What he does is this:

1. checks the box on his domain registrar to forward from example.com/* to www.example.com/
2. once the user’s web browser arrive at www.example.com, he checks the HTTP Referer¹ header to see if the user came from example.com/something, and, if so,
3. redirects the user one more time to www.example.com/something based on the Referer (in this case example.com/something).

I’m not sure that solution would have ever occurred to me, but I love it for the hack value.

1. Merriam-Webster says that should be spelled “Referrer”, but RFC 2068 codified the misspelling “Referer” as the actual header name way too long ago to fix.

As the rate that browser vendors are shipping updates keeps getting faster and faster, it’s becoming almost impossible for web developers to keep up. Despite that most of the browsers with fast release schedules are well-behaved and make every effort to be as standards compliant as is practical, each micro-release provides a moving target that requires attention and ongoing effort for each developer to keep in his sights.

As a developer, I’ve certainly been in a situation where someone’s platform changed out from under me, and it didn’t jump to the top of my priority list to fix whichever of my features they broke. Not that my customers care whether it was my fault or a platform vendor’s–I’m sure they were frustrated at me, not at Facebook or Microsoft or Google or Netflix or whoever just made the breaking change in question.

Even Google, who with their Chrome browser, set the bar for frequent, high-quality browser releases, is having trouble keeping up with Firefox’s Chrome-inspired rapid release process. I have two recent examples: 1) the Google Toolbar is not yet compatible with Firefox 5, and 2) Google Docs lost drag and drop support post Firefox 3.6, and they still haven’t fixed whatever broke.

I’m willing to assume good things about Google’s intentions here, and figure that it just isn’t a high priority for them to keep up with the Firefox release treadmill. Surely they’re not being proprietary buttheads and being intentionally incompatible in subtle ways with their competitors’ platforms. After all, that would be evil, right?

As browsers begin to ship faster than ever before in an effort to keep pace with the capabilities provided by iOS and other native platforms, we should, at least in the short run, expect to see much more churn and many more breaking changes (some accidental, some intentional). It’s unfortunate that the churn will be worst in exactly the features that are most interesting and innovative–the features most needed to bring web experiences up to par with their tightly integrated, and much more mature desktop application competitors. (The aforementioned drag and drop into Google Docs is a fantastic example of this.)

I don’t think there’s any perfect short term solution here–I think that we’ll have to continue to trade off which side of the “seamlessly integrated” vs. “web-style application delivery” chasm our projects will be built on. Meanwhile, we know that the browser vendors are (mostly) fighting to make web applications feel as native and integrated as possible, while the native platform vendors continue to snicker to themselves at our browser compatibility pains. Maybe someday we can have the best of both worlds.

Nicholas has been doing great if getting up a bit more frequently than Mommy or Daddy are used to in the middle of the night.  Before he was born, we expected him to be a big baby since we were both over 9 lbs at birth, so we were surprised with his long and lean frame.  In fact, his Grandma T even got him a preemie outfit that he has worn a couple times.  But over the course of the week, he got his first bath, lost his umbilical cord, and is starting to round out a bit.  He has also christened Jennifer into the ranks of motherhood by managing to leak all kinds of bodily fluids onto her and her clothes during diaper changes and feedings.   He is a pretty awesome kid and it will be fun for more of the family to meet him.

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So we’re headed out. Here are the two who are doing all the work dressed and ready to go:

Around 6:30 last night, Jennifer was experiencing what seemed to be increasingly serious contractions and suggested that we begin to make our way to the hospital. We wrapped up dinner (turned out she didn’t have much of an appetite by the time food was ready), and then headed up the hill to OHSU around 8:30pm. By 10:30pm, in between contraction-induced grimaces, a resident physician under the supervision of Jennifer’s regular doctor was convinced that Jennifer was definitely in active labor and admitted her to the hospital.

We transferred to a delivery room, moved quickly through full dilation with a well-timed epidural right around where Jennifer started to get belligerent from the pain, and by 2:30am were in the final stages of delivery. At 5:17am, Nicholas Steven Blomquist was born, weighing exactly 7lbs and measuring 21 inches in length.

Having pulled the first non-puzzle-related all-nighter in recent memory, Jennifer and I are absolutely exhausted, but everyone is in good spirits and doing well.

We have been very impressed with the entire OHSU staff, and would like to thank all the nurses, residents, and doctors that have made this experience good so far.

Today’s shirt is another Microsoft shirt. It’s actually one of my most-worn t-shirts of all time. For some reason I just like wearing it. I think it’s because it goes over well both with my colleagues from my days at Microsoft (“more free swag—wonder where he got it”) as well as with the crowds that don’t tend to like Microsoft so much (“his intent must be irony, right?”). For example, it went over quite well as a humor piece the day I wore it to Open Source Bridge a couple months ago.

The story of how I got it is even a little entertaining. When the Windows Genuine Advantage campaign launched back in the Windows XP days, their marketing team asked for stories on how Windows Genuine Advantage helped me in exchange for a t-shirt. I knew I wanted the t-shirt, but I couldn’t think of any times it actually helped with anything, but despite that I dusted off my creative writing pencil and scribbled up a few sentences. It arrived in inter-office mail a week or two later, and I’ve worn it proudly ever since.

Solving the puzzles is sorta like programming a computer, so those of you with a mathematical or computer science bent will be more likely to enjoy it, but the programming environment is so simple (only “go forward”, “turn right 90 degrees”, “turn left 90 degrees”, and “only do this if the robot’s on a ____ colored square”).

So check it out, and let me know if you find any particular favorite puzzles. I had fun with one called “Tetris”, and I haven’t solved it yet, but I like the idea behind “Reflection”. (Both of those two are by the same author.)

The cloud lock-in problem cannot be considered solved until there are multiple viable alternative cloud hosting providers that have essentially zero barrier to switching amongst the set.

To that end, Sun Microsystems announced their Open Cloud Platform today at their CommunityOne East developer event in New York. (Best technical overview: the walk-through on their wiki)

While this launch still only solves the problem in theory and not in practice, I give them reasonable odds that theirs will be the standard API that gets broadly adopted first by making a credible (if for no other reason than Tim Bray’s active involvement) and public effort to create open standards around managing machines, networks, images, deployment, storage, clustering, backups, and all other common aspects of managing a cloud hosting environment.

Come on Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, you should get involved in some kind of cloud standardization effort, even if not this one!

Footnotes

[1] The only comment I can find from Microsoft regarding Azure lock-in is that they appear to have, in the time since yesterday’s Live Search cache snapshot, removed “or lock-in” from the “Low Risk… without worrying about operational constraints or lock-in” on the official Azure Services Platform page.