Want to make it easy to monitor the quality of an internet connection? Convert test packet travel times into a scale of musical notes and play that sound in the background.
The time a pulse took to make the round trip depended on the state of the network. Say a pulse arrived at one end every 10 milliseconds. When fed into a loudspeaker and if the connection was good, this would emit a synthesised note of about 100 hertz - around an octave-and-a-half below middle C. The longer the transmission time, the lower the pitch of the note produced.
This gives a qualitative way of monitoring an internet connection. Sudden loss of sound can reveal a break in the network connection or missing packets of data. "It's like having your CD player hiccup, or an MP3 player that stalls," says Chafe. Most important, the sound accurately reveals the jitter. If the latency varies over time, so does the pitch. "Musically speaking that would be like pitch bends, or vibrato," he says.
Go here to get the Mozilla 1.2 release.
Also, Phoenix 0.5 is going to be released using Moz 1.2 source code and will be out next week. The name is being changed to some other name for legal reasons. New name has not yet been announced.
Update: You might want to wait a day and get the Mozilla 1.2.1 rev that fixes a few last minute regression problems. Though I'm using 1.2 without any problems myself.
UPDATE: Mozilla 1.2.1 is now released. Get 1.2.1 rather than 1.2.
If you want to get out close to the cutting edge in Mozilla browsing the run-up to the v1.2 release means that daily builds are being done on a branch that is very stable. Try out a build from here.
If you have ever wanted to put a different skin or appearance on a browser you might want to try the theme that I've just installed on the latest Mozilla nightly build: Orbit 3+1 1.2.0.0.6.5-dev. You can find it here. I used the second choice that is compatible with Mozilla v1.2 and v1.3 and also with Phoenix 0.3/0.4.
You can find more themes on Mozdev and on Deskmod.
Update: If you want the icons to be really small and to make as much room as possible for the viewed page then try the Little Phoenix theme. I have it installed right now on the Phoenix v0.4 and while the text on the menu bar and pop-down lists is small its readable. The Wood theme also makes the browser's menu bar text and tab text smaller. I think its grainy word background makes the text a bit harder to read though.
I like the way the MozDev site organizes themes. If you want to see all the themes that are compatible with a particular browser then note the little set of icons right above the Themes text in the right hand column. You can click to see only themes that are compatible with your particular Mozilla family browser. For instance, click here for the Phoenix browser themes.
Smaller cities which are dependent on nearby larger cities for their internet connectivity would be hardest hit:
The biggest impact would be felt in the small and medium-size cities whose only or main connections to the Internet come through the major hub cities. Larger cities often have multiple connections to the Internet in and out of the city and would be harder to completely disconnect from the Internet.
The actual impact of a network disruption would depend on a variety of factors, such as the cities affected by the disruption. Grubesic said the most severe impacts would occur if telecommunications equipment were destroyed in the six largest Internet hubs: Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Dallas, Chicago, and Washington, DC.
For example, Los Angeles is a major hub location connecting other large cities in the South and West. If Los Angeles were eliminated as a node on the Internet, many other cities in California may not have Internet access. But it would also hurt Internet accessibility in Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, Denver, Dallas and Houston, the study suggests.
A relevant glimpse of what could happen with the loss of a major Internet hub occurred with the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York City, Grubesic said. One major telecommunication hub was located at Ground Zero, and the loss of that hub disconnected three New York counties from the state of New York's computer system. In addition, several major Internet services and e-business providers were left without service for nearly two days.
Grubesic noted that there are more than 40 network provider companies that make up the backbone of the Internet. Many of these companies have agreements to help distribute each other's Internet traffic, which would help if one company's equipment was destroyed in a disaster. Still, most of the companies have hubs in the same cities and a major disaster could destroy the infrastructure of multiple networks.
For that reason, Grubesic said networks should not be concentrated too much in major cities.
Peter Biddle, Paul England, Marcus Peinado and Bryan Willman of Microsoft have written a paper arguing that the file swappers who swap music, movies, and other digitally encoded entertainment can not be stopped. Well, since they are from Microsoft perhaps now people will recognize the obvious. But why is this even a debate? As storage capacity continues to rise and as bandwidth becomes cheaper swapping will become easier and the amount exchanged in each swap will rise.
The truth of this matter can be arrived at with use of pretty simple intuition. Imagine you can hold in your hand a device that can story thousands of movies and tens of thousands of musical albums. Imagine that two such devices can be set next to each other and that they can quickly swap their full contents to each other. Even without the internet people could use such devices to gradually swap just about every movie and album ever made. Such devices will eventually exist. Storage device densities will increase by orders of magnitude. This will so increase the ease having and swapping large quantities of entertainment content that swapping will become unstoppable.
In the future entertainers will still be able to make money off of live performances. Also, any entertainment content that embeds advertisements into it will be able to make some advertisement revenue in exchange for embedding the content. My guess is that both of these sources of revenue will not be enough to replace what is lost through copying.
One way that the movie industry will be able to continue to make revenue from new movies might be to use heavy encryption on content sent to theaters. The theaters could have projectors that have the decryption built right into them. The movie studios could own and even have staff that controls the projectors. The weak link in such a system would be the single movie company employee who gets access to the unencrypted content and then pirates a copy and distributes it. Even if this scheme can be made to work the movie companies are still going to lose revenue from later single copy sales of movies. because of illegal copying.
Those of us who are not at all inclined to do illegal copying will pay a price for the illegal copying done by others because there will be less revenue to fund the generation of new content and hence less new content will be generated.
Update: The Register has a good article on this story including a link to the original paper.
