Hacking for Christ

Welcome to Brussels

I arrived in Brussels last night for FOSDEM and, while attempting to figure out how to use the ticket machine for the public transport, was welcomed to the city by someone stealing my luggage. I no longer have my laptop, clothes, books, papers or Ogg player.

By God's grace, I still have my wallet, passport, phone and return ticket. But I need to go and do some clothes shopping.

Ironically enough, on the Eurostar, I was studying the 8th Commandment ("You shall not steal")! A related verse my notes flagged up is Ephesians 4:28:

He who has been stealing must steal no longer, but must work, doing something useful with his own hands, that he may have something to share with those in need.

So it's fairly clear what I should be praying for the thieves :-) That's the good part - they stole my Bible so, who knows, they might read it. No-one is beyond God's reach.

Trading Standards (Follow-Up)

Two things:

Firstly, there have been several negative comments on Slashdot and in other places directed towards the trading standards lady for not knowing copyright law and for even contacting the Foundation at all. This is unfair - contacting the copyright holder (or the organisation representing them) is exactly the right thing to do. I would much rather they did that than just confiscate or prosecute unconditionally! My comment was not upon that, but upon her follow-up, suggesting that giving software away for free was terribly inconvenient for her. So no more ad hominem attacks, please.

Secondly, one visitor to the article saw the following text ads:

Company Steals Software? Report software piracy confidentially. Up to $50k reward. www.bsa.org/usa

Accused of Piracy?
Experienced counsel to defend you against software piracy claims.
www.scottandscottllp.com

:-)

Free Software? You Can't Just Give It Away!

My latest Times article is called "Free software? You can't just give it away!", and relates an amusing incident which happened to me recently in my capacity as code licensing contact for the Mozilla project.

DSML In Workflow Applications

My DSMLTools project (DSML is an XML dialect for directory data) is currently in long-term maintenance mode. Not much has happened with it for a while - the DSML 1.0 standard is stable, and I've had very few bug reports. Do excuse the retro web design on the home page; as I said, this is deep maintenance mode.

However, it got a mention today in an article entitled "Building Workflow Applications with XML", as a suggested intermediary for being able to do XQuery on LDAP data.

IE, ActiveX and Netscape Plugins

It's always hard to tell how much of an interview is what the guy actually said, and how much is editing, but the following paragraph from a betaNews interview with Gary Schare, Director of IE Product Management makes the blood boil:

GS: ActiveX is a very powerful platform. While ActiveX itself is unique to Internet Explorer, the technology of extending a browser with native code is not. You have the Netscape plug-in model that runs in Netscape browsers and Firefox browsers, and is the moral equivalent of ActiveX from a code perspective.

And it used to run in IE and therefore be a cross-platform plugin model, before you removed support "for security reasons". If the two are "moral equivalents", what were the inherent security problems in the Netscape plugin model that you couldn't fix?

Or was, in fact, the removal of IE's ability to run Netscape plugins nothing to do with security and the needs of users, and everything to do with shoring up your monopoly?

In fact, of course, the two are not "morally equivalent" - installing a plugin is just like installing any other piece of software on your computer, whereas installing or using an ActiveX control is far easier than that - hence the problems.

The difference is that we did a lot of work in ActiveX to ensure that users only install the controls they really intend to, eliminating the drive-by download vectors of the past. A lot of that work came in IE6 XP SP2.

That's enormously misleading, because saying "the difference" implies that Netscape and Firefox still suffer from being "drive-by download vectors". In fact, drive-by downloads has always been 95% an IE problem and 5% a JVM problem. This is like saying "The difference between me and Bob is that I've stopped beating my wife." It doesn't say that Bob still beats his wife, but it implies it.

Bittorrent in Firefox (again)

So it seems like Bittorrent support for Firefox is one of those projects, like a graphical XUL editor, which seems to have some sort of jinx. There have been at least three attempts made, the last one backed by a $4000 Google Summer of Code bounty, and still there's not even an extension I can install to do Bittorrent downloads natively. (Although the Ubuntu helper app I discovered recently does a creditably simple job.) At this rate, we'll run out of names for Bittorrent/Mozilla projects before we get one which produces something. :-(

Meanwhile, Opera are stepping up to the plate. Kudos to them, but we really should have been first.

