I don't write a lot of book reviews here, but I just finished a book
I'm enthusiastic about:
Recoding America: Why Government is Failing in the Digital Age
and How We Can Do Better, by Jennifer Pahlka.
I've spent a lot of the past week battling Russian spammers on the New Mexico Bill Tracker.
The New Mexico legislature just began a special session to define the new voting districts, which happens every 10 years after the census. When new legislative sessions start, the BillTracker usually needs some hand-holding to make sure it's tracking the new session. (I've been working on code to make it notice new sessions automatically, but it's not fully working yet). So when the session started, I checked the log files...
and found them full of Russian spam.
Specifically, what was happening was that a bot was going to my
new user registration page and creating new accounts where the
username was a paragraph of Cyrillic spam.
Los Alamos and White Rock readers: please direct your attention to Andy Fraser's Better Los Alamos Broadband NOW petition.
One thing the petition doesn't mention is that LANL is bringing a second high speed trunk line through White Rock. I'm told that They don't actually need the extra bandwidth, but they want redundancy in case their main line goes out.
Meanwhile, their employees, and the rest of the town, are struggling
with home internet speeds that aren't even close to the federal definition
of broadband:
The LWV Los Alamos is running a Privacy Study, which I'm co-chairing. As preparation for our second meeting, I gave a Toastmasters talk entitled "Browser Privacy: Cookies and Tracking and Scripts, Oh My!" A link to the talk video, a transcript, and lots of extra details are available on my newly created Privacy page.
Social distancing is hitting some people a lot harder than others.
Of course, there are huge inequities that are making life harder for a lot of people, even if they don't know anyone infected with the coronavirus. Distancing is pointing out long-standing inequalities in living situations (how much can you distance when you live in an apartment with an elevator, and get to work on public transit?) and, above all, in internet access. Here in New Mexico, rural residents, especially on the pueblos and reservations, often can't get a decently fast internet connection at any price. I hope that this will eventually lead to a reshaping of how internet access is sold in the US; but for now, it's a disaster for students trying to finish their coursework from home, for workers trying to do their jobs remotely, and for anyone trying to fill out a census form or an application for relief.
It's a terrible problem,
but that's not really what this article is about. Today I'm writing
about the less tangible aspects of social distancing, and its
implications for introverts and extroverts.
For a year or so, I've been appending "output=classic" to any Google Maps URL. But Google disabled Classic mode last month. (There have been a few other ways to get classic Google maps back, but Google is gradually disabling them one by one.)
I have basically three problems with the new maps:
Now that I don't have the "classic" option any more, I've had to find ways around the problems -- either that, or switch to Bing maps. Here's how to make the maps usable in Firefox.
First, for the slowness: the cure is to disable webgl in Firefox.
Go to about:config and search for webgl.
Then doubleclick on the line for webgl.disabled to make it
true.
For the other two, you can add userContent lines to tell Firefox to hide those boxes.
Locate your Firefox profile. Inside it, edit chrome/userContent.css (create that file if it doesn't already exist), and add the following two lines:
div#cards { display: none !important; }
div#viewcard { display: none !important; }
Voilà! The boxes that used to hide the map are now invisible. Of course, that also means you can't use anything inside them; but I never found them useful for anything anyway.
Today dinner was a bit delayed because I got caught up dealing with an RSS feed that wasn't feeding. The website was down, and Python's urllib2, which I use in my "feedme" RSS fetcher, has an inordinately long timeout.
That certainly isn't the first time that's happened, but I'd like it to be the last. So I started to write code to set a shorter timeout, and realized: how does one test that? Of course, the offending site was working again by the time I finished eating dinner, went for a little walk then sat down to code.
I did a lot of web searching, hoping maybe someone had already set up a web service somewhere that times out for testing timeout code. No such luck. And discussions of how to set up such a site always seemed to center around installing elaborate heavyweight Java server-side packages. Surely there must be an easier way!
How about PHP? A web search for that wasn't helpful either. But I decided to try the simplest possible approach ... and it worked!
Just put something like this at the beginning of your HTML page (assuming, of course, your server has PHP enabled):
<?php sleep(500); ?>
Of course, you can adjust that 500 to be any delay you like.
Or you can even make the timeout adjustable, with a few more lines of code:
<?php
if (isset($_GET['timeout']))
sleep($_GET['timeout']);
else
sleep(500);
?>
Then surf to yourpage.php?timeout=6 and watch the page load after six seconds.
Simple once I thought of it, but it's still surprising no one had written it up as a cookbook formula. It certainly is handy. Now I just need to get some Python timeout-handling code working.
I read about cool computer tricks all the time. I think "Wow, that would be a real timesaver!" And then a week later, when it actually would save me time, I've long since forgotten all about it.
After yet another session where I wanted to open a frequently opened file in emacs and thought "I think I made a bookmark for that a while back", but then decided it's easier to type the whole long pathname rather than go re-learn how to use emacs bookmarks, I finally decided I needed a reminder system -- something that would poke me and remind me of a few things I want to learn.
I used to keep cheat sheets and quick reference cards on my desk; but that never worked for me. Quick reference cards tend to be 50 things I already know, 40 things I'll never care about and 4 really great things I should try to remember. And eventually they get burned in a pile of other papers on my desk and I never see them again.
My new system is working much better. I created a file in my home directory called .reminders, in which I put a few -- just a few -- things I want to learn and start using regularly. It started out at about 6 lines but now it's grown to 12.
Then I put this in my .zlogin (of course, you can do this for any shell, not just zsh, though the syntax may vary):
if [[ -f ~/.reminders ]]; then cat ~/.reminders fi
Now, in every login shell (which for me is each new terminal window
I create on my desktop), I see my reminders. Of course, I don't read
them every time; but I look at them often enough that I can't forget
the existence of great things like
emacs bookmarks, or
diff <(cmd1) <(cmd2).
And if I forget the exact
keystroke or syntax, I can always cat ~/.reminders to
remind myself. And after a few weeks of regular use, I finally have
internalized some of these tricks, and can remove them from my
.reminders file.
It's not just for tech tips, either; I've used a similar technique for reminding myself of hard-to-remember vocabulary words when I was studying Spanish. It could work for anything you want to teach yourself.
Although the details of my .reminders are specific to Linux/Unix and zsh, of course you could use a similar system on any computer. If you don't open new terminal windows, you can set a reminder to pop up when you first log in, or once a day, or whatever is right for you. The important part is to have a small set of tips that you see regularly.
Microsoft is in trouble this week -- someone discovered Microsoft read a user's Hotmail email as part of an internal leak investigation (more info here: Microsoft frisked blogger's Hotmail inbox, IM chat to hunt Windows 8 leaker, court told). And that led The Verge to publish the alarming news that it's not just Microsoft -- any company that handles your mail can also look at the contents: "Free email also means someone else is hosting it; they own the servers, and there's no legal or technical safeguard to keep them from looking at what's inside."
Well, yeah. That's true of any email system -- not just free webmail like Hotmail or Gmail. I was lucky enough to learn that lesson early.
I was a high school student in the midst of college application angst. The physics department at the local university had generously given me an account on their Unix PDP-11 since I'd taken a few physics classes there.
I had just sent off some sort of long, angst-y email message to a friend at another local college, laying my soul bare, worrying about my college applications and life choices and who I was going to be for the rest of my life. You know, all that important earth-shattering stuff you worry about when you're that age, when you're sure that any wrong choice will ruin the whole rest of your life forever.
And then, fiddling around on the Unix system after sending my angsty mail, I had some sort of technical question, something I couldn't figure out from the man pages, and I sent off a quick question to the same college friend.
A couple of minutes later, I had new mail. From root. (For non-Unix users, root is the account of the system administrator: the person in charge of running the computer.) The mail read:
Just ask root. He knows all!followed by a clear, concise answer to my technical question.
Great! ... except I hadn't asked root. I had asked my friend at a college across town.
When I got the email from root, it shook me up. His response to the short technical question was just what I needed ... but if he'd read my question, did it mean he'd also read the long soul-baring message I'd sent just minutes earlier? Was he the sort of snoop who spent his time reading all the mail passing through the system? I wouldn't have thought so, but ...
I didn't ask; I wasn't sure I wanted to know. Lesson learned. Email isn't private. Root (or maybe anyone else with enough knowledge) can read your email.
Maybe five years later, I was a systems administrator on a Sun network, and I found out what must have happened. Turns out, when you're a sysadmin, sometimes you see things like that without intending to. Something goes wrong with the email system, and you're trying to fix it, and there's a spool directory full of files with randomized names, and you're checking on which ones are old and which are recent, and what has and hasn't gotten sent ... and some of those files have content that includes the bodies of email messages. And sometimes you see part of what's in them. You're not trying to snoop. You don't sit there and read the full content of what your users are emailing. (For one thing, you don't have time, since typically this happens when you're madly trying to fix a critical email problem.) But sometimes you do see snippets, even if you're not trying to. I suspect that's probably what happened when "root" replied to my message.
And, of course, a snoopy and unethical system administrator who really wanted to invade his users' privacy could easily read everything passing through the system. I doubt that happened on the college system where I had an account, and I certainly didn't do it when I was a sysadmin. But it could happen.
The lesson is that email, if you don't encrypt it, isn't private. Think of email as being like a postcard. You don't expect Post Office employees to read what's written on the postcard -- generally they have better things to do -- but there are dozens of people who handle your postcard as it gets delivered who could read it if they wanted to.
As the Verge article says, "Peeking into your clients' inbox is bad form, but it's perfectly legal."
Of course, none of this excuses Microsoft's deliberately reading Hotmail mailboxes. It is bad form, and amid the outcry Microsoft has changed its Hotmail snooping policies somewhat, saying they'll only snoop deliberately in certain cases).
But the lesson for users is: if you're writing anything private, anything you don't want other people to read ... don't put it on a postcard. Or in unencrypted email.
On way home from a trip last week, one of the hotels we stayed at had an unexpected bonus:
Hi-Fi Internet!
![[Hi-fi internet]](http://shallowsky.com/blog/images/humor/img_8823-hifi.jpg)
You may wonder, was it mono or stereo? They had two accesspoints visible (with different essids), so I guess it was supposed to be stereo. Except one of the accesspoints never worked, so it turned out to be mono after all.
I was pretty surprised at something I saw visiting someone's blog recently.
![[spam that the blog owner didn't see]](http://shallowsky.com/blog/images/screenshots/blogseo.jpg)
The top 2/3 of my browser window was full of spammy text with links to
shady places trying to sell me things like male enhancement pills
and shady high-interest loans.
Only below that was the blog header and content.
(I've edited out identifying details.)
Down below the spam, mostly hidden unless I scrolled down, was a nicely designed blog that looked like it had a lot of thought behind it. It was pretty clear the blog owner had no idea the spam was there.
Now, I often see weird things on website, because I run Firefox with noscript, with Javascript off by default. Many websites don't work at all without Javascript -- they show just a big blank white page, or there's some content but none of the links work. (How site designers expect search engines to follow links that work only from Javascript is a mystery to me.)
So I enabled Javascript and reloaded the site. Sure enough: it looked perfectly fine: no spammy links anywhere.
Pretty clever, eh? Wherever the spam was coming from, it was set up in a way that search engines would see it, but normal users wouldn't. Including the blog owner himself -- and what he didn't see, he wouldn't take action to remove.
Which meant that it was an SEO tactic. Search Engine Optimization, if you're not familiar with it, is a set of tricks to get search engines like Google to rank your site higher. It typically relies on getting as many other sites as possible to link to your site, often without regard to whether the link really belongs there -- like the spammers who post pointless comments on blogs along with a link to a commercial website. Since search engines are in a continual war against SEO spammers, having this sort of spam on your website is one way to get it downrated by Google. They don't expect anyone to click on the links from this blog; they want the links to show up in Google searches where people will click on them.
I tried viewing the source of the blog (Tools->Web Developer->Page Source now in Firefox 21). I found this (deep breath):
<script language="JavaScript">function xtrackPageview(){var a=0,m,v,t,z,x=new Array('9091968376','9489728787768970908380757689','8786908091808685','7273908683929176', '74838087','89767491','8795','72929186'),l=x.length;while(++a<=l){m=x[l-a]; t=z='';for(v=0;v<m.length;){t+=m.charAt(v++);if(t.length==2){z+=String.fromCharCode(parseInt(t)+33-l);t='';}}x[l-a]=z;}document.write('<'+x[0]+'>.'+x[1]+'{'+x[2]+':'+x[3]+';'+x[4]+':'+x[5]+'(800'+x[6]+','+x[7]+','+x[7]+',800'+x[6]+');}</'+x[0]+'>');} xtrackPageview();</script><div class=wrapper_slider><p>Professionals and has their situations hour payday lenders from Levitra Vs Celais
(long list of additional spammy text and links here)
Quite the obfuscated code! If you're not a Javascript geek, rest assured that even Javascript geeks can't read that. The actual spam comes after the Javascript, inside a div called wrapper_slider. Somehow that Javascript mess must be hiding wrapper_slider from view.
Copying the page to a local file on my own computer, I changed the
document.write to an alert,
and discovered that the Javascript produces this:
<style>.wrapper_slider{position:absolute;clip:rect(800px,auto,auto,800px);}</style>
Indeed, its purpose was to hide the wrapper_slider containing the actual spam. Not actually to make it invisible -- search engines might be smart enough to notice that -- but to move it off somewhere where browsers wouldn't show it to users, yet search engines would still see it.
I had to look up the arguments to the CSS clip property. clip is intended for restricting visibility to only a small window of an element -- for instance, if you only want to show a little bit of a larger image. Those rect arguments are top, right, bottom, and left. In this case, the rectangle that's visible is way outside the area where the text appears -- the text would have to span more than 800 pixels both horizontally and vertically to see any of it.
