Monthly Archives: April 2005

Free Comic Book Day Next Weekend

Posted on April 27, 2005 by Kelson

[Free Comic Book Day]I just realized I’d completely forgotten about Free Comic Book Day, which is coming up in just 10 days: Saturday, May 7.

This year’s books include the usual big names. DC’s got Batman Strikes!, Marvel’s got a team-up book, Archie’s got Betty and Veronica, Dark Horse has a Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith tie-in, etc. Plus there’s another dozen and a half small-press books. It looks like a pretty good round-up of genres, too.

The purpose of FCBD is to introduce people to comics. A lot of people still think comics are just for kids, or just super-heroes, or unsuitable for kids, etc. A lot of people don’t know where to find comics. (Check out the store locator if you fall into this group.) And a lot of people just don’t want to spend $3.00 for a 24-page comic book when they could spend it on renting a movie, or saving up for a video game, or—let’s face it—lunch. The promo books put out for Free Comic Book day are a sampler, ranging from kid-friendly super-heroes, teen dramas, and Disney cartoons to the more story– or art-driven books aimed at adults. In other words: something for everyone.

Posted in Comics | Tagged | Leave a comment

GPL Victorious Again

Posted on April 26, 2005 by Kelson

The gpl-violations.org project has scored another victory, this time against Fortinet, whom they accused of not only violating the GPL (by using GPL’ed source code without publicly releasing their changes) but actually trying to hide that usage with encryption.

Edit (I hit “publish” too soon!): They settled out of court, with Fortinet agreeing to make the source code available for their customized Linux kernel and other GPL’ed software they snurched from other projects, and to include the GPL in their licensing terms.

This is the latest in a string of victories for the gpl-violations.org project. Since starting the project in 2004, Welte has negotiated more than 30 out-of-court settlements.

But then, “the GPL has never been tested in court,” right?

Posted in Linux | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Opera CEO All Wet

Posted on April 25, 2005 by Kelson

[Opera Logo]Sorry for the misleading title, it’s sort of an homage to CNET’s recent coverage of Firefox.*

Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner, excited by the response to Opera 8.0, promised to swim from Norway to the US if Opera 8.0 managed 1 million downloads in 4 days. (By comparison, Firefox 1.0 managed 1 million in less than a day, and hit 2.5 million by the end of day 2.

Well, they did it, and von Tetzchner has donned a wet suit.

Tetzchner entered the “freezing Oslo fjord” on Monday and started swimming toward the United States, the company said. Opera’s public relations manager, Eskil Sivertsen, is rowing an inflatable boat alongside Tetzchner “as an act of guilt after making the CEO’s statement public,” according to the Opera Web site.

Full details, photos, and a map are at Opera.com/swim. [archive.org]

*Things like “Mozilla flaws could allow attacks, data access” which didn’t just bury but actually omitted the fact that a fixed version had been released three days earlier, and that the disclosure was made as part of the release. The second-to-last sentence, “All versions of Mozilla Suite prior to version 1.7.7 and all versions of Firefox prior to 1.0.3 are vulnerable.” sort of hints at it, if you know that these are the newest versions, and if you don’t misread it as “through” instead of “prior to.” And the original article on the Opera swim promise misstated the Firefox download numbers using one of the preview releases instead of the big launch, claiming it took 5 days to reach 1 million. They’ve “corrected” it to “within days,” which is technically true—but wouldn’t “in less than a day” be more accurate and better convey the contrast? Compare this to other articles from last week like “Apple patches iSync flaw” and “RealNetworks fixes ‘highly critical’ flaw” and you have to wonder whether there’s a misinformation campaign some editorial bias involved.

Posted in Opera | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Simple Browser Categorization

Posted on April 24, 2005 by Kelson

Sometimes you want to know exactly what software people (or bots) are using to view your website. Sometimes all you want to know is which rendering engine’s quirks you need to cater to. To that end, I have here the ultra-simple browser detection algorithm. Just check the User-Agent string for each of the following words, in order:

  1. Opera — they spoof IE by default, so check here first. If they ever change this to something else, you’ll be glad you started here.
  2. KHTML — this will catch Safari, Omniweb and Konqueror. They mention Gecko, so if you need to treat them differently, check for KHTML first.
  3. Gecko — this will catch Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, Netscape 6+, etc.
  4. MSIE — this should Internet Explorer and anything else that uses its engine.
  5. bot, spider, crawler, or compatible — filter out robots and anything unknown.
  6. Mozilla — just about everyone uses Mozilla in their UA string these days, but the rules above should filter most of them out and leave only old-school Netscape.

