This Gnomedesktop posting outlines the future of galeon. All it's users (and maybe former users, too) should read it... Basically: the main (current) galeon authors don't have enough time to work on galeon (e.g. on the bookmarks editor, which has some issues). Epiphany, which was forked off Galeon, has a much more active developer community, a more up-to-date codebase, including an extension system. So the galeon authors decided to try to work galeon into epiphany extensions as far as possible (btw, epiphany is to get hierarchical bookmarks independently, so one of the big issues many people have with it is gone then) and maybe make a new Galeon based upon Epiphany to add these features which are not possible with Epiphanys' extension system. Neither Galeon nor Epiphany currently have an easy standing. For example Ubuntu prefers Firefox to Epiphany (albeit Epiphany is way better intergrated in the desktop). This is a pity, since IMHO firefox suffers from featurits. Also I'm not a fan of extension systems like in epiphany and firefox. Especially with firefox, the code quality of extensions varies a lot. And even extensions that are really useful (e.g. the webdeveloper toolbar, albeit it offers little more than I do in Galeon with Bookmarklets) still suffer from some old bugs (e.g. the "show divs" menu item will still be checked after you changed the page) that are maybe just not fixeable in the extension. At the same time, using extensions basically means that the application will be (and behave) different on the machines you work on, unless you spend a lot of time in installing the same extensions everywhere (and then in turn syncing their configurations as well etc.). Neither will the UI be consistent, themes won't support the extensions etc.

Here's a bunch of smaller updates which probably don't warrant extra blog posts, but might be interesting nevertheless:

• On the right-hand side of my homepage you now have three new blocks which should simplify site navigation. Each contains a weighted list of tags (tag clouds) for my blog, my podcast, and my photoblog, powered by Drupal's tagadelic module. Of course, the "traditional" navigation menu is still there.
• There's also an RSS feed for comments on this site now, courtesy to Drupal's Comment RSS module.
• On the lower left-hand side of my homepage, there's another new block. It shows where the visitors of my site come from in (almost) realtime. This is a service provided by MapStats (I already talked about it earlier).
• I have uploaded updated versions of my bashrc, vimrc, and muttrc config files.
• My podcast is now listed in iTunes (thanks Daniel Reutter for adding it). You can subscribe by clicking on this button: . The amount of people who subscribe to my podcast have almost doubled, figures went up from 30 subscribers to more than 50 today! If you're reading this and subscribed through iTunes: thanks ;)
• My video iPod will (probably) be shipped on October 31, and it'll take a few more days until it arrives. Arghh, /me wants it now!

Planets are a fairly common method to aggregate blogs. They are especially pervasive in the FOSS world, with planets for Debian, Gnome, KDE, and many others. I find planets as a useful resource for a community to give a single place for the communication and to check for updates. The usual method of communication in blogs is a reply in a post, the planet makes the replies come in the same page for the reader with little context loss. For this reason I'm also fond of setting up planets myself for those communities that lack them, and so I setup planets for FOSS-IL for Israeli blogs about FOSS issues (mostly in Hebrew), Planet (former) Advogato for former Advogato bloggers and the latest one is Planet MicroISV for MicroISVs. I was asked to provide some (tutorial help something) on setting up a planet, and this post is the answer to that request.

