I finished my exams on Saturday. That’s right, with a paper at 9:00 on a weekend. Following my Sunday afternoon off, I’ve been launched straight into project work, having spent nine hours in the department today.
Somehow I thought that finishing exams would be quite nice, and that I’d be able to relax. Not so, it would appear. Still, at least the work is somewhat more interesting than the dull routine of lectures which I’m used to.
Some inane chatter to celebrate my return…
I just noticed today that I’m currently reading 50 different blog feeds. In fairness, I must confess that one of these is a test for my new CUGCR website, but I still think I’m doing quite well.
Down at the bottom of the sidebar I’ve added a whole heap of buttons to let you subscribe. If you’re an existing user of Yahoo! or Gmail then it’s a doddle. Even if you aren’t click one of the buttons, and it’ll show you the feed experience you could be having.
Blimey, I sound like an advert writer. All I need to do now is write something worth subscribing to.
Apparently, Yahoo! have been getting themselves into all sorts of shady dealings with spyware vendors. And now they’re being sued, by the chap who wrote the post behind the first link.
Now I’ll admit I haven’t always given Firefox a good press. But sometimes I think they don’t set themselves up in the nicest way. The religious fervour of Firefox fans goes to the levels of extremism. Yes, maybe you like it. But it’s a web browser. Get a life.
I had mixed feelings, therefore, reading this post by Ed Bott.
Gee, guess who reserved the following domains:
Hint: It wasn’t Microsoft.
I think one of the comments put it best: (UPDATE: I’ve now added the comment which went before that as it then makes sense.)
Fanboyism at it’s [sic] finest. It will be fun to see Microsoft’s legal hounds jump on this and sue them into oblivion.
…
The best part about this is that if Microsoft was to do this then they would be ripped a new one by the community. Is it me or does the underdog always end up being just as bad as the supposed Golith they are out to slay?
I suppose Microsoft haven’t exactly been shining examples of good behaviour in the browser wars, but it still annoys me somehow. Maybe I’ve become an IE-fanboy.
Somebody today said to me in the pub that he didn’t believe that I read every blog in my sidebar. So I thought I ought to show how it’s done. Here is a screenshot of Bloglines which I use to subscribe to RSS feeds:
In the left-hand pane is a list of every blog I read, sorted into folders by category. In the right-hand pane is the current entry I’m looking at, which happens to be this one at hack a day.
So that’s how. Dead easy, really.
This post at Harry’s Place discusses a feature in the independent giving credence to the old conspiracy theory that “The Jews control the world.” The theory itself, of course, is self-evidently nonsense (if it were true, the Palestinians would have been nuked long ago).
What is disappointing for me is that the Independent has fallen so far. The cover image they printed was this:
Which comes disappointingly close to this:
I’ve finally installed it.
It’s shiny.
I like.
I lost the links toolbar for a while, but I’ve found it now. Perhaps the most exciting thing was that it told me my security settings weren’t tight enough, but rather than just leave it there, it told me which specific setting was wrong (I was permitting unsigned ActiveX downloads) and recommended what to change it to. All in a totally intuitive way.
By default, the menu bar is turned off, so it’ll take me a while to find my way around, but that’s great – the lack of clutter is amazing.
I’ll tell more in a few weeks.
A while ago, I said (while discussing browser extensions for Internet Explorer):
There’s extensive information about how to go about coding these yourself. The only thing that’s missing seems to be a real drive to produce these things. The only ones I’ve seen have tended to be produced by big companies, e.g. MSN, Google, Yahoo and eBay have all produced downloadable toolbars. If only Microsoft had put effort into encouraging the creation of new extensions. But it’s against their mindset – I think extensions will always be a predominantly open source thing. That’s where people are positively encouraged to add code to the browser.
But it turns out I was wrong. There’s loads of extensions for IE7, and it hasn’t even been released yet.
… those who can’t, teach.
I was thinking about this today while watching a BSM driving instructor trying to park. Suffice it to say, it wasn’t impressive. Why do people allow themselves to be taught by monkeys?
In a sense I feel that this ought to be somehow exciting, and that I should have something really important to say.
Unfortunately, I don’t, so I’ll just link to videos of people putting CDs in a microwave.
…Animal Farm was once banned in the US, according to this list. How ironic that a veiled satire of Stalinism was banned due to Communist overtones.
It’s also worth reading the original preface, which was cut from many versions of the book. It’s often quoted by those discussing freedom of the press. The discussion of institutional pro-Stalinist bias throughout the media is particularly interesting.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a committed Windows user. I like the way I can mess with it and almost think I know what I’m doing. But this site has got me confused. It seems official enough. It’s a US site from the .gov.uk domain. It’s got a sensible logo. But it says this:
This bulletin provides a year-end summary of software vulnerabilities that were identified between January 2005 and December 2005. The information is presented only as a index with links to the US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletin the information was published in. There were 5198 reported vulnerabilities: 812 Windows operating system vulnerabilities; 2328 Unix/Linux operating vulnerabilities; and 2058 Multiple operating system vulnerabilities.
[emphasis added]
So that count gives more vulnerabilities in Unix than Windows? How can that be right?
Maybe some fanboys will come along and tell me where I’m going wrong.
This webpage is a rather exciting read.