Of course, Mozilla, Opera and Safari have put much more effort than IE into following the standards, so most of the time you can write your code using the spec and just build in work-arounds. The way I look at it, there are three main categories:

  1. Standards-compliant(ish) browsers: Gecko, Opera, KHTML
  2. MSIE
  3. Everything else

I write for group 1, work-around for group 2 (and sometimes other browsers in group 1), and figure that group 3 (with the exception of Netscape 4, which has a tendency to do things like make links unclickable or hide entire chunks of the page if it doesn’t like your CSS) should at least be able to figure out how the text and graphics break down. It may not look perfect in randombrowser, but it should at least be comprehensible.

Posted in Web Design | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Tag plugin test

Posted on April 22, 2005 by Kelson

I’ve been experimenting with tags, particularly aimed at Technorati, and I rather like being able to add ad-hoc categories and (I hope) increase the visibility of some posts. I’ve rigged up some style rules (that so far only work in Gecko and KHTML-based browsers, since they rely on the substring attribute selector from CSS3 and no one else has implemented that yet), but typing out <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/whatever" rel="tag">whatever</a> over and over has gotten tiresome. Enter Bunny’s Technorati Tags, which automatically handles them using WordPress’ extensible custom fields. No muss, no fuss, just type in the words in another form field.

One thing I haven’t figured out yet: since the list is separated by spaces, how do you specify a multi-word tag like “Internet Explorer”?

To be honest, this post only exists because I want to test it, and because there seems to be a tradition of “I just installed this neat new plugin” posts. Continue reading →

Posted in Site Updates | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Alpha PNG in IE7!

Posted on April 22, 2005 by Kelson

Web designers have clamored for it for years, since they saw what you could do with PNG images’ multi-level transparency (now available in every major browser except Internet Explorer, and several minor ones). It’s been speculated on for months, and rumored for several weeks.

And now, the wait is over. Microsoft has confirmed a few details about IE7 beta 1:

Support the alpha channel in PNG images. We’ve actually had this on our radar for a long time, and have had it supported in the code for a while now. We have certainly heard the clear feedback from the web design community that per-pixel alpha is a really important feature.

Woo hoo!

Posted in Browsers, Web Design | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

MT-Blacklist Author Joe-Jobbed

Posted on April 21, 2005 by Kelson

As a WordPress user I haven’t had much first-hand experience with MT-Blacklist (a system for combatting comment spam on Movable Type, though the data has been adapted for use on other toolkits), but it was enough to be suspicious when I found this in my inbox:
Continue reading →

Posted in Spam | 8 Comments

Double fill-in

Posted on April 21, 2005 by Kelson

I remember reading a post a while back where someone looked at one of those “personals” spams—the ones that claim some sexy girl has seen your profile and wants to *ahem* “meet” you, and the variations that claim the rendezvous has already been arranged. Whoever it was noticed that one message used four or five names for the same (probably fictitious) woman.

We get a lot of these in some of our spamtraps, and I would’ve just skimmed right by this one except that they’ve upped the ante with two temptresses named Erika & Julia. In fact, that’s exactly how they were referred to every single time, even the line about how you can “get a better look at her beautiful body before you head over.”

Wait a minute. “Her body, ” singular? I thought this was two girls? Are they conjoined twins? Do they psychically share the same mind? Is Erika&Julia sort of a Samneric thing? And why does the message quote someone named Janice? Is she trying to make her profile more attractive by making men anticipate attending to the needs of two women instead of one? I’m confused, and that spamtrap is going to be very disappointed. ;-)

Posted in Spam | 1 Comment

Adobe/Macromedia FAQ Translated

Posted on April 21, 2005 by Kelson

Daring Fireball has “translated” the Adobe/Macromedia merger FAQ from marketese into plain English. Worth a read.

Posted in Computers/Internet, Humor | Tagged , | Leave a comment

Perspective on the browser wars

Posted on April 21, 2005 by Kelson

At the end of a post on SSL/TLS and just how much security a “secure” site really gives you, Eric Lawrence of IEBlog posted an interesting thought:

The so-called “browser wars” have fundamentally changed. It’s no longer Microsoft vs. Mozilla vs. Opera et all. Now it’s the “good guys” vs. the “bad guys.” The “bad guys” are the phishers, malware distributors, and other miscellaneous crooks looking for a quick score at the expense of the browsing public.

We’re all in this together.

I’m not sure I agree entirely. It’s more like a second war has started, one in which former enemies are (or at least should be) allies. I do still think competition is necessary, as evidenced by Microsoft’s sudden reversal on updating IE once Firefox became popular—but more cooperation on security may be something MS/Moz/Opera/Apple should consider.

Posted in Browsers | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment