P.T. Barnum is credited with the quote “There’s a sucker born every minute” though supposedly he never said it. Well, guess what folks, you’re not getting the whole story. What story is that? The HTML email story that is! Gather round kids…

See, like most people, I get a lot of what we call spam. Unsolicited commercial email, as it were. Now as a reasonably intelligent person, I don’t like HTML email much, over 95% of the HTML email I get is spam, so I generally ignore it. Now, I use Mozilla for Mail (and Thunderbird as well) and they let you easily toggle between seeing an email as plain text or HTML, or viewing the source if you’d like to do that. Now, those familiar with email, Content-Type, and multi-part messages know that you can have a section of your message show up to plain text folks, and another version show up to HTML folks. So I got curious when what appeared to be spam by the subject, showed the following message in plain text.

In 1835 he removed his family to New York, taking a house in Hudson street. For a time he tried to get a position in a mercantile house, not on a fixed salary, but so as to derive a commission on his sales, trusting to his ability to make more money in this way than an ordinary clerk could be expected to receive.

I mean, at least some spam makes sense, I want a better rate on my mortgage, don’t I?

So I figured I’d view the HTML part of the message, and sure enough, it was spam about what else - getting a better rate on my mortgage.

I had to know what that plain text was all about though, which led me to learn a little bit more about ol’ P.T. Barnum, and in doing so, discovered the quote is from The P.T. Barnum of the Barnum and Bailey Circus
by Joel Benton.

Thinking about the relation between P.T. Barnum, suckers, and spammers, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry…

(Oh, I did recently get a better rate on my mortgage, and it’s due to my neighbor, not to some random email I received…)

Want to learn what “user experience” is all about? Read this account of using BuyMusic.com (You can also find the article on Blogcritics.org)

And still, companies still think they can just take a quick look at things that Apple produces and make a cheap copy and somehow make a killing financially. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen things that are modeled after Apple products that miss the little things, the details, and those details are often what it’s all about. Those details are things like the user experience, things you don’t see listed alongside RAM, megahertz or drive capacity in those Sunday ads. When people say they prefer to use a Mac it’s usually because of those unmentionable reasons, the pure joy of using something that just works and is a pleasure to use. Usually when people ask why they chose a Windows machine over a Mac it’s because “it’s cheaper” or “they have more games” and while those might be valid reasons for some, I don’t play enough games to care, and my time is more valuable to me than the frustration of dealing with Windows.

Here’s my side note, I titled this ‘DontBuyMusic.com’ because I thought I was being witty with my commentary and all that, but you can of course visit dontbuymusic.com or buymusicsucks.com if you are so inclined… And if you are not so inclined, just look around, and you’re likely to find more criticism of BuyMusic.com out there.

I plan on starting a new mailing list, and since I want this list widely used, it will address subjects that everyone is familiar with. Here are some of the topics we will be discussing:

• HELP!!!
• Out of Office
• GET ME OFF THIS LIST!!!
• emacs vs. vi
• RTFM
• Re: Re: Fwd: Re: Please trim the subject line of your posts!
• [OT] OFFTOPIC
• Doesn’t work!
• How do I???

I’m sure we’ll discuss other things, but this is just a short list to get us started…

I missed this Wired article that mentions Drupal a while back. The Drupal site also has a mention of the article: Drupal empowered US presidential candidate Howard Dean, as well as a mention of another Drupal powered site for some guy named Bush.

Favorite mailing list message excerpt of the day:

could you please, for the love of god, help me, my boss will kick my ass really strong if i don’t fix it rapidly

Is RDF too hard? Read the following:

The principal suspect is surely RDF which is perceived to be somehow “difficult”.

Ok, now read the next sentence:

Although built on a simple triples data model there is no fixed XML serialization since abbreviate XML syntaxes are supported, and it is thus not easy to capture this neatly in an XML schema language.

Huh? triples? serialization? schema?

Ok, now let’s assume someone that is a well versed HTML author, who has even managed to create an RSS 0.91 feed, reads this. How much of it will they understand before eyes start to glaze over?

Ok, to be fair, as a simple news syndication format, RSS 0.91 or RSS 2.0 works. As an extensible and more advanced syndication format, RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 are probably better choices. And what of (n)Echo/Atom? It’s early still, but I think it’ll definitely gain popularity, mainly due to the people and groups involved.

Anyway, it’s all just XML right? Transforming it should be no problemo! (Or at least that’s what they tell me…)

RasterWeb is included in a list of Mozilla Related Blogs, which is cool. We cover a lot of stuff here at RasterWeb, and Mozilla is a subject we’ve been interested in since the early days. Why, we remember using the MXX builds that would take what seemed like minutes to launch, we’ve come a long way, and things just keep getting better.

