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Facebook has bought the Internet startup Parakey which was founded by two co-creators of the Firefox web browser.

This is going to be an interesting combination, I've been waiting to see what comes out of Parakey since the article about them in the IEEE Spectrum magazine in November.

LugRadio is now finished for another year. I met lots of really interesting new people at LugRadio Live and caught up with some old friends.

I had quite a long chat with Aaron Seigo from the KDE project about Software as a Service (he's not a fan). I realised that we're interested in solving the same problems, but have very different views on how to solve them. I commented that I'd love to see him have a discussion with Chris DiBona from Google about it (he was also at the event). I then wandered into the cafe and spotted Chris sitting in the corner on his laptop so I stopped to say hello. I mentioned my conversation with Aaron, and Chris said to invite him in for a chat. I went and fetched Aaron, bought them both a drink and then tried to keep quiet while they discussed the issue amongst themselves.

It was really quite interesting to see two people, both from the open source community but with differing views have a productive conversation. I actually thought this little encounter was a microcosm for the whole weekend. A diverse community of people with common goals but differing views all together in one building, having informal, intelligent debates about the issues they consider to be important in the software community.

There were representatives from lots of companies like Canonical, Google, Neuros and the BBC and particularly brave attendees from Novell and Microsoft. There were also people from community projects, notably the youthful Bongo Project and MythTV.

On Sunday I had lunch with Elliot from OpenAdvantage (and his friend whose name I've forgotten but would like to keep in touch with) and we must have been having interesting conversations because an hour seemed to vanish in a blink

Also, I think I found a hosting company for Krellian, the Linux friendly Bytemark Hosting.

So well done to the LugRadio team and the event crew who pulled off another great event.

Oh, and hi to all the Wolves LUG people who I had a few drinks with on Saturday night, they were a very friendly bunch!

Designing web applications in a RESTful way from the User Interface perspective can be very challenging and many people argue that REST just isn't suited to user interfaces and should be restricted to Application Interfaces. I've come across this recently when trying to understand why the Bongo Project uses a separate URI scheme for the user interface to the application interface. I've always thought that a resource is a resource, regardless of whether you're a man or a machine. Different people and different machines want different representations of the resource, but it is still the same resource.

Dave Thomas is a pragmatist with knowledge and experience behind him. But in reply to Dave's insightful blog post, The RADAR Architecture: RESTful Application, Dumb-Ass Recipient, I play devil's advocate and put forward an idealistic alternative argument:

From a pragmatic point of view this makes an awful lot of sense because it's easier to bend your server application to the will of millions of existing web browsers than to change the way browsers work.

However, I wonder whether from an idealistic point of view this would be better addressed in the design of the "dumb browsers" you talk about. The dumb browser doesn't need to be quite as dumb if we don't want it to.

What if XHTML forms and Web Browsers *did* support the PUT and DELETE verbs? I'm not familiar with the reasons that browsers do not already support these HTTP methods, but I do know that the original vision Tim Berners-Lee had of a web browser was of an application which could write data as readily as it could read it.

Maybe it is a user interface problem.

Asbjørn Ulsberg asked what a request/response would like if a web browser wants to GET a resource represented as an HTML form so it can edit the information and then PUT it back to the same URI. In answer to his question, I don't believe we should have a MIME type to put into an Accept header specifically for an HTML form view. It's still HTML after all!

Perhaps the answer is that when HTML is displayed in a browser, if the user has write permission, it is editable in the same way that a document in a word processor is editable, rather relying exclusively on forms for user input. If you've ever used Google Docs you may have noticed that if you click on the title of a document, it becomes editable using JavaScript. There is no separate "edit" and "view" mode, it's all one thing so you don't need to tag ;edit to the end of the URI. The reason web browsers themselves don't work this way is probably because the HTML view is only one representation of a resource and it might be hard to translate changes made by the user to this presentation of the information into changes in the underlying data model. Using forms allows the application designer to restrict user input to specific fields in the underlying data model. This is something which needs more thought because I believe it's also the core reason behind the "offline problem", but that's a different story.

roberthahn writes that "The dumb browser doesn't provide the user with a way of submitting requested Mime types." Well, again, maybe this is a user interface issue with the browsers, maybe they should! Remember that the web is just a collection of resources, HTML is only one representation of those resources.

If "smart" client interface can specify which representation it wants, why can't a user? Maybe a user should be able to choose whether they want to browse the web in plain text, formatted text, or even 2D or 3D vector graphics or a voice representation of a resource. The user agent could allow the user to choose a particular mode in which to browse the web depending on their current environment, and offer alternative representations where they are available. For devices that are only capable of certain modes of interaction with the user (e.g. a voice interface), this could be fixed by the user agent.

