This has led to an explosion in financial instruments (translation: nearly but not quite scams). Because everyone who invented, bought and sold these things was trying to scam everyone else involved, it sort of worked and huge, huge piles of loot were made for the Nazgul, the maths PHDs and the pissed old boys who still held stock. Some of this cash even made it to coke dealers and strippers, but not, alas, the homeless. This is called trickle down economics, incidentally.

I learned more in fifteen minutes of Andy explanation this week than I did from a hundred hours of learned discourse on the news. Also, if more people read it then maybe we can shame him into carrying on.

I’d sorta-kinda been involved in the Linux community before 2000, when I moved to the Midlands, but my participation was rather sporadic. I was running Linux — had been since university in ‘96 — but I’d hardly ever managed to make it to a LUG meet or talk on mailing lists. When I came over here, to the armpit of the world that is the greater Birmingham area, I thought to myself: let’s give this LUG thing a try. The closest one to me, technically, is South Birmingham LUG, but then as now they’re pretty unresponsive (as I write this their website’s down, for example). Wolverhampton, a place I’d only ever heard about on the telly, was the next closest, and so along I went. Meets in pubs; there were only a few people there, and one of them was Jono. (Wave, those of you who were around back then! — fizz, pinkoi, Ranulph*, Jon Farmer, the elusive Sparkes.) For a while, he used to drive me back to Stourbridge after the meetings so I didn’t have to leave on the 10.30pm bus, before the pub closed.

When someone stole my Sharp Zaurus out of my hand in Wolverhampton, he was the one I called. Came and looked after me, too, despite me reeling somewhat.

At the first and last Wolves LUG meeting in my house (in Stourbridge, which is not Wolverhampton), we set up LugRadio. There’ve always been four people on the team, from day one right up until we ended the show this summer, but the two who were there at the beginning and the end were Jono and me. It’s taken us to America, around the UK, to conferences, into the ears of two million people*, and onto stages and off again. Was a wild ride. The feeling of walking out on stage and having hundreds of people cheer makes every drug you can think of slink away with its tail between its legs. We did that.

I remember going out for a Chinese meal, wives and girlfriends in tow, and the two of us being genuinely unable to stop laughing at the idea of someone with the name James Hilchin who told a lot of lies. Could not stop. One of those moments where your sides are hurting and your eyes are watering and you’re trying hard to breathe and you can’t get it together and it wasn’t even that funny. It’s moments like that that make the world go round. If it’s not happening to you then you don’t have good enough friends.

He’s got a Ctrl key from an old keyboard, and every now and again he’ll re-discover it in a drawer or under a plate of Chinese food or balanced on top of the tumble dryer, and he’ll turn to someone and hand them the key and say, “I think you need to take control.”

Now the next stage begins: Jono’s off to America. It’s pretty exciting, to be honest. I’m rather envious of him — not particularly of being in America per se: I want to be near my daughter, and, well, the Americans ship people off to Syria and waterboard them* — but being able to grasp the nettle with both hands. I grasped a nettle once when I was a kid and I couldn’t even clench a fist for two weeks. It seems to work for him, though.

Americans: you don’t know what’s gonna hit you.

When I split up with my wife I ended up living in his house for three months. Barely charged me any rent, either. On the other hand, have you tried living in a house without a fridge? It’s not as easy as it looks, especially if you drink a lot of tea and have to make it with frigging horrible powdered milk that floats in big lumps like the Titanic’s iceberg in your PG Tips. I could probably stand to not go through that again, given the choice.

George Bernard Shaw, unless it was Chesterton or someone like that, said that a man’s friends argue with him but leave him as he is. I’ve lost count of the number of people who think that Jono and I can’t stand one another because of the volume of the arguments. We’ll argue about anything. It’s really hugely enjoyable, although not everyone sees it that way. In fact, pretty much no-one sees it that way, which is probably one of the reasons I enjoy it so much. Not that mature, but, well, there it is.

There’s a certain thread of immaturity running through the whole of the last five years when Bacon and I have been together, I ought to note. In The League of Gentlemen (in the first episode, I think), there’s a scene (pretty famous scene, which is on YouTube like everything else) where a bewildered policeman stumbles into the local shop to search for a missing child. Tubbs, the proprietor, tells Edward (her husband) that “he’s looking for a boy”, and Edward responds with “Poofter, eh?” Since then, every time without exception either of us rings the other, which is pretty much every day, that’s the line we open with. I don’t even think he likes the show very much. We changed it at one point to “Poofter, B?”, but that wore out when I tried out “Poofter, ℵ” (that’s an aleph! First character of the Hebrew alphabet!) and then neither knew what the next letter was. I suppose this is what Wikipedia is for, but that’d spoil the fun, you know it would.

I’ve lost track of all the crises and trials and tribulations we’ve helped one another through.