---

The PlanetPlanet program is a very common RSS feed aggregator, it works with most feeds and is fairly tolerant to non-standard-conforming feeds. It is also relatively low maintenance, which is why I chose it for my aggregators. Prerequisites The first thing you'll need is to make sure you have Python 2.2 or better installed. If you're on a sane OS, you can just do apt-get install python2.3 otherwise you are left to fend for yourself. For the Windows folks there is ActivePython. Another would be prerequisite is GNU Arch or GNU Arch or Bazaar, two implementations for the Distributed Revision Control algorithm which was pioneered in GNU Arch. Bazaar would be more user friendly, but both IMNSHO are horrendous user-interface wise. Which is why I provide a snapshot of the latest revision for your benefit. Install Installation would be fairly simple, just unpack the tar.gz and it's installed, nothing else needs to be done, except configuring it. The snapshot I provided is just a raw dump of the arch repository, it is useful as is since you can update the installation as needed by just updating and merging with Arch/Bazaar. This will not be covered here. Too much of a trouble for now, and the PlanetPlanet development is at the pace of a snail carrying an elephant, don't expect updates in the near future. Configure I assume you have in mind the list of blogs you want to put on the planet. It need not be comprehensive, a few blogs to start would be good enough. It's trivial to add more as you go. In the planet directory you should copy the examples directory to a new one, say myplanet, copy the output directory to myplanet-output and edit the myplanet/config.ini file. At the minimum you should change the following variables:

• name – The name of your planet
• link – The URL where you planet will live, used inside the feeds the planet exports
• owner_name and owner_email – obvious isn't it?
• output_dir – that should be myplanet-output according to the instructions above
• template_files – change and replace examples with myplanet

The next stage would be to replace the existing blog listed in the config.ini file with your own list. The example is there and is trivial to follow, the entry for a blog looks like:

[http://baruch.ev-en.org/blog/index.rss2]
name = Baruch Even

Where the feed URL is in square brackets and the name of the blog is the name. There are various games that are possible with the templates but we'll ignore them for now and let you learn them from the examples provided by the authors. The next stage is just to run the planet on the new files, we will use the defaults for the rest.

python planet.py myplanet/config.ini

The planet will work for a while, churn out various uninteresting messages and generate the files we asked it for in the myplanet-output. You can now inspect the files in the output directory, load them in a browser and enjoy. Tweaks So you haven't left yet? Want some more info? One obvious question is now that we have the files, how do we serve them to the world so everyone can enjoy our creation? First, you should ask yourself if the world really cares... you do, ah?! OK. If the world cares enough it will find a way to show you how to do it. Since it depends on your OS, web server and various configurations, I can't help you on this. This is left as an exercise to the reader. The configuration in config.ini should be fairly obvious and is well commented. The look of the site depends on two factors, the HTML that is generated, which is a clean HTML version 4.01 and has all formatting controlled by the CSS file which was kindly provided in the outputs directory. The templating code is very simple, it has two operations, TMPL_LOOP and TMPL_VAR. TMPL_LOOP will loop over a variable, usually the Channels variable. And the TMPL_VAR operator will emit that variable, there are the global vars and the loop vars. The best way to figure it out is to use the existing templates as a building block, they are fairly easy to understand. Enjoy your new Planet!

Mike Sperber finally reviewed my patches; they unfortunatly were not deemed appropriate for the Scheme48 distribution, see this thread. Hopefully these issues can be sorted out in the not-to-far future. If you also need the one or other features from my hacks so far, and are adventurous, you can conact me on #scheme on freenode for help with getting and building my fork. Writing portable Scheme programs with scmxlate and spells For the conjure project, we are using scmxlate to make it portable across multiple Schemes. For that purpose, I slightly extended scmxlate and built a kind of meta-module system on top of it. Here is how that looks like: You write a description of the modules your application or library is made of; this is done in a sightly extended subset of the Scheme48 configuration language. For example (from this page, see there for more details):

 (define-structure conjure.foo.bar (export qux baz
					  ((froboz fribnitz)
					  :syntax))
  (open scheme srfi-1 srfi-13 conjure.util.files)
  (dialect (guile (open ice-9.syncase))
           (scheme48 (open extended-ports)))
  (files (foo basic-bar)
         (foo bar)))

This defines the module conjure.foo.bar, which exports the identifiers qux and baz, as well as the macros froboz and fribnitz. The open clause means: this module is written in R5RS Scheme (scheme), plus additionally using srfi-1, srfi-13 and the conjure.util.files module. The dialect clause can be used for specifiying additional modules needed for the dialect-specific code for the module. Finally, the files clause tells us that this module consists of the files foo/basic-bar.scm and foo/bar.scm. This file then gets processed by scmxlate, generating a file with the right module definitions for the selected target dialect, e.g.:

