K-Squared Ramblings

Firefox Fifty Million!

Yes, you heard right: Firefox achieved 50,000,000 downloads today. (That’s full downloads since 1.0 was released, and no, it’s not artificially inflated with stats from auto-updates, so leave the conspiracy theories at home.)

Not bad for a spinoff of a spinoff of a company all-but killed off by the world’s most powerful software company, is it?

Congratulations to the “Little Browser That Could” on doing the impossible! Let’s keep this momentum going for 1.1 and 2.0!

In the past week we’ve had major milestones for Opera (massive response to Opera 8), Safari (passing Acid2 and releasing 2.0) and now Firefox. Heck, even IE finally committed to PNG alpha transparency. It’s nice to see the web browser field getting active again.

Surviror: Mac OS X

In checking my pre-order status for Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, I noticed this customer recommendation:

I assumed it was yet another book about the OS timed to come out just as people would be interested. No, it’s the 1982 rock album by Survivor, featuring the well-known Rocky III theme…which has now lodged itself firmly in my head.

Rogues, Not Rouge

This week’s issue of The Flash featured brief introductions to all of the reformed Rogues. The inclusion of Magenta on that team got me to thinking: she’s the only woman on either of the two Rogue teams. She’s also one of only three who have ever been part of the Rogues Gallery. Of the other two, Golden Glider had an in—two, really: her brother and her lover were both members of the group—and Blacksmith actually had to form her own team.

Still, they’re not doing so bad in proportion. It turns out there just aren’t very many female villains in Keystone and Central City. I’ve got 72 villain profiles on my site right now, not counting teams, and just 7 solo women. (8 if you count the second version of Colonel Computron, but who can tell under all that?) By my reckoning 19 villains have been members of the Rogues proper. (That’s counting legacy villains, like the original and replacement Trickster, both times, and counting all of Blacksmith’s team.) 3/19 is roughly 16%, and even 8/72 is roughly 11%, so women are actually represented a bit more in the Rogues than in the general Flash villain population.

Invisible Grub Boot Menu

I recently upgraded my computer’s motherboard and processor, and spent the next few days trying to work out which glitches were hardware related and which were coincidental. One problem I had was that the GRUB bootloader menu would not appear when the computer started. It was clearly there. It would boot to the default operating system after 10 seconds. If I hit an arrow key it would stop and wait for me to choose an OS. It just didn’t show up. All I got was a black screen with a cursor in the upper left corner.

On top of that, when Linux started booting, the screen was messed up as if the character set had been run through a meat grinder. You could tell what the letters were, but there was a ton of extra garbage. Then, when init set the character set, the gibberish cleared up and the screen looked normal again.

I had been dealing with other problems that looked like video card or driver issues, but I eventually realized that the problem had nothing to do with the hardware upgrade.

Read the rest of this entry »

Snow-capped mountains of L.A.

As long as I’m debunking myths about Southern California, check out this picture of the Los Angeles skyline:

Granted, I doubt it looks like this very often (the mountains only get snow in winter, and you can only see them like this on a clear day). Source: public domain photo on Wikipedia.

Update: I see this post is getting a lot of attention with the recent snowstorms. I’ve posted a panorama photo of almost the entire mountain range from January 2008.

Yes, it does rain in L.A.

An intense deluge woke us up briefly around 5:00 this morning. I think I was awake enough to say “Damn!” and fall back asleep. It reminded me of something that’s been bugging me.

I looked through the first few pages of Otherworld #2 in the comic store yesterday. As at the end of the first issue, one character made a big deal about how it never rains in L.A.

Admittedly, people drive as if it were true. It starts drizzling, and people freak out. Three days of rain is billed as Stormwatch 2005 on the TV news. Some years we don’t get much rain at all.

But every 7 or 8 years, we get drenched.

I’ve heard people cite this year’s near-record rainfall as an example of the extreme weather that climate models predict for global warming. While I do think there are plenty of valid examples, this isn’t one of them. We got just as much rain in 1997—eight years ago—when the UCI campus flooded, stairs turned into waterfalls, streets and underpasses became rivers, and one student infamously bodysurfed naked down the hill next to the Student Center. (A yearbook(?) ad later remarked, “Who says nothing happens in Irvine?”) We got nearly enough rain two years before that. I knew someone from Vermont who brought friends out to visit during the heaviest period of rain. They got their preconceptions handed to them.