StrategyPage.com has an interesting article on Romanian web hackers:
With only .3 percent of the world's population, a quarter of the attacks on Honeynet sites in the first six months of this year came from Romania.
The Honeynet they refer to is Honeynet.org.
Its a shame the Romanians don't have anything more constructive to do with their time.
Within a year or two more than half of all email will be spam junk mail. What do to about it? One approach is to use whitelists to exclude all email from people you do not know:
But the filters are running out of gas. The spammers keep multiplying, and they keep finding clever ways to fool the systems designed to stop them. Promising newcomers such as CloudMark, which taps the collective power of e-mail recipients to identify spam, may improve things for a while. But there will always be a trade-off between catching all the spam and ensuring that every piece of legitimate e-mail gets through.
So, sophisticated Internet users are turning to a new approach. Instead of trying to block spam while allowing everything else, these users employ software that blocks everything except messages from already known, accepted senders. These systems, called "whitelists," change e-mail from an open system to a closed one.
There are practical problems with whitemail lists. Among the reasons why legitimate email could be filtered out:
- People have more than one email address. So, for instance, you might have a home address for someone on your list but then they can try to send you email thru a a work address.
- People change their email addresses when they change internet service providers.
- Someone could get your emal address from, for instance, classmates.com in order to contact you for legitimate reasons. Well, that's a new email address for the recipient the first time the email comes in.
- Automated tools could send email to notify about some problem (eg a list admin demon could send a warning that some email being sent to your account is bouncing due to conventional junk mail filtering done by an ISP). The sending address would be a new address from your standpoint.
- A public figure (commentator, politician, etc) might want to make an email address public in order to get comments from the larger public. A whitelist is not a realistic option for such email addresses.
- A large variety of email addresses are used for reporting problems (eg web site main admin addresses and some tech support email addresses) from users who are often totally unknown to an organization before they first send in a message.
The basic problem is that there are a variety of legitimate reasons for why email gets sent from addresses which wouldn't already be in the receiver's address book. Another problem is that junk mail senders can fake the originating email address. So junk mail that pretends to be from an address on a whitelist could get thru.
There are a few methods proposed for dealing with this problem of legitimate email that isn't already on a whitelist. One could put it in a folder that the user would occasionally glance thru to look for what might be legitimate email. Many of us do that with existing email that our filters route to junk mail folders. Another option would be to have automated software that would respond to the suspect mail asking that the originator read some GIF to identify a keywork embedded in a thatched pattern. Then the user would either go to a web page that the response mail would provide a link to or would respond with an email that contained the keyword. Basically, the idea is to ensure that a human cares enough about getting the email thru to look at a response to it and do something to get one registered as a real human sender of individual email messages.
The sharing of whitelists has been proposed. That way, for instance, everyone in a company that deals with some other set of companies could use the whitelists for those other companies. One problem with these shared whitelists would become valuable for junk mailers to acquire. After all, the bulk of their entries would tend to be real used email addresses that could be added to lists of email addresses to email to. Plus, by analysing whitelists the junk mailers can choose originating addresses to fake. It is easy for spammers to put a fake value in the From address field. This would up the odds that a junk mail message will get thru.
One response to the problem of spammers using whitelists as part of their toolbox would be to encrypt the email addresses in the whitelists. Dan Brickley has proposed using an RDF format file to allow sharing of whitelists. He calls this approach FOAF for Friend Of A Friend. He proposes the use of encryption to hide the addresses:
This is an experiment based on the idea of sharing lists of garbled email addresses, ie instead of sharing 'mailto:danbri@w3.org' we might share '357fdd378d61684762ed88277192cfdf001189af', which is what we get when we feed that address to the sha1 algorithm. Consumers of this data can do the same thing with addresses from incoming mail, and then check to see if the resulting value is on the (garbled) whitelist.
One problem with encrypted shared whitelists is that if someone was to give you one you'd have no way of knowing who you are opening yourself up to receiving email from. Another problem with it is that a junk emailer who has a huge database of email addresses could get a copy of a whitelist and then run all of their email addresses thru the encrypting algorithm and compare the output to the entries in the whitelist. The irony here is that the junk emailers, because they have such large numbers of email addresses in their databases, are in a better position to figure out what the encrypted values are in the whitelists.
It might be possible to prevent spammers from faking at least some From addresses by creating a group of trusted POP servers that know about what From domains each POP server is allowed to originate email with those domains in the From field. The sending POP servers would have to enforce on senders that they can only send email with the specific From addresses that have been assigned to them. The receiving POP servers would have to know what domains each sending POP server can legally use to send to them and if an email gets sent by an untrusted POP server and that email contains a domain in the From field that is a domain that is "owned" by a trusted POP server then the receiving POP server would know to reject the email.
I found this interesting URL http://labs.google.com/cgi-bin/keys?q=101+mozilla&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&start=0&sa=N&fromkey=1 in my TechiePundit referral logs. Note the labs.google.com. Okay, so what is it? It appears to be a site where Google lets people try out new Google features. One thing they are trying out is support for Google results pages browser keyboard shortcuts. So if you bring up that URL above you can hit N to go to the next page of results and then hit P to go back to the previous page. If you hit the '?' key it will pop down a list of all the keyboard shortcut keys. This works for me with Mozilla 1.2b. I see in the keyboard shortcuts discussion group (see below) that someone has found it works on Opera 7 beta as well. I like the way one can hit keys 1 thru 9 to choose any one of the first 9 results to go to.
