Mozilla Archive Format add-on rocks

I've long wished that Firefox would get compatibility with Microsoft's longstanding MHT format for saving complete webpages as single files. Not only does this extension do that, it also provides an open version that basically works by zipping up the product of the it's own version of the standard Save Webpage Complete feature of Firefox (though you can, as an option, make it use the browser's own version of said feature if you want to, or the Save Complete extension's). This makes the resulting files readable by anyone: all you have to do is unzip them and then open the html page inside like normal. The extension also has a useful conversion utility that will seek out all your Firefox webpage complete saves and turn them into .maff archives.

The only downside in Linux is that Gnome thinks that the resulting .maff file is a zipfile and tries to open it as such. I worked around this by adding Firefox as an option for opening zip files. It would be better if they could find a way to produce zip files that look like a distinct file format in Unix environments like OpenOffice does so you could cleanly associate the file format with Firefox. Still, it's a great extension. BTW, be sure to get the 1.0.0 preview version if you're using Firefox 4.

Update: It is possible to differentiate .maff files from .zip files in Gnome/Linux. This mailing list post has everything you need to know to figure it out. I might post detailed step-by-step instructions later.

WordPress.org getting WordPress.com features

through Jetpack. Nothing there looks too compelling to me, but it's nice to see anyway. Not to mention that there's more to come.

Color me skeptical

Are some of the most conservative Republican Senators really considering tax increases as part of an overall deficit-reduction package? I'll believe it when I see it. My guess is that it will either a) be limited to eliminating tax credits that are really social spending in disguise or b) "on the table" is merely a theoretical term to them and there's no chance they'll ever do it. If anything can be said about the GOP since Bush I raised taxes, it's that they are so fanatically anti-tax that they'd practically rather see the country burn than raise a single tax on a single billionaire. Nor do I think that either they or the Democrats will seriously overhaul Social Security and Medicare. The GOP is counting on the votes of senior citizens and the Democrats cannot afford to look weaker on protecting the vulnerable than the GOP. Likewise Defense is off the table; in a time of (eternal) war, neither side is going to be willing to seriously cut spending there. True, they could come together like mature adults and take the hit together for the country, but there's not a snowball's chance in hell that will ever happen. Not unless the country really does start burning, and probably not even then. The result of no new taxes and over half the budget (Defense, Medicare, Social Security) off limits: massive deficits as far as the eye can see.

I think I know why John Kerry lost

He habitually instills the sense with his statements that he's taking a long, long time to say almost nothing. Case in point: his statement on Bradley Manning's treatment in prison:

There are concerns about what is happening, but a strong argument is being made that they're trying to preserve his safety, they don't want him harming himself, and using his own clothing to hang himself, or do something like that," he said. "That's happened in prison before. I think it is possible to protect him, I think, and there are some legitimate reasons to believe that that may be true also. But I think that a lot of people are now reviewing this very, very closely, people have weighed in, myself included, I think that analyses are being made. There was a big article in the newspapers today examining it. And I'm convinced that there will be real scrutiny with respect to that issue.

YouTube Commenting: Epic Fail

Problem #1: They don't allow urls in the comments.

Problem #2: When you try to put one in, the comment fails and they don't tell you why. It's up to you to figure out that it wasn't a temporary error and dig through their help files to figure out what the problem is.

Apple trying to get multiple downloads

Not being able to download a file more than once isn't too big a deal if you're responsible about backups, at least if we're talking unDRMed media (putting a download-once limit on DRMed stuff is just obnoxious), but this would still be nice for iTunes users. The reason, though, that Apple is doing this is that it is really necessary for their vision of a post-PC future. Presently the need to backup makes the use of the PC a practical necessity. If they could institute some combination of cloud-based backups and multiple downloads, the PC could eventually be totally eliminated. I'm not saying I welcome this--actually, the prospect of a post-PC world run by Apple of all people terrifies me considering how restrictive they are--but it does make sense.

I love Disqus

I really like having all my comments on various sites in one place. It makes following discussions really easy. I have added Disqus comments on this blog as well, not that I get much in the way of commenters at this time. As a webmaster I particularly love the Twitter and Facebook integration, making it easy for anyone to comment without having to allow unregistered commenters (which I currently do since this blog has such minute traffic).

Wordpress.com leaves much to be desired

It's mystifying that the service is so popular considering that it is ridiculously locked-down* and upsells you on things that Blogger gives for free. No user-specified JavaScript, even in sidebar widgets (which means no Sitemeter, no Disqus, etc.), no editing templates, and of course no plugins. To edit CSS, you need to pay them $14.97 a year. To add a custom domain, you need to pay them $12 per year if you have the domain registered somewhere else and $17. If you want no ads on your blog, you need to pay them a whopping $29.97 a year. All of which come standard in Blogger; the ability to edit CSS has been there since at least 2003 (or was it 2004) when I started my first blog and the lack of ads has been there since shortly after Google bought them. And they've always let you add ads, something that Wordpress.com won't do no matter what you pay them (assuming you don't have a special elite account not available to the public).

