Search Results: "ana"

20 January 2006

Dan Weber: DWeb's guide to cleaning shoes

Today I was running out the door chasing the dog. The dog saw a person walking on the street and ran up to see her. I managed to get a hold on the dog and bring her home, but on the way back, theres this mini slope. Of course I'm bringing dog back inside and didn't think of this and get my sneakers covered in mud as there is a big ditch at the bottom. :(

So here's my instructions on washing shoes:

- First toss them in the washing machine on a low water level setting. Add in a bit of laundry detergent to help get the stink and mud out.
- Next take them out and stuff them with newspaper. Don't let the chunks of newspaper be too thick or it will not absorb as well. Leave newspaper in both shoes for 30-45 minutes.
- Now its time to let them air dry. The best approach is to put a fan in front of them. The more power the faster they dry. Right where I live right now, its the middle of a heat wave. So I realized the big air conditioning fan and motor outside is going around 24/7 and with huge amounts of hot air. If you take the latter approach, the shoes are usually dry with 1.5-2 hours, especially since it runs at least 10000 rpm. Otherwise the in house approach may take 4-6 hours. Also note that the air blown out from under your refrigerator is also good.

So in under 3 hours you can have your shoes squeaky clean with a nice smell, and be dry.

Clint Adams: pinga pongalo

Andres, Ari really likes ping-pong balls.

19 January 2006

Simon Law: WvDial 1.55

My day at the office has been pretty grand. I got to talk with a whole bunch of people about their problems and promised to look into some of them. Then I talked to someone about sales and marketting. Then I talked to Chris and we struggled with PHP. And finally, a chat with Tim about release management. It was like a day at the Montr al office, but with people who are less bouncy. I tried to smile at people and make them feel happier, at which I think I was mildly successful. Perhaps my motivational poster will help? I had some tasty ph for lunch at Ph Vi t which is a Vietnamese restaurant run by Cantonese people. It is also within walking distance of the office. Their soup was rather filling for a small portion and they had delicious spring rolls. Alas, they are not UltimateSpringRolls, but one can't expect to find those everywhere. A special bonus was that I got to talk with Deidra, in between happy bites of noodles and soup. It is now late and I guess I should be heading out. I was hoping to hang out with people after work, but they seem to have gone home. Oh well. So to pass the time, I released WvDial 1.55. Hurray!

Simon Law: lists.nit.ca

I suppose it would be a good time to mention that http://open.nit.ca is up and running on a nice new server in Montr al. That's the website that hosts all of NITI's free software offerings. About two months ago, our mailing lists were eaten by a disk failure. We've managed to get the archives back, from our subscription lists are all gone. But I've got them up and running now, on GNU Mailman no less, and have subscribed some people to them. They have doubtlessly noticed this because spammers have been hitting two of our mailing lists like crazy. After going into denial for a while, I have decided that I ought to moderate these posts. Oh hey. The new XPLC got into Debian. Too bad we realised that we need to kick in another change soon. Ah well. I look forward to pushing out a WvDial release over the holidays, as it really needs to get out the door now.

