If you’re reading this entry on a blog that is not florafaunarocks.wordpress.com (that is, florafaunarocks dot WordPress Dot com), then chances are that the blog you’re reading is one of those spam blogs. The despicable owners of such blogs use programs that grab new posts, then reposts them with some modifications on their own blog. There are an incredible number of them “surfing” around WordPress.com, with the result that any post I make automatically gets reposted somewhere else. It’s very irritating, not to mention a copyright infringement.
It’s easy to spot such blogs. The idiots send pingbacks to your blog, which the Akismet filter automatically catches. Just check your spam comments and you’ll see them. Perhaps WordPress.com should try to collect the IP addresses of all these bots and block them. That’ll clean up things a lot. Maybe we should all report these blogs to Google to get them blocked from the search engine, and kicked out of AdSense.
Domain tasting is basically the thing that NetSol took advantage of. It allowed them to register a domain name without paying a cent, provided they returned the domain name within a few days (I forget the exact length). It was meant to protect the registrars from credit card fraud and things like that, so that they don’t have to pay fees for domains where the registrant used a fake credit card. The whole thing has been badly abused by people everywhere, including the latest, notorious incident involving NetSol.
As everyone has been saying, there’s something deeply wrong with software patents. The latest news has Trend Micro taking up a lawsuit against Barracuda Networks, a mail and security vendor. The claim here is that ClamAV, an open source antivirus program which they use, does gateway antivirus filtering, something which Trend holds a patent in.
This is not the first time open source software has been a target of companies in lawsuits. Remember when SCO sued IBM over Linux? Well, obviously not only did SCO lose, it went bankrupt. But that was a particularly obnoxious lawsuit, and it was not over a software patent which this one is.
Personally, I believe software should be protected by copyright laws only, and not software patents as well. It’s ridiculous that someone can patent a general idea of how to do things. There are only so many ways one can do a particular thing. And to patent protection of FTP and SMTP gateways? That’s ridiculous. There really should be a law against predatory patent infringement lawsuits like this.
The WordPress.com stats are awful. Sure, it gives you which pages have been viewed. Yeah, that and the phrases that led people to your site. But there’s really a dearth of information. For example, which search engines were used for those phrases? Where is the visitor path report? Browsers? Operating system? And so on.
It’s not just the poor stats. It’s that they prevent you from even effectively using third party web statistics by their removal of all JavaScript code whenever you post. So all you can do is use the stats’ basic image option, which can’t really provide sufficient information.
I want better stats. And I want JavaScript support for my blog entries.
23,000 Linux PCs have just been deployed in schools in Philippines. This is great news. I’m hoping that the momentum continues and that Microsoft does not somehow pay (is “bribe” the right word here?) their way into reversing this somehow.
I think it’s important that Linux becomes a real threat to Windows. When MSDOS was in its heyday, with no competitors, it stagnated. But along came DR-DOS 5, and instantly, development in MS-DOS restarted again, with useful improvements that advanced the OS significantly. Without Linux as a threat, the only OSes we’ll get from Microsoft are things like Vista. Resource hog, incompatibility and massive DRM riddled into the system. We need Linux, not only for itself, but also to improve the state of OSes all round.
But of course, ideally, Linux replaces Windows. But I don’t think this will happen soon, unless Microsoft continues their blunders and Linux actually gets some third-party applications and commercial software developed for it.
There’s an announcement at Trolltech’s site about how Nokia has made a bid to buy TrollTech. It’s only January, and this is already the second acquisition of a major company providing core open source components needed by many, the first being MySQL.
I’m not against change. It may seem like I am, since I expressed queasiness about the MySQL acquisition, but I’m not, in principle. However, acquisitions of software companies have a habit of killing the product somehow. Like when AOL took over Netscape. Where is Netscape now? Or when the Watcom C++ compiler was bought by Sybase. The product died, and if not for the open source community’s effort to get it open sourced, that product will be ancient history by now. And so on. Somehow, the acquiring company rarely shares the original makers’ vision and energy. And Nokia? Good grief.
Windows clipboard is really limited. The moment you cut something, you automatically replace whatever was in the clipboard before. If you need the old copied text, there’s no way other than to go back, copy it again, if it still exists, and then paste it.
I’ve just installed a program called ClipX, a marvellous free clipboard extender. It lets you go back through your cut and paste history and paste older copies. The best thing is that it doesn’t interfere with the regular cut-and-paste that I use. And I only need to learn one more new hotkey.
According to the NPD group, the HD-DVD format isn’t quite dead yet. The poor sales of HD-DVD in a particular week, according to them, doesn’t mean that it is a trend - there were extenuating circumstances in that week that led to the fall in sales.
Anyway, news aside, I’m not sure what to think about this Blu-Ray HD-DVD format war. I do know however that unless one format wins in the end, sales of either format is not really going to increase. What I’m not sure is whether Blu-Ray should be the winner. If I’m not wrong, there are DRM issues with this format.
The latest news on the series of QuickTime 7.4 blunders is that this version is incompatible with Adobe After Effects, a Mac OS X software. It basically prevents After Effects from rendering video content. Apple’s response to this is to delete posts on their forum describing the problem. Anyway, the only way to solve this is to use the Time Machine to roll back your system to a pre-7.4 state. If you have not installed QuickTime 7.4, don’t do it.
The other web browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari, Konqueror, etc, all have no trouble keeping up with the web standards. As a result, when web designers create a page, it is a simple task to get their page render correctly in all non-IE browsers - just follow the standards. Then they have to add a lot of hacks to check if the user is using IE, and to use all sorts of workarounds so that the page will render correctly in IE.
