I was getting a haircut to look nice for my job interview at a popular
geek web site. As I
scooch into the chair, I'm all excited about the interview, and
try to make conversation about web sites with the woman cutting my
hair.
(I'm
hoping to find out if she's ever heard of the sites I'd be writing
for). Our conversation goes like this.
ME: So, do you ever look at any web sites on the
internet? HAIRCUTTER: No.
"Like many baby boomers, the general-purpose computer was born
in the years following World War II, grew up in a restrictive
environment
and went
batty as a young adult."
Steven Levy has always been my favorite technology writer...
Eyargh!!! Firefox 2.0 is drawing little red lines under misspelled
words!
How can you stop this?
layout.spellcheckDefault
After typing about:config into the URL bar, double-click on the
value at
the end of the layoutspellcheckDefault line, and enter 0 in the pop-up
window.
I can proofread my own speling, thak you very much!
For years every time I'd try to copy something cool from Wikipedia, it
would mistake the keyboard shortcuts (Alt-E C)
for an attempt to edit the page myself.
Firefox 2.0 eliminates this behavior. Now typing Alt-E C will copy
the
text, just like it's supposed to.
I bought a Samson C01U microphone. It's ideal for podcasting. (You
can
tell, because on the microphone there's a sticker that says "Ideal for
podcasting.")
The instruction manual advises users to install the
driver-and-applet combination from Samson's web site - but I wish I
hadn't. This sets the volume levels so low that recording is
impossible.
And even worse, the driver
cannot then be easily uninstalled.
There's an article in the latest Business 2.0 called
"Blogging for
Dollars." It talks about the insane amounts of money that the top
blogs like
BoingBoing and Fark are earning.
The son of novelist Norman Mailer describes Generation Y as "the last
generation to begin discovering what the world was all about before we
got
hit by the technological revolution and the age of terror." After the
advent of the internet , "The world was suddenly faster and smaller
and
filled with near-infinite possibilities."
"It was also a great deal more confusing. After my generation is
gone, no
one will remember what the world was like before the technological
revolution. [This] makes me feel the responsibility to preserve what
I
can of the old world, and pass that on to the generation beginning to
come
up now."
It's an interesting
set-up for his book of interviews with his father.
"[T]he chance of history being rewritten to serve the powers that be
increases exponentially. What advice would you give us in trying to
hold
on to the positive elements of the twentieth century?"
Mailer senior replies that he can't even turn on a PC. He argues
that
handwriting is "perversely elegant" - and when it is then typed up,
"you
are able to read your stuff as if someone else wrote it." (Working on
a
computer, in contrast, conflates the writing and editing processes
into
one.)
Mailer's son says writing on a computer is too sterile, and mourns the
fact that his generation doesn't understand the pleasures of holding a
newspaper.
Jon Stewart mocks the chairman of the Senate commerce committee,
saying Ted Steven's
critique of internet neutrality sounds like a "crazy
old man in an airport bar at 3 a.m."
"But that's okay," Stewart ads sardonically. "You're just....the guy
in
charge of regulating it."
I enjoyed this summary
of debate over the telecommunications bill in the Senate Commerce
Committee.
"If we include net neutrality in the bill, we won't have 60 votes to
pass
the bill", [Ted Stevens] said, to which
John Kerry responded with something along the lines of "If you don't
put
net neutrality in the bill, you won't have 60 votes to pass the
bill either." Ouch.
A guy walks into the BBC for a job interview.
The BBC mistakes him for a pundit, and puts him
on
the air.
BBC:
Hello good morning to you.
GUY: Good morning.
BBC: Were you surprised by this verdict today?
GUY: I'm very surprised to see this verdict to come on me.
Because I was not
expecting that! When I came, they told me something else. And I'm
coming,
and you've got an interview so - a big surprise anyway.
BBC: A big surprise?
GUY: Exactly.
That's close enough to an actual answer. The BBC pushes ahead with
the
interview...
