Safari: Ok, you win

I really thought Safari's web rendering engine was doomed, though I noted some caveats.

Ok, so even I can be wrong. Yes, I still use Firefox (kind of got away from Camino, though I use it on slower machines), but clearly WebKit is a winner.

The iPhone has established WebKit compatibility as a must-have for most web sites, but the use of WebKit in the Android platform has finished the deal.

This is from the Safari WebKit blog:

...Many of you have seen the announcement of the Android Mobile Platform (www.openhandsetalliance.com) followed by today’s release of the SDK (code.google.com/android). We (Android) were happy to highlight the use of the WebKit engine as the rendering core for Android’s browser. We have been working on our mobile implementation of WebKit for quite some time. A few changes that we made to WebKit, which make it more suitable for mobile devices, have been submitted to the Tip Of Tree prior to the release of the SDK...

Another interesting change we made, which is not mobile specific, was to make the canvas tag platform independent. Again we are working on migrating this to SVN.
Most changes made to WebKit are clearly identified with a #ifdef ANDROID_[feature name]...

Canvas is the drawing environment for applications in WebKit. Knowing little, I think of it as "QuickDraw for the web".

Making Canvas "platform independent" sounds interesting.

Anyway, sorry WebKit. I was wrong, you were right.

If Google changes their Docs and Blogger sites to work better with Safari, I might even switch back. (Safari editing in Blogger causes a tag mess in the output.)

Update: See the comments for a persuasive explanation of what Canvas does and it's relation to Quartz. I'd been using "QuickDraw" as a metaphor rather than a technology, but it's very nice to get more background.

Incidentally, I write this blog primarily as a way to create notes for my own learning and reference, and secondarily as a way to "give back" to the net. I get enormous help from people who share knowledge freely, this blog is a small way to share what I know, and sometimes what I think (I mostly put opinion elsewhere).

I assumed readership would only come incidentally, as the result of a Google Search to solve a specific problem I'd written about.

Somehow, for reasons that are unclear to me, I seem to have acquired some rather knowledgeable readers. It's an unexpected pleasure.

Lunarpages: a sign of the end-times for low end hosting solutions?

My blogs are posted through Google's Blogger, and they've been very reliable for months.

My older web pages however, and several domains, are hosted by Lunarpages. Lunarpages is a low-end to mid-range hosting provider with an above average reputation. I've used them for years and I've been reasonably satisfied.

They're not doing so well lately. They've been down 3 times in the past 10 days, and they've been offline all day today. Only their forums are working. Even several Google Apps domains, where Lunarpages only does redirects, are unavailable because the redirects have failed.

My guess is it's some kind of denial-of-service attack on their DNS servers. The worst part of it is they're maintaining complete radio silence -- no postings at all on their network status. Since their entire domain is unreachable I think that merits a comment or two.

Google has the technical team and infrastructure to handle a pretty massive BOT attack. Lunarpages clearly doesn't. I wonder if that vulnerability is going to wipe out the low end internet services market -- leaving only the big players.

I'll have to start moving off of Lunarpages. It'll take quite a while, but I'll start by moving my domains to the service Google uses for the Google Apps domains I have. The last step will be finding a new home for my legacy web pages.

Update 11/14/07: It looks like this was two problems. Lunarpages had been failing due to DNS attacks, but the failure of the past week was a routing problem with the service my Hotel was using. I didn't have time to debug the routing problem, so I can't say who was ultimately responsible.

Terrific review of Google Search 2007 - power user techniques

I hadn't realized how much personalization of search results Google does now. No wonder I can find my own blog material so easily!

Biases and Restrictions in Google Search:

...5. If you don't like Google's personalized results you can log out from your Google account, disable the Web History service or turn off the personalization bias by adding &pws=0 to Google's URL. Note that the parameter is not persistent and it only works for the current search.

6. To restrict your search to the high-quality (?) web sites included in the Open Directory Project, you can append &cat=gwd/Top to Google's URL or perform your search at Google Directory...

There's lots more. It's definitely worth studying this and keeping a link to the reference.

I tried the &pws=0 parameter when searching for my own stuff, and it was neat to see the search results change. It wasn't a large change, but in general my stuff moved down the main page one step.

XP Demotion: from Administrator to Debugger User

My corporate Dell laptop has been behaving badly. As far as I can tell, it's possessed.

Today our noble and long suffering sysadmin took a look at my privilege settings.