David Pashley: Mozilla causing XSS in Livejournal

As mentioned in my last entry, Livejournal have changed their url scheme to get around a problem in mozilla. The trouble is down to the -moz-binding CSS property. I'll repost a copy of the short lived posting to the lj_dev community earlier.
Discussing the URL Change As we recently announced in [info]news, we have changed the canonical URL of most journal, community, and syndicated content. While we did offer subdomains to Paid users in the past, this is now the canonical URL that we will link and redirect to for all journals. However, all communities are located at http://community.livejournal.com/username and syndicated accounts at http://syndicated.livejournal.com/username. Due to the way certain proxy servers are configured, and the fact that the HTTP RFC prohibits it, the canonical URL for journals with a username starting with an underscore will be http://users.livejournal.com/username. We are however offering a free rename if you fall into this group. So now the technical side of all of this and why it was a required change; bear with me as its 3am my time and I'm sitting in John F. Kennedy Airport after a five hour flight. Late last week we become aware that it was possible to use the "-moz-binding" CSS attribute within Mozilla and Mozilla Firefox to execute arbitrary offsite JavaScript. As this attribute is designed to allow attaching an XBL transform and JavaScript to any node within the DOM, it is quite easy to use in a malicious fashion. We immediately altered our cleaner to strip this attribute from entries and comments, though also realized that wasn't even half the battle. As we allow custom CSS in many of our styles, as well as the ability to link to an external stylesheet in a variety of fashions, it was quite possible to take advantage of this exploit and hijack the session cookie of any user who views your journal. As we, along with many other sites, used one cookie to authenticate a user, this cookie was quite powerful if stolen. If the user had not chosen to bind their cookie to their IP address, a malicious user could steal it, login as that user, deface the account and SPAM with it, as well as modify that user's style to include the exploit thus causing this problem to spread much like a virus. Borrowing the idea from another development team within Six Apart, we decided we needed to break our cookies into three categories. One cookie would be our application management cookie, this cookie would only be accessible on www.livejournal.com where we will not display untrusted content. A second cookie will be accessible on all subdomains of livejournal.com, though it only will say if you are logged in or not; it is solely for optimization. We then will issue one cookie for each journal you visit. This cookie will be only accessible on username.livejournal.com or community.livejournal.com/username as it is limited to a single journal. This cookie will only grant you the permission to read protected entries and post in the particular journal. This means that if the journal owner steals your cookie, they will be able to do nothing more than view their journal and comment upon it as if they are you. In the end you will have n+2 cookies, with n being the number of journals you visit. Due to the fact that we cannot clean every external CSS stylesheet linked to every time we generate a journal page, this change is required. While it does not fully protect us from some new cross site scripting vulnerability that can be exploited via entries or comments, they are much easier to block, patch, and recover from quickly. With Mozilla deciding to allow the execution of arbitrary JavaScript via CSS, there is no other viable solution than the one we have undertaken. We developed a plan to phase all of this in over the next week, URL change first and then followed by the cookie change, though this morning we were made aware that this was being actively exploited. As such we took our week time line and shortened it to about twelve hours. While URLs have been changed at this time, our cookie handling change has not yet happened. This should however be expected to take place within the next day or two as well as various other cleanups and fixing bugs we've already encountered. Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions and open a support request if you find a bug or encounter a problem. Sorry all of this came with just about zero warning, but in the end we could not wait longer to fix this problem.
Thanks to Daniel Silverstone for providing me with a cache copy of the text.

David Pashley: Unintended Consequences of Technology

I've been meaning to post this for a couple of days. I discovered a rather unintended and quite unexpected consequence of using a piece of software. At work I use Workrave to enforce breaks from the computer. For those that have never used it, workrave is a little gnome applet that monitors your keyboard and mouse usage and after about an hour of work locks your screen and gives you a 10 minute break with a few exercises to reduce RSI. It also gives you microbreaks of 20 seconds every 3 minutes of work, so you can look away from the screen, stretch, whatever.. I should point out that it isn't 20 seconds every 3 wallclock minutes, but 3 minutes of using the mouse/keyboard and isn't quite as intrusive as it sounds. I get to rest my eyes, prevent RSI annd take breaks. This sounds like exactly the thing Workrave was written for. So what is unintended? It turns out that the 20 seconds micro-break is just the right amount of time to have a drink of water or get up and fill my glass if it's empty. Before I would forget to fill my glass up, but now I have time where I can't do anything on the computer. In the 30 minutes since I got in to the office and started writing this entry I've had two micro-breaks and drunk a pint of water. Workrave has managed to increase my water intake during the day and as a result the number of toilet breaks. :) I notice LiveJournal have enforced http://<username>.livejournal.com/ url scheme now to prevent cross-site scripting attacks where people were stealling session cookies and gaining access to accounts. Not sure what the exact problem was, but I know of several attacks over the last week by one group of scriptkiddies. Update: Appears the problem was in firefox. Explaination here. Update: Nope, they pulled it. Basically mozilla allows you to execute javascript via CSS stylesheets. I'll update with any further URLs as they become available.