Also, the Google folks have discussion groups (am I like the only one who doesn't know this? - yeah I know about their Usenet groups support) where users discuss their experiences trying out new Google features. For instance, there is a discussion group for Google keyboard shortcuts.
I visit a lot of other blogs and sometimes get annoyed by problems with their readability and general useability. With that in mind, and with the hope that the publishers of the reviewed blogs will change their layouts in response to my review, I present some views about good blog layout followed by comments about several blogs.
Here are some of my personal preferences on blog layout:
- The text should be easy to read. The foreground colour should not be just a slightly different shade of the background colour. The font shouldn't be extremely small. If you have a basically black font then make it black. The faded grey that MovableType and other templates use as default just makes it harder to read. Maximize contrast.
- Link list on right side. Links to other blogs and news sources should go on the right side, not the left side. That way if one has no intention of clicking thru to the one can narrow the page by dragging to make the links not visible. This frees up desktop space for other windows. Note that this is an advantage only if column widths are fixed (and, no, I don't use fixed column widths myself).
- Archive pages should have a link back to main blog page. Suppose you reach a blog by a link from another blog to a particular post. Typically that is going to take you to an archive page. Once you've read the post that brought you to the site the natural thing to do is to want to click to the main blog page. Too many blogs have no link on their archive pages for doing that. You end up having to use the mouse and delete key to cut the URL down to the core blog URL. Worse, a few blogs have main pages that are not just a cut down or an archive page URL. So finding the main blog page is a nontrivial exercise.
- Don't use alot of white space and border shapes. Some sites have so much margin and fancy drawn shapes that there is little room left over for blog messages. You can read one post or a post and a half at a time. Makes it necessary to page up and down too often and makes it harder to go back to some post you want to read again. Artistic layou can look nice on first appearance. But is it convenient for your visitors?
- Sort your blog links into categories and/or rate by quality. A site that has 50 or 100 links to other blogs is saying what exactly? That all the blogs are equally worth visiting? That the site author doesn't want to seem too unegalitarian by actually rating other sites? Most of us have too few hours in the day. Some guidance as to the types of blogs you are recommending would be helpful. Also, ranking them may seen unegalitarian but its helpful. Its why we visit our favorite blogs in the first place: we've decided particular blog writers are good at finding and choosing articles and information sources that we find worth reading.
- Comment dialog boxes should be resizeable. When you pop open a comment list and there are 50 comments it is extremely annoying to have to scroll the thing after every 10 lines and 40 columns to try to read all the comments that have been made so far. Just because MovableType and other blogging software come with a default unresizeable pop-up doesn't mean that bloggers should stick with this default choice.
- The control where visitors write comments should resize along with the entire dialog box. Hey, I know I haven't fixed this on my own blogs. Sorry about that. Eventually I'm write a scathing critique of my own blogs and point out all the other things I don't like about them.
- Serious successful bloggers should move off of blogspot. Visitors want to click on your URL and actually see the site load. Plus, there is that small matter of reliable archive links. Its only $11 per month to host on Hosting Matters. I chose that hosting service based on Bill Quick's recommendation and so far I'm quite satisfied with the service. Glenn Reynolds uses them too.
With this in mind here's a review of some blog sites that I frequent (or in some cases might frequent if they weren't so hard to read):
PejmanPundit's yellow text on dark grey background is hard to read. Am I the only one who has that reaction?
Also, I do not like the blackspace on either side. The browser window's own borders provide plenty of delimiting signal to my eye. Generally speaking, I find I do not like lots of white space or black space filler on sites. I do not want a browser window to be any wider than necessary. I may have other windows open on the desktop that I want visible at the same time. I don't want to waste space.
Also, for links on the right the light blue text on a gray-green background doesn't provide sufficient contrast. Make the blue darker and the background lighter. Or do the opposite. Just up the contrast.
Update: A friend who looks at this site using IE 6.0 sees the text as white, not yellow. But using IE 5.5 and Mozilla 1.2b I see yellow and the style sheet confirms that its not white since the post text color is specified as FFFFCC.
Samizdata.net is easier to read than PejmanPundit. This is partly due to the white text on a blue background. But the font looks better as well. Samizdata also wastes less in margin space. One can narrow the browser window to get rid of most vertical unused blank space that is outside the blog column. I'd still like to see them cut back on the margins on the left and right of each post inside the blog column.
The top and bottom margins between posts are excessive. There is the blue box with yellow outline as a boundary. So why use so much empty space as well? On this site one rarely can see more than one whole post at a time even when the posts are short.
The link list over on the left side is light blue text on a darker blue with a small font. They need to either increase the contrast or increase the font size.
This site demonstrates a problem I see on a number of sites: The Date is displayed on the most recent post of all the posts for that day. Well, its hard to spot that date. It doesn't get its own boundary shape. The boundary box between posts is quite large. There ought to be smaller boundary between posts (since they are already easy to distinguish for other visual reasons) and the box should just be put out before each date.
Also, this site does not show a Date/Time stamp on each post. I understand that the posters are spread out across many time zones. But it helps if one is coming back to the site to be able to guess where one left off if there is a time on the posts. Maybe GMT would be an acceptable time to use.
He is really Steve Bail but named his blog after the RAF captain which Peter Sellers played in Dr. Strangelove. You will recall that is the fellow stuck on the base with the USAF general who goes mad and rants about flouride and pure bodily fluids.
Well, a few complaints about Steve's site:
- The background color and the URL link color are too similar.
- Steve first talks about a news article and even excerpts it and then puts the URL link to it at the end of the post. A link to an article should come sooner in the post and the A HREF should span a few words to provide a larger place to spot with one's eye and click on.
