August 2003 Archives
I just cancelled my Apple Store order for a PowerMac G5, an iPod and an iSight. I made that order on June 30, admittedly in a bit of an impulse but also because I had a rebate coupon that otherwise would have expired two days later.
Two months later I'm being told that there is about zero chance that my order will depart from Cork before October, with an additional week of delay for shipment. Three months for something that was sold on the promise it would ship between 7 and 10 weeks, added to the refusal of the Apple Store to ship me the iPod and iSight -- which they have in stock -- before the G5, is more than I can take.
Three months is an awful delay in the IT industry, so reason is taking over the geek impulse, an effect of age I guess. I'll let to others the pleasure of discovering the first version of the G5 and check its quality for me. My good old PowerMac G3 is still working after all, and prices cannot go up.
Prof. Lessig, writing about the current fight against software patents in Europe, reminds us of a bit of wisdom coming from nobody else than Bill Gates:
So here’s perhaps the most concise and compelling account of just why software patents will harm new innovators (that’s you Europe) and benefit old innovators (that’s America), written in 1991 by Mr. Gates:
“If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete stand-still today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.” Fred Warshofsky, The Patent Wars 170-71 (NY: Wiley 1994).
The Register reports that Microsoft is preparing changes to IE in response to a patent ruling:
Microsoft may alter its dominant Internet Explorer Web browser following a ruling against it in a Chicago court earlier this month.
That is according to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), an industry standards body, which said on its Web site that the Seattle giant had told the group that changes to the software may be in order. It was in mid August that Microsoft lost a civil case brought against it by Eolas Technologies and was ordered to pay the company $520.6 million for infringing on patents relating to Internet Explorer (IE).
This has the potential to lead us in many directions, from boosting redesigns that conform to web standards down to increasing chaos in terms of active browsers out there and more tag soup to accommodate them. If Microsoft has an incentive -- and quite! El Reg reckons it to be in the range of hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars -- to modify IE, it will be very interesting to follow the trends in user agents as the Redmond giant pushes about 96% of Internet users to upgrade their browser.
And I guess we will have another version of IE after all!
Enough is enough. I have received so far only five spams through dummy comments on this site, one was some weird offensive delirium from someone obviously out of her mind, one was chinese porn and the other three were all from a miserable form of life that tries to hijack traffic for a zip code scam or something like that.
Thanks to Phil Ringnalda, URLs including zipcode are prohibited on this weblog now.
Et c'est pas dommage !
You are a webmaster in a rather big corporation and you just cannot unstick your eyes from your screen, currently describing your life :
How do you encourage unenthusiastic developers/mark-up authors to adopt forward-thinking web development methods?
How do you engage people who consider their work on the web as just that: only work, something that pays the bills but doesnt exactly leave them beside themselves with excitement?
I am but one individual in a team of many (in my place of full-time employment) and I am from a strange breed - I have a passion for the web! What happens when you are part of a team that is not as uniformly enthusiastic to learn?
This is a problem that faces many IT managers and standards advocates working in the corporate sector. Though were doing good things in adopting accessibility practices and optimising our code, its still very difficult to get a site to conform to all the major standards in the real world. Why is this the case?
Why, indeed? A must read for anyone involved in making companies switch to web standards, even if you are not a corporate webmonkey.
The quoted article is not an exhaustive list of the problems one can encounter in making a corporation switch (nor does it pretend to be). A very obvious issue being money, for in a difficult economy redesigning their web sites is not exactly on corporations priorities. I might live long enough to may be write something about my own experience in that matter.
On a side note, I shall pay my respects, along with a bit of jealousy and a great deal of envy to these two masters and a former employer.
Apple's G5 and Microsoft's Virtual PC are incompatible, says Microsoft category development manager home and retail division Sandra Peignaux to MacWorld UK. This is clearly not good for people, like me, who rely on VPC. No information on when this problem will be solved.
Spilling coffee with style. Mort de rire ;-)
The MIT offers a selection of a few hundreds of its courses online with its OpenCourseWare program:
The idea behind MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) is to make MIT course materials that are used in the teaching of almost all undergraduate and graduate subjects available on the Web, free of charge, to any user anywhere in the world. MIT OCW will advance technology-enhanced education at MIT, and will serve as a model for university dissemination of knowledge in the Internet age. This venture continues the tradition at MIT, and in American higher education, of open dissemination of educational materials, philosophy, and modes of thought, and will help lead to fundamental changes in the way colleges and universities utilize the Web as a vehicle for education.
One cannot graduate or pretend to have got an MIT education with it, nevertheless, this is a great initiative.
Source: BoingBoing, citing this article on Wired.
Not that you would ever think of doing such a foolish thing, but I discovered that printing this site with Safari gives, er, rather crappy results, and that trying to print my French weblog crashes it consistently.