BBC: Yes, yes. Um, with regards to the cost that's
involved,
do you think
now more people will be downloading online?
GUY: Actually, if you can go everywhere, you're gonna see
lot of people downloading through internet and
web site, everything they want. But I think, uh, is, is much better
for
the
development and to import people what they want to get, an easy way
and so
faster
if they looking for.
It amazes me that the BBC doesn't miss a beat. They just keep
acting
like useful
information is being conveyed.
BBC: This does really seem to be the way the music
industry is
progressing now
that people want to go onto the web site and download music.
GUY: Exactly. You can go everywhere on
and you can check, you can go easy - is going to be easy way for
everyone
to get something through the internet.
It was all a mix up. His name was Guy Goma, and his accent apparently
confused the
receptionist into thinking he was Guy Kewney. The real Guy Kewney
records
his surprise
on his
weblog.
"[L]et's admit it: of all the things you can say about me, one word
that really has to be deleted from the list is this one: 'Black.'"
The poor Congolese graduate student told
a
British newspaper that
he's "still waiting for the result" of his interview. One insider
claims
that, truthfully, he's "a little upset that nobody asked him about his
data cleansing expertise."
"Is there anyone else you would like to impersonate?" a TV interviewer
asks him.
"Misunderstanding the question, Mr Goma replied: 'Yes, I really want
to
work at the BBC.'"
The Wall Street Journal ran an article about how the internet has
been portrayed in movies over the last two decades.
My favorite part of their online gallery of clips was this close-up of
Tom
Hanks' mailbox in You've Got Mail. Besides that fateful email
from
future
love Meg Ryan, there's also two
messages in Hanks' inbox which are clearly
spam!
When I tried to create a new account, their site gave me a blank web
page.
When I tried to contact them - the site gave me another blank web
page.
Since this is the site where I order prescriptions through my company
health plan, I was disturbed that it wasn't supporting Firefox. I
emailed
them that "Firefox development is considered a very important
cause for many people who work in the technology industry - so your
lack
of support is upsetting."
Here's their reply back.
PrecisionRX Website does not except FireFox , we apolizie for any
inconvinence please use Internet Explorer.
It wasn't playing the movie trailers at the Internet Movie Database.
RealPlayer left Firefox showing the green jigsaw puzzle piece over the
message
"Click here to download the plugin" - even though I'd already
installed
(and re-installed) the latest version (10.5).
A web search
found a MozillaZine article about
embedded media and problems with poorly-coded web pages. It gave
me
the idea of un-installing RealPlayer altogether, and instead using
Real
Alternative.
Steven Levy wrote Hackers and Insanely Great - two of
the
best books about the early days of the internet.
He just co-wrote a
great
article for Newsweek, arguing excitedly that the web "has
finally matured to the point
where it can fulfill some of the outlandish promises that we heard in
the '90s."
Levy finds different ways to explain
the positive effects of "Web 2.0" applications,
calling it a "live web"
that takes advantage of the large number of connected
web surfers. The people he talks to cite "the wisdom of crowds" and
call Flickr "the eyes of the world."
"The smartest guy in the room is everybody," Levy writes.
"What makes the Web alive is, quite simply, us. "
I didn't know Craig's List was the 7th-largest site in the world.
Via Waxy
"And here I thought that traffic congestion was my biggest problem,"
Steve
posted wrly.
"I can hear you," he rallied the citizens of
Stefangrad
through a bull horn. "The whole world can hear you! And pretty soon
the people who attacked this sports stadium are going to...."
Er, okay, that part didn't happen.
Instead, Steve watched
in horror as the citizenry recoiled from the staggering
reconstruction
costs.
"Soon, the
city's population abandoned Stefangrad, taking it from a city of
45,000 down to 20,000..." The tax base evaporated,
drastically cutting the
money needed for road maintenance, fire departments, and police.
"Crime
became rampant and even more of the good citizens migrated out."
As bridges crumbled and railways collapsed,
Steve looked at his namesake - a lawless, ruined city. He must
have felt a moment of sad, stunned silence.
