Posts

Nicholas Kristof: All-American Osamas. I’m not sure if this piece is overly alarmist or if we just haven’t seen the worst yet. There’s no question that there are plenty of lunatics hiding in the woodwork plotting dastardly schemes in the name of truth, justice, and their version of the American way, but the question is how real a threat they are. Kristof obviously thinks that we ought not underestimate them, and indeed people like Timothy McVeigh illustrates the dangers of doing so. I’m usually tempted to ignore them, but perhaps that’s just denial. Riffing on the previous item, it seems likely that a lunatic from some rural hellhole might be able to get that USDA loan for a “crop duster” that Mohammed Atta was refused. ...

Via Dangerousmeta: Mohammed Atta tried to borrow money from the USDA to buy an airplane that he claimed he’d use for crop dusting. Atta used his real name, told her he had come from Afghanistan, and sang the praises of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

Jason Levine posted a mini-review of Mozilla 1.0 yesterday, which I found somewhat interesting. Here it is: So, I decided to be as unbiased as possible, and not only install Mozilla 1.0, but use it as my primary browser to see if it would grow on me. And in the first two days of using it, I have to admit... it didn't. It crashed three times, once when I clicked in the address bar, once when I submitted a web form, and once when I played a QuickTime clip. I didn't like the nonstandard widgets in the interface, either -- they felt clunky and slow. I did like the tabbed interface, but didn't like how some things wanted to open in other windows, and others were OK with opening in other tabs of the present window. And so I'm back to IE, and happy about it. I have to assume that I’m just lucky with Mozilla, because it almost never crashes on any of my computers. It hasn’t really been crash-prone in the past 8 or 10 releases in my experience. If it did crash a lot, I wouldn’t use it, so I can sympathize with the people who dump it for that reason. Jason’s criticism of tabbed browsing is one that I agree with. When you click on a link that wants to open a new window in Mozilla, it automatically opens it in a new window, not a new tab. If I wanted to restrict myself to one window for browsing, that would bug me. I do find the tabs very useful for doing something like going to the front page of the Washington Post and opening every story I intend to read in its own tab and then going back to read them later. Jason never got to the two things that bring me back to using Mozilla instead of IE every day. The first is the highly effective pop up ad suppression in Mozilla. It’s easy to turn on, and it just works. That alone makes my life as a Web user that much less painful. You can also turn off automatic window resizing and the ability to use JavaScript to put one window on top of another and vice versa. The other feature that makes Mozilla a keeper is cookie handling. Mozilla’s cookie handling code makes it really easy to enable or disable cookies on a site-by-site basis. I can stay logged into Yahoo and the NY Times and turn off all of those Doubleclick, WebTrends, and Hitbox cookies really easily. In fact, between Mozilla and SpamAssassin, I feel like I’ve been able to take control of my Internet usage experience to a much greater degree than I would have thought possible a few months ago. My biggest gripe with Mozilla is that it is still somewhat incompatible with certain sites. Things have really improved, but even now, there are some sites that just don’t look quite right. The only site I specifically open IE to view is espn.com, but that said, there are still others that are a bit off. I don’t feel like it’s the responsibilty of the Mozilla developers to cater to every badly coded site on the Internet, but it’s still a point of frustration for me. ...

Netcraft shows that netscape.com no longer runs a Netscape Web server. That has to be the end of an era, or something.

I opened a new Mozilla bug tonight: Bug 149794 - .exe appended to names of downloaded files It’s probably a dupe, but I couldn’t find a bug like it in Bugzilla. I’ve seen the bug on all three of the computers I use since installing Mozilla 1.0. Update: as I figured, the bug is a duplicate of bug 120327, which has about a billion comments. Even though the bug is old and well worn, I haven’t run into it, and I’ve been using Mozilla more or less exclusively for months. ...

NYRB: True Confessions. Jane Mayer looks at David Brock’s tell-all/plea for redemption, Blinded by the Right: New York Times columnist Frank Rich, while warning that readers should not necessarily take Brock's account on faith, has similarly vouched for the accuracy of the material Brock includes about him. Errors of both fact and judgment in his book will probably come to light, because Brock has a history of mistaking advocacy for reporting. But for the most part, he is writing here about episodes that he witnessed firsthand. Perhaps, as Brock insists, he has matured, both professionally and personally. In any event, the book has been available in easy reach of critics for several months, but other than small quibbles from mostly minor characters, there have been no serious blows to its credibility yet.

I’m normally not a big fan of using skins for my applications, because usually the amateur skins are rather poor. I’ve had to make an exception, though, for the Orbit skin for Mozilla. It’s very clean and aesthetically pleasing.

Are translation tools like the one Microsoft is providing to convert Java to C# actually used to practical effect by customers, or are they just an elaborate way to demonstrate superiority over one’s competitors and obtain media attention? It seems to me that it would be incredibly difficult to write such a translation tool effectively, even for Java, which is a relatively simple language, at least syntactically. I wonder whether it actually knows about all of the classes in the Java standard class library and properly translates them. Furthermore, if you use any external packages at all, like a third party logging tool, or XML parser, or regular expression library, I would imagine that the wheels fall off completely. I doubt many people write code on projects of any size without using external libraries. I guess the creation is news, of a sort, but rarely are the stories accompanied by analysis into how impractical such tools really are. ...

I’ve made a few changes to the RSS feed. Basically, I’m now capable of entering titles for links, which should show up in the RSS feed as the link title instead of the first few words of the post, which is how it is for every post up to this one. Optionally, the titles can also be displayed as the headline of the post when the posts are displayed on the Web site as well. If you notice any inconsistincies with regard to headlines, please let me know so I can fix the problem. (Yes, the reason the site hasn’t been updated all day is that I was working on improving the RSS stuff in my free time.) ...

One of the better topical weblogs I’ve discovered recently is How Appealing, Howard J. Bashman’s daily take on the goings on in the world of appellate litigation. As a charter member of the IANAL club, a lot of it is Greek to me, but it’s a useful graze when a significant decision comes down the pike. After more than four long years, it’s Mozilla 1.0. Congratulations! (I’ve successfully downloaded and installed Mozilla 1.0, if anything terrible happens, I’ll post it here – using IE.) ...