$ mkdir -m 0700 -p Maildir/{cur,new,tmp}

The -m and -p options are no-brainers, but the {cur,new,tmp} was new to me. It was easy to figure out what was going to happen… one command to create the Maildir directory, and the three subdirectories, I was simply unfamiliar with the syntax. A quick look at the Bash man page and I discovered Brace Expansion:

Brace expansion is a mechanism by which arbitrary strings may be generated.

A comma separated list between opening and closing braces is expanded by the shell including any preamble (in my case Maildir/) or postscript. Brace expansion can also generate ranges:

$ echo {1..10}
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Cool, huh?

After mixing a batch, and tearing up an old cotton T-shirt, I gave it a try. At first pass, the streaking was minimized, but still there. I applied a more generous amount of solution to the cloth and went at it again. After some light rubbing the streaks were gone, and the display is good as new.

It used to be a rare occurrence that a message I sent didn’t make it to the intended recipient’s inbox because of some overly aggressive filtering. No more. It seems to be happening on a weekly (almost daily) basis now.

What happens when messages you originate no longer make it to the inbox, but instead are dumped into a Junk mail folder with dozens (or hundreds) of other messages? Is everyone diligent about routinely scanning through spam to make sure nothing is overlooked? How can you be sure it won’t be missed among so much garbage?

It’s all fun and games until your outgoing messages are lost.

In Another War We’re Not Winning: Us vs Spam, after learning how much spam hits the servers at O’Reilly, Dave Doughtery asks,

[Is] the situation as bad as I thought it might be? In short, the answer is yes, which only makes me wonder why more people aren’t talking about it.

Why aren’t people talking about it? Because we’ve accepted it.

The email inbox is one of the most accurate virtual instances of a real life object — the traditional mail box. Junk mail has always been part of the package, and we have all been perfectly willing to sort through coupons, advertisements, credit card applications, real estate ads, catalogues (from the store we bought something at years ago), and anything else our friendly postal carrier can stuff in the box. It’s just a fact of life. Why would email be any different?

I don’t think we’ve lost the war… I don’t think it was a war. We are simply faced with a reality that comes with almost every form of communication in a world where so many vie for our attention.

I still walk to my mail box every day, I still answer my phone, and even after filtering and sifting through the spam, I still read and respond to my email. And I know that there are smart people out there that will find ways to make email more reliable. While I realize that none of the solutions proposed so far have gained much acceptance or momentum, I think things will change. As Eric Allman summarized,

I still get junk phone calls, but the phone system is reasonably usable today. I think that spam can get to that level.

I agree.

There is no doubt the system needs work. Alternate forms of communication like IM, SMS will gain mind share and acceptance, but I still like to know “I’ve got mail”.

PS. Please check your inbox, I forwarded you an email from a Nigerian prince whose father has been dethroned but has some stock tips and a large amount of Viagra he’d like to get out of the country. I think we can help him.

Jobs cites figures regarding the number of iPods sold, and the number of songs sold through the iTunes store. Perhaps most interesting is the number of songs sold online, compared to the number of songs sold on CD. According to Jobs, the figures for 2006 are:

• < 2 billion songs sold online worldwide (with DRM)
• > 20 billion songs sold completely DRM-free on unprotected on CDs by the music companies themselves

If these figures are valid, DRM is protecting less than 10% of all the songs sold last year. There is absolutely nothing to stop anyone from ripping 90% of all the music sold last year into completely DRM-free tracks, and distributing them illegally. It appears that DRM has simply managed to make it more difficult to use and enjoy a small number of legally purchased songs.

Jobs talks about the practicality and impact of DRM in it’s current state, and some of the technical problems that come with developing and maintaining a DRM system. He outlines three possible alternatives going forward, but ultimately calls on the big music companies to “abolish” DRM, saying:

Imagine a world where every online store sells DRM-free music encoded in open licensable formats. In such a world, any player can play music purchased from any store, and any store can sell music which is playable on all players. This is clearly the best alternative for consumers, and Apple would embrace it in a heartbeat.

The big question is, why should the recording industry dump DRM? The simple answer according to Jobs is, because it doesn’t work. What benefits are gained from DRM? Jobs says:

There appear to be none. If anything, the technical expertise and overhead required to create, operate and update a DRM system has limited the number of participants selling DRM protected music. If such requirements were removed, the music industry might experience an influx of new companies willing to invest in innovative new stores and players. This can only be seen as a positive by the music companies.

If that’s the case, why does the recording industry continue to shove DRM down the throats of online distributors and consumers alike?

One can assume that the music companies look forward to a day when all music will be sold exclusively online. If the recording industry never backs down, and DRM becomes firmly rooted and accepted by the consumer, they will have greater control over distribution, and personal choice than ever.

I hope that doesn’t happen.

When it comes to having greater scalability in a web page, especially in AJAX scenarios, innerHTML offers unmatched flexibility. There has also been benchmark tests verifying that innerHTML is more efficient compared to using DOM methods.

The benchmarks test referred to are here, and show a dramatic speed advantage when choosing innerHTML over DOM methods.

The fact that it is not in a standard is simply because nobody got around to it. If you read the mailing list of the W3C Web API’s Working Group you can see that Opera, Mozilla and Apple want it to be standardized and we bet Microsoft would like the same thing.

As snook pointed out, the XMLHttpRequest object isn’t standard (yet) either. Funny, no one complains about that.

Recognizing that there are some instances where using DOM methods may be more elegant, in many cases, I choose to use innerHTML to update content. It just seems natural, especially when the content is repeatedly generated using the same server-side code.