"Stefangrad now stands a ghost town, a shell of its former self."
A 20-year-old living in Downey, California raked in nearly $60,000 in
payments from adware
firms - for surreptitiously
installing their products into unsuspecting
computers.
At one time he'd commanded an army of over 100,000 "bots" -
computers he'd compromised and could command to install the
software. He'd also rent them out for denial-of-service attacks.
By July of 2004, he'd created an IRC channel called "botz4sale -
making a $400 sale to a woman named "circa", selling a worm to
"KiD"...
He sold 8,500 bots to zxpL for denial-of-service attacks against King
Pao Electronic Co., Ltd. in Tapei and Sanyo Electric Software Co, in
Osaka, Japan. He warned client "o_2riginal" to filter out .mil and
.gov
domains, then
sold another 5,000 bots.
By August he had 100,000 bots, picking up 10,000 more per week, and he
was now
focussing on installing the adware. The paychecks kept coming.
His unindicted co-conspirator replied "i just hope this stuff
lasts so I don't have to get a job right away."
When told the army of bots now included some .gov and .mil domains,
he
replied "rofl."
His mistake was infecting
military computers at the China Lake Naval Air
Facility in California and the Defense Information System Agency in
Falls
Church Virgina.
("A combat support agency" offering network solutions for
"the President, Vice President, the Secretary of Defense and various
other DOD components.") The United States attorney did not appear
amused
when she
wrote in his
indictment that "On or about January 9, 2005, Ancheta caused
a computer on the computer
network of the Defense Information Security Agency to attempt to
connect
to #syzt3m#, an IRC channel he controlled..."
Yes, it was all illegal. Yes, he's facing time in prison. Yes, he
had to
forfeit the $60,000.
(And his BMW, and his three computers)
I got that dreaded message when I tried viewing this page's RSS feed in
the
new Firefox 1.5. The syntax in my XML had a bug which slipped past
earlier versions of Firefox - but not version 1.5.
I finally figured out what the problem was. My file started with
these
two lines...
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<rss version="2.0">
Firefox wanted the complete version of the RSS version identifier.
A-way back in 1997, AOL visited shopping malls, state fairs and
baseball
games with a custom-painted 18 wheeler. Their presenters were
instructed
to answer the question: "Will the internet kill AOL?" by
answering...
"AOL is the internet. And a whole lot more."
In a conference call, Steve Case repeated the
claim, then added "A lot
of this is a semantics argument that will get clarified over time."
Today we find a
mind-boggling
essay by Robert Cringeley about Google's plans for a recent
purchase
of fiber optic
cable.
...in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk,
is a shipping
container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping
container is a prototype data center...3.5 petabytes of disk
storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig."
Placing Google data center's at the internet's 300 peering points
would
create a parallel Google internet, Cringley notes - and one that's
faster
and cheaper. Even at $1
million apiece, "That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the
Internet."
A-way back in 1997, AOL visited shopping malls, state fairs and baseball
games with a custom-painted 18 wheeler. Their presenters were instructed
to answer the question: "Will the internet kill
AOL?"
by answering...
"AOL is the internet. And a whole lot more."
In a conference call, Steve Case repeated the
claim, then added "A lot
of this is a semantics argument that will get clarified over time."
Today we find a
mind-boggling
essay by Robert Cringeley about Google's plans for a recent purchase
of fiber optic
cable.
...in a secret area off-limits even to regular GoogleFolk, is a shipping
container. But it isn't just any shipping container. This shipping
container is a prototype data center...3.5 petabytes of disk
storage that can be dropped-off overnight by a tractor-trailer rig."
Placing Google data center's at the internet's 300 peering points would
create a parallel Google internet, Cringley notes - and one that's faster
and cheaper. Even at $1
million apiece, "That's $300 million to essentially co-opt the
Internet."
On Tuesday, Blogger announced they'd be down for two hours on Saturday,
starting at noon.