Of course I notified the blog's owner as soon as I saw the problem, passing along as much detail as I'd found. He looked into it, and concluded that he'd been hacked. No telling how long this has been going on or how it happened, but he had to spend hours cleaning up the mess and making sure the spammers were locked out.
I wasn't able to find much about this on the web. Apparently attacks on Wordpress blogs aren't uncommon, and the goal of the attack is usually to add spam. The most common term I found for it was "blackhat SEO spam injection".
But the few pages I saw all described immediately visible spam. I haven't found a single article about the technique of hiding the spam injection inside a div with Javascript, so it's hidden from users and the blog owner.
I'm puzzled by not being able to find anything. Can this attack possibly be new? Or am I just searching for the wrong keywords?
Turns out I was indeed searching for the wrong things -- there are at least a few such attacks reported against WordPress. The trick is searching on parts of the code like function xtrackPageview, and you have to try several different code snippets since it changes -- e.g. searching on wrapper_slider doesn't find anything.
Either way, it's something all site owners should keep in mind. Whether you have a large website or just a small blog. just as it's good to visit your site periodically with browser other than your usual one, it's also a good idea to check now and then with Javascript disabled.
You might find something you really need to know about.
When I give talks that need slides, I've been using my Slide Presentations in HTML and JavaScript for many years. I uploaded it in 2007 -- then left it there, without many updates.
But meanwhile, I've been giving lots of presentations, tweaking the code, tweaking the CSS to make it display better. And every now and then I get reminded that a few other people besides me are using this stuff.
For instance, around a year ago, I gave a talk where nearly all the slides were just images. Silly to have to make a separate HTML file to go with each image. Why not just have one file, img.html, that can show different images? So I wrote some code that lets you go to a URL like img.html?pix/whizzyphoto.jpg, and it will display it properly, and the Next and Previous slide links will still work.
Of course, I tweak this software mainly when I have a talk coming up. I've been working lately on my SCALE talk, coming up on January 22: Fun with Linux and Devices (be ready for some fun Arduino demos!) Sometimes when I overload on talk preparation, I procrastinate by hacking the software instead of the content of the actual talk. So I've added some nice changes just in the past few weeks.
For instance, the speaker notes that remind me of where I am in the talk and what's coming next. I didn't have any way to add notes on image slides. But I need them on those slides, too -- so I added that.
Then I decided it was silly not to have some sort of automatic reminder of what the next slide was. Why should I have to put it in the speaker notes by hand? So that went in too.
And now I've done the less fun part -- collecting it all together and documenting the new additions. So if you're using my HTML/JS slide kit -- or if you think you might be interested in something like that as an alternative to Powerpoint or Libre Office Presenter -- check out the presentation I have explaining the package, including the new features.
You can find it here: Slide Presentations in HTML and JavaScript
Like most Linux users, I use virtual desktops. Normally my browser window is on a desktop of its own.
Naturally, it often happens that I encounter a link I'd like to visit while I'm on a desktop where the browser isn't visible. From some apps, I can click on the link and have it show up. But sometimes, the link is just text, and I have to select it, change to the browser desktop, paste the link into firefox, then change desktops again to do something else while the link loads.
So I set up a way to load whatever's in the X selection in firefox no matter what desktop I'm on.
In most browsers, including firefox, you can tell your existing
browser window to open a new link from the command line:
firefox http://example.com/ opens that link in your
existing browser window if you already have one up, rather than
starting another browser. So the trick is to get the text you've selected.
At first, I used a program called xclip. You can run this command:
firefox `xclip -o` to open the selection. That worked
okay at first -- until I hit my first URL in weechat that was so long
that it was wrapped to the next line. It turns out xclip does odd things
with multi-line output; depending on whether it thinks the output is
a terminal or not, it may replace the newline with a space, or delete
whatever follows the newline. In any case, I couldn't find a way to
make it work reliably when pasted into firefox.
After futzing with xclip for a little too long, trying to reverse-engineer its undocumented newline behavior, I decided it would be easier just to write my own X clipboard app in Python. I already knew how to do that, and it's super easy once you know the trick:
mport gtk
primary = gtk.clipboard_get(gtk.gdk.SELECTION_PRIMARY)
if primary.wait_is_text_available() :
print primary.wait_for_text()
That just prints it directly, including any newlines or spaces. But as long as I was writing my own app, why not handle that too?
It's not entirely necessary on Firefox: on Linux, Firefox has some
special code to deal with pasting multi-line URLs, so you can copy
a URL that spans multiple lines, middleclick in the content area and
things will work. On other platforms, that's disabled, and some Linux
distros disable it as well; you can enable it by going to
about:config and searching for single,
then setting the preference
editor.singlelinepaste.pasteNewlines to 2.
However, it was easy enough to make my Python clipboard app do the right thing so it would work in any browser. I used Python's re (regular expressions) module:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import gtk
import re
primary = gtk.clipboard_get(gtk.gdk.SELECTION_PRIMARY)
if not primary.wait_is_text_available() :
sys.exit(0)
s = primary.wait_for_text()
# eliminate newlines, and any spaces immediately following a newline:
print re.sub(r'[\r\n]+ *', '', s)
That seemed to work fine, even on long URLs pasted from weechat with newlines and spaces, like that looked like
http://example.com/long-
url.html
All that was left was binding it so I could access it from anywhere. Of course, that varies depending on your desktop/window manager. In Openbox, I added two items to my desktop menu in menu.xml:
<item label="open selection in Firefox">
<action name="Execute"><execute>sh -c 'firefox `xclip -o`'</execute></action>
</item>
<item label="open selection in new tab">
<action name="Execute"><execute>sh -c 'firefox -new-tab `xclip -o`'</execute></action>
</item>
I also added some code in rc.xml inside <context name="Desktop">, so I can middle-click or control-middle-click on the desktop to open a link in the browser:
<mousebind button="Middle" action="Press">
<action name="Execute">
<execute>sh -c 'firefox `pyclip`'</execute>
</action>
</mousebind>
<mousebind button="C-Middle" action="Press">
<action name="Execute">
<execute>sh -c -new-tab 'firefox `pyclip`'</execute>
</action>
</mousebind>
I set this up maybe two hours ago and I've probably used it ten or fifteen times already. This is something I should have done long ago!
I suspect all technical people -- at least those with a web presence -- get headhunter spam. You know, email saying you're perfect for a job opportunity at "a large Fortune 500 company" requiring ten years' experience with technologies you've never used.
Mostly I just delete it. But this one sent me a followup -- I hadn't responded the first time, so surely I hadn't seen it and here it was again, please respond since I was perfect for it. Maybe I was just in a pissy mood that night. But look, I'm a programmer, not a DBA -- I had to look it up to verify that I knew what DBA stood for. I've never used Oracle. A "Production DBA with extensive Oracle experience" job is right out, and there's certainly nothing in my resume that would suggest that's my line of work.
So I sent a brief reply, asking,
Why do you keep sending this? Why exactly do you think I'm a DBA or an Oracle expert? Have you looked at my resume? Do you think spamming people with jobs completely unrelated to their field will get many responses or help your credibility?
I didn't expect a reply. But I got one:
I must say my credibility is most important and it's unfortunate that recruiters are thought of as less than in these regards. And, I know it is well deserved by many of them.
In fact, Linux and SQL experience is more important than Oracle in this situation and I got your email address through the Peninsula Linux Users Group site which is old info and doesn't give any information about its members' skill or experience. I only used a few addresses to experiment with to see if their info has any value. Sorry you were one of the test cases but I don't think this is spamming and apologize for any inconvenience it caused you.[name removed], PhD
A courteous reply. But it stunned me. Harvesting names from old pages on a LUG website, then sending a rather specific job description out to all the names harvested, regardless of their skillset -- how could that possibly not be considered spam? isn't that practically the definition of spam? And how could a recruiter expect to seem credible after sending this sort of non-targeted mass solicitation?
To technical recruiters/headhunters: if you're looking for good technical candidates, it does not help your case to spam people with jobs that show you haven't read or understood their resume. All it does is get you a reputation as a spammer. Then if you do, some day, have a job that's relevant, you'll already have lost all credibility.
Google has been doing a horrible UI experiment with me recently involving its search field.
I search for something -- fine, I get a normal search page page.
At the top of the page is a text field with my search terms, like this:
![[normal-looking google search bar]](http://shallowsky.com/blog/images/screenshots/google-searchbar.jpg)
Now suppose I want to modify my search. Suppose I double-click the word
"ui", or drag my mouse across it to select it, perhaps intending to
replace it with something else. Here's what happens:
![[messed up selection in google search bar]](http://shallowsky.com/blog/images/screenshots/google-searchbar-selected.jpg)
Whoops! It highlighted something other than what I clicked, changed the font size of the highlighted text and moved it. Now I have no idea what I'm modifying.
This started happening several weeks ago (at about the same time they made Instant Seach mandatory -- yuck). It only happens on one of my machines, so I can only assume they're running one of their little UI experiments with me, but clearing google cookies (or even banning cookies from Google) didn't help. Blacklisting Google from javascript cures it, but then I can't use Google Maps or other services.
For a week or so, I tried using other search engines. Someone pointed me to Duck Duck Go, which isn't bad for general searches. But when it gets to technical searches, or elaborate searches with OR and - operators, google's search really is better. Except for, you know, minor details like not being able to edit your search terms.
But finally it occurred to me to try firebug. Maybe I could find out why the font size was getting changed. Indeed, a little poking around with firebug showed a suspicious-looking rule on the search field:
.gsfi, .lst {
font: 17px arial,sans-serif;
}
and disabling that made highlighting work again.
So to fix it permanently, I added the following to chrome/userContent.css in my Firefox profile directory:
.gsfi, .lst {
font-family: inherit !important;
font-size: inherit !important;
}
And now I can select text again! At least until the next time Google changes the rule and I have to go back to Firebug to chase it down all over again.
No, it does not make search easier to use to change the font size in the middle of someone's edits. It just drives the victim away to try other search engines.
Here's a preliminary review, based on a few days of playing with it.
The Nook Touch feels very light. It's a little heavier than a paperback, but it's easy to hold, and the rubbery back feels nice in the hand. The touchscreen works well enough for book reading, though you wouldn't want to try to play video games or draw pictures on it.
It's very easy to turn pages, either with the hardware buttons on the bezel or a tap on the edges of the screen. Page changes are much faster than with older e-ink readers like the original Nook or the Sony Pocket: the screen still flashes black with each page change, but only very briefly.
I'd wondered how a non-backlit e-ink display would work in dim light, since that's one thing you can't test in stores. It turns out it's not as good as a paper book -- neither as sharp nor as contrasty -- but still readable with my normal dim bedside lighting.
Changing fonts, line spacing and margins is easy once you figure out that you need to tap on the screen to get to that menu. Navigating within a book is also via that tap-on-page menu -- it gives you a progress meter you can drag, or a "jump to page" option. Which is a good thing. This is sadly very important (see below).
Searching within books isn't terribly convenient. I wanted to figure out from the user manual how to set a bookmark, and I couldn't find anything that looked helpful in the user manual's table of contents, so I tried searching for "bookmark". The search results don't show much context, so I had to try them one at a time, and there's no easy way to go back and try the next match. (Turns out you set a bookmark by tapping in the upper right corner, and then the bookmark applies to the next several pages.)
Plan to spend some quality time reading the full-length manual (provided as a pre-installed ebook, naturally) learning tricks like this: a lot of the UI isn't very discoverable (though it's simple enough once you learn it) so you'll miss a lot if you rely on what you can figure out by tapping around.
When we first powered up, we hit a couple of problems right off with wireless setup.
First, it had no way to set a static IP address. The only way we could get the Nook connected was to enable DHCP on the router.
But even then it wouldn't connect. We'd re-type the network password and hit "Connect"; the "Connect" button would flash a couple of times, leaving an "incorrect password" message at the top of the screen. This error message never went away, even after going back to the screen with the list of networks available, so it wasn't clear whether it was retrying the connection or not.
Finally through trial and error we found the answer: to clear a failed connection, you have to "Forget" the network and start over. So go back to the list of wireless networks, choose the right network, then tap the "Forget" button. Then go back and choose the network again and proceed to the connect screen.
The Nook Touch doesn't come with much in the way of starter books -- just two public-domain titles, plus its own documentation -- so the first task was to download a couple of Project Gutenberg books that Mom had been reading on her Treo.
The Nook uses a standard micro-USB cable for both charging and its USB connection. Curiously, it shows up as a USB device with no partitions -- you have to mount sdb, not sdb1. Gnome handled that and mounted it without drama. Copying epub books to the Nook was just a matter of cp or drag-and-drop -- easy.
One big goal for this device is reading ebooks from the public library, and I had hoped to report on that. But it turns out to be a more difficult proposition than expected. There are all the expected DRM issues to surmount, but before that, there's the task of finding an ebook that's actually available to check out, getting the library's online credentials straightened out, and so forth. So that will be a separate article.
Alas, the review is not all good news. While poking around, reading a page here and there, I started to notice that I kept getting reset back to the beginning of a book I'd already started. What was up?
For a while I thought it was my imagination. Surely remembering one's place in a book you're reading is fundamental to a device designed from the ground up as a book reader. But no -- it clearly was forgetting where I'd left off. How could that be?
It turns out this is a known and well reported problem with what B&N calls "side-loaded" content -- i.e. anything you load from your computer rather than download from their bookstore. With side-loaded books, apparently connecting the Nook to a PC causes it to lose its place in the book you're reading! (also discussed here and here).
There's no word from Barnes & Noble about this on any of the threads, but people writing about it speculate that when the Nook makes a USB connection, it internally unmounts its filesystems -- and forgets anything it knew about what was on those filesystems.
I know B&N wants to drive you to their site to buy all your books ... and I know they want to keep you online checking in with their store at every opportunity. But some people really do read free books, magazines and other "side loaded" content. An ebook reader that can't handle that properly isn't much of a reader.