David Pashley: I had an epiphany in the shower

About a year ago I had a problem with udev crashing during startup on my powerpc box. Somehow I managed to muddle on with this problem, probably by not rebooting the box. :) Last summer I had to reoot it again so I did a bit more research and discovered that udev was trying to looking up the nvram group, not finding it in /etc/group and then trying ldap, which, of course, failed because we have no networking yet. Adding the group fixed the bug and filed a bug against udev saying that udev should add any groups it used. Carrying out further debugging revealed that the crash was during nss_wins. The general order of events were:
  1. udev looks up a user or group.
  2. Group doesn't exist in compat.
  3. Lookup in ldap.
  4. Ldap attempts to resolve the name of the ldap server or client. (server is 127.0.0.1 so confused about this point.)
  5. Network and/or dns server isn't up so dns fails fails.
  6. Attempts to look up host in wins.
  7. udevstart crashes.
I didn't have time to debug this any further and proceeded to forget the problem, but last night my fileserver started having the same problem. Removing ldap from passwd, group and shadow resolved the udev problem, but then I didn't have any users. Late last night I booted without ldap and then changed nsswitch.conf to add ldap, and went to bed. This morning I had an epiphany in the shower. Not only did I remember what the bug was, but also a sensible workaround. The problem wasn't with the passwd et al lines, but the hosts line. I did have 
hosts: files dns mdns wins
The solution is to return if dns isn't available and changed the line to: 
hosts: files dns [UNAVAIL=return] mdns wins
Now all I need to do is to debug nss_wins and get to the bottom of the crash. It might be worth filing a bug against nss_ldap for trying to do a lookup against an ip address.

Clint Adams: Not adjusted for inflation

Twice upon a time, there was a corporation called Company B. Ironically, their bugle player quit two days before the beginning of this story. Two days after the bugle player quit, something sinister was happening at Company B. To better understand it, we need to go back in time a bit. So this next part happens well before the beginning of the story. Once upon a time, Company B was run by a middle-management team known as Team Alfalfa. These guys were young and na ve and inexperienced, but idealistic and somewhat morally pure. They certainly didn't expect the bugle player to quit. They were surprised by almost every one of the things to come. When they hired a Belarussian, they were surprised when he quit shortly thereafter and moved to Hampshire County in Massachusetts. They were surprised when the owners of Company B hired Team Buckwheat. Team Buckwheat was a group of power-hungry jerks, who were hired because they had Experience and Vision. Company B needed to grow, because Progress is important, and anyway, how else would the owners be able to bilk the company of millions of dollars through fraud and mismanagement if the company didn't grow big enough to amass millions of dollars in the first place? The thirst for power was great within each member of Team Buckwheat, and they collectively vowed to take over the company. Through trickery and deceit, they sabotaged Team Alfalfa. Team Alfalfa mistakenly believed that its power hold was strong and that it could threaten to hold the company's business hostage, but it was very much mistaken. Slowly but surely, Team Buckwheat started to drive Team Alfalfa out of the company until only two members remained. In fact, their lust was so great that they began vying for power amongst themselves before they had succeeded completely in their purge of the ranks of Team Alfalfa. They employed evil and complicated manipulations and machinations, until only two of them remained as well. As only two, they were much less powerful, and as they saw the danger and became afraid, they clung to one another and allied. Losing faith in Team Buckwheat, the owners of Company B hired the Grey Knight to continue the work of rapidly growing the company in order to make enormous profits. The Grey Knight came in and exuded Calmness and Rationalness, and provided a stark contrast to the meanness and cruelty that Team Buckwheat inflicted upon its subordinates. So some unlikely bedfellows among the grunts and peons formed an alliance, and with the reluctant aid of the Grey Knight, they had the remnants of Team Buckwheat fired based on flimsy pretexts, while the remnants of Team Alfalfa watched from the sidelines. The peons and grunts were na ve and overly hopeful in the Grey Knight, who was not as noble as he seemed. After a few months of everything functioning better than it had ever done before, he brought in his friends, Team Corn. Team Corn was power-hungry as well, but more patient. Unlike Team Buckwheat, which had been cobbled together from strangers, Team Corn stuck together and moved from company to company, leaving waves of disgust and resentment in its wake. These people immediately took steps to secure their power base. Where things had been transparent and group-oriented before, they were made obscure and individualized. Each project was assigned to a single person. All communication regarding each project was required to go directly and privately to the responsible person. Discussing a project with anyone else was a breach of protocol. If the responsible person fell sick or left the country for mysterious reasons, all activity on that project would cease. Accomplishments were discouraged, and simulating the appearance of much effort and progress was encouraged. The members of Team Corn were stunted in their moral development. They believed that one was either with them or against them. Those who chose to be sycophants were given rewards and promotions, no matter how incompetent and unqualified they were. Those who did not were oppressed and punished. Objections and questions to ill-advised policies were met with hostility, and if anyone ever took a principled stand, Team Corn became fraught with confusion; they could not conceive of a reason one might act for the greater good or based on conscience rather than to do what would advance one's own interests. After a very long time, this fundamental lack of comprehension of their own evil led to their downfall, but that small bit of justice was tempered when Team Durum came in to replace them. Team Durum wasn't as bad as Team Corn, but boy did it suck.

