Tuesday, July 19th, 2005
This article on News.com is pretty funny. Is it just me, or does this article make it sound like some major scandal was uncovered? It’s friggin’ foxgate! :-)
The open-source Firefox browser and Thunderbird e-mail client will be updated for the second time in a week because of code changes that have unintentionally stopped some third-party extensions from functioning correctly.
“A few days more, and it’s gonna be a big public relations disaster for Firefox outside the U.S.A.,” the developer added.
Another developer attacked the foundation in its bug-reporting forum.
[…]
Calling for the foundation to release its software in all supported languages simultaneously, the developer said that by delaying the foreign language versions, Mozilla was wasting the work done by developers promoting the foundation’s brands in local markets.
A Mozilla Foundation representative was not immediately available to comment on the changes.
You have to admit, when news sources are reporting about some Open Source project in this manner, it just has to be populair.
Monday, July 18th, 2005
Hm. Yesterday I wrote about X.org entering Debian Unstable. Turns out though that it’s still causing a lot of conflicts. So far most notably with Xine and various display libraries. Better wait a while before upgrading to X.org.
More information about this problem on slashdot.
Update: The totem-xine problems and probably many other related to some mesa-glut kinda library, have been fixed. Finally I can listen to online radio stations again.
Saturday, July 16th, 2005
I have a small request to the world. Can we please have some saner blog entry headlines please? These:
"HTML_AJAX"
"Come on, that's all? - Tobias Schlitt"
headlines tell me absolutely nothing! The first one’s obviously about something called HTML_AJAX, but what’s it about exactely? Just generally about HTML_AJAX? Then make the headline “About HTML_AJAX”. The second one is completely non-descriptive. Anybody could have said it at any time anywhere in the universe and it could still apply to anything at all.
Headlines are all about scanability. I want to be able to quickly scan my RSS headlines and instantly decide what I do and don’t want to read. These do not qualify in the least.
Thursday, July 14th, 2005
There are a lot of things I hate about the internet: Internet Explorer only pages, pages with lots of animated gifs, sites hosted at geocities, Flash intro’s on webpages, anything Flash in general, websites with 90% bullshit and only 10% of the screen used for real contents, etc. But the thing I hate most of all is obtrusive ads.
It continues to amaze me to what level content-providers will sink in order to make a quick buck. Now, normal ads don’t bother me much, as long as they don’t require Java, play LOUD tunes using flash or cause me to go into epileptic shock with all their blinking. What does annoy me to no end however are three types of ads:
Window Pop-ups
These are annoying because they clutter my desktop and steal my focus from what I was doing. They also often startle me if I’m fully concentrated on reading some or such website. Pop-ups aren’t import anymore though, since pop-up blockers are readily available.
DHTML Pop-ups
DHTML pop-ups are those ads that pop-up in the middle of the browser, but which aren’t a real window. Usually, they’ll come sliding in from the top, immediately stealing your attention. They’ll cover the real contents of the webpage and you won’t be able to close them for, usually, a couple of seconds. These are the most annoying, irritating and intruding advertisements I’ve ever seen, and you can be sure that if your product is featured in one of them, I’ll never buy it in my lifetime, even if my very existence depended on it.
The above mentioned ads are pretty obtrusive and fairly annoying. But they’re nothing compared to:
Link ads
The ultimate low in advertising: trick people into thinking they’re getting some sort of valuable information, and instead shove ads in their face. How does it work? You know the world wide web, don’t you? It’s the thing you’re looking at right this moment. Now, check out the words that are different in color from the rest; the dark-red text. Those are links. Links provide, well, links to more information. Clicking on a link takes you to that information.
The lastest fad is to hide advertisements behind those links. What seems to be a link to more information about a certain topic is in reality nothing more than a lure. When you hover over them with the mouse cursor, a giant ad jumps up in your face. Talk about misleading.
coLinux Wiki
Take for example the colinux wiki. (I won’t link to it here; read on for the reason). Just when you think you’ve gotten a quick referal to the auto-built binaries you need… BAM! AD.. IN.. YOUR.. FACE! Think that’s annoying? At least they make their precious ad-links distinguishable from the real links. OSnews.com does too, but ‘unfortunatelly’ their ad-links display exactelly the same as real links, tricking you even more than the ghastly deeds of the coLinux wiki.
OSnews bullshit
If content-providers believe they can trick and deceive their users like this for a couple of bucks a month, then shame on them. These people are every bit as deceptive and low as con-men. They really disgust me so much, I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it.
From now on, I will ban each and every site that employs such devious ways of squeezing money out of their userbase. Think I need your site and I’ll just have to put up with your crap?! Wrong assholes! Wrong, wrong, wrong! I’ve thrown my television out because of the crap advertising (that includes the ‘shows’ that were on; it’s all one big ad, is what it is), I don’t read magazines anymore because of the 75% ad/25% crap-content and I will gladly banish your site from my life if that’s what it takes to avoid your intrusive ways.