But when Saturday rolled around, Blogger found they were also having
database trouble, which
unfortunately happened 90 minutes before their
scheduled outage.
Maybe this explains something Wired Newsnoticed
in April.
"...enter 'Blogger sucks' in Google and you get 720,000 results."
Ironically, Blogger is owned by Google.
"It can make for some pretty ugly reading," the article
continues. "Imagine what they might say
if they actually paid for the service?"
I actually paid to have Blogger remove their ads from my blogs.
Eventually I got so frustrated with their outages that I moved
all my blogs here.
I just watched the March, 2001 pilot episode for the short-lived
X-Files spin-off, The
Lone Gunmen. And in an eerie
coincidence, it offered a conspiracy theory for the World
Trade Center attacks
six months before they actually happened.
Byers (the geek with the beard) discovers that his father faked his own
death because he'd uncovered the plot. Byers confronts him about it...
BYERS: We know it's a war game scenario - that it has to do with
airline counter-terrorism.
Why is it important enough to kill for?
FATHER:
Because it's no longer a game.
BYERS: If some terrorist group wants to act out this scenario, why
target you for assassination?
FATHER: It depends on who your terrorists are.
BYERS: The men who conceived of it in the first place! You're
saying our goverment plans to
commit a terrorist act against a domestic airline...
FATHER: There you go, indicting the entire government as usual.
It's a faction. A small faction.
BYERS: For what possible gain?
FATHER: The cold war's over, John. But with no clear enemy to
stockpile against, the arms market's flat. But bring down
a fully-loaded 727 into the middle of New York City and you'll find a
dozen
tin-pot dictators all over the world just clamoring to take responsibility
and begging to be smart bombed.
BYERS: I can't believe it. This is about increasing arms sales!
When?
FATHER: Tonight.
BYERS: How are you going to stop them? Why don't you tell the world
this? Go to the press!
FATHER: You think I'd still be drawing breath 30 minutes after I
made that call. The press?
Who's gonna run this story?
BYERS: We would.
The targetted flight leaves from Boston... (Click
here to read more from the episode.)
The actor who played Byers on The Lone Gunmen later called the
coincidence "A strange,
awful confluence of pulp culture and reality."
After hearing the news on 9/11, "I experienced an eerie terror, as if
I had seen the future, and not understood it until it was too late."
So today I went and saw Doom - the Movie - with a geek named Mr.
Neutron.
(Who'd warned me, "I enjoy crappy movies.")
Random thoughts...
I have to applaud the movie for switching to the videogame's first-person
point of view before the climactic showdown between Karl Urban and the
Rock.*
Mr. Neutron pointed out the geek significance of the name for the
mad scientist stranded on the Mars research station -- Dr. Carmack.
(Also the name of the Id
programmer who created Doom.)
Among the
promotionalclips
for the movie is one titled, simply, "Monkey."
Blam! Blam! Blam!
Blam! Blam! "What was that?" "A monkey."
Like Roger
Ebert, I enjoyed how the
Universal logo morphed into the planet Mars. Although for Ebert, that
just ended up being a disappointment.
"I'm a science fiction fan
from
way
back. I go to
Mars, I expect to see
it. Watching 'Doom' is like visiting Vegas and never leaving your hotel
room."
* In a very un-Doom-like moment, they
eventually put down their weapons and just start punching each other.
Bio-Force Gun? Who among us thought that "BFG" stood for "Bio-Force
Gun"?
I like how Andy Baio
handled
this question in his site's FAQ. He
co-founded Upcoming.org, which was recently acquired by Yahoo.
You guys are big corporate sellouts!
That's not really a question.
Fine... You guys are big corporate sellouts?
If getting paid for doing what you love is selling out, guilty as charged.
But know that nothing has changed our ideals, and we won't compromise
ourselves because we're working at a large company. We've always been
focused on making something useful and used, and we think that working
with Yahoo! will make that a zillion times easier.
Also cool: Gordon Luk, another co-founder. I met him last night at a
party
for Andy.
