I’ve read other semi-biographies of Jobs and, working with a lot of people in the tech industry, I’d heard many of the stories of how much of a bastard he was. However, this biography left me quite bemused and surprised: I never expected Jobs to be such a disgustingly-shameless-sociopath-brat-cry-baby! even to the last minute, with Jobs having to have control over the cover image of the book.

I don’t think he would have liked much of what is inside this book; which is what makes it great.

It’s amazing that Jobs sought out Isaacson to write this biography. And Isaacson, pre-warning Jobs that he was going to uncover all the dirt, delivers a very inhuman story. In Isaacson other book on Einstein, he also revealed Albert’s many flaws and brought Albert down to our level. With this book, he absolutely devastates the image of Jobs as a great business leader and as human being: from his stinky hippy days, to his denial of his daughter Lisa and smear campaign of the mother, to his tyrannical and plainly mean way he constantly ripped-off and mistreated other people.

I guess Job’s own reflection of his life must have been also distorted by his “reality distortion field”. It’s great that this book came out when it did. If anything, it shows that Steve Jobs was not in the same league as other great inventors and geniuses of the past century. Jobs just rode on the great ideas of those around him. If it was him that made those ideas successful is unclear, so Jobs is just shown as part of the greater collective that was, and remains, Apple computers.

I anything, it’s good that Isaacson shows why no one should take inspiration from the cold, hard, tyrannical a**hole that was Steve Jobs. A great read! And proof you can’t judge a book by its cover.

The W3C and Vodafone are hosting a Workshop on The Future of Off-line Web Applications on 5 November 2011, in Redwood City, California. According to the workshop website,

The goal of this workshop is to identify a clear path forward for innovation in the Open Web Platform related to offline Web application invocation and use.

As I’ve done for previous events, I’ve prepared a paper entitled ”Misconceptions about W3C Widgets” (PDF, I know… I’ll publish it here in HTMLs when I get some time).

As I am on the program committee, it means I get to review papers. I’ve actually read all the papers that have come in thus far, and it looks like it’s going to be fun workshop. The other program committee members have been a bit slack, however. I’ve only seem papers from about 2 or 3 of them. I hope Microsoft, Google, and Mozilla submit something.

What usually happens after these workshops is that a new Working Group is established. This will probably either mean:

• The death of W3C Widgets: Google and Moz will make a powerplay and dump in their own JSON based widget format on the w3c (Moz’s offer, Google’s offer).
• Or,  the rebirth of W3C Widgets: Google and Moz will come to their senses and finally embrace the W3C widget format (unlikely, but here’s to hoping:)).

If you try to run the Arduino IDE and the RXTX Java library on MacOS Lion and you are hitting a “Serial Port Already in Use” error,  try:

$ sudo mkdir /var/lock
$ sudo chmod 777 /var/lock

That should hopefully allow you to run them both (though only one at a time!)

If you want  interface your Arduino with the Java, see the Arduino documentation.

When multiple people are working with CVS, what can sometimes happen when you do a “cvs update” is that binary files get “merged” as if they were text files. Naturally, this can cause some file types to become corrupt.

To avoid this happening, type:

$ cvs admin -kb path/to/binary.file

Usually, you have a large number of these files (in my case, I had about ~1000 zip files). So combining the above with Bash’s find can be very useful. Assuming you are in the working directory:

$ find . -name "*.ext" -exec cvs admin -kb {} ;

The “{}” substitutes the found file, which CVS marks as binary for you.

There is also a handy guide on working with binary files in CVS.

XML Spec says that when someone declares xml:lang somewhere in the ancestor chain of an XML document, element nodes in the DOM are supposed to inherit the value of xml:lang. However, although xml:lang is an inherent part of XML, the DOM Core level 3 specs lacks means to easily find what value of xml:lang an element has inherited (or explicitly has been assigned).

From section 2.12 Language Identification of the XML spec :

The language specified by xml:lang applies to the element where it is specified (including the values of its attributes), and to all elements in its content unless overridden with another instance of xml:lang. In particular, the empty value of xml:lang is used on an element B to override a specification of xml:lang on an enclosing element A, without specifying another language. Within B, it is considered that there is no language information available, just as if xml:lang had not been specified on B or any of its ancestors. Applications determine which of an element’s attribute values and which parts of its character content, if any, are treated as language-dependent values described by xml:lang.

Below is a little useful code snippet to help you find the value of xml:lang. The code simply recurses up the tree till it finds an xml:lang attribute to inherit the value from. If it can’t find one, it just returns an empty string:

function xmlLang(element){
  var xmlns = "http://www.w3.org/XML/1998/namespace";
  var value = element.getAttributeNS(xmlns,"lang");
  //check if we are at the root
  if(element === element.ownerDocument.documentElement){
      //no xml:lang?
      if(!element.hasAttributeNS(xmlns,"lang")){
          return "";
       }
       //we have it, so return it.
       return value;
   }

   //this is an element in the tree
   if(!element.hasAttributeNS(xmlns,"lang")){
       //no xml:lang? recurse upwards
	    return xmlLang(element.parentNode);
   }
  //we have a value, so return it
   return value;
}

To make it more useful, it would be good to validate the value derived from the code above against the IANA language tag registry.