To be honest, there’s probably more going on in the free software world in San Francisco than there is in the UK anyway. There’s certainly more going on in SF than in Wolverhampton. It all makes a tolerable amount of sense: a new chapter, still young and still have the opportunity to do it. I don’t think anyone lies there on their deathbed and says, well, I wish I’d seen less stuff and spent more time at the office. Jono’s repeatedly told me that San Francisco is the birthplace of thrash metal, like I could give two tugs of a dead dog’s dick. It’s the exuberance I like: he’s really excited about this, even though no-one he speaks to cares, because he’ll be in a place where his heroes walked.

If I have a hero, he’d be it, I think.

Fly well, mate.

It looks for a <link rel="up" href="..."> tag and uses it if there is one; if there isn’t, it chops the last part off the URL.

We’re starting to get somewhere with Enso now. A couple more problems to solve and then I think it’ll be ready for people to play with, at which point I’m going to do some writeups and a screencast and whatnot. The original Humanized page for the commercial proprietary version of Enso explains how it works; people who have seen noise about Ubiquity, Enso is the same thing (originally from the same team) but it’s better because it’s a desktop app rather than being limited to the web. I love it, lots.

I personally am just happy because Mark Shuttleworth came up and shook my hand after the talk. I am such a shameless fanboy. Sorry.

(I’ve corrected the error that I got called on while I was on stage. Er. Oops.)

Also, keep your eye on the LRL UK 2008 talks page; recorded video for each of the talks is being gradually added, one at a time, again thanks to Tony. There’s a few up now and more will come along as time goes on.

Actually, I’m pretty proud of it. Nice one, team.

'You may want to upgrade your browser (from IE6)', says Facebook

Two interesting things here: first, they recommend that you try another browser, and give a list of Firefox, Safari, and Flock as well as “upgrade to Internet Explorer 7″. Flock? I bet the Opera people are a bit hacked off about that.

Second: there have been a few cases so far of people dropping support for IE6 (MobileMe, not that that really counts because all its users are Mac people, and 37 Signals, ditto), but nothing remotely as high-profile as Facebook. This is the boot starting to descend, I think. IE6 is already the bugbear of the industry (and has been for some time: I said “Internet Explorer is the new Netscape 4” in 2005 and I was hardly the first!); how long before we see support for it drop to Netscape 4 levels of “you get the unenhanced non-JavaScript version”?

I’d like to see more people publish browser stats for their websites. Yes, they’re unreliable, yes people change their user agent, blah blah blah. They’ll give us an indication, though; how many people out there are using IE6? Google Analytics tells me that 36% of my visitors are using IE, and 37% of those are using IE6, which means that IE6 visitors to my site are down to under 15%. (If you’re not using Analytics, analog -G -A +a +B <apache logfile> will give you a browser list, as will many other things.) Other people will doubtless differ, and I’d be thoroughly interested in seeing more of these percentages from sites with a different user-base to mine. If you’re a company, tell us what percentage of your users are using IE6! We’re not going to get stats out of Google or Yahoo or the BBC, but non-behemoths will do fine here. Everyone else, start thinking: where’s the cut-off point? How low does IE6’s market share need to go before it’s reasonable to not devote extra development time to it?

“Extra” is the keyword there — people thinking “hey, Opera/Safari/Firefox 3/IE8 has less than 15% market share in my statistics, let’s cut them off, Mr. Microsoft Hater” need to consider that modern browsers don’t (or at least shouldn’t) take any extra development time to work around their idiosyncrasies. (In practice, Safari does require more extra development time than I’d like, I find, but its market share is high enough (or the idiosyncracies are infrequent enough) that supporting it is broadly worth the effort.)

So: if you have IE6 stats, publish them. If you’re a web hacker: when should we cut off the ailing IE6’s life support? Speak now…

@silogenixkry.org

Spam harvesters looking at that will see the following code:

<p style="padding-left: 5em"><span>@</span><span
 style="margin-left: -2.5em">sil</span><span
 style="margin-left: 3.5em">ogenix</span><span
 style="margin-left: -5.3em">kry</span><span
 style="margin-left: 4.1em">.org</span></p>

Or, with HTML stripped, @silogenixkry.org, which ain’t an email address. It does it by breaking up the address into bits, putting the bits into HTML in the wrong order, and reassembling the bits into a readable order with judicious use of CSS.* It requires a certain amount of fiddling to get the margins right such that (a) the address shows up in the right order and (b) changes in font-size don’t screw it up. I’d write a tiny web-service to do it to a supplied address if I could be bothered; lazyweb, go for it. Of course, if everyone uses this, harvesters will learn how to interpret CSS (and this is relatively trivial to do in this case). Might keep your name off the lists for a little while longer, though.

Obviously, the root certificate would only be installed in your browsers if you get them from your distro (because the distros would add them to their browser packages) — this means that people on Windows or who install their own copy of Firefox (or whatever) would still get the “this is a certificate I don’t recognise” warning. However, that’s no worse off than it is now, and I think it’s reasonable to assume that people who use bug-tracking sites for free software projects running on a free software OS are disproportionately people using that OS who will therefore have the certificate.

(Update: johnath says “StartSSL, in the Firefox 3 root store, offers [SSL certificates] for free“, which might have the same effect; I don’t know whether StartSSL’s root certificate is in other browsers, but that’s no worse than the idea that I propose above.)