Here's A Nickel, Kid

I was talking to someone about doing some website work lately. While my part of the work is mainly focused on the back end ( php, some xml/xsl, and a bit of ajax ), I was trying to explain how it would be tied together on the front end to make a nice, fast loading, single page product ordering wizard. And it's kind of hard explaining how the interface will look, what parts of the html will dynamically change, and how that all ties to the structure of the HTML; and other output from the php I'll be writing. So, I got out a simple online drawing tool, and sketched this out:

Broken down, it's one large containing DIV. An upper DIV which holds a series of tabs relating to the product options. Below that, a main content area, divided into 2 sections. An options selection area on the left, and a product preview on the right.

As Kevin likes to say, "It makes sense in my head."

Ivan.

I saw the iPhone used to browse MacRumors.com story yesterday, and figured I'd check the logs for incompetech.com, since it gets plenty of traffic.

There were several hits, and after cutting out the css and images, here's what's left:

May 2 9:19 (Apple IP #1) "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; PPC like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A001a Safari/419.3"

May 18 16:26 (Apple IP #1) "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; PPC like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A001a Safari/419.3"

May 18 16:35 (Apple IP #2) "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A530a Safari/419.3"

May 19 03:36 (Comcast IP) "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A530a Safari/419.3"

May 21 05:25 (Comcast IP) "Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A533a Safari/419.3"

Interesting things that I noticed:

The very 1st request on May 2nd fetched only 1 page, no images or css.

All the 1st hits gave no referer information, but after fetching the html page, the following requests for css and images listed the right referring page. Not sure how they picked incompetech, but I guess it's good to know it's on somebody's list.

Looks like the Mobile/* string could be a build identifier, which has been advancing along as bugs are fixed and sites are retested. It could possibly be a hardware identifier, for keeping track of the prototype units.

Finally, what's the story with the "PPC like"/"CPU like" change? The iPhone was first noticed by Russell Beattie at mowser.com on May 9th, with "PPC like" in the User-agent string. But other sites posting later in May show the switch to "CPU like". I don't know if that means the iPhone is running some sort of low power/embeded PowerPC chip, and Apple's trying to obscure things a bit. Or if it was some unchanged strings left over from porting WebKit/Safari onto whatever hardware the iPhone runs?

In about a month it'll finally be available, so there may be more details coming soon. Especially how open it will be for third party application development, which would be a real sticking point for me. One thing that made my Palm Vx great was all the handy little apps and utilities which I used as often as any of the bundled PalmOS apps.

In an event not much heralded around the world, Kevin declared April 22nd to be "International Graph Paper Day". The reason for this declaration was the unveiling of the newly revitalized graph paper section for Incompetech.com.

I've been working on the project for quite a while, so here's my behind the scenes view of things.

Continue reading "International Graph Paper Day" »

I've been thinking off and on about putting up a blog. Ok, actually for probably closer to a year.

Finally, after much delay, I just dove into it tonight and got things running. I don't have some sort of grand plan on what will appear here, but I'll use it to keep up with various things I've been working on, especially regarding OpenSolaris, Unix, system administration and programming in general.