Hacking for Christ

Always Take The Weather With You

I recently went round for dinner with some friends I haven't seen for about five years. Conversation turned to my job and I mentioned that I worked for the Mozilla Foundation. "Firefox? We've got that, but we never really use it. Why's it better?"

I went to their laptop PC, balanced on the sofa in the corner of the lounge, and showed them about tabs, and how it makes browsing so much more pleasant. (I couldn't show them middle-click, as the laptop didn't have a middle mouse button.) They seemed only mildly impressed.

Next, I moved on to the addons system. Trying to find something that would appeal, I went to addons.mozilla.org and started looking through the "Most Popular" list. However, everything on offer suddenly seemed incredibly geeky and irrelevant to their lives. Web Developer Toolbar? Nope. FlashGot? Get real.

Then we scrolled past ForecastFox. Now, my view of weather is that it's something you dress for, not something you obsess about, and so this extension has never been of interest. But when I explained it, their eyes lit up. Somewhat bemused, I installed it (incidentally, ForecastFox's UI for telling it your location is far too complicated). They thought that having three little weather symbols in the status bar was was the coolest thing since sliced bread, and said they'd be using Firefox from then on!

It just goes to show, you can hook people on Firefox with the strangest things ...

Radiotherapy Shell Details

As requested, here is a picture of my radiotherapy shell, and another with me wearing it, positioned and fastened down for treatment. These were taken this morning, before my second session.

Looking at the picture of the shell, the treatment area is outlined in red. Actually, it's a little more complicated - you should be able to see a thin black line in the bottom left of the red shape; the area below that is masked off by a screen inside the machine, so it's not treated either. Inside that area, you can see the scar from my most recent operation - healing very nicely.

The other thin black lines on the shell are for calibration, to make sure I end up in exactly the same place each time. The treatment machine emits a series of green lasers which shine across my body, and are used to line me up.

There are four fasteners; two on the side of the head and two on the shoulders. The pink shoulder pieces are quick-setting thermoplastic, which was added as a second stage in the shell making process, after it was fitted.

As you can see in the on-table photo, my neck is supported by a white neckrest, and my chin is as far back as possible, to keep mouth and teeth out of the field. They irradiate me by shining the beam vertically downwards from the front, then rotate the entire machine around me, rearrange the shielding automatically and do the same vertically upwards from the back. Even though it looks a bit odd, it's pretty comfortable, and I'm normally only in that position for a few minutes; the actual beam time can't be more than 20 seconds per side. The daily dose is 2 Gray.

If anyone has any other questions, please do ask. Yes, I do get to take the shell home when I've finished :-)

Airbag Licensing

Airbag is a new cross-platform crash-reporting tool intended to have the same functionality as Talkback, which the Mozilla project currently uses. At the initial launch, they were planning to use the Apache License 2.0 but, after discussions with the Mozilla Foundation, I'm pleased to say they are now using a BSD-like licence which is compatible with all three Mozilla licenses.

A replacement for talkback has long been on my list of things to make happen. It never made it to the top, so I'm very glad that someone is taking up the banner. Kudos to Google, Mark Mentovai and friends. This could really make a massive difference to the quality of free software.

Radiotherapy Week 1

I started my radiotherapy course today. Here's the "before" photo, warts and all :-) I'll post a new one each week to document any changes. The most obvious side-effect will be to my skin; I anticipate ending up with a very bad case of sunburn. However, I'm told this will only begin to appear after two weeks.

Just in case it's not obvious: the treatment is to the right side of my neck, the one with the scars.

Stabilised SmackPad

Some of you may know of SmackBook - a way you can switch virtual desktops by tapping your Mac. Michele Campeotto did SmackPad for the Thinkpad.

The problem with Michele's code is that it had an unacceptably high rate of false positives. So, while here at EuroOSCON, I've added stabilisation. That is, my version is very careful about only allowing a desktop switch when the laptop starts in and returns to a stable, non-moving state. So you can tap the desktop backwards and forwards, then pick the laptop up, wave it around, and set it back down again without triggering a false switch. It's very cool :-)

It does this by keeping an archive of data, and only allowing smacks when the standard deviation is less than a certain value. More details of the exact algorithm are in the comments at the top of the file.

Stabilised SmackPad requires the hdaps driver; "sudo modprobe hdaps" in Ubuntu. More details of the requirements are on the original blog post. Once you've loaded the driver and started the script, short, sharp thumps on the side of the screen with two fingers should do it. Remember, you can't switch it more often than about once every two seconds.

Free Data - A Valuable Commodity

My latest Times Online article is now available. Entitled "Free data - a valuable commodity", it talks about the injustice and economic foolishness of keeping government-collected data in the UK proprietary.