18 January 2006

Jean-Michel Kelbert: Wordpress and gallery2

At least I managed to have a nice integration of gallery2 into my wordpress installation.
Now next step is to sort the 2500 pictures I made 2 years ago in Austria. :-)

Lars Wirzenius: Debian: One more about the OpenSolaris talk at Debconf6

Alvaro Lopez Ortega comments on my explanation of why I don't want the OpenSolaris panel talk at Debconf6. He misses the point: I am not objecting to OpenSolaris itself, but to having a talk about it at Debconf6. From my entry: "I [...] questioned the fact that Debconf6 will have a talk on OpenSolaris, when there are good Debian related talks rejected." I think that for a Debian development conference, having a talk about Debian is much, much more important than discussing OpenSolaris, or even co-operation between Debian and OpenSolaris. That is the core of my objection: OpenSolaris is not about Debian, and the talk is crowding out a talk about Debian. As a smaller issue, I do also happen to dislike the OpenSolaris license (the CDDL), and this makes me dislike having the OpenSolaris talk (instead of a Debian one) even more. I have sufficient grounds for disliking it in the fact that it is Yet Another License. More importantly, it seems to be incompatible with the GPL, which causes all sorts of unpleasant complications if Debian wanted to use OpenSolaris code. Further, it seems unclear that the CDDL fills the requirements of the Debian Free Software Guidelines. The result: there is little room for co-operation between Debian and OpenSolaris. This doesn't mean OpenSolaris is evil or that it needs to be shunned. I'm perfectly happy with non-free software, but not in the Debian context. The license issue can, however, be disregarded completely, when arguing about having this talk at Debconf6, as far as I care. I want to see a Debian conference concentrate on making Debian better, and not on making OpenSolaris better. If there were free slots in the conference programme, I wouldn't mind, but there aren't. All slots are full, and Debian specific talks have been rejected in favor of the OpenSolaris talk. That is what irks me. Note also that I'm not criticizing the people who want to give this talk (or hold the panel, or whatever), only the Debconf6 talks committee. And I did that in private, I didn't drag it into public.

