Author: Rory

Firefox developer Blake Ross has some criticisms of the new Netscape beta. Actually, he has so many criticisms he’s going to write about them in daily posts over the next few days. The first post covers the many ways that Netscape prevents users from easily closing the browser. This browser is written by people who don’t care about their users. That’s a complaint that can’t even be leveled against Internet Explorer.

Admittedly I’m not particularly knowledgeable on the subject of card manipulation, but this guy (MPEG4 video, 8MB) is pretty freaking awesome.

Google has a new toolbar out. You may already know this. If you don’t know about it here’s a brief introduction:

The new toolbar has a button on it to automatically transform some pieces of text on web-pages into links. When the user presses the button it converts plain-text ISBNs into links to Amazon, and converts plain-text addresses into links to Google’s map service. Some people who make websites don’t like this feature. They want to control the contents of their pages under all circumstances, even after the page has been served. Jeffrey Zeldman created a tool to help webmasters prevent users from using the new toolbar feature.

Here’s a sample objection from Tim Bray (ordinarily a sensible person):

[…]perhaps our friends at Creative Commons could have a look and develop a professional legal opinion as to whether their licenses, like the one I use, are infringed by AutoLink (my non-professional opinion is that Google’s damn close to the edge). If not, perhaps they could create a variant license that clearly rules it out of order. Then Google stops, or we sue their ass.

He wants to sue Google for providing a tool with which users can alter their own local copy of a web-page. While we’re at it, let’s sue scissors-makers because they let us cut the ads out of magazines; marker-makers for letting us cross out pieces of text in a book; or biro-makers for letting us write in margins. After all, it encourages us to make illegal derivatives of copyrighted works.

Only it damn well doesn’t, because copyright covers how and when you can distribute creative works, not what you can do with them once you get your hands on them. If I request a page from your server and your server gives it to me I can do whatever I want with it as long as I don’t show anyone else the result. I can print it out and fold it into a swan if I like. And anyone who wants to can make available the tools I need to do that. There is neither a legal nor moral foundation to your objection. If you want to prevent me from changing your page to fit my needs—whether it be to increase text sizes to help me read, or to add links to the page, or to replace every occurance of the word "French" with "Freedom"—then you can keep it on your own private intranet site and off of the Web.

Phil Ringnalda provides some interesting analogies to help throw this stupid hysteria into sharp relief. He also has a script to block Zeldman’s tool from breaking the toolbar.

If you’ve ever written so much as the smallest piece of code you’ll know how important it is to be able to test it. You would presumably then understand my frustration right now as I launch into writing a big ol’ heap of code for my major project (whose deadline has recently been brought forward by two weeks) without access to any environment in which to test it. I maintain a sliver of hope that the constant connection problems to csserver.ucd.ie will be fixed, and fixed soon.

I didn’t follow Battlestar Galactica last season but the bits I did happen to see were of astounding quality. It really was very well produced. This view is supported by those of my friends who did follow it and by everyone else I’ve heard mention it. It’s a pity then that what Slashdot refered to as a free download of the first episode is only a streaming video in Real Media format. Hint: If you want people to go the legal route to getting your material you have to make it more appealing than BitTorrent.

Phil Ringnalda has piece on advertising in blogs and one piece of it led me to develop an old idea just a little further than I’d seen before.

I do think, though, that the people who farm Google searchers for money by only showing ads in their old archives, where most of the viewers are people searching for bizarre terms that they are a horrible result for, have a much better idea than trying to show ads to the people who subscribe to an RSS feed because they want to know what you say.

All the way back in February of last year (though I thought it was longer ago than that) Aquarion announced that he was selling out by putting ads on posts more than three months old. The point was to give some value to those people stumbling across old posts that aren’t really relevant anymore. The trial must have worked, since the ads are still there.

So here’s the extra bit: It’s trivial to see when someone is coming to your site from a search engine. Some sites do it all the time, listing recent search terms that led to the site, tracking what search terms lead to the site most often, even highlighting the searched terms (that last one is a favourite of mine). Why not fine-tune the ad serving a little more and only serve ads on pages reached from searches? That way links from newer posts to old ones, links from outside sites that specifically refer to the contents of your post, and links from systems like SoylentRed’s own nostalgia list ("This time last year") will continue to point to ad-free content. Meanwhile random search-engine traffic can continue to generate revenue or, in Aquarion’s altruistic view, Google can at least give people something relevant if they’ve stumbled across an old post of yours that lacks current applicability.

Aunty Beeb is carrying a piece on protecting children from the abusive effects of ‘child exorcisms’. On its face this seems to be just another case of cruel acts committed in the name of religious beliefs. We don’t need another example of that; everyone just uses the crusades or the middle east or Northern Ireland as their primary examples of evil in the name of God. The counter-argument from theists—and a valid one at that—is that those situations are essentially political and/or ethnic at their root and that the various religions involved are used as a more convenient Us-versus-Them dividing label. Theists argue that people will divide themselves by any available label, be it race, colour, class, or religion. They’re right.

In contrast, the situation described by the BBC piece is one that can only have the fairy-tale-like mythology aspect of religious belief at it’s heart. It can not be the result of using religion as an excuse or as a convenient delimiter. This is an evil that only exists because of the wonky world-view of its perpetrators. Whether that constitutes an argument against religious belief per-se is left as an exercise for the reader.

I hope that those involved are not let off lightly in the name of religious tolerance.

That took longer than I expected. It’s just taken me over a day to get my unread items list down to zero. I spent most of Wednesday away from the ‘Net so my blogroll was going to stretch a little longer than usual anyway. Combine this with a couple of new high-content blogs in my subscriptions, the fact that many people are giving their take on Kottke‘s new venture, and the fact that Dave Shea’s new book is out (and the reviews are in) and you’ve got several hours worth of reading. I’ve improved my methods of keeping track of what I want to mention here, so unless I lose my motivation really quickly there are going to be a few more posts later today.

Unforunately my dad has been ill for the last day or two so all this is going to have to wait until after the shopping is done. There really isn’t as much time in a four-day weekend as you’d expect.

Via Leslie Orchard at 0xDECAFBAD, I’ve just discovered the previously unsung complexity of the iPod’s notes facility. Apple’s developers’ site has a PDF describing the extended functionality, including support for basic HTML like <br> and <p>, the ability to link to other notes and songs, and most interestingly the ability to link to temporary playlists identified by artist, album, genre etc. This is all aimed at making it easy to develop custom applications for the iPod.

I’ve been peripherally aware of Jason Kottke for the last couple of years. He’s always trotted out as an example of a blogger who everyone reads; he’s the prototypical A-lister. Struggling to keep myself off the bandwagon, or simply through inertia, I’ve never subscribed to Kottke.org. If you read the same blogs I do you could be forgiven for thinking that I’m the only person that doesn’t subscribe (well, you too because you read the same blogs I do…)

Anywho, I’ve just done the unimaginable and added Kottke’s feed to my Bloglines subscriptions, because Jason has done the unimaginable and quit his day job to work as a full-time blogger. No advertising, no memberships, no subscription-only content, just a request to pay what you think he’s worth. That’s pretty ballsy, and I can’t wait to find out if it works.