What is a dynamic page? It’s a page that can change, in response to the user, without having to be reloaded from the server. Javascript, of course, is the vehicle for this functionality.

For so long, 99% of what was seen done with javascript was gimmicky dropdowns and rollovers that I honestly assumed it had little other power. Rollovers (colour or image change when your mouse hover on a link) may be done with purely CSS, and far better mechnisms exist for menus, such as the widely celebrated Suckerfish Dropdowns, which contain a tiny piece of Javascript only to correct for IE’s broken CSS support.

I didn’t think I’d seriously ever need to learn much Javascript until I hit an interesting problem with Quickcook, early in its development. I realised that for someone entering a recipe, scrolling through all the ingredients on the site was an unacceptable way to find what they were looking for. So I devised this little demo page, which is a mock-up of the ‘ingredients’ portion of the recipe-adding system. Now, the paeg weight is only 8k, and there’s about 100 ingredients on the site, so that’s pretty good. But the idea of pre-downloading all the fish when someone’s making bread just doesn’t seem to click.

There’s been a lot of buzz on the web since Google launched Google Suggest a week ago. But even more in web-development circles — how do they do that? Because it actually sends data back to the server while you type, and returns results for the suggestion box, behind your back.

Just as a site like Wired News adopting standards is good for the web, so also is a high-profile company adopting a new technology like this. We’ll be seeing a lot of ‘live searches’ out there in the next little while, I expect. And when I finally have some time to work on Quickcook, there’ll be a few interesting features to try implementing.

For now, though, it sure would be cool if Mapquest worked the way this map does.

Mike ps– for those keeping track, the Algebra exam went very well yesterday. Just getting back to studying for Chemistry now.

I clicked ‘Send’ on a rather important business-related email several days ago, and began shutting down my computer, barely giving it another thought. Within a few moments, however, a bounce message came back, alerting me that my mail had been flagged as spam — worse, in fact, my IP had.

This page exists on Shared Hosting, which means that a single server at Surpass hosts this and approximately 150 other small sites. One of these 150 other users, one of them used their shared hosting account to send a 419 mailing, and now that server’s IP, my IP, is listed at at least two major ‘Spam-Originating Host’ Directories. The two organizations that rejected my mailings were SpamCop and SpamHaus.

To the credit of the excellent people at Surpass, the troublesome user has been expelled, the IP of the server is in the process of being released, and so it’ll shortly be business as usual.

But I’d never seen spam-blocking of this nature before — I’d assumed it was almost entirely inbox-sided. Paul Graham’s articles on killing spam have fascinated me since I first found them several years ago. Mozilla Thunderbird, my mail client, uses a Bayesian filter, and has not had a single false-positive since I started with it in September. And it’s caught all but a small handful of spam.

One thing I found at the SpamHaus page that interested me was the ROKSO, the Register of Known Spam Operations. It’s amazing to see that 99% of the spam we receive originates from only a handful of major sources. Many of the names on the Register are familiar to us, others are just aliases that use aliases.

Anyhow, if you’ve sent me mail in the last few days, and I either haven’t replied, or replied from my uwaterloo account, I apologize for the inconvenience. But I’m back on track, now, I think.

Mike

If there’s a silver bullet for distributing music online, Puretracks.com hasn’t found it.

I mentioned some time ago that I had enjoyed shopping online with my nifty new Mastercard. Contrary to the accusation that shopping on the Internet would encourage careless spending, I found that it allowed me to be much more educated about a purchase, since I could click to dozens of review sites and forums to get the general consensus on a product.

I haven’t bought anything since my new Laser Printer, since I haven’t had occasion. Today, however, I got a moo-ing milk carton for lunch which contained a $5 online music voucher. I was disappointed to not win the Mazda obviously, but it seemed like a good opportunity to form an opinion of ’small purchase download vending’.

As above, it was disappointing. I appreciated the ‘30-second’ preview of each song, but I was annoyed by the inability to do more complicated queries, such as ‘Show me the top 40 most popular songs by number of downloads in subcategory X’, rather than just a general ‘This Week’s Top 100′ listings and by album/artist. Perhaps I was just prejudiced, because the site forced me to use IE instead of Firefox.

I really had a much more positive experience several weeks ago when I purchased the track ‘Feeling the Love’ from the band Reactor’s home page. Of course, the motivation and situation were different. With Reactor, I could have stolen the track, but I paid them the $0.99 to support a group breaking away from the record company bureaucracy. On Puretracks, I was looking to buy any $5 worth of tunes, and ended up with four that I could just as easily have leeched. Except that instead of getting real, normal MP3s, they’re these strange WMA files that require some kind of wierd online authentication to play. Can I even burn these to a disc?

Perhaps much as the open-source movement has changed the way software is distributed (I’ll take OpenOffice over Word any day), groups like Reactor will change the face of the music industry.