17 January 2006

Gunnar Wolf: No antialiased fonts here, thank you

Edd Dumbill writes from time to time about hinting or using the right fonts so they look nicer - At the first glance, I found three such articles in ~six weeks.
I don't know if I'm too atypical in this area as well... But for most of my work, I prefer fonts not to be beautified by antialiasing. Strangely, it seems to depend on which program (or, maybe, activity) I am working - I have no grudge against antialiasing in a web browser, but I swear to God that if you antialias my emacs or my xterms, I will hate you. It just gets more tiring.
I have no rational explanation for this - I just noticed the fact after using it for a while. I get more tired if the borders of the letters are not crisp - and I don't really care about the little details in smaller sized fonts.
Maybe that's part of the reason antialiasing is nicer in the browser - After all, it is common to find text too small to read there. At 1280x1024 (or 1400x1050 on the laptop) with the usual font size, I get a nice 170x66 rxvt. That's quite OK for most of the work that requires attention - and for following large amounts of text, decreasing the font size to a somewhat tiring size gives me a nice 200x92 window - almost always enough room. Crisp fonts. Easy to read.
Does anybody else feel the same, or am I just too looney?

Ross Burton: Leftie?

Thomas wonders if I'm really a leftie, or a capitalist swine. Well, 99% of my music collection is only on CDs, but I must admit to having 5G of MPEG4 music on my iPod... Maybe when the Linux on iPod project has working power management I'll re-encode it all to Ogg Vorbis. NP: Groove Salad, Soma FM

16 January 2006

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: It s runoff time

Update: Corrected Tarja Halonen’s total vote percentage. The preliminary count in the Finnish presidential elections is finished with the following results:
Candidate Total votes Votes short of next* Pre-poll
pos %
Tarja Halonen 1,396,161 46,3 % not applicable 1st 52
Sauli Niinist 725,213 24,1 % 670,948 48 % 2nd 20
Matti Vanhanen 561,556 18.6 % 163,657 23 % 3rd 18
Heidi Hautala 105,086 3.5 % 456,470 81 % 4th 4
Timo Soini 103,368 3.4 % 1,718 2 % 4th 4
Bjarne Kallis 61,458 2.0 % 41,910 41 % 6th 1
Henrik Lax 48,639 1.6 % 12,819 21 % 6th 1
Arto Lahti 13,041 0.4 % 35,598 73 % 6th 1
* The difference between the current candidate and the next (upward) candidate on the list, in votes and as a percentage of the next (upward) candidate’s votes.
The result of the last opinion poll published before the election, commissioned by YLE and conducted by phone between 10th and 11th of January. The margin for error is 2,5 %-points for Halonen and decreases when the percentage decreases. Since the incumbent failed to reach majority, a runoff election will be held on the 29th of January between the two best placed candidates (starred). A remarkable fact is the low number of votes that the independent candidate Arto Lahti received, for he had to get at least 20,000 people to sign their name in favour of his candidacy, while he received only 65 % of that number in votes. It is very likely that both runoff candidates retain the votes they received today. What decides the runoff election is how the rest of the voters behave. As a quick and dirty Stetson Harrison estimate, most of Vanhanen, Kallis and Lax’s spporters are likely to vote for Niinist , while most of Hautala’s supporters are likely to vote for Halonen. Assuming that the “most”s cancel each other (an assumption that probably favours Niinist ), this yields an additional 22.2 %-points for Niinist (total 46.3 %) and 3.5 %-points for Halonen (total 49.8 %). Hence it would seem that Halonen has the upper hand in runoff. A few words on each of the eight candidates, in reverse order of popularity, follows. Arto Lahti (b. 1949) is a professor of entrepeneurship and has experience in various positions in the private sector. He has no prior political experience and is not affiliated with a political party. Henrik Lax (b.1946) is a Member of the European Parliament since 2004, representing the liberal Swedish People’s Party. He was a Member of the national Parliament 1987 2004. Prior to his political career, he had been a lawyer. Bjarne Kallis (b.1945) is a Member of Parliament since 1991, representing the party currently called Christian Democrats. He has chaired his party since 1995. For most of his non-political professional life he has been a teacher and later principal in a business school. Timo Soini (b. 1962) is a Member of Parliament since 2003, representing the right-wing populist True Finns party. He has chaired his party since 1997, which he cofounded in 1995; prior to that, he was an active member of the since-dissolved Finnish Agrarian Party. Heidi Hautala (b. 1955) is a Member of Parliament since 2003 and before that 1991 1995. She was a Member of the European Parliament 1995 2003. She represents the evironmental-liberal Green League, a party she cofounded and later chaired 1987 1991. Matti Vanhanen (b. 1955) is Prime Minister since 2003, representing the liberal Centre Party. He previously served as Minister of Defense in 2003. He has been a Member of Parliament since 1991. He has chaired his party since 2003. Sauli Niinist (b. 1948) is currently a Director at the European Investment Bank. He served as Minister of Justice 1995 1996 and Minister of Finance 1996 2003. He was a Member of Parliament 1987 2003. He represents the liberal-conservative National Coalition party, which he chaired 1994 2001. Prior to his political career, he worked as a lawyer. Tarja Halonen (b. 1943) is the incumbent, Her Excellency the President of the Republic of Finland since 2000. Prior to her presidency, she was a member of the Social Democrat Party and had served as Minister of Social Affairs and Health 1987 1990, Minister of Nordic Cooperation 1989 1991, Minister of Justice 1990 1991 and Minister of Foreign Affairs 1995 2000. She was a Member of Parliament 1979 2000. Prior to her political career, she worked as a lawyer in a labor union.

