Almost Christmas

I’m a webmaster. When I’m designing web pages, it’s often useful to see how they look in different browsers and on different operating systems. But at work, I’m just one guy with IE 7 and Firefox 3 on Windows XP. What am I to do? Browsershots is a great service if you want screenshots of your page in different browsers. But what if you need to interact with your pages on different platforms?

Enter CrossBrowserTesting.com. The site gives you access to various Windows, Mac, and Linux boxes so you can do your thing. It’s kind of slow because you’ve got this stuff going back and forth over a network, but it’s pretty indispensable if you need to see how your web pages behave, which is often the case. It’s free to create an account and use the service; unless you buy credits, you’re limited to 5 minutes at a time, and paying customers get to skip ahead of you. In spite of that, there usually isn’t much of a wait. Sometimes there’s none.

The site requires Java, which shouldn’t be a problem for most people. By default, you connect to their computers via a Java applet. They also let you use your own VNC client, in which case they just give you the IP address and a password. You’ll still need to have Java, though. I know, it’s kind of lame. (I should add that Vinagre, the default VNC client in Ubuntu, is pleasantly easy to use. I had never needed to use it before.)

So CrossBrowserTesting.com went swimmingly on Windows at work, but on Ubuntu at home, the Java applet would cause Firefox to use 100% of the CPU and hang. It turned out that many, but not all, Java applets were doing this. I found out that it was a problem with the Java plugin that Firefox was using. With the version of Sun Java in Ubuntu 8.10 (Java 6 Update 10), there are two browser plugins: the regular one and the “next-generation” one, which fixes some bugs. The regular one is used by default, but the next-gen one is supposed to work a lot better.

So how do you switch between them? Here’s what I did. Your mileage may vary. No warranty, etc.

First, I deleted the symbolic link I created about a year ago:

cd ~/.mozilla/plugins
rm libjavaplugin_oji.so

As per this comment on the bug, I created a symbolic link to the new plugin in the same folder:

ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun-1.6.0.10/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so

But it didn’t work; both the old and new plugins were listed in about:plugins. So I followed the instructions of another comment:

sudo rm /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.4/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/xulrunner/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo rm /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre/lib/i386/libnpjp2.so /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-1.9-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/xulrunner-1.9.0.4/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/xulrunner-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/xulrunner/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/firefox-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so
sudo ln -s /etc/alternatives/mozilla-javaplugin.so /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libjavaplugin.so

The author provides these commands as a shell script (I found it easier just to run them one by one) and notes, “Don’t worry if you get an error message saying that something can’t be deleted.” (Not all of the files to be deleted existed for me.) Anyway, I did all those things and sho’ ’nuff, Java was working fine on CrossBrowserTesting.com and other sites. Yay.

Okay, that was boring. Here’s something a little more exciting. I just found out my grades for this semester: three A’s and two B+’s. It’s better than last time, and it brings my GPA up ever so slightly (about one hundredth of a grade point). I had already found out (or could guess) the grades for several of my classes, but my Indian Ocean class I had no idea about: part of the grade was a paper, which of course would be graded subjectively. Fortunately, I got an A. Thanks, prof. I’ll give you a good rating on Gator Ratings, a new site that a computer science student recently started.

Also, Where’s George?, a site I used to be heavily involved with, turns 10 years old today. I can’t believe it. That means I’ve been a member for almost nine years, which is crazy nuts. I haven’t done much in the past few years, though. Hardly anything, in fact. Still, the site is an interesting idea: enter the serial numbers of your US currency to track them as they go. The idea just got boring for me after a while, but it’s still cool when I think about it. (Also, when the forums were changed from WWWBoard to vBulletin, things were never the same.)

Although World War II ended in 1945, several Japanese soldiers held out from surrendering for various reasons: either they were really, really convinced that they shouldn’t surrender, or they weren’t aware that the war had ended. The last ones surrendered in 1974.