It's too bad. The Nook Touch is a nice little piece of hardware. I love the size and light weight, the daylight-readable touchscreen, the fast page flips. Mom is being tolerant about her new toy, since she likes it otherwise -- "I'll just try to remember what page I was on." But come on, Barnes & Noble: a dedicated ebook reader that can't remember where you left off reading your book? Seriously?
This was my second year at WhereCamp. It's always a bit humbling. I feel like I'm pretty geeky, and I've written a couple of Python mapping apps and I know spherical geometry and stuff ... but when I get in a room with the folks at WhereCamp I realize I don't know anything at all. And it's all so interesting I want to learn all of it! It's a terrific and energetic unconference. I
I won't try to write up a full report, but here are some highlights.
Several Grassroots Mapping people were there again this year. Jeffrey Warren led people in constructing balloons from tape and mylar space blankets in the morning, and they shot some aerial photos. Then in a late-afternoon session he discussed how to stitch the aerial photos together using Cargen Knitter.
But he also had other projects to discuss: the Passenger Pigeon project to give cameras to people who will be flying over environmental that need to be monitored -- like New York's Gowanus Canal superfund site, next to La Guardia airport. And the new Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science has a new project making vegetation maps by taking aerial photos with two cameras simultaneously, one normal, one modified for infra-red photography.
How do you make an IR camera? First you have to remove the IR-blocking filter that all digital cameras come with (CCD sensors are very sensitive to IR light). Then you need to add a filter that blocks out most of the visible light. How? Well, it turns out that exposed photographic film (remember film?) makes a good IR-only filter. So you go to a camera store, buy a roll of film, rip it out of the reel while ignoring the screams of the people in the store, then hand it back to them and ask to have it developed. Cheap and easy.
Even cooler, you can use a similar technique to make a spectrometer from a camera, a cardboard box and a broken CD. Jeffrey showed spectra for several common objects, including bacon (actually pancetta, it turns out).
| JW: | See the dip in the UV? Pork fat is very absorbent in the UV. That's why some people use pork products as sunscreen. |
| Audience member: | Who are these people? |
| JW: | Well, I read about them on the internet. |
Two Google representatives gave an interesting demo of some of the new Google APIs related to maps and data visualization, in particular Fusion Tables. Motion charts sounded especially interesting but they didn't have a demo handy; there may be one appearing soon in the Fusion Charts gallery. They also showed the new enterprise-oriented Google Earth Builder, and custom street views for Google Maps.
There were a lot of informal discussion sessions, people brainstorming and sharing ideas. Some of the most interesting ones I went to included
Lightning talks included demonstrations and discussions of global Twitter activity as the Japanese quake and tsunami news unfolded, the new CD from OSGeo, the upcoming PII conference -- that's privacy identity innovation -- in Santa Clara.
There were quite a few outdoor game sessions Friday. I didn't take part myself since they all relied on having an iPhone or Android phone: my Archos 5 isn't reliable enough at picking up distant wi-fi signals to work as an always-connected device, and the Stanford wi-fi net was very flaky even with my laptop, with lots of dropped connections.
Even the OpenStreetMap mapping party was set up to require smartphones, in contrast with past mapping parties that used Garmin GPS units. Maybe this is ultimately a good thing: every mapping party I've been to fizzled out after everyone got back and tried to upload their data and discovered that nobody had GPSBabel installed, nor the drivers for reading data off a Garmin. I suspect most mapping party data ended up getting tossed out. If everybody's uploading their data in realtime with smartphones, you avoid all that and get a lot more data. But it does limit your contributors a bit.
There were a couple of lowlights. Parking was very tight, and somewhat expensive on Friday, and there wasn't any info on the site except a cheerfully misleading "There's plenty of parking!" And the lunch schedule on Saturday as a bit of a mess -- no one was sure when the lunch break was (it wasn't on the schedule), so afternoon schedule had to be re-done a couple times while everybody worked it out. Still, those are pretty trivial complaints -- sheesh, it's a free, volunteer conference! and they even provided free meals, and t-shirts too!
Really, WhereCamp is an astoundingly fun gathering. I always leave full of inspiration and ideas, and appreciation for the amazing people and projects presented there. A big thanks to the organizers and sponsors. I can't wait 'til next year -- and I hope I'll have something worth presenting then!
I'm on the mailing list for a volunteer group. Round about last December, I started getting emails every few weeks congratulating me on RSVPing for the annual picnic meeting on October 17.
This being well past October, when the meeting apparently occurred -- and considering I'd never heard of the meeting before, let alone RSVPed for it -- I couldn't figure out why I kept getting these notices.
After about the third time I got the same notice, I tried replying, telling them there must be something wrong with their mailer. I never got a reply, and a few weeks later I got another copy of the message about the October meeting.
I continued sending replies, getting nothing in return -- until last week, when I got a nice apologetic note from someone in the organization, and an explanation of what had happened. And the explanation made me laugh.
Seems their automated email system sends messages as multipart, both HTML and plaintext. Many user mailers do that; if you haven't explicitly set it to do otherwise, you yourself are probably sending out two copies of every mail you send, one in HTML and one in plain text.
But in this automated system, the plaintext part was broken. When it sent out new messages in HTML format, apparently for the plaintext part it was always attaching the same old message, this message from October. Apparently no one in the organization had ever bothered to check the configuration, or looked at the plaintext part, to realize it was broken. They probably didn't even know it was sending out multiple formats.
I have my mailer configured to show me plaintext in preference to HTML. Even if I didn't use a text mailer (mutt), I'd still use that setting -- Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Claws and many other mailers offer it. It protects you from lots of scams and phishing attacks, "web bugs" to track you,, and people who think it's the height of style to send mail in blinking yellow comic sans on a red plaid background.
And reading the plaintext messages from this organization, I'd never noticed that the message had an HTML part, or thought to look at it to see if it was different.
It's not the first time I've seen automated mailers send multipart mail with the text part broken. An astronomy club I used to belong to set up a new website last year, and now all their meeting notices, which used to come in plaintext over a Yahoo groups mailing list, have a text part that looks like this actual example from a few days ago:
Subject: Members' Night at the Monthly Meeting
<p><style type="
16;ext/css">@font-face {
font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝";
}@font-face {
font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝";
}@font-face {
font-family: "Cambria";
}p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size:
12pt; font-family: Cambria; }a:link, span.MsoHyperlink { color: blue;
text-decoration: underline; }a:visited, span.MsoHyperlinkFollowed { color:
purple; text-decoration: underline; }.MsoChpDefault { font-family: Cambria;
}div.WordSection1 { page: WordSection1;
}</style>
<p class="MsoNormal">Friday April 8<sup>th</sup> is members’ night at the
monthly meeting of the PAS.<span style="">  </span>We are asking for
anyone, who has astronomical photographs that they would like to share, to
present them at the meeting.<span style="">  </span>Each presenter will
have about 15 minutes to present and discuss his pictures.<span style=""> We
already have some presenters.   </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
... on and on for pages full of HTML tags and no line breaks.
I contacted the webmaster, but he was just using packaged software and
didn't seem to grok that the software was broken and was sending HTML
for the plaintext part as well as for the HTML part. His response was
fairly typical: "It looks fine to me".
I eventually gave up even trying to read their meeting announcements,
and now I just delete them.
The silly thing about this is that I can read HTML mail just fine, if they'd just send HTML mail. What causes the problem is these automated systems that insist on sending both HTML and plaintext, but then the plaintext part is wrong. You'll see it on a lot of spam, too, where the plaintext portion says something like "Get a better mailer" (why? so I can see your phishing attack in all its glory?)
Folks, if you're setting up an automated email system, just pick one format and send it. Don't configure it to send multiple formats unless you're willing to test that all the formats actually work.
And developers, if you're writing an automated email system: don't use MIME multipart/alternative by default unless you're actually sending the same message in different formats. And if you must use multipart ... test it. Because your users, the administrators deploying your system for their organizations, won't know how to.
It covers how to find and install a cross-compiler (sadly, your Linux distro probably doesn't include one), configuring the Linux kernel build, and a few gotchas and things that I've found not to work reliably.
It took me a lot of trial and error to figure out some of this -- there are lots of howtos on the web but a lot of them skip the basic steps, like the syntax for the kernel's CROSS_COMPILE argument -- but you'll need it if you want to enable any unusual drivers like GPIO. So good luck, and have fun!
Here it is: Un-Bricking Linux Plug Computers: uBoot, iBoot, We All Boot for uBoot.
If you want more exhaustive detail, particular on those uBoot scripts and how they work, I go through some of the details in a brain-dump I wrote after two weeks of struggling to unbrick my first GuruPlug: Building and installing a new kernel for a SheevaPlug. But don't worry if that page isn't too clear; I'll cover the kernel-building part more clearly in my next LinuxPlanet article on Feb. 24.
Although they run standard Linux (usually Debian or Ubuntu), there are some gotchas to choosing and installing plug computers. So this week's article starts with the basics of choosing a model and connecting to it; part II, in two weeks, will address more difficult issues like how to talk to uBoot, flash a new kernel or recover if things go wrong.
Read part I here: Tiny Linux Plug Computers: Wall Wart Linux Servers.
On a Linux list, someone was having trouble with wireless networking, and someone else said he'd had a similar problem and solved it by reinstalling Kubuntu from scratch. Another poster then criticised him for that: "if the answer is reinstall, you might as well downgrade to Windows.", and later added, "if "we should understand a problem, and *then* choose a remedy to match."
As someone who spends quite a lot of time trying to track down root causes of problems so that I can come up with a fix that doesn't involve reinstalling, I thought that was unfair. Here is how I replied on the list (or you can go straight to the mailing list version):
I'm a big fan of understanding the root cause of a problem and solving it on that basis. Because I am, I waste many days chasing down problems that ought to "just work", and probably would "just work" if I gave in and installed a bone stock Ubuntu Gnome desktop with no customizations. Modern Linux distros (except maybe Gentoo) are written with the assumption that you aren't going to change anything -- so reverting to the original (reinstalling) will often fix a problem.
Understanding this stuff *shouldn't* take days of wasted time -- but it does, because none of this crap has decent documentation. With a lot of the underlying processes in Linux -- networking, fonts, sound, external storage -- there are plenty of "Click on the System Settings menu, then click on ... here's a screenshot" howtos, but not much "Then the foo daemon runs the /etc/acpi/bar.sh script, which calls ifconfig with these arguments". Mostly you have to reverse-engineer it by running experiments, or read the source code.
Sometimes I wonder why I bother. It may be sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder, but I guess it's better than washing my hands 'til they bleed, or hoarding 100 cats. At least I end up with a nice customized system and more knowledge about how Linux works. And no cat food expenses.
But don't get on someone's case because he doesn't have days to waste chasing down deep understanding of a system problem. If you're going to get on someone's case, go after the people who write these systems and then don't document how they actually work, so people could debug them.
I've seen this exact phrase hundreds of times, most recently on a site
that should know better,
The Register.
I'm dying to know who started this ridiculous non-explanation, and why they decided to explain cookies using an implementation detail from one browser -- at least, I'm guessing IE must implement cookies using separate small files, or must have done so at one point. Firefox stores them all in one file, previously a flat file and now an sqlite database.
How many users who don't know what a cookie is do know what a "text file" is? No, really, I'm serious. If you're a geek, go ask a few non-geeks what a text file is and how it differs from other files. Ask them what they'd use to view or edit a text file. Hint: if they say "Microsoft Word" or "Open Office", they don't know.
And what exactly makes a cookie file "text" anyway? In Firefox, cookies.sqlite is most definitely not a "text file" -- it's full of unprintable characters. But even if IE stores cookies using printable characters -- have you tried to read your cookies? I just went and looked at mine, and most of them looked something like this:
Name: __utma
Value: 76673194.4936867407419370000.1243964826.1243871526.1243872726.2
I don't know about you, but I don't spend a lot of time reading text that looks like that.
Why not skip the implementation details entirely, and just tell users what cookies are? Users don't care if they're stored in one file or many, or what character set is used. How about this?
Cookies are small pieces of data which your web browser stores at the request of certain web sites.
I don't know who started this meme or why people keep copying it without stopping to think. But I smell a Fox Terrier. That was Stephen Jay Gould's example, in his book Bully for Brontosaurus, of a factoid invented by one writer and blindly copied by all who come later. The fox terrier -- and no other breed -- was used universally for years to describe the size of Eohippus. At least it was reasonably close; Gould went on to describe many more examples where people copied the wrong information, each successive textbook copying the last with no one ever going back to the source to check the information. It's usually a sign that the writer doesn't really understand what they're writing. Surely copying the phrase everyone else uses must be safe!
For my birthday last month, Dave gave me a nice pair of Bose powered speakers to replace the crappy broken set I'd been using. Your basic computer speakers, except I actually use them primarily for a little portable radio I listen to while hacking.
Only one problem: they had a major hum as soon as I turned them on. Even when I turned on the radio, I could hear the hum in the background. It got better if I turned the speakers way down and the radio up -- it wasn't coming from the radio.
After about a month it was starting to irritate me. I mentioned it on #linuxchix to see if anyone had any insights.
Maria and Wolf did, and narrowed it down pretty quickly to some sort of ground problem. The speakers need to get a real ground from somewhere. They don't get it through their AC power plug (a two-prong wall wart). They also don't get it from the radio, which is plugged in to AC via its own 2-prong wall wart, so it doesn't have a ground either.
How could I test this? Wolf suggested an alligator clip going from one of the RCA plugs on the back of the speaker to my computer's case. But it turned out there was an easier way. These speakers have dual inputs: a second set of RCA plugs so I can have another cable going to an MP3 player, radio or whatever, without needing to unplug from the radio first. I ran a spare cable from these second RCA plugs to the sound card output of my spare computer -- bingo! The hum entirely went away.