15 January 2006

Joachim Breitner: Analog Clock for the Gnome Panel

Since I’m using a thin vertical panel, the normal text-based panel clock provided by Gnome is too wide (I lost sub-10-minutes-precsision). So, for a long while, I was looking for a analog clock applet for the panel. Not having found one, today I thought I’d do it myself.Since I’m lazy, I searched for a ready analog clock widget, which I found at the ruby-gnome site. That forced my to use ruby (which I haven’t yet used), but luckily it was similar enough to python to not have problems with the syntax. Adding that code to a sample Ruby panel applet did the work. I spend most time trying to figure out how to resize the applet correctly. Not sure if I did it correctly, but it seems to work. Comments appreciated.To install this, you have to put the ruby script somewhere, make it executable and put the bonobo server file to /usr/lib/bonobo/servers, and then adjust the path to the ruby script therein. You need at least the libgnome-applet2-ruby package.

Edd Dumbill: A clean sweep

Firstly, if you haven't the faintest interest in the software I use to write this weblog, please feel free to go and do something more interesting right now. Now I'm in the company of dedicated readers of colophons, I will proceed. Redesign and reimplementation  This weblog, which has now been running for over two and a half years, originally ran on some custom software I'd hacked up in Zope: at that time my web development platform of choice. Today, I've relaunched with another custom content management engine, this time written using Rails. It's been a lot of fun to write, and a good excuse to sharpen my Rails skills further. The design has also been fun. It's a little basic right now, but I hope easy to read. Of course, the font is Lucida Grande, which ensures that I am fully Web 2.0 compliant.
The main new feature is that the tags I give articles are now made public. I used to tag posts for my RSS feed, but not publish them on the site. Now they are public--what few tags I currently have--and it's possible to find RSS and Atom feeds just for certain subsections of my writing. I worry sometimes about spamming the various Planet aggregator sites my blog features in, so this gives me a way to direct content specifically at them. That said, at least for Planet XML I like hearing about everything the community members have to say, not just their on-topic posts. New URLs My blog now has a new location, http://times.usefulinc.com/, and new places for  RSS and Atom feeds: Tools used

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.
View Rendered Source Chart
Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose
Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us
Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.
Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Edd Dumbill: The Web as it was meant to be used

