Computers
It's only recently that I got around to properly exploring the use of EtText with WebMake. However, in recent times, I've been giving it a look (as well as implementing some bug fixes). The EtText documentation mentions that it takes care of ``header recognition", but gives no examples of this. In order to create a <h1> tag, simply underline a paragraph with three or more hyphen characters, i.e.:
This is a header ---
Note that there is no indent from the left margin. This is then translated into:
<a name="This_is_a_header" id="This_is_a_header"> <h1>This is a header</h1></a>
This not only creates the desired header, but allows you to link to it using an internal link. The same behaviour for the <h2> and <h3> tags can be obtained by using ``=" and ``~'' characters respectively instead of hyphens.
However, as Ralph Page notes in the mailing list, this is not valid HTML, as the <h1> block element is contained within the <a> inline element. Applying my patch causes these headers to be translated as:
<h1 id="This_is_a_header">This is a header</h1>
This achieves the same effect (including the internal linking) and passes the W3C validator.
Java developers running compiz with Xgl or AIGLX will have noticed a problem with running NetBeans 5.0 in that environment. In fact, there seems to be a problem with any Swing-based app running on Java 5.0 in that environment. A number of workarounds have been proposed (e.g. running a seperate instance of X.org using Xnest or switching temporarily to metacity while the application is running).
However, NetBeans 5.0 runs perfectly under Java 1.4.2, which doesn't appear to have any issues with compiz for some reason. Therefore, by installing Java 1.4.2 side-by-side with Java 5.0, NetBeans can be run as before.
Firstly, grab a copy of the 1.4.2 JDK from here (though I'm sure the JRE by itself will be fine). Then in the directory where you installed netbeans, find the "etc/netbeans.conf" file and change the "netbeans_jdkhome" option to the directory in which you installed your new copy of Java.
For anyone developing for the web, cross-browser compatibility is (or at least it should be) important. Developing from a Linux environment usually necessitates having a copy of Windows and Internet Explorer hanging around for testing, either through running them on a separate computer or via an irritating dual-boot.
The IEs 4 Linux project provides a simple way to install Internet Explorer versions 5, 5.5 and 6 on Linux (using wine, removing the need for any of the above (although in order to comply with IE's licence terms, you'll need a valid Windows licence). Installation is by simply running a single executable and following the instructions.
I recently got around to finally ditching Mozilla Firefox as the default browser on my desktop machine, which runs Ubuntu Linux. Firefox's sluggishness, together with the necessity to restart it periodically (in order to stop it hogging the CPU) have caused me to switch to the Epiphany Browser.
Epiphany, with its extensions, currently supports all the features that I had grown to love as a Firefox user: tabbed browsing, popup and ad blocking, mouse gestures and an incremental find feature.
As I use a number of search engines on a day-to-day basis (Google, Google Scholar, CPAN, Wikipedia, etc.), I had been using yubnub as my search tool of choice, allowing my to use a single search.
YubNub describes itself as a "command line for the web", though I've found its greatest feature to be its ability to dispatch search terms to different engines by prefixing your search with an appropriate command (e.g. `g' for Google, `wp' for Wikipedia, etc.).
Epiphany and Firefox both support "Smart Bookmarks", which work in the same way, but it is necessary to set these up for each browser you use on each machine. Personally, I find it far easier to merely set up YubNub and use this instead.
Epiphany supports a keywords feature whereby anything typed in the Location bar that isn't recognised as a URL is dispatched to Google (by default) and a search for the keywords entered is performed. I have changed this behaviour to default to YubNub instead, so that I can dispatch any searches from the Location bar. This can be done by firstly typing "about:config" into the Location bar and then changing the "keyword.URL" property to "http://www.yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=". You should also ensure that the "keyword.enabled" property is set to "true''.
A number of tech news outlets have noted the expiry of the two-year period Microsoft gave themselves to stamp out spam.
Step forward Microsoft spokesman Ryan Hamlin, who claims that by stopping 95% of spam reaching inboxes on MSN, he considers it solved. For once, I'm not going to be semantically pedantic and ignore the numerous possible definitions and interpretations of the word "solve" in this context. Instead, I'm going after the maths.
The problem is this: how on earth do they know they're achieving a 95% success rate in catching spam? By definition, in order to calculate such a figure, they'd have to know how many spam messages their customers receive, in addition to the figure for how many they're blocking. Question: if they can count every spam message, why do they let 5% of them through? And if they can't count them, where are they getting the 95% figure from? Do they really expect that their customers report every instance of spam getting through to their inboxes?
But then again, aren't 54.2% of all statistics made up on the spot anyway? So surely they should be able to join in. Or is that 71.56%? I can't quite remember. Possibly both.
Google's latest beta project has just hit the 'net, with yesterday's announcement of Google Talk, yet another Instant Messenger system.
The interesting thing about this one is that firstly, they're using the free Jabber protocol, rather than creating their own, so any client that supports Jabber can connect to the service. Not only that, but they're actively encouraging people to use third party clients (particularly on currently-unsupported platforms, though Linux and OS X ports are promised), as they express the belief that people should be free to use whatever client they wish. This is different to the other mainstream providers who frequently alter their own protocols in order to foil free software developers attempting to connect to their service.
