Anything Else

Just tried out Grease Monkey extension for Firefox, and its too cool! Now I can have saved searches in GMail!


This also lets you toggle between fixed width fort and the normal ones while you are viewing messages as you can see in the screenshot. Too cool. Few other scripts:

• Site Skinner: Lets you add CSS to any page.
  
• Customized Google.
• Google Fool.

More here.

PS: Running code from untrusted sources on your computer can be injurious to your health.

K5 has an article discussing the real issues behind AutoLink. AutoLink. As so often with k5 or /., comments were more interesting than the original story, here are a few:

You missing the point entirely (2.00 / 5) (#76)
by greggman on Fri Mar 4th, 2005 at 02:45:39 PM EST
(http://greggman.com/pages/email.htm) http://greggman.com
It's not about users editing the content. It's not about business models. It's not about sacred content. It's about one company (one person) having a chance to edit every webpage for millions of people.

Right now if you search for Bush you'll get lots of sites pro and con. Pro sites will have pro links, con sites will have con links. When version 1.1 of Autolinks appears that does more than the 4 types of data it does now then google will now have a chance to make all those links point one way or the other, pro or con. That power will be concentrated in one company. That is the scary part. You think it's scary that people get most of their news from 4-5 TV news sources? Just wait till the day when all online news sources pass through the editing hand of google and google alone.

it's gets worse. Assume google doesn't actually directly control the content but uses pagerank to decide where links to a certain topic go. Then, who ever figures out how to hack pagerank (which many people have already done) will have a HUGE influence in shaping public opinion.

Face it, techinically it's great idea. Instead of manually searching for stuff with my personal phrase of preference (bush president, bush oil, bush iraq) each person deciding for themselves how to search, the convienence of Autolink 1.1 will be "just click that button and I'll get links selected by google as the best links for more info" and everyone else will get the exact same links.

That's NOT good if you want diverse opinions.

And:

Opt-In for Content Providers? Are you NUTS? (2.66 / 6) (#75)
by knight37 on Fri Mar 4th, 2005 at 02:32:27 PM EST
(knight37m@gmail.com) http://www.bloglines.com/blog/knight37
On the subject of content-producer opt-in:

No. Sorry. But content producters DO NOT get to control how I view their content. This has been the way the web has worked since it began. The CLIENT is responsible for the presentation of the content. If I want to reformat it, add to it, do anything I want to it, I can do that. The thing is, you can not stop this! The server has no way of knowing what the client has done to the content after it has been sent.

There are already DOZENS of browser plug-ins and tools that alter or enhance web-page content in some form or fashion. If you suggest that content providers have some say in whether or not this happens, all of a sudden all of those devices have to support "opt-in" too.

Don't like those pop-up ads? Too fucking bad, we haven't "opted in" to allow you to block them.

If you try to make some stupid law and/or standard that supports opt-in for content producers, that just means there will be "underground" browsers that do not support this feature. In other words, no one will be using Internet Explorer anymore, they'll be using 1nt3rn37 Xpl0r3r, because it has all the features of IE, without the limitation of forcing me to be at the mercy of the content provider. There is no way to avoid this! The server has SENT the data, it is now COMPLETELY in the hands of the client, and there is no way for the server to prevent the client from altering its presentation.

You want to talk about slippery slope. The slippery slope is there, but it's going the opposite way you think it is. You start suggesting that content-providers actually have some say in what is being displayed on the client end, and all of a sudden you've made just about every internet tool currently in existence illegal.

Now back to the main thrust -- autolinking:

I think it's a great tool if used responsibly. As long as the user of the software is PERFECTLY AWARE of where that link is being generated, and not able to confuse a link generated by the content provider and by the tool that is doing autolinking, I don't have a problem with it. As Cory Doctorow wrote on BoingBoing, the problem ONLY occurs if there is some deception involved, and that's a problem with whoever wrote the tool doing the decieving, not the actual technology of autolinking in and of itself.

As a user I would only be interested in this product, however, if it:

1. let me customize where the autolinks go to, for example, if it's autolinking a book, I want the option to have it search Barnes & Noble or Amazon.com as I see fit, not be forced into a choice by the maker of the tool just because they get "kick-backs".
2. no one gets a kick-back unless the author of the web page that I was reading gets one.
3. no one gets a kick-back if I don't want them to get a kick-back. It's my money, I get to decide who gets it.
4. I am always fully aware of where the link is being generated.
5. It's completely optional and "turn-on per use" type thing, it isn't something enabled all the time while browsing.

Those are my conditions before *I* would use it, YMMV. BTW, I am using Firefox so I can't use the Google thning even if it does work the way I want it to. I would be very interested in a FireFox plug-in that did something similar though.