Since you cannot report bugs anymore from within Safari, I just hope that a TrackBack to this will reach the Safari Jedis at Infinite Loop. Shame on me, the bug reporting feature has moved under the Safari menu.
Tomorrow, a protest against software patents in Europe will take place in Brussels. An online protest is organized today by the FFII (Foundation for a Free Internet Infrastructure).
For more information :
If you are opposed to the adoption of software patents in Europe, sign this petition.
I love NetNewsWire's ability to show the differences between two edits of the same entry in an RSS feed. Above is an example where you can see that CNet editors rewrote two stories excerpts. Credits for this feature go to "teenage writer, coder, and hacker" Aaron Swartz.
We have seen this before. Dave Hyatt shares the joy of implementing CSS in Safari:
A few days ago I was visiting Dave Shea's site and I noticed that the three parallelograms at the top (zen garden, blue spark, and modernalus) didn't line up properly in Safari.
I quickly reduced the HTML+CSS and discovered that the problem was really elementary. Safari didn't support relative positioning of floats. It would just ignore any relative position you specified on a float. [...]
... the fix was a no-brainer...
I made the fix, fired up Dave Shea's site, and the problem was solved. [...]
Then today Don was idly going over the list of issues at Mark Pilgrim's site to see what we'd fixed since v85. We were chatting on the phone and he said, "Hey, the tabs are mispositioned on Mark's site. There's a vertical gap underneath them."
Someone makes a browser according to a specification document full of must, must not, may, should, whatever that leaves room for interpretation. Other people make other browsers, on the same spec with their own interpretations plus a bit of re-engineering on existing browsers. Some designers start fiddling with browsers, trying to code to the spec but forced to accommodate the browsers quirks, since it's what their visitors will use anyway. The innovators among them explore, create and document browser hacks, which quickly become widespread. As years and spec versions pass, the re-engineering story becomes more complex for browsers makers when, while testing their product on existing sites, they are tempted to follow the crowd vs. re-read (and maybe re-interpret) the specification.
I don't know if we have seen the end of this story, but Dave Hyatt made a sound decision:
I now believe that Safari's rendering (gap and all) is correct, so until a spec tells me otherwise, I'm changing nothing. NOTHING.
He chose the spec path vs. a site design (and a rather prominent one, mind you).
John Gruber on Daring Fireball adds his views on why people continue to choose PCs over Macs (emphasis is mine):
Assemble a group of intelligent and curious people who are mostly inexperienced with computers. Sit each of them in front of comparable Mac and Wintel boxes and give them a few hours to explore. I’m confident most of them will prefer the Mac. The Mac OS is easier to explore, more intuitive, more consistent. But this isn’t how most people buy computers. They don’t take a day or even a few hours to try different systems. Fear of blowing $1000 or $2000 on a “bad” computer motivates them to buy whatever is recommended by their closest nerd.
Choose, not prefer:
And so the question isn’t why don’t more people choose Macs, but rather, why don’t more computer nerds choose them?
There is one more reason, which is rarely seen because it is rather controversial, but since I've heard it so many times not pointing it would be hypocritical. It's software piracy. In addition to "what would you recommend?", people often ask for software, and they don't mean to buy. So the nerd willing to "share" software will close the deal on his/her platform of choice. The perception that there is more software on the PC platform may help, but the question is more about the easiness of piracy. Not so long ago, pretty much all versions of Windows would happily accept 111-11111... as a valid license number. If that was not an incentive, what was it?
In the same article, he also has an interesting point of view about Outlook:
Outlook and Exchange are very good to one class of people: IT. [...]
An Outlook/Exchange installation at a medium or large company requires a decent chunk of IT manpower just to stay afloat. There is no good reason an email system should require so much effort to maintain. You can argue that Exchange and Outlook offer much more than just email. But that’s not an excuse — it’s part of the problem.
This goes along the lines of the Anti-Apple IT conspiracy.
The Register explains the reasons behind the Mac OpenOffice delay. It boils down to very few things, among which the lack of human force (two half-time Mac OS developers over the past two years) and the lack of interest from Sun:
We checked with Sun's Irwin Tenhumberg, product marketing manager for Sun who confirmed that the community has stuck to an eighteen-month cycle for OpenOffice - so much for the "delay" to version 2.0.Sun's position is understandable, although I think it would serve their goal to displace Microsoft out of the desktop (but they are still locked into the thinking that every software they do serves only one purpose: sell more Sun hardware). This leaves two opportunities for Apple, either jump in and throw some resources at OpenOffice for Mac, or complement their first component of an Apple-brand office suite, Keynote, with what's missing. I'd prefer the latter, unless OpenOffice has a usable interface for Mac OS X. If it looks like the Gimp, well, bad luck. The Gimp, compared to Photoshop, looks like Quasimodo compared to Esmeralda. With people, such as Quasimodo, you should not focus on the envelope, but in terms of software, the interface remains the key to the application's functionalities.