Best to either use Blogger or do what I did and get a cheap webhosting account and run real Wordpress with fully editable themes, the ability to install new themes yourself, the ability to add JavaScript anywhere, and the ability to add plugins galore. The ability to install new themes is particularly important considering that Wordpress themes in general either a) suck or b) are appropriate only in very specific purposes. Finding a good general Wordpress theme is like looking for a diamond in the rough. The 106 free themes they allow you simply doesn't cut it.

*Speaking of locked down, way back when it first started I began the process of migrating to Wordpress.com from Blogger. I found a 3-column theme I liked, I think it was one of the Andreas ones, but the way the items were displayed on the left sidebar didn't match the way they were displayed on the right sidebar. I discovered a hack using a text-box that allowed me to make them match. Within an hour or two (!) the theme was altered so that my hack didn't work. Because of the timing, I believed, and still believe, that they saw what I did and changed the theme just to break my simple display hack. I immediately gave up my migration plans. That is a level of control-freakery I won't put up with.

Update: That last paragraph was written from memory. I have since managed to dig up a contemporaneous post I wrote on my Blogger blog (which is long since gone, as is the account it was on: thank you Internet Archive!). The post is copied below the fold:

New PC Demand in a slump

Tablets get the blame. I can understand tablets being the cause of not buying a second or a third laptop for the household, but delaying replacement of laptops strikes me as more likely to be a result of software not catching up with hardware development. What, exactly, is a three-year old laptop not going to be able to do for you? Hardcore gaming and serious video editing (even the iPad can now do casual video editing)? Those aren't things one generally does on a laptop to begin with (and the sort of people who buy $3000 laptops to do that probably are still swapping them out on schedule).

Government Shutdown Delayed

Agreeing to the two-week version of the Republican budget either means  one of two things: either that the Democrats are scared that a government shutdown will burn them or that they think a shutdown is inevitable and want to start by capitulating to the IMO unreasonable demand that a very short-term continuing resolution be a miniature version of their deviation from the status quo in order that they come out looking like the reasonable party when the shutdown happens. Of course this is all the Democrats fault for failing to pass a real budget in an election year and leaving it to the next, divided congress to handle it.

Well, I guess if the fight weren't about this it would be about the debt ceiling. That is Obama's fault. It makes no sense to approve the extension of the Bush tax cuts, thus denying the government more revenue that it would get automatically, without also getting an increase in the debt ceiling as well.

Free Kindle?

Okay, no one is apparently suggesting it would be truly free as in you go put it in your shopping cart for $0.00 and have it show up at your door a couple of days later. There is the possibility floated that you could get a free Kindle as part of an Amazon Prime subscription, which could make sense.  I still think it's more likely you'll get a very cheap Kindle with Amazon Prime. The problem with giving away physical goods for free hoping to make the money back with subscriptions or ads or book purchases or whatever is that people might take the physical good just because it's free and/or repurpose it. That's what happens with alternative newspapers, and they have built their business model around that, hoping that something will catch your eye from the bottom of the birdcage. I doubt that could work for the Kindle.

The idea of a free Kindle with the purchase of a bundle of books is an intriguing idea. Having to buy a whole bunch of books would prevent abuse by repurposers and it would aid in getting Kindle everywhere. Short of stuff like that, though, I don't see Kindle for less than $99 to non-Prime subscribers anytime soon. That seems like the magic price-point that they're looking for.

I had just moved to Chrome when...

I found the (mostly) stable version of Firefox 4 available for Ubuntu (excepting the official version with its hideous text display). Phew. Chrome's awesome-fast, but the bookmark interface sucks. And when I say sucks, I mean it is horrible. Netscape Communicator 4.06, released in August 1998, has an infinitely better interface (I have it running under Wine right now). Chrome a) won't let you drag the page your on onto the bookmark bar folder and open said folder to drop it anywhere you want in the folder. This is something I do all the time, as I like to have new Notable bookmarks at the top rather than the bottom. More than that, there is no way to make a bookmark below the top level (which includes all top-level bookmark bar folders, to be fair) without deleting any copies of said bookmark that might be hanging around. This means that if I want more than one copy of a bookmark, I have to open the damned bookmark manager. There's no keyboard shortcut to do that, which there was in Netscape 4.06 in 1998 and ever since, and the bookmark manager doesn't even support drag and drop copying. You have to copy and paste.

If you want Firefox 4 for Ubuntu...

forget about the Daily Builds PPA. Go with the Mozilla Team Firefox Next PPA. That will give you a much more stable beta. Plus you won't have to fool around with pinning Thunderbird in Synaptic to prevent it from updating to a daily build too.

What a travesty

84,000 websites were not only taken off the Internet by mistake, but redirected to a page that suggested that the sites contained child pornography. Incredible. I'm tempted to regret that a class action lawsuit for defamation or libel can't be brought against the feds over this. In lieu of that, Congress should hold hearings on this. Someone needs to get fired.