Something Awful needs to move its servers out of New Orleans and into a
permanent hosting facility in the Kansas City, Missouri area ASAP! If you
know of any professional colocation facilities around KC, please email
me... We need a 100 Mbit connection, a full cabinet, 40
amps of power in an actual managed data center with several peers...
our
systems administrator and resident coder, survived the hurricane, but his
parents had their house and business completely destroyed. They are
staying in a hotel right now, far north, staffed by the Red Cross. I've
been trying to communicate with Ken, but there's hardly any cellphone
coverage in the area, much less Internet connectivity
The cable TV program Attack of the Show! interviewed a writer from
Something Awful.com.
But the site's creator gave him specific instructions
on how to sabotage the interview...
The show's perky host had no idea what he was walking into when the final
interview went down.
Suddenly his guest was describing the site's $80-a-month fees,
claiming the site once illegally sold prescription drugs over the
internet, and that
now "It's pretty transparent that it's just basically a cult."
(Transcript here.)
ATTACK OF THE SHOW: What is Something Awful all about?
But the best part was when they conned the show's host into mis-stating
the URL.
("It's actually Something is Awful . com").
And then at that
URL,
they
erected a dummy site that matches that description.
It touts their $80-a-year forums, has lame advertising,
and automatically plays bizarre ad sounds, over and over again.
"I resolve to freeze the weasel."
"do it naked!"
"i want a sandwich!"
The Supreme Court ruled Monday, June 27, that cable companies do not have
to share their high-speed lines with rival Internet service providers, a
decision that will make it more difficult for smaller ISPs and other
independent broadband companies to compete in the high-speed Internet
market.
"Over time many ISPs will likely go bankrupt," said Michael Salsbury, a
partner at Chadbourne & Parke LLP in Washington. "If you can't share the
high-speed DSL phone service and can't use the cable system, all you have
got left is dial-up, which is a loser in today's broadband world."
1.They are all my computers; I am only letting you borrow them. People
constantly laugh at me when I say this, with no idea that I am
absolutely serious. I have been given the responsibility of every
computer in the office; they are all under my auspices, bar none.
If I
am gracious enough to give you access to one of my computers, then be
nice to it. Talk to it kindly, call it a nice computer, and
occasionally pat the monitor. Your computer and your IT guy will thank
you for it.
"...if Google has released a product so damaging that it requires a
massive
edit of the entire internet, maybe it shouldn't be [the webmaster's]
problem, it should be Google's."
I love reading the "Studio
Briefing" at IMDB.com. It's the Internet Movie
Database's daily round-up of movie and TV news.
It took me a while to realize that it had its own "
smart keyword" in
Firefox. Instead of typing in its URL - which I always forget - I can
just type imdb studio briefing into Firefox's address bar.
Firefox knows where to go...
UPDATE: Actually, you can get Firefox to take you there with the secret
code-word:
O'Reilly's technical books are so thorough and precise.
I laughed out loud at the last line from a section about Function Literals
in JavaScript - the Definitive Guide.
"There is one other way to define a function: you can pass the argument
list and the body of the function as strings to the Function()
constructor. For example:
var square=new Function("x", "return
x*x;");
"Defining a function in this way is not often useful."
We've reached a milestone. Now there's Podcast PR....
Paris Hilton
starts a podcast on April 29 - specifically to
promote the release of
horror film House of Wax. (In which Hilton co-stars.)
The podcast will contain "her personally recorded accounts of the
hottest
events leading up to the May 6 release of House of Wax," and it'll
be
called "The Paris Hilton Podcast - Countdown to House of Wax." (Catchy
name...)
Paris "is the first performer to host her own Podcast in association with
the release of a movie," reads a gushy news article, "and the custom
House of Wax Podcatcher is the first custom movie Podcast
client."
Just what the world needs...
Ironically, this movie PR is described in an article in which the word
"movie" is itself an ad - an "intellitxt" link to a promo for Blockbuster.
There's an old geek saying: "Read the F*@king Manual."
