Rory Parle

I’m going to be a little bit informative and a large bit experimental today. I want to know whether telling people my plans will motivate me to finish within a reasonable timeframe or pressure me beyond the point of caring. For the moment I’ll forget the whole months-to-write-the-comments-interface fiasco.

The plan in question is a redesign. It has already begun, in fact, but there are problems ahead. The most major of these is that I promised myself I wouldn’t redesign until I had seperated scatterbrain’s code from soylentred’s design. That’s the bit that’ll take time. I may not have another chance to look at it until Monday either.

I have a preview of the new design. Take a look and tell me what you think. I call it Krimson Kream. When it’s replaced, it will be renamed Krimson Kreme Klassic. I don’t forsee any problems.

From the irony department: Two of my PHP-related bookmarks (the forums at devnetwork and PHP complete) have suffered fatal errors within seconds of each other. PHP is the scripting language that scatterbrain is written in. Both of these sites are also running on PHP-based systems. I suddenly don’t feel so bad that I’ve got some minor unresolved bugs, when the big-wigs can’t keep their systems up.

Everyone’s tired of the wet weather in Ireland, right? The noise of rain against the windows tends to distract me from my computer games. It also makes window washing necessarily more frequent. You won’t have failed to find the solution, surely (given the clue in the title)? A holiday to somewhere dry. Where?

The tropics are out, too humid. Nowhere on the coast. Maybe the Atacama desert? Driest place on the Earth, isn’t it? Aparently not. While my discovery of the Dry Valleys isn’t as important as Robert Scott’s, it is news to me. Go read about them. Then read it again. No rain in two million years. I’d better bring some Coke.

In response to a comment made by djinn on Friday about Mozilla/Firebird and Internet Explorer. A few things first though: I’m going to be pedantic; it’s the way I am. Try not to let this affect your reading of the non-pedantic parts of the response. Also, I’m going to explain why I like and use Firebird. There are other reasons to use it that I don’t take advantage of, and I’ve stated before that it’s not necessary for everyone. And finally, bear in mind that any reference to Netscape Navigator is a reference to version 4 or earlier, as subsequent versions are nothing other than rebranded Mozilla suites. For context, here’s the relevant comment, in full:

no thanks. I use this browser for eating, sleeping and maybe building a little fort. What more do i want? Neither of these browsers have any problem with doing the required task the internet was designed for. In my humble opinion, the only people who give a damn are the ones who dont spend enough time out side of their little browser world. It angers me to see such broad intellects worrying about such small differences. I am comfortably browsing this site in IE and and cant see a reason to abondon it in favour of another browser. I didnt pay for this either. It was already installed. I dont have to change anything. It is saving me more time keeping this than moving to another browser will cost me in the attempt to supress pop up adds that vanish with a click. Grrrr…. feel my fury

I’ll get the pedantry out of the way first: The Internet was designed so that Charlie Herzfeld, former head of the Information Processing Techniques Office, part of ARPA, wouldn’t have to remember three different ways to log into three diferent computers. You mean the Web. And you’re right. Both Internet Explorer and Netscape Navigator were fully capable of handling the Web as it was originally conceived. But neither can exploit the resources of the Web to the extent that Mozilla/Firebird can. Consider that it is perfectly possible to browse the Web without a ‘Back’ button, though it’s clearly much more useful to have one than not.

So why do I use Firbird? Here’s a taste:

Tabbed browsing

The single greatest inovation in browsers since bookmarks. I read through a page, middle clicking on any links that I find interesting. All of these pages load in the background so that I can continue reading and have them waiting to be read by the time I’m ready. This saves so much time on a dial-up connection that I would rate this feature higher than every other feature here listed, combined.

Popup blocking

My browser is running on my computer. I tell it what to do, not some punk kid halfway across the world. If he says "show Rory an ad", my browser says "fuck you." I don’t want to know. If you want to control my machine, write a virus like everyone else.

Control of Scripts

I’d like my statusbar to show me the URL that a link is pointing to. Why should I let that punk change it to "Click Here!!!"? My window is maximised at 1024×768 pixel resolution because that’s the size I like it to be. Why let the punk resize it?

