Skip introduction & navigation

Web Design | Views & Rants | Reviews | Contact | Links | About

Welcome to the weblog, which gets updated whenever I have time to do it. Which hasn’t been often in the past month, one way and another. Sorry about that — hopefully some of the things which interefered with keeping reasonably up to date will be a thing of the past very shortly. But, as always, I’m making no promises…

Thursday 6th June

Before going any further, let me take this opportunity to wish the lads of the Argentinian football team the best of luck in their match tomorrow. Knock ‘em dead — and out.

There has been a lot of talk since the weekend about the Golden Jubilee celebrations being one in the eye for republicans. Well, speaking as a republican (and when I say that, I mean a Scottish republican — I don’t care if England wants to keep its monarchy until a nearby supernova sterilises the planet, but I want to see Scotland an independent republic) I can’t say I feel downcast. Sure, there was at least a million people there for the finale; sure, the pop concert was actually a good one to judge from the bit I saw (and it was worth tuning in just to see, standing next to each other on stage, Paul McCartney, Cliff Richard and Ozzy Osbourne); sure, the fireworks display and the Concorde/Red Arrows flypast were spectacular; sure, the images of the Mall crammed with flag-waving people were stunning.

But even if The Guardian is right in saying that “This has undoubtedly been a great weekend for the House of Windsor” and “The golden jubilee may have given those of us who seek radical change in the way Britain is governed food for thought,” one stupendously good party does not mean that the entire country is suddenly rabidly monarchist.

One point seems to have escaped a lot of commentators on the Jubilee celebrations, particularly those on television: the people who went to the Mall, who went to the concert, who went to see the Queen on her tour — these were never going to be either lukewarm or hostile to the monarchy; only those enthusiastic for the monarchy (why they should be I don’t know, but there you go) would turn up for these events. Outside of the television screen, my personal encounters with the Jubilee celebrations are precisely two, despite reports of Scotland entering the Jubilee spirit.

The first was a couple of weeks ago — yes, it was a Thursday — when I was heading down West George Street from Blythswood Square in the mid-afternoon. Suddenly I see, almost directly ahead of me, three Tornadoes flying in a tight ‘V’ formation banking to head straight for me. I could see the blue-white fire in the engines as they approached and passed directly overhead at no more than 200 feet. This flypast was the first I knew of HM the Q’s visit to Glasgow.

The second was on Sunday. Sunday, remember, being in the middle of the weekend devoted to the main Jubilee celebrations. On Saturday I had been in Edinburgh for a conference — stupendous fun — and we’d crashed with a friend. On Sunday we were looking for somewhere to eat and went to the Grassmarket. This did not go as planned because Helios Fountain, which used to have a killer combination of good veggie food and an interesting selection of books, has lost both the food and almost all the books, becoming a New Age tat shop. Not worth a visit. So we headed up to Bann where we had a superb brunch — definitely worth a visit.

On the way to Bann we passed a street party of sorts. It wasn’t actually taking place in the street but in a small courtyard by a block of flats. A Union flag hung unimpressively from a window and some fairly tatty looking bunting was strung around. The partygoers appeared uniformly glum. To be honest, it seemed fairly pathetic.

And that was it. That was the one occasion on which I have seen any "celebration". I don’t know anyone who has spoken of the Jubilee with any enthusiasm; I know a lot of people who have moaned about the sycophantic shite — that’s pretty much a direct quote — on television.

So it was a good party. The meaning ends there.

I make no pretence of this being a cutting-edge news source, but yesterday I think this was the first site outside mozilla.org to have the news of the release of Mozilla 1.0. Sheer chance, of course. (And to the person who said, “Do you know how sad it sounds that you got the news of Mozilla’s release from the Mozilla site?” — I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too.)

Today the story is being well picked up. The BBC reports on the release, neatly summarising some of the reasons I like Mozilla so much:

Mozilla is quick, stable, and virtually free of the default links to manufacturers’ products that feature so prominently in commercial browsers.