Today I stumbled across Google's Firefox home page, and the random
tip it displayed was "Know your [keyboard] shortcuts."
Eh, why not. I
checked out the list of
shortcuts at Mozilla.org - and I learned so much...
Typing / brings up the "find in this page" window. But...
' brings it up for searching only the names of links
Cntrl-G will "find again"; and Cntrl-G-shift will do that find-again
search backwards.
F7 turns on "caret browsing". A cursor appears on the web page
when you click in it, allowing you to "arrow key" your way through its
text. Very handy if you hate using your mouse to copy-and-paste.
And
cntrl-A will select all the text on a page...
F6 will switch frames.
Holding down the tab key will cycle through each link - and
cntrl-Enter will open them.
Cntrl-tab will cycle through the open browser tabs. (I've been using
Cntrl-PgUp.) And Cntrl-W will close an open tab. (I've been reaching for
the mouse!)
I've never seen six punctuation marks next to each other. Until now.
"The Book of Javascript" explains (in Chapter 9) how to activate a command
after a timer has finished counting down. Their example is an alert
function,
displaying a (punctuated) sentence. It's in single quotes (because it's a
text string),
and parentheses (because it's an alert!)
To indicate the command has ended, after that closing parenthesis
there's a semi-colon.
And to isolate that command as a parameter, it appears in quotation marks.
Finally, it's the first of
two parameters, so before the second one there's: a comma.
Six punctuation marks - all different, all next to each other.
setTimeout("alert('You have been on this page for 3 seconds!');",
3000);
So I've got a vinyl record album that's over 40 years old.
On the back of the album cover below the liner notes, there's a message
touting RCA's "DynaGroove"
technology and its
effect on
surface noise and sound clarity.
"To solve these old and obstinate
problems in disc recording, highly ingenious computers - 'electronic
brains' - have been introduced to audio for the first time!"
I just type the magic science word
backintime before
the URL
- and
lost web pages resurrect themselves from the murky past!
I engineered this scientific miracle simply by
right-clicking the text area next to archive.org's "Take me back"
button. Firefox prompts me to add a keyword - and from now on,
whenever I input that keyword before a URL, Firefox will
know to whisk me to the web page that results when that URL is run through
Archive.org's search box!
It's not well-publicized, but Firefox allows you to
set up a keyword for any text-area form.
"A new ad format - with a twist" ?! Be-still my heart!!!!
Google sent everyone involved in their "AdSense" program an email
touting a new format for the ads you'd install on your web pages.
Instead of a single four-line ad, it's four single-line TOPICS -
each of which is a URL that takes you to a web page about that topic.
(And, of course - covered with Google ads.)
Oh, and now your checks from Google can be delivered to you in another
currency besides U.S. dollars. (AdSense services 43 different countries!)
And, you can set up direct-depositing of those checks!
Of course, so far Google hasn't paid me anything. (I'm below their
"smallest allowable check size" of $10.00 by - er, quite a bit.)
Amazon's A9 search engine
can now be easily re-configured to displays results
from a variety of
sources -
like the web, books, the yellow pages, a database of
images, or the Internet Movie Database.
But there's more. They're pioneering "Open Search
Results" - their search results made
available for easy incorporation into other sites.
To show that it's a two-way street,
A9 is offering users the ability to incorporate into their A9
results the search results
from other
sites. There's
Wikipedia, the CIA Search Engine, Russell Beattie's Weblog,
the New York bar search from HappyHourHotSpots.com...
That's one of two things I learned today. The other is that it's
hard to impress my friend Andy.
Andy: I was there when Jeff Bezos announced it.
Dland: Wow!
Andy: He accidentally rebooted his presentation laptop
Dland: Did he have to vamp throughout the re-boot process? Dland: "Okay, instead of the Windows logo I swapped in a bitmap of
my wife..."
Firefox has an Easter Egg which displays a photograph of William Shatner!
Just type the secret code-words "imdb William Shatner" into the address
bar - and Shatner's picture comes up!!! (Along with a biography...)