This is particularly important given that services aren't compatible, resulting in some people running multiple clients to connect to many of their friends' preferred networks. Multi-protocol clients such as Gaim will allow you to connect to many networks without the need for a seperate client for each and since Gaim already supports Jabber, adding a Google Talk account to it is trivial.
Google are aware of this issue too and so are attempting to a situation similar to telephone and email where people should be able to IM anyone, regardless of provider. If they can use their not-insignificant influence to bring this about, things'll be a whole lot simpler.
Interoperability is definitely the buzzword-du-jour at the moment. It looks like Microsoft have finally bowed to (mostly governmental) pressure and are going to use an XML-based file format as the default for their next release of Office. While there's no mention of them adopting any pre-existing format (Us?? Use a format we don't control??), they are going to publish this new format on a royalty-free basis. This can only be a good thing, as it will hugely cut down on the amount of time spent reverse-engineering closed formats, which will be a huge boost to other office programs.
It's not quite as good as if they had agreed to adopt a pre-existing open format, but this is definitely a step in the right direction.
According to a Dublin-based corporate helpdesk that will remain nameless, if you want to send an image in an email, putting it in your signature will make it take less memory!
I've been using Wikipedia for looking up items of interest for quite a while now. For those unaware of it, Wikipedia is an encyclopedia that is maintained by the general internet community (with some moderation to prevent vandalism and such, obviously). Frequently, after watching a film/documentary about a historical event/person, I'll look up their Wikipedia entries to get the whole story, particularly because of the tendency of movies to gloss over the areas of the story that don't suit the director's view of the event.
It's only yesterday that I realised just how dynamic the whole Wikipedia project really is. Just over an hour after yesterday's election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI, I made my way to Ratzinger's wikipedia page to find out more about the new Pontiff, to discover that the entry had already been updated to reflect his new status (and name). This morning (about 16 hours after the election result was announced), the page had changed considerably, to offer a far more in-depth biography of someone who had just been elevated to a status deserving of it.
Of course, all the traditional elitists with their dust-covered copies of World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica (along with everyone who spent good money on Encarta) still have John Paul II as the Pope when the kids go researching for a school project. This is a great example of Wikipedia becoming a seriously useful tool - now all they need is some investment to speed the damn thing up a bit!
We're all sick of those email-harvesting robots that are constantly traversing the web in the not-so-vain hope that they'll come across even more people to attempt to sell their dubious wares to. Most www users are, by now, aware that it's inbox-suicide to post your email address on the web unobfuscated.
This is why I was interested to come across Spam Poison. It invites website/blog owners to include a link on their sites which leads to a page at one of Spam Poison's other domains that contains a long list of fabricated email address, all at domains used by known spammers. This page, in turn, links to similar page, thus leading naive or impolite web crawlers into an infinite loop. This has the effect of keeping the crawler busy, while at the same time `poisoning' the spammers' databases with thousands of useless email addresses.
As someone who uses a web crawler for legitimate purposes, I must admit that when I initially came across the site, I was ever so slightly worried by the intentional luring of crawlers into infinite loops. However, they've been impeccable in their respect for polite crawlers, making use of both the robots.txt exclusion standard and the robots meta tag, meaning that my crawler wouldn't have been affected.
It's nicer still to notice that they actually followed the extremely simple robots.txt standard properly, instead of using some homemade `variation' of it, like an amazing number of other sites do.
Of course, an endorsement of the system wouldn't be complete without using it, so here's a little link for you all to not bother clicking on:
Having installed Ubuntu Linux on a Dell Latitude D505 (which has an Intel 855GM graphics chipset), I was initially stuck with an everything-unfriendly 1024x768 resolution. 1280x1024 was managed by fiddling with the rather conservative settings in my XF86Config-4 file, which wasn't easy, given that supported Horizantal Sync values are near-impossible to find anywhere. (I say near-impossible, as I'm allowing for the fact that I just couldn't find them).
However, the 1400x1050 resolution that Dell's site claims my machine supports wasn't appearing. Apparently this is because the BIOS doesn't list it as an available resolution. Much Googling later, I came across 855resolution, a little program by Alain Poirier which, well, fixes it. Easily. Thanks Alain.
It's probably that most computer users have come across an End User Licence Agreement (EULA) at some stage. It's also probable that most of those people just blindly clicked on `I agree', in order to dive into their new software as quickly as possible.
Many people see the EULA as a useless bunch of legalese that isn't ever likely to be of any real relevance to them and, for the most part, this is highly likely to be a reasonable assumption. However, sometimes you're likely to miss a gem of a paragraph in plain English. For example, this is an extract for the notorious GATOR eWallet:
"In exchange for offering you free software products, we collect anonymous usage information from your computer that we and our partners may use to select and display pop-up and other kinds of ads to you and to perform and publish research about how people use the Internet."
In other words: we are expressly telling you that our product is spyware and adware and if you're not going to bother to read the licence, that's your own fault.