(define-module (conjure foo bar)
  #:use-module (srfi srfi-1)
  #:use-module (srfi srfi-13)
  #:use-module (conjure util files)
  #:use-module (ice-9 syncase)
	
   #:export (qux baz)
  #:export-syntax (froboz fribnitz))
	
 ;; code for foo/basic-bar.scm and foo/bar.scm follows

will be generated for Guile. We recently split scmxlate and the meta-module systeem out of conjure, see the scmxlate category in the conjure archive, so it is available for other projects. Now the split-out of the general purpose modules into a separate project — SPELLS, (S)pell’s a (P)ortability (E)nvironment (L)ibrary for (L)ots of (S)chemes — is in preparation. This library will further aid writing portable code, by providing a consistent interface to functionality that has different APIs in different Schemes. These modules are already there:

• spells.util.pregexp: Dorai Sitaram’s portable regular expressions
• spells.util.named-args: Conviniently create procedures with named arguments
• spells.util.table: Hash tables
• spells.util.condition: SRFI 34 and SRFI 35
• spells.system.file: Lots of file-related proedures, e.g. copy-file, directory?, …

All of those are implemented for all of mzscheme, Guile, Scheme48 and Gauche, using native functionality where available. Other modules will surely follow, a project has been requested at Gna! to facilitate contribution. The spells library will also be used by my upcoming port of G-Wrap to Scheme48.

I’ve decided to laying the foundation for creating bindings of the GNOME software stack for Scheme48, specifically: create bindings for GLib/GObject. At the core of GNOME, there is the GLib Object System (GObject), on top of which GTK+ and the rest of the developer platform are built. Thanks to the header scanning tool h2def.py, which creates a S-Expression representation of the API, you are able to create bindings for any GObject-based library, once you got the core bindings right. I have a rough plan how to do this; basically I plan to fork guile-gnome and reuse the existing infrastructure (e.g. .defs processing). The Guile-GNOME fork will drive a G-Wrap that’s capable of emitting code for the upcoming Scheme48 FFI. Work on G-Wrap/Scheme48 has already progressed to a degree where it’s possible to turn to the GObject bindings and fill out the holes as needed in the process. The plan is also to make the resulting bindings “mostly compatible”, so that programs written for Guile-GNOME will also work with Scheme48-GNOME and vice versa. Since Scheme48 has no built-in object system, and the object system would have to be compatible with GOOPS (Guile’s object system) anyway to achieve source-compatibility between the bindings, I started working on a GOOPS-compatible version of TinyCLOS.

I’m going to get paid for open source developement! Wooha! More specifically, the company I work for since 2 months is going to switch away from CVS as SCM tool. We had a look several SCM systems, among them Subversion, GNU Arch and several commercial offerings, including BitKeeper :-0. The final contestants were GNU Arch and AccuRev. Subversion fell flat for its missing features (mediocre merging support, no distribution), and BitKeeper was not considered seriously because they don’t even list prices at their site (which indicates a fairly high price tag, normally and due to opposition from myself (for the obvious political reasons). Well, finally the case was made for GNU Arch, and since it lacks a decent GUI (currently the GUIish guys here use WinCVS), it was decided to develop the GUI in-house, and as an open source project!. It will probably be developed using Python and GTK+, so it will run also on Windows (which is a requirement). Expect more news, including project announcement soonish.

The time is 18:43 and I’m going to bed. If anybody wishes to make my day they could point to a good set of documentation on the setup and running of a buildd. Lots of people apparently manage it successfully (Experimental, AMD64, etc) however I’m finding it:

• Confusing
• Difficult to visualise.
• Painful.