Control of Text Zooming

Internet Explorer refuses to resize text specified in pixels, points or centimeters (though NN never had trouble with this). I read a lot of web pages, mostly at night when I’m tired, and I have pretty bad eyesight. It is useful to be able to resize text to something more comfortable. This is even more important when nearly every "web designer" (read page designer) thinks that 80% of my chosen text size looks better that 100%.

Themes

Firebird just plain looks better than Internet Explorer. And if you don’t agree, there are plenty more themes to choose from.

Bookmark keywords

I type "sr" in my location bar to get to Soylentred, "/." to get to Slashdot. I can type "g " followed by some keywords to do a Google search. Except I don’t need to because…

Search with the Location Bar

typing anything that isn’t a URL into the location bar will bring me to the first result of a Google search for the term, though I can choose which search engine to use.

Displays ABBR/ACRONYM Properly

Hover over any marked abbr(eviation) of acronym and have it’s expanded meaning displayed in a tooltip. This removes clutter from the page but leaves the information available. Though if you continue to use Internet Explorer the information is only accessible through View>Source.

I have a list this size again of other features that are useful to me but aren’t so generally applicable. I have also omitted those features that require extensions (Bear in mind that Firebird is meant to be "stripped down" so that many useful functions are only available through extensions, but it still kicks IE‘s ass in the vanilla version.)

To tackle your points in turn, you say "In my humble opinion, the only people who give a damn are the ones who dont spend enough time out side of their little browser world." First, you clearly don’t see your opinion as humble and neither do I. I just think it ill-considered. The people who give a damn are those who use their browsers, who get annoyed when some punk kid starts to screw with their machine when they themselves just want it to work. They are the people who try alternatives, whether out of desperation, curiosity or recomendation, and who see that those features listed above, and the others, are worth the time (only twenty minutes on dial-up) to download. The "little browser world", you might care to notice, is the whole world.

"It angers me to see such broad intellects worrying about such small differences." You seem to confuse my interest in the Mozilla Project, or in the Web or even the ‘net as a whole, with what I require of others. When I suggest people try alternative browsers, I don’t tell them to follow the project, to follow bugs and feature requests in bugzilla, to get accounts in the MozillaNews and MozillaZine forums. I do all of that out of curiosity, like someone would follow a sport or learn to juggle. What should broad intellects worry about, I wonder? Should I not be allowed hobbies because I might be useful for something more important to you? Have you considered that other people don’t share exactly your interests, and that the world is better for it?

"I am comfortably browsing this site in IE and and cant see a reason to abondon it in favour of another browser." Part of the reason you’re comfortably browsing in IE is because I spent considerable time ensuring that you could. Would you like to see what it looks like without the hacks to make IE like it? It’s really not pretty.

I’ll paraphrase your conclusion with "Internet Explorer is good enough for me." I have no problem with this. It makes web design harder because it doesn’t play by the rules, but I’ve accepted that some people don’t want or need to change their browser. But I wonder why you hate the others so much. You have said before that Mozilla is "crap", yet it is inarguably a better browser than the one that is "good enough" for you. Why are you furious that some of us feel the small time taken to download (diminished to almost nothing by the fact that I’m online anyway, my bandwidth isn’t otherwise in use and I don’t sit in front of the download manager waiting), is worth the gain in usability? Why are you so angry?

Not so long ago, a war was being fought on the computers of every university student, businessman and teenaged geek. It was a bloody conflict, with many casualties. It was a war between what was then the best, most used browser ever made (Netscape Navigator 4 – now about the worst browser still in use), and the hideous spawn of a convicted monopoly (Microsoft’s Internet Explorer – now, as then, the worst thing to ever happen to the internet). This war will not soon be forgotten by those in the know. It was scarring.

The war has been over for some time now, with IE the clear and undisputed victor (versions 5 and 6 account for about 90% of browser traffic, apparently). But both browsers continued to develope, IE by adding its automatic image resizing, NN by releasing its source under the Netscape Public Licence, forming the Mozilla Project, rewriting the browser almost from scratch with total support for all web-related specifications and actually making a very good browser.

Now it appears that both browsers are dead. Microsoft will release no more versions of IE, though it will continue to develope (possibly with the addition of a helpful paperclip, we don’t know) as part of the Windows OS. You might recall that IE‘s integration into Windows was the whole point of their monopoly-abuse conviction, but that’s what republicans in the white house get you. Just weeks after MS‘s announcment, AOL, the owners of Netscape, announced that it had layed off all remaining Netscape staff. Navigator is officially dead.