- OSnews.com
- coLinux wiki
- Who’s next?…
Thursday, July 14th, 2005
Hm. Yesterday I wrote about X.org entering Debian Unstable. Turns out though that it’s still causing a lot of conflicts. So far most notably with Xine and various display libraries. Better wait a while before upgrading to X.org.
Thursday, July 14th, 2005
A new project, the GNU Source Installer, popped up.
[…] a graphical tool which provides configuration, compilation, installation, tracking and removal of source packages.
Basically, it’s a front-end to configure && make && make install. This screenshot describes it best. But the cool part is de-installation and easy access to information on installed packages. This article sheds more light on the tool.
Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
GNU/Linux window managers almost always have a feature built in called virtual desktops. The first time I installed GNU/Linux, I was immediatelly in love with this feature. It increases the ease of use of your desktop by such a large factor that I absolutely cannot work without this feature.
Unfortunatelly, such a feature is not built into Windows. Odd, since it’s really quite easy to use, unobtrusive and not hard to implement. I even remember it being included in some power tools package on old windows versions, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on the CD when I last installed Windows 2000.
Luckily, there are third-party applications that provide the same functionality on Windows. So far, I ‘ve always used MultiDesk. Unfortunatelly, maintenance on MultiDesk seemed almost non-existent and there where still some much needed features, such as fully configurable keybindings, unimplemented.
Recently, I discovered Dexpot though. Dexpot has all the features you’ll ever need, is highly configurable, is free, is still being maintained and, as far as I’ve been able to tell, has no strange quirks or bugs. If you’ve never experienced virtual desktops before, go ahead and try Dexpot. You’ll never turn back.
Wednesday, July 13th, 2005
X.org has finally entered Unstable (Sid) version of Debian. It’s been available for testing from people.debian.org before. I recently – yesterday as a matter of fact – installed it from there, since it wasn’t available from the main debian archives yet, and everything worked rather nicely. This is also the first X server I’ve ever gotten hardware acceleration working on. I’m not sure whether that has anything to do with my hardware or the fact that X.org is just a lot better. Now I just need to get my fonts working again. I hate fonts under GNU/Linux.
Anyway, X.org can be installed by removing the xserver-xfree86 package and installing xserver-xorg.
Update: Be careful
Monday, July 11th, 2005
I’ve written a small message and data queueing server in Python. It has a fairly simple text-based protocol featuring single line commands like ‘PUSH queuename This is a message‘. It features FILO and FIFO queues and various queue restricitions like size restrictions, etc.
The basic idea behind DataQ is to make it easy to have multiple clients at various locations to report to a single target which, in turn, can be queried from a single or multiple sources.
Sunday, July 10th, 2005
From a slashdot article:
“According to BBC News, the second series of “The Mighty Boosh” will be available to stream from the 19th of July, A full week before starting its run on BBC 3.
And then a comment from one of the slashdot readers:
It’s ironic that a socialist funded network can innovate faster than our great and mighty capitalist free market media can.
America used to innovate like this before MicroSoft and their gang came along… before the dotcom bust there was a huge sense of “let’s throw money into the great evolutionary genesis pit and see which species wins”. Now the winners have been declared by the decree of those with the big money, and new technologies are threatened with patent disputes or RIAA/MPAA lawsuits.
What the heck went wrong? How can we get our free market system working again?
Well, duh! It seems somewhat obvious, doesn’t it? Perhaps it’s because I live in the Netherlands and we have a lot more publicly funded things here than they do in the capitalistic U.S; perhaps it’s because I’ve witnessed a great deal of government-owned companies and public services going private over the last years. But one thing is sure: the quality of just about anything in a government owned enterprise is always better than that of a private counterpart.
I am surprised this actually surprises some people. Companies on the capitalistic free market don’t care about innovation; they don’t care about service, quality, image, their employees or their customers.. unless it brings in more money. If the projected costs of innovation is higher than the projected profits, then forget it. If the projected costs of providing quality customer service doesn’t weigh up against the projected profits they’ll lose if they don’t provide quality service, then forget it. All this and the negative impact it has on quality and innovation should hardly be a surprise to anyone.
The free market is about one thing and one thing only: Generating as much profits from offering as little as possible. Generating those profits and protecting them. Profits. Money. The BBC doesn’t have to care about whether what it’s doing will reach the largest demographic possible and will therefor make the biggest profits.
When the Dutch Railways (NS) went private, ticket prizes suddenly went through the roof and quality sunk to the bottom of the ocean. The Dutch Public Television Broadcasting produces some pretty quality shows and programs; the commercial stations only steal crap from U.S television and only broadcast proven-concept programs.
On a side-note: People often complain about everything publicly owned being so extremely bureaucratic. While this is in general not a good thing, it does allow for all the holes and gaps to be plugged. You know, the gaps you fall through with commercial companies when you need something that slighly deviates from their average customer’s needs.
Anyway, while publicly owned companies may throw money down the drain every once and a while, they do innovate and they do provide quality services that will never be surpassed by the free market. And when, like me, you’re not part of the largest, most profitable, demographic, you’re out of luck when dealing with commercial companies.
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