Oh, in other news, Asa has referred to us as ‘good people’ which is very kind indeed…

Talk about off-site backups… TransOrbital wants to store a backup of your data in a safe place. Like on the Earth’s Moon, for example. PC Magazine has an article about it, the best quote is:

The moon is a pretty safe place to store your data.

Well, I suppose it might be relatively safe, but I’d think a RAIS (or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Satellites) might be another alternative.

So when you need to do a restore from backup, do you need to suit up for a lunar mission first?

Last night Emma put our large cooler on top of the small trampoline we have and climbed on top with a plastic grocery bag. I managed to convince her that it wouldn’t quite work as a parachute, and instead suggested we try something else. We ended up making parachutes out of a plastic garbage bag, string, and some tape. The only tools used were a magic marker and a pair of scissors. We attached the parachutes to little people that the girls had and then tossed them from the top of the swing set. It was a great success. Here’s a photo of one of them sailing through the air.

I have a confession to make. even though I’ve been using computers for well over 20 years, I am unable to use a standard office fax machine. There’s some sort of mental block there. I used to think it was because fax machines don’t have a mouse, or perhaps because they don’t have a command line. I don’t know… but I do know that it take me an average of 5 attempts to send a fax. Do I have to dial a 9 first? Do I dial a 1? What does the alternating beeping mean? Mysteries of the modern day office, indeed.

Now I can send and receive faxes, as long as they come in from eFax, and get sent via capturing them with the flatbed scanner, and sending them via software. Otherwise, forget it. You’ll either get 4 copies from me, or you’ll call me back asking if I ever got a chance to fax it. I might as well send email with an attachment.

There, the truth is known. I can’t operate a fax machine.

ChefMoz:

…read and write restaurant reviews here, but you’ll also find direct links to reviews on other sites. It’s all the work of our volunteer editors, who scour the web to collect restaurant information for you. We also accept reviews and restaurant information from the public.

Now that we can actually promote the use of Mozilla and not conflict with the goals of the Mozilla Project, EvangelMoz will get up and running again real soon now.

(The site is yet to be updated, but the mailing list is running…)

And from the list comes this interesting page from the University of Washington on why you might want to switch browsers.

We here are Rasterboy Enterprises use HTML-Template for many things. We’ve found it a good templating language. It’s simple, and does one thing very well, rather than try to do everything, and not succeed at any. Oh, it’s also extremely easy to install, unlike other template toolkits I won’t mention the name of…

While we’ve only used the Perl version, HTML-Template is available for the following languages:

• Perl
• PHP
• PHP (another one!)
• Python
• Java
• Ruby
• Common Lisp

So the next time you’re looking to fulfill your templating needs, check out HTML-Template, even if you use one of those silly language that isn’t Perl.

(Where’s the ASP and ColdFusion versions?)

I had one more AOL/Netscape/Mozilla thought. Let’s for a moment assume AOL is planning ahead. They know that they can use IE as their browser for the next 7 years or so, but want to plan ahead anyway. Initially, the thought was that AOL would keep Netscape/Mozilla around as insurance, so that they could switch to some Gecko-based browser at any time. Now that Netscape has been killed, and Mozilla set free, how has that changed? AOL can still create a Gecko-based browser anytime they want, using the current Mozilla code, and since they no longer employ people working on Mozilla code, they save money that way. They are contributing $2 million and other services to the Mozilla Foundation, but that’s all deductible, as the Mozilla Foundation is a non-profit group. And guess what? Other companies (Sun, IBM, Red Hat, are contributing money towards Mozilla as well, which would not happen if Mozilla was under AOL’s control.

So what’s the big loss here? Well, the Netscape brand will go away. Honestly it had more or less gone away long ago. Perhaps AOL knows that the Netscape brand doesn’t hold what it used to. (Of course this could all be AOL’s fault I guess.) Now, Mozilla could be the new brand, in some yet-to-be-determined name. With the death of standalone IE, and the end of Netscape, Mozilla appears to be the #1 freely available, cross-platform browser. (I’m not counting Opera as free, though I suppose it’s free ‘as in beer’ if you don’t mind the ads.)

So does it come down to marketing? If you take your average everyday user, someone who has used IE bacause that’s all they’ve ever known, and install Mozilla for them, and walk them through the features, and explain why they might enjoy using it more than IE, do you think they’ll go back to IE? I think if I had to come up with a good catch phrase for Mozilla it would be Smart People use Mozilla, or something like that, because while 90% or more of the general web users might use IE, well over 90% of the people I respect and admire seem to use Mozilla…

Well, that’s enough semi-coherent rambling for one day… More tomorrow!

Read Anil’s idea for Mozilla, Google, etc… It might make one of those little light bulbs above your head light up.