Note that the Times has now added a comment system to some articles, including mine. Feel free to comment there if you want to be nice about it, and here if you want to point out a mistake. ;-)

Mould Making

This week, I had my perspex shell made and fitted. It will keep me in exactly the same place for the 30 radiotherapy sessions.

The process was somewhat like the one described in Wikipedia's entry on Lifecasting. In a special Mould Room at the hospital, lying flat with my head tilted as far back as possible (so important stuff will stay out of the beam) my head and neck were smeared with vaseline, then (apart from my face) covered with blue alginate gel and plaster of paris bandages to add strength. After five minutes of setting, the whole thing was peeled off.

While I was gone, they filled it was more plaster of paris to make a bust, and the reversed it again by vacuum-moulding a plastic sheet around the bust. The result was trimmed, and a hole was cut for my face. Now, after a second fitting and the addition of extra shoulder restraints and clips, they can use the resulting shell to pin me to a table in such a way that I can only move a couple of mm each way. Impressive :-)

There don't seem to be good photos on the web; I'll see if I can take some when I start treatment at the end of the month.

Searching For Good Usability

My latest Times Online article is now available; entitled "Searching For Good Usability", it uses Firefox's Find As You Type function as an example of usability innovation.

Server Error: Licence Expired

The dangers of relying on proprietary software:

So our intranet search is not working. And, of course, the person who knows about the licensing isn't in yet. Thanks, Coveo.

Verbs Ahoy!

Windows Vista's new Task Dialog finally allows the use of verbs on action buttons.

Jeff Waugh will be pleased. (He doesn't put his slides online, but everyone in the universe has seen the talk I'm referring to by now, right? :-)

Hacking For RMS?

Nirvana said that they never believed they had really "made it" until Weird Al Yankovic did a parody of one of their songs.

In a possibly similar vein, I'm honoured to be included in this week's "Everybody Loves Eric Raymond". I can confirm that John Leach is also a superbly nice chap.

Verisign Has Bought Geotrust

Verisign has bought Geotrust. For one possible reason why, see Geocert's "comparison with Verisign" page, and the market share graphs therein. It seems Geocert are a Geotrust reseller; although I don't know if the similar name denotes a closer relationship. I wonder how long that page will last on their servers? :-)

Carbon Offsetting

That humans are raising Earth's temperature is about as certain as any scientific consensus can be. And while the western world may be able to mitigate the impact somewhat, a low-lying Pacific island state can hardly build a sea wall around their entire country. Therefore, I feel it's very important that people consider the amount of carbon dioxide their activities are generating and do something about it.

So I'm pleased to say that the Mozilla Foundation (that is, Frank, Zak and I) hope to use a small part of our giving budget to offset all the emissions caused by all flights taken by us or Foundation-sponsored volunteers (e.g. localisers attending FOSDEM last February) in 2006.

The current plan is to do this by making a donation to a carbon offsetting charity. The charity concerned needs to be a formal charity, and ideally would be US-based for convenience. So far I have only found carbonfund.org which meets those criteria; if anyone knows of others, I'd be interested to hear about them.

In doing the research to try and work out how much we need to donate, I have been looking at the different carbon offsetting sites to see how they calculate their figures.

The first thing is that the flight distance between two points on the earth seems to be fairly standard - everyone uses Great Circle distances (handy calculator). A great circle is the shortest distance across the surface between two points on a sphere.

However, what does vary is the figure used for emissions per mile, and then the cost per metric tonne of CO₂ emitted. This can lead to wildly different offsetting figures for the same flight. I've tried to reverse-engineer what these sites do using inputs for flights of different lengths.

Site	$ per Kg	Kg per mile	$ per mile
climatecare.org	0.0145	0.23	0.0036
carbonfund.org	0.0055	0.27	0.0015
carbonneutral.com	0.0163	0.18	0.0029
atmosfair.de	0.026	0.6 [0]	0.0156

[0]: Or, seemingly, 0.4 for flights under 3-4000 miles)

So it seems that if you offset with atmosfair.de, you pay almost ten times as much as with carbonfund.org! Of course, you would expect the amounts to be somewhat different, if they were tied to the real cost of whatever initiatives were being taken, and because working out the actual impact of 1Kg of carbon is an inexact science. But still, a tenfold difference seems excessive.

Again, if you know of other sites which provide carbon emission calculators for flights, and enough information to be able to work out the above figures for comparison, let me know and I'll add them to the table.

Free Software That's Trouble-free

My latest Times Online article is about the state of usability in the Free Software world. It's been a bit more than two weeks since the last one; the hiatus was caused by some personnel changes at The Times.

Perhaps "Trouble-Free Software" might have been a catchier title; but I don't write those, and that's with the benefit of hindsight. As always, comments and cluesticks welcome.