There’s already a lot of stuff written on the internet about how GoDaddy SSL certificates aren’t recognized by Mac but are by Windows, all of it pointing to “a configuration problem”. I’m not sure how we got such special treatment but none of the instructions I’ve seen work in our particular case. In case you’re not familiar with it, the problem is that on Mac OS X connecting to the site displays a dialog saying that the certificate could not be validated for an unknown reason.

From Brett, our engineering manager extraordinaire: With Ephox’s recent sales growth we are expanding the R&D team and are currently looking for two outstanding Java developers to join the team in our Brisbane office. We develop in both Swing and J2EE using agile techniques and have a set of values based on the XP values. We have a fun workplace and are looking for the right people to join us.

At the risk of becoming a link blog, anyone thinking about social software should go and read Dare Obasanjo’s latest post: Participation as Social Capital: The Fundamental Flaw of Social News Sites. I think the most telling part for me was: Although turning participation in your online community into a game complete with points and a high score table is a good tactic to gain an initial set of active users, it does not lead to a healthy or diverse community in the long run.

I’ve had this article by Seth Gottlieb open for a while now but quite frankly don’t have much I could add except to say go read it. The idea that content is more than just data because of how real people perceive and work with it leads to a huge difference in how you design user interfaces for content management systems. A content management system should be more than just a web interface to some great big database, it shouldn’t make users think the way the database is laid out, it should let them focus on the content and the true messages that it conveys.

For the first few years that I worked at Ephox there was a regularly recurring problem: how to let our clients know exactly what’s changed between versions. We were good at showing off the new features but never had an accurate list of which bugs were fixed and every so often a client would ask for that. It seems simple enough – just keep a changelog – but there were some challenges.

Around the time of the iPhone’s initial release, I wrote: It’s this popularity of Java in the mobile phone world that makes the lack of Java on the iPhone seem so odd to me. I can understand Apple wanting to have complete control over the iPhone interface, and I’ll concede that most of the existing games for mobile phones probably wouldn’t translate very well to the keypadless iPhone, but it will be interesting to see if Apple can satisfy the great desire for cool little mobile games that today’s teenagers, a key market segment for the iPhone, without leveraging the existing knowledge mobile games developers have in Java.

Doug’s discovered a way to improve the effectiveness of simian to avoid adding more duplication to a code base: The solution is very simple. The simian-report is a an xml file, so I wrote a SAX2 DefaultHandler that was able to parse the number of duplications at the different threshold levels. Putting this into a trivial ant task then gave us a task to help make things no worse even at levels below what the simian-check was doing!

There are a lot of articles around the place giving generally good advice on how to be a better blogger and get noticed. Alastair Rankine highlights one of the key problems with slavishly following this advice – you become boring: I was initially attracted to Atwood’s blog for its relatively simple premise and smart delivery. With startling regularity over an extended time he managed to deliver bite-sized morsels relating to the stated domain of programming and human factors.

Back as far as Raskin’s The Humane Interface, and quite possibly before, modes in user interfaces have been frowned upon. Despite that, huge amounts of software ships with a simple mode and an advanced mode. The theory being that when users get started they use the simple mode which makes the simple tasks they want to do really straight forward. Later when they want to do more than the basics, they’ll be more familiar with the software and thus be able to handle the advanced mode.

David Welton described a frustration he had with FireFox’s spell checker which piqued my interest: I write most of my email (in gmail) and submit most web site content in English, however, a significant portion is also done in Italian. I leave the spell checker in English, because Italian is, in general, quite easy to spell, so that even as a native speaker, a helping hand is occasionally welcome. However, it isn’t as if I write Italian perfectly either, so the help there would be nice as well.

Kevin Gamble pointed me towards the Sun Wiki Publisher for publishing documents to MediaWiki servers straight from OpenOffice/StarOffice. The key problem with these types of integrations is that wiki markup simply can’t handle anywhere near the same level of expressiveness as even HTML, let alone a word processor document. Hence the description mentions: All important text attributes such as headings, hyperlinks, lists and simple tables are supported. Even images are supported as long as they have already been uploaded to the wiki site.

Jeff Atwood: Some of the largest sites on the internet — sites you probably interact with on a daily basis — are written in PHP. If PHP sucks so profoundly, why is it powering so much of the internet? The only conclusion I can draw is that building a compelling application is far more important than choice of language. While PHP wouldn’t be my choice, and if pressed, I might argue that it should never be the choice for any rational human being sitting in front of a computer, I can’t argue with the results.