Dylan posted a good blog post at a ridiculous time of night last night discussing software architecture, his role in it and more. Firstly, it’s really good to see these kinds of blog posts appearing – Ephox has gotten really slack at blogging and I think that’s a shame because we have a lot of good stuff to say. Actually publishing things makes you actually think it through and it allows people to build on those ideas and improve them.

Antonio Cangiano: In theory I could have been disappointed. After all, my visit didn’t fix the problem at hand, my expensive laptop seemed to be good as a door stopper, and repairing this thing could potentially be less advantageous than just buying a newer unit. Yet, as I arrived home, I told my wife that my next laptop would definitely be an Apple. The reason for this is that I saw a genuine effort to help me out, an unheard level of care for the customer and an willingness to do what’s right, even if it costs the company some money.

If you haven’t heard already, we’re spending our first Christmas away up in the Swiss Alps so we’ll be sure to get a white Christmas. We actually found a self guided tour from an Australian company which includes the hotel, Christmas lunch, a sleigh ride and a suggested itinerary for exploring Switzerland. The train ticket they give us includes most of the travel around the country and discounts off the optional parts so we should wind up seeing quite a lot of the country.

Andy Baio did an experiment with Mechanical Turk which is somewhat interesting on it’s own, but what really caught my eye was: Upload a photo of yourself… DON’T provide any identifiable information, like your name or email, since that’s a violation of MTurk policy. When did technology take over so much that our face, the single most important aspect our brains use in identifying people, become not personally identifiable information?

One of the hardest types of bugs to track down is a deadlock situation. They are very time dependant which makes them intermitten, specific to a particular computer and configuration and generally impossible to reproduce in a debugger. Fortunately, at least in Java, it’s fairly easy to spot most of the situations where a deadlock is possible: Calls to SwingUtilities.invokeAndWait Calls to Object.wait() synchronized blocks There might be a few others depending on the libraries you’re using, but starting with those three, in that order, is very likely to lead you to at least one point in the deadlock.

While many web visionaries are busy advocating the correct use of ETags and URIs etc etc, I just wish people could get the very basics of HTTP right. I’m not even talking about mime-types here, just status codes would be a really good place to start. If you’re returning the page as requested, use 200. If you’re returning a server error, use 500. If the requested page doesn’t exist, use 404.

James Duncan Davidson did the math and found he was better off without a land line phone: Once the numbers have been looked it, however, it makes more sense to just go all the way. Of course, if $2400 per year was the only way to have decent access to the Internet, it’d be a different story. But it doesn’t need to cost that much anymore. So I’m cutting the twisted pair lines.

While reviewing some screen mockups for EditLive! today, it occurred to me just how limited an environment we’re forced to work in. It turns out that the default, and thus most common, size of a rich text area in IBM WCM is 740×450 (note to Ephoxians, I mistakenly quoted this as 740×360 earlier so we have slightly more vertical space than I thought). Even in my blog’s editing interface, the editor is 718×600.

IWWCM has a component specifically to provide “inline editing” – in other words, adding links to content items so you can quickly edit, accept, reject or delete if you’re logged in as a user who has permission to do such things. I have two problems with this approach: You have to be logged in to see the links. The links affect the way the page looks so you don’t see the site the same way as normal visitors.

You’re sitting on the train listening to music on your iPhone. Your wife rings, you answer it and the girl sitting cross from you suddenly gives you an odd look. What went wrong? When you have headphones in the iPhone makes no audible ringing noise. So people around you have no idea that you just took a call. Not that Id change this but it does generate some odd looks. Especially when you answer with “hey sweety”.

The Ephox bloggers have been way too quiet lately (myself included) so I thought I’d start an Ephox meme. What’s your 5 favorite features of any of Ephox’s products? They might be built in or plugins that we’ve developed, maybe even features of our internal systems that make your life easier, but preferably something that our clients could get hold of (teasing people just isn’t nice). Here’s my list: Built-in Image Editor.

For future reference, James Tauber has a very useful article on using the HSL color scheme to create shiny gradient buttons. It’s worth knowing that in Java HSL is actually called HSB (brightness instead of luminosity) and there are various methods on the java.awt.Color class for converting between HSB and RGB as well as creating color objects directly from HSB.