I'm currently listening to my backlog of ubuntu uk podcast recordings. There was an interesting piece on the Show Me Do site, that provides lots of educational screen casting videos on various open-source topics. Very interesting.
Slide Share is an on-line slide presentation sharing web site. It seems to be popular with the Perl community, this year's YAPC::EU having it's own Slide Share Event.
I've therefore decided to upload all my sides to the site and make them freely available on that site as well as the ones they are currently on. My slides can be found here: www.slideshare.net/drajt and as new ones are created or the old ones updated I'll keep them up to date.
After an administrive cock-up, Nildram have cut my network connection off at home. Today they promised to put a new line in and have given me a free month of connection time. Even with maximum urgency it is still going to take 5 working days at best...
If they hadn't been quick I would have selected an alternative supplier, probably Zen Internet.
Last night when we got home we discovered that our ADSL line was dead. Today I checked and it looks like there is a problem with Nildram. I've sent them an email but I'll probably give them a call as it looks like a billing problem, rather than a technical problem. We could be without Internet connectivity at home for a few days...!
After a few weeks delay Firefox 3 has arrived in Debian Lenny. Since it arrived in Debian SID a few more themes and add-ons have been ported so the upgrade hasn't been too painful. Compared with 2.x it does seem quite a bit faster and more responsive but on Linux Firefox 2 was always sluggish when compared to Konqeror or Opera. On Windows Firefox could sometimes be slow but on Windows there is always Microsoft's IE which was an order of magnitude slower...
As predicted the Firefox launch broke their servers... Anyhow I took part in the record attempt and downloaded a copy for my Windows box at work. A few add-ons don't work yet and as they are important to me I can wait for them to be ready before I upgrade my Linux box. Seeing as I use Debian's version that will be a few days, which should give the add-on authors a bit more time to update.
So far it mostly looks a little difference and doesn't seem any faster. The bookmark section appears to have had the biggest change, though I've not dug in deep enough to see the advantages yet. No doubt there will be a rush of fixes, as there usually are with .0 releases, but so far so good...
Today Mozilla released their brand new Firefox 3 browser. At the moment they are trying to break a world record in number of downloads in just one day - however I think they are most likely to break their download servers...
In a virtual system I have Debian SID which comes with the latest release candidate of Firefox 3 already and the release version will no doubt appear over the next day or so. It won't help the record attempt but it less messing than downloading and trying to install a third party application.
Over the weekend I downloaded the latest version of the Opera browser, version 9.5. It looks very much like the earlier 9.x series but like Firefox has very much changed innards and is at long last available for Linux in a 64-bit binary.
It's nice to see continual improvement in browsers, for so long Microsoft's IE dominated and there was total stagnation in web design as everyone contented themselves with designing within the considerable limits of Microsoft's antique platform. Since Firefox gained significant share and other browser have gained a small but increasing share the design market has opened up and everyone can see good design works well everywhere but on Microsoft's dinosaur platform. IE7 is a step in the right direction but until IE8 comes out Microsoft users are still left in another world...
Looking at the past fortnight on this site, it is interesting to see the browser breakdown.
| Browser | Version | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|---|
| Firefox | 3.x | 03.88 |
| Firefox | 2.x | 28.05 |
| Firefox | 1.x | 19.31 |
| MSIE | 7.x | 14.89 |
| MSIE | 6.x | 24.92 |
| MSIE | 5.x | 00.65 |
| MSIE | 4.x | 00.22 |
| MSIE | 3.x | 00.11 |
| Mozilla | 1.x | 02.48 |
| Opera | 9.x | 01.40 |
| Opera | 8.x | 00.22 |
| Opera | 7.x | 00.43 |
| Safari | all | 00.97 |
| Konqeror | 3.x | 02.48 |
If you lump them crudely by rendering engine family you get:
| Engine | Market Share (%) |
|---|---|
| Mozilla Gecko | 53.72 |
| MSIE | 40.78 |
| khtml/web-kit | 03.45 |
| Opera | 02.05 |
This site is more pro-open source and the content is clearly more pro Linux that Microsoft but one of the most popular section is the stable site that is hosted here, which isn't technical at all. It's good to see more than just one browser, and it's good to see that MISE isn't the most popular!