--Knight37

Once a Gamer, always a Gamer

In general the modification is a Good Idea. Ctrl-+/Ctrl-- to increase/decrease font sizes, user defined stylesheet, esp in Opera to convert all the pale white on black fancy coloring on some site to sane black on white. Then you can think of a plugin to put a tooltip on all the non common words with their meaning when you are visiting a site in a languge you are learning, or another plugin that shows a page in a paragraph by paragraph manner, show one para with head aligned with the top, press Space and next para [or the part of para not visible on the screen] takes that place, and I am sure numerous other innovations are possible. Therefore arguments in the line of modification of content is a voilation of copyright are bad. The reason I could be against it is in the lines of:

If you love the Internet, you better be worried. (1.33 / 3) (#96)
by Marknot on Fri Mar 4th, 2005 at 09:27:46 PM EST

It isn't what the toolbar does to the webpage, it is what it does to the web. This is the beginning of a slippery slope which will eventually pave the way for Microsoft to embed SmartTags into MSIE.

Fast forward and we will have embedded ads competing with online ads and many of your favorite sites will end up having to close down because they will not be able to pay for their hosting services.

The mom and pops and web publishers will be the first to suffer.

For those who do not know, Microsoft tried to do this back in 2001 and and they will have the green light to try again.

AutoLinks is step one in a plan to funnel billions of dollars to the major portals. In the end, they will be perfectly wedged in between the major retailers and the consumers. This is a very subtle power grab.

In short, people do not mind AutoLink as long as Microsft is not doing it. Microsoft, real evil thing: IE7 is in the line, and they will/might put forced [which means active by default, and a hidden entry on msdn site to disable it] autolinking, make IE7 mandatory to get security updates, force people to use security updates by floating a lethal virus/worm and suing some Russian about it, and zap instantly all pages on the internet show ads/content by Microsoft, and we all know where they would point to on all pages showing information about using linux or Mac over Microsoft for example.

MPlayer, the best video player, has been shutdown due to patent infringements.

India, a major source of inexpensive AIDS drugs, passed a new patent law yesterday that groups providing drugs to the world's poorest patients fear will choke off their supply of new treatments.

Democracy has failed.

Carriers killing much requested iTunes Phone.

Google recently previewed and pulled off a Google X. Queryster Directory has launched Search X, a spoof of that service, but its more than a mere parody, it opens a non intrusive popup, actually we should call it toolbar, when you search something using it, that gives you an option to check result from other search providers from within the search results shown for one search provider. They should add the zoom effect on the toolbar, and a lineedit to modify the query string. And if they dont, someone should write a Firefox extension to do it.

You didn't write that awful page. You're just trying to get some data out of it. Right now, you don't really care what HTML is supposed to look like.

Neither does this parser.

BeautifulSoup.py

Via SwaroopCH, who says it is:

... a neat module to help you do screen-scraping i.e. get information from websites, no matter how badly they are written.

Who for such dainties would not stoop?

Came across this on Atul Chitnis' blog:

David Hammerstein, a Member of the European Parliament, has sent a letter to the Indian government on the subject of software patents.

Will this make India see sense? Will it stop India from sending its "pride of the nation" industry into a complete hell that it has been safe from till now?

Stay tuned for the next gripping episode of "a country commits intellectual suicide", coming soon to a browser near you.

For now, here is the letter:

To
Mr. T.K. VISWANATHAN Secretary to Government of India,
Mrs. Sonia Gandhi, Leader of the Indian National Congress, 10, Janpath,
Dr. Manmohan Singh Prime Minister of India
Shri Kamal Nath Minister for Commerce & Industry
L K Advani Leader of Opposition

David Hammerstein Member of the European Parliament Grupo Verde/ALE

Subject: Software patents in the Parliaments of Europe and India

Dear fellow MP,

I am writing to you on the subject of software patents as Member of European Parliament. The European Parliament has opposed to make software patentable in September 2003, and in February 2005 the European Parliament by unanimous vote rejected a proposal by the Council of the European Union to request that. The debate is still open here, but speaking as a Parlamentarian I urge you to avoid any hasty and unwise steps in India.

During our debate, the US trade representative (for example in a letter of 16 September 2003) has argued that Europe was bound to have software patents due to the TRIPS treaty. We have now reached the understanding that in the making of TRIPS there is no indication that computer programs were to seen as a field of technology in the sense of TRIPS. Hence we clarified in Article 2 of our directive: "(2) The use of natural forces to control physical effects beyond the digital representation of information belongs to a field of technology. The processing, handling, and presentation of information do not belong to a field of technology, even where technical devices are employed for such purposes".

This is in accordance with art 52 (2)(c) of the European Patent Convention that states clearly that "schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, and programs for computers" shall not be regarded as inventions.

Moreover, article 10 of the TRIPs treaty also clearly demands protection by copyright for computer programs; TRIPS does not mention patent protection for computer programs at any place.

Given that the majority of software patent applications at the European Patent Office is from US and Japanese countries, having software patentable is clearly not in Europe's interest, and it is also likely also not to be in India's interest.

I would recommend either

• to amend the Indian law in the sense as outlined at http://wiki.ffii.org/InAmend0503En

• or just to keep the acceptable present wording of the Patent Act's 2002 version "3 (k) a mathematical or business method or computer programme per se or algorithms" and to reject the ambiguous wording that has it had been issued by the Minister of Industry Kamal Nath in December 2004 ordinance "3 (k) a computer programme per se other than its technical application to industry or a combination with hardware; 3(ka) a mathematical method or business method or algorithms;"

• or to improve the present wording of the Patent Act's 2002 version by simply deleting "per se" in "3(k) a mathematical or business method or computer programme per se or algorithms"
  

With kind regards,

David Hammerstein

Taken from http://wiki.ffii.org/Hammerstein050321En

I have talked about software patents in the past too, especially this note, and here and here. I will just quote Bill Gates on software patents:

If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today. The solution . . . is patent exchanges . . . and patenting as much as we can. . . . A future start-up with no patents of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to impose. That price might be high: Established companies have an interest in excluding future competitors.