Video

While I’ve been home for the weekend, I realized that my webcam was here. Ah yes, my beloved webcam that I bought earlier this year to use with the video/phone program Ekiga. What happened to it?

When I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 in April, I encountered some changes the Ubuntu developers made to the way sound works. I couldn’t get sound working with Ekiga. My microphone wouldn’t work with any application. So that was that… until I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.10.

All the sound issues seem to have been sorted out, so I’m taking out the old webcam and microphone again with the hopes that someone might call me. You don’t have to be using Ekiga; you should be able to use any SIP client. So hit up sip:jordon@ekiga.net if I’m on Ekiga. This status indicator will say “Call Me!” if I’m online and “Offline” if I’m offline.

I’ve also been having fun with my webcam because I can now use Cheese to record videos with it. And with that, I’ve been delving into the magic of ffmpeg. (We’re getting into some serious Linux stuff right now, so you can just skip ahead if you don’t care.) I was bored and I figured out how to crop a 640×480 video to the ever popular 16:9 widescreen aspect ratio.

ffmpeg -i input.ogv -sameq -aspect 4:3 -croptop 60 -cropbottom 60 -aspect 16:9 output.mpg

Explanations: input.ogv is the input file, -sameq indicates that the output file should be of the same quality, -aspect 4:3 forces the aspect ratio to be 4:3 (in case ffmpeg acts up, which I’ve noticed that it does), -croptop and -cropbottom take off that many pixels from the top and bottom (60 in this case), and -aspect 16:9 ensures that the new aspect ratio is indeed 16:9 if ffmpeg doesn’t understand that from the cropping (which it doesn’t). output.mpg is the output file. If you were using a different sized video, you would take off a different number of pixels from the top and bottom.

Turns out that ffmpeg can’t write to Ogg Theora video. But there is a similar tool called ffmpeg2theora that can. The equivalent command for ffmpeg2theora is:

ffmpeg2theora input.ogv –croptop 60 –cropbottom 60 -o output.ogv

This is simpler because ffmpeg2theora doesn’t screw up the aspect ratio while it’s working.

I’m going home soon, and I’ve got another busy week ahead. Let’s get to the links.

Too weird: Anti-Terror Law Requires God Be Acknowledged.

Maybe you’ve heard that “piracy” of “intellectual property” causes 750,000 lost jobs. Where did the number come from? Find out.

And finally, here are 10 Weird Psychology Studies.

Thanks given

I’m at my grandparents’ house, and it’s Thanksgiving, the quintessential American holiday that may or may not be about gluttony. Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday, which means that people get the Friday after off and sometimes the Wednesday before also. Even if they don’t have the day before Thanksgiving off, they act like they do. I’m talking about everyone at my school, which was basically abandoned yesterday. I had one class on Tuesday which was dismissed early because I was one of the only people there. Yesterday, one of my classes was canceled and the other one wasn’t. There were only 8 people there when there are normally 50.

What can I say? People love their Thanksgiving. They love the four-day weekend, and would love to have a five-, six-, or nine-day weekend if they could. That leaves me. I wanted to go to my classes, and I also wanted to work and make that money. With my job as webmaster for the Dean of Students Office, I’ve been working on updating a web site for a biennial event that will be held in the spring. The person in charge of the event keeps telling me that Google’s listing for the page hasn’t been updated. Hey Google, go check out the Florida Hispanic Latino Collegiate Forum 2009. You might also want to see how I replaced an ugly JavaScript drop-down menu system with a beautiful, mostly-CSS, screen-reader-and-search-engine-friendly drop-down menu system. Don’t ask me how long it took to make it work on Firefox, IE7, and IE6. Please don’t.

