as days pass by, by Stuart Langridge

The US Patent Office has upheld the Eolas patent on browser plugins. This is only the latest stage in what will be a long, drawn-out process, and it’s being appealed to the Supreme Court, so it might all change again. From my perspective, though, it’s a good thing. “Plugins” in browsers are bad. Java applets, embedded movies, all bad. I never watch movies embedded in the browser; I get the URL and load it into a proper movie player. I don’t have the Java applet plugin installed. None of this affects my use of the web. The web is, true enough, a marvellous delivery system for all kinds of interesting multimedia content. The browser, though, is not. Browser plugins have non-standard interfaces, are confusing, and break a lot. The only plugin that I use even remotely often is Flash, and I wouldn’t miss it if it went away. I say support Eolas, and let’s keep the web HTML.
That is, assuming that the patent doesn’t cover things like images or JavaScript in web pages. If it does then I’ll be less supportive…

Did you know that Mozilla doesn’t fire the scroll event when you scroll a page with the mousewheel? Pretty annoying, that. However, I have just discovered that it does fire the DOMMouseScroll event. So, if you’re annoyed that using the mouse wheel doesn’t give you a scroll event, trap the DOMMouseScroll event instead, with window.addEventListener('DOMMouseScroll', scroll_function, false). Quite why this inconsistency exists escapes me a bit, but now there’s a solution.

If I override a property in Moz with __defineSetter__, can I get at
the original property inside my setter function? Say I wanted to add
something to a page so that every time someone tried to set
anyelement.style.display, it alerted “hello” and then set the value
they specified. I could do

function setterfn(newstyle) {
 alert('hello');
 this.display = newstyle;
}

CSSStyleDeclaration.prototype.__defineSetter('display',setterfn);

Of course, that won’t work, because “this.display” in setterfn calls
the setterfn, because it’s trying to set “display” on a style object!
Infinite loop.

I’m quite happy to do this another way, if setters aren’t the
approach. Just don’t suggest Object.watch(), because it’s totally and
utterly unreliable on DOM objects and doesn’t fire half the time. The
solution can be (and I am expecting it to be) Moz only, but it has to
be a proper released version of Moz and not Deer Park.

I’ve been trying to do this for two days and it’s doing my head in. :-)

(originally a mail for a couple of people, but it occurred to me that I have a weblog for this sort of thing)

And, lo, everything changes and nothing changes. I’m now using WordPress, and thanks to the people in #wordpress on irc.freenode.org for the help. Sorry, feed readers, that the feed got republished; I don’t know how to avoid that. Let me know if anything changes, and particularly if any URLs have broken.

Got quite a few projects on the go, although they are on a bit of a temporary hiatus while I finish the next book. (DOM fans, it’s not a DOM book; it’s about setting up a LAMP server.) None of these projects have yet come to fruition, but they will do and will be cool. The latest one I’ve come up with I am really excited about, and I should have something runnable in the next few days for people to play with.

In beer news, last night I drank a lot of beer, oh yes. It was the Annual Wolves LUG big beer drinking night, because it’s nearly Jono’s birthday, and it’s just worked out that that night is the big beer night. Actually, it wasn’t a massive beer blast; instead, we ate a curry, drank a lot of Carling, and watched Ron do an interesting talk on Asterisk and Voice-over-IP. I’m still of the opinion that using VoIP right now is a bit like using the X Window System was five years ago; you have to configure stuff and know loads of acronyms. Just like how setting up X meant you had to know about ColorDepth and Visuals and Modelines and the refresh rate of your monitor and what chipset your graphics card was, until Klaus Knopper and Red Hat and lots of other people made the damned computer work it out for you like it’s supposed to. Ron demonstrated some hardware SIP phones, which look cool, and a lot more successful than trying to use softphones like KPhone or LinPhone. Personally, I think shtoom has real potential as a softphone for someone hacking on it and improving usability (I’d like to do this, because it’s in Python and I can hack it), because the UI for a softphone should be a window with one textbox that lets you enter a phone number and that’s all. However, shtoom’s underlying VoIP implementation isn’t quite good enough yet (and the shtoom guys acknowledge this, and they’re working hard with it).

And yes, that’s one more project on my list that I’m not going to get to for a while. I need to do some more contributing to free software projects, I think. Gotta rebuild this website first, though. And finish the book. And, y‘know, get thinner too. Too much to do. Anyway, where was I? Ah, yes, usability. Havoc made me laugh with his note on the Tor design contest. You see, Tor is a thing that anonymises your internet connection (it makes your connection bounce through a load of servers before getting to the destination, so people can’t tell it’s you connecting). It’s a bit of a bark to set up, though, so the Tor people have announced a UI design competition to build a GUI to configure and manage Tor while it’s running. Havoc thought exactly the same thing I did: the “GUI” for Tor should have one big tickbox on it which says “Enable anonymous internet connection” and that’s all. If you have to show people which servers your connection goes through or have them configure that or even care about it then you’re doing it wrong, I think.
I need to install my own web-based RSS aggregator. I’m tired of Bloglines being down and slow and not telling me how many of the “unread” messages it indicates next to each weblog name are actually “Keep New” messages. Anyone got any suggestions? I’m trying to avoid the urge to write one—q.v. big list of projects above.

We’ve sorted the backups! Backups on angel now work, thanks to Jono and I fixing the damned things for the last four hours. Hooray.
This post is only called “in metal we unite” because that should be the name of a metal song. Or a band. Or it should be written on a t-shirt or something. And I want to prove that I thought of it before Jono did :)
Oh, and if you want to know what it is to be united in true metal, you need to heed the words of the Manowarrior. Hail the Manowarrior! His word is the lifeblood of metal. Yes it is. Mock not, or you are no true brother of metal. Really. Hail and Kill!

We’ve been trying for ages, in the Linux world, to get away from the idea that you have to open up a command line to do anything complicated. Gnome and KDE have been making big strides toward this goal (Mac people may smile happily because they had this nailed 20 years ago*). And now what do we see? In the Windows Vista Self-Guided Tour over in Microsoft Technet, the first section of the tour begins:

1. Log on as administrator and start a command prompt by clicking Start, Run, and then typing command.
2. Create a new user account named Toby by typing Net user Toby /add. The account will be created with a blank password.

Amazing.

* Although not any more, since as has been said, what’s the most powerful improvement Apple was able to make? They finally put a god damned shell back in. Then again, that was said by Jamie ‘now I use a Mac anyway’ Zawinski, so I don’t know what to think now.

I did a brief talk last night on the semantic web at our LUG. Mainly slagging it off, to be honest with you, because I don’t think it’ll work (and I cribbed a lot of excellent discussion on this point from Clay Shirky and Cory Doctorow and Mark Pilgrim and others). The “slides of the talk, ‘The Semantic Web: what (is it) and why (should you care)”:http://www.kryogenix.org/code/the-semantic-web/the-semantic-web.html can be read online. They’re pretty sparse, though; there are no notes, because I did it off the top of my head. Sorry about that.

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