We shouldn't entirely dismiss the idea of changing web user agents themselves, just because it is a difficult option.

Melt the Megafreeze, let it trickle

Tuomo Valkonen writes that The megafreeze development model is broken in GNU/Linux distributions. He argues for a very long release cycle for an extremely stable base system (in line with Kernel releases) and then separate repositories for applications which are constantly upgraded.

I've often thought that in a world where security updates can be trickled over the Internet as they become available, it's odd that new features come in big chunks with each new release of a distribution. With Ubuntu, I upgrade every 6 months to see new features, why can't the features just appear as they become available like we're used to with Software as a Service?

Sam has tried to explain the reasons for the status quo to me on numerous occasions (him knowing a lot more about building Linux distributions than I), but like Valkonen I still remain unconvinced that the Megafreeze is the best approach.

Abstract User Interfaces: "Plasticity"

While I was on Tuomo Valkonen's homepage I noticed the Ion window manager that he developed. I found the UI ideas very interesting because they're very similar to a lot of things I'm trying to achieve with Webscope.

Ion has "tiling workspaces with tabbed frames" and the screen is always filled at any one time, like the multi-level resource tabs I want to create.

Ion also has a "query module" which "implements a line editor similar to mini buffers in many text editors. It is used to implement many different queries with tab-completion support: show manual page, run program, open SSH session, view file, goto named client window or workspace, etc." which is a similar concept to the Natural Language Command Line I am trying to develop.

In a paper entitled Vis/Vapourware Interface Synthesiser Valkonen describes a system for describing user interface semantics and then automatically generating actual interfaces based on user's preferences with the use of stylesheets. This seems very much like a transform view in a Model View Controller design pattern and he's essentially talking about doing for the desktop what I want to do for the multimodal web. Starting with a semantic description of a user interface (e.g. using DIAL) and then transforming that semantic description into various different presentations using XSL stylesheets.

In his bibliography, he links to papers which use the term "Plasticity" in user interfaces, which I might explore further. User interfaces these days have to go "above the level of a single device" -- O'Reilly.

I use three different operating systems on a daily basis - Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux - yet my data is always the same and I often use the same applications. Here's what I use on a regular basis:

Sometimes I'll use an OS-specific app if it provides a better experience, but still uses open standards. For example, I use iCal, iChat, iTunes and Address Book on the Mac with iCalendar, Jabber, MP3 and LDAP respectively (I know, MP3 isn't entirely open). I can easily chop and change which application I use, or even use different ones at the same time because my data is stored in such an accessible way.

Although I believe that desktop Linux is very important and Ubuntu is my first choice of OS, what's more important is the open standards it uses for managing data. Free software won't fend off proprietary software by building a better desktop, it will win by making the operating system a user is running almost irrelevant.

What I'm working towards at the moment is hosting all of my data across web servers and having a web application to manage each type of data. That way I can access my data on any device with a web browser - including my phone and Internet tablet. I've had a web server at home for a couple of years now which I store some of my data on.

Web applications I've been using include:

• Horde IMP
• GMail
• PHPiCalendar
• Google Calendar
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets
• Ampache
• Flickr
• Gliffy
• Trac
• Gregarius
• Google Reader

Some of these are hosted by companies, some are hosted on my own server, but what's important is that they use the same open standards.

One of the aims of Moya is to create a home server which manages all of these types of data and provides a web interface, making the client operating system irrelevant.

I've just set up a wiki farm with MediaWiki for the new hippygeek.co.uk. This means running multiple instances of MediaWiki from a single installation, to reduce the amount of work needed to perform upgrades on multiple wikis.

Basically it involves symlinking the entire contents of the mediawiki directory for each instance, with a few exceptions. I'm not sure how well this will scale if I automate creating wikis in this way and I'm yet to attempt an actual upgrade, I'll write about my experiences here.

A creatively written article from Wired describes the "Internet cloud, where massive facilities across the globe will store all the data you'll ever use."

The article describes Google's search for cheap power for their giant data centres and touches on others like Sun and Ask.com. It raises some interesting new paradigms in computing, such as electrical power being more scarce than processing power and time being more precious than money.

It's perhaps interesting to include a mention of Amazon's own EC2 or "Elastic Compute Cloud" and S3 or "Simple Storage Service" which allow you to pay for remote storage and bandwidth. It's also interesting to note Microsoft's shift towards the new "Live" brand and their move into Software as a Service, all before Vista is even out of the door.

This could all be passed off as just another spin on "the network is the computer", but things certainly seem to be speeding up around here. You have to wonder whether the concept was just before its time, and now the infrastructure is catching up, the real fun is starting.

An aside...

With all these clouds around, I've created an experimental "tag cloud" of my own. It sits on the right hand side of my homepage and represents the topics I'm currently writing about.