Ah, Internet Explorer 6, the bane of every web designer’s existence. Fortunately, the percentage of IE6 users visiting the Dean of Students Office web site is at 15% and falling. (For this site, it’s about 12%.) But that’s still a significant number. Most of the computers in the DSO now have IE7, so what is a web designer supposed to do when he needs to test a site on IE6? I once resorted to going to the conference room and kicking someone off their computer to use IE6. But it turns out there’s a better solution. CrossBrowserTesting.com has saved my life. You can get free access to various testing environments for five minutes at a time, usually with little waiting. (You can also pay and skip the wait.) Java is required, but that’s no big. Except it doesn’t seem to work on my Ubuntu Linux setup at home; I think it’s the Java check that makes Firefox hang. Does anyone have a fix? (Please, nothing involving Wine.)

Anyway, right. Yesterday was quiet. The campus was practically dead. I could hear every footstep I took. In class, I could hear every stroke of my pen while I was taking notes. I hardly had to overtake anyone on the sidewalk. There wasn’t even a lot of traffic when there normally would have been. It’s a good thing, I guess. Everyone is with their families, enjoying Thanksgiving. And that’s really what Thanksgiving is all about.

Here’s a blog that’s counting down 1000 Awesome Things. It’s up to #886 right now.

Talk about quiet: the quietest place on earth is unnervingly quiet.

This article gives some insight on why cell phones work the way they do: Peering Inside a Mobile Phone Network.

Yeah, computers

Who’s ready to rock and roll?!

Well, too bad. You’re reading a blog post instead.

Ubuntu 8.10 (code-named “Intrepid Ibex”) came out last Thursday, but I didn’t make the time to upgrade for about a week. I was a bit hesitant as I usually am, especially since my friend Mark told me that the update messed up his computer quite a bit. I forget what it did, but it was something scary.

Like last time, I decided not to rely so much on the servers for the upgrade because I figured they would probably still be smashed due to the traffic. While I was home for the weekend, I downloaded the alternate installation CD image via BitTorrent (which I can’t do from my dorm room). When I was ready to upgrade, I mounted the CD image as a CD (details here), thus eliminating the need to burn a physical CD. This saves me time and makes Mother Nature happy.

Still, upgrading your operating system is a little scary. I fear for the safety of my computer and my data the same way a parent might fear for his or her child. The horror stories, like Mark’s, do nothing to help. But usually, everything turns out fine, and things seem to have turned out fine this time. Each release of Ubuntu has a few annoying bugs that are (hopefully) fixed in the next release. Fortunately, Intrepid seems to fix more than it introduces.

First, the new quirks. Intrepid relies less on the xorg.conf file, so when it reset my default keyboard layout, I had to look up how to change it. There’s a semi-graphical way to do this sort of thing now. You have to enter sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup, go through every screen, wait while the computer thinks, and then reboot. Well, maybe you just have to restart X, but I usually reboot when that’s called for. I also wanted to edit my actual keyboard layout file. It had moved from /etc/X11/xkb/symbols/us to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/us.

GNOME has a new “guest session” feature that creates a temporary account that doesn’t have access to anything important. This would be handy if someone needs to use your computer real quick. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work for me. Good thing people don’t need to use my computer real quick very often, I guess.

Recently, I figured out how to enable gapless playback in Rhythmbox. In Intrepid, this gives me a problem when I’m listening to albums or playlists. Rhythmbox stops playing the last song of the album or playlist just before it’s over. The only solution I’ve been able to figure out so far is to turn gapless playback off.

During the upgrade, I was prompted about overwriting several files. They had to do with the fixes I implemented for this nasty hard-drive killing bug that I thought should have been fixed now. It turns out that the bug hasn’t been fixed, so I tried this fix suggested on the Ubuntu Forums. It seems to work.