I hope Steve is right that his chosen background color is soothing wild belligerent humans the world over. If World Peace suddenly inexplicably breaks out I know who I'm going to credit.
The guy who runs this blog is known as Lynxx Pherrett. Since Lynxx Pherrett is a catchier name than Assume The Position I think he ought to have named his blog after his pseudonym instead.
Okay, one big complaint about this blog: He italicises all excerpts he makes from articles that he quotes from. That makes these excerpts (which run for paragraphs) harder to read. Plus, any pre-existing use of italics in the quoted text gets lost. The indenting from the BLOCKQUOTE tag is already sufficient to allow one to identify text excerpts. The use of italics for this purpose is a bad idea.
Glenn Reynolds has of course become larger than life, InstaMan, Blog Father, Uber Pundit. How dare I question any blog site decision he has made in the face of his overwhelming blog dominance?
Well, first of all, as Glenn surely knows, no one dominates blog world. Secondly, I'm really hoping he'll fix a couple of things that obviously ought to be fixed.
First of all, his pop-up dialog boxes are not resizable. Why? Probably because that is the default for MovableType and he never changed it. When a comment list is long it really helps to be able to make it bigger to see more at once. That way it isn't as necessary to scrolls as often and messages that are in response to other messages can be compared to the other messages.
Second complaint: His permalink icon. I know what it is. But do all users? It also is sufficiently small that its harder to get the mouse over it than it is to get the mouse over, say, the text "Permalink".
She has no permalinks dammit!
Also, I think her main text column should be wider. Most people will come to the page with their web browser open wide enough to allow wider lines and hence fewer lines per post and hence more posts visible at once.
This is a stylish site. If Charles Johnson wants to say "Who are you to criticise my site. Just look at your site in comparison" I'd have to say he's right. Still, since the right to be a hypocrite needs to be exercised constantly in order to help defend it I feel compelled to review Little Green Footballs.
Okay, first of all, he uses a lot more vertical space per post than is necessary. The date/time, comments, permalink are spread out over 3 lines. Also, since all 3 of his columns are fixed width one can't widen the page as a way of getting the middle post column wider.
Charles claims his site is validated for HTML 4.0 Transitional. He says:
This page contains validated HTML 4.01 Transitional code, with a validated stylesheet. (Or at least it used to; but allowing visitors to comment makes validation impossible.)
But the W3.org validator finds problems in places that are not in user comments. So I would be curious to know what validator Charles uses and how recently he's done his validation.
Try this link to see HTML 4.01 validation on Little Green Footballs.
Still, this is a beautiful site and is functionally rich. He has made available some of his scripts he's written for managing his site. See the "Scripts" category in the left hand column.
Over in his left hand column "A few of my favorite things" the links are in orange against a green-gray background. Add in the font choice to make it even slightly worse and the contrast between the colors makes it harder to read the links than it should be. Charles, you are a biological scientist at Harvard with no doubt a very well developed observational abilities. Surely you have noticed your color contrast choice is far from ideal.
For perfectly understandable reasons lots people want to make their sites look unique. The temptation is to use color combinations that look attractive and that are used by few other sites. Well, the reason so many color combinations are rarely used and a fairly small number of color combinations are widely used is that most color combinations do not provide the good contrast that makes text easy to read.
Okay, back to Charles' blog: in the post body section he has light yellow-green text on a darker green background. The contrast is better than what he has in his links column. But it still could be improved upon. I would also suggest a change in font as well. Verdana,Arial is what Glenn Reynolds uses and I've patterned my own sites after the wise choice of the Blog Father (though I'm still using a less readable font in my links column).
I like the picture of the Gorilla (orangutan?) mother on the left cradling the baby. Very cool. Nice touch.
The pairs of double colons on the date posted/links line and at the top make for a mildy stylish touch. I don't understand why he provides his contact info on each post. If it was a shared blog maybe that would make sense (even then not absolutely necessary though).
Charles has a Stats icon at the bottom of his page. But you can't click on it to see his traffic levels since it asks for a password. For all other sites with similar icons that Ive tried to click thru on the result is immediate display of tables and charts of traffic history.
Another small complaint about stats icons: A lot of bloggers put them at the very bottom of their pages. I think it would be more sensible to put them at the bottom of one of their links columns.
His site is too wide and fixed width.
His text is too light. Chuck, use solid black for the text. Light color isn't neater looking. It is just what some of the blogging software temlates ship with as the default. Also, if you want a different background color for the excerpts then use a lighter grey in the background to denote the excerpted text from articles in order to increase the contrast between the text and background.
His Comments option runs some Javascript that opens a new window on Mozilla (at least a fairly recent build 2002100714) but there is nothing in the window. So Comments may not work on Netscape 7 either. Not sure but its a good possibility.
You know how you hate animated gifs on news sites that distract you from reading the text? (unless you are a freak who likes animated gif ads - in which case you are a mutational adaptation to the web). Those animated gifs are usually there to sell things. If annoying distracting moving stuff on web pages unless the moving stuff isn't an advert then it could be an entertaining animated gif cartoon or some other content meant to entertain. But Sounding Board has those flashing and moving objects just because the web site author wanted it that way. Go figure.
I'd tell you more about this site but I'd get dizzy trying to stare at it any longer. Sorry.
Update: Allan at Sounding Board appears to have dropped his animated gifs. Since I can now look at the site without feeling dizzy I'll say some more things about it.