Since giving XTech 2006 the tagline "Building Web 2.0", I've received a few questions as to how wise this was. The Web 2.0 label has been accused in some quarters of being a vague, marketing-oriented, term. Perhaps an attempt to kickstart a new bubble. I was going to write further, defending my choice: that, practically speaking, Web 2.0 encapsulates a combination of technologies and practices driving the web forward. Yes, it's a label of convenience, but the implementation trends are real. The maturation of XML, a revival in browser technology, a willingness to share data openly and new web development frameworks. Just as I embarked on distilling these thoughts into a fuller form, Paul Graham published an excellent essay on Web 2.0. In it he analyses the Web 2.0 term:
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it.
So what's the reasoning that means we don't need the term? Graham writes: "Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used." There's nothing fundamentally new, but there is a groundswell of understanding of what's been there all along. For me, that's a wonderful encapsulation of both current web trends and my aspirations for XTech. "Web 2.0" is a just a handy label for this. "The Web as it was meant to be used" will strike a chord with many web practitioners today--whether it's sensible use of web services with REST, improving user interaction in web design, or open semantics and data interchange. If you're involved in using the web as it's meant to be used, consider submitting an XTech proposal.

Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho: The Finnish presidential elections

Today is the election day in Finnish presidential elections. The polls close at eight (18:00 UTC), and the preliminary result is expected to be all but done at eleven (around 21 UTC). If you are a Finnish citizen and happen to be in Finland near your home, please vote if you haven’t already done so! The President of the Republic, as the official title goes, is the Commander-in-Chief of the Finnish Defense Forces (though he or she can delegate that authority to another person), is in charge of Finnish foreign policy in cooperation with the Prime Minister’s Cabinet. The President has also some miscellaneous powers of appointment (including the exclusive power to appoint judges to permanent offices) and the general power to grant pardon in individual cases. The President also has certain tightly constrained roles in legislation, the forming and dissolution of government, and the dissolution of the parliament. It should be noted that the President is not the most powerful person in the Finnish government any more. After the almost royal tenure, a quarter of century long, of Urho Kekkonen, the trend has been to limit the powers of the President. Limits were placed on the number of terms a person may serve as President (two), to the President’s veto powers (can only veto a specific bill once), to the President’s foreign policy powers (cooperation with the cabinet is now required), to the President’s role in forming a government (limited from choosing the Prime Minister to the current, mostly ceremonial, role), et cetera. However, the Finnish people still seems to see the President as the people’s champion against the dirty politicians in the cabinet and parliament; this may explain the popularity of presidential elections (it has the best voter turnaround of all the general elections in Finland). The President is now for the third time elected with a popular vote. There are eight candidates. If nobody achieves majority, a run-off election is held after two weeks between the two candidates who received the most votes. The newly elected president is inaugurated on the 1st of Februari, if there was no run-off, and on the 1st of March otherwise. The eight candidates have been allocated numbers between 2 and 9. A voter writes the number of their candidate on the ballot. The same numbers are reused for the runoff. A voter could also vote in advance at the numerous advance polling stations between 4th and 10th off January (excluding the 6th). The eight candidates are (the candidate number and a recent polling result in parentheses) The most interesting guestion in these elections is whether the incumbent can get majority, forgoing a runoff election. In the latest polls, more than 25 % of the polled refused to indicate their choice, if any. The incumbent is the eleventh President of the Republic. The full list:
  1. K. J. St hlberg (1919 1925), elected by Parliament
  2. L. K. Relander (1925 1931), elected by electoral college elected by proportional vote
  3. P. E. Svinhufvud (1931 1937), elected by electoral college elected by proportional vote
  4. Ky sti Kallio (1937 1940), elected by electoral college elected by proportional vote
  5. Risto Ryti (1940 1944), elected twice by the 1937 electoral college
  6. C. G. E. Mannerheim (1944 1946), elected via special enactment
  7. J. K. Paasikivi (1946 1956), elected by electoral college elected by proportional vote
  8. U. K. K. Kekkonen (1956 1982), elected four times by electoral college elected by propotional vote, once via special enactment
  9. Mauno Koivisto (1982 1994), elected once by electoral college elected by proportional vote and once by a run-off electoral college elected by proportional vote
  10. Martti Ahtisaari (1994 2000), elected by run-off popular vote
  11. Tarja Halonen (2000 2006), elected by run-off popular vote