Tenhumberg confirmed that Sun doesn't provide internal coding manpower to the Mac community, as it packages versions for Windows, Linux and Solaris as StarOffice.
"It's more in Apple interests than ours to provide more than backline support for OpenOffice," he told us.
P.S. bloggers and wiki participants beware, since the Reg article is written by Andrew Orlowski, he just cannot prevent himself to vomit on weblogs and wikis while writing on an entirely different matter. In polite French, he is hors sujet and that's too bad for a journalist.
P.S. 2: And according to Niklas Gustavsson, we shouldn't expect Sun to come up with the best interface in town.
A propos of this story in the Guardian, which is another attempt to explain the so-called "French paradox":
"Scientists have another solution for the notorious "French paradox" - the riddle of how a nation of alcohol-quaffing, croissant-munching gourmands stays healthy and slim, while a disproportionate number of health-obsessed Americans are obese and at cardiovascular risk.
The answer, after methodical study of brasseries, eateries, pizza parlours, Chinese restaurants and Hard Rock cafes in both countries, is simple: the French eat less of everything. And they eat less because they are served smaller portions. The French paradox has baffled European and US scientists for more than a decade.
Olivier Travers has a good laugh:
Baffled scientists for more than a decade? Come on. The first time I went to the US 14 years ago, I was baffled that what we call a bucket over here in Europe passed for a glass in Los Angeles. If you drink Coke by the liter and have 6 meals a day (Americans really keep eating all the time) you're going to get fat, OK? So after all we French have some common sense lessons to provide to the supposedly more pragmatic Americans.
It's time to convert our American friends to the metric system once and for all, and launch a new brand of food dubbed French Paradox. Yes sir, that's a bottle of 25 cl of Coke for the price of half a gallon, but that's much healthier. Take a 6-pack!
CNet and MacMerc report about a new line of products at Macromedia. According to CNet, Macromedia plans to announce an upgrade to its MX line today. Here is a primer of what's to come:
- Flash MX 2004. Flash will now be delivered in two versions (same binary, different licenses) with a new Professional Edition that focuses on video content integration. Both add support for ActionScript 2.0, CSS, accessibility, PDF+EPS and a spell checker.
- Dreamweaver MX 2004. DW new features are Expanded Table Mode to zoom on tables (but you shouldn't design with tables, should you?), SFTP (at last!), MS Office support (promises to convert to CSS on the fly, I'm looking forward to that one), built-in validation for cross-browser support, better CSS design support.
- Fireworks MX 2004. Comes with check-in/check-out support, unicode, faster, a cleaner UI and the ability to customize the application menu.
- Studio MX 2004. As usual, the Studio package will wrap all those applications in one box.
Macromedia continues to focus on standards (XHTML, CSS, unicode), accessibility and integration within its products. I bet the Standards Knights will give the MX 2004 family a close look as soon as they ship, since Macromedia is instrumental in the mass adoption of web standards within the web design shops.
Macromedia is also expected to release Flash 7, which is already available in beta.
Slashdot is wondering how objective is Microsoft's search:
There have been a number of stories on Microsoft trying to do a 'Netscape' on Google.. what would a world in which Microsoft provides search look like? A search for 'linux' on msn.com give amazon and ebay as the top two results, and a microsoft site promoting migration from Linux to Windows as the fourth listing. A search on MSN India is even more amusing -- the top result is a dead link, and the second one is Linuxsucks.com.
I found the same results as reported and other interesting facts re. searching for "linux" on several engines:
- Google has about 58,800,000 results, and shows linux.org, linux.com, redhat.com and linuxdoc.org at the top and visible on my screen without scrolling
- Yahoo! has about 48,400,000 results, and shows the same top results as Google
- AllTheWeb has 24,120,376 results, and shows the same top results as Google except #4 which is kernel.org
- Altavista found 14,551,832 results, but won't show anything not sponsored until the 9th item (i.e. requires scrolling).
- MSN US has about 542 results, and as mentioned on /., its top four results are Amazon, eBay, MSN Tech and Microsoft. Linux.org is 8th, Red Hat makes the 12th and 14th (but not with their home page), linux.com and linuxdoc.org do not make it on the first page. None of the "normal" links are visible on the first screen
- MSN India has only about 53 results, and indeed the first link is dead and the second one is linuxsucks.com. Linux.org makes 6th. No Red Hat in sight, but lots of Indian Linux Users' Group (the first making it as 3rd result). MSN India does not seems to have all the sponsored sites and ads that are on MSN US, so 7 "normal" links are visible on the first screen
"Screen" above refers to the visible area in my browser window on my PowerBook 15' (resolution: 1152 x 768). This represents a 634 pixels height per browser screen with my normal Safari settings (tools, bookmarks, tabs, status bars). My own webmaster's rule is that the most expensive real estate is within the first 500 vertical pixels, and I'm very sensitive to what is presented in that space which does not require scrolling. I appreciate that search engines include paid placement in their business model, but I do want to see useful (e.g. relevant and unbiased) results on the first screen. I will scroll as necessary to my search, but seeing nothing except ads at first makes me stay away. Add to that a world of difference in the various indexes, notwithstanding an alleged bias, which boils down to their relevance, MSN has still a long way to go in order to "Netscape" Google out of cyberspace.