Arthur on the Debian Administration Site suggested using backscatter.org as a way of controlling backscatter. Looks interesting.
Some spotty little Herbert is forging my domain and I'm getting backscatter like mad at the moment. Killing spammers is too good for them...
Additionally people who are stupid enough to send backscatter emails deserve to be treated like spammers too.
On my work Windows XP machine I've been tinkering with Apple's Safari browser. The page rendering looks very good, much better than other Windows applications including Microsoft's IE and Mozilla's Firefox. The user interface is a bit odd - though I'm sure it works well on a Mac.
The underlying rendering engine, "Web-Kit" is based on the open source "khtml" engine from the KDE browser Konqeror. Konqeror is commonly found on Linux/BSD systems running the KDE desktop system, where it works very well, if it does play second fiddle to Firefox. There are few differences in the engines and the user interfaces are miles apart, but both are very very standard compliant and very fast.
In speed terms it's hard to compare fairly, but IE comes rock bottom in most tasks, Firefox is normally faster but can get sluggish if you open too many tabs, but Safari/Konqeror and Opera normally vie for top spot in speed and they are all more standard compliant as well![1]
I must remember to use Konqeror a bit more often at home and Safari at work.
I've had a Technorati profile for some time but never done much with it. As I'm updating stuff today here it is.
I've long known about social network site, I joined one once, got excited for 30 seconds and then got bored with the volume of mindless drivel. Some time ago I was invited by a colleague to join LinkedIn, which looks slightly less childlike and possibly more useful. Today I got round to filling the forms in and actually joining.
Over the weekend I used someone else's computer. It's was an unmaintained Windows XP/SP2 box running IE6. Even browsing google resulted in multiple pop-under adverts. Norton "whatever" claimed that the machine was clean and fullly up-to date.
I almost never use IE for anything and though I'm forced to use Windows at work, I mostly use PuTTY to Linux/AIX systems or the SAP R/3 GUI, so I touch almost non of Windows it's self or any of the standard Microsoft applications. At home I've used Debian GNU/Linux and the KDE desktop for several years now and I've used Firefox since the 0.6 betas.
Using a vanilla Windows XP machine and IE6 really is like stepping back into the dark ages. Crashes, adverts, pop-ups, pop-unders and all other flavours of badness are just something I'd forgotten existed...
I feel sorry for some Windows users, they must have such a pitiful computing experience, then I realise that so many refuse to use a superior alternative and defend their choice with such vigour that my pity disappears.
Microsoft launched their second take-over bid for Yahoo! this week. If you ask me Microsoft might as well launch a take-over bid for Ford so that they can better complete with Honda for all the sense it makes...
Microsoft have a web presence, it's dismal, loses money hand over fist, and what they have the bought in from outside. So far they have just been pouring money down the drain, huge sums of money and it's got them no where.
Yahoo! were born on the web, understand the web and have the web coursing through their veins. They may not be doing all that well against Google, but they are doing a lot better than Microsoft.
If I were a Yahoo! shareholder, selling to Microsoft is a perfect exit strategy: take the money and run, letting MS-Yahoo sink without a trace... If I were a Yahoo employee I'd be sending my CV to Google now.
If I were a Microsoft shareholder, I'd want that vision-less chair thrower out of the door now. Microsoft as the also ran (indeed they are so insignificant they hardly appear on the radar) and frankly with no where to go should be the one looking for the exit strategy, not buying a stumbling number two player.
Microsoft and Yahoo! have utterly different technologies, histories, cultures and they won't mix. Everyone with any idea knows this. The only way to make a combined MS-Yahoo! to work would be for MS to swallow their pride and switch platform to Yahoo's LAMP stack, switching the other way would kill any value that Yahoo have left.
Microsoft should give their web properties to Yahoo! take a equity stake and stand well back. That way Yahoo! can stick with their non-Microsoft platform and migrate Microsoft's customer base onto Yahoo's platform. By standing well back Microsoft won't be forced to admit that their technology stack can't support a large system like Google or Yahoo. With Microsoft's added customer base, some cash and stability Yahoo may be able to turn themselves around, netting Microsoft a profit on a relatively small stake - 10% of something is a lot better than 100% of nothing.
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