberton (Chair of the W3C XForms WG) took part in the conversation.
I learnt from the chat log that they don't compile the software with the expensive Macromedia Flash environment, but with KineticFusion (free download, closed source, still interesting).
They were pondering a couple of options on how to proceed with the development, pointing out a standard-compliant DOM implementation and an fitting XML event engine as the issues on top of their list.
As ActionScript itself is basically standardized ECMAScript (like JavaScript), it seems to be a promising and rather probable option for DENG to switch entirely to ECMAScript, gaining even more flexibility in deployment. (!)

DENG Chat is taking place every 1st and 3rd thursday of the month, second time on July 15th, 18:00 CEST on #codeazur (irc.freenode.net).

Top 5 search keywords for mediagonal.ch: Some rather appropriate acronyms and an entirely unrelated term:

php5 (12.8 %)
j2me (6.2 %)
unicode (2.3 %)
haarprodukte (1.9 %)
oop (1.9 %)

To put things straight: We do *not* sell hair products. No shampoos, no conditioner, no shaving cream.

So what's your site's strangest keyword?