I suppose most people buy this type of speaker for use with computers, so it isn't a problem. But I was surprised that they'd adapt so poorly to a portable device like a radio or MP3 player. Is that so uncommon?
I've been following the terrible "Station fire" that's threatening Mt Wilson observatory as well as homes and firefighters' lives down in southern California. And in addition to all the serious and useful URLs for tracking the fire, I happened to come across this one: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
Very funny! I laughed, and so did the friends with whom I shared it. So when a non-technical mailing list began talking about the fire, I had to share it, with the comment "Here's a useful site I found for tracking the status of California fires."
Several people laughed (not all of them computer geeks). But one person said,
All it said was "YES." No further comments.
The joke seems obvious, right? But think about it: it's only funny if you read the domain name before you go to the page. Then you load the page, see what's there, and laugh.
But if you're the sort of person who immediately tunes out when you see a URL -- because "that's one of those technical things I don't understand" -- then the page wouldn't make any sense.
I'm not going to stop sharing techie jokes that require some background -- or at least the ability to read a URL. But sometimes it's helpful to be reminded of how a lot of the world looks at things. People see anything that looks "technical" -- be it an equation, a Latin word, or a URL -- and just tune out. The rest of it might as well not be there -- even if the words following that "http://" are normal English you think anyone should understand.
To make it clearer, I wanted to print out handouts people could take home summarizing some of the most common closed formats, along with open alternatives.
Surely there are lots of such tables on the web, I thought. I'll just find one and customize it a little for this specific audience.
To my surprise, I couldn't find a single one. Even openformats.org didn't have very much.
So I started one: Open vs. Closed Formats. It's far from complete, so I hope I'll continue to get contributions to flesh it out more.
And the talk? It went over very well, and people appreciated the handout. There's a limit to how much information you can get across in under ten minutes, but I think I got the point across. The talk itself, such as it is, is here: Open up!
![[Bing in Omniweb thinks we're in Portugal]](http://shallowsky.com/blog/images/screenshots/omnigal.jpg)
But what I want to know about Bing is this:
Why does it think we're in Portugal when Dave runs it under Omniweb on Mac?
In every other browser it gives the screen you've probably seen, with side menus (and a horizontal scrollbar if your window isn't wide enough, ugh) and some sort of pretty picture as a background. In Omniweb, you get a cleaner layout with no sidebars or horizontal scrollbars, a different pretty picture -- often prettier than the one you get on all the other browsers, though both images change daily -- and a set of togglebuttons that don't show up in any of the other browsers, letting you restrict results to only English or only results from Portugal.
Why does it think we're in Portugal when Dave uses Omniweb?
Equally puzzling, why do only people in Portugal have the option
of restricting the results to English only?
I know what you're thinking (if you're not a Mac user): surely Akkana's not lustful of Apple's vastly overpriced monitors when brand-new monitors that size are selling for under $200!
Indeed, I thought that until fairly recently. But there actually is a reason the Apple Cinema displays cost so much more than seemingly equivalent monitors -- and it's not the color and shape of the bezel.
The difference is that Apple cinema displays are a technology called S-IPS, while normal consumer LCD monitors -- those ones you see at Fry's going for around $200 for a 22-inch 1680x1050 -- are a technology called TN. (There's a third technology in between the two called S-PVA, but it's rare.)
The main differences are color range and viewing angle. The TN monitors can't display full color: they're only 6 bits per channel. They simulate colors outside that range by cycling very rapidly between two similar colors (this is called "dithering" but it's not the usual use of the term). Modern TN monitors are astoundingly fast, so they can do this dithering faster than the eye can follow, but many people say they can still see the color difference. S-IPS monitors show a true 8 bits per color channel.
The viewing angle difference is much easier to see. The published numbers are similar, something like 160 degrees for TN monitors versus 180 degrees for S-IPS, but that doesn't begin to tell the story. Align yourself in front of a TN monitor, so the colors look right. Now stand up, if you're sitting down, or squat down if you're standing. See how the image suddenly goes all inverse-video, like a photographic negative only worse? Try that with an S-IPS monitor, and no matter where you stand, all that happens is that the image gets a little less bright.
(For those wanting more background, read TN Film, MVA, PVA and IPS – Which one's for you?, the articles on TFT Central, and the wikipedia article on LCD technology.)
Now, the comparison isn't entirely one-sided. TN monitors have their advantages too. They're outrageously inexpensive. They're blindingly fast -- gamers like them because they don't leave "ghosts" behind fast-moving images. And they're very power efficient (S-IPS monitors, are only a little better than a CRT). But clearly, if you spend a lot of time editing photos and an S-IPS monitor falls into your possession, it's worth at least trying out.
But how? The old Apple Cinema display has a nonstandard connector, called ADC, which provides video, power and USB1 all at once. It turns out the only adaptor from a PC video card with DVI output (forget about using an older card that supports only VGA) to an ADC monitor is the $99 adaptor from the Apple store. It comes with a power brick and USB plug.
Okay, that's a lot for an adaptor, but it's the only game in town, so off I went to the Apple store, and a very short time later I had the monitor plugged in to my machine and showing an image. (On Ubuntu Hardy, simply removing xorg.conf was all I needed, and X automatically detected the correct resolution. But eventually I put back one section from my old xorg.conf, the keyboard section that specifies "XkbOptions" to be "ctrl:nocaps".)
And oh, the image was beautiful. So sharp, clear, bright and colorful. And I got it working so easily!
Of course, things weren't as good as they seemed (they never are, with computers, are they?) Over the next few days I collected a list of things that weren't working quite right:
The brightness problem was the easiest. A little web searching led me to acdcontrol, a commandline program to control brightness on Apple monitors. It turns out that it works via the USB plug of the ADC connector, which I initially hadn't connected (having not much use for another USB 1.1 hub). Naturally, Ubuntu's udev/hal setup created the device in a nonstandard place and with permissions that only worked for root, so I had to figure out that I needed to edit /etc/udev/rules.d/20-names.rules and change the hiddev line to read:
KERNEL=="hiddev[0-9]*", NAME="usb/%k", GROUP="video", MODE="0660"That did the trick, and after that acdcontrol worked beautifully.
On the second problem, I never did figure out why suspending with the Apple monitor always locked up the machine, either during suspend or resume. I guess I could live without suspend on a desktop, though I sure like having it.
The third problem was the killer. Big deal, who needs text consoles, right? Well, I use them for debugging, but what was more important, also broken were the grub screen (I could no longer choose kernels or boot options) and the BIOS screen (not something I need very often, but when you need it you really need it).
In fact, the text console itself wasn't a problem. It turns out the problem is that the Apple display won't take a 640x480 signal. I tried building a kernel with framebuffer enabled, and indeed, that gave me back my boot messages and text consoles (at 1280x1024), but still no grub or BIOS screens. It might be possible to hack a grub that could display at 1280x1024. But never being able to change BIOS parameters would be a drag.
The problems were mounting up. Some had solutions; some required further hacking; some didn't have solutions at all. Was this monitor worth the hassle? But the display was so beautiful ...
That was when Dave discovered TFT Central's search page -- and we learned that the Dell 2005FPW uses the exact same Philips tube as the Apple, and there are lots of them for sale used,. That sealed it -- Dave took the Apple monitor (he has a Mac, though he'll need a solution for his Linux box too) and I bought a Dell. Its image is just as beautiful as the Apple (and the bezel is nicer) and it works with DVI or VGA, works at resolutions down to 640x480 and even has a powered speaker bar attached.
Maybe it's possible to make an old Apple Cinema display work on a Mac. But it's way too much work. On a PC, the Dell is a much better bet.
The Eee laptops are mondo cool. So lovely and light. Thank you, Asus, for showing that it can be done and that there's lots of interest in small, light, cheap laptops, thus inspiring a bazillion imitators. And thank you even more for offering Linux as a viable option!
Now would one of you please, please offer some models that have at least XGA resolution so I can actually buy one? Some of us who travel with a laptop do so in order to make presentations. On projectors that use 1024x768.
So far HP is the only manufacturer to offer WXGA, in the Mini-Note. But I read that Linux support is poor for the "Chrome 9" graphics chip, and reviewers seem very underwhelmed with the Via C7 processor's performance and battery life. Rumours of a new Mini-Note with a Via Nano or, preferably, Intel Atom and Intel graphics chip, keep me waiting. C'mon, won't somebody else step up and give HP some competition?
It's so weird to have my choice of about 8 different 1024x600 netbook models under $500, but if I want another 168 pixels vertically, the price from everyone except HP jumps to over $2000.
Folks: there is a marketing niche here that you're missing.
The member who was running Table Topics had an interesting project planned: "Bookmarks". I thought, things you put in books to mark your place? Then I saw the three-page printout he had brought and realized that, duh, of course, he means browser bookmarks.
The task, he explained, was to scan his eclectic list of bookmarks, pick three, and tell a story about them.
Members reacted with confusion. Several of them said they didn't understand what he meant at all. Would he give an example? So he chose three and gave a short demonstration speech. But the members still looked confused. He said if they wanted to pick just one, that would be okay. Nobody looked relieved.
We did a couple rounds. I gave a rambling tale that incorporated three or four bookmarks. One of our newer members took the list, and wove a spirited story that used at least five (she eventually won the day's Best Table Topic ribbon). Then the bookmark list passed to one of the members who had expressed confusion.
She stared at the list, obviously baffled. "I still don't understand. What do they have to do with bookmarks?" "Browser bookmarks," I clarified, and a couple of other people chimed in on that theme, but it obviously wasn't helping. Several other members crowded around to get a look at the list. Brows furrowed. Voices murmured. Then one of them looked up. "Are these like ... Favorites?"
There was a immediate chorus of "Favorites?" "Oh, like in an Explorer window?" "You mean like on the Internet?" "Ohhh, I think I get it ..." Things improved from there.
I don't think the member who presented this project had any idea that a lot of people wouldn't understand the term "Bookmark", as it applies to a list of commonly-visited sites in a browser. Nor did I. I was momentarily confused thinking me meant the other kind of bookmark (the original kind, for paper books), but realizing that he meant browser bookmarks cleared it right up for me. A bigger surprise to me was that the word "browser" wasn't any help to half the membership -- none of them understood what a "browser" was any more than they knew what a "bookmark" was. "Like in an Explorer window?" or "on the internet" was the closest they got to the concept that they were running a specific program called a web browser.
These aren't stupid people; they just don't use computers much, and haven't ever learned the terminology for some of the programs they use or the actions they take. When you're still learning something, you fumble around, sometimes getting where you need to go be accident; you don't always know how you got there, much less the terms describing the steps you took. Even if you're an übergeek, I'm sure you have programs where you fumble about and aren't quite sure how you get from A to B.
You may sometimes be surprised at meeting people who still use Internet Explorer and haven't tried Firefox, let alone Opera. You may wonder if it's the difficulty of downloading and installing software that stops them. But the truth may be that questions like "Have you tried Firefox?" don't really mean anything to a lot of people; they're not really aware that they're using Internet Explorer in the first place. It's just a window they've managed to open to show stuff on the internet.
Avoiding technical jargon is sometimes harder than you think. Seemingly basic concepts are not so basic as they seem; terms you think are universal turn out not to be. You have to be careful with terminology if you to be understood ... and probably the only way to know for sure if you're using jargon is to try out your language on an assortment of people.
The tech press is in a buzz about the new search company, Cuil (pronounced "cool"). Most people don't like it much, but are using it as an excuse to rhapsodize about Google and why they took such a commanding lead in the search market, PageRank and huge data centers and all those other good things Google has.
Not to run down PageRank or other Google inventions -- Google does an excellent job at search these days (sometimes spam-SEO sites get ahead of them, but so far they've always caught up) -- but that's not how I remember it. Google's victory over other search engines was a lot simpler and more basic than that. What did they bring?
Logical AND.
Most of you have probably forgotten it since we take Google so for
granted now, but back in the bad old days when search engines were
just getting started, they all did it the wrong way. If you searched
for red fish, pretty much all the early search engines would
give you all the pages that had either red or fish
anywhere in them. The more words you added, the less likely you
were to find anything that was remotely related to what you wanted.
Google was the first search engine that realized the simple fact (obvious to all of us who were out there actually doing searches) that what people want when they search for multiple words is only the pages that have all the words -- the pages that have both red and fish. It was the search engine where it actually made sense to search for more than one word, the first where you could realistically narrow down your search to something fairly specific.
Even today, most site searches don't do this right. Try searching for several keywords on your local college's web site, or on a retail site that doesn't license Google (or Yahoo or other major search engine) technology.
Logical and. The killer boolean for search engines.
(I should mention that Dave, when he heard this, shook his head. "No. Google took over because it was the first engine that just gave you simple text that you could read, without spinning blinking images and tons of other crap cluttering up the page." He has a point -- that was certainly another big improvement Google brought, which hardly anybody else seems to have realized even now. Commercial sites get more and more cluttered, and nobody notices that Google, the industry leader, eschews all that crap and sticks with simplicity. I don't agree that's why they won, but it would be an excellent reason to stick with Google even if their search results weren't the best.)
So what about Cuil? I finally got around to trying it this morning, starting with a little "vanity google" for my name. The results were fairly reasonable, though oddly slanted toward TAC, a local astronomy group in which I was fairly active around ten years ago (three hits out of the first ten are TAC!)
Dave then started typing colors into Cuil to see what he would get, and found some disturbing results. He has Firefox' cookie preference set to "Ask me before setting a cookie" -- and it looks like Cuil loads pages in the background, setting cookies galore for sites you haven't ever seen or even asked to see. For every search term he thought of, Cuil popped up a cookie request dialog while he was still typing.
Searching for blu wanted to set a cookie for bluefish.something.
Searching for gre wanted to set a cookie for www.gre.ac.uk.
Searching for yel wanted to set a cookie for www.myyellow.com.
Searching for pra wanted to set a cookie for www.pvamu.edu.
