I have been interested in calendar and time reform for some time. Each proposal has its own advantages and disadvantages. One of the largest disadvantages is that breaking compatibility with established systems and norms is hard.

So, any system should do as much as it can to improve matters, while still keeping existing norms where possible. Of course, to find out what norms are important, one must ask people.

In all my discussions with people about time, something has become apparent: people like days. They like going to bed at the same time every day, waking up every morning, and generally having a measurable system that follows the rotational cycle.

Conclusion: days should form the basis for any system of time.

People are way less attached to months. Months are icky, of non-uniform length, and are the focus of most attempts at calendar reform.

Instead of proposing a new sort of month (many have done that before me, and there are some good proposals out there) I propose something much less radical. Something that has sat well with the handful of people I’ve run this by privately so far (some geeks, some not). I propose we stop including months in our datestamp expressions.

What format will we use, then? Thankfully, ISO8601 (from whence we get the YYYY-MM-DD format) defines a nice format for use to use: YYYY-DDD. All major software libraries support this format (for example: the strftime string for it is %Y-%j).

Getting a bit more radical

What about time? Hours and minutes really suck. They really do. 24 in a day? What kind of “halfway” is 12? or 30?

Since I’ve already established that days should be the basis for time, why not just keep using them? What is time trying to convey? It is trying to convey how far one is into the day.

Right now I am 70.7% through my day. How do I know that? I just read it off my clock! My clock looks like this:

2009-209.708

That . is not just a separator: the whole bit after the – is a real number! (Some locales may prefer , as their decimal separator).

Halfway through your day becomes “.5” or “.500” instead of “12” or “1200”. That just makes sense!

Other benefits:

• Math. 209.710 + .40 = 210.110 Simple!
• If you take just up to millidays (three digits of time) and express in UTC+1 you get Swatch Internet Time

You’ll note that I am using this format on blog posts on this site.

Timezones

I would just like to also advocate a minimalist expression of timezones. UTC timestamps should end in ‘Z’. Other zones can use their offset in hours (which is really a name, so keeping it in hours for compatibility is fine).

YYYY-DDD.TTTZ
or
YYYY-DDD.TTT+00

Internet activities, publications of international interest, etc, should be expressed in UTC with the ‘Z’ terminator.

Was Googling this today and couldn’t find an answer. Wrote support. They don’t support it.

Does Dreamhost support mod_ssl and SSLVerifyClient? I tried putting the following in my .htaccess at singpolyma.net/catest, but nothing happened

Sorry, but I’m afraid not! While we do have mod_ssl, there is no
SSLVerifyClient. Sorry about any trouble this causes you!

If you have any other questions, just let me know!

Today I received a threat from Facebook about an old F8 app of mine called “The Wall” because it was designed to look identical to the Facebook wall (back when that was a separate area of one’s profile) but actually tie data back to a datastore on one’s own website. (Only Chris Shiels ever used it).

They claim to have a trademark on the word “wall”. I wonder what the superwall people (or anyone with the Unix command “wall” installed, which is where Facebook got the name from in the first place) are going to do.

The email is below:

To the developer of The Wall (6506538869):

During an automated check, our system found that your application name contains a variation on the disallowed term “wall.” Application names may not contain Facebook trademarks without the express prior written permission of Facebook.

Please change your application name within two weeks of receiving this email. Failure to comply will result in our system automatically changing your application name to “Unnamed Application #6506538869”

If you believe your application name has been selected in error, please contact us through the Developer Help form at http://www.facebook.com/dev-help?category=Name+Appeal&app_id=6506538869&issue_location=Developer+App&title=Appeal+to+use+%22The+Wall%22+%286506538869%29 .

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

First off, why would one want to do this? Well, cryptographic security is useful in communications medium other than email, and sometimes one may not have an email address for the person one is contacting. Also, a public key got from someone’s profile page is more likely to be their current key than the one got off a keyserver. Finally, if the discovery is done over TLS (or upcoming XRD signing techinques) then one can use the PKI to verify that the public key is, at very least, the one the owner of the URL claims. Which, for pseudonymous communications, may often be enough.

I will here propose three different ways to make this discovery work. Consumers must try all three. Publishers may publish more than one.

Content Negotiation

A public key represents a person. If a URL represents a person (such as on a profile page), then were that page’s data to be represented in the OpenPGP key format, one would get the user’s OpenPGP public key.

Send the header Accept: application/pgp-keys along with an HTTP GET request. If the Content-Type on the response is application/pgp-keys then the body is the user’s OpenPGP public key.

Links

If a GET or HEAD request is performed on the URL and in the headers is a Link header with rel=me and type=application/pgp-keys, then the URL of that link is the user’s OpenPGP public key.

If the Content-Type header of the GET request is text/html or application/xhtml+xml, then look in the page for <a> and <link> tags with rel=me and type=application/pgp-keys. If there is such a tag, then its href attribute is the URL to the user’s OpenPGP key.

LRDD+XRD

If LRDD discovery is performed on an endpoint, leading to the discovery of an XRD document containing a section like the following:

<Link>
<Rel>http://www.iana.org/assignments/relation/me;
<MediaType>application/pgp-keys</MediaType>
<URI>...</URI>
</Link>


Then the URI is the URI of the user’s OpenPGP key.

Security Considerations

The URLs used in all methods above should be either HTTPS URIs secured using TLS and a certificate issued by a CA known to the client, or data URIs.

Application to Other Crytography Schemes

Everything in this document applies equally well to public keys for any cryptography scheme, as long as the MIME types are changed appropriately.

I’ve been complaining about the state of GUI toolkits and standards, etc, for some time now. Even (and especially) in the FLOSS world we have so many incompatible ways to do GUIs, it’s crazy. No one can bother to write a GUI in every possible toolkit (or usually even in more than one!) so we end up with multiple projects all working on the same thing, but “in X toolkit/style”.

I was looking at the output of the Qt Designer (GUI drag-n-drop tool for the Qt toolkit) a couple weeks ago and realised something: the output is very hackable! In fact, many of the GUI designer tools out there have text or XML files that can be processed. To convert between them, all it would take is mapping the classes, properties, and events between the different toolkits.

Of course, that got me thinking. Mapping Qt to Gtk and Tk etc al, then mapping Gtk to Qt and Tk et al would be a rediculous proposition. Each toolkit or format would add an increasing number of bidirectional mapping requirements to any software.

The solution was pretty obvious. Create an intermediate data model that can represent GUIs from any toolkit and just write input/output filters. The strategy has a side-benefit too: such a data model could form the basis for discussion between different toolkits and formats on their similarities and where they could be brought closer together. Ideally, very simple GUI programs could be source-compatible between, say, Qt and Gtk.

So, how to determine the best way to model this data? Research and a wiki of course! Document existing toolkits and formats and what widgets/properties/events/layout stragegies they have, and see what the common patterns are.

So far I have at least widgets documented for Gtk, Qt, HTML forms, XForms, XUL, and wxWidgets. I have identified common widget and property patterns and common layout patterns. I have already started writing software to read and write GladeXML and should start on Qt Designer output soon.