Now, as IE tries to be more standards-compliant, it is umpteen years late in the task, and has to contend with the plethora of websites with these hacks. So it introduces another non-standard hack.
If IE cannot keep up with the web standards, which incidentally has been around for innumerable years now (what is it, 8 years now?), then Microsoft should really get out of the web browser business. Just install Firefox or license Opera to place on Windows machines. I’m sure these free modern browser vendors would be delighted to have it as the new default Windows browser.
As everyone knows, Internet Explorer is truly behind the curve in standards compliance. Even the latest version, IE 7, is a pain to workaround if your site does any sophisticated use of CSS. With IE 8 in the horizon, Microsoft is now looking for a way to do things so that they don’t have to break all the websites that currently have to bend-backwards to support IE 7 and IE 6. There are some suggested solutions in the works in their IE article.
What I found interesting is the way they have to skirt the issue why IE is so incompatible with the standards compliant sites on the web:
In IE7 we made a lot more changes to improve IE’s standards compliance, particularly with CSS. We limited these behavior changes to IE’s “standards mode” only, and we expected that this would help limit compatibility problems as it had in the past. Unfortunately, and somewhat surprisingly to us, this wasn’t true; many of those changes made IE incompatible with content that was already part of the web…
But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser? The answer is that developers of many sites had worked around many of the shortcomings or outright errors in IE6, and now expected IE7 to work just like IE6… In many cases, these sites would have worked better if they had served IE7 the same content and stylesheets they were serving when visited with a non-IE browser, but they had “fixed their content” for IE. Sites didn’t work, and users experienced problems.
Now the above is one way of spinning events. Let me un-spin a portion of this to describe things as they really are:
But wait, a lot of people say at this point, why isn’t this a problem for Firefox, or Safari, or any other browser?
The answer is that when the other browsers fixed their browsers to deliver standards compliant behavior, they actually fixed it correctly. The browsers thus were able to render pages in accordance with what the standards specified. When the browsers saw, from the DOCTYPE, that a web page wanted to be rendered in a standards compliant fashion, it did accordingly.
Sadly, When IE 6 and 7 said it was standards compliant, it was only paying lip service. Webmasters everywhere found to their consternation that pages that worked perfectly in Safari and Firefox and Opera and Konqueror, and every other modern browser around, broke horribly in IE 6 and its supposedly-improved successor IE 7 when rendering in “standards-compliant mode”.
So they had to work around it. When IE 7 (which is, ahem, standards compliant) came out, they had to apply all sorts of workarounds to deal with the remaining major problems it had rendering pages.
We expect the same thing to happen again when we release IE 8, with its newer definition of “standards-compliant”.
Unix shell commands have always been known for their terse syntax. But if you string together a few Unix shell commands, it is possible for you to form a command line description of a dating relationship (of the boy-girl kind, not the carbon dating kind).
who && gawk && uname && talk && date && wine && touch && unzip && strip && touch && finger && head && mount && fsck && more && yes; yes; more; yes; umount && make clean && sleep
Disclaimer: These are just commands commonly found in Unix systems. Anything you read into this is purely in your mind.
(For the non-Unix users, you can find the manual page for each of these commands by searching on Google. For example, to find what the “gawk” command does, search for “gawk man page”.)
I applaud the OLPC. I really do. But sometimes, I think that Nicholas Negroponte and his people can be awfully thickheaded.
Sure, they want to provide the OLPC for the children in the poorer nations. I agree that this is a good thing. The best way to get people out of poverty is to provide them the means to do so.
But they shouldn’t be so rigid about not commercializing the OLPC. I look at it this way: if you sell the OLPC to the developed nations as well, it may well become popular. It’s not just the geeks who want to own it. Small notebooks are all the rage today. When OLPC becomes popular, the price of the OLPC will drop. Better still, people will become accustomed to the way it works. Linux and whatever special networking and educational stuff they put into OLPC will become the de facto standard. When that happens… wow.
(I think that is what Microsoft is afraid of. They are afraid that people will start getting used to Linux. Then when software developers start seeing people use it, and port their applications to that OS, the days of Windows are numbered.)
But Negroponte is too blind to see that. He has a one track mind. I say that to reach your non-commercial target, you should not eschew the commercial opportunities. People are dying to get their hands on the OLPC. Today. But if you wait too long, and Intel Classmate, which is making its way onto American stores secretly via other channels, will take its place. Once that happens, it will be too late for OLPC.
The window of opportunity is closing. They need to get their act together.
I seem to be making a lot of posts about my current blog host. The trouble is that I sort of discover these things as I use the platform. There was no list of things that are different between a normal WordPress installation and the one provided by WordPress.com. The latest thing I found was that the main page’s “Posted in: (category name)” link does not lead to my list of categories on my own site. Instead, it despicably leads to wordpress.com’s own category list. Horrible.
I thought I already dealt with this when I stopped using “tags” and started using “categories”, but it looks like WordPress.com is determined to make all our WordPress.com blogs link to them. I may have to move my blog back to a normal web host. My old web host, which I mentioned in my first post, is trying to fix the problems in its server, and by some reports, the server is apparently up again. I mean, at least on my own account, I can configure the template properly and not have all these sneaky links on my site linking to other sites out of the blue.
Update: I’ve decided to add my own “Filed under” links under my posts. It’s a bit tedious to have to do things that the downloadable WordPress software does automatically, but at least it’s better than nothing. A good side effect of this is that at least the categories show up in my permalink pages.
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