Delhi Linux User Group has compiled a FAQ on it.

The real question is not software patents are good or bad, but are they good or bad for India Right Now. On the minus we would limit a lot of people to do things, make a lot of people criminals. Government is granting people monopoly, one day in parliament costs couple of crores of Rupees, one law requires tens of crores more to complete the process once approved by parliament, then something of this magnitude, that is potentially going to make half of computer using population criminals is going to require thousands of crores to inforce if it is to be done effectively, I just want to see some studies that says they are worth it, that at the end of the day, in economic terms, India is going to profit from it. I havent seen one yet, though I have seen many like this.

A good resouce to follow software patent related news in India is here.

From their site:

Finally! A complete Web Authoring System for Linux Desktop users as well as Microsoft Windows and Macintosh users to rival programs like FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Nvu (pronounced N-view, for a "new view") makes managing a web site a snap. Now anyone can create web pages and manage a website with no technical expertise or knowledge of HTML.

Have been getting requests for recommendation about WYSWYG HTML editor for Linux, and Quanta did not really cut it, now we have Nvu. Good thing about Nvu [pronounced NView for New View] is its based on Moziall composer [meaning slightly better rendering than Quanta's Konqueror], and is cross platform. They have plans to get it integrated with Mozilla Suite, and Linspire is behind them. I perticularly liked their CSS editor. Get it here.

UPDATED: Added comparative screenshot.

Just finished a small program for resizing images, more as an exercise to learn various tools than anything else, though I think I will be using it. It was developed in python, using PyQt. First, used Qt Designer, and created the ui files (imageresizer.ui and imagepreviewer.ui) and the implementations (imageresizer.ui.h and imagepreviewer.ui.h). These were translated to python source code using pyuic.exe that comes with PyQt. To test them I used Image Resizer.py. After playing with all these for couple of hours, when things started to look satisfactory, I started thinking about distribution. I have individually installed Python, Qt and PyQt, which not everyone has, py2exe to rescue! I had to create a small setup.py, and run "python setup.py py2exe --includes sip", to generate self contained executable resolving all the dependencies. Then I had to create some icon file, and found LiquidIcon quite handy. I wanted to add an item to right click context menu for image files in windows explorer, that will launch the resizer, not having any experiece with that, I found this very informative. The final step was to put everything together and creat an installer. I had two free options, NullSoft's NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System), they have quite a few interesting projects; and Inno Setup. Both of them are quite cool, come with decent editors to speedup the work, have very little overhead on executable size, good compression etc. I went ahead with Inno Setup, as as soon as I had finished installing it, the editor popped up, opened a wizard, and I finished creating my first installer in less than the 5 mins Firefox told me the other fellow is going to take for download. I tweaked it a bit for next half an hour or so to get the registry setting working. installer.iss (Open it in ISTool). Finally, putting together 7MB for Qt, 1MB for Python, and 20KB for my scripts, I got a 2.64MB installer.

Google Code's featured project is PyGoogle. For a taste of it:

>>> import google
>>> google.doGoogleSearch('amit upadhyay').results[0].URL
'http://www.rootshell.be/~upadhyay/'
>>> google.doSpellingSuggestion('pithon')
'python'
>>>

Also check out the neatest game programming platform: PyGame.

Incidentally, Python is also under the hoods of this cool application. Lets pronounce the beginning of the age of python. If you are feeling left out from the scene of action, learn python today. :-)

Just hacked up this script. Modify it to change the username, it downloads the list of feeds the user is subscribed to on bloglines [since they don't give any direct access to it]. Here is my notes (yes I believe in documentation):

for a user: upadhyay, get page:
http://www.bloglines.com/public_subs?username=upadhyay

and from this page get all the string matchingn the pattern: javascript:doLoadf(39,4654814,250)

ignore the first and the third argument above, second one is "sub".

for each "sub" get a page or format:

http://www.bloglines.com/public_display?username=upadhyay&sub=5422438

in that page look for the first occurance of:

<li><a href="http://www.forbes.com/technology/index.xml">subscribe</a></li>

done.

bloglines-whacking.py

Radiation Detectors in Ports

By schneier

According to Reuters:

The United States is stepping up investment in radiation detection devices at its ports to thwart attempts to smuggle a nuclear device or dirty bomb into the country, a Senate committee heard on Wednesday.

Robert Bonner, commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, told a Senate subcommittee on homeland security that since the first such devices were installed in May 2000, they had picked up over 10,000 radiation hits in vehicles or cargo shipments entering the country. All proved harmless.

It amazes me that 10,000 false alarms -- instances where the security system failed -- are being touted as proof that the system is working.

