New Links

I've added a bevy of new links to the sidebar (if you can't see it, click on Home in the top bar). They are mainly various Open Source resources, including the unofficial LibreOffice web forums, which considering The Document Foundations unwillingness to provide a web forum itself, is something that the LibreOffice community should support. Mozilla (Firefox, Thunderbird, etc.) users had to create their own web forums too in the form of mozillaZine.

Giganews sued

The lawsuit looks like bull to me (admittedly based on a TorrentFreak article), but this isn't exactly shocking. Giganews, and pretty much all other massive bandwidth Usenet providers, real business is helping users pirate content, though done in a way that still provides them safe harbor cover. Come on, anyone with any plan beyond the $4.99 plan is going to be used for binaries (and I'd be shocked into catatonia if they were getting most of their money from that plan), and what binary files would anyone want to download from Usenet? It's an incredible kludgy way to share files. The answer is: things that would get taken down or get you sued if they were distributed over less complicated and error-prone channels, i.e., pirated material (and porn, but the most of that is pirated too).

Look, any attempt to shut them down or hold them responsible would set a horrible precedent that would have a chilling effect on Internet freedom for years to come, but let's call a spade a spade.

Rental store installed spyware on laptop

It even took pictures through the webcam without the renters knowledge and consent. This really is an outrageous invasion of privacy, whatever the justifications offered. Looks like my mother wasn't being excessively cautious when she asked me to physically disable her rented laptop's camera (I cut out a piece of black paper from an envelope and taped it over the camera using transparent tape).

Steve Gibson said a little while ago on Security Now being recorded right now that laptop camera's ought to have a physical shutter that the user must open and close manually. I second that. But what about the microphone? Would a shutter work for that or is that something no one can fix without cracking the laptop case? It doesn't seem that the microphone was used in this case--maybe that would've broken wiretapping laws--but built-in microphones are even more of a privacy risk both inherently and because they are harder to completely thwart.

New Yahoo Mail

Spending a few minutes on it, I think it's an improvement. It has all the new features you've come to expect from Yahoo Mail but finally looks un-OddPosty and like a more conventional webmail service. It's a good fusion. The ads are also less obnoxious than before, bringing Yahoo to the same level as the new Hotmail (though both are still quite obnoxious--AdBlocker is still justified IMHO).

I'm still sticking with Gmail, though, for a plethora of reasons. My backup mail, also, will continue to be Hotmail, mainly because Yahoo continues to lack one crucial feature: the ability to keep HTTPS on throughout the session. This is particularly important because I like to POP all my Gmail to my backup account and I'm not about to send my Gmail password over plaintext.

Whither OpenOffice?

Now that Oracle has (after the introduction of LibreOffice and The Document Foundation) decided to make OpenOffice a community-based project, what will happen in the world free StarOffice derivatives? I can see three possibilities:

1. OpenOffice successfully transfers to The Document Foundation and LibreOffice is merged back into OpenOffice under the OpenOffice name. I strongly suspect that The Document Foundation would undergo major changes in that case.


2. OpenOffice becomes its own successful project. In that case, LibreOffice and The Document Foundation die on the vine. Not only would the advantage of the OpenOffice name be nearly insurmountable, the LibreOffice community is mired in excessive open source zeal and geek elitism (the bitter opposition by a large segment of said community to the introduction of web forums--because "mailing lists are better"--is only one example of that). Reading the LibreOffice lists, one would never guess that the overwhelming majority of OpenOffice downloads are for Windows. Linux comes in third behind Mac OS X and far, far, far behind Windows. And if you think that's just because Linux users have all gone to LibreOffice, think again (web snapshot for June of last year, pre-LibreOffice).


3. Oracle manages to hamstring community-driven OpenOffice somehow. In that case LibreOffice either gets its act together, or it doesn't. If it does, it could supplant OpenOffice. Otherwise, free Star Office-derivatives will languish.

Options 1 and 2 seem the most likely. A fourth possibility is that The Document Foundation receives the OpenOffice brand and decides to kill it. That is too stupid to consider.

Update: A commenter made a good point below about the reliability of the usage statistic:

Your figure for how many people use OpenOffice is bogus. Linux users get their copy of OpenOffice bundled in their distro; they don't need to download it. So unless you throw in all the copies distributed via Linux distros, your figures mean nothing.

Okay, so the ~90% OpenOffice.org for Windows download figure doesn't reflect the overall share of Windows OpenOffice.org. It does still show that there are a huge number of OpenOffice.org Windows users even if we can't be sure how much of the OpenOffice.org install base they represent.

Never upgrade an Operating System

Always do a fresh install. Or so they say. I should have listened. Instead, I decided to upgrade Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04 with the built-in tool and it's been a disaster. First, it crashed half-way through and wouldn't let me back into the GUI. That's okay, I said: I'll just run the command-line upgrade utility. That worked, but the install is totally messed up. Even in "Ubuntu Classic (with no effects)" I'm getting all kinds of graphical anomalies. I'll do a fresh install from scratch. My only question is whether I'll install 11.04 again or go back to 10.10.

Upgrading wasn't really necessary either. I already have LibreOffice and Firefox 4 via PPAs and I wouldn't want Unity even if my current machine wasn't too antiquate to run it.

Update: I'm reinstalling 10.10. 11.04 simply doesn't work right with my hardware. Actually, my modern Laptop won't even boot the CD, which coupled with the video problems on my very old IBM Pentium 4 tells me that Natty Narwhal simply isn't ready for prime time. Not surprising considering that they decided to foist Unity, a Desktop Environment they made from scratch and that has no following, on everyone in this release. Making the release actually work is apparently a secondary concern.