Then again, I guess if AllPeers are doing it (although we haven't seen any source from them, they have promised that their code will be released under a licence "broadly similar to the Mozilla Public License") do we need any independent implementations?

Well, it's my view that Bittorrent support needs to be part of core Firefox. And for that to happen, we need an implementation under a licensing scheme compatible with the mozilla.org tri-licence. AllPeers may be that, although "similar" rather implies "not the same"; but if it's not, a Firefox Bittorrent is still needed.

Anyone want to have a fourth go?

The Music Licensing System Sucks

Another attempt at musical innovation on the web bites the dust:

We are sorry, but we are currently unable to make the various Cross Rhythms radio programmes available as Podcasts. When we launched the service we believed that we could do so under our existing radio station licences. We have subsequently found out we were in error in this, and it is right for us to put on hold the provision of this popular service until we have the relevant permissions given. We are now beginning this process.

However we have also learned that there is no simple licensing body that covers Podcasts, and it is a complex process to get permissions. Thus we are not sure when we will be able to re-launch this service.

"How To Be A Good Mentor"?

There are multiple documents on how to write good bugs, documents on how to release software, and even documents on what to call your computer, both serious and humourous.

But has anyone written a document on how to be a good mentor to a contributor who has joined a free software project? I think one is sorely needed. Once we've picked the people we want as quickly as possible, it would be good if everyone knew the best ways to encourage them...

Online Font Recognition Service

I remember people getting excited about this a while back, but I think it deserves more publicity for being incredibly cool. It's an online font recognition service - upload an image and it'll work out which the letters are and tell you about any matching fonts in its database!

Consistency

Over the last few days of the Mohammed Cartoon Controversy, I have heard Muslim leaders on the radio saying things like "Free speech should absolutely be protected, but it needs to be tempered with respect."

If you are a Muslim and that is your view (it's not mine, but I completely support your right to hold it) then,for consistency, you should do the following:

• Get on a bus to Birmingham, where Jerry Springer The Opera, which contains many insults to Jesus, is currently on tour, and protest outside the theatre that "Free speech needs to be tempered with respect".

• Get on a plane to the Muslim country of Saudi Arabia (or, if lack of funds prevents that, standing outside the Saudi Embassy in London will do), where the public practice of Christianity and the promulgation of Christian ideas is illegal, and lead a demonstration saying that "Free speech should absolutely be protected".
  

SongBird Preview Released - Under GPL

The first preview version of SongBird, a XULRunner-based media player, has been released. Unfortunately, their site has been Dugg, so it may be a while before you can read all about it. The Digg comments have links to mirrors of the download itself, however.

A particularly interesting thing about this release is that, because they are combining Mozilla code with VLC code to provide the media playback functionality, they are using the XULRunner codebase under GPL terms. This is possible because of the ongoing effort to relicense the Mozilla codebase under a disjunction of three licences - the MPL, the LGPL and the GPL - thereby making the code available for use in many more projects. SongBird is the first in what will hopefully be a long line of innovations enabled by this change.

SongBird actually had to remove various bits of still-unrelicensed code to make their release, but they have managed it - which shows we are close. We are still hoping to get permission to relicence the code they had to remove - there has been movement on this very recently - but if not, it will be removed or rewritten, and then I'll make a formal announcement that the process is finished.

The End Of The (Free) Pipe Dream?

The latest "Our Man From Mozilla" article is now available at The Times Online. Entitled "The end of the (free) pipe dream?", it talks about the dangers to the Internet of the loss of network neutrality, as ISPs start discriminating between different providers of the same service.

Localisation Change Monitor

We currently don't have a good way of automatically knowing if a particular localisation in mozilla.org CVS is up-to-date. I think this might bw useful information to know when trying to do a security release for 30 or more locales simultaneously.