Actually, that's an example of
Smart
Keywords. Firefox has built-in support for searches on
the Internet Movie Database. (For any actor or movie title.) This
link shows you
what comes up if you go
into your address bar and type...
Firefox doesn't appear to be promoting this capability
- there's nothing in Firefox's
help document about Smart Keywords, for instance.
But wait, there's more. Thanks to Firefox's infinite configurability, you
can
add your own search keywords. Got a search engine you use alot?
Click in
its search window, and Firefox gives you the option to add your own
custom syntax to the address bar - your own codeword telling Firefox to
run any words after it through that same search engine.
It doesn't even have to be a search engine - Firefox gives you the same
option for any web-based form. I proved this by whipping up a quick web
page with a Form
called the "Pamela Anderson likes
you" page. Now, thanks
to
Firefox,
my browser supports the keyword Pam.
I think the IMDB keyword was installed just to give people
an example of how it works.
But - ohmigod! Firefox has an Easter Egg which displays a photograph
of
Mr T!
Just type the secret code-words "imdb Mr T" into the address
bar - and Mr. T's picture comes up!!!
"Microsoft Word is trying to get me fired!" complains my friend Andrew.
An important document has six pages, each with an appropriate header.
(Page 1 of 6, page 2 of 6...) But when Andrew prints it, Word 2000
instead substitutes bad headers. (Page 1 of 1. Page 2 of 2. Page 3 of
3. Page 4 of 4....)
"That's right. It isn't just you," a Wisconsin attorney
noted in
December. "This is a long-standing and still-existing bug in Word." He
goes on to link to Microsoft support pages and "service packs" which will
make your problems better (or worse!)
You'd expect better from a major piece of software.
I thought of this when I realized my Firefox browser didn't have a MIDI
player. I installed the latest version of QuickTime, but it's MIDI
playback
would skip halfway through the song. I don't know if this was QuickTime's
fault - Apple had
MIDI problems with earlier
versions, but Apple's page suggested I could just
tweak a few settings.
The original 2002 manifesto
announcing the mozilla/browser project and the principles behind it.
("The personal toolbar is the personal toolbar, not the whorebar.")
It was linked in a January 22 essay on Blake Ross's blog.
("People had plenty of obstacles to the web already - popup ads, spyware,
and that damn monkey who gets punched and keeps coming back for more....")
"It's fast, secure, open source - and super popular. The hot new browser
called Firefox is rocking the software world. (Watch your back, Bill
Gates.)"
Wired magazine's article about Firefox is finally
online. Their February 2005 article inspired me to read up on recent
browser history. Let's see if I got this right...
April, 2002 - Dave Hyatt notes
early development on a separate Mozilla-for-Macs browser, and urges a
second separate browser free of extraneous applications (and
developers) called mozilla/browser. (Later: Firefox)
January, 2003. Apple releases a new browser, Safari - and
instead of
using Mozilla code, they base it on the sleek Konquerer browser.
(Developers like Mike Shaver concede
"We've all known forever that
[Mozilla's] Gecko missed its
'small-and-lean' target by an area code...")
Geeks wonder if this
means
the
end
for development of the Mozilla-for-Macs
browser. (Answer: no.)
It's all happening in plain sight. You can watch the Firefox revolution
in real-time...
I was reading the actual
source code
for Firefox tonight. ("Proper fix is to just check
whether focus is in the urlbar. However, focus with the autocomplete
widget is all
hacky and broken and there's no way to do that right now. So this just
patches it to ensure that alt+enter works when focus
is on a link....")
There's even chat channels on IRC -
#firefox and #spreadfirefox.
One by one, people came in with their questions, and a helpful Firefox
booster answered every one of them.
It was like watching Firefox adoption in real-time....
November 9 - Firefox released
December 10 - 10 million
January 24 - 20 million
February 16 - 25 million
?????? -
Their mission? Collect the URLs of web sites that use buggy code which
can only be displayed by non-standards-compliant browsers. (Like Internet
Explorer.)
