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May 15, 2005
Apache and Tiger
I’ve been taking a little vacation from blogging. We will return to your regularly-scheduled programming soon.
However, I did want to bring up one very serious bug that may be affecting some of my visitors.
In the comment thread to my WebDAV post, Andreas Amann points out that there seems to be a serious incompatibility between MacOSX 10.4 and Apache 2.0.x.
I had not noticed any such problem exchanging 200 KB PDF files under WebDAV. The reason — as I will explain below — is that the Apple Finder WebDAV client is clever enough to hide the problem from me.
May 6, 2005
A Thin Veneer
It’s Yom haShoah. Time, again, to reflect on the events of 60+ years ago, and what they mean for us today.
My father survived the Holocaust under rather unusual circumstances1. Growing up, as the child of a Survivor, I tend to think my childhood as having been fairly normal. But there were a few telltale signs that not all was completely as it seemed.
All the years I was growing up, we had gold hidden in the basement of our house. “Dad,” I would plead, “there are these things called banks …”. “You never know.” he would reply, thoughtfully holding up a gold bar, “One of these might buy a loaf of bread, or a sack of potatoes, some day.” And so the gold remained, a hedge against eventualities I could never quite wrap my head around.
It’s hard for us to remember, today, but Germany, before the rise of the Nazis, was the most civilized country in Europe. And German Jews were better off than their co-religionist anywhere else in Europe or, probably, in the world. But the veneer of civilization is thin. And my father, having learned that lesson well, could never be as complacent as I.
1 In honour of the day, please take some time out, and watch the video.
May 2, 2005
MT Admin
It sounded like a simple request: serve the MovableType Administrative Interface with the correct XHTML MIME-type, so that authors at the String Coffee Table could see the MathML when they preview their posts.
Shouldn’t be too hard, eh? After all, MovableType is supposed to be pretty hip with Standards-compliance, and we’re already serving all of the public-facing pages with the correct MIME-type.
One of the abiding illusions of web-design, is that, on a well-constructed XHTML website (and, if MovableType isn’t one, what is?), changing from text/html to the correct application/xhtml+xml should be an easy transition. Well, here was a good test case: a web application, written by hip, Standards-aware people, but which had (evidently) never been tested with an XHTML MIME-type.
How did it fare?