As an example of how the system was working, Bonner said on Jan. 26, 2005, a machines got a hit from a South Korean vessel at the Los Angeles seaport. The radiation turned out to be emanating from the ship's fire extinguishing system and was no threat to safety.

That sounds like an example of how the system is not working to me. Sometimes I wish that those in charge of security actually understood security.

Also check out Bruce's latest newsletter (backissues).

• Using Amazon API (Click on books to see details)
• Using Flickr API (Modify URL)
• Using Yahoo! Image search API
• Another using Yahoo! Image Search.
  

Was just reading about A9's OpenSearch (demo) when I remembered a writeup I had written in the years before the blogging became cool:

Was having lunch, and this thing stuck me. First I thought why don't Google do "SETI"(later realized they do something similer, but read on). People would obviously be willing to donate a few processor cycles to Google [we love Google!]. This I say because after all what a node at the Google's distributed systems is? quite close to my current system that is lying idle in my room while I am lunching. So for google it may make much more sense than for MSN search maybe [who probably is not using off the shelf components and have special requirements]. So I asked myself how will I (as Google) use this system? Well if people are willing to share bandwidth too, I may let the "donated nodes" fetch and index website [here by Index I mean compiling the raw text to some processed binary format, which will then further be used to search rank the pages at Google's site].

But then I realised it would be only a marginal thing, wont really change things much, and then got this idea: What if websites index themselves? After all we know the difference between ftp-ing a directory and ftp-ing tar.gz for the same directory(with probably 1000s of small files). How about a googlify.exe that will create google.index which will be placed like robot.txt?

Why?

* Can save a bit of bandwidth, and much time (checking 100-1000 pages per website vs 1/few, even if all you did is to check the last modification timestamp).
* Job of sanity checking and indexing can be distributed, reducing the load on the google servers (and hence much more detailed algos can be employed).

Why would a website do that?

Everyone wants to be ranked high. Everyone wants their latest content to be indexed by google soon. Everyone wants to optimize their bandwidth utilization. So lets say there is something like ping.google.com, and you can do a: http://ping.google.com/?host=http://www.retrolabs.com/google.index after lets say when something on www.retrolabs.com gets modified and new google.index has been created, that will give the webmaster great deal of control on how quickly site shows up in google search results for changes just made.

[Small clearification: First question is how can you trust a google.index file to be authentic? But that you might be able to control by doing crazy/smart things in Googlify.exe that site owners download from Google. Or everytime a googlify.exe "pings" the mothership, mothership "signals" random googlify.exe-s to check the authenticity of the index, and penalize a bad googlify.exe if required.]

I don't know if Google would do it, or if there would be the need of for them, they have immense infrastructure, but this is how opensource search engines will have to be if there is to be any.

Check out Google X (UPDATE: Google pulled it down, working mirrors). A "fun late-night coding jaunt". Guess this is what happens when you ask PhDs to learn HTML and Javascript. Take a look at the source of Google X page, sheer delight!

Also check out this cool application of Yahoo! Image Search API.

And


presents Buzz Game.

[All via: Google BlogScoped.]

Saw this on boingboing:

I PIRATE HOLLYWOOD cheeky tees

By Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow: These cheeky I PIRATE HOLLYWOOD tees beg to be worn to the next paranoid screening you attend where hired goons are patting people down and confiscating their camera-phones. Link (via Preshrunk)

Its not geeky enough, it should be:

:-)

BoingBoing is pointing to somebody saying: blogging is good for career, and states ten reasons:

1. You have to get noticed to get promoted.
2. You have to get noticed to get hired.
3. It really impresses people when you say "Oh, I've written about that, just google for XXX and I'm on the top page" or "Oh, just google my name."
4. No matter how great you are, your career depends on communicating. The way to get better at anything, including communication, is by practicing. Blogging is good practice.
5. Bloggers are better-informed than non-bloggers. Knowing more is a career advantage.
6. Knowing more also means you're more likely to hear about interesting jobs coming open.
7. Networking is good for your career. Blogging is a good way to meet people.
8. If you're an engineer, blogging puts you in intimate contact with a worse-is-better 80/20 success story. Understanding this mode of technology adoption can only help you.
9. If you're in marketing, you'll need to understand how its rules are changing as a result of the current whirlwind, which nobody does, but bloggers are at least somewhat less baffled.
10. It's a lot harder to fire someone who has a public voice, because it will be noticed.

I don't know about that, infact I took some time convincing myself that posting that last reason is okay, I mean isn't it like blackmailing your boss? Blogging is a tool, per se not good or bad for anything, its how you use it, almost just like anything else.

