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Paul E. Jones' Blog

XML Paper Specification (XPS) was approved as a standard

August 10, 2009

Perhaps I am a bit late to the party, but I just learned that Microsoft's XML Paper Specification was standardized by ECMA as a new standard (ECMA-388) on June 16, 2009.

XPS seems to be an important printing technology for Microsoft and has been adopted by quite a number of hardware and software makers. Native XPS support has already been introduced by some printer manufacturers, for example. This makes it great for taking documents directly from the PC to the printer, perhaps something that needed improvement? I don't know. I thought my documents printed perfectly well before.

What makes this so interesting to me is that XPS is a direct competitor to Adobe's PDF format. The next big question is which of these two competing formats will be the winner, or will we have many years ahead where both formats will be common? I write a lot of documents that I need to share with others. PDF has been the standard for a very long time now, but XPS looks very promising. With XPS support built directly into Windows Vista and Windows 7, will it be easier to send around XPS documents rather than PDF documents?

The tools are also important to the success of XPS. Microsoft Office 2007 has excellent support for both PDF and XPS, but other products lack PDF support. With the XPS "printer driver" on Windows, I can easily create XPS documents from any application, and I do. Sometimes, XPS wins only for that reason. But, that is the best thing I can say for XPS, to be frank. I've used the XPS viewer in Internet Explorer and also the stand-alone XPS viewer from Microsoft. Adobe Acrobat Reader really looks and works much nicer than Microsoft's XPS viewers. I hope they consider making some serious improvements. It would be nice to open a document that fits the width of the viewer window. I'd also like to have the XPS viewer remember its position on the screen after I close it. It reminds me a lot of my first "Hello, World!" program on Windows in the way that it opens.

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Internet Explorer 8's Compatibility List

July 11, 2009

While the browser wars seemed to have picked up again and a lot of technically-oriented people have moved over to Firefox, I've noted that Packetizer still gets a large number of visitors using Microsoft Internet Explorer. And, I'll confess that I also use IE. I really like it, and I appreciate some of the cool new additions in Internet Explorer 8.

That said, there is one feature I absolutely despise: the Compatibility Views feature. If you use Internet Explorer 8, you will note that for many sites you visit, there is an icon at the top of the browser that allows you to select which mode in which to view the site. I found that feature to be terribly confusing and the button was right beside the refresh button, so I often pressed the wrong one.

Not having found a way to get packetizer.com added to Microsoft's compatibility list, I finally decided to figure out how to get rid of that button on IE. I think there is a menu option somewhere to disable it, but I wanted a solution that worked for all visitors to Packetizer. After all, the site should work with Firefox and IE8 and if it does not, people will tell us!

So, I did some searching and found that Microsoft allows control of this feature through an HTTP header. This did the trick for Apache:

Source Code

BrowserMatch "MSIE 8" IE8_support
Header set X-UA-Compatible "IE=8" env=IE8_support

I hope other site administrators will also turn off this very annoying feature in Internet Explorer 8, once they have verified that their sites work. I hate accidentally pressing that button!

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Wave Goodbye to Email

June 2, 2009

Last week, Google introduced a technology called Google Wave. It is a communication platform that will allow users to communicate, much like they can with email. But, it is significantly different than email in the way discussions take place. A "wave" can be significantly more dynamic than email messages. Plus, the technology allows one to integrate a messaging platform with blogs, Twitter, or just about any other information source on the Internet.

All that sounds interesting, but what really caught my attention was the fact that Google is not just building a platform that it runs in-house and users around the Internet use. Rather, what got me really excited is that Google is building a system that fully federates with domains around the world. Anybody can run a wave server, much like they run an email server today.

The way inter-domain federation is enabled is by building on open standards like XMPP. By using XMPP, they are able to have members of a wave who exist in any number of domains. Those users are then able to communicate in real-time through the wave. And when I say real-time, that is what I mean: as you edit a wave, the other users who are a part of the wave can see your edits as they are made.

This is definitely the first messaging platform that I have seen that truly embraces the capabilities enabled by the web. It might take a few years for this technology to take off, but I do believe it has a real potential to displace email as the primary mode of communication in the future. It's really awesome.