The CSS-ification is going well. And all being well tomorrow I’ll have blacklisting support for the Planet Debian Searching. If people wish to opt-out of the indexing then that will become trivial. I still believe that I am correct in believing that content carried upon Planet Debian is liable to be mirrored, but I’m not going to argue. (Sure an individual server hosting a blog might have a /robots.txt forbidding it - but planet.debian.org doesn’t - so it will likely be crawled, archived, whatever.) Shrugs. Night night, world.

The DCC Alliance (not to be confused with the DCC Alliance, which is entirely unaffiliated with the former. But it's a recursive acronym, so there's NO TRADEMARK ISSUE) aim to produce a distribution which is entirely binary compatible with Sarge. A laudable aim. Sadly, there's a bit of a problem.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released this week. In common with previous versions, it's a horrid mixture of C++, Java and assembler. It's the Java that's the problem, of course. To compile it, you either need Sun's ridiculously non-free Java, or you can use gcj. That's gcj 4.0, of course. Which can be installed in parallel with gcc 3.3, so that's not a problem. Except. gcj 4.0 wants the libgcc from gcc 4.0 (unsurprisingly), which has the same SONAME as the libgcc from 3.3 (correct behaviour - code built against libgcc from 3.3 will run fine with libgcc from 4.0). However, libgcc from 4.0 adds some extra symbols - as a result, code built against libgcc from 4.0 will not necessarily run on systems with libgcc from 3.3.

Or, in other words, shipping libgcc from gcc 4.0 will result in a system that will build binaries that can't be installed on machines running plain Sarge.

So, there's a bit of a dilemma. Either

• Fail to support OpenOffice.org 2.0


• Only support OpenOffice.org 2.0 if non-free Java is used


• Break binary compatibility with Sarge


• Do something really quite nasty

The DCC Alliance want to build a distribution base that's binary compatible with Sarge. It's an entirely laudable aim, and (regardless of any impression I may have given in the past) I hope it's successful. But. That level of binary compatibility inherently compromises your ability to use new software. To begin with, you can work around that - backport code to older versions of libraries, include local copies, do static linking, that sort of thing. Over time, it gets harder.

Optimistically, Etch will be released in December 2006. If we assume that DCC releases occur at roughly the same rate as Debian ones, we're looking at 18 months until we get a DCC based on etch.

In 18 months time, is it really going to be possible to build a useful modern desktop system that's binary compatible with Sarge without it being an utterly unmaintainable pile of ugly hacks? Even after 5, we're seeing pain.

There's a reason that derivative distributions tend to diverge from the original project. It's because it's really quite remarkably difficult to maintain sanity, technical correctness and not change any of the underlying structure. I'd like to see DCCA succeed in doing so, and I do admire them for not just giving up in exasperation already.

So yesterday Google announced their earnings, beating estimates, sending their stock even higher. Every time someone says GOOG can’t possibly go any higher, they’re promptly proved wrong. So I’m not going to say that GOOG can’t go any higher. I am going to say though that it’s overpriced given the cards that are showing. Peter Lynch compared the stock market to a game of seven card stud, where every new piece of information released about a company is like a new card showing. The more you find out about a company, the more accurately you can gauge the value of a company, and thus whether it’s worth buying. The problem with Google (and similarly with Apple, but to a lesser extent) is that they try very, very hard not to release any information. What’s worse is that Google has built up a mystique about itself, so that any little piece of information (like an otherwise irrelevant partnership with Sun) gets turned into wild rumor and speculation (like that Google will make a web-based Office suite). If you believe the speculation will come true, that means that it will effectively break one of Microsoft’s monopolies, thereby entitling Google to its current market cap. But that means that Google has to deliver on something they’ve never even hinted that they’re working on. If Google’s going to keep its stock from going through a “correction”, it better start showing some more of its cards, and they better be good. Otherwise, they may end up like another company that valued secrecy and was going to take down a different monopoly.

I hope to be back to normal in a week or so.