He conveninetly has an Alta Vista Babelfish set of icons for translating his site into other languages. That's very nice. I've found entries in my referral logs which were for URLs that translated my own site into other languages. It is nice to see that one can put easy access links on one's site to make that easy for people to do. I just tried one of the flags and the translated result appears to be Italian. The fact that there are flags instead of text there for each of the language makes it hard to tell what language each link is for. Since, for instance, Spanish is the primary language for many countries it seems more sensible to include a text label under each flag icon. Or if character set support on different operating systems is a concern one might want to use an image of a piece of text instead. Still, this is the first blog site I've notice that has this feature right on it.
Another nice touch for the international nature of the internet is his (GMT+8) after each posting time to let you know not only when he posted it but from what time zone. Of course, unless you know how many hours off of GMT you are its not much good. But since GMT is in Britain its not too hard to guess that approximately. I'm guessing he's in the Pacific Standard Time that the West Coast of the US and Canada uses.
I find the color of orange he's using for not-yet-visited URLs to be a big hard to read. Its harder to read against the blue than against the darker background he uses on on some parts of his left column. Seems to me that one should coordinate one's foreground and background color use. Also, while I like the color of blue that he has as a background (Being so unartistic I don't know the fancy name for that color; kinda teal and sapphire) I think the level of contrast between it and the white text leaves a bit to be desired. Its not horrible or unreadable. I just think the contrast ought to be a bit greater.
The various proprietary Unix implementations and their processor architectures are looking more and more like road kill:
In 2003, revenue from servers built on Intel processors will for the first time exceed revenue from more customised Unix systems built on RISC processors, analyst firm Gartner Dataquest has predicted.
Meanwhile, a major factor pushing both Linux and Java is the fear of corporate IT departments of getting too far locked in to Microsoft APIs and server applications. Gartner is predicting that Dot Net is going to equal Java in marketshare or Java may stay ahead of it. But Mark Driver of Gartner seems to be saying that Microsoft's tools for developing server apps are more productive than their Java equivalents:
"The basic equation is that Java tends to give you more flexibility at the cost of productivity, while Microsoft tends to give you more productivity at the cost of flexibility," Mr Driver said.
I think that Microsoft really does put a lot more effort into making it easier for lower skilled software developers to produce apps. Microsoft prototyping and GUI design tools are often frequently more productive even for more capable developers. Java already suffers this disadvantage. But two other disadvantages are stacking up againt it: 1) Sun is becoming weaker financially as Solaris and Sparc lose ground to Windows and Linux on x86. 2) Microsoft is producing products (C# and .NET) to directly target Java on the server.
The biggest thing that Java has going for it into the future is that it runs on an operating system (Linux) that is cheaper than Windows on the same hardware. Java runs on various other operating systems and non-Intel processor architectures. But its ability to run on x86 hardware is what is going to maintain its appeal in the face of the Microsoft .Net C# onslaught.
If Java is to have an appeal that is greater than "its not from Microsoft" then what it Java needs is a richer set of APIs and better development tools that do more automation of design and development tasks.
This is significant because it shows that Microsoft is showing some signs of maturity in recognizing that the server OS market is highly resistant to major upgrades. People get their servers running just right and then they just want them to run for years without trouble.
Longhorn OS will be confined to the desktop, while its follow-up OS, known as Blackcomb, will power servers only.
If you are using Macintosh check out the Chimera browser. Its written on top of the Mozilla Gecko source code but with a different user interface.
Its finally here! Go download and give it a whirl. I'm downloading from the US web site and its coming down at 9 kb/sec which is a good order of magnitude slower than my web connection. So a lot of people are going after it at the moment.
From the Opera News page here are a few of the improvements:
The standards support in Opera 7 for Windows Beta 1 has been improved with added support for DOM level 2 and CSS2; improved ECMAScript and HTML 4.01 support; and complete WML 1.3 and 2.0 support. Opera 7 also handles non-standard pages using DHTML, giving Opera's millions of old and new users a hassle-free Internet experience.
Also, Opera has released a version of their browser for FreeBSD.
I'll come back and update this post once I have some experience using it.
Update: Its fast, small, and pretty. I've taken it to perhaps 100 pages so far with no crashes or rendering problems. It has a new email client that sounds interesting. All email from all accounts are accessible via a single database structure that can sort and search on any number of characteristics (eg like who it is from). One problem I see with it is that while it has a spam filter there is just 3 levels of filtering and so far I haven't found anything about user-programmable spam filters.
An article on IBM DeveloperWorks on 5 myths about Java programming:
Myth 1: Garbage collection solves all memory-related problems
Myth 2: Parameters are passed by reference
Myth 3: Atomic operations are thread safe
Myth 4: Synchronized code is the same as a critical section
Myth 5: Waiting threads are awakened in priority order
There was a bit of a surprise for me in this article: Threads can keep their own copies of object variables. So you can assign a value to a variable in one thread and even though that line has executed that doesn't mean another thread reading the same variable will see it. But that isn't so unexpected Certainly with regular code optimizations with registers to hold variables one would expect this sort of thing to happen. It is hard to tell from the article whether Java takes this further than what one would expect to see in just compiled C that did the same thing.
John Derbyshire explores how Google is changing punditry:
And not everything is yet online in any form. A month or so ago I quoted a line from a John Betjeman poem. Several readers wanted to know where they could read the whole poem. Not on the Web, is the answer — at any rate, Google couldn't find it. Those of us who have actually read and memorized a lot of stuff still have an edge, though probably not for much longer. I feel a bit like the guys who knew how to manipulate slide rules must have felt when pocket calculators came in. I have a head full of junk, crammed with odd and arcane facts, which I can sprinkle through my writing to add charm and seasoning to it. That head full of junk used to be my working capital. But now, anyone else can get the same effect, just by googling.