Came across this site via Rahul's Furl list, BTW if you are not already using Furl, check it out. Its a huge list of things a guy has "agrued about" with his Girlfriend. Its actually quite huge, so I am listing a few I liked:

Margret is sitting at this computer (which is in the attic room, incidentally) typing something. I'm flopped in a chair close by with a paper and pad, scribbling away at a bit of work.
I pause and say to her, 'Tortoise and turtle is the same word in German, isn't it?'
She stops typing, reaches over, pulls off one of my Birkenstock shoes, throws it down through trapdoor (I hear it thud below, then flip-flop down the stairs) and returns to her typing. All in a single, silent movement.
Your guess is as good as mine, frankly.

and this one:

If I'm sitting on the sofa reading a book and Margret enters the room she will say this: 'What are you doing?' If I'm peeling potatoes in the kitchen when she happens upon me, or pushing batteries into one of the children's extensive range of screeching toys, or writing on the side of a video cassette I've just pulled out of the recorder, the same thing: 'What are you doing?' I mean, a fellow likes to feel he's a bit enigmatic now and then, a tad mysterious and deep, but how can a person see me, for example, screwing a new bulb into a light fitting and not be able to see immediately and with huge, reverberating, chill clarity precisely what it is that I'm doing? It's like living with Mork. It's not even as if I can use these moments to exercise my impressively sardonic (yet, at the same time, profoundly attractive and alluring in a deeply sexual way) wit either. Because, as previously mentioned, Margret regards large sections of what we on Earth call humour as nothing but shameless mendacity.
Margret [spotting Mil picking with his fingernail at the goo left on a CD case by the price label]: 'What are you doing?'
Mil: 'I'm talking to Mark using Morse code - he's at home right now holding one of his CD cases, picking up the vibrations I'm making.'
Margret: 'No you're not, you liar. You're lying. Why do you always lie? You liar.'
Mil: 'It works by resonance. You just have to practise for a bit to be able feel the plastic quivering - go over and get that Black Grape case, press it on to your nose, and we'll see if you can pick up anything.'
(There's the briefest flicker of indecision in her eyes; offering me, for one tantalising moment, the possibility that I'm going to spend the next ten minutes - 'What about this, then? Press it on your face harder.' - having quite simply the best of times... but then she grunts.)
Margret: 'Liar. You're just a liar.'
Mostly, however, we've got it smooth and efficient now. We don't have to think. She says, 'What are you doing?', I peer at her with irritation and expel air, we go on about our business. This morning, though, she came upstairs to the attic here while I was sitting in front of the computer doing some work on the net.
'What are you doing?' she asks.
Trying to concentrate on something, distracted and harassed, I reply with some degree of acerbic aggravation.
'What does it look like I'm doing?'
There's a beat, during which we hold each others eyes, unblinking.
It's immediately after this beat has passed that I realise I'm wearing no trousers.
There is, it's opulently redundant of me to add, a perfectly reasonable and innocuous explanation for why I'm browsing the web alone in my attic with no trousers on, but you're all busy people and I know you have neither the inclination nor the time to waste hearing it. As an image, however, it did rather undercut my sarcasm. Margret - in a brutally savage reversal of tactics - didn't speak. She merely raised her eyebrows and there, revealed, was a face that read, 'I have been waiting thirteen years for this moment.'

or this:

I was watching Mission Impossible and it was making me uneasy. Tom Cruise was doing something - infiltrating, probably, you know what he's like - and he was continuously describing the situation to his distant support buddies via his headset radio. For a while, I naturally assumed that it was simply Tom Cruise's big nose that was unsettling me and tried, using soothing visualisations and breathing exercises, to move myself, mentally, to a place where it wasn't an issue. But then - the realisation freezing my arm and abruptly halting a crisp's journey from bag to mouth - I had a small epiphany: 'Lawks,' I thought, 'This is my girlfriend.'
"Margret, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to wander around constantly articulating precisely what it is that you're doing at that moment, as though relaying it to an unseen control team somewhere. Possibly, on an alien mother ship, secretly orbiting the Earth. For example."
She does this all the time. 'Get some eggs from the fridge... here's the butter... and now a frying pan... What's in the cupboard? OK, we've got oregano... some basil... I'll go for the mixed herbs... Now I need some scissors...' Who is she talking to? It's certainly not me: for one thing, I can see what she's doing - and, further, am not interested - and for another, I sometimes hear her doing this while she's alone in a room in another part of the house. And - though, admittedly, there's often a huge temptation to think she functions like this - I don't believe it's because she simply has no idea what she's going to do until it's actually occurring and I'm merely listening to her keeping her mind informed about what it is that her body appears to be doing right now. Sometimes we'll be sitting down watching TV and she'll get up and say, 'I'm going to the toilet.' Why would anyone say that? Does she think I'm keeping a log for research purposes? Is she intimating that she needs help? Does she have reason to expect that she may be abducted halfway up the stairs and thus wants me to at least be able to tell the police, 'Well, the last time I saw her I know she was on her way to the toilet.' What?
Surely, it can only be that she's an undercover member of the M.I. team. Every time a van is parked near our house now, I imagine Ving Rhames is in it; 'OK, the toilet's at the top of the stairs - it's unguarded, but has a slightly bent hinge...'
Oh, and the first person to say, 'Well, if she's doing an impossible mission, then that'd be 'living with you', Mil, wouldn't it?' gets a very slow handclap, OK?

and:

Margret: 'Mmm... Is anything in the world better than the feel of fresh bed sheets?'
Mil: 'Yes.'