Right. A week later, my connectivity issues have gotten so much worse... Yesterday, I was trying to do some of my neglected Debian work at my mother's house (namedly, updating some packages for GNOME 2.12.1), when the ADSL modem lost its link and didn't come up again. As it was a bit late, I just cursed the nth incident with Wanadoo and left until the next day. Today, when I go back there, my sister asks if I can have a look, because there's no Internet. I suspect that the Wanadoo people have finally freed us and have cancelled our contract as we asked for two weeks ago. I phone and they confirm this is it. I then ask, innocently, if I am free to sign up with any other telco. They say I now need to wait, without any internet service, until the telephone line is freed so any other company can take care of it. That will happen in thirty or fourty days. WTF! I'm sure this can be reported somewhere, it's totally unacceptable. I've had to come to my father's house, out of the city, to do the most urgent pending tasks, and it'll be a pain to do this throughout the week. The good news is that today I got a call from Telefonica telling me that my modem should arrive at home on Monday, and some other day my own DSL link will start working. Hopefully that'll happen even before I leave to my American adventure. I am sure The Acetarium will be ready for my arrival. If you're waiting for some upload from me, please have a bit of patience because my current situation is making it quite difficult.

MJ Ray in Will the last ex-UEA-er to leave Norfolk please switch out the light? asks why lots of people are now leaving Norwich... In my case, it was fairly simple, I wanted out of Paston, I hadn't really had time to look around as such, so when JD suggested that there was a job going at Runtime and would I be interested, I kinda jumped at the chance, threw across my CV (which still badly needs editing), and got an interview. As soon as the results where in, and I knew I had the job, I handed in the magical letter of resignation to Paston and moved my arse down to Brighton. It's a much better job, with more fun things to play with. Asterisk has been rocking my socks recently, and we should now have an almost fully functional set of phones on the asterisk pbx in London (which I'm maintaining from Brighton \o/). Anyways - it's nearly the weekend, and this time I *WILL* finish off reading the licences and throw Myon a mail (promise!).

I've gone from managing two buildd machines a few months ago, to five now, six or seven soon. Whew. New machines are bob and wendy (armeb), and ska/kiivi (ska was set up around the time kiivi broke down; kiivi's been fixed now, so that means one extra box too). Future ones may be jazz (m68k; Quadra950) and a third armeb box. Getting pretty crowdy—but nothing I can't handle. Yet. Though it is the highest number of buildd machines I've ever managed before. Since Christian Steigies is back from holiday, he had a look at garkin, his atari-with-CT60-board. It had lost its serial connection while he was away, so it didn't build anymore. But other than that the connection was gone, the box was still alive and kicking -- just needed to download a few megabytes of updates, which takes rather long through serial. In case you wonder: there's no ethernet connection, because the ethernet boards haven't been manufactured yet (they've been designed and ordered at the factory which will create them, but that hasn't happened yet). So with kiivi and garkin now both building again, the graph is going in the right direction again since a day or two. It's even more visible on the second graph; if you have a look at the new quarter graph, you'll see that the level of up-to-dateness is currently at its highest level in weeks; I count 28 days between now and the previous peak that is at approximately the same level as today. Which is good, of course. I'm quite happy about that quarter graph, BTW. The usefullness of the other two graphs (one with all information since the statistics were being gathered, one with the information of the last two weeks only) was seriously deteriorating. What this graph shows is way more useful... now if only there'd be a quarter version for the other graph as well...