Every once in a while the cycle skips. Those skips coincide suspiciously with droughts. I remember tons of rain and the occasional hailstorm in the early 1980s, then it was all dry until 1995.

The thing is, while a very wet winter is uncommon for Southern California, it’s not unusual. In fact, it’s very regular. I recommend looking up El Niño as a starting point.

Acid2: And the Winner is…

Dave Hyatt has succeeded in making Safari pass the Acid2 test. (And on the eve of Mac OS X Tiger’s release, too!)

No word on when the fixed version will make it into users’ hands (probably with the first update to Tiger), but he’s posted all the patches for KHTML, so the Konqueror team can start working the fixes back into the main codebase.

Congratulations, Dave!

Hawaii’s East Coast

We didn’t get to see much of the Hilo side of the island. Our last day there, we checked out of the hotel and just started driving, figuring we’d just see how far we could get before turning back to make our flight. We did actually make it to Hilo itself—just in time to turn around. (It was a Sunday anyway, and supposedly there isn’t much open in Hilo on Sundays.)

When we first crossed through Waimea to Hamakua, we took a side trip north to the lookout for Waipio Valley. The valley itself is unreachable without 4-wheel drive (the road has a 25% grade), but the view from the lookout was incredible:

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Opera Swim Cut Short

Let me tell you, those PR folks at Opera know how to set up a publicity stunt.

In a “dramatic” update to the saga, Opera’s CEO won’t finish swimming to America after all, as his PR manager’s raft deflated an hour into the day’s swim.

Some choice quotes:

“As much as I don’t want to talk behind a colleague’s back, there is no doubt that we would never have let Eskil assist Jon in the raft had we known he can neither swim nor read maps,” says an embarrassed Tor Odland, Opera’s Communications Director. “I feel partly responsible for letting Jon down, as he cannot possibly continue without the raft.” [emphasis added]

A local farmer spotted the drama from his kitchen window and took surprisingly sharp photos with a remarkably powerful telescopic lens.

“And my mother [in Iceland] will be so disappointed when I call and tell her that I won’t be stopping by for hot chocolate after all.”

The tongue-in-cheek tone of the whole thing is right up there with the Opera Bork Edition that translated the MSN website into the Swedish Chef’s unique form of gibberish. That was to point out the ridiculousness of MSN singling out visitors using Opera and sending them a broken—or perhaps we should say borken—page.

It’s kind of funny how Opera can get away with stunts like this. Microsoft or Apple would be embarrassed to even consider it, and Mozilla wouldn’t dare. These days Mozilla/Firefox is too busy fighting uphill for respect. They wouldn’t risk sanctioning the “Always use Protection” poster, and they wouldn’t try something this wacky. Whatever happened to the days when the IE team deposited a big blue “e” on Netscape’s front lawn?

Dollar coins: Take 3

No one liked Susan B. Anthony dollars. “Gold” dollars all but vanished from circulation, as far as I can see (I can’t remember the last time I saw one that wasn’t change from a vending machine.) And while CNN/Money seems skeptical, Congress wants to try for another dollar coin. The catch? Collectability. Modeled after the state quarter series, they’ll release four Presidents a year, in historical order.

OK, it could work. But I have yet to see any of this year’s crop of commemmorative nickels, and I’m not even sure I’ve seen all of 2004’s quarters, never mind any from 2005.

Then there’s the matter of living people:

When the time comes to honor contemporary presidents, such as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their successors, their likenesses are to be minted whether they are living or dead.

That means by 2018 or so — when Bush and Clinton would be in their early 70s — the United States could break a long-standing tradition that money only honors the deceased.

I had thought this was codified somewhere, but I may be confusing the issue with postage stamps. The important part is keeping current government figures off of the money (too monarchist), but I’m not exactly thrilled about the precedent.

Of course, the real question is this: Why hasn’t the dollar coin caught on? I remember an Australian grumbling about American currency and how “you can have a pocket full of coins and have nothing.” Admittedly Australian currency no longer uses $1 bills (coins go from 5¢ to $2 and bills from $5 to $100), but they had a point: A pocket full of £1, 1€ or even AU $2 coins can buy a lot more than the same pocket full of quarters and dimes.

Free Comic Book Day Next Weekend

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.

GPL Victorious Again

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?

Opera CEO All Wet

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.

Simple Browser Categorization

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.

Tag plugin test

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. Read the rest of this entry »