Another big step will come when mind-machine interfaces will allow one to think a query in one's mind and then get it back so quickly that one can use it in a real-time conversation without any listeners knowing that the information didn't come from one's own mind.
You need at least Java 1.3 to see this. If you have it (or want to go grab it from the Sun site) then go try out the TouchGraph GoogleBrowser.
Is it useful? Maybe. But is it fun? Definitely.
Thanks to Adam Flinton for the heads-up on it.
On the XUL Planet site Neil Deakin has listed 101 advantages of Mozilla over Microsoft Internet Explorer. I've excerpted the first 10 here. Go to this link for the full list.
- Tabbed browsing
Lets you display more than one site in a window using multiple tabs. - Popup blocking
Block all those popup ads. - Prevent scripts from doing various things
such as moving windows, closing them and setting cookies. - Link toolbar
Displays content from the <link> tags provided by a document, allowing one to navigate to various parts of a site. - Sidebar
The sidebar provides a number of tabs by default, and others can be added by the user. - Can add custom panels to sidebar
Custom sidebars can be implemented in HTML or XUL and can be installed from a remote site without much hassle. - More control over text zooming
Can zoom text to any size. IE only supports five sizes and has no shortcut keys that I could determine. - Can zoom any text, even that with fixed pixel sizes
Can zoom text no matter what units were specified. - Can select from multiple stylesheets provided by page
When a page provides multiple (or alternate) stylesheets, one can select between them by choosing from the View menu. - Page info dialog
Provides additional information about encoding, MIME type, referrer and meta tags.
There are Mozilla features on this list that I was unaware of. So even if you are a Mozilla user you may find that the list is worth a perusal. For instance, the ability to select between different style sheets for a site is a cool feature. Now that I know about it I'm going to try to develop multiple stylesheets for my 4 web logs. Also, the feature for searching thru bookmarks was one I was unaware of. I just tried it and it is quite handy. Plus, he says there is a way to bookmark a group of tabs and then open them as a group. I want to figure out how that is done.
Update On how to use Bookmark Tab Groups: Open a Mozilla window. Open a bunch of tabs on different pages. Then click on Bookmarks on the menu bar and choose "Bookmark this group of tabs" from the pop-down list. Then in the dialog box that pops up type in a name for the group and select a folder to put it in. Then when you click on that group all those pages will open up in a set of tabs. That is very cool. Just be aware that there doesn't appear to be a way to select a subset of tabs from all the open tabs for a given Moz window. So think about what you want to have in the group and get only those pages open.
Its the highest rate for Silicon Valley since 1983. By contrast, Orange Country is only 4.0%. Read more details here.
At this rate Spam is going to become more than half of all Email within a couple of years. Perhaps spammers should be put on US State Department terrorist organization lists.
The amount of junk e-mail in inboxes has risen by over 80% since the beginning of the year.
According to a monthly report from filtering firm MessageLabs, one in six e-mails is now spam, an alarming 64% increase on September and up a massive 81% since January.
Phoenix is a browser built on top of a large chunk of the Mozilla source code. Mozilla is the open source browser development project that Netscape v6.x and later (now at some v7.x rev) is made from. Mozilla without the Netcape/AOL "enhancements" is available for download. Mozilla is my own favorite browser and at the moment I'm using the 2002110610 nightly build.
If you want to download and install the newest release version of Mozilla then go here for Mozilla Release builds and choose the highest version number directory. Then choose what looks like it is for your operating system (win32 is for all of Win98, WinME, NT, Win2k, Win XP). At the moment as I type this the newest Mozilla is v1.2b. But v1.2 will be out any week now.
If you want to be more cutting edge and install the latest Mozilla nightly build then go here for Mozilla nightly builds and again choose what looks like it is for your operating system.
But this post is really about Phoenix. Phoenix is a project to build a better front-end on the Mozilla page rendering source code. To find out where to download it and how to install it read the Phoenix release notes at this page. It seems pretty stable to me after a couple of hours of beating on it with lots of page visits.
Phoenix has a nice facility for blocking pop-up ads. It lets you control by URL site which sites can do pop-ups.
For another browser built on top of the Mozilla source code you can also try K-Meleon which is also built using a lot of the Mozilla source code but with yet another different UI. I haven't tried K-Meleon yet but they just released their v0.7 rev and it is built on top of the Mozilla v1.2b source code base.
For Mac users there is a different project to use the Mozilla Gecko source code to build a better browser. You can download Chimera here.
Update: I've been running Phoenix v0.4 continuously for two days now with many pages visited without any crashes, It seems pretty solid. My complaints about it: It doesn't have the left side panel view of bookmarks (at least not that I can find) that IE, Mozilla, and Opera have. It just has the old Netscape v4.x pop-down style. Also, filing a bookmark when the whole bookmark folder tree becomes visible on the pop-down combo list is not easy. It does have a nice feature for controlling pop-up ads though.
The Fritz Hollings proposal to require copy protection technology to be placed in all PCs looks to be dead now that John McCain will be chairman of the US Senate Commerce Committee:
His replacement is likely to be John McCain of Arizona, currently the top Republican on the committee, who has not adopted such a pro-Hollywood stance. During a hearing in March, McCain said he was skeptical of proposals such as Hollings' that "select technological winners and losers and mandate government intervention in the marketplace."
