This quarter, I’ve stepped away from programming to manage the Open Grid Public Beta program: the first step towards breaking out of the walled garden of virtual worlds.

In this stage, identity is what’s portable. Participants sign in to what we’re calling an Agent Domain on Second Life’s preview grid (aditi.) Then they can log into regions supporting the Open Grid Protocol. Some of those regions are hosted by Linden Lab, the bulk of them are externally hosted, running a special version of the OpenSim virtual world toolkit.

You’ll show up as a default avatar, without a prim or pixel of clothing to your name, because managing inventory, permissions, and the copyright issues surrounding them are out of scope for this part of the program. But you can jump between virtual worlds.

My coworker Periapse Linden coined a wonderful term for the participants, they are gridnauts, a word evoking the romance of the space program.

If you’re interested in the project, read the Second Life wiki page to learn more. If you want to know more about what’s behind all this, Tish Shute has a background piece on the program at Ugotrade (thanks, Tish, by the way, for letting me have the last word, so to speak.)

In an email to the Lab, I paraphrased Alasdair Gray, and called this the early days of a better metaverse. There’s a lot of work to do. It will be fun and not so easy, and I believe that virtual worlds are the place to be right now if you’re looking for interesting technology and governance challenges.

And yes, I know I’m contributing to the proliferation of cat photos on the Web.

One more thing: the Gallery provides feeds in Atom.

8 August 2007 ETA: Charles launched the official SproutCore site this evening. And woah, a link from Daring Fireball can spike one’s traffic, and hopefully create a bunch of users and contributors for the framework.

Yesterday, in a grump about PHP, Jens Alfke remembered that web servers used to ship with client side JavaScript. That reminded me it’d be nice if there was a decent XPath library in JavaScript.

See also: Whitebeam Application Server.

The LiveHTTPHeaders extension prompted me to try this. However, it’s not on the Firefox extensions site, and I had to go digging.

The new version of the server software now plays all the tracks I had ripped in AAC format (which was almost all my Yoko Kanno) so I now can listen to my Cowboy Bebop soundtracks without reripping them.

Installing the server software is easy; configuring the player is more tedious than it needs to be (you use the remote instead of a GUI.) But the effort is worth it.

I find it ironic that Slashdot is worrying about offshoring of programming. These are the same folks who cheer everytime a country like Israel or China chooses to go with free software over software written in America that costs money. Nice to know they care.

At a high level, you we can state that offshoring and choosing open source software are driven by first-order optimization: it may be, in some cases, cheaper to use Linux or outsource work overseas.

However, I don’t think the comparison holds up that well.

Much of what’s outsourced is ‘commodity’ work. Even if the projects were written in C# rather than Perl, that work would go overseas.

China and Israel’s choice to use Open Source over Microsoft tools means that for those decision makers, the Open Source value proposition is better than Microsoft’s, Apple’s, SCO’s, or HP’s (to name a few vendors.)

I don’t see offshoring going away unless eXtreme Programming and other rapid methodologies are adopted by IT organizations, and are demonstrated as less expensive than outsourcing ‘traditional’ methods.

However, there’s a market for platforms, and Microsoft, Apple, and Open Source compete.

Robert, if Microsoft wants China, then Longhorn, as software you buy, has to be more compelling then good old grubby command line and scary window manager Linux. But regardless of if it’s developed in .Net, J2EE, Project Builder, or LAMP, most likely we’ll see most IT work developed in China and India.

They’re promoting the survey in response to some gloating by the Apache folks about their 63.98% share in the August 2003 Netcraft Survey.

Port80 looked at the response headers from the home pages of the top 1,000 companies. They found that 53.6% of them ran on some version of Microsoft’s Internet Information Server.

What Are We Counting?

So who is right: Netcraft or Port80? I’ll say neither of them are.

Port80′s correct when they point out that a large number of Apache sites are on shared servers and may be parked, or abandoned domain names. It’s an Apache feature that it’s so easy to use the Virtual Host directive to support hundreds of domains on one server. So the Netcraft survey is flawed in that they don’t distinguish between the importance of amazon.com v. whump.com. Both sites have equal weight in the survey.

However, the 53.6% IIS share of major corporate web sites does not correspond to dominance either. The Port80 survey looks at the parent corporation home site, which may not be the main destination site for that firm’s customers. Or it may be a corporation without a major internet presence that maintains a site for communication with shareholders and the press. So there’s the weighting problem again: cdw.com v. warnco.com. Both run IIS 6.0, but cdw.com is a heavy traffic commerce site and warnco.com redirects to irpage.com

Traffic and Weight

Looking at traffic gets us towards the goal of determining which server platform ‘dominates.’

Nielsen’s site has the top ten destinations by home and business users aggregated to parent company. Again, this is flawed data, as we lose the detail of what application/property people use.

Microsoft, TimeWarner (AOL Server), Yahoo, and Google (Google Web Server) are in the top ten.

Microsoft leads both the home and business use lists, probably by virtue of hotmail.com (IIS 5.0). But how much of that work is done on IIS and how much is still on FreeBSD?

Conclusion

Port80′s right to point out the flaw in interpreting the Netcraft Survey as indicating Apache’s absolute dominance. But they cannot conclude that IIS is the dominant server by looking at raw numbers of the top corporate home pages.

A rigorous analysis must take into account traffic going to every host and what’s running on each host. I’m sure that Nielsen would love to sell you that information if you have means to pay for it.

Aside

Everyone, when you send out numbers or pointers to white papers, please don’t use HTML email. That sets off my “it’s spam” assumption.

From that list, mod_murka looks neat. It looks for a cached HTML version of the request URI, and if it’s not found, looks for the .xml file, transforms it using whatever stylesheet’s mentioned in the file’s processing instruction, and caches the result.

It requires LIBXML2 and LIBXSLT, but shouldn’t be impossible to build on Mac OS X, since Marc’s new PHP build has those libraries.

Compare and contrast with Per Bothner’s XQuery tools for building photo pages.

David Gleason and I met him for lunch.

David’s group and my group use Marc’s PHP module in our day to day work. We’re glad that Marc’s helping to support web developers on the Mac.

†

Marc’s also working on a new distribution of PHP for Mac OS. This one has the DOM XML extensions using the Gnome libraries baked in.