We have all seen these banners before or heard people say “Firefox is Faster, Firefox has Lower Requirements, Firefox is Secure, Firefox defends me from all Spyware, etc.” How misleading is it? Read on.
There’s some great stuff in here, and it’s all well thought-out, well reasoned, and extensively backed up with other sources. I’ve drawn out some of these.
This page discusses a study of browser speeds, under Linux, Mac and Windows. There’s good evidence that Opera is in fact by far the fastest browser, and also that Internet Explorer outperforms Firefox in nearly all categories.
I’ve heard some complaints about Firefox using excessive amounts of memory when running. This blog post from the Mozilla team gives some more details.
What I think many people are talking about however with Firefox 1.5 is not really a memory leak at all. It is in fact a feature.
To improve performance when navigating (studies show that 39% of all page navigations are renavigations to pages visited < 10 pages ago, usually using the back button), Firefox 1.5 implements a Back-Forward cache that retains the rendered document for the last few session history entries. This can be a lot of data. It’s a trade-off. What you get out of it is faster performance as you navigate the web.
Does anybody else remember the old joke about fixing bugs? If you get stuck, just label the current bug as a “feature” and move on. Personally I’d rather not use up piles of system memory just in case I press the back button ten times. Especially since I very rarely do that anyway.
The page smashes the myth about Internet Explorer not supporting extensions with this page from the Microsoft Developer Network.
Browser extensions, introduced in Microsoft Internet Explorer 5, allow developers to add functionality to the browser and enhance the user interface.
There’s extensive information about how to go about coding these yourself. The only thing that’s missing seems to be a real drive to produce these things. The only ones I’ve seen have tended to be produced by big companies, e.g. MSN, Google, Yahoo and eBay have all produced downloadable toolbars. If only Microsoft had put effort into encouraging the creation of new extensions. But it’s against their mindset – I think extensions will always be a predominantly open source thing. That’s where people are positively encouraged to add code to the browser.
Interestingly the page features the following paragraph at the bottom:
Firefox Fanboys are so scared people may actually read this page and make up their own minds that they have gone to great lengths to censor any discussion of this page. Anywhere this page appears they desperately try to have the information removed. So far they have been successful in getting this page banned from www.Digg.com. Anyone even posting a link to www.FirefoxMyths.com will have it removed, their account deleted and their IP address blocked. Now why would Digg do this, unless the administration were trying to promote their own agenda. Which apparently includes censoring any perceived negative criticism of the Firefox web browser. When this site was initially submitted on Digg it made the front page in under two hours and was buried to oblivion by the Fanboys in half that time. This censorship of freedom of speech is supposedly what Digg is against, yet this clearly proves otherwise. You have to ask yourself what are they so afraid of? Obviously people reading the factual information presented on this page, instead of the misinformation fed to them by the Fanboy community. It really is that simple.
Perhaps we’ve al been carried along by the excitement brought by Firefox. Myself? I’m off to install Internet Explorer 7.
The Euston Manifesto throws in a paragraph about Open-Source Software.
As part of the free exchange of ideas and in the interests of encouraging joint intellectual endeavour, we support the open development of software and other creative works and oppose the patenting of genes, algorithms and facts of nature. We oppose the retrospective extension of intellectual property laws in the financial interests of corporate copyright holders.
I agree with this, especially with the complaints about intellectual property laws which inspire Digital Rights Management (DRM) systems. But I still remain to be convinced that open-source is a good way to design large systems. Large systems require careful management, and I’m yet to be convinced that that’s always achievable in the open-source environment.
I look forward to people’s attempts to convince me.
Hopefully I’ll be able to discuss the manifesto more thoroughly when I’ve had time to digest it. The main problem with it is how to actually go about accompishing the aims.
In this New Statesman Article, Norm Geras and Nick Cohen explain the history behind a document which has become known as “The Euston Manifesto.”
The Manifesto itself can be downloaded from here [PDF] or read on Norm’s Blog. I think I agree with most of it.
Please read the whole thing.
This is the third time now in as many days I’ve had an error message on the internet. This time, while trying to comment on Oliver’s Blog, I got the error message:
Space Not Available
The MSN Spaces service is being upgraded and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later.
For the record, the comment I had wanted to add was: “How Rude”
This chap’s given it up. I’m still trying to find how I got to his site, however, as I never subscribed to it. I downloaded the feed for another site and got both of them.
Oh well, we’ll see what happens. Maybe WordPress will sort themselves out.
Over at Chronotron, it’s Web 2.0 Week.
All through the week (9th – 16th), Chrono Tron’s posts will be fully dedicated to Web 2.0, it’s various aspects and loads more to keep you interested.
I’m going to be following it. Will you?
This chap has finally gone totally bonkers. Here’s a sample:
Acknowledge the math below or go to hell.
4 Day Cube disproves 1 Day God.
[…]
4 Day math condemns 1 Day fools.
These 4 absolute simultaneous days PROVES the
1 day god, 1day academia, 1 day religion and the
1 day media to be erroneous, fictitious and evil lies.
Education equates to a mass icepick lobotomy –
destroying the mind’s ability to think as opposites.
[…]
Adam and Eve were created at the same time,
but sexless. A rib was removed from eve and
a hole left to make a woman of her. The rib
was stuck on Adam to make a man of him –
and Eve is still trying to get her rib back.
Epic stuff. Try and read a little, if you can get past the enormous text size.
