Technorama

An omnibus of tech posts by a Futurologist on software development primarily.

Wednesday 25 June 2008

Spaces in filenames

One long-standing difference between Windows Mac and GNU+Linux is that of filenames. Windows long kept DOS 8.3 format filenames, and didn't support unix style filenames which included spaces, now it does. However, as many scripts still need to operate on files which don't handle spaces (e.g. Makefiles) and even people wanting to paste filenames into a terminal window will encounter problems as the filenames contain spaces.

It's a shame the system wasn't standardised on making a character like under-score "_" always converted to a space character in filenames, that way on disc everything would be "_", apps could still display with a space if that made it more meaningful.

Character sets are another area of difference, GNU+Linux distros have at last all switched to UTF-8, but a lot of apps still save filenames with corrupted accented characters (KTorrent), which then need manual fixing. I personally don't use accented characters as there's the risk that I will save it on a pendrive and take it to a clients, and Windows refuses to read files with the "corrupted" filenames (why does it do this when ubuntu and mac dont have a problem accessing them!?).

Labels: GNU+Linux, Microsoft

posted by 東京 # 13:42 0 Comments

Wednesday 18 June 2008

Bike and Ski helmets

I'm still surprised bike and ski helmets are not compulsary, either of which could save a life or prevent severe concussion. Time to make helmets compulsory?

I've landed on rocks myself when skiing and it hurts! luckily not on my head yet though :)

Labels: HealthAndSafety, UK

posted by 東京 # 12:50 0 Comments

Prime Minister Petitions

I've posted two petitions which I hope will get some signatories. The first is to provide 24/7 service on government websites such as the Land Registry and Companies House, currently they shut at night and weekends. The second is to reform the Electoral Commission website and publish election data in open accessible formats.

posted by 東京 # 11:21 0 Comments

Sunday 15 June 2008

New Asus Eee, but old keyboard

There is a new Asus Eee coming out, but it unfortunately still has an old cramped keyboard layout,! I posted my modern design sometime ago, Dell have since followed suit., at least by ditching the F-keys.

..so come on Asus! Drop down to 58keys, and make them big enough to touch type on!

Labels: Keyboards

posted by 東京 # 19:15 0 Comments

Ubuntu Firefox + Thunderbird integration

Just switched to my Kubuntu 7.10 laptop for mobile working.. found that KDE has a bug which means it does not pass on the mailto: clicks via the Default Applications option in System Settings.

Workaround is to create a Firefox user.js with this code in it:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.external.mailto", "true");
user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "/usr/bin/thunderbird");

This gets it working, although I wish KDE functionality would keep working between releases!

Labels: KDE, Ubuntu

posted by 東京 # 17:02 0 Comments

UK House Price Crash

Looks like the house price crash I predicted last year is now in full swing. The crash is going to be even bigger than the last 40% correction potentially. A 50% reduction in prices over the next four years is a distinct possibility after all these uncontrolled boom years!

Labels: UK

posted by 東京 # 13:16 0 Comments

Monday 9 June 2008

Demos The New Politics of Personal Information FYI

An excellent report published by the Demos Think Tank titled The new politics of personal information FYI was made available last year, quote: "We no longer control what others know about us, but we don't yet understand the consequences..."

As Demos allow redistribution I created the online HTML version as only a PDF was made available at the time by Demos -- so it is be easily searchable using standard online tools now!

Labels: DataProtection

posted by 東京 # 20:34 0 Comments

Friday 6 June 2008

GMail addons

Increasingly I'm online away from offline apps like my Thunderbird and Firefox, which means I don't get my settings and addons that I've setup in Thunderbird as I use GMail online. What Google really need to launch is an addon mechanism for their GMail and other services, in the same way that Facebook support users adding apps to their profile etc. So wherever I login.. I get my setup!