"This site will help many web developers and others learn
correct CSS and HTML standards so that the web will become a resource
viewable by anyone."
I may be the last geek to discover there's an undocumented in-joke
in Mozilla browsers. Typing about:mozilla into the
address bar pulls up a quote from the Book of
Mozilla.
The quotes offer fragments from a Revelations-like book
documenting the struggle between good and evil...browsers.
Mozilla - a Godzilla-like lizard symbolizing Netscape - is
obliquely referred to as "the beast."
"And the beast shall come forth surrounded by a roiling cloud of
vengeance. The house of the unbelievers shall be razed and they shall be
scorched to the earth. Their tags shall blink until the end of days."
That was the quote from 1995 until August of 2002 - Netscape 1.1 through
Netscape 4.8. But in 2000 a new quote started appearing
in Netscape 6.0, the first Netscape browser to use computer code
contributed by the Open Source community of developers.
"And the beast shall be made legion. Its numbers shall be increased a
thousand thousand fold. The din of a million keyboards like unto a great
storm shall cover the earth, and the followers of Mammon shall tremble."
Alas, rival Internet Explorer grew to more than 90% of the browser market,
and hope for a new browser lay with open source project's like Mozilla
Firefox. (Originally named "Phoenix" and "Firebird".)
And so at last the beast fell and the unbelievers rejoiced. But all was
not lost, for from the ash rose a great bird. The bird gazed down upon the
unbelievers and cast fire and thunder upon them. For the beast had been
reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in
horror.
The next version of the Firefox browser has been code-named "Deer Park."
(Lead engineer Ben Goodger thought "it sounded nice"
after passing a sign on the Long Island railroad.)
But it was also the name for a 1955 novel by Norman Mailer "which has
something new to say about Hollywood," according to the lurid paperback
cover. "Love, sin and sex."
It drew its title from a notorious
18th-century pleasure grove
constructed by King Louis XV, described in the book's epigram by a
passage from Mouffle D'Angerville.
...the Deer Park, that gorge of innocence and virtue in
which were engulfed so many victims who when they returned to society
brought with them depravity, debauchery and all the vices they naturally
acquired from the infamous officials of such a place.
Apart from the evil which this dreadful place did to the morals of the
people, it is horrible to calculate the immense sums of money it cost
the state. Indeed who can reckon the expense of that band of pimps and
madames who were constantly searching all the corners of the kingdom to
discover the objects of their investigation; the costs of conveying the
girls to their destination; of polishing them, dresing them, perfuming
them, and furnishing them with all the means of seduction that art could
provide. To this must be added the gratuities presented to those who
were not successful in arousing the jaded passions of the sultan but had
nonetheless to be paid for their submission, for their discretion, and
still more for their being eventually despised.
So I'm really enjoying this blog
by
Ross Blake, Firefox uber-developer.
For instance, I didn't know "Ask Jeeves" was assimilating
Bloglines. I've always liked
Bloglines' web-based feed reader - but wondered what synergy Jeeves could
be going after. The theory (on the site Blake links to) is that Jeeves is
going after their archives of
web-log
feeds...
There's some other interesting thoughts in the discussion...
* "I remember when MS got their hands on Hotmail. Let's hope things stay
non-evil at Bloglines..."
* Oh great -- now there's a yet another source for Ask Jeeves' patented
"nonsense answers to straight-forward questions" search technology.
Misdirected traffic -- my favourite!
Apparently Bloglines new "partner" caught Ross Blake by surprise too.
"Does anyone actually still use Ask Jeeves?
When the most glowing praise they can find to stick on the front page is
"There's a lot to like about the new Ask Jeeves" from October, you have to
ask yourself..."
The news comes from Napsterization.org, a site dedicated to
understanding "the idea of napsterization: the disintermediation by new
technologies and digital
media of old economy, incumbent institutions and analog frameworks."
Ironically, I've started watching my RSS feeds using...Firefox's "Live
Bookmarks".