One possible system would watch checkins to the /l10n partition and maintain a "last changed date" for every single key/value pair in every single file. If a value in the en-US file has changed more recently than the value for the corresponding key in the localised file, it would flag that localisation as "out of date".

The tool would loop as follows:

• cvs update
• check to see if any monitored files had been modified
• load any modified files and look for modified or new keys
• update its stored last-changed date for those keys to be the file checkin date
• warn if the last-changed-date for a "base" (en-US) key was greater than the last-changed-date for that key in another locale
• list the keys and files affected on a per-locale basis
• write all new date and key info back to the database

Does this seem like a good design?

The only problem would be if a localiser decided that the change in the English string did not warrant a change in the localised string. Perhaps we could make them touch the file anyway, just to flag that they had seen and dealt with the issue? Hacky, perhaps...

Newsgroup Tweaks

Having stepped back and surveyed the landscape, we are considering making a few more tweaks to the newsgroup hierarchy, by merging some groups.

As a matter of principle, we think that both developers and users of a technology (e.g. XUL) should share a group. This sort of mixing is how users become advanced users and then developers. So we won't be having separate hierarchies for "developing" and "using" the Mozilla platform. (This doesn't extend to end-user support; we have and will continue to have separate groups, mozilla.support.*, for that.)

Here are our suggestions:

Comments, anyone? Of course we will be posting our suggestions in the relevant groups as well.

Google Censorship Not Perfect

Censorship in action. Compare: google.com Image search for Tiananmen (22,100 hits), and google.cn image search for Tiananmen (413 hits). And I don't see any of Google's promised "some stuff has been censored from this search" notifications.

But it's not quite perfect: see page 5 of the results (although the host concerned has already been taken down).

GuessDTD

I notice that the wmlbrowser extension for Firefox has a problem; some WML sites render better if wmlbrowser has access to the WML DTD, but wmlbrowser can't ship it for licensing reasons.

That got me thinking: surely it's possible, particularly for XML-based languages where conformance to the schema is a requirement, to reverse engineer the contents of the schema if you have enough documents which conform to it? Or, at least, you could make a good guess.

For example, if the root element is always <wml>, you could guess that as the root. And if it only contained elements from a given list, and if a particular element only ever appeared once, etc. etc. Is this feasible? If so, has anyone already written "guess-schema"?

There's A White Robe Waiting For Us

One morning a few weeks ago, I was lying in bed in that vague state between sleep and wakefulness, when I started thinking about something someone had said to me a few days before - that there weren't enough good hymns about the future, and the certain hope Christians have, in Christ, of the new creation. And, as I lay there, words started to run around in my mind, falling seemingly effortlessly into rhyme and meter.

This has happened to me once before, a few years ago. That time, I didn't write anything down, and when I woke up, I forgot it all. This time, I didn't make the same mistake. A few days ago I found the scrappy post-its and typed them up. With really very little additional polish, here is the result.

There's A White Robe Waiting For Us

version 0.1

There's a white robe waiting for us -
Cleaner than new-fallen snow,
Brighter than the sun at noon-day,
Radiant with a heav'nly glow.

Such a garment we can't merit,
Given by the Lord we serve.
Symbol of his love and kindness,
Sign of grace we don't deserve.

There's a body waiting for us -
Perfect, whole in every way.
We will suffer no more sickness,
Slaves no longer to decay.

Weak and frail are earthly bodies,
Into dust they fade away.
But our resurrection dwelling
Fit and strong will ever stay.

Perfect bodies, robed in splendour -
This will be our final state.
And that time is nearly with us,
Not much longer now to wait.

Mindful of that new creation,
Send us out to love and serve.
Tell your message to the nations
Of forgiveness undeserved.

(C) 2006 Gervase Markham

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5
License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative
Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

Given that I'm normally not creative in this way, the authoring credit should go to the Holy Spirit... but I'm not sure the law would recognise His copyright.

IE 7 Beta 2 Preview Now Public

If you are interested in trying out IE 7, you can now do so (once you've got past the spiffy Flash intro). There are also some release notes.

Update: I'm officially suspicious! Given that I work on anti-phishing stuff, that's rather ironic...