It’s called Straight Edge, and I’ve switched to it today. Once I’ve finished alpha-testing it I’ll write more about it, and offer it for download if anyone’s interested.

Cheers, all: see you at OGN7, June 25th.

I don’t know how much experience Neil Berkett has of bus lanes—I will gladly credit him with enough of it to speak from a position other than that of the pompous, ignorant millionaire who thinks the only way to use a bus lane is to drive a bus—but in my own universe the bus lane is how buses get into the town centre far faster than private transport. If I were a customer looking at Virgin Media right now, to determine whether or not it was worth signing up with them, I’d scarcely pay more for less: that counts for both connection speed and managerial intelligence.

Beta testers have been hammering away at the Carbon Account for ages to make sure everything’s working right. The Facebook application has been live a week or so to people involved in beta-testing, and the nascent Wychwood CRAG has been using the Carbon Account as its platform of choice, monitoring and comparing each member’s carbon footprint for a couple of months now. That’s been especially useful, as the CRAG has argued about the functionality and design decisions a good deal from a whole range of viewpoints: from environmental newbies to astonishingly well-informed amateur-experts.

A lot of preparation has gone into today’s launch, but although I’ve been using it for nearly a year, I’ve not been directly involved in the development of the Carbon Account so can’t take any share of the credit. Everyone who has worked on it deserves a big pat on the back today, though. The rest of you, sign up!

This is wonderful news, especially because the collection is being released through a slightly adapted version of Flickr’s existing website. This means, apart from it being an established interface that millions of people already know vaguely how to use, that you can do all the Flickry things with the photos—dedicated Flickr-heads will hopefully give a more qualified response in due course—and that third-party tools should already be set up to work with the content. The meta information storage won’t particularly excite any Dublin-Core enthusiasts—a block of unstructured HTML in the standard Flickr notes field, plus of course Flickr tagging—but the whole project is still a fascinating experiment, and interesting for even the casual observer of American history. How exciting does it get? More exciting than the World of Mirth Shows?

Thinking offline for a moment, this hopefully presages more leaps forward in MLA culture. One of the first would be to remove the “NO PHOTOGRAPHS” signs from all museums. At the very least such signs could be more honest, and instead read “NO PHOTOGRAPHS; unless our security guards don’t catch you at it, in which case we’ll be blissful in our ignorance. Anyway, in five years time it’ll all be online so we don’t know why we’re bothering, to be honest….” On reflection, I suppose they would need bigger signs.

Hopefully everyone whose phone hasn’t died will put up photos in due course on their Flickrs through their blue teeth connected to their Fonnettas. Until then, first post!

(I’m completely exhausted. I don’t know how Natalie manages.)

If you haven’t ever had cause to use it, there’s a standard called ETag out there which you can probably implement using existing technology that can boost the efficiency of your content delivery a hundredfold. Along with the longer-standing HTTP header Last-Modified it can be used with compliant browser/aggregator software to drastically lower your overheads, while scarcely impacting on your non-compliant users. And although the two standards see most use in the blogosphere, they can be used for anything else from a company’s record in a directory to enormous high-resolution image feeds from astronomy laboratories.

The idea is that you embed in every outgoing page request a couple of HTTP header lines. That’s easier for the total n00b than it sounds: you can do it in one line each with, say, the PHP function header() or the Coldfusion tag <cfheader>, or even in the HTML if you don’t have that level of access, using <meta http-equiv=.../>. The point is that you set the following two flags on the “envelope” that surrounds the page you send to the browser:

Last-Modified: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:20:54 +0000
ETag: “78c4d3d8-1834-11dc-8314-0800200c9a66″

Typically for the first field you’ll want e.g. the latest date from your RSS feed, or the date on which a semi-static page was last edited. The second field is really up to you: if you never go back and edit posts without changing the published date then (a) well done you—there’s a space in heaven already reserved—and (b) you can just calculate ETag from the published date. It can actually be the published date if you’re a bit slack, although you might want to hash it instead, in the way that you might with passwords, to avoid any sloppy client software depending on ETags being dates.

What happens next? Well, you won’t see anything at first. But compliant software that’s visited your site before will start sending you two headers that correspond to your original submissions:

If-Modified-Since: Wed, 15 Nov 2006 18:20:54 +0000
If-None-Match: “78c4d3d8-1834-11dc-8314-0800200c9a66″

The idea is that you make sure that you can compare these to the values you’re about to send out, quite early on in your workflow. That way, if they match, you can immediately terminate all further work and just send a “304: Not Modified” HTTP header. The result? Well, with quite complex pages, involving the computation of tag clouds and term hierarchies and archive structures, you can work out quite early on whether it’s worth bothering, or whether the remote client will know exactly what to do if you just tell it, concisely, that nothing has changed since it last looked.

Word to the wise, though: if you are going to send a 304, you should also send your two headers as you always would. If you don’t then you only win out every other time, because the remote client will see the absence of ETag and Last-Modified headers and duly forget the ones it had in its cache.

In other news, Oxford Geeknights #3 has been announced: it’s in the same venue as before, on 25 July. Hopefully I’ll be able to give organiser Natalie more of a helping hand than at the last one, where I essentially helped out by not turning up and thus reduced the alarmingly high headcount by precisely one.

I think they currently provide, oh, some old version of Ubuntu on two of their billion computer models only in the US, and then only in states whose names begin with “K”. This might be a way to lever open the barriers placed around this potentially very popular market. You’ll have to move fast, though, as the petition closes on Friday March 23.

Do this for your potential customers, Dell. You could be part of a new revolution: after all, Tim O’Reilly says that Web 2.0 is all about putting the customer first. I bet that came as a bit of a shock to all those people in other industries, like the old Web 1.9, or cheese-making, or DIY superstores, who think their sector is about putting the customer first and it’s nothing to actually crow about. But banal marketing statements from industry sacred cows aside, this is a great chance for Dell and for their customers.

If Dell can give me a computer which categorically does not contribute to the statistics of how many users there are of Vista or XP, and which has a reasonable Linux version on it from day one, then I for one pledge to go out and buy one off them. They’ll have to be quick, though. Without choice, I’ll eventually lose patience and go for a cheaper option: any one of their competitors will do. I’ll have to swallow my pride and just buy and then discard an XP licence for zero pounds, but I’ll be buying it from them, dearest Dell: not you. Time’s a tickin’.