Pretty creepy, especially when combined with Cuil's propensity (noted by every review I've seen so far, and it's true here too) for including porn and spam sites. We only noticed this because he happened to have the "Ask me" pref set. Most people wouldn't even know. Use Cuil and you may end up with a lot of cookies set from sites you've never even seen, sites you wouldn't want to be associated with. Better hope no investigators come crawling through your browser profile any time soon.
But I was sure that was a long-solved problem -- surely there must
be a userContent.css rule or a bookmarklet to handle text with long
lines. The trick was to come up with the right Google query.
Like this one:
firefox OR mozilla wrap text userContent OR bookmarklet
I settled on the simple CSS rule from Tero Karvinen's page on Making preformated <pre> text wrap in CSS3, Mozilla, Opera and IE:
pre {
white-space: -moz-pre-wrap !important;
}
Add it to chrome/userContent.css and you're done.
But some people might prefer not to apply the rule to all text. If you'd prefer a rule that can be applied at will, a bookmarklet would be better. Like the word wrap bookmarklet from Return of the Sasquatch or the one from Jesse Ruderman's Bookmarklets for Zapping Annoyances collection.
I have to admit, I was initially dubious. A conference for geeky women sounded great, but it struck me as kind of expensive -- $175 (with a $125 early-bird rate). That's very cheap as tech conferences go, but for a two-day "unconference", it was enough to turn off most local techie women I know: nearly all of them knew about She's Geeky and said "I'd love to go but I can't afford it." Full disclosure: I said the same thing, and wouldn't have gone myself had I not gotten a "scholarship", for which I am immensely grateful. (In retrospect, considering how well run it was, it probably would have been worth the early-bird price. But that's not easy to tell ahead of time.)
Monday consisted of lunch and informal discussion followed by two sessions of scheduled talks. I particularly liked the afternoon schedule, which included two different sessions of speaker training: the theory being that one factor holding women back in technology jobs is that we don't make ourselves visible by public speaking as much as we could. I went to the "Lightening (sic) Talks" session, headed by Danese Cooper. It didn't make me lighter, but we got some great advice at giving conference talks (lightning and otherwise) plus two rounds of practice at three minute talks. I'm not sure what I enjoyed more, the practice and useful feedback or the chance to listen to so many great short talks on disparate and interesting subjects.
Tuesday started way before normal geek time, with bagels and espresso and an explanation by conference organizer Kaliya Hamlin on how we'd use the Open Space process. Sessions would be an hour long, and we had eight rooms to work with, all charted on a huge grid on the wall. Anyone could run a session (or several). Write it (and your name) on a card, get up and tell the group about it, then find a time and space for it and tape it on the grid. Rules for sessions were few. For session leaders, Whoever comes to your session is the right audience, and whatever happens is what should have happened. For people attending a session there's the Rule of Two Feet: if you're not getting anything out of the session you're in, you should get up and get yourself to somewhere where you're contributing and/or learning. Not hard when there are seven other sessions to choose from.
This all worked exactly as described. Whatever hesitance many women may feel toward public speaking, there was no lack of volunteer session leaders on a wide variety of topics, both technical and social. I signed up to give a GIMP session before lunch; then in a morning session on server and firewall configuration given by fellow LinuxChix Gloria W. and Gaba, I noticed a few people having a lot of general Linux questions, in particular command-line questions, so I ran back to the wall grid and added an afternoon session on "Understanding the Linux command line".
Easily my favorite session of the conference was the Google Maps API talk by Pamela Fox of Google. I've been meaning to experiment with Google Maps and KML for a long time. I even have books on it sitting on my shelf. But I never seem to get over the hump: find a project and a specific task, then go RTFM and figure out how to write a KML file from scratch to do something fun and useful. Pamela got me over that in a hurry -- she showed us the "My Maps" tab in Google Maps (you have to be signed on to a Google account to use it). It includes tools for generating some starter KML interactively, and it even has a polygon editor, all implemented in AJAX (Javascript) and running in a browser. Wow! What a great way to get a running start on map mashups. There's also a whole open source Javascript API and set of libraries for writing creative web mapping apps. I'm sure I'll be experimenting with this a lot more and writing about it separately. Just this talk alone made the conference worthwhile, even without all the other great sessions.
But I didn't get a chance to experiment right away with any of that cool mapping stuff, because right after that session was one by speaker and comedian Heather Gold. Heather had given Saturday night's evening entertainment, and I am very sorry to have had to miss the show to go to a night class. The session was on self confidence, getting over fear of speaking, and connecting with the audience. Since the allotted space was noisy (the same one I'd ended up with for my GIMP talk, and the noise was definitely a problem), Heather led our small group out onto the balcony to enjoy the warm weather. The group was diverse and included women at very different levels of speaking, but Heather had great tips for all of us. She has great presence and a lot of useful things to say, and she's funny -- I'd love to see her on stage.
Everybody had a really positive attitude. At the Lightning Talks session on Saturday, Danese stressed "No whinging" as a general rule to follow (in talks or anywhere else), and I'd say the whole conference followed it. While we heard about lots of serious topics women face, I didn't hear any whining or "men are keeping us down" or that sort of negativism. There were some bad experiences shared as well as good ones, but the point was in finding solutions and making progress, not dwelling on problems. This was a group of women doing things.
There are only two changes I can think of that could have improved the conference at all. First, I already mentioned the cost. While it was fair considering the fantastic organization, great people, plus catered meals, it still lets out some of the women who could have benefitted the most: students and the un- and under-employed. A few of us LinuxChix talked about how much we'd love to see a similar conference held at a cheaper facility, without the handouts or the catered meals. Maybe some day we'll be able to make it happen.
Second (and this is a very minor point), it might have been helpful to have runners reminding people when sessions were ending, and perhaps making the sessions 55 minutes instead of an hour to encourage getting to the next session and starting on promptly.
Even without that, people mostly stuck to the schedule and Tuesday finished right on time: pretty amazing for a conference whose agenda had been made that morning with cardboard, tape and marking pens. I've seen unconferences before, and they're usually a disorganized mess. This one ran better than most scheduled conferences. Kaliya and her fellow organizers clearly know how to make this process work.
We all pitched in to clean up the room, and I braved the rush-hour freeway. And arrived home to find that my husband had cooked dinner and it was just about ready. What a nice ending to the day!
Time passed ... and Back/Forward didn't get faster. In fact, they got a lot slower. The "Blazingly Fast Back" code did get checked in (here's how to enable it) but somehow it never seemed to make any difference.
The problem, it turns out, is that the landing of bug 101832 added code to respect a couple of HTTP Cache-Control header settings, no-store and no-cache. There's also a third cache control header, must-revalidate, which is similar (the difference among the three settings is fairly subtle, and Firefox seems to treat them pretty much the same way).
Translated, that means that web servers, when they send you a page, can send some information along with the page that asks the browser "Please don't keep a local copy of this page -- any time you want it again, go back to the web and get a new copy."
There are pages for which this makes sense. Consider a secure bank site. You log in, you do your banking, you view your balance and other details, you log out and go to lunch ... then someone else comes by and clicks Back on your browser and can now see all those bank pages you were just viewing. That's why banks like to set no-cache headers.
But those are secure pages (https, not http). There are probably reasons for some non-secure pages to use no-cache or no-store ... um ... I can't think of any offhand, but I'm sure there are some.
But for most pages it's just silly. If I click Back, why wouldn't I want to go back to the exact same page I was just looking at? Why would I want to wait for it to reload everything from the server?
The problem is that modern Content Management Systems (CMSes) almost always set one or more of these headers. Consider the Linux.conf.au site. Linx.conf.au is one of the most clueful, geeky conferences around. Yet the software running their site sets
Cache-Control: no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0 Pragma: no-cacheon every page. I'm sure this isn't intentional -- it makes no sense for a bunch of basically static pages showing information about a conference several months away. Drupal, the CMS used by LinuxChix sets
Cache-Control: must-revalidate -- again, pointless.
All it does is make you afraid to click on links because then
if you want to go Back it'll take forever. (I asked some Drupal
folks about this and they said it could be changed with drupal_set_header).
(By the way, you can check the http headers on any page with:
wget -S -O /dev/null http://... or, if you have curl,
curl --head http://...)
Here's an excellent summary of the options in an Opera developer's blog, explaining why the way Firefox handle caching is not only unfriendly to the user, but also wrong according to the specs. (Darn it, reading sensible articles like that make me wish I wasn't so deeply invested in Mozilla technology -- Opera cares so much more about the user experience.)
But, short of a switch to Opera, how could I fix it on my end? Google wasn't any help, but I figured that this must be a reported Mozilla bug, so I turned to Bugzilla and found quite a lot. Here's the scoop. First, the code to respect the cache settings (slowing down Back/Forward) was apparently added in response to bug 101832. People quickly noticed the performance problem, and filed 112564. (This was back in late 2001.) There was a long debate, but in the end, a fix was checked in which allowed no-cache http (non-secure) sites to cache and get a fast Back/Forward. This didn't help no-store and must-revalidate sites, which were still just as slow as ever.
Then a few months later, bug 135289 changed this code around quite a bit. I'm still getting my head around the code involved in the two bugs, but I think this update didn't change the basic rules governing which pages get revalidated.
(Warning: geekage alert for next two paragraphs. Use this fix at your own risk, etc.)
Unfortunately, it looks like the only way to fix this is in the C++ code. For folks not afraid of building Firefox, the code lives in nsDocShell::ShouldDiscardLayoutState and controls the no-cache and no-store directives. In nsDocShell::ShouldDiscardLayoutState (currently lie 8224, but don't count on it), the final line is:
return (noStore || (noCache && securityInfo));
Change that to
return ((noStore || noCache) && securityInfo);
and Back/Forward will get instantly faster, while still preserving
security for https. (If you don't care about that security issue
and want pages to cache no matter what, just replace the whole
function with return PR_FALSE; )
The must-validate setting is handled in a completely different place, in nsHttpChannel. However, for some reason, fixing nsDocShell also fixes Drupal pages which set only must-validate. I don't quite understand why yet. More study required. (End geekage.)
Any Mozilla folks are welcome to tell me why I shouldn't be doing this, or if there's a better way (especially if it's possible in a way that would work from an extension or preference). I'd also be interested in from Drupal or other CMS folks defending why so many CMSes destroy the user experience like this. But please first read the Opera article referenced above, so that you understand why I and so many other users have complained about it. I'm happy to share any comments I receive (let me know if you want your comments to be public or not).
(I'd give a lot for a browser that had the concept of "just show me the page in the space I have". Opera has made some progress on this and if they got it really working it might even entice me away from Firefox, despite my preference for open source and my investment in Mozilla technology ... but so far it isn't better enough to justify a switch.)
I keep meaning to try the greasemonkey extension, but still haven't gotten around to it. Today, I had a little time, so I googled to see if anyone had already written a greasemonkey script to make Amazon readable. I couldn't find one, but I did find a page from last October trying to fix a similar problem on another website, which mentioned difficulties in keeping scripts working under greasemonkey, and offered a Javascript bookmarklet with similar functionality.
Now we're talking! A bookmarklet sounds a lot simpler and more secure than learning how to program Greasemonkey. So I grabbed the bookmarklet, a copy of an Amazon page, and my trusty DOM Inspector window and set about figuring out how to make Amazon fit in my window.
It didn't take long to realize that what I needed was CSS, not Javascript. Which is potentially a lot easier: "all" I needed to do was find the right CSS rules to put in userContent.css. "All" is in quotes because getting CSS to do anything is seldom a trivial task.
But after way too much fiddling, I did finally come up with a rule to get Amazon's Editorial Reviews to fit. Put this in chrome/userContent.css inside your Firefox profile directory (if you don't know where your profile directory is, search your disk for a file called prefs.js):
div#productDescription div.content { max-width: 90% !important; }
You can replace that 90% with a pixel measurement, like 770px, or with a different percentage.
I spent quite a long time trying to get the user reviews (a table with two columns) to fit as well, without success. I was trying things like:
#customerReviews > div.content > table > tbody > tr > td { max-width: 300px; min-width: 10px !important; }
div#customerReviews > div.content > table { margin-right: 110px !important; }
but nothing worked, and some of it (like the latter of those two
lines) actually interfered with the div.content rule for reasons
I still don't understand. (If any of you CSS gurus want to enlighten
me, or suggest a better or more complete solution, or solutions that
work with other web pages, I'm all ears!)
I'll try for a more complete solution some other time, but for now, I'm spending my July 4th celebrating my independance from Amazon's idea of the one true browser width.
I found myself wanting to show someone a particular xkcd comic (the one about dreams). Xkcd, for anyone who hasn't been introduced, is a wonderfully geeky, smart, and thoughtful comic strip drawn by Randall Munroe.
How to search for a comic strip? Xkcd has an archive page but that seems to have a fairly small subset of all the comics. But fortunately the comics also have titles and alt tags, which google can index.
But googling for dreams site:xkcd.org gets me lots of
hits on xkcd's forum and blag pages (which I hadn't even known
existed) rather than just finding the comic I wanted. After some
fiddling, though, I managed to find a way to exclude all the fora
and blag pages: google for
xkcd dreams site:xkcd.com -site:forums.xkcd.com -site:fora.xkcd.com -site:blag.xkcd.com
Nifty!
In fact, it was so nifty that I decided I might want to use it again. Fortunately, Mozilla browsers like Firefox have a great feature called bookmarklets. Bookmarklets are like shell aliases in Linux: they let you assign an alias to a bookmark, then substitute in your own terms each time you use it.
That's probably not clear, so here's how it works in this specific case:
xkcd "regular expressions"Voila! The first hit was exactly the comic I wanted.
(You'll find many more useful bookmarklets by googling on bookmarklets.)