A surprisingly high proportion of ex-UEA people stay in the area after finishing at UEA. Over 40% want to, according to the local chamber of commerce. Eventually, that number falls: with John and Brett leaving, I think I can now count on one hand those from my Norwich years (1994-1998) who I know are still here. Most left some time ago. Why? Small place syndrome? Underpaid work? Both? Possibly. It feels like only in Norfolk could the train station start to expand its car park to cope with demand and the same week most train services to it are cancelled because a Cambridgeshire farmer drove onto the single line stretch, was killed and it takes at least a day for access and safety checks in this sparsely-populated area. From the BBC's picture, the unit involved was one of the commemorative King's Lynn "picture trains". You seldom hear what happens to the damaged trains and injured drivers. I guess the railways and the media doesn't like to worry passengers. Even the Potter's Bar investigation ending only got brief mentions that I saw. Also at the train station, local police put out a picture of people they would "like to interview" about the spate of recent bike thefts. Possibly as a result, they've charged one man. Someone I know had a bike nicked, which meant a long walk to/from work until it was replaced. Very annoying. The sort of petty bike vandalism/theft which annoyed savs is also on the increase here again. I'd've expected nicked bikes to sell better in summer, but maybe the local crims are thick or there are more easy-to-nick bikes in September. At least it's not Fakenham, (which is one of the most boring places on earth, you may remember - original source ) where the headline story is that the kerbs are too high. I'm sorry someone was hurt, but kerbs here seem tiny compared to the ones in Northamptonshire. Probably they've all been lowered for safety there too now. As a result of adding Dave's blog to Planet ALUG, I noticed BritBlog for the first time. I spent a while browsing the other Norfolk-based blogs on it one evening. Unsurprisingly, I knew about most of the ones I found interesting already, apart from Ztroller who links to me... erm, why? Does he read this? Most listings are from blogspot and I still won't add Atom support to my blogging software - I want to read, not edit, so Atom is mostly extra cache filler. I only added Really Simple Syndication as well as RDF Site Summary because it was fairly cheap to do and I didn't know about the obvious way to get RSS 1 from Wordpress. Finally, in local(ish) concerns, Northern Ireland, from Noodles' emptiness:

"while I'm ranting, why is the adjective for someone from the UK "British"? Britain doesn't cover all of the UK. I wasn't born in Britain yet I'm British. Can't I be UKish or something?"

I'd hate to be called UKish. I don't have any particular affection for this Kingdom's political boundaries. If the UK ended tomorrow, would anyone besides its rulers mourn? I'll not thank you if you call me British. I'm English, a midlander and Towcestrian. British nationality is a side-effect. (And why is it so hard to get .gb domains anyway?) It's odd that there's such argument over England's anthem. So there is imagery or irony involved in Jerusalem, depending how you want to view it: who cares? It's rousing (unlike the UK dirge) and mentions England past. Yikes, I've just discovered I'm agreeing with Billy Bragg of all people. As for the UK, why don't we work together with others when we agree and work independently when we don't agree? Unfortunately, few politicians advocate English self-rule, apart from racist bigots and English imperialists. The really depressing thing is that those sort of people would probably easily get a majority in any English legislature, if backed by the mess media. Maybe Britain is diverse enough that it balances the extreme English... diverse we are or de verse it gets... (ouch)

There’s a subtle difference between a replacement and an upgrade, and in my mind it has something to do with the relative qualities of the old and the new. I like my current car and don’t expect that my next car will be particularly better, but different, and for a different purpose. My old and new RSS aggregators are both complete crap. Lisa and I have been living in our home for almost exactly one year now; the exact day that we moved was July 23. It’s been a good starter house, but there are a few factors lately that have convinced us that it’s getting time for an upgrade. Recently we discovered that the air conditioning didn’t work; it didn’t cool the air that came out, and it no longer blew into the downstairs area. It’s taken us two weeks to get it working, and it’s still not fixed; there’s a leak and it’s so slight that to find it will take a week, during which we won’t be able to use the system. Since it’s the middle of summer we opted to postpone fixing it and will just have it refilled periodically, until we’re willing to not have heating or cooling (like October). It’s under warranty so it’s not our expense. Also, being in a townhouse has made us keenly aware of our neighbors, and our desire to have a bit of distance from them. So last weekend we started getting an idea of places and types of homes that we’d be interested in looking at. We’ll probably end up moving in a year or so. As a housewarming gift, my dad bought us a rather nice television. We have DirecTV with TiVO, but it’s not the HD service, so recently I’ve been thinking about getting it. The satellite dish is actually currently owned by our homeowners’ association, and they’re absolutely miserable to try and get anything done through. So I think since I’m the only one in my building who has DirecTV, that I’ll just replace the dish myself, and put back the original one when I move out. Is there more than one HD DirecTiVo box? The one that Best Buy has on their website is $700 for 250GB.