Speaking of Thunderbird: There's an easier way to backup

Skip the copying to local steps until you actually need to restore the mail. Just tar or zip the whole backup profile after the download has finished and keep the archive for later. Then when you need it, unzip it, replace your current backup profile directory with what you just unzipped, and open Thunderbird. Since you last closed Thunderbird in offline mode it should still be in offline mode, so Use Profile Manager to start the Backup profile in offline mode and you shouldn't have a problem viewing and copying your old emails without Thunderbird trying to sync with whatever's on the IMAP server now. Until they kill Profile Manager in Thunderbird, that is. Then you'll need the standalone Profile Manager app as well.

What is Mozilla thinking?

They seem to be planning to kill off the Profile Manager feature quite soon. Idiots. Hopefully Thunderbird won't face the same fate in the near future, as that is where I use Profile Manager more (due to my use of a backup profile). Maybe that'll be the silver lining to their sidelining of Thunderbird (another dubious decision).

 

This should put an end to the birther pseudo-controversy

Of course it won't. They'll point out that the long-form birth certificate is obviously a photocopy (which it says on the document), will demand that the original be released, will ask what was on the other page that the curve in the image indicates is there, will find some clerical error to nitpick about, and in the last analysis will say: "He's the most powerful man in the world. Of course he can forge a birth certificate!"

Obviously the reason that Obama stooped to throw the crazies a bone is because Donald Trump took up their cause and made it mainstream. I strongly suspect that this will not be the end of it. Perhaps it will, though, push it back into the right-wing fringes where it belongs.

Update: See what I mean?

If I were British, I'd vote no on the Alternative Vote

I was always skeptical about it. It was rather difficult to find out just what was being proposed. This video does was the first clear explanation how it works (which is confirmed by the BBC, though the video oversimplifies things by having all the Greens put the Lib-Dems as their first choice, etc.), including the anomalous results that it can produce. Even if the possibility of actually hurting a candidate by putting them first is overstated, the system is still too complicated and has an element of unpredictability in it.

Here's what I mean: plurality voting, called First Past the Post in the UK, is like a two dimensional colored block puzzle where you try to make blocks disappear by pushing them around on a flat plane lining them up three or more at a time to make them vanish without being left with just one or two of any color. The Alternative vote would be a three dimensional version of that game where if you make blocks disappear on the bottom it can set off a chain reaction as higher blocks fall into the empty spaces forming rows of their own and disappearing leading to more blocks falling. That is difficult to predict. But in this case it's impossible for anyone to predict because the higher blocks represent other people's votes and are protected by ballot secrecy.

Don't be nice about WordPress Theme Ratings

There's an enormous sea of WordPress themes, and most of them are (let's be honest) dreck. The rating system doesn't do nearly enough to navigate said ocean as it is. By all means, don't be afraid to give one and two star ratings when they're deserved.

One of the greatest things about WordPress.org...

is the enormous plug-in ecosystem. Latest example: I wanted a way to backup and reimport my linklist (which I just added). I figured out how, using a direct link to the OPML file and the default Blogroll importer plugin, but that plugin blows away the categories. Since WordPress doesn't enable you to even add categories to links in batches, that's a real problem. Enter Import Blogroll With Categories. It solves the problem perfectly, even adding said cryptic link to the OPML file to the Links category in the WordPress control panel's sidebar.

I finally shifted the menu buttons

As you no doubt know if you've ever used Ubuntu Linux, they have a weird setup by default where the close, minimize, and maximize buttons on every standard window are in the upper-left corner instead of the upper-right. By the time I found out how to change that, I had already gotten used to that button layout. But now that I'm using Windows occasionally I find switching between the button layouts to be confusing, so I made them standard.

The New York Times doesn't allow comments on letters

I find that strange. Why not allow people to respond to other reader's responses to Times articles. Considering that comments are hidden from readers by default when they are allowed, this seems only reasonable and in no way disruptive.

This was prompted by this letter from a Catholic priest criticizing Gail Collins' recent column on Planned Parenthood funding. The letter itself is representative of how people of his perspective view the matter, but his criticism of Collins' is unjust. I actually think that both the column and the letter are right, to a certain degree. Undoubtedly, the first and foremost reason for the crusade to defund Planned Parenthood is because the anti-abortion activists view it as morally equivalent to the Third Reich (seriously, Godwin's Law is fulfilled every five minutes, or less, in that world). Giving money to Hitler is naturally unacceptable whatever Hitler wants to do with it.

Second is the dubious claim the writer mentions about how giving Planned Parenthood money for contraceptives, etc., increases subsidy for abortion (which assumes that the federal money will not be replaced with increased donations and that PP or donors would subsidize abortion less rather than let contraception and other things be subsidizes less, which contradicts their own demonization of the organization). Ironically, this contradicts the way the good Monsignor's own Church's organizations get money from the government without violating the establishment clause.Third, though, is the Catholic prohibition on contraception and the Evangelical opposition to anything that makes what they deem to be sexual immorality easier.

That's for the activists. For establishment Republican politicians, they pick fights on things like this to keep pro-lifers on the reservation after more than 30 years of doing uncommonly close to nothing on the issue (including thirty-three years of having seven or more Republican justices on the Supreme Court). Even if they didn't get even the Planned Parenthood funding cut, they can at least use the Democrat's fighting to defend it as a means of renewed demonization of them on this issue.