Labels: Firefox, Google, Thunderbird

posted by 東京 # 13:11 0 Comments

The benefit of foreign TV

Travelling in the Netherlands and Scandinavia it's amazing just how good everyone's second language (English) is. It's hard to find someone who doesn't speak English. One off the reasons is that for films and other TV programmes which originate in English, they are not dubbed into a local language -- so everyone gets practice daily understanding English. For countries like Germany which dub foreign programmes into their local language this is a shame as generations will grow up missing the opportunity to understand another language as well as the Scandinavians and Dutch do!

Labels: English, Europe

posted by 東京 # 00:44 0 Comments

Wednesday 4 June 2008

Thunderbird needs Conversation mode

Coming from GMail back to Thunderbird on my laptop I'm experiencing all the issues that GMail neatly fixed.

Displaying email threads in "Conversation mode", hiding top posts (see email 101). Reply to an email you've sent and the reply only goes to yourself.. not the same people in the first email.! -- it's a long list. Not even sure if Thunderbird is maintained any more, it hasn't had any new features since it was Mozilla messenger back in 2000 as far as I can see. Addons are good though ;)

Labels: GMail, Mozilla, Thunderbird

posted by 東京 # 19:25 0 Comments

Tuesday 3 June 2008

Shockwave Flash crash takes out Firefox

If like me you see the problem with Adobe's Flash format and how it diverts us away from the openness of the interweb market which has facilitated so much progress you'll see the bugs in Adobe's software as just another problem in their strategy.

Today I needed to use a computer in an office running Windows, at least it was Firefox, but Adobe Flash still managed to bring it down with a crash!

It's fully reproducible from this page, linked from this other page with Firefox 2.0.13 and Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60, DLL v9.0.60.184 backtrace:

NPSWF32! 3000d6fa()
NPSWF32! 300d106d()
NPSWF32! 300d343e()
NPSWF32! 300e580e()
NPSWF32! 300e5a22()

3000D6FA   mov         ecx,dword ptr [eax+1Ch] <--Crash
3000D6FD   call        3000D705
3000D702   ret         4

I have plugins installed:


Shockwave Flash

File name: NPSWF32.dll
Shockwave Flash 9.0 r60

MetaFrame Secure Access Manager

File name: npCtxCAO.dll
Endpoint Analysis Client

VLC Multimedia Plugin

File name: npvlc.dll
Version 0.8.6c, copyright 1996-2006 The VideoLAN Team

http://www.videolan.org/

I've posted here as they don't provide any email address for bug reports, and they've never replied to any other communication I've sent about crash bugs in their propreitary software. Will they ever fix this? Not sure when they have loads of other exploits and privacy issues (secret cookies which ignore browser settings etc)

Labels: Adobe, Firefox

posted by 東京 # 20:56 1 Comments

Broken Apple Mail URLs

If you're getting lots of emails like me, you are bound to get one from an Apple Mail user, which means you'll suffer the broken Apple Mail bug. So that the links are not clickable, and appear mangled like:

http://www.openrightsgroup.org/orgwiki/index.php/
Keysigning_party_London_2008-06-02

This is one of the problems with proprietatry software, because none of the thousands of programmers who have encountered this bug have been allowed to checkin a fix to the Apple Mail source code. Had this been in Evolution or Thunderbird.. of cause it would have been fixed within hours!

Unlike this outlook bug, there is unfortunately no workaround like using <> around the URL. As a final note, Outlook also breaks URLs in the plain-text email like Apple Mail does! Time to switch to Ubuntu and Thunderbird like the rest of us?

Labels: Apple, Mozilla

posted by 東京 # 14:15 0 Comments

Monday 2 June 2008

Must have Firefox addons

My personal favs, save entire page as an image, (alternative is Screengrab). Adblock Plus, DownloadHelper, ColourfulTabs, AutoAuth and MediaPlayerConnectivity complete the experience for the moment ;)

Labels: Firefox

posted by 東京 # 18:22 1 Comments