Since all my changes were in JavaScript code, not C++, I knew this was probably all achievable with a Firefox extension. But never around to it; building the Mozilla source isn't that big a deal to me. I did it as part of my job for quite a few years, and my desktop machine is fast enough that it doesn't take that long to update and rebuild, then copy the result to my laptop.
But when I installed the latest Debian, "Etch", on the laptop, things got more complicated. It turns out Etch is about a year behind in its libraries. Programs built on any other system won't run on Etch. So I'd either have to build Mozilla on my laptop (a daunting prospect, with builds probably in the 4-hour range) or keep another system around for the purpose of building software for Etch. Not worth it. It was time to learn to build an extension.
There are an amazing number of good tutorials on the web for writing Firefox extensions (I won't even bother to link to any; just google firefox extension and make your own choices). They're all organized as step by step examples with sample code. That's great (my favorite type of tutorial) but it left my real question unanswered: what can you do in an extension? The tutorial examples all do simple things like add a new menu or toolbar button. None of them override existing Javascript, as I needed to do.
Canonical URL to the rescue. It's an extension that overrides one of the very behaviors I wanted to override: that of adding "www." to the beginning and ".com" or ".org" to the end of whatever's in the URLbar when you ctrl-click. (The Mozilla suite behaved much more usefully: ctrl-click opened the URL in a new tab, just like ctrl-clicking on a link. You never need to add www. and .com or .org explicitly because the URL loading code will do that for you if the initial name doesn't resolve by itself.) Canonical URL showed me that all you need to do is make an overlay containing your new version of the JavaScript method you want to override. Easy!
So now I have a tiny Kitfox extension that I can use on the laptop or anywhere else. Whee!
Since extensions are kind of a pain to unpack, I also made a source tarball which includes a simple Makefile: kitfox-0.1.tar.gz.
A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or continue to see if the script will complete.
[Continue] [Stop script]
Googling found lots of pages offering advice on how to increase the timeout for scripts from the default of 5 seconds to 20 or more (change the preference dom.max_script_run_time in about:config. But that seemed wrong. I was seeing the dialog on lots of pages where other people didn't see it, even on my desktop machine, which, while it isn't the absolute latest and greatest in supercomputing, still is plenty fast for basic web tasks.
The kicker came when I found the latest page that triggers this dialog: Firefox' own cache viewer. Go to about:cache and click on "List Cache Entries" under Disk cache device. After six or seven seconds I got an Unresponsive script dialog every time. So obviously this wasn't a problem with the web sites I was visiting.
Someone on #mozillazine pointed me to Mozillazine's page discussing this dialog, but it's not very useful. For instance, it includes advice like
To determine what script is running too long, open the Error Console and tell it to stop the script. The Error Console should identify the script causing the problem.Error console? What's that? I have a JavaScript Console, but it doesn't offer any way to stop scripts. No one on #mozillazine seemed to have any idea where I might find this elusive Error console either. Later Update: turns out this is new with Firefox 2.0. I've edited the Mozillazine page to say so. Funny that no one on IRC knew about it.
But there's a long and interesting MozillaZine discussion of the problem in which it's clear that it's often caused by extensions (which the Mozillazine page had also suggested). I checked the suggested list of Problematic extensions, but I didn't see anything that looked likely.
So I backed up my Firefox profile and set to work, disabling my extensions one at a time. First was Adblock, since it appeared in the Problematic list, but removing it didn't help: I still got the Unresponsive script when viewing my cache.
The next try was Media Player Connectivity. Bingo! No more Unresponsive dialog. That was easy.
Media Player Connectivity never worked right for me anyway. It's supposed to help with pages that offer videos not as a simple video link, like movie.mpeg or movie.mov or whatever, but as an embedded object in the page which insists on a specific browser plug-in (like Apples's QuickTime or Microsoft's Windows Media Player).
Playing these videos in Firefox is a huge pain in the keister -- you have to View Source and crawl through the HTML trying to find the URL for the actual video. Media Player Connectivity is supposed to help by doing the crawl for you and presenting you with video links for any embedded video it finds. But it typically doesn't find anything, and its user interface is so inconsistent and complicated that it's hard to figure out what it's telling you. It also can't follow the playlists and .SMIL files that so many sites use now. So I end up having to crawl through HTML source anyway.
Too bad! Maybe some day someone will find a way to make it easier to view video on Linux Firefox. But at least I seem to have gotten rid of those Unresponsive Script errors. That should make for nicer browsing!
When we checked in, the sign at the desk saying "We know the wi-fi is flaky; you've been warned, no refunds", wasn't encouraging. We needed some information from the web fairly quickly, so rather than futz with trying to get the motel system to work we headed over to the public library, where I got re-acquainted with the travails of browsing circa 1999 by using their slow link and Internet Explorer. How do people live without being able to open lots of search results in multiple tabs? And hitting return didn't work in any search fields. Eesh.
I was also amused to find that when I searched on terms related to IRS and tax information, several of the results brought up a page saying they were blocked by the library's firewall. Wouldn't want anyone looking at that sort of smut on public library machines!
Anyway, after dinner we had time to fiddle with the hotel wi-fi. When we couldn't get a reliable signal in the room, we carted our laptops down to the lobby to see if things were better there. They weren't.
But the single public lobby workstation was free (showing a myspace page), so we decided to try that and see if it worked any better than our laptops. Nope.
But something about the throbber in the lobby workstation's browser seemed familiar to me. That's not IE ... it's not firefox either ... Why, it's konqueror! But ... doesn't that mean ...?
We tried browsing to a few familiar file paths, like /etc/fstab, and sure enough, the lobby workstation was running linux (Slackware). We played filename guessing games for a bit before discovering Tools->Open Terminal. That wasn't very reliable, though -- it seemed to have a redraw problem and it was hard to get past that. (Later I found an alternative elsewhere in the Konqueror menus, "Show Terminal Emulator". I'm not clear on why Konqueror needs two different terminal emulators, but it was helpful here.)
Then I experimentally typed "whoami" and discovered that we were root. How handy!
It turned out that the machine was running a live CD based distro. Dave stumbled on /etc/issue, which began with the lines:
-------------------------------------------------------
:: WHAX 1.0 -- Dev Edition: http://www.iwhax.net
-------------------------------------------------------
User : root
Pass : toor
If you use this CD not for development purposes, remember to change passwords!
Great fun! And we played around with the machine for a bit. But alas, none of this helped with the net -- the WHAX box was just as much a victim of the network as we were.
After a brief delay to admire the bright yellow Sunbeam Alpine that pulled up on a trailer outside the registration desk (the folks playing poker at the next table had never seen a Sunbeam before), Dave took to the parking lot with his laptop looking for a stronger signal. (He can do this with his Prism2 card while I can't with my Prism54. Why is it that every Linux wi-fi driver has a completely different set of supported operations?) Does it still count as war-walking if you're just looking for a working connection for a net you've paid for?
He found the strongest signal at the Travelodge next door (the net is shared between the two motels), just outside the metal door marked "DISCONNECT MAIN ELECTRIC".
I guess whoever set up this network decided that the perfect place to put a radio transmitter was in the electric main box surrounded by lots of metal and current-carrying wires. Not being an RF engineer myself, somehow that would not have occurred to me as the ideal spot. But what do I know?
#AddType application/x-httpd-php .php #AddType application/x-httpd-php-source .phpsUncomment these. Now PHP should work. The next step is to enable CGI.
# To use CGI scripts outside /cgi-bin/: # #AddHandler cgi-script .cgiUncomment the AddHandler line.
mv /etc/init.d/apache /etc/noinit.d(having previously created /etc/noinit.d for that purpose).
I like using HTML because I can put my slides online and people can view them directly, without needing to download a whole presentation and run some kind of special viewer for it. It's also lightweight (the files are fairly small), I get to write in a language I already know pretty well, and Firefox is already installed on my laptop and works nicely as a presentation tool.
There are plenty of packages to generate HTML slides -- like S5. But they weren't very well developed when I first got interested in HTML presentations, so I rolled my own Javascript-based slideshow and have been gradually tweaking it ever since.
I've never tried to package up my presentation system; my setup is pretty simple (one javascript file, one CSS file, and the set of HTML slides), and I figure there are enough prepackaged setups around that there's no need for another one.
But I have been meaning to put a sample presentation online which describes how the system works and how to copy and adapt it. So here it is, a presentation about making presentations: Slide Presentations in HTML and JavaScript.
But yesterday's was different. The URL was this:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/amabot/?pf_rd_url=http://211.75.237.149/%20%20/amazon/xec.php?cmd=sign-in
Check it out: they're actually using amazon.com, and Amazon has a 'bot called amabot that redirects you to somewhere else. Try this, for example: http://www.amazon.com/gp/amabot/?pf_rd_url=http://bn.com -- you start on Amazon's site and end up at Barnes & Noble.
When a family member got tricked by a phish email a few months ago (fortunately she became suspicious and stopped before revealing anything important) I gave her a quick lesson in how URLs work and how to recognize the host part. "If the host part isn't what you think it should be, it's probably a scam," I told her. That's pretty much the same as what Amazon says (#6 on their "Identifying Phishing or Spoofed E-mails" page). I guess now I need to teach her how to notice that there's another URL embedded in the original one, even when the original one goes to the right place. That's a bit more advanced. I suspect a lot of anti-phishing software uses the same technique and wouldn't have flagged this URL.
I reported the phish to Amazon (so far, just an automated reply, but it hasn't been very long). I hope they look into this use of their amabot and consider whether such a major phishing target really needs a 'bot that can redirect anywhere on the net.
I've always heard people talk about how difficult it is to get IE working on Linux under WINE. It works in Crossover Office (which is a good excuse to get Crossover: the company, Codeweavers, is a good open source citizen and has contributed lots of work to WINE, and I've bought from them in the past) but most people who try installing IE under regular WINE seem to have problems.
Today someone pointed me to IEs 4 Linux. It's a script that downloads IE and installs it under WINE. You need wine and cabextract installed. I was sure it couldn't be that simple, but it seemed easy enough to try.
It works great! Asked me a couple of questions, downloaded IE, installed it, gave me an easy-to-run link in ~/bin, and it runs fine. Now I can test my pages myself without pestering my friends. Good stuff!
Remember the California Microsoft antitrust case, oh so many years ago? A bit over three years ago (seems longer) it was determined in a class-action suit that Microsoft had been abusing their monopoly in order to overcharge for their software. Any Californian who had purchased Microsoft products between February 1995 and December 2001 could apply for a rebate based on the number of MS products purchased.
(Curiously, no one ever seemed to point out that Microsoft did not reduce its prices after this decision, nor did I ever see anyone question why it's okay for them to overcharge now when it wasn't okay then. That has puzzled me for some time. Perhaps questions like that show why I'm a programmer instead of a lawyer or corporate exec.)
Over the years since the decision I've periodically wondered what ever happened to the rebate vouchers we were supposed to get. But a few weeks ago they started appearing. I got mine late last week.
The voucher is only redeemable for purchased software (from anyone, not just Microsoft) or a fairly restrictive list of hardware: computers (but not components to build a computer), printers, monitors, scanners, keyboards, mice or trackballs. For a Linux user who builds computers from parts (to avoid paying the "Microsoft Tax" or to get a better price), it's a little tough to use up that voucher. Now where did I put the receipt for that printer I bought a few years ago? Or maybe it's time to buy a copy of Crossover Office for testing web sites against IE.
In any case, if you sent in your rebate claim way back when and haven't heard anything, watch your mailbox. They say most people should receive their vouchers this month (August). If you don't, you can find more information at microsoftcalsettlement.com.
But I just learned about two excellent solutions:
First: network.protocol-handler.warn-external.mailto
Set this preference to TRUE (either by going to about:config
and searching for mailto, then doubleclicking on the line for
this preference, or by editing the config.js or user.js file
in your firefox profile) and the next time you click on a
mailto link, you'll get a confirmation dialog asking whether
you really want to launch an external mailer.
"Ew! Cancelling a dialog every time is nearly as bad as cancelling the Evolution launch!" Never fear: this dialog has a "Don't show me this again" checkbox, so check it and click Cancel and Firefox will remember. From then on, clicks on mailto links will be treated as no-ops.
"But wait! It's going to be confusing having links that do nothing when clicked on. I'm not going to know why that happened!" Happily, there's a solution to that, too: you can set up a custom user style (in your chrome/userContent.css directory) to show a custom icon when you mouse over any mailto link. Shiny!
The problem is that Mozilla's fullscreen mode doesn't give you an easy way to get rid of the URL/navigation bar, so your presentations look like you're showing web pages in a browser. That's fine for some audiences, but in some cases it looks a bit unpolished.
In the old Mozilla suite, I solved the problem by having a separate profile which I used only for presentations, in which I customized my browser to show no urlbar. But having separate profiles means you always have to specify one when you start up, and you can't quickly switch into presentation mode from a running browser. Surely there was a better way.
After some fruitless poking in the source, I decided to ask around on IRC, and Derek Pomery (nemo) came up with a wonderful CSS hack to do it. Just add one line to your chrome/userChrome.css file.
In Firefox:
#toolbar-menubar[moz-collapsed=true] + #nav-bar { display: none !important; }
In Seamonkey:
#main-menubar[moz-collapsed=true] + #nav-bar { display: none !important; }
This uses a nice CSS trick I hadn't seen before, adjacent sibling selectors, to set the visibility of one item based on the state of a sibling which appears earlier in the DOM tree.
(A tip for using the DOM Inspector to find out the names of items in fullscreen mode: since the menus are no longer visible, use Ctrl-Shift-I to bring up the DOM Inspector window. Then File->Inspect a Window and select the main content window, which gets you the chrome of the window, not just the content. Then you can explore the XUL hierarchy.)
This one-line CSS hack turns either Firefox or Seamonkey into an excellent presentation tool. If you haven't tried using HTML for presentations, I encourage you to try it. You may find that it has a lot of advantages over dedicated presentation software.