The one local and two network admin accounts on the Dell had been switched to Debugger User. Apparently, it's going around the office.

As of 11/09/07 a search on Microsoft's site doesn't turn up any useful explanation. The current theory is that it's a .NET bug.

The way the security privileges had been reconfigured should, in theory, work. It's not, however, standard.

Anything that's not standard in XP is in the danger zone - and it's getting worse. My best guess is that Microsoft has stopped seriously debugging XP, and every security update and/or installation of new Microsoft software drives XP closer to entropic collapse.

Vista SP 1, not coincidentally, is starting to look better.

I am tempted to buy a MacBook Pro for the office and run Outlook and Access in an XP VM. I could use OS X for all my other tools, and if the system started misbehaving I'd delete the VM and restore from backup...

Phil Bradley's Top 10 Useful Web Tools

A terrific list. I use many of Phil's choices, but Netvibes and PageFlakes are new to me:

Phil Bradley's weblog: Top 10 Useful Web Tools from Pandia:

...Netvibes is their preference for a start page. I use Netvibes as my backup system on Internet Explorer, but I'm very firmly in the PageFlakes camp here. More flexible, better options, easier to use, larger user base ...

I use Picasa Web Albums instead of Flickr -- though lately Picasa WA has really been annoying me. Otherwise I'm aligned with Phil in all tool choices.

Fixing a broken Windows XP Remote Desktop Connection install

This was so much harder than it should have been.

My home copy of XP Pro no longer had a Program shortcut to Remote Desktop Connection. It wasn't in Programs\Accessories\Communications or anywhere else I could find.

On the other hand RDC was installed. I tried reinstalling from the XP CD (see help for XP) but it said a newer version was already in place.

I tried looking for a way to uninstall RDC thinking I could then reinstall and retrieve my shortcut - I couldn't find any way to do that.

I tried searching my hard drive for the file and navigating windows folders, but I couldn't find it.

Eventually I found Remote Desktop Connection (Terminal Services Client 6.0) for Windows XP (KB925876) and installed that. It went well, but it didn't create a favorite/shorcut!

Well, it turns out that c:\windows\system32\mstsc.exe is the remote desktop client (tsc probably stands for terminal server client).

Isn't that pretty bloody obscure.

So I created a shortcut to that and now everything is fine. Presumably I accidentally deleted the original when cleaning up my start folders (specifically, I moved a lot of stuff out of the "all users" folder to protect it from the children).

How did I figure this one out? I had to find another XP machine and identify where the shortcut went on that machine. There was no other way.

Incidentally, mstc.exe has some very obscure command line options:

Parameters

ConnectionFile : Specifies the name of an .rdp file for the connection.

/v:server : Specifies the remote computer to which you want to connect.

/console : Connects to the console session of the specified Windows 2000 Server.

/f : Starts Remote Desktop connection in full-screen mode.

/w:width /h:height : Specifies the dimensions of the Remote Desktop screen.

/edit : Opens the specified .rdp file for editing.

Remarks ...

.rdp files are stored for each user as hidden files in My Documents.

When I use RDC on a dual monitor setup, full screen mode is limited to the size of my primary monitor. I wonder if I could use the /w and /h options to set it to the size of my larger secondary monitor ...

Searching: Google and Yahoo are very different from Microsoft

Today a quite heavily used and very senior Mac site noticed that almost all their search referrals come via Google:

TidBITS Inside TidBITS: Google Used 70 Times More than Yahoo:

... What could possibly account for Google's utter dominance in our statistics? I know the crawlers come through all the time, and indeed, searching Yahoo and the others for the same keywords used in the popular Google searches brings up our articles. Do users of Yahoo and the others just not like us?

Very strange. My first guess is that Google Analytics has a bug in it, but that would be one heck of a bug.

In any case I'm posting on this because I noticed something curious the other day that could be related.

I used the search string "Gordon's Tech" on Microsoft Live Web search. My blog didn't appear anywhere in the first few pages. Oh well, I thought, I can just type the URL. I have no delusions of fame after all.

On impulse though, I tried "Gordon's Tech" (phrase search, so with the quotes) on Google. The blog is the number one result. It's also, for that matter, the number one result on Yahoo (albeit with an older URL that still works).

I don't think this accounts for the TidBITS oddity, but it is a worthwhile reminder that Microsoft's search results can be very different from those of Google or Yahoo. So if you don't find what you expect on Google, try Microsoft.

Of course you can guess which search engines I approve of.