The question will still remain, though: Is it financially viable? Will artists’ websites be plastered with corporate sponsorship? Can live concerts, shows, and fan donations really pay the bills for these adults and their families? Probably not… so the model still needs some work. But in the meantime, it’s an uphill battle for the Empire against Peer-2-Peer. Kazaa has been successfully destroyed, but in its place, several more clients vie for the top position, not to mention the almighty Bittorrent.

Mike

I realised a couple nights ago that I’d been pretty well listening to the same 50 songs for the two months since I arrived in Waterloo. This is a problem.

I’d resisted upgrading past Winamp 2.7, since reports had been bad on Winamp3. But I sprung for it, having heard about the Winamp Radio Stations, which operate under the dubious legality of ’since it’s streaming media, it doesn’t matter that you get whole songs for free.’

I really like it. I’ve got an all-time hits station and an classic rock station bookmarked that have both been great. The titles are unimportant, though. What matters is that it’s really just someone’s 24 hour playlist being broadcast over the net for anyone to listen to. And as long as their taste is agreeable, the relationship is good.

I’d remembered reading poor reports about internet radio some time ago, but my recollection is that the article author was checking out RealPlayer streams and was connecting via a fast modem or slow highspeed.

Well, I’m connecting on quite brisk highspeed (Rogers), and I haven’t had a single Buffering Break in my 128kbps streams in the 5-6 hours that I’ve listened to them over the past few days.

I realise, scrolling through the gigantic list of stations, many with less than ten listeners, that there’s probably a lot of really lousy ’stations’ out there. But the Internet is ruled my mob law. Yes, anyone can publish whatever they like out here, but it’s the votes of confidence by readership that make some fail and others not.

Mike

Stuff this cool should be illegal. Seriously, I thought only the military had access to satellite maps this good. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, get yourself over to Keyhole.com and sign up for the 7-day trial.

My housemates and I spent at least a good hour bouncing around the globe checking out various landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Washington Monument. It seems that some areas are censored out, such as the US Capitol, however the Pentagon is shown in stunning detail, as is my neighbourhood back home.

Unfortunately the town of Waterloo is considered ‘Rural Area’, so the images of campus are considerably less impressive. I was also disappointed to not see some international sights such as the Pyramids and the Palm in Dubai. In spite of these, it’s an absolutely stunning job they’ve done of compiling data from different mapping projects into a single globe like this. It’s my understanding that similar projects have been undertaken before, but never with this slick a result.

It’s hard to even describe, but it gives you such an incredible feeling of the enormity of the Earth when you’re able to zoom from street level to viewing the whole thing in just a few mouse movements.

This sort of thing has incredible potential as a teaching tool. I was embarassed with myself that I wasn’t able to locate the Eiffel Tower without cheating (looking up the co-ordinates). However, experience playing Scotland Yard gave me a significant advantage navigating around London and identifying a few of the buildings between Hyde Park and the Thames.

I don’t know what these people would charge a school board for a site license, but it would be criminal to not at least consider it. This thing has implementations extending far beyond geography. History, Geometry, Languages, Literature, anyone?

Mike

But only because Hotmail feels the need to compete.

Not that I have anything against Google, but I’ve already been at Hotmail for four years, and I don’t feel any need to switch. I’m sure it’s a fabulous service, but I’m just not in the market at the moment…

Anyway, if Hotmail wants to suddenly offer their customers 250 MB of storage for free, I’m all for that.

Mike

I haven’t been on MSN for a few days because it was inexplicably not connecting… I had assumed this was a temporary setback at Microsoft’s end, but have since decided that it was probably because they released version 6.2 and I was still on 6.1. Oh well, being on dialup as I am, it takes like an hour to download a 5 MB installation, so I’ll see you all online in an hour — maybe.

The larger issue, I expect, is simply that Microsoft has grandfathered the old MSN Messenger program in favour of Windows Messenger. I don’t really blame them… but it’s still frustrating to lose support like that.

It seems that Greece won the Euro 2004 soccer thingy-thing, so Philip will be pleased about that. I heard the horns on Danforth earlier — I expect they’ll be celebrating that for a couple hours.

So I was checking my web stats to see how many folks drop by here, and it’s only a handful a day, which is what I expected — a good deal of traffic is generated by the googlespider and other robots. Anyhow, more interesting than the numbers is the referring sites. A couple hits have come in through QBasicnews, which doesn’t surprise me, although I rarely post there any more… and another bunch from the Rage3d Forums. But the surprise was to see 27 hits from the domain www.clublatte.com. If you clicked on that link, you’ll see right away that it’s an online singles site… hmm… How is it that a link to this page somehow ended up on there? Ah well, life is full of mysteries.

Mike