Privacy protection looks set to be strengthened:
In this case, a change in leadership may not make a difference. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.), the current chairman of the banking committee, may be replaced by Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), who is also a very strong advocate for privacy protections.
"Shelby is one of the most ardent pro-privacy senators of either party," said Evan Hendricks, editor and publisher of Privacy Times. "Privacy is in much better shape there [in the banking committee] than anywhere else."
Broadband deregulation might embolden local phone carriers to make bigger investments in the local loop:
Online privacy bill, broadband deregulation, other legislation could pass more easily with power shift, watchers say.
It will be an especially good thing of the Fritz Hollings proposal dies in committee.
See the discussion in this Javalobby thread of Wee Jin Goh's recent repeat of the C vs Java benchmark that Chris Rijk published over 2 years ago in this Ace's Hardware article. The latest results show the server version of the Sun JVM 1.4.1_01 on a Windows box doing as well as and even better than C compiled with GCC 3.2 to do the same algorithms. You can find a PDF version of Wee Jin Goh's results here. Another interesting point about the results is the big difference between the client and server versions of the Sun JVM. It would also be interesting to see how the IBM JVM compares on the same hardware. Also, keep in mind that GCC 3.2 is probably producing less optimized code than the latest Intel C compiler produces.
The high end Java server vendors do not appreciate the importance of the low end of the market. Microsoft had built its empire by launching its attacks on the top end using products it first has sold into the mass volume low end. The jBoss founding developer Marc Fluery sees the same pattern with MS .NET:
On the contrary, I would argue that Open Source and JBoss in particular are already Sun's best defense against Microsoft .NET. Only Open Source has proven uniquely resilient to a Microsoft onslaught. In the same way that Linux has prevented MS NT from dominating the server operating system, JBoss will prevent .NET from making serious inroads into the application server tier, the crucial gateway to enterprise software applications.
The other players in the J2EE market cannot offer Sun much support against .NET. Last time I talked to Scott Dietzen, CTO of proprietary J2EE market leader BEA Systems, he claimed that they don't see .NET in the marketplace. Not surprising that .NET lacks visibility in the very pricey end of the enterprise market. At JBoss, we see it plenty. Not only do we see .NET coming into the market, we are good at defending the J2EE turf against it.
What's the biggest problem with Java? Sun is in control of its development. Sun has been too slow in improving AWT, Swing, the File classes, the network classes (TCP/IP related mostly but other protocol support as well), and for an assortment of other categories. Some of these API categories are improving. But the changes have taken years longer than they should have. Sun has been too slow about getting around to implementing shared pre-compiled classess across processes too. Java should be improved not just for long-running server processes but also for fat clients and command line utilities. Java should become a better all-around language.
Here are some improvements I'd like to see made to Java. You can also read my previous Java rant.
One of the most important bugs on the Sun Java Bug Parade is "multiple JVM runtimes do not share memory between themselves". This limitation creates a number of problems when running multiple Java processes:
- Each library has to be compiled for each process that starts up. So process start-up is slower.
- Each JIT compiled output goes into a separate in-memory copy and hence more total memory is used.
- Processor cache hits are reduced. Multiple processes that could share the same code don't and so what one process causes to be loaded into CPU cache doesn't get reused when the OS switches control to a different process.
In theory the common libraries could all be precompiled just once and kept in a cache and loaded the first time they are requested. All later processes could make use of the already loaded libraries. This would speed up development, reduce memory needs in some server configurations, and make it more feasible to use Java to write fat client applications. Multiple client apps running on the same machine could share a common compiled in-memory copy of Swing and other core APIs.
Some people respond to this kind of proposal by arguing that DLLs are evil. I'm not arguing exactly for DLLs. I am really arguing for sharing the same set of classes across processes when the processes specify the same sources for those classes. Obviously, if different processes are using the same JVM version then they are going to use the same JVM core classes anyway. This wouldn't have to require the use of DLLs. There could be a master process (which could come as part of the JRE/JDK) that all processes go to for particular jar files and that master process compiles and loads them into memory and JIT compiles them when the first process asks and then the other processes can just map them in. But one could have a way to make a Java process to start up and load its own stuff. One could even make the default be that each process loads from its own classpath from its local environment. But add a command line flag that says "Go ask the central dispatcher to map in the core libraries I need".
Doing that would save memory, increase performance (by increasing cache hits when switching between processes) and speed development. If you have JBuilder or Forte or Eclipse running you could have the IDE tell the main Java process manager to load classes it uses and classes that the target processes use. Then each time you start up a debug session the process could load faster since the standard libs would not have to JIT recompile every time the target process started. You'd only have to reload and re-JIT compile the stuff in your own actively changing classes.
This approach could be extended to include having preloaded copies of non-Sun classes for any libaries that are rarely changing.
Swing: there are people out there writing Java GUI apps. I have no idea how many. But the comp.lang.java.gui Usenet group seems to have quite a few posters in it. There'd be a lot more if Java was easier to write GUI apps in and if Java had richer libraries and if Java apps weren't such big pigs.
Of course, it would take more than shared memory between fat client apps to make Swing more tenable as a library for writing serious client apps. Swing would have to become much richer. The fact that Sun after all this time has expanded Swing's API set so slowly does not bode well for that to happen. Sun is the bottleneck and with Sun's financial problems that is not likely to get any better. What is needed is for Sun to allow the open source community to take over control of development of more API categories of Java. Java needs to be opened up.