If you want to dig deeper into whether MSN is biased, I suggest you try the same test with "Bill Gates". The results are equally interesting.
Mena Trott writes about Six Apart's "Philosophy of Yes" (emphasis is mine):
At the Supernova conference, I spoke about Six Apart's "Philosophy of Yes." For the most part, we try to accommodate what our users want and have a hard time saying no to features. We support a number of protocols and formats because we feel it is important to err on the side of mass support. From day one of Movable Type to day one of TypePad, we have provided not just an import mechanism but also an export mechanism. We never wanted to hold content hostage in order to guarantee tool lock-in.
The "export" button in Six Apart's products keeps us on our toes. Knowing that you can leave at any time is our motivator to keep on developing stable, intuitive and flexible applications. We want you to stay because you like the product, not because you can't get out.
A bold yet unfortunately uncommon philosophy among many commercial software companies, or music majors for that matter.
Pr Lessig laments about the level of ignorance of the WIPO about the public domain.
In the extremists in power, he notes the ignorance (as in not knowing what you're talking about) of:
Lois Boland, director of international relations for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, who said “that open-source software runs counter to the mission of WIPO, which is to promote intellectual-property rights.” As she is quoted as saying, “To hold a meeting which has as its purpose to disclaim or waive such rights seems to us to be contrary to the goals of WIPO.”
In balance in exile, he recalls the ignorance (as in if we ignore it, it will disappear) of:
Maria CATTAUI, Secretary-General of the International Chamber of Commerce, [who] scolded me that issues of “intellectual property” were not to be discussed because they were “exclusively” the concern of WIPO.
I promptly threw away the talk I had intended to give, and gave a completely different talk about how — Ms. Cattaui’s scolding notwithstanding — it was crucial that a summit on the world “information society” consider the role of the public domain in spreading knowledge and culture even if WIPO claimed exclusive jurisdiction of the matter. That assured I won’t be invited back to WSIS anytime soon (or at least by Ms. Cattaui).
It is therefore extraordinary now that people purporting to speak for WIPO would say that WIPO too is not to consider issues about the public domain. Neither at WIPO, nor at WSIS, nor apparently anywhere.
Why is so difficult to understand that one cannot define property as just private property, excluding the public domain, as one cannot describe "bad" without "good", or "plus" without "minus"? Still confusing commons with communism?
Jim Clark, founder of Netscape, gets scratched at VentureBlog:
Jim Clark tells BusinessWeek that nothing's going on [via Scripting News].
There's nothing going on that's of interest. There are only very few things.
That's right, nothing. Neither weblogs nor wikis, nor hi-fi nor wi-fi, nor googling nor ogling, will save us now.
Nothing to see here folks. Now move along.
I wonder when the former Netscape founders started those lamentations. Or when exactly they lost vision. Was it before they left? How long before Netscape died?
I apologize for the bit of nostalgia. I'll remember Andreessen's rule of crappy people, but that's about all I'll remember about that particular management.
By touring the city on a Segway. This is the most ridiculous way to discover the City of Lights. Paris is a place you walk, this is the best and most secure way to fill your eyes with everything the city can offer. And if you're tired, get on a tourist bus or a boat. But "doing" Paris on a Segway is the best way to miss it, ask for trouble (Parisians pedestrians are an aggressive and not endangered species) and at best look like a parading nerd who doesn't know how to waste money.
A very interesting article comparing the merits of SSL vs. IPSec Virtual Private Networks (spotted on Boing Boing).
In the corporate environment, VPNs are becoming common in the software arsenal, allowing mobile employees to connect to the intranet securely from anywhere through the Internet public network. One can use this technology to continue providing support, in a secure way, to the highly insecure FTP protocol -- even with the burden of a VPN client, it is far easier than replacing FTP altogether in favor of SSH/SFTP/SCP access because the mainstream webmasters' tools such as Dreamweaver do not support secure protocols out of the box yet.
Note to Mac OS X users: there are several solutions to connect to corporate VPNs. CISCO provides a Mac OS X client (which is even compatible with AirPort NAT, I use it with my old station). VPNTracker is a swiss-knife tool that allows access to many other vendors VPN servers, like Checkpoint (which itself do not provide any Mac client). The next version of Mac OS X dubbed Panther will include an IPSec VPN client, but I haven't yet installed my beta copy, so I don't know which server solutions it can connect to.