In an effort to ascertain whether *anybody* reads EULAs, PC Pitstop included the following clause in one of its EULAs (email address obfuscation is mine):
"A special consideration which may include financial compensation will be awarded to a limited number of authorize licensee to read the section of the license agreement and contact PC Pitstop at consideration /at/ pcpitstop /dot/ com."
Translation: If you read this far and send us an email, we'll give you money.
After four months and 3,000 downloads, only one person contacted them for his reward. He received a cheque for US$1,000. Maybe it's worth reading the agreements after all.
A German court has ruled that a university acted illegally by blocking incoming emails from a former employee from reaching addresses within the institution. It's reasoning on the issue was that email is private and therefore the university did not have the right to filter it based on content, unless related to combating a viral threat.
The Register is wondering if they have thereby unintentionally banned spam blocking too, as that is generally done by applying filtering rules to message content. Surely it's more likely that spam-blockers will just be offered as services to which users have to consent, thus getting around any possible privacy issues.
A number of security flaws have been discovered, and fixed, in Google's popular Gmail service. One of these holes was apparently discovered accidentally when a couple of hackers (not crackers) were testing a mailing list distribution program they had written, which unintentionally exposed a flaw that gave them access to random information from others' messages, including (in one case) a password.
It's worth noting that GMail is still in the Beta testing stage, despite the number of users it has accumulated, so bugs like this shouldn't be considered particularly surprising. It is, however, quite impressive that this hole was plugged within an hour of its details appearing on Slashdot.
This has *got* to be the geekiest thing EVER. It's a command reference for the wonderful GNU Emacs text editor . . . on a t-shirt. The trick is that it's printed upside-down so that the owner can consult the guide while wearing it.
Does this count as Wearable Computing]], I wonder?
No, that's not money we're talking about.
Mozilla Firefox 1.0 was finally released this week and had 2 million downloads in the first two days alone.
Firefox is a wonderful, modern, standards-compliant, feature-laden and secure web browser and what's more, it's free. Free as in speech and free as in beer.
The second browser war is only beginning!
Just in case proof were needed to show that Google's technical staff are, indeed, totally insane, here's an advanced search with the language preferences to 1337 speak (i.e. the incomprehinsible alphabet used by those who consider themselves to be wonderful 'hackers' - and also tend to use the word 'uber' a lot).
For the uninitiated, this basically involves butchering the English language by using '3' for 'e', '7' for 't', '1' for 'l' and so on. Managing to convey the impression of 'gangsta-speak' is (apparently) considered a bonus. For example:
"PH1ND P4G3Z 7H4T L1NK 70 d4 P4G3"
or alternatively . . .
"Find pages that link to da page"
. . . well, one at a time anyway.
On a regular tour of the interweb, I've come across this, a totally useless but incredibly interesting piece of java code that converts an image file into a HTML representation of it (thus increasing its size 60-fold, but who's counting?).
Ok - I lied. Technically they're the digit '8', but that didn't make for a snappy headline.
Nestling amongst today's Irish Independent's tips for avoiding spyware comes this gem:
"Always type in URLs yourself rather than clicking on links."
Now, just for practice, anyone who wants to see what the last book I bought was, can type the following URL into their browser - I've reduced the temptation to cheat by not making it a link - and no copying and pasting!
See how silly it is?
El Reg is reporting on a rather bizarre development of Canada's Institute of Information Technology.
Known as a "]", this rather curious device replaces your mouse by letting you move your mouse pointer with your nose! Apparently, a webcam tracks the movement of the end of your nose and allows to blink your left or right eye to simulate the relevant mouse-click.
While such an invention seems far from useful at first glance, surely the ability (in 3D games) to dispose of opponents merely by winking at them is too good an opportunity to miss.
Funny how much can happen in the blink of an eye nowadays.
Following on from June's warnings by CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team) against using Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which led to a small but significant gain in market share for Mozilla and its derivatives, the German Federal Office for Information Security has become the latest influential security body to do likewise.
With Mozilla Firefox already more secure and feature-laden than its rival, as well as being totally free of charge, you'd think it's only a matter of time before we see some interesting new trends begin to emerge.
Of course, it's not always that simple when Microsoft's marketing department are involved.
I've been a user of Gentoo Linux for about a week now (no, it's not my first foray into Linux - it's just the first one that I've had a blog to write about it in!). The unusual thing about Gentoo is that everything is compiled specifically for the hardware you're using, which should result in better performance once it's installed. The downside of that is that it takes the best part of the weekend to actually install. In Gentoo's defence, there are apparently prebuilt installations available but in my case, I got the disc from Linux Format, who only included from-source installation as an option.
Seems to be worth it though. Portage (the package management system) is wonderful, the online docs are great and the community is outstanding.
Indeed, it's largely the community aspect that makes it special. With Red Hat now using the community to pre-test technology that "may eventually make its way into Red Hat products" (via the Fedora project) and Mandrake charging membership fees for access to their forums, it's quite refreshing that in the Gentoo Store, the t-shirt actually costs more than the OS itself! Sure, it's understandable that companies have to make money but it's still nice to see distros that are aimed at the enthusiast, rather than the corporate dollar.
And then there's Larry, the Gentoo cow, who I'm not going to comment on.