The press release has been picked up by Mozillazine — worth checking out for the subtle heading (do you think they’re excited?). As it is an open source project, it is being celebrated with an open party in San Francisco and satellite parties around the world. (I like the sound of Bierzilla — can’t think why…)

Kevin Murphy reviews Mozilla 1.0 for Computerwire; the review is also carried on The Register. CNET carries a review which summarises the browser like this:

The good: Fast; stable; free; includes full-featured e-mail client.

The bad: Incompatible with some sites built for Internet Explorer; chat client doesn’t work with the big commercial IM systems, including ICQ, Yahoo IM, AOL IM, and Windows Messenger.

The bottom line: Until Netscape 7 comes out, Mozilla is the best free alternative to Microsoft IE. And it’s faster, to boot.

Well, “the good” is fair. “The bad” — hmm. “Sites built for Internet Explorer” covers a lot of sins. (I’m not, by the way, particularly interested in the email or chat clients — there is plenty of software out there to handle email and chat, but a solid, stable, standards-compliant browser is hard to find.) There are sites which use non-standard M$-specific tricks — these don’t all work even in every current version of IE. There are sites which are “built” (to use totally the wrong word) with no understanding of how to use HTML, CSS or JavaScript; if they work in IE, it is because they are tested in IE.

There are problems with certain JavaScript-reliant sites because the site designers seem blissfully ignorant of the fact that document.all is not the proper way to access page elements. This comment in fact boils down to criticising Mozilla for doing things properly, i.e. handling the instructions it is given in accordance with the standards. Yes, pages will break — if they are broken pages. Pages which are properly marked-up will look fine in both Mozilla and IE.

I find the “bottom line” comment bizarre. Not that Mozilla is faster than IE — that’s my impression, too — but the thing about Netscape 7. Netscape is built on Mozilla; it’s not identical, it doesn’t use the entirety of the code of the Mozilla build it is based on, but it uses a lot of it. The strengths as a browser of Netscape 7 will be the strengths as a browser of Mozilla. Why go for Netscape with its larger footprint and ad links to AOL and Real when you can have just as good a browser without all that?

Wednesday 5th June

“Stick a fork in it. It’s done” Mozilla 1.0 is now released and available for download.

Here is a press release and the Guide to Mozilla 1.0.

Free speech fights back.

Leave now: US and British governments advise their nationals in Inda and Pakistan.

Megiddo = Armageddon — I assume I didn’t need to tell you that?

Strange bedfellows: At least one American columnist seems to have woken up to the fact that the Saudi regime is not a staunch defender of democracy and that the Saudis are tacit supporters of terrorism directed against the West. How long will it take the US government to realise that the Saudi regime is at least as dangerous as the Iraqi one?

Fear of nudity — an impediment in the war against terrorism. To deal with chemical or biological attacks it is imperative to remove victims’ clothes and then wash them (pretty obvious):

But the reluctance of modest victims to strip naked in front of co-workers or strangers “has been one of the issues that has prevented us from moving forward and developing a scheme to manage mass casualties,” he said. “Some people would rather be dead than strip in public.”

Open source = terrorist risk? That’s what The Register reports a Washington think-tank as saying:

A Washington think tank calling itself the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution is preparing to release a ‘study’ warning that the widespread use of open source software will allow international terrorists to have their way with us.

“Terrorists trying to hack or disrupt U.S. computer networks might find it easier if the federal government attempts to switch to ‘open source’ as some groups propose,” the group warned in a press release.

If that has you scratching your head, The Reg suggests the muddy thinking which may lie behind this:

We imagine the argument will have to go something like this: Microsoft software is safer because the company carefully conceals its security flaws; thus evil terrorists will never find them on their own. But with open source products, the Evil Doers will be able to audit the source code and find novel weaknesses they can exploit to bring Christendom to its knees.

As they say, “we know they can’t possibly try to argue that MS offers inherently more secure products.”

Following on from that (literally, I followed one of The Reg’s links): we all know that Microsoft and security are two words which don’t sit well together in the same sentence — unless it’s something like “Microsoft software has bugger all security.” This was why Bill Gates’ memo about “Trustworthy Computing” — “Our products should emphasise security right out of the box” and other rib-ticklers — was greeted with such derision. Richard M. Smith was prompted by that memo to produce a list of security problems with M$ products. The first point listed is unarguable:

File sharing in Windows is seriously broken. If I share a disk drive under Windows it should only be available on my LAN, not the entire Internet. I can’t see why a drive should be ever be available to everyone on the Internet, but that’s how Windows works today.