From: Administrator@mac.com
Date: Ven aoû 22, 2003 12:05:43 Europe/Paris
To: [names removed to protect the innocents]
Subject: [MailServer Notification]To Recipient virus found and action taken.
ScanMail for Microsoft Exchange has detected virus-infected attachment(s).
Sender = [name removed to protect the innocent]
Recipient(s) = [names removed to protect the innocents]
Subject = ANALYSE EMAIL : ALERTE DE VIRUS LORS DE L'OPÉRATION D'ATTACHEMENT DE FICHIER~HARD DISCOUNT DE PISCINES
Scanning time = 08/22/2003 12:05:43
Engine/Pattern = 6.510-1002/620
Action on virus found: The attachment Anciens documents Word.lnk.exe contains PE_BUGBEAR.B-O virus. ScanMail has Deleted it.
Warning to recipient. ScanMail has detected a virus.[name removed to protect the innocent]
mac.com email running on Microsoft Exchange. Bwahahahaha!
Grabbing from Jez' comment on my last post, Wednesday's spam surge is related to the latest Microsoft's security flaw. I'm already two days late, but since I'm working on a Mac, the spam surge was merely the only sign of that misery for me (although I wonder if the unavailability of my home Internet connection for most of that day was related to that exploit too).
A few reports for your reading pleasure, which I find harder and harder for Microsoft with each new virus:
- BBC: World wakes up to another virus
- Slashdot: Microsoft Worms Crash Ohio Nuke Plant, MD Trains
- The Register: Forget California, it's time to recall Microsoft and Slammer worm crashed Ohio nuke plant net
I apologize for repeating myself, but to the IT managers who are fed up with the hidden costs of managing security in a Windows environment (three significant viruses in the past two weeks), you do have a choice. And it's not necessarily one with an ugly desktop and lawyer-unfriendly legal ground. Funny how that choice is rarely, if ever mentioned in IT articles.
That is not to say that Unices and Mac OS are safe from viruses or security flaws. But in more than 20 years I have never been hit by a virus on any of the Unices I've worked with, and the latest virus I remember seeing on one of my Macs was around 1990 (because I never run macros on MS Office documents, I might have come close to a few since then). According to this article, not a single Mac OS X-specific virus has yet appeared. May be those targets are not interesting for the script kiddies.
Jeffrey Zeldman notes that there has been a surge in spam yesterday. I am doing a little survey on the spam I receive, and I got 17 spams yesterday on an address that usually receives between 3 and 7. I don't know about hell or purgatory for spammers, I just wish someone would find a terrestrial and definitive solution to put us out of their misery.
Scaring "domestic terrorism" practices by radical animal-rights extremists against a top San Francisco chef and his use of foie gras, are reported by SFGate.com. I don't think that this sort of violence is serving the cause it is supposed to support. And I have come several times to the same conclusion as Manrique, i.e. free speech is an extremely relative notion in America.
Foie gras is already under scrutinity in many countries as well as by the European Union itself, and could be on the verge of disappearance (although the figures below show the contrary). Israel's Supreme Court has scheduled its ban of production for 2005. Europe has given until 2010 to improve the methods of production in order to improve the animals welfare.
The WSPA notes that:
Animal protection laws in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Poland and Austria specifically prohibit force-feeding. In Switzerland the law against cruelty to animals is interpreted as preventing foie gras production, and in the United Kingdom, successive ministers have stated that it would not be allowed. Despite such laws, many of these countries still import large amounts of foie gras from France.
This highlights the hypocrisy, and to me the real gordian knot around the whole issue, many are condemning force-feeding in their vicinity but many are still willing to pay premium price to eat good foie gras. How many people do belong to both categories, would be an interesting figure to foresee the futur of foie gras.