Xorg 6.9 RC1 packages for x86 are in incoming and will hit experimental tomorrow. Enjoy!

Gaim has some nice to read news. Including upcoming SIP/SIMPLE support (from gaim-vv). But the paragraph I liked most is the following:

"I (Sean) [the main gaim lead devel] have been hired by Google, moved to Seattle, and have been working on the Google Talk team for about a month and a half. [...] Currently, I'm working on making it as easy as possible for other clients to use Google Talk's voice features. You can expect Gaim and other clients to be interoperable with Google Talk's voice features in the near future."

So google is still playing "good guys". At least as long as it's bad for their competitors (Skype, MSN, Yahoo Messenger...)?

I wonder if you can make a PXE (Netboot) image for VMWare player. That would basically give a free VMWare for everyone, wouldn't it? Or at least a kernel which will mount a NFS root.

The Internet Advertising Bureau thinks the UK spend could be over a billion for the first time. It's now 5.8% of the national advertising spend and is growing at a pretty remarkable rate. Is Christmas coming early for online? OSCommerce - the future will be templated. We're doing more OSCommerce work and 2.2 MS2 is a fairly typical PHP application, with some structure, but also lots of spaghetti code. The next version is looking a lot better, including this announcement from the lead developer. Templating and styling has to be the most-requested work. I find it a little worrying that OSCommerce is not more openly developed, but it'll be good when the new release ships. Jakob Neilsen has announced the top ten web design mistakes of 2005 and "Legibility Problems" are number one. This isn't a surprise to me. Many websites, including some big names, are totally broken if your browser defaults are light text on a dark background, because that's easier on your eyes. I once spotted the Disability Rights Commission getting this wrong. Even planet.debian.org is missing a:link color: ... . The second top mistake is bad linking, including:

"In particular, don't open pages in new windows"

.which is another thing which I find irritating on many sites. If I want a new window, I'll pick the link for a "new window" from the context menu, or by shift-clicking. Does Mozilla or Firefox or something have an "ignore _blank link targets" option yet? It's only a matter of time. My own company's web site has been updated and I've tried to take these on board. We don't do any of the worst things, but there are always things we can do better. Our site isn't that high a priority - there's so much else to do. The W3C's internationalisation working group has issued a note on working with time zones. I get a lot of unusual time zone requests while programming, but I'll remember these explanations and I think I usually follow the recommendations in s1.5 anyway. Also from W3C is a Working Draft of "Mobile Web Best Practices 1.0" which they'd like feedback on, if you use or develop for mobile web devices. At first glance, it seems that many of the items are stronger versions of the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. PlayStation chipping is legal in Australia but not in the UK, where it was ruled illegal last year. Chipping is the practice of adding a part to the games console so that it can play imported titles. If the chipping and the risk of breaking it costs less than the difference between imported and domestic releases, some people will want to do it. It's competition between markets. I remember similar things for the old cartridge-based machines of my youth. UK law-makers seem to be trying to kill off that trade in favour of foreign companies that want to tightly control the consoles long after they've been sold. The ruling from Australia might bring the start of a backlash against the increasingly restrictive UK laws, but it's more likely that the EU, US and others will press Australia to fall into line. Copyright seems to be one of the few areas where free trade is being reduced, rather than increased. And finally, I remember the feeling of getting sparc32 Linux working.

This has got to be the funniest cause someone has ever requested donations for:

After we collect $400 in donations, we will take that money to a local Apple Store. We will purchase the iPod, open it right inside the store, and destroy it right on the spot. The whole thing will be shot on film, and displayed on this site. This is only a social experiment, for the entertainment of the donors, and visitors of this site.

The $400 are raised, so expect the video anytime soon...