Well, quite. However, Smith’s list is not something one can accept in its entirety. Consider this comment on email clients:

In Outlook Express 6, there is an option to automatically deleted executable files which come in as attached files to email messages. However the option is turned off by default. The default should be “on” just like it is in Outlook 2002. Hotmail should also be removing all attached executable files from email messages.

If I were to express my disagreement with this as though I were a Tarantino character attempting to demonstrate his poetic command of every profanity under the Sun I would still not be putting it strongly enough. This nannying approach is one of the reasons Microsoft’s software is already so hypertension-inducing.

Rule number one of software design is (or should be): the user knows what he’s doing. Granted that is not always actually the case, but it should always be assumed to be the case; software vendors should also attempt to give the user access to necessary information. In the case of attached .EXE files, there should be a warning — with the option to disable it once seen — stating the risks clearly. (It should go without saying that no email client should ever — ever — automatically launch an attachment.)

This suggestion of Smith’s is ironically characteristic of one of the main flaws in M$ software design, security excepted: the inability to grasp that the user of software may need to do something other than the designer(s) of the software expects. I have certainly received an .EXE file which I wanted — needed, in fact — and expected. (It was, by the way, uncompressed because at 96kb there wasn’t much point in it being compressed.) If some moron had designed the mail client so that the file was automatically deleted I would have been spitting mad.

Design secure software: yes. Second-guess the user: no.

Sticking with computer security: a sophisticated but thankfully pretty harmless virus has been developed which can evade anti-virus software and infect both Windows and Linux systems. However, before the rabid Microsofties start chortling at being placed in the same class of (lack of) security as Linux, Linux systems would have to be running in superuser mode to be infected — and how likely is that?

I am making no comment on this one since a stream of obscenities occasionally offends: Joseph McNicol, a Perth man (not the real Perth, the Australian one), was sick of being swamped by spam so he posted details of the marketing company on the Web; as a result, SPEWS blocked the company’s IP addresses — and now the company is sueing Mr. McNicol for about $45,000.

A hurricane in Guatemala has exposed huge veins of the blue jade prized by the Olmecs and the Mayas.

The glassy, hard, often translucent rocks occur at only a few known sites around the world. But jade catches the eye because of its astonishing range of colors: white, red, blue, brown, blue-green, emerald green, dark green and blackish. Individual rocks are often mottled with colored specks and streaks.

Early peoples of the Americas considered jade more valuable than gold and silver. The Olmecs, the great sculptors of the pre-Columbian era, carved jades into delicate human forms and scary masks. Mayan kings and other royalty often went to their graves with jade suits, rings and necklaces. The living had their teeth inlaid with the colored gems.

Here’s a report that says oil supplies may be inexhaustible. Obviously that cannot be literally true, but the suggestion is that there may be vastly more oil within the Earth’s crust than has previously been thought. This relies heavily on Thomas Gold’s idea that natural oil and gas are not formed through the action of pressure and heat on organic material but rather derive from methane present at the formation of the Earth.

Gold is, to put it mildly, something of a maverick — which doesn’t necessarily mean he is wrong, of course. Perhaps his hypothesis will one day seem as mainstream as, say continental drift. But assuming there is plenty of oil and gas there, and more importantly that it is accessible at reasonable cost, that may be good in one sense for our civilisation, but it’s an appalling prospect for the environment.

I mentioned recently that Netscape 7 had been released. Technically, this is preview release 1 — i.e. a beta. A first review in The Register says that it is based on Mozilla RC1, which is good news. What is interesting is the size comparison between N7 and Mozilla: Mozilla is about 10Mb, Netscape 7 PR1 30.8Mb — what’s the betting that extra 20Mb is mostly advertising and AOL crap?

Here’s an interesting article looking at ten disasters and the common human factors which were involved in their causation.