Be sure to check out the video Google made where they unveiled Google Wave for the first time. It was given at the developer's conference, but you do not need to be a software engineer to see the power and flexibility of this new messaging paradigm.

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Using Amazon EC2 to Provide Email Services

May 25, 2009

Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) is an amazing cloud service that offers a lot of flexibility. One might use the service to perform complex or time-consuming calculations, employing any number of servers in parallel. It can be used by web-based companies to store tons of information, with virtually unlimited storage capacity. Or it might simply be used to provide web hosting or email services to businesses and individuals.

Packetizer.com has been around since 2000 and we have had a few hosting companies. Initially, we hosted our web site and email on a simple web hosting account. As time progressed, the site grew and we found ourselves in need of a dedicated or virtual server. We tried the use of a virtual server and found the performance less than satisfactory and so we ultimately leased two dedicated servers: one to serve up web pages and one to provide email services.

One of frustration points with a dedicated server is that one's web site and email services are at the mercy of the hardware upon which your services are running. And, that became painfully clear when one of our servers started crashing unexpectedly. In need of a quick solution, we moved packetizer.com to the Amazon EC2 service. For those who are not familiar with the service, it is very comparable to virtual dedicated servers offered by other hosting companies. However, unlike other hosting companies, Amazon also offers virtually unlimited storage space on the "pay for what you use" model.

Another thing that is really cool about the cloud computing model is that if you setup your server and do not like the way you have it configured, you can just terminate the "instance" (a virtual server) and start a new one. Changing operating systems or configuration is very quick and easy. With a dedicated server, one has to re-install the operating system and that takes time. What might be an all-day upgrade effort with a dedicated server becomes a 10-minute task with Amazon EC2. In fact, one can prepare a new instance and get everything just the way it needs to be before terminating the old instance.

Having been successful with moving packetizer.com to the Amazon EC2 infrastructure, we then decided to move our mail server over. In the past, people had been reluctant to use EC2 to provide critical email services for two reasons: 1) there was apparently no way to assign a static IP address to a mail server, and 2) when an instance was terminated, any data stored on the instance was lost. However, neither of those two issues exist with enhancements Amazon has made to EC2.

One can now allocate an IP address for such services as email servers. Once allocated, that IP address is, in effect, statically assigned. As long as one wishes to continue using Amazon's EC2 service, the IP address is reserved and does not change. One merely maps the IP address to the instance that provides email or web services. If one starts a new instance (such as when moving from one operating system to another), one can re-assign the given IP address to the new instance. So, to the outside world, the IP address remains static.

Another significant introduction is Elastic Block Storage (EBS). EBS is a means of allocating storage space, with storage volume sizes presently ranging from 1GB to 1TB. To a Linux machine, this storage space presents itself just like any other block I/O device. When mapped onto a Linux machine, it appears as a device with a name like /dev/sdh. One can then format the storage space with a preferred file system (e.g., ext3) and mount the file system as if it was a local hard drive.

By utilizing EBS and statically assigned IP addresses, we had everything we needed to move Packetizer's mail server to Amazon EC2. We run Linux and use sendmail for message delivery. So, to prevent loss of data in the event that the mail server instance gets terminated (e.g., such as when there is a hardware failure), we allocated block storage for /var/spool/mail and /var/spool/mqueue. We could easily terminate the currently running instance, start a new one, put configuration files in place (which is entirely scripted), and then re-mount the EBS-based file systems. It is really cool and definitely a big step forward in terms of management.

But, not everything is perfect. What we discovered was that there were some organizations that considered Amazon's EC2 service as a source of spam and our IP address was blacklisted. Most of the organizations were reasonable and unblocked our assigned mail server address. Unfortunately, we were unsuccessful at convincing some organizations to unblock our address. They would argue that Amazon's cloud service uses dynamically assigned IP addresses and I could only counter the argument with the fact that we have a statically assigned address. Unfortunately, they would not listen to reason.

Fortunately, we have not really encountered significant problems with messages being blocked by those organizations. It has happened a few times, but I can report that the Amazon EC2 service has been a great platform for operating Packetizer's mail services, including our public mailing lists. If you have not experienced Amazon EC2, I would invite you to check it out. It truly changes the way Internet applications and services will be deployed in the future.

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