And now some good things in Ubuntu 8.10, in no particular order:

• There’s an option to allow sideways scrolling with the touchpad. I don’t know if this is new, but I’ve never seen it before.
• Ubuntu 8.04′s infamous Adobe Flash/PulseAudio bug is no more. Now I can watch Flash videos without worrying about Firefox crashing. This is really, really, really good. Really.
• The new version of GNOME puts less space between lines when listing things such as files. This saves space in a lot of places, including Pidgin‘s “Buddy Details” view.
• Keyboard controls: I’m once again able to change the volume (I don’t even know when that stopped working), and some of the sensitivity in changing the screen brightness that was lost in Ubuntu 8.04 is back.
• The Wi-Fi light once again lights up if a signal is detected.
• Audacity isn’t at all sluggish or uncooperative like it was in 8.04.
• For the first time, the desktop effects actually seem to work. My graphics driver hasn’t been up to the task in the past, but things seem to be going pretty smoothly with this release. I haven’t had a freeze yet.

Overall, it looks like 8.10 is a big improvement over 8.04.

On Flickr, here’s a photoset of Barack Obama before, during, and after his election night speech. The behind-the-scenes photos are especially interesting. I like this one of Obama watching McCain’s concession speech on TV. The photos aren’t very large, but they’re licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license.

A probably out-of-date link from our own reader Daniel: Will You Go To Homecoming With Me? Aw, how cute.

Advice I should follow: How to Be Interesting. I already do two of those ten things, so maybe I’m 20% interesting?

Free software vs. open source

Over the past ten years, the term “open source” has found a place in the public consciousness. The idea got an early boost in 1998, when Netscape decided to release the source code of their flagship program, the Communicator suite, for others to improve upon. It seemed like a desperate business decision for a company that was about to be crushed by Microsoft. But the hard work that countless programmers, designers, and testers put into Netscape’s code has brought us the ever more popular Mozilla Firefox browser, which is now used by nearly 20% of web surfers. (Yes, I just said “web surfers.” Really puts you in the 1998 mood, doesn’t it?)

Nowadays, every software company announces that it’s open-sourcing this or that, always to the delight of the community. There’s a large and growing number of software developers and users who support the open source ideals. But what exactly are these ideals? How did they come about? What implications do they have?

The open source movement originated from the free software movement, which was founded by Richard Stallman. When Stallman became a computer programmer in the 1970s, it was customary for programmers around the world to share the source code for their programs so that other programmers could study and improve them. Stallman saw the good things that this atmosphere of cooperation created. But by the early 1980s, it became more common for companies to distribute proprietary software, which placed restrictions on the users’ ability to modify and redistribute the software for their own needs.

To combat the proliferation of software that kept its users “divided and helpless,” Stallman founded the Free Software Foundation in 1985. He codified the programmer community’s vanishing ethic in the Free Software Definition. According to this document, a program is called “free software” if it gives its users all of the following freedoms:

• The freedom to run the program for any purpose.
• The freedom to study how the program works and adapt it to your needs.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
• The freedom to improve the program and release your improvements to the public so that the whole community benefits.

The free software movement grew slowly at first but became more popular as the the FSF’s GNU operating system, combined with the Linux kernel, found its way into server rooms and onto computer geeks’ desktops. The success of GNU/Linux, better known simply as Linux, had people fired up about free software. But some supporters differed from Stallman in several respects.

First, they didn’t like the development model that the FSF used for GNU. The FSF had a very authoritative role in the development process of its operating system, controlling which improvements it would accept from members of the community. Linus Torvalds, on the other hand, allowed a large community of programmers to guide the development of his Linux kernel, which is probably one reason why it became so popular. In addition, the younger supporters of free software, such as Torvalds himself, grew up in a world where proprietary software was commonplace. Unlike Stallman, they weren’t around to see their freedoms being taken away. They were more focused on the community aspect of software development than issues of freedom.

This led a group of free software supporters to create the Open Source Initiative and publish the Open Source Definition. Its requirements are similar enough that almost all open source software is free software and vice versa. The OSI advocated the term “open source” to make free software more community-oriented and palatable to companies that might be afraid of the word “free.” Shortly thereafter, Netscape announced it would be open-sourcing Netscape Communicator, and the media ate it up. Open source stayed in the minds of the public in a way that free software never had.