I love these guys! Okay I will quote just one more:

Do you remember the thing about 'Shut up'? It's not on this page anymore but, if you're an old-timer (or, I suppose, on the Mailing List and have read through the stuff that's no longer here) you might recall it. Well, she's sort of at it again.
I was looking for something that should have been somewhere, and wasn't. I asked Margret where it was, and she said, 'It's in the bedroom.'
'No, it isn't,' I replied - having just come from searching in the bedroom for about ten increasingly tantrumy minutes.
'Yes, it is,' she repeated.
'It's not. I've looked there.'
An expression of amused indulgence came over her face the subtleties of which I can't quite convey, so I'll have to make do with the description of it as, 'absolutely bleeding infuriating.'
'How much,' she said, 'will you give me if I find it?'
OK, so this operates on two levels. The first is simple sadism. Margret knows the agony it would cause me if - after my prolonged, stomping insistence that it isn't there - she calmly walks over and places her hand immediately on it. Tauntingly, she knows that just the possibility of this happening is quite probably enough for my nerve to crack. She is well aware that if, just one more time, my frustrated raging of, 'The nail scissors aren't here. See? They're not bloody here. Do you understand? Not... Here... Look! Go on! You try to find them then! Go on! Where are they then? Eh?' receives the near-instantaneous reply, 'Here they are,' and a pair of nail scissors, then I'm simply going to have to run away to sea. Can you see the other level, the one which ties it in kind with the 'Shut up' affair, though? Have a think.
That's it, well spotted: monetary gain. If I've maintained that something isn't somewhere until I've had to jump up and down, hold my breath and squeal that she's not my real mom, then simple, human decency should compel Margret to say, 'Yes, you're right,' rather than go there and find it. Going there and finding it is what you'd expect a Colombian Death Squad to do. What separates Margret from a Colombian Death Squad - perhaps the only thing that does - is subtlety. She's awfully keen to make that bet about finding things, isn't she? Now... why could that be? Well, obviously, it's because she's rigged the deck. The reason I can't find what I'm looking for is that she's previously spotted what I'm looking for, and moved it.
I have innate positioning instincts, you see: like a salmon returning thousands of miles across unmarked oceans, right to the stream where it was born. In exactly the same way, when I've finished using it, I will place a screwdriver on top of a bedroom radiator and - when I need it again, perhaps eighteen months later - unerringly return to that spot to retrieve it. Frequently, to discover that Margret has, maddeningly, taken it upon herself to transfer it to somewhere else. My instincts, moreover, are incredibly precise. If I'm looking for a pair of trainers that my astonishingly accurate positional memory remembers putting down in the bottom left of a cupboard, then I'm not going to notice them if some fiend has moved them to the bottom right of the cupboard during the intervening four and a half years, am I? That'd be stupid. What's the point of having a gift for such specific location if your visual perception is so vague as to wander around all over the place? Eh? What's more, I place things logically. Where are you most likely to need carpet tacks and a hammer, for example? Precisely. So leaving them on the stairs is simple ergonomics.
However, for some reason, Margret is unable to respect my filing system. She spends her day roaming the house, wilfully moving things from where I've deliberately placed them. And that's why she's keen to make the bet. She's hidden my stuff, and now she wants me to pay for her to retrieve it. It's basically a form of extortion, isn't it? Let's call a spade a spade: Margret has kidnapped my stuff and is holding it for ransom. Really, ladies and gentlemen, it's a sad state of affairs when your girlfriend abducts your favourite underpants.

and this:

A question I get asked a lot is... Um, actually, a question I get asked a lot is one I get asked by those Litigations R Us-style firms - the ones that encourage you to sue everyone you've ever met so they can have a share of the settlement. Every single time I walk through town one of their salespeople will leap out in front of me:
'Hello. I'm trawling for business on behalf of a parasitic company that happily feeds the special and delightful sense of greedy, self-centred victimhood that so elevates contemporary society. You can be confident of my noble legal stature because - look - I'm wearing a corporate waterproof jacket.'
Hold on, let me start that again. I think I may have edged, just slightly, into editorializing.
OK. Fact: I cannot walk through town without one these people heading me off. Their eyes shine the moment I stumble into their line of sight - they'll push other shoppers out of the way just to get at me. What does that say? What kind of lift to your self-confidence does that provide, eh?
Salesgit: 'Excuse me. Have you had an accident within the last three years?'
Me: 'No. I always look like this.'
I mean, it's basically someone coming up to you and saying, 'Hi - you appear to be the result of some terrible catastrophe,' isn't it?
Maybe I should reassess my haircut or something.
Anyway, as I was saying before you set me off on that tangent, a question I get asked a lot is 'What's the most frequent argument you have?' I can't imagine why people ask me things like this. That is, I can't imagine why people ask me this - why don't they ask other people? If you want to ask about arguments, then ask an argument expert. I can't claim to be an expert, because I lack the vital aspect of depth - I can't provide a balanced answer, because I've simply no experience of what it's like to be in the wrong. I'd like to have that experience, obviously. In some ways I even feel vaguely cheated by my consistent rightness but, well, we have to play the hand we're dealt, right?
However, though I can't really say what the most frequent argument is, I can have a stab at the definitive one. This argument illustrates a fundamental theme - a core issue. Because of that, it can be used in all kinds of situations. The details are unimportant; the following example may be 'about' domestic chores, or shopping arrangements, or 'sorting out of children', or any number of things. Below those superficial, ephemeral points is the true heart of the matter. The argument goes:
Margret: 'I cannot believe that you didn't do it.'
Mil: 'You didn't ask me to do it.'
Margret: 'Why should I have to ask you to do it?'
Mil: 'So I know you want me to do it.'
Margret: 'But I have to ask you to do everything.'
Mil: 'But I do everything you ask me to.'
Margret: 'But I have to ask you to do everything.'
Mil: 'But I do everything you ask me to.'
Margret: 'No - listen - the point is, I have to ask you to do everything.'
Mil: 'Yes - and I do everything you ask me to.'
[Some hours later....]
Margret: 'I... have to ask.... you... to do everything.'
Mil: 'And I... do everything... you ask me to.'
Margret: 'Arrgggh! Listen! I...'
And so on. You see the problem, yes? The problem is that, for some reason, Margret is completely unable to grasp point that I do everything she asks me to. You'd think that'd be a simple enough concept, wouldn't you? Tch.