A few figures:
Egyptians were producing foie gras 4500 years ago. France is by far the first producer of foie gras, with 16,430 tons in 2001 split into 583 T of goose (38% of the whole market for this variety) and 15,847 T of duck (91% of the whole market for this variety). In 2001, France exported 2979 tons of foie gras (+200% since 96) for 63 M€ and imported 2578 tons (+24% since 96) for 36 M€. Imports were from Hungary (60%) and Bulgaria (37%). Spain is the first client with 407 T in 2001 (+16% from 2000), followed by the Benelux with 155 T (+20%), Switzerland (148, stable), Japan (125, +51%), UK (101, -17%), Germany (70, +32%). The US imported 42 T (+56%) and Honk Kong 50 T (+100%). [Source : Etude Filière Gras, novembre 2002, PDF]
Other readings on this subject:
- An excerpt of the summary, conclusion and recommendations from Welfare Aspects of the Production of Foie Gras in Ducks and Geese, a report of the Scientific Committee on Animal Health and Animal Welfare (whole report from the EU in PDF, or HTML preview)
- Ongoing initiatives on animal welfare on the farm
- Council Directive 98/58/EC of 20 July 1998 concerning the protection of animals kept for farming purposes
- Grounds for hostilities by Damelon Kimbrough (hat tip for the SFGate.com article)
- (In French) site du Comité Interprofessionnel des Palmipèdes à foie gras
Some moron using the IP address 61.181.5.80 (which resolves to "CHINANET Tianjin province network", needless to say that it's been banned now) has left a spam in a comment on one of my posts. At least it tasted like a spam (I don't write about or call for comments on pills and tits on this site) and looked like a comment (email notification, listed on the recent comments, etc.) but I soon realized that the entry body had completely been wiped out and replaced by that spam.
Weird.
Has anyone seen this before?
Update: I received an email from Ben Trott explaining it, and it's an unfortunate chain of events associated with a bug in Safari:
This is actually a bug in Safari (I assume that is what you're using? [yes]), unfortunately. What happens is this:
1) You go to edit a comment on the edit comment screen.
2) You delete the comment.
3) Your browser is redirected to the edit entry screen for the entry on which the comment was made.
4) The text of the entry is filled in with the text of the comment.
5) You save the entry to republish that entry, removing the comment from the public site.
The bug in Safari is #4 in the above steps--it seems that Safari will fill in form fields with the values from a form on the previous page, if the previous page has redirected to the current page. This is an awful bug, and I've emailed the Safari team at Apple (didn't get a response, but I assume they're rather busy). We've tried working around it by using Safari's suggested no-cache headers, etc., but that didn't help.
Just something to be careful of until it's fixed, I guess. Sorry about that. (But it's not a hack.)
I discovered another problem today, and that one may not be linked to a browser bug. I used the "search entries" form to find the troubled entry. I entered a few keywords in the search field and hit return, a rather natural way of using a search box. Except that MT performed a search and replace, replacing all occurences of those keywords in my entire site with nothing.
John Robb writes (emphasis is mine):
What I would like to see: a method by which Google's AdSense or Overture's Content Match could be applied to a single post. This would allow the inclusion of ads within RSS (not ad boxes, but simple text with the label advertisement). I really don't want to see ads in my RSS, but it is inevitable. For qualified content, like what I am working on with the Weblog Network, it is a must. Should ads get their own treatment or should they be included in the description?
Two examples of RSS feeds with ads (I don't have many more, I really dislike ads in RSS feeds, and unsubscribing is even easier than subscribing):
- Ben Hammersley's Dangerous Precedent (RSS | web site) the ad is always present after the first fresh entry in the feed
- MacMerc (RSS | web site) this one shows the same ad at the end of every post
Eventually Adrian Holovaty will need to complete his article on how to separate ads from content in all browsers.
Robert X. Cringely in May the Source Be With You thinks that Macs aren't getting in large organizations because they threaten the livelihood of IT staffs:
If you recommend purchasing a computer that requires only half the support of the machine it is replacing, aren't you putting your job in danger? Exactly.
Ideally, the IT department ought to recommend the best computer for the job, but more often than not, they recommend the best computer for the IT department's job.
He is also digging around why they prefer Linux over Mac OS:
Again, it comes down to the IT Department Full Employment Act. Adopting Linux allows organizations to increase their IT efficiency without requiring the IT department to increase ITS efficiency. It takes just as many nerds to support 100 Linux boxes as 100 Windows boxes, yet Linux boxes are cheaper and can support more users. The organization is better off while the IT department is unscathed and unchallenged. [...]
Macs reduce IT head count while Linux probably increases IT head count, simple as that.
I'm among those who claim that Macs have a lower TCO than Windows-PCs, and for many more tasks than the creative ones people usually think Macs are made for. A couple years ago, my better half was doing IT support for a Mac OS-based operation of 200 people spread in 20 cities, alone! Would you imagine one person supporting 200 Windows-PCs, even on the same building? Me neither.
I think that one of the main reasons why Macs aren't getting into corporate IT is simply ignorance. It is amazing to see how many IT people, and in particular CIOs, are simply labeling the Apple world as unknown and uninteresting. Ignorance leads to fear for most people, and those guys -- who you would expect to stay informed of everything that is new and innovative in their industry, which come from Apple more often than not -- tend to limit their curiosity to what is the latest Windows vulnerability of the week.
The rest of the article is focused on IT outsourcing, in particular the current trend of Indian off-shore operations. Only time will tell us how this trend will evolve, but I don't think it's going away anytime soon.