From its burning corpse rises a phoenix (now renamed Firebird). More generally, Mozilla. AOL gave all Mozilla property (Trademarks, servers, $2m, etc.) to the new Mozilla Foundation for the continued developement of Mozilla, Firebird, Thunderbird, the newly released Sunbird and all other Mozilla-based projects.

So the two biggest browsers ever, within weeks of each other, are gone. Take this opportunity to go get a better one

I have sitting on my home computer a file that tracks all of my aims for the near-term developement of scatterbrain and soylentred.net. In the absence of anything else of note happening (ignoring those things that deserve a more considered entry which I don’t have time for) I’ve decided to post a version (minus boring technical details and security information) of this file here:

• Add all the files and directories necessary to comply with Greg Knauss’ Standard for Site Organization.
• I need to create the UI for editing my linkroll (the list of links which may or may not appear on the right – I haven’t added any at the time of writing).
• Move all (error) messages to a seperate file for modularisation.
• Convert to a template-based system where HTML is seperate from the scripts that utilise it.
• I need total control over comments. It will be enough to start with just the ability to completely remove a comment. Ideally, I want some moderating control like deleting parts of comments or adding (suitably marked-up) editorial commments. (Note that I have this control at the moment but it involves directly accessing the database, which is ugly.)
• Some system for allowing others to contribute to my "/about/" page. I love this idea, and Stephen has expressed an interest in it too. This will certainly be implemented at some point. You can email me your submissions in the mean time if you want.
• Syndication? RSS, Necho, ESF? (Syndication allows other sites to grab the important content from a site to include it in their own, or for people to read the content without having to visit the site.)
• Add a sitemap. Is this necessary yet? Probably not.
• Re-style. Including graphics. Once the system is stable and useful, I want to focus on the visuals for a while. This should be after the templates are in place.
• XUL/Javascript extension to Mozilla/Firebird for posting. (Program an extension for my browser so that I can post entries without visiting my administration pages.)
• Add support for the "Catagories" of entries. Archive by catagory. Display an entry’s catagory with other meta-information (as a link to that catagory’s archive).
• Add support, including UI, for editing an entry retrospectively. This includes adding text to the end, adding inline text, editing text/markup and changing the comments status (opening or closing comments.) (You might notice that some entries cannot be commented on. That’s what the comments status refers to.)
• Add a contact page with a form for mailing me. (Very simple.)
• A funky 404 page would be a nice addition. (404 is the error code for ‘file not found’. I want one that fits the style of the site and has some informative information on it about finding what you’re looking for. If I can make it entertaining, all the better.)
• A search function would be a real challenge, and is frankly probably beyond me. The idea is recorded here for completeness.
• Polls might be a fun distraction.
• Should I put this file online? Should I allow additions to it from anyone? A definite mechanism for suggestions would be a good idea. (Apparently ‘yes’. No real mechanism for suggestions except email or comments.)

As the last point mentions I really would like suggestions and requests from readers. Go nuts.

Well, I just fixed the dodgy comment bug but, as you may have noticed, scatterbrain now thinks all entries and comments were posted today. At the same time. It seems that updating a record has the side-effect of altering timestamps.

Solution? Well I have the posttimes of most of the entries in the backups. Everything before the recent rewrite. I’ll probably restore them for the sake of the archives. But the times of the comments are lost. Pooh.

Well, you live and learn. If this is the worst I get to teach me to backup everything then I guess I got off easy.

Well that was unpleasant for all concerned. Ie me. Laziness took its toll, and what should have been a week-long project has finally been completed after a month and a half. I feel I should go into politics. I’ve saved up some interesting offerings over the last while, but I think, for now, you would be better served by using my newly-created comment system to talk amongst yourselves while I tidy up the administration end over here. Unless you all got bored and wandered off of course. Please come back?

ESP Experiment – This is the most bloody obvious trick in existence. But just look at all those pleas for explanations!

…without breaking something? It seems not. It also seems that I’m going to have to migrate the whole damn system away from a flat file based system to a database of entries. Which means one thing. Lots of work for me to get back to where I started. Two things actually. Work, and no comments for a while. Three. Work, no comments, and you’re only reading this because I went to the trouble of FTPing it to the server. And the element of surprise.