This is as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

After Rob, after Jack, after slateford.org, we present: my remix of FAC2. Source available, for what it’s worth.

Matt has decided that he would like to do a bit of coding, and he’s gone for Python (which I suspect was a little, although not wholly, influenced by me going on about how easy it is). I asked him to keep a journal of his thoughts on what it’s like and the process, because I think it’ll be an invaluable guide to how user-friendly Python really is to people just picking up coding, and how suitable the “introductory” documentation really is. Stay in touch with Matt’s thoughts for more.

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“for the most part, comments suck. And here’s why – the audience is stupid. But actually, it’s not their fault (well, not completely).”

Since he linked to my pet the audience are stupid thread, I feel I ought to respond. :)
I’d be profoundly shocked if anyone posting to my thread cared about my existence, or even knew about it. Clearly they’ve missed the point of the whole thing, since the whole point of the post I originally made was to slate the sort of people who are posting their email addresses and pleas to be famous! (The irony of this is not lost on me; it’s one of the main reasons I keep the thread open.) Matthew Thomas has written about how humans have frequently demonstrated that they will try to converse even in areas where discussions are not wanted, and this is a prime example; I want to encourage conversations in my comment threads, but I can’t stop conversations drifting off-topic without using the blunt tool of comment deletion. Site creators can’t help that either; it’s very, very difficult to apply social pressures through ASCII (one reason why flames are so common on the net), and without social pressure on people to keep a comment thread reasonable and appropriate, all site owners can do is remove individual comments or posters’ commenting privileges.
Kaswell goes on to bemoan the essential emptiness of weblogging: “that’s what I think a lot of the web sites (this site included) have become – nothing but people shouting out to no one in particular“. As he says, this isn’t a new idea. Weblogs might be tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, as old Bill S. himself might have told us, but I think not. The key words in Kaswell’s description are no one in particular. The writing I do here (with the occasional exception) isn’t written for consumption by one person, or even any specific group of people. In fact, I’d say that the person I write for most is the Googlebot. (Someone else wrote about doing this recently, but I couldn’t find the post. I wanted to search my browser history, but I need something to do that, and someone wrote about that too, and I can’t remember who that was either. Bah.)
Maybe we’re shouting empty rhetoric into the wind. Maybe no-one is listening. Maybe those that come to post don’t come to listen. Then again, so what? People who need to feel a real value on what they do don’t use computers anyway, they make clay pots and sell them.

I’d like to be able to open a window without browser chrome from the Python webbrowser module. After a bit of poking around, it seems to be possible. This will only work with Mozilla, and it might only work on Linux (although it should be OK on Windows). The complexity in doing it is that you can’t specify a window size or configuration when calling webbrowser.open(). However, JavaScript can: the window.open() function can specify no-chrome, window sizes, the lot. But you can’t just call webbrowser.open('javascript:window.open("...")'), because then you’ll have two windows; the one that ran the JS and the one the JS opened. JS can’t close the one that ran the JS, because it wasn’t opened by JS. The solution? Chrome windows:

import webbrowser
moz = webbrowser.get('mozilla')
moz.open('javascript:void(window.open("http://www.kryogenix.org","winname","chrome"))')

It should be possible to make this work for IE as well, because IE allows a child window to close its parent, even if the parent wasn’t opened by JS. However, I don’t need that at the moment; if I ever release this app that I’m using this for (it’s an example of Browser as Desktop UI) then I’ll make it cross-browser.

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Assembly, the big demoscene yearly event and awards, had its 2004 demo party recently, and they have a browser demo competition. Demos are remarkable because they push the graphics capabilities of the medium to their limit to get speed, and at Assembly there is now a browser demo section! Grab the entrants from scene.org. (via Andy Baio)

I’ve just upgraded to Linux kernel 2.6.8, and my Zaurus works again. Clearly the usbnet module was broken in 2.6.5. Upgrading fixes it. Yay!