and:

Margret, had gone out. (It doesn't really matter where as, irrespective of her stated destination, she'll come back carrying another bloody plant.) As she'd left, she'd seen that I was sitting in front of the computer. If Margret is leaving the house and, as she's doing so, she sees me sitting in front of the computer, she will say, 'Do the hoovering.' - there's no way she can stop herself: it's Pavlovian.
Her 'Do the hoovering' had been followed by the clunk of the front door, the soft rumble of the car pulling away and then nothing but a silence in which I sat, pensive.
I glanced around. OK, the carpets weren't immaculate, that was true. They were hardly in such a condition as to demand a hoovering, though. There's a clear point at which a carpet is ready for hoovering, in my opinion, and that point is "when it's crunchy". Even then, it's not what you'd call vital. In lots of the places I've lived, especially as a student, we never had a hoover at all. Sometimes, yes, walking across the landing required snow shoes - but no one ever died or anything. I glanced around some more.
A few hours later, Margret returns.
After unloading around seventy-five new plants from the car, she hunts me down; finding me, by a fluke, sitting in front of the computer.
'Have you hoovered?' she asks, her tone swaying unsurely between conversational and murderous.
'What do you think?' I reply. (Cleverly, here, I'm indignant yet inscrutable - only my disdain for the question is clear; I provide no clue at all of the answer to it.)
'Have you? Or not?'
'Well, what does it look like?'
'Just tell me whether you've hoovered.'
'No. That's not the point.'
'What? It's completely the point.'
'No, it isn't. You thought the house needed hoovering. If you think it looks OK now, then you're happy, right? Whether I've hoovered or not.'
'And what if I don't think it looks OK?' She pauses for a moment, then adds, 'Or if I smash your laptop to pieces with a tyre jack?'
'If I've hoovered, and you still think it doesn't look hoovered... then there's no point my hoovering, is there? Ever again.'
There's a degree of glaring goes on here, but I hold my nerve and continue. 'The only other possibility, as far as I can see, is that you simply can't tell whether I've hoovered or not. And, if you can't tell, then it doesn't matter - in any real sense - whether I've done it or not, does it?' I've one more card to play, but it's a great one. 'That is, not unless the thing that concerns you isn't whether the house has been hoovered, but only whether I've been sitting here enjoying myself all this time rather than slogging around with a vacuum cleaner. But I'm sure that's not it. I mean, you'd be happy for me to sit here idle for as long as I want, wouldn't you, if there's no need for me not to? It's about the hoovering, not about my sitting here idle, isn't it?'
Margret just stares at me.
I am triumphant. A choir sings. Cherubs circle my head, scattering petals. Shafts of golden light fan out from behind me. It's an intoxicating three seconds.
'Clean out the fridge,' says Margret.

Bloglines for some reasons hates "<span>"s, and tries to mutilates them:

by Michal<span style="text-decoration: underline;"></span>R., for KDE.

which looks like:



to:

by Michal<defanged-span style="text-decoration: underline;"> R., for KDE.

which looks like:



Its a minor technical bug, but I don't like bloglines policy of arbitrarily modifying the content: remove stylesheet info, and javascript, remove embeddeds [flash etc], and give the reader no indication that something has been done. Bloglines people, please start adding a notification everytime you remove flash/style information from a post telling readers what you have done, apologize for your brain deadness leading to the false positive, tell them if everything does not look right it is possibly a bug on bloglines service, and recommend them to go and look at the original blog while you debug your "beta" software.

I recently got a recommendation to use KeyNote. I have previously worked on [the development of] a note talking application called KnowIt by Michal R., for KDE. Though KnowIt is functional to the level of being useful in day to day life, but KeyNote is much closer to what I desired it to be. The real killer feature is the one click access to it, you are working on any application, just press the shortcut [mine is Ctrl-Shift-.] and it appears instantly, put down your thoughts/whatever, and press Escape, and its gone. No taskbar, no systray, no waste of any real estate. The notes are organized in multiple tabs, and within each tab you can then create a tree:



The default configuration is slightly heavy, you will have to disable a couple of toolbars from the View menu to make it look a little unintimating, but the UI and the application as a whole is extreamly configurable with lots of interesting features [support for strong encryption, configurable format for inserting date/time, configurable "formats", automatic capture of clipboard content, complete customization of eack keyboard shortcut, plugin system, special macro system, spellchecker, (external) dictionary , hyperlinking across notes, virtual notes to view/edit external file as a subnote, glossary/configurable text expansion, templates, rot13 etc etc comes packed with extensive documentation, go explore!] hidden in deep corners for the 133t users, in the true spirit of an open source project.