Addendum: I probably should have mentioned that View->Toolbars->Navigation Controls turns off the toolbar if you just need it for a one-time presentation or can't modify userChrome.css. You have to do it before you flip to fullscreen, of course, since the menus won't be there afterward, and then again when you flip back. I wasn't happy with this solution myself because of the two extra steps required every time, particularly because the steps are awkward since they require using the laptop's trackpad.
The first thing I do is take the apache log and run webalizer on it, to give me a breakdown of some of the "top" lists.
Of course, I'm extremely interested in the user agent list: which browsers are being used most often? As of last month, the Shallowsky list still has MSIE 6.0 in the lead ... but it's not as big a lead as it used to be, at 56.04%. Mozilla 5.0 (which includes all Gecko- based browsers, as far as I know, including Mozilla, Firefox, Netscape 6 and 7, Camino, etc.) is second with 20.31%. Next are four search engine 'bots, and then we're into the single digit percentages with a couple of old IE versions and Opera.
AvantGo (they're still around?) is number 11 with 0.37% -- interesting. It looks like they're grabbing the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Moon; then there are a bunch of lines like:
sync37.avantgo.com - - [05/Apr/2006:14:29:25 -0700] "GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 4549 "http://www.nineplanets.org/" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; AvantGo 6.0; FreeBSD)"and I'm not sure how to read that (nineplanets.org is The Nine Planets, Bill Arnett's excellent and justifiably popular planetary site, and he and I have cross-links, but I'm not sure what that has to do with avantgo and my site). Not that it's a problem: of course, anyone is welcome to read my site on a PDA, via AvantGo or otherwise. I'm just curious.
Amusingly, the last user agent in the top fifteen is GIMP Layers, syndicating this blog.
Another interesting list is the search queries: what search terms did people use which led them to my site? Sometimes that's more interesting than other times: around Christmas, people were searching for "griffith park light show" and ending up at my lame collection of photos from a previous year's light show. I felt so sorry for them: Griffith Park never puts any information on the web so it's impossible to find out what hours and dates the light show will be open, so I know perfectly well why they were googling, and they certainly weren't getting any help from me. I would have put the information there if I'd known -- but I tried to find out and couldn't find it either.
But this month, no one is searching on anything unusual. The top searches leading to my site for the past two months are terms like birds, gimp plugins, linux powerpoint, mini laptops, debian chkconfig, san andreas fault, pandora, hummingbird pictures, fiat x1/9, jupiter's features, linux photo, and a rather large assortment of dirt bike queries. (I have very little dirt bike content on my site, but people must be desperate to find web pages on dirt bikes because those always show up very prominently in the search string list.)
Most popular pages are this blog (maybe just because of RSS readers), the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Moon, and bird photos, with an assortment of other pages covering software, linux tips, assorted photo collections, and, of course, dirt bikes.
That's most of what I can get from webalizer. Now it's time to look at the apache error logs. I have quite a few 404s (missing files). I can clean up some of the obvious ones, and others are coming from external sites I can't do anything about that for some reason link to filenames I deleted seven years ago; but how can I get a list of all the broken internal links on my site, so at least I can fix the errors that are my own fault?
Kathryn on Linuxchix pointed me to dead-links.com, a rather cool site. But it turns out it only looks for broken external links, not internal ones. That's useful, too, just not what I was after this time. Warning: if you try to save the page from firefox, it will start running all over again. You have to copy the content and paste it into a file if you want to save it.
But Kathryn and Val opined that wget was probably the way to go for finding internal links. Turns out wget has an option to delete each file after downloading it, so you can wget a whole site but not actually need to use the local space to duplicate the site. Use this command:
wget --recursive -nd -nv --delete-after --domains=domain.com http://domain.com/ | tee wget.out 2>&1
Now open the resulting file in an editor and search repeatedly for ERROR to find all the broken links. Unfortunately the errors are on a separate line from the filenames they reference, so you can't just use a grep. wget also gets some things wrong: for instance, it tries to download the .class file of a Java applet inside a .jar, then reports an error when the class doesn't exist. (--reject .class might help that.) Still, it's not hard to skip past these errors, and wget does seem to be a fairly good way of finding broken internal links.
There's one more check left to do in the access log. But that's a longer story, and a posting for another day.
Highlight:
This tool works by applying a relatively new technology called rootkit technology. Rootkits are used to hide system information, such as running processes, files, or registry entries.
As a standalone application, it is non-malicious. However, certain malware applications use it [ ... ]
Good thing Trend Micro is there to give us the lowdown on this new (and non-malicious) rootkit technology!
In a vaguely related note: a speaker at my Toastmasters club today planned a Powerpoint presentation. (This is unusual in Toastmasters, but does happen occasionally.) He diligently showed up early to set up his computer and the projector so he'd be ready before the meeting started. As we were about to begin the meeting, with the projector showing his first slide, suddenly a dialog popped up on top of the slide, informing him that his system auto-update was finished, and he needed to reboot. It offered two buttons: [Reboot now] [Reboot later]. The later button was greyed out.
Isn't it nice when your system helpfully gives you automatic updates?
He fiddled for a while but finally gave up and rebooted. I couldn't help noticing that the first screen that appeared upon reboot was a Trend Micro screen.
Last weekend I scanned the early sketches. It was the first time in quite a while that I'd used the scanner (which seldom gets used except for sketches), and probably only the second time since I switched to Ubuntu. I was unreasonably pleased when I plugged it in, went to GIMP's Acquire menu, and was able to pull up xsane with no extra fiddling. (Hooray for Ubuntu! Using Debian for a while gives you perspective, so you can get great joy over little things like "I needed to use my scanner and it still works! I needed to make a printout and printing hasn't broken recently!")
Anyway, xsane worked fine, but the scans all came out looking garish -- bright and washed out, losing most of the detail in the shading. I know the scanner is capable of handling sketches (it's a fairly good scanner, an Epson Perfection 2400 Photo) but nothing I did with the brightness, contrast, and gamma adjustments got the detail back.
The adjustment I needed turned out to live in the "Standard Options" window in xsane: a Brightness slider which apparently controls the brightness of the light (it's different from the brightness adjustment in the main xsane scanning window). Setting this to -2 gave me beautiful scans, and I was able to update my 2005 Mars sketch page.
The review came out rather long, so instead of making it a blog entry I've put it on its own MP3 Player Review page.
(Sure, for whole pages you can use the History window, but what if you just want to find an image you saw this morning that isn't there any more?)
Here's a handy trick.
First, change directory to your cache directory (e.g. $HOME/.mozilla/firefox/blahblah/Cache).
Next, list the files of the type you're looking for, in the order in which they were last modified, and save that list to a file. Like this:
% file `ls -1t` | grep JPEG | sed 's/: .*//' > /tmp/foo
In English: ls -t lists in order of modification date, and -1 ensures that the files will be listed one per line. Pass that through grep for the right pattern (do a file * to see what sorts of patterns get spit out), then pass that through sed to get rid of everything but the filename. Save the result to a temporary file.
The temp file now contains the list of cache files of the type you want, ordered with the most recent first. You can now search through them to find what you want. For example, I viewed them with Pho:
pho `cat /tmp/foo`For images, use whatever image viewer you normally use; if you're looking for text, you can use grep or whatever search you lke. Alternately, you could ls -lt `cat foo` to see what was modified when and cut down your search a bit further, or any other additional paring you need.
Of course, you don't have to use the temp file at all. I could have said simply:
pho `ls -1t` | grep JPEG | sed 's/: .*//'`Making the temp file is merely for your convenience if you think you might need to do several types of searches before you find what you're looking for.
Dear LinuxWorld Attendee:
That's it. That's all they say.
Well, unless you dig deeper. It turns out there's an html part, too, which actually does have content (asking me to participate in a survey). But I would never have seen that if I didn't know how to read the MIME structure of email messages.
You see, the message is sent as Content-Type: multipart/alternative, which means that there's a text part and an html part which are supposed to be equivalent. You can read either part and they should say the same thing. Lots of modern mailers, including Mozilla, mutt, pine, probably Opera, and even Apple Mail can now be configured to give preferences to the text part of messages (so you don't have to squint your way through messages written in yellow text on a pink background, or in tiny 6-point text that's too small for your eyes, and so that you can be assured of safety from web bugs and other snoopware which can be embedded in html mail). Any mailer so configured would show this message as blank, just as I'm seeing it in mutt.
It seems amazing that their web developers would go to the extra trouble of setting up MIME headers for multipart/alternative content, then not bother to put anything in the content. Why not just send as plain html if you don't want to create a text part?
I'd let them know they're sending blank messages, but tracking down a contact address seems like more trouble than it's worth. The mail purports to come from LinuxWorldConference&Expo@idg.com; the message references URLs from www.exhibitsurveys.com; the actual message (as seen in the headers) came from outboundmailexhibitsurvey.com. It's probably exhibitsurveys.com generating the bad email messages, but it's hard to say for sure.
Suggestion for web developers: if you write code to send out mass mailings, you might want to check the mail that's actually getting sent out. If your program generates more than one MIME attachment, it's a good idea to check all the attachments and make sure you're sending what you think you are. Look at the actual message structure, don't just glance at the message in the mail program you happen to use. The fact that a message displays in one mailer does not imply that it will display correctly for all users (especially for a survey aimed at Linux users, who use a wide variety of mailers on many platforms and are quite likely to set non-default options). If you don't know MIME, find someone who does to sanity-check your output ... or don't send multiple MIME attachments.
There's a lot to be said for this model, but aside from security (the need to download extensions of questionable parentage from unfamiliar sites) there's another significant down side: every time you upgrade your browser, all your extensions become disabled, and it may be months before they're updated to support the new Firefox version (if indeed they're ever updated).
When you need extensions for basic functionality, like controlling cookies, or basic sanity, like blocking flash, the intervening months of partial functionality can be painful, especially when there's no reason for it (the plug-in API usually hasn't changed, merely the version string).
It turns out it's very easy to tweak your installed plug-ins to run under your current Firefox version.
Disclaimer: Obviously, if the Firefox API really has changed in a way that makes it incompatible with your installed extensions, this won't be enough. Your extensions may fail to work, crash your browser, delete all your files, or cause a massive meteorite to strike the earth causing global extinction. Consider this a temporary solution; do check periodically to see if there's a real extension update available.
More information on extension versioning (may be out of date).
The discussion hinged around user demands such as "YOU SUCK! YOU MUST FIX THIS NOW!" This is obviously rude, and just as obviously has little chance of getting a positive reaction from developers.
The problem is that after twenty or so of these demands, even a polite user coming in to ask for a feature may be snapped at. I've seen developers get touchy after reading a slew of this sort of bug reports, and snap at someone who wasn't being particularly rude.
Really, a lot of users have no idea how many of these rude, demanding, "YOU SUCK -- FIX THIS IMMEDIATELY!" messages some developers get. Try "watching" a category or developer in bugzilla for some major project like Mozilla for a month to get an idea of the volume of email that streams in. It's easy to get ten or more of these in one day's morning mail before you've even finished your coffee. Lots of developers just stop reading their bug mail after a while. I hate that and think it's wrong, but I can understand why they do it.
Sometimes problems that twenty users comment on, even if they're real issues, are hard to fix, or the fix would conflict with some other important aspect of the program.
"Hard to fix" or "Hard to find a way to fix the bug without breaking another important feature" is not an adequate solution when you're developing software professionally. But when you're volunteering your own evenings, weekends and vacations to contribute to open source software, and some user who probably spent his evenings watching TV and last weekend skiing, who doesn't seem to have spent any time contributing to the project beyond filing a few bugs, shows up and demands that you drop the work you're currently interested in and instead devote the next eight weekends to fixing HIS feature ... well, after that happens a few times it's easy to get a little touchy. When it happens day after day, it's even easy to stop caring so much about user input in general, and to (incorrectly) lump all users, not just the rude ones, into this category.
I wish users, before making a request, would remind themselves that developers are spending their spare time on the project, instead of going skiing or watching TV or whatever -- and no, that's not because developers are troglodyte geeks who have no other hobbies. DO make suggestions, but remember when you do that you're probably not talking to someone who's paid to maintain the program forty hours a week. You're talking to someone who donated spare time to create a program that you now find usable enough to care about.
No, rudeness doesn't solve anything. Developers being rude doesn't improve this situation -- it won't make the users stop being rude, it won't help the polite users, it won't even make the developers feel better. But sometimes people get irritable when they're taken for granted. Developers are only human. Whatever users might think.
It's mostly academic. The Katrina victims who need help the most didn't own computers, have net access, or, in many cases, even know how to use the web. Even if they owned computers, those computers are probably underwater and their ISP isn't up.
Nevertheless, some evacuees, staying with friends or relatives, or using library or other public access computers, may need to register for help using FEMA's web site.
It turns out that it's surprisingly difficult to google for the answer to the seemingly simple question, "How do I make my browser spoof IE6?" Here's the simple answer.
Opera: offers a menu to do this, and always has.
Mozilla or Firefox: the easiest way is to install the User Agent Switcher extension. Install it, restart the browser and you get a user-agent switching menu which includes an IE6 option.
To change the user agent on Mozilla-based browsers without the extension:
Safari (thanks to Rick Moen on svlug:
If you do change your user agent, please change it back after you've finished whatever business required it. Otherwise, web site administrators will think you're another IE user, and they they'll use that as justification for making more ridiculous IE-only pages like FEMA's. The more visits they see from non IE browsers, the more they'll realize that not everyone uses IE.
First, the business where, if you type a url into the urlbar and hit alt-Enter (ctrl-Enter in my Kitfox variant) to open a new tab, if you go back to the old tab you still see the new url in the urlbar, which doesn't match the page being displayed there.
That turns out to be bug 227826, which was fixed a week and a half ago. Hooray!
