dsandler.org

I can’t believe I missed the Slashdot thread on RSS popularity, bandwidth, etc. on Wednesday of last week.

The discussion even veered into p2p territory several times. (Of course, the /. community seems to equate “peer-to-peer” with BitTorrent because that’s all they’re really familiar with, despite the fact that BT isn’t really tuned for this task.)

Oh, yeah, now I remember why I missed this. The article was on Wednesday, and every class of my first semester of grad school had its final project due the next day, for all the marbles. Stupid grad school!

Chris DeSalvo points out that RSS bandwidth requirements hurt clients, too, especially when those clients are bandwidth-limited (by rate, cost, or both). His example (natch) is the Danger HipTop. Which, of course, makes me wonder what kind of mindblowing apps you could build on the HipTop if you could sneak a p2p overlay onto it. [It’s not out of the question, either, since the HT is a Java device (well, J2ME anyway).]

Remember, peer-to-peer isn’t just about file sharing; perhaps most interestingly for mobile devices, group messaging (self-organizing, scalable multicast). The possibilities are endless!

OK, RSS, I love you. But it has to be said: you suck.

Regularly. By design.

Not that there aren’t already enough acronym expansions for RSS out there, but you could call it “Regular Sucking Schedule”. If you’re Glenn Fleishman, you’re the first to do so, and you just set up a new blog to track solutions to the RSS scalability situation.

Despite what appears to be a scathing critique of Glenn’s server-side once-only throttling mechanism, I actually like the spirit of it: It is a serious attempt to force constraints on the system on the server end, rather than a polite request for clients to be better citizens.

I’ve been too busy until now to really play with Desktop Manager (a virtual-desktop—or workspaces, or whatever you want to call it—implementation for Mac OS X). I gave up on workspaces when I first started using OS X, since there were (for a very long time!) no satisfactory implementations (and I was too lazy to write my own). Apple clearly feels that the solution to window clutter is Exposé, and while I agree in theory that Exposé is pretty cool, in practice I really haven’t gotten into it. I think what’s most frustrating about it (to me) is that it’s Fifty-Two Pickup with your windows: you still have to perform a visual search of the screen to find the window you want. (To make matters worse, most windows look pretty much like every other window: black text on white, or white text on black, or some slight variant.) I guess I just crave more structure in my window-search system.

So, back to Desktop Manager. It works, it’s fast, it’s pretty. Sold! There are a few twiddly features I’d like, such as more control over the desktop-name display, but that’s eye candy that I can hack into the code if I’m feeling really bored. Here’s a cute non-invasive hack that works with the codebase right now: slick numbers attached to desktop names, thanks to Unicode.

1. Open the Desktop Manager prefs; go to the Desktops tab.
2. Choose Show Character Palette from your keyboard menu. (You do have the keyboard menu showing, don’t you? If not, turn it on from the International pref pane.)
3. Be sure you’re viewing unicode blocks in the char palette, and scroll down to (and select) Dingbats. You’ll see some lovely sans-serif white numerals on black circles.
4. For each desktop (back in the Desktop Manager prefs), double-click its name to edit it, place the cursor at the beginning of the name, and then double-click the corresponding numeral in the Character Palette.

Now you have a nice, easily-visible numeral in the corner of your desktop (and in the pop-up while switching desktops).