Edd Dumbill: Cool toys for Firefox and Emacs

Firefox extensions The release of Firefox 1.5 has awakened my interest in the browser, and a few extensions can make life easier.
View Rendered Source Chart
Really handy for a structured view of an HTML page's source. The big advantage is that is displays generated source too, perfect for figuring out AJAX applications.
Foxpose
Sheer eye candy. Thumbnail all your tabbed pages into one page.
Del.icio.us
Browser button for working with the del.icio.us bookmarks site. I've been reluctant to use remote bookmarks before, this extension might just push me over the edge. Really well thought-out integration with the browser.
Rails in Emacs Seeing as I'm not quite prepared to switch to OS X just in order to get TextMate, I figured it was time again to play with my editing environment. Pages from InVisible Blog and Scott Barron give a lot of tips as to the current state of play with Rails and Emacs. I've now got a reasonably pleasant setup, though I wasn't inclined to go the whole way to running the ECB IDE inside Emacs. On Ubuntu, the packages you are looking for are: speedbar eieio semantic ruby-elisp mmm-mode. I also found pabbrev a very handy interface for tab completion. Screenshot of Emacs editing a Rails application The future for Ruby and Emacs is looking hopeful. I learned that a proper Ruby grammar for the semantic package is being worked on, which will enable class browsing and intelligent completion. I am still disappointed that there's no version of Emacs that uses Xft or Pango for anti-aliased font rendering. To get sharp fonts, I still need to use a bitmap font like misc-fixed. If I were in the business of offering bounties for open source development, dragging Emacs into the GTK2/Pango era would be the biggest one. Checking the mailing lists indicates that Pango is not suitable for Emacs, but no alternative scheme ever seems to bear fruit. Yet if Aquamacs can do it... If somebody came along with a decent TextMate-a-like for GNOME, I'd pay good money for it. I've never been really happy with an editor since Cygnus Ed. Hallski and I keep talking about this, and only just manage to resist wasting months of time on trying to write one ourselves.

Edd Dumbill: The Web as it was meant to be used

Since giving XTech 2006 the tagline "Building Web 2.0", I've received a few questions as to how wise this was. The Web 2.0 label has been accused in some quarters of being a vague, marketing-oriented, term. Perhaps an attempt to kickstart a new bubble. I was going to write further, defending my choice: that, practically speaking, Web 2.0 encapsulates a combination of technologies and practices driving the web forward. Yes, it's a label of convenience, but the implementation trends are real. The maturation of XML, a revival in browser technology, a willingness to share data openly and new web development frameworks. Just as I embarked on distilling these thoughts into a fuller form, Paul Graham published an excellent essay on Web 2.0. In it he analyses the Web 2.0 term:
Does "Web 2.0" mean anything? Till recently I thought it didn't, but the truth turns out to be more complicated. Originally, yes, it was meaningless. Now it seems to have acquired a meaning. And yet those who dislike the term are probably right, because if it means what I think it does, we don't need it.
So what's the reasoning that means we don't need the term? Graham writes: "Web 2.0 means using the web the way it's meant to be used." There's nothing fundamentally new, but there is a groundswell of understanding of what's been there all along. For me, that's a wonderful encapsulation of both current web trends and my aspirations for XTech. "Web 2.0" is a just a handy label for this. "The Web as it was meant to be used" will strike a chord with many web practitioners today--whether it's sensible use of web services with REST, improving user interaction in web design, or open semantics and data interchange. If you're involved in using the web as it's meant to be used, consider submitting an XTech proposal.

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