CNet, Europeans to get Music Stores:
A new pay-by-the-song music service is launching in Western Europe, putting an iTunes-like digital download store inside Microsoft's Windows Media Player
Branded variously as the MSN Music Club and Tiscali Music Club, the service is actually run by online music company OD2, rather than by Microsoft itself. As with Apple Computer's iTunes, the stores will be accessible inside the music-playing software itself. In this case, each may be accessed by a tab in the Windows Media Player premium services section.
I have some doubts about the comparison between WMP and iTunes, but it seems that at a time where Apple only plans to open its music store to U.S.-based Windows users, Europe will enjoy several solutions aimed at Windows users only. You know better Apple, a significant chunk of your revenue has been coming from outside the U.S. for quite some time now.
See also, on The Register: Microsoft beats Apple iTunes Music Store to Europe.
If I tell you that the current 26°C in Paris seems cold compared to the 37-40°C we've had for nearly two weeks, it's nothing compared to what Google thinks 26°C is in Fahrenheit: -412.87°F! Gosh, that would be -247.15°C, only 26°C from the absolute 0 Kelvin. The Google calculator has still some bugs is missing a spell checker to correct my bad English (see Alek's comment below). Google thought I had entered 26 degrees Kelvin and translated it in °F.
Chers lecteurs francophones, vous pouvez désormais découvrir le côté français de la Force sur padawan.info/fr, mon weblogue en bon franchouillard bien de chez nous (mais de qualité quand même). Je vais ainsi séparer Shakespeare et Molière, les cows et les vaches n'en seront que mieux gardées chacunes de leur côté. Le premier qui me parle de traîtrise se prend un blocard. Je n'ai pas terminé le design et surtout la bonne intégration du weblog et du weblogue, mais les liens ne devraient pas changer.
Dear non-francophone readers, I will not bother you anymore with my French posts on this weblog. The French side of the Force now has its own separate weblog at padawan.info/fr. Of course, francophones who can read English can enjoy both (amazingly, it works also for anglophones who can read French). Actually I lied, I will continue to annoy all of you with the French side of the Force, only I will do it in English.
I've been struggling with MT, along the lines of the previously reported missing category problem. It had become impossible for me in the past week to post anything using NetNewsWire without getting a time out and the dreadful wrong URL that gets spilled everywhere through pings and RSS files.
Pings! Here are the culprits. Following advices here and there, I added Technorati, bloggrolling and weblogues.com to my ping list about a week ago. Wrong move. Pinging those sites, or one of them, adds a significant delay to the build process, hence the consistent time out with NNW. All of those sites (apart weblogues.com but that one is for French weblogs) will pick up my updates through the default blo.gs and weblogs.com anyway.
Lesson: always note changes you make to your MT configuration. I knew it, I just have a terrible memory :(.
- I wake up at 5h30 to get at CDG airport before my flight checking limit scheduled at 7h00. I reach the airport at 6h30, first time I get a parking place without turning for 20 mn, parisians are not back from holidays yet.
- They ask us to board the plane at 7h00.
- The plane takes of at 8h30, 45 mn late. Thanks for the extra 1h30 sitting on the tarmac. At least we have air conditioning.
- Munich, 37°C, inside the office.
- I spill water on my PowerBook by accident, near the power button. The poor beast starts to ask if I really want to shut it down, in an endless loop. I shut it down. The beast then attempts to startup every 30 s, even when closed. Weird. I remove the battery.
- I get stopped at the airport security control in Munich because I have a knife (more on that one later, but it won't be a "I'm a suspected terrorist" story ;-).
- Flight back OK.
- The sign on the highway to Paris says: "Take the A1, the A3 is blocked for 12 km". I take the A1. I'm blocked right after the turn for 10km and of course that road is far longer than the other one. One hour. The trip in the other direction takes 14 mn, says a sign when I reach Paris.
The PowerBook runs fine now. I guess two hours in the plane plus a few others between 33 and 37°C helped evaporate the water (that works for me too, apparently). I'm back in blogness ;-)
According to Météo France, last night the temperature in Paris did not go below 25.5°C (77.9°F), marking this night of August 11 as the hottest in France's capital in the last 130 years (actually since the creation of the weather observatory in the Parc Montsouris in 1873).
Now I know why I did not sleep well last night.
Praising the merits and promises of Rapid Prototyping in 3-D Printing's Great Leap Forward, Wired gives me a 15-year journey backward in time:
The granddaddy of the RP family is stereolithography. The technique was commercialized in 1988. It uses a vat of photosensitive liquid polymer and a laser beam to trace out each layer, which drops into the vat so the next layer can be traced.
The youngest addition to the layered manufacturing family is 3-D printing, which means exactly what it says: One printer head spits out a fine powder, while another spits out a bonding agent, creating one layer. The model bed drops one layer, and the heads pass over again.