Get it here.

I got this in mail today:

Dear Supporters of NoSoftwarePatents.com:

The political struggle over the EU software patent directive
is making EU history. EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy, who
supports our opponents in an appalling way, told the press a
few days ago that this political process is in "chaos" without
precedent in the history of the EU. That's the way it should be:
A major injustice like software patents must not happen without
strong resistance from responsible politicians and citizens.

On Friday, Reuters reported that the EU Council has its proposal
for the software patent directive on the agenda for Monday,
as an A item, which means "for debateless approval".
To be very precise, it's a proposal for a proposal. If it were
to be adopted, it still wouldn't become law. It would, however,
become the EU Council's proposal that gets sent to the European
Parliament, and that is a very important step toward a directive.

Now, the latest news is that Denmark will side with Poland
(which is absolutely against the current proposal but said this
week that it can't fight all alone), and those two countries,
most probably with support from others, will stand up on Monday
in the EU Council (the legislative body in which the EU member
country governments cast their votes) and prevent a decision.
Those countries will ask for a renegotiation so that Europe will
hopefully see a much more balanced and well-thought-out directive
on the patentability of software concepts and functionalities.

A renegotiation of a Council text at this paticular stage would,
dependent upon whom you ask among EU insiders, either be without
precedent or there would be no more than one precedent in the
history of the EU (which passes like 1,000 regulations a year).

You can read about this latest (and exciting) development here:
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=428
(contains links to several articles, including one on ZDNet)

If you have a Web site with a lot of traffic, are on mailing lists,
know journalists or have time to make Slashdot submissions (Slashdot
mentioned the Danish story in a little note but not as a separate
article), then please help generate some more awareness over the
weekend. Some online media will still be able to report on this.

Also, here is a fake press release about the de-facto acquisition
of a part of the European Commission by Microsoft:
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=426

It's a joke and most people usually figure it out but it looks
relatively realistic as I've been told :-)
If you mention this in a Slashdot submission, make it clear that
it's a joke. Otherwise there will be total chaos.

Now let's see what happens on Monday in Brussels. We're in for
a really big thing.

Best regards,

Florian Mueller
Campaign Manager, NoSoftwarePatents.com

• Superhacker and Phoneboy [Via RG]
• What is Software design [Via ashweta]
• Peeking into Google [Via AP, AP start blogging!]
• "Double slit in time" experimentPhysicists in Europe and the US have performed a novel version of the double-slit quantum-interference experiment with single electrons. In the classic version of the experiment, electrons pass through a mask containing two parallel slits and produce a pattern of bright and dark interference fringes on a screen. Now, Gerhard Paulus of Texas A&M University and co-workers in Berlin, Munich, Sarajevo and Vienna have observed an interference pattern with electrons that pass through a double slit in time, not space, as a result of being ejected from an atom at one of two possible times by a laser pulse.. [Via /.]
  

Molly is talking about web developers(/bloggers) abusing semantics to achieve desired look:

Some of the elements weve misused are also some of markups most critical ones. Take the p element, which is used to denote paragraphs, and the br element, used to force a line break. Anyone ever commit this markup crime?

If you place the line above in a document between some text sections, youll get some white space, but the markup has absolutely no meaning. A paragraph tag should be used to denote a paragraph, period. A line break should be used to force a break in a line, not to gain white space.

I should be taken to markup prison and/or fined for having done this for years! Fortunately, Ive got CSS by my side now, and can get back to cleaner living.

Question like should we put the quote in <blockquote> tag or <i> is dealing with semantics. This person tries to justify why choosing the one that is semantically correct is better thing to do.

Consider Google's latest toolbar's AutoLink as an example, it parses the current page you are viewing and converts data in it like ISBN number of books, to Amazon page listing for that book; and address information to a GoogleMap page that shows direction from your current location to the given address. Imagine a tool that looks at the page you are viewing, finds <blockquote>, does a google search on it and finds the original site, and creates small button near the quoted text, clicking on which will show the original text with the quoted text highlighted. Or a tool that finds the abbreviations and shows a tooltip containing the full form for it when you hover the mouse over it. All this services would be useful innovations, but creating them would become extremely difficult if people do not put the abbreviations in <abbr> and for say we will just put them in <b> do it consistently for our sites and our visitors will know it, and not put addresses in <address> and say we just show them in deep red font, or put all the <blockquote> material in <i>s. If everyone is creating standards, there is no standards at all.

After ignorance, the most important reason people ignore semantics is the fact that it used to be difficult to achieve the desired look at times without breaking semantics, but with CSS we have complete control, take a look at this for example, that that reason no longer is valid. So therefore respect semantics, not doing so may be hindering innovation.