19 February 2011

Dream Diary?

Another incredibly complicated and detailed dream. It was like a steampunk Terry Gilliam movie. I was helping a friend check out a house he was going to buy, and it had underground torpedo launchers (they launched underground torpedoes, yes, really), rooms full of boxes of stuff from the '30s including evidence that Marilyn Monroe was Aleister Crowley (played by Christopher Lloyd)'s girlfriend, secret rooms, an incredibly detailed greenhouse with huge thick plate-glass walls that led into an undersea base with room after cavernous room full of mysterious boxes, crates, parcels, and luggage, racks of 1890's clothes, and of course giant dangerous-looking steampunk machines. All through the dream I was exquisitely aware that I was playing a role in a movie that I'd seen before, but couldn't control what I was doing. The villainess was the ex-wife of the house's owner, and was bent on destroying his works (which would I knew lead to a revolution in science and technology). She was intermittently a huge bloated old woman covered in cracking make-up and a young girl who was probably a remotely controlled robot.

The plot centered around her starting up one of the machines, and deliberately unbalancing the power feed. This involved skinny butler-type minions, one of whom was me in disguise, puling on ropes and levers in various parts of the house. I had to convince myself not to play along, but I ignored myself when I wasn't myself and when I was myself I KNEW I was playing along to try and find where she was hiding the key... to something... it was important, I knew that.

Then I suddenly realized that I was trapped, and I had to wake up and go to work, so I woke up and it was 12:55 AM.

09 February 2011

The problem with HTML5 "apps"...

Getting back to my comment in June about making HTML5 a "flash killer", this would also solve the problem of HTML5 as an alternative to native applications. The same ".zap" bundle should be treated as an application, that you can download and install, and have a nice self-contained package that acts like an app.

When I recently brought this up on Buzz, I was directed to HTML5 offline support. That seems rather fragile to me:
  • It's built on top of caching, what happens when you clear your cache? What should happen? Should such implicit "offline" apps stay around after you clear your cache? That sounds like a way to create a "persistent script injection" attack. The idea of the "app bundle" is that you have an object (an app) that you deliberately choose to install, and that you can throw away when you don't want it.
  • How do you know when you have the whole application safely in your cache?