I notice Chris Blizzard (600K JPEG) does something like me, and calls his folders things like "Z-People" to make them sort to the end (I use z__todo). Grr. Why can't you set the order?
(No, I haven't looked in Bugzilla. This is a rant; I'm exempt.)
Wise words from "cantsin" over at the excellent LWN weekly news site. (No, that's not really tautologous. Read their FAQ.)
IMHO a working Linux desktop strategy for mainstream users needs to refocus from OS installations on existing PC hardware to a platform strategy similar to the Apple Macintosh: computers with 100% Linux-supported components (without the need of proprietary drivers or third-party patches), a pre-installed, simple to use, plug-and-play, 100% free distribution (Ubuntu IMHO), built as boxes that also look differently from an ordinary PC, with a Penguin logo where a Mac would have an Apple logo.
Could Linux on the desktop be pushed forward by a funky and unusual case design? If some company were to come up with one, and sell it only to companies preloading Linux, so you had "Linux machines" available from a number of different vendors but with identifiable common physical features...
Planet Mozilla only carries my posts which are related to the Mozilla project or free software. If you are interested in other things I talk about, like the progress of my cancer treatment (which I just did an update on), then you'll need to subscribe directly to my RSS feed in your reader, or visit the site itself regularly.
I went back for the follow-up consultation relating to my last neck operation two weeks ago, and my consultant (Mr Rhys-Evans at the Royal Marsden in Kensington; highly recommended) thinks it would be best for me to have radiotherapy to the site to try and reduce the chance of recurrence. There's only so many operations one neck can sustain, and it's best to do everything to avoid having to have any more.
In three weeks time, I'll be fitted for a removable clear plastic brace/mould for my head and neck so that everything stays in the same position during treatment sessions. The course itself starts at the end of September (carefully planned to be just after Euro Foo and EuroOSCON :-) and runs for six weeks.
The dose, for those interested in such things, will be 60Gy, given over 30 treatments of 2Gy, each lasting about 15 minutes.
Due to the angle they are giving it at (from the front, down the right side of the neck) the beam will miss important things in the centre line of my body like my eyes, ears, teeth, oesophagus and spinal cord, so side effects are expected to be limited to skin reddening and damage.
Guy Kewney, a UK tech journalist, has encountered some particularly frustrating usability problems with Windows, which he is rather unhappy about.
Dear Sir Bill Gates,Please find enclosed my invoice for £1,200 sterling for administrative and consulting work, caused by the need to repair Microsoft sabotage. I dare say you'd like details...
Microsoft's policy about how IE 7 will handle IDNs has changed slightly in beta 3, but unfortunately as it stands will still have a serious detrimental effect on IDN take-up. Here's why.
IE 7 displays all IDN domain names as punycode (e.g. http://www.xn--caf-hya.com), unless the copy of IE has the "language" of that domain name configured as one of its Accept Languages.[0] If it displays the ugly and indecipherable punycode, it also presents a yellow security bar, saying "We can't display this domain name; click for options", where presumably the user might have the option of adding to the whitelist whatever language IE thinks the domain name is in.
This will cripple IDNs in almost any international market, simply because domain owners are not going to want an unknown percentage of users visiting their domain to have that horrible user experience. You are a German company - will you choose an IDN domain name containing a ß as your primary domain name if you know you might one day want to expand into the European market and sell goods outside Germany? And that almost all your European customers will have to go through this?
IDNs might be perhaps used when the site owner can guarantee that all their visitors will have a particular language configured - but how common is that? Even aside from the situation above, this is the "World Wide" Web, and people use the browser of a friend, or an Internet café. The browser doesn't really know what languages its user speaks, and it's unlikely that the user will take time to tell it. When was the last time you configured the Acceptable Languages in a browser you were using? And if you did, when you stopped using that browser, did you remove them and reset the setting?
The sad thing is that this measure by itself doesn't improve security. A particular domain name is either dangerous or it isn't - that is, it's either a homograph of another domain registered to a different person, or it isn't. If the domain name is a homograph then all those people who, by default or by configuration, have that language configured are at risk. And if it's not a homograph, why not display it to everyone from the start?
The other measure IE 7 is taking, which is to forbid most script mixing, will improve security. But here they have gone the other way - this measure is too draconian. Script-mixing by itself is not dangerous, as long as your registry is on the ball.
Firefox has a system based on a whitelist of TLDs whose registries have sensible anti-homograph policies. Only they can tell if a domain name is dangerous or not; browsers just don't have enough information. Our policy allows many more safe domain names.