I started to work on stereolithography in 1987, doing research, one year before getting my engineer diploma. I spent some 9 years in that field. I put my hands on one of the first 3-D printers in 1991. Over more than a decade, I've seen strikingly similar stories on how revolutionary those 3-D printers are, how cheap they will become and how fast they will spread once they get mainstream, tomorrow morning that is. I quite possibly might have missed the big news, but to me this field hasn't done any significant move in the last 10 years and that sort of appliance is nowhere in sight.
What this article, like many others before, doesn't tell you is that the real breakthrough about rapid prototyping in the past 15 years has been virtual prototyping, i.e. expanding the CAD software abilities from design to prototyping in allowing for more and more complex computer simulations not just on the look but also the cinematic, resistance, behavior of new products. What the industry has always been looking for is to reduce price and time to market of products, not prototypes.
What with these Britons again? They beat a 50-year old speed record and go nuts. Now they come close, but still under by a few °C, of the temperature we've had for a week all over France (and will have for another ten days), and they're ready to sodo sacrifice goats!
Now I hear that the Pope is praying for rain. A few degrees more and he would have done rain dances. For the sake of our mental health, could someone finally prove those ozone hole and greenhouse gazes theories true?
While DoCoMo plans to introduce fuel-cell batteries in its phone by 2004, Apple's next generation batteries will continue on the Lithium bandwagon.
Fuel cells are commonly used in satellites for their high performance and capacity but have not yet found their way into mass market products. The generation of energy is made by oxidation of a combustible. To refill the battery, you add more combustible (and possibly remove the by-product, usually water). That is less convenient than plugging the battery in a power socket, but potentially very lucrative (think ink cartridges).
... is this! Or is it the convergence of blogging and moblogging? [Hat tip: netlexblogger]
Me voilà donc, au beau milieu du gratin de la blogosphère francophone réunie mercredi à Paris, traité de traître à la francophonie parce que j'écris essentiellement en anglais sur ce carnet.
Outre les fleurs ci-dessus et d'autres ici par François Hodierne (qui ne m'en veut pas tant que ça finalement), ce qui m'a le plus interpellé mercredi est cette remarque de Laurent me disant que d'écrire en anglais me marginalise.
Bin fuck alors !
The Associated Press on Wired News gives some more details on the EU case against Microsoft I reported yesterday, see Microsoft EU Monopoly on Last Leg:
The EU can fine violators up to 10 percent of their worldwide sales -- a figure that could reach into the billions for Microsoft.
[...] The EU will hold off until it sees Microsoft's response, due by the end of September
Gavin Bell has an interesting post on Apple to take on Sony's role:
Business Week have a special online section on Apple this week. It makes for interesting reading, with one columnist justifying writing about Apple week after week because Apple is essentially the only innovator in the computer business, corporate desires removing any interest from the standard Windows laptop.
Another article suggests that Apple may become the new Sony, citing the success of the iPod as the basis for this. Steve Jobs said that Apple would "innovate through the downturn", when the stock market bubble burst.
Gavin makes a good point on how Apple is extending its reach on creative people in far more domains than its traditional DTP market, the influential people who are trends setters, but also the content creators.
There is room for improvements of course, and I'm not alone to think about not renewing this .Mac account if Apple does not beef it up (emphasis is mine):
Products like TypePad are the kind of quality internet offering that Apple should be providing, the .Mac homepage stuff is so 1999.
Since their last presidential election, our American friends have decided to have as much fun as possible during elections.
On October 7, California may see Governator vs. the revenge of the Pr0n. If Gray Davis looses over Schwarzie, will he dare to say "I'll be back?"
Side notes:
1. Jeremy Zawodny spanks Google's PageRank:
If you search Google for "Schwarzenegger for governor" you get an entry form [sic] my blog as the first result.
At the time of this post, he's still the first result. Good links on PageRank on his weblog.
2. As always each time they face a problem, the US dig further into technology and want to replace their punch cards by electronic voting systems. Precisely computers running Microsoft Access on Windows, with all their renowned security and reliability. What's wrong with paper bulletins and manual counting by ordinary citizens under public scrutiny, as we've been doing for centuries here? [Update: fresh news about Diebold Election Systems' security skills]
When I wrote yesterday that flying, to me, has become a foretaste of hell, I was not joking. And we haven't seen the worst of it yet. There will be a time where you won't be able to board if you're not completely naked and after passing an X-ray of your entire body.
Business idea: if renting things was not so inconvenient and expensive, I would gladly board a flight with nothing much and rent everything I need at the airport. Now that you're forced to waste around 2 hours there anyway, that would kill time a bit.
Ce soir, je m'en vais rejoindre un distingué aéropage à la MousseNavire. Rencontrer le gratin de la blogosphère française et francophone me rend un poil fébrile. Comme il fait 40° à Paris, je n'aurais qu'à prétexter la chaleur.<