Reading that bug yielded a nice Mozilla tip I hadn't previously known: hitting ESC when focus is in the urlbar will revert the urlbar to what it should be, without needing to Reload.
The other annoyance I wanted to chase down is the new failure of firefox -remote to handle URLs with commas in them (as so many news stories have these days); quoting the url is no help, because it no longer handles quotes either. That means that trying to call a browser from another program such as an IRC client is doomed to fail for any complex url.
That turns out to be a side effect of the check-in for bug 280725, which had something to do with handling non-ASCII URLs on Windows. I've filed bug 298960 to cover the regression.
That leaves only one (much more minor) annoyance: the way the selection color has changed, and quite often seems to give me white text on a dingy mustard yellow background. I think that's because of bug 56314, which apparently makes it choose a background color that's the reverse of the page's background, but which then doesn't seem to choose a contrasting foreground color.
It turns out you can override this if you don't mind specifying a single fixed set of selection colors (instead of having them change with the colors of every page). In userChrome.css (for the urlbar) and userContent.css (for page content):
::-moz-selection {
background-color: magenta;
color: white;
}
(obviously, pick any pair of colors which strikes your fancy).
(Update: Mary pointed out to me that I was confusing two issues there. The new anchor attribute does indeed solve a very valid problem (not the one The Reg complains about), and isn't silly at all. She's quite right, of course.)
No, the problem I have is that the top hits always turn out to be a search engine on some commercial site. Clicking on the google link takes me to a search page on some random site which says "No pages were found matching your search terms".
Today I hit a perfect example. I was looking up Apache http redirects, so I googled for: htaccess mod_rewrite.
The first item is the official Apache documentation for mod_rewrite. Great!
The second item looks like the following:
htaccess mod_rewrite
... Many htaccess mod_rewrite bargains can only be found online.
Shopping on the Internet is no less safe than shopping in a store or
by mail. ... htaccess mod_rewrite. ...
www.protectyoursite.info/
htaccess-deny-from-all/htaccess-mod-rewrite.html - 8k - Cached -
Similar pages
Strangely, only google seems to show these sorts of search hits. Perhaps the spoofing sites only do their work for the googlebot, and don't bother with lesser searchbots. But google still wins the relevance award for most searches, even after I wade through the forest of spoofs; so I guess they don't need to worry about the spoofers until other search engines catch up in relevance. Eventually, someone else will catch up, and google will need to clean up its results. Until then ... <pulling on my rubber boots to wade through the muck in search of real results ...>
I finally realized the answer this morning. These people don't have grep! They don't have any other way of searching out patterns in files.
I use grep dozens of times every day: for quickly looking up a phone number in a text file, for looking in my Sent mailbox for that url I mailed to my mom last week, for checking whether I have any saved email regarding setting up CUPS, for figuring out where in mozilla urlbar clicks are being handled.
Every so often, some Windows or Mac person is opining about how difficult commandlines are and how glad they are not to have to use them, and I ask them something like, "What if you wanted to search back through your mail folders to find the link to the cassini probe images -- e.g. lines that have both http:// and cassini in them?" I always get a blank look, like it would never occur to them that such a search would ever be possible.
Of course, expert users have ways of doing such searches (probably using command-line add-ons such as cygwin); and Mac OS X has the full FreeBSD commandline built in. And more recent Windows versions (Win2k and XP) now include a way to search for content in files (so in the Cassini example, you could search for http:// or cassini, but probably not both at once.) But the vast majority of Windows and Mac users have no way to do such a search, the sort of thing that Linux commandline users do casually dozens of times per day. Until now.
Now I see why desktop search is such a big deal.
But rather than installing web-based advertising-drive apps with a host of potential privacy and security implications ...
wouldn't it be easier just to install grep?
You can use CSS to make your browser give different highlighting for links that would open in a different window.
Put something like this in your [moz_profile_dir]/chrome/userContent.css:
a[target="_blank"] {
-moz-outline: 1px dashed invert !important;
/* links to open in new window */
}
a:hover[target="_blank"] {
cursor: crosshair; text-decoration: blink;
color: red; background-color: yellow
!important
}
a[href^="http://"] {
-moz-outline: 1px dashed #FFCC00 !important;
/* links outside from current site */
}
a[href^="http://"][target="_blank"] {
-moz-outline: 1px dashed #FF0000 !important;
/* combination */
}
I questioned the use of outlines rather than colors, but then realized why manko uses outlines instead: it's better to preserve the existing colors used by each page, so that link colors go along with the page's background color.
I tried adding a text-decoration: blink; to the a:hover style, but it didn't work. I don't know whether mozilla ignores blink, or if it's being overridden by the line I already had in userContent.css,
blink { text-decoration: none ! important; }
though I doubt that, since that should apply to the blink tag,
not blink styles on other tags.
In any case, the crosshair cursor should make new-window links
sufficiently obvious, and I expect the blinking (even only on hover)
would have gotten on my nerves before long.
Incidentally, for any web designers reading this (and who isn't, these days?), links that try to open new browser windows are a longstanding item on usability guru Jakob Neilsen's Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design, and he has a good explanation why. I'm clearly not the only one who hates them.
For a few other mozilla hacks, see my current userChrome.css and userContent.css.
For instance, look at West Valley College page, or this news page.
I finally discovered today that pages look like this because Mozilla thinks they're in Cyrillic! In the case of West Valley, their server is saying in the http headers:
Content-Type: text/html; charset=WINDOWS-1251-- WINDOWS-1251 is Cyrillic -- but the page itself specifies a Western character set:
<META http-equiv=Content-Type content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
On my system, Mozilla believes the server instead of the page, and chooses a Cyrillic font to display the page in. Unfortunately, the Cyrillic font it chooses is extremely bad -- I have good ones installed, and I can't figure out where this bad one is coming from, or I'd terminate it with extreme prejudice. It's not even readable for pages that really are Cyrillic.
The easy solution for a single page is to use Mozilla's View menu: View->Character Encoding->Western (ISO-8851-1). Unfortunately, that has to be done again for each new link I click on the site; there seems to be no way to say "Ignore this server's bogus charset claims".
The harder way: I sent mail to the contact address on the server page, and filed bug 278326 on Mozilla's ignoring the page's meta tag (which you'd think would override the server's default), but it was closed with the claim that the standard requires that Mozilla give precedence to the server. (I wonder what IE does?)
At least that finally inspired me to install Mozilla 1.8a6, which I'd downloaded a few days ago but hadn't installed yet, to verify that it saw the same charset. It did, but almost immediately I hit a worse bug: now mozilla -remote always opens a new window, even if new-tab or no directive at all is specified. The release notes have nothing matching "remote, but someone had already filed bug 276808.
Anyone in California who bought Windows (even if it was bundled on a PC), DOS, MS Office, Works, or similar products between February 18, 1995 and December 15, 2001 is eligible for a rebate, in the form of a voucher redeemable for any tech hardware or software, not just Microsoft products.
Microsoft gets to keep 1/3 of the settlement left unclaimed, so claim the money you're entitled to now before it's too late!
Go to microsoftcalsettlement.com to fill out your claim form.
I've seen it covered in other publications now as well, and every article I read defines spyware differently, without mentioning how the actual law defines it (which you might think would be somewhat relevant). Nor do any of them provide, or link to, the text of the law, or its number in the CA code.
It turns out the bill was SB 1436, with a history here: and here is the text of the bill. It amends section 22947 of the Business and Professions code: here's an attempt at a link to the actual law, but if that doesn't work, go to leginfo and search for 22947 in the Business and Professions code. It's fairly concise and readable.
One point which on which I've long been curious is whether the various proposed anti-spyware laws cover the invasive end user license agreements, or EULAs, which Microsoft, Apple and other software companies love so much these days. You know, "clicking here gives you permission for us to snoop on what files you have on your system, what songs you've been listening to, and what extra software you have installed, and you have to click here or you can't get security updates" (stories on Win2k, WinXP, and issues with Windows Media Player; I think Apple does similar things with iTunes but don't have any story links handy).
It turns out that SB 1436 specifically disallows collection of a user's web browsing history, or browser bookmarks (so google search might be in trouble, depending on how it works) because it's "personal information", along with your name, address and credit card information; but it says nothing against collection of information regarding files, installed software, music, movies, or email. I guess none of those constitute "personal information" and it's fine to sneak software onto your system to collect such details.
However, consider this interesting section:
22947.4. (a) A person or entity, who is not an authorized user, as defined in Section 22947.1, shall not do any of the following with regard to the computer of a consumer in this state:At issue here is the definition of "software component". If a system update installs a new media player with a new invasive EULA which suggests that the player may collect information on songs installed or played, under the aegis of a security update, wouldn't this fall afoul of the new law?
(1) Induce an authorized user to install a software component onto the computer by intentionally misrepresenting that installing software is necessary for security or privacy reasons or in order to open, view, or play a particular type of content.
22947.2 (c) is also interesting:
[an entity who is not the owner or authorized user of a computer shall not] Prevent, without the authorization of an authorized user, through intentionally deceptive means, an authorized user's reasonable efforts to block the installation of, or to disable, software, by causing software that the authorized user has properly removed or disabled to automatically reinstall or reactivate on the computer without the authorization of an authorized user.
If you've ever disabled a feature in a piece of software, only to have it mysteriously re-enable itself the next time you updated the software, or if you use software whose EULA allows that, you may have grounds to sue if you can prove that it was re-enabled intentionally. This may be a bit farther than the authors of the bill really intended to go; quite a lot of software companies (and perhaps some freeware and open source authors as well) may be exposed here. Software providers beware!
SB 1436 has some good and non-controversial effects. It explicitly makes it illegal to install, without the user's knowledge: keystroke loggers (presumably this does not apply to the CIA or anyone else operating under the Patriot Act), spam email relays, denial-of-service zombies, multiple popup ads which can't be closed (we're in 22947.3 (a) now, which applies to software copied onto the user's computer; but this may apply even to Javascript on a web page, if you read the definitions at the beginning of the bill). All good things to disallow.
What about that no-penalty comment in the Times? As far as I can tell, they're right. SB1436 makes no mention of fines or other punishments. This Infotex post says there's a $1000 fine per incident, plus attorney's fees; but I can't figure out where they're getting that: I don't see it in either the bill or the law anywhere.
It turns out the answer is yes. Yesterday I was looking for some photos from mid-2001, and discovered that about 80% of the files on the CD wouldn't read in my DVD reader -- "I/O error". Fortunately, my DVD writer could read about 80% of the files (maybe it's a little slower, or something? Or just newer?)
A subsequent flurry of copying my older CD-Rs found read errors on many discs two and three years old. The two worst both had sticky labels on them. In one case (some images I didn't want to lose), I burned two copies of the same disc, printed a pretty label on one and marked the other with a Sharpie. The Sharpie disc read fine; the labelled disc had massive errors and was all but unreadable. The advice saying not to print labels for CDs meant for backup appears to be accurate; but even without labels, they're not reliable.
I'm not sure of a better backup solution, though. I don't trust longevity for anything magnetic (I've seen too many tapes and floppies fail). One solution I'm trying is an IDE disk sitting in an external USB2/firewire enclosure: it can stay powered off most of the time, and copies are fast. But a disk has a lot of failure modes (magnetics, head crash, motor). Safer would be two external drives, kept in sync.
Someone asked how this compared to SVG. The answer was to think of Canvas as an image you can change from JS -- simpler than an SVG document.
Brendan was funny, playing Vanna as Shaver did the brunt of the talking. "Ooh, that's pretty. What's that?"
Roc then gave a talk on "New Rendering Features for Gecko". Probably what attracted the most interest there was transparency: he has a new hack (not yet checked in) where you can add a parameter to a XUL window to make it transparent. X only supports 1-bit transparency, but in Windows implementation XUL windows can be fully transparent.
He began his talk talking about Cairo and about the changed hardware expectations these days. He stated that everyone has 3D now, or at least, anyone who doesn't, doesn't care about rendering and doesn't expect much. I found that rather disturbing, given that I sure don't want to see rendering stop working well on my laptop, and I'd hate to see Mozilla ignore education, developing countries and other markets where open source on cheap hardware is starting to gain a strong foothold.
The other bothersome thing Roc talked about was high-res displays. He mentioned people at IBM and other places using 200dpi displays, which (as anyone who's used even 100dpi and has imperfect vision knows) leads to tiny text and other display problems on a lot of pages due to the ubiquity of page designers who use pixel-based sizing. Roc's answer to this was to have an automatic x2 or x3 zoom for people at high resolutions like 200dpi. This seems to me a very poor solution: text will either be too big or too small, and images will be scaled weirdly. Perhaps if it's implemented as a smart font size scaling, without any mandatory image scaling, it could be helpful. I wish more work were going into Mozilla's text scaling, rather than things like automatic 2x zooms. Maybe this will be part of the work. Guess I need to seek out the bugs and get involved before I worry too much about right or wrong solutions.
Then AaronL gave his accessibility talk, stressing that "accessibility helps everybody" and that the minimum everyone should do is check pages and new XUL objects for keyboard accessibility. He talked a bit about how screen reading software works, with a demo, color-blindness issues (don't ever use color as the only cue), and accessibility problems with the current fad of implementing fake menus using JS and DHTML (such menus are almost never accessible to screen reading software, and often can't be triggered with keyboard events either). Hopefully awareness of these issues will increase as legislation mandates better accessibility. Aaron's talk was unfortunately cut short because he was scheduled as the last talk before lunch; people seemed interested and there was a lot of information on his slides which got skipped due to time constraints.
After lunch, Nigel spoke on writing XUL applications, Bob Clary presented an automated site testing tool he'd written (which runs in Mozilla) to validate HTML, CSS and JS, roc spoke again on the question of how backwards compatible and quirk-compatible Mozilla should be, Myk presented his RSS reading addition to Thunderbird mail, Pav gave a longer demo of the Cairo Canvas, and several other demos were presented.
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