Make your very own huge URLs. Almost funny enough to write a service for …

What do you do when the worst happens? Do you make light of it? Do you keep quiet until the storm is almost over?¹ Or, do you post the honest truth, and go above and beyond — because your customers are your guests? That’s what 37Signals did today:

We’re very, very sorry for this interruption of service … While we don’t have a formal service-level agreement (SLA), we still want to compensate anyone who felt they were negatively affected in their work because of this outage. Please write support@37signals.com and we’ll get that taken care of.

1. Rackspace was quiet about this until hours later ↩

A slightly hyped summary of Amazon’s scalable web services.

Today I was thinking about how to write a web app that draws comic bubbles. There are many parts and solutions to the problem. It’s one of those things that gets complex quickly, unless you’re willing to remove some of the harder features.

I need to spend some time thinking about compromise, as a perfect solution is unlikely given the tools available for web applications.

Some of the problems:

• Embedding special fonts
• Resizing irregular bubbles
• Adding/positioning bubble parts
• Positioning fonts based on irregular edges
• Clipping bubbles to strip edges
• How/where to render (client or server, svg, js, raster, etc.)

I can see a few different approaches. Each solves a few of the hard problems, and each has its own rough spots.

One approach would be to perform the rendering on the server side. Something like Inkscape could be pared down to run as a web service. Comics would be stored in SVG, but rendered to GIF/PNG to embed in the web pages. Comic authors would edit their strips using rich Javascript approximations (edit boxes over the rendered form), and readers would see the already-rendered strips. This allows for high quality rendering, for authors who wanted to go to press with their strips.

Another approach would live within the limitations of xhtml/css/javascript. Fonts would be limited, and all rendering would be done client-side. Features could be added to this as browsers matured, but would depend heavily on browser vendors and compatibility. This approach would initially limit things like clipping, available fonts, etc., but would likely be easier to build.

There are dozens of other approaches too. Flash or the canvas widget could be used, or something written in Java. Luckily I don’t have time to start today, so I’ll have to let my subconscious gnaw on it for a while.

‘Nightmare’ drove desperate user to open source, a story about a company switch to BSD for infrastructure. A few interesting quotes:

Then PWC was hit with a virus affecting network traffic and the Checkpoint firewall was running at 100 percent CPU capacity which was effectively a denial of service. “So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint (a commercial Windows firewall),” he said.

And the kicker:

Despite this Uemura is adamant the move wasn’t made because he wanted to. “As much as I love OpenBSD, we had no choice,” he said.

It isn’t about features, it’s about what works (and what doesn’t).

del.icio.us direc.tor
del.icio.us direc.tor is a prototype for an alternative web-based rich UI for del.icio.us. It leverages the XML and XSL services of modern browsers to deliver a responsive interface for managing user accounts with a large number of records.

Ten Things I Didn’t Know About Google
I spent most of today at an event called the Google Factory Tour–which involved neither a factory nor a tour, but turned out to be a worthwhile opportunity to hear a bunch of Google people talk about Google the company, Google the array of services, and Google the philosophy. (If you’re sorry you missed it, check out this Webcast of the whole thing, including me asking a couple of questions.) (Via PC World)

Wozniak and the Secret Service As I opened my wallet, I considered whether I should risk using this fake ID on the Secret Service. It probably amounted to a real crime. I had my driver’s license as well. But you only live once and only a few of us even get a chance like this once in our lives. So I handed him the fake ID. He noted and returned it. The Secret Service took an ID that said “Laser Safety Officer” with a photo of myself wearing an eyepatch.