It’s now been five months since Havoc first wrote abuot whether the open-source desktop should stick with C or move to Mono, Java, Python, or something else. Every point he brought up in that initial essay on the reasons why that discussion needs to take place was very valid. ” Every month without a coherent open source managed runtime answer – something we can start using across the board in the major projects – risks losing developer mindshare and the open Internet to a de facto Microsoft lock-in.” Has any progress been made? Mono seems to be making small inroads into various areas, especially (unsurprisingly) with Novell’s hackers (f-spot, dashboard, beagle), but Havoc’s points about the community’s feelings for Mono (“Cloning .NET on Linux may speed up adoption of Microsoft’s technology, handing them the Internet on a silver platter. Speeding up the competition’s success is not the way to catch up with them. Fear of this is widespread.“) are also well-taken.
Has any progress been made beyond the initial flurry of discussion that came about after Havoc’s post?

I want my appointments calendar to be available in lots of places. I have a desktop computer, an Ericsson T68 phone, and a Sharp Zaurus. I’d like to have my appointments calendar in a number of places: on my desktop, accessible to gdeskcal, on my Zaurus in the Zaurus calendar application, or in a different Zaurus calendar application if a different one would be easier, and also somewhere on the web so that other people can subscribe to it and see if I’m busy. The phone can synchronise with an online WAP SyncML server. The Zaurus should theoretically be able to sync with my desktop (although I can’t seem to get this to work; the usbnet module loads on hotplug but no usb0 is created). Does anyone have any suggestions? I could, for example, use gdeskcal to manage my appointments, publish them to the web, SyncML them from the web to the phone, and then from the phone to the Zaurus via Bluetooth. Alternatively, I could fix the Zaurus sync, sync the Zaurus and gdeskcal together, and then cron a job that publishes the calendar to the web. i don’t know what the best approach is, nor which tools to use. Suggestions are very welcome.

I can’t imagine anyone who reads adpb doesn’t know about this, but:

More to the point, even if you do know about it, a lot of people that you know do not. I sold my electrician on Firefox and Thunderbird this weekend; he was in my study turning off the electricity, and after noticing that I have one or two computers, asked how he could “stop getting all this junk email“. I explained that Thunderbird catches spam emails, and that it is free, and he was highly excited. When i asked if he had problems with pop-up windows and recommended Firefox because it stops that and is more secure, his eyes nearly fell out of his head. I didn’t even have to try hard. Ordinary people out there are sick and tired of Outlook and Internet Explorer making their lives a misery. Windows XP SP2 might well include a popup blocker, but most people aren’t running that: now_ is the time to get people switched, before Microsoft’s continuing realisation that they’re losing business leads them to wake up more than they already have and we lose our opportunity. Get out there and evangelise today!

Stone me, this has been a long week.

I’ve been decorating. Well, I’ve been building IKEA furniture and paying other guys to add new sockets and put up wallpaper and stuff.

It’s very tiring. Today I have built five wardrobes. The tips of my fingers are throbbing with all the damned screws I’ve been doing up. If I never see another exploded diagram of a drawer with arrows showing you where to put the bits of dowling it will be too soon.

Nonetheless, it’s cool. I have new wardrobes. And new carpet and wallpaper. And a tidier library. And no money again, but what the hell :)

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A big shout out to Ron, who saved my life. My computer’s power supply died last Monday. It is not good, not being able to properly read your mail or anything. He dropped round to say hello the other day, and I explained my predicament (ranting about how you can’t get a power supply from any real shop for less than about thirty quid) and he promptly offered me one he had lying around for free. So I now have a computer again, thank God.

Waaah! I wanted to go and couldn’t make it.

In my Gnome menu (on Debian unstable, Gnome 2.6) I’ve got “System Tools, Printers“, which runs foomatic-gui, which I can never get to work. I’ve just discovered “Desktop Preferences, System Tools, Printers” which is really nice! Why didn’t anyone tell me about this before? Why are there two System Tools sections? WTF isn’t the good one somewhere more obvious? Whose fault is this, Debian’s or Gnome’s? I don’t know where to file the bug.

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And no, I haven’t gone away or retired or anything, I’m just frantically busy. Coming soon (although I promised this last year) the write-up of the Men With Big Thrones tour! More detail about my book! A rant and plea for help about synchronising all my devices and calendars and notepads!