AWT, Swing, and SWT: On one hand AWT is faster but it has too few controls and too simple a set of features on the controls it does have. The biggest limitation with AWT is that it was designed to use a lowest common denominatior of underlying native OS controls. On the other hand Swing has more and fancier controls. However, Swing is bigger and slower and still has plenty of bugs. Plus, its controls are still too limited in both number and power as compared to what Win32 has to offer.
Are developers happy with AWT? Well no, not exactly. They want Sun to keep improving AWT. As you can see from that request for enhancement people have lots of complaints about Swing too and that is why many developers come back asking for more AWT improvements.
How fast does Sun fix Swing and AWT bugs? Well, here'sa popular bug that is over 4 years old. They don't all take that long. But some important ones do.
A lot of developers like the Java langauge and think that if only Swing didn't have as many bugs and if only it was smaller, faster, and more feature rich then they could write more client apps in Java. But the years go by and progress on Swing's problems continues to be a case of too little too late.
Then there is the SWT which IBM developed because they wanted speed and size that were more like AWT but IBM gave SWT all sorts of advantages that Sun has been unwilling to give to AWT. On the bright side SWT is open source. But SWT is not available on all OSs, its faster on Windows than in other implementations, and it does not ship with the core JRE or JDK. Plus, since it relies on native controls it is not as likely to be consistent across OS platforms. Plus, since it was originally developed for Win32 to achieve the same functional set on some other platforms may require a greater quantity of coding by the SWT porters.
I compare Basic to Java because I've done a lot in both languages (and in C++ as well and there the standard libraries are much worse than in Java). Using Basic shows me just how handy it is to be able to rely on a very large and well tested set of calls for doing an assortment of things that I do alot. I process a lot of data that has dates and I have to compare dates and calculate durations in days, months, and years. Well, Basic makes it easier to do this than Java does.
I've written a lot of Basic code and ported a fair amount of it to Java. In order to do the porting I had to write functions in Java that did the equivalent of Basic functions that Microsoft has had in Basic for literally at least a decade. For example, as I mentioned in my previous Java rant, date classes in Java lack some capabilities that are commonly used and already available in Basic. But I've also had to write substring matching functions and other functions that I think should already be built into Java. What is needed is a systematic sweep thru the MS Basic library calls to identify all the calls and operations that Basic has that Java lacks equivalents for. Java equivalents then should be written.
My point here is that these functions are not that hard to write and so Java ought to have them. Java has been around for so many years and since one of the major ideas behind it is to avoid having to use platform specific stuff. Well, that makes big standard libraries all the more important. I think Sun lacks sufficient numbers of people working on Java and that is why they are the bottleneck. Plus, they show signs of having a Unix "Real men write their own libraries" mindset which doesn't help.
Developers are unhappy with the class loader. The jBoss people could probably write a good spec on how the class loader ought to work.
The biggest problem with Java for doing math is that it tries so hard to prevent illegal array and pointer use that the checking overhead makes it run slower for many types of math problems. IBM has proposed a multi-dimensional array class for Java in part to make it easier for JVMs to reduce the amount of required array bounds checking that is required. The current Java model of multi-dimensional arrays is really done by array of arrays and so the existing approach also costs more in other ways. There is less locality of access (a series of memory allocation calls go into allocating all the pieces) and more overhead to allocate the arrays since each extra dimension has to be traversed to do a series of new calls to fill in its array pointers.
Name Java processes any name you want to give them. A java.exe command line option to allow you to specify what name the OS will give to a process. Seeing a bunch of processes in the OS process list that are all named java.exe isn't exactly helpful.
Have a way to define Java command line names. Starting Java programs requires that one start the Java process with the class name and potentially other options such as classpath info. It would be nice if there was some way to have a registry where you can define OS-independent aliases for Java program names that have the command line options and even which Java version to use to start each Java class entry point. The Java class shared memory manager (mentioned above) should be what knows about common Java program names. It could keep precompiled Java exes in its cache. Then Java command line utilities could be very fast starting and still share memory for core libraries with other Java processes.
The Sun Community Process needs to come out from under the control of Sun. At least some classes of libraries should be developed totally outside of Sun's control. Sun just doesn't have enough people moving at a fast enough speed to develop all the libraries that Java needs. Enough years have gone by without various deficiencies being addressed that its clear at this point that Sun is too slow on too many parts of Java. Sun's worsening financial condition makes a loosening of their hands on the Java reins even more important.
Sun ought to let compiler makers generate native exes that don't require the exes be distributed with any core Java jar files in order to run. Let Java act more like a normal language.
My view of the library issues is that IBM could lend its support to an effort to organize some meetings of the people like Mr. Harold who care about such things. IBM could start up its own parallel community process to hammer out complete standards with the open source community to develop libraries that would be presented to Sun for inclusion in JREs and JDKs. If Sun won't play ball then other JRE and JDK distributors should just include these libraries in their downloads.
Is this insurrection? Yeah, pretty much. The JDOM libraries were developed outside of Sun's control and the result has been most beneficial. JDOM could serve as a model for how various basic library categories could be developed outside of Sun's control. Collections would be a great next area to tackle in this same manner. They don't require access to underlying OS APIs and therefore a new set of collection libraries could be developed independent of Sun. Of course there are areas where Sun's cooperation is necessary because in order to do the improvements one does have to either change the JVM or make native OS calls. Still, many types of API development could be done without Sun's cooperation.
Its time to identify areas that can be improved without any cooperating from Sun. Then the classes and be developed and made available to everyone. Eventually Sun may agree to make them part of the core but with continued open source licensing for those libs that are developed outside of Sun's control. This is what is needed. Break free of Sun and let a lot more people get involved in improving the core libraries.