Unfortunately, as domain owners will only pick names which work everywhere, IE 7 is further restricting the set of names that can be used in practice. Having worked for a long time on making IDN safe and usable in browsers, it's very sad to see its uptake stunted in this way. :-( I hope they change their minds and remove that first check, but I fear it's too late.
[0] There will also be a host of problems caused by the fact that domain names use characters from particular scripts, or perhaps multiple scripts, and IE has a list of languages. Languages and scripts have a really complex relationship - in which language is the letter é? What Accept Language do I have to have configured to correctly view www.café.com? I haven't covered this further because it's secondary to the even bigger problem mentioned above.
rebron's IE 7 Competitive Analysis is worth a read. I'm glad that printing has been picked out as an area where Firefox needs future work.
It's nice to think, as rebron suggests, that IE 7 won't take away share from Firefox. Perhaps it won't by converting users back directly. But it could have indirect effects; where today, if people get a new computer with IE 6, they think "Ick! Install Firefox now!", if it comes with IE 7, they may just live with it. Also, people often install Firefox for their relatives or friends - will they be as eager to do so when the feature/usability gap is smaller?
I guess the answer to that is, let's keep that gap wide :-)
As many people know, Sun are planning to make their Java implementation free software. The biggest open question, upon which Simon Phipps continues to be tight-lipped, is what licence or licences they are going to use.
There are two free Java efforts - divided by licensing. There's the GPL effort, containing projects like Kaffe and Classpath, and the Apache effort ("Harmony"), using the ASL.
As Dalibor Topic wisely points out, when picking their licence Sun need to choose which side to be compatible with - or, better, be compatible with both. A third free Java implementation, further splitting the community, doesn't bear thinking about.
At some point, I plan to make some comments on draft 2 of the GPLv3 free software licence, which came out a couple of weeks ago (high level summary: much better). However, there's one thought I want to throw out there now.
The GPL v2, as commonly used, has an upgrade clause - that is, the boilerplate allows you to use the code under "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version". The GPLv3 section 11 has a covenant not to sue with regard to patents, which was not in GPL v2:
You receive the Program with a covenant from each author and conveyor of the Program, and of any material, conveyed under this License, on which the Program is based, that the covenanting party will not assert (or cause others to assert) any of the party's essential patent claims in the material that the party conveyed, against you, arising from your exercise of rights under this License.
Here's the scenario. Company X contributes code to a GPLed project under "v2 or later". They have a patent on something that code does, but don't tell anyone and aren't enforcing it. The project maintainer subsequently upgrades the licence on the development version to v3. Does Joe User, who takes a copy of the code under GPL v3, have protection from being sued by Company X for patent infringement? After all, the licence under which Joe received the code states that he received it with a covenant from each author, which includes Company X, that they won't.
One could argue that yes, by licensing the code under GPL v2 or later, Company X has implicitly given away any rights that future versions of the GPL state that they have given up. One could also argue that no, they didn't give away that right and they can't be forced to do so now.
I wonder if this is a scenario which the FSF has considered?
I spend far more time than I'd like to on long-haul flights, and I've developed a number of techniques designed to help me get some shut-eye. As Google suggests that no-one else has written up their accumulated wisdom, here is mine. Comments, war stories and suggestions for improvement welcome.
Of course, they probably won't let you take a blindfold and earplugs on board these days, in case you use the blindfold elastic to ping the earplugs viciously across the cabin and take out a sky marshal...
Easyjet has made the remarkable observation that if you raise the price of something, with the intent of deterring people from purchasing it, then this deters people with a little money more than it deters people with a lot of money. Who would have thought it?
Like it or not, unless we can find some way of powering planes without emitting carbon dioxide, over the next few years air travel must go back from being a cheap commodity to being an expensive luxury. And whichever way you cut it, poor people can't afford luxuries. :-( There's only so much improvement you can get out of more efficient planes. Eventually, you have to do things which mean that there are fewer flights, and so fewer seats, and so (given constant or rising demand) higher prices.
Incidentally, planes are not "public transport" in the normal sense. Public transport is transport you take as an alternative to private transport - i.e. cars. Its existence and use is encouraged because it is better than a car in one or more ways - e.g. lower fuel use per passenger, less congestion, more accessible to the poor, higher capacity. But only for very short flights are plane journeys alternatives to car journeys. For long-distance trips, they are the only game in town.
So when someone suggests removing the tax exemption on aviation fuel, complaints of "but other types of public transport get more subsidy than we do anyway" don't wash.