Since then, the many people have moved to the term “open source” because they see it as less ambiguous than “free software.” But is it really? The FSF cites cases of various authorities assuming “open source” to mean “software for which the source code is available.” Those people clearly haven’t read the Open Source Definition, which extends “open source” beyond its literal meaning to describe the freedoms that users have with the source code. In fact, the definition begins, “Open source doesn’t just mean access to the source code.”

The term “free software” can be confusing because “free” can mean either “without cost” or “unrestrained.” But according to the FSF, “free software” is less ambiguous: one sense of the term captures the FSF’s intended meaning, but no sense of “open source” encompasses the OSI’s full meaning. The confusion over the meaning of “open source” means that companies can release code under licenses that allow the viewing of source code but little else, and some people will inevitably call it “open source.”

While the FSF and OSI seem to resent one another, they do work together because they basically have the same goal in common. It’s their ideologies that differ. When you talk about free/open source software, you might want to consider which side you’re really on. The FSF says that software should respect your freedom to do whatever you want with it. The OSI emphasizes its belief that the most valuable software has a community of users developing it.

If you haven’t been able to tell, I know which side I’m on. I support the free software movement, and I recognize that without freedom, there can be no community collaboration. But if you’re not sure, or if you want to stay neutral, you might like the increasingly popular term “free and open source software” (FOSS) or the even less ambiguous “free (libre) open source software” (FLOSS). In the meantime, you can browse the official sites of the FSF and OSI to get a feel for what their respective movements are about.

Hidden in plain sight

Here’s something more people need to know: when you delete a file from your hard drive, it could still remain there, inaccessible through normal means, for a long time. Here’s an analogy: Think of a hard drive like a book in which each file occupies one or more pages. The pages may or may not be in order, so there’s a table of contents to let you know what’s there and how to find it. Deleting a file only removes it from the table of contents. When files are added later, they are added to pages that aren’t listed in the table of contents, an act which may or may not overwrite old, de-listed files. Well, it’s something like that.

These deleted files aren’t normally accessible. But there are programs that scan hard drives for unlisted, “deleted” files. If you’re going to be selling a hard drive or flash drive, the security implications are enormous. There are numerous accounts of people buying old hard drives or camera memory cards on eBay and using “undelete” utilities to find photos and even credit card numbers. Today I decided to try out one such program to find files I had deleted from my flash drives. The program I used is called Magic Rescue, and it’s available as magicrescue in Ubuntu‘s repositories and probably other Linux distributions. So this is a Linux program, but there are similar tools for other operating systems.

Magic Rescue works by scanning a drive for certain file types that you specify and outputting any that it finds into a separate folder (which should be on a separate drive to prevent the program from duplicating the same files over and over again and entering an infinite loop). It works on any filesystem or lack thereof. To use magicrescue, you need to know the device name of the drive you’re going to work on. It should be in /dev. For me, it was /dev/sdb1 whenever I had one flash drive plugged in. I was able to find this by going to the GNOME Partition Editor (gparted), but there’s probably a better way. In any case, do find out the right device name before you run the program, or else infinite loops might happen and the world will explode. You might also want to unmount the drive. I’m not sure if it’s necessary, but it couldn’t hurt.

The folder /usr/share/magicrescue/recipes contains “recipes,” or brief scripts for recognizing certain types of files. If you need a recipe that’s not there, you might be able to find it on the Internet or, if you’re really good, write it yourself. Some of them require programs that you may not have; to extract JPEGs, you need jpegtran (which I was able to get by installing libjpeg-progs). You use the -r flag to specify any or all of the recipes when doing a search. The -d flag says where you want to place any files that Magic Rescue finds. The final argument is the location of the drive being searched. Here’s what I ran when I searched a “blank” flash drive for some file types that I’d be likely to put on there:

sudo magicrescue -r avi -r gimp-xcf -r gzip -r mp3-id3v2 -r msoffice -r zip -r png -r jpeg-exif -r jpeg-jfif -d ~/found-new /dev/sdb1

Maybe it wasn’t necessary to include the -r a million times? But it worked anyway, and I found some pretty interesting stuff. It tended to find more recent files, which, in the case of one of my flash drives, were projects from my senior year of high school. Many different revisions of a few Microsoft Office files were retrieved, which gives some indication about how they’re saved. My camera’s memory cards revealed more secrets. Again, most of the photos it found were recent, but I recognized one as being from April 2005. I went back to my folder of April 2005 photos just to be sure, and… it wasn’t there. I knew I had taken 62 photos that particular day, and here was a final 63rd that the camera never told me about.

So you see, deleting files doesn’t delete them for good, and in fact, they can remain for years. So you’re going to want to get rid of them for good. Luckily, this is possible. Just as there are programs that can scour drives for deleted files, there are others that can overwrite them so they would be very hard (if not impossible) to recover. The GNU utility for this is called shred. (Windows has a similar tool whose name escapes me.) shred can obscure individual files or an entire drive by writing random data or zeroes. By default it does this 25 times.

I took one of my “blank” flash drives (that had 45 recoverable files on it) and used shred to overwrite the whole drive with random data five times and once more with zeroes. Again, the drive had been unmounted. And again, if you try this, be very, very sure of which device you’re shredding.

sudo shred -n5 -z /dev/sdb1

This took about 10 minutes to complete on a 64 MB flash drive. Once it was done, there was absolutely nothing on the drive, not even a filesystem. When I ran Magic Rescue on it again, it found nothing. I reformatted it to make it usable again, and it was ready to go, as though the old files had never existed. (Just to be sure, I ran Magic Rescue again after reformatting, and it still didn’t find anything.)

So before you give away that old computer or camera, remember that reformatting the hard drive or memory card isn’t enough. Your data could still be retrievable using simple tools. You have to actually overwrite the old data, preferably a large number of times, so your sensitive financial information and/or drunken party photos don’t get into the wrong hands.

Back in the ’50s, being a paperboy was a big deal. Check out the Cleveland Press‘s Carrier’s Handbook from back in the day. Later, the newspapers figured out they could save money by just throwing papers out of a truck.

As most older Americans can tell you where they were when John F. Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963, longtime South Floridians can tell you what they were doing on January 19, 1977, when it snowed here for the first time in recorded history. Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of snow events in Florida.

How much do you know about the Nobel Prizes? Here are 12 Things You May Not Know About the Nobel Prizes.

Blah blah blah

I went ahead and upgraded to Firefox 3 yesterday, leaving a backup of my profile folder in case I wanted to downgrade.

Good things:

• It seems faster. I’m not sure if it actually is, but it seems that way. It might be that I don’t have as many extensions installed (since some of them aren’t yet compatible).
• The AwesomeBar is pretty awesome. I’ve only been using the browser for a day, but I expect to get more accustomed to it.
• Better operating system integration, with a Tango theme that fits right in with everything else on my desktop. The widgets (checkboxes, radio buttons) are nice and smooth the way they should be. Text boxes have rounded edges. And the currently selected tab now has a nice hue to it that I think wasn’t there before. Some buttons are smoother, and others look the same.
• Seems to be tougher on web standards. Despite the aches and pains that this may cause to web designers ‘n’ developers, it’s a good thing. For what it’s worth, Firefox 3 doesn’t render web pages any differently from Firefox 2, but I have to write nicer JavaScript for it.
• You can click on a site’s favicon (or lack thereof) to see the security information. Previously, the most you could see from the main browser window was whether a connection was encrypted. Now, the space around the favicon is blue if a site has basic security measures (“You are connected to example.com and the connection is encrypted”) and green if it has complete identity verification (“You are connected to example.com, which is operated by Example Co., San Francisco, CA, and the connection is encrypted”). In the latter case, the name of the company or organization will show up next to the URL in the address bar. Firefox also warns you rather strongly if a site has a bad security certificate. I think these features are a good idea. Here’s some more info.
• The thing where it asks you to save a password after you’ve tried to log in is cool.
• I like the improvements made to the download window. I may be the only person on Earth who likes Firefox’s download manager the way it is: in a separate window. (A lot of people love the Download Statusbar extension. Tried it, didn’t like it.) In Firefox 3, the download window has been refined a bit: you can search among your downloads, go to the pages where you downloaded each file from, and so on. A message appears in the browser’s status bar tells you how many downloads you have going and how many minutes they have left. And you get a pop-up notification when they’re done.

Bad things:

• It’s still a memory hog from my limited experience. It’s using 455 MB for me right now, but that’s less than it was at a little while ago. It does seem to give unused RAM back, though.
• I thought I’d give the new malware notification feature a try. (This is not to be confused with the similar anti-phishing feature that has been around for a while.) It always seemed to download the list of bad sites when I was loading a page (or pages), which used all of my bandwidth and slowed down page loading massively. I unchecked the option and haven’t had the problem since. I’m smart, and I can recognize suspicious web sites. [Edit Mon Jun 23, 2008 10:55 EST (UTC -5): This problem is caused by an extension and has nothing to do with Firefox's malware protection or Firefox itself.]
• Firefox 3 likes to wreak havoc on my site. It sometimes displays pages without the stylesheet or randomly fails to load random images. Sometimes it starts to load the page without a stylesheet and then applies it an instant later. It only reminds me how bad of a job I did with this layout. (Next time I redesign the site, whenever that may be, I’ll make sure it looks good without a stylesheet. I’ll also blindfold myself and see if I can get around using a screenreader. If not, it’s back to as-yet-nonexistent drawing board.) I’ve set nglayout.initialpaint.delay to a nonzero value, but I’m not sure if that trick still works. We’ll see. [Edit Mon Jun 23, 2008 19:59 EST (UTC -5): This problem was caused by my server's response to an about:config setting that was drastically different from the default for some reason.]

A thing I am ambivalent about:

• Bookmarking. Maybe it’s just that I have too many bookmarks, but the changes in Firefox 3 make bookmarking a little more confusing. One-click bookmarking is simple, but it sends your bookmarks into the “Unsorted Bookmarks” folder, which you kind of have to hunt for. If you just click again, you can choose a folder and add tags. Looks like I won’t be needing the OpenBook extension anymore. But your bookmarks now exist in three separate domains: the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, the Bookmarks Menu, and your Unsorted Bookmarks. It looks like you can also place bookmarks outside that hierarchy (or non-hierarchy) if you so desire. Anyway, this seems to be an incentive to clean up all the loose bookmarks I’ve had lying around, like four Garfield Minus Garfield cartoons. The bookmarks and history can be found together in the Library, which I would like to be more easily accessible than Bookmarks -> Organize Bookmarks. (Oh, it’s also available through History -> Show All History. But why not just have a button for the Library?)

I have had other issues, but most of them involve extensions, so they aren’t Firefox’s fault. That said, I recommend upgrading. It’s new, it’s shiny, it’s probably fast. The good outweighs the bad.

I was going to write once again about my lack of romantic companionship, but listening to music and having a good conversation with a friend are therapeutic. I’ll be going with my family to visit my grandparents this weekend. Peace out.

You can see changes in political and graphic design trends by looking at USA political election logos 2008 – 1960. (They go reverse-chronologically, so the name is arguably appropriate.)

Speaking of graphic design: these album covers might hurt your eyes, but they’re really cool. Soulwax: Nite Versions, Any Minute Now.

I’ve always wondered how trigonometric values could be calculated without computers or calculators. I had no idea that there were so many exact trigonometric constants that could be written as ratios of irrational and irrational quantities.

News on the march

Yesterday I went to my friend Kim’s graduation party. Actually it’s more like my friend Mark’s sister Kim’s graduation party. I hadn’t seen Mark in a while, so it was good to see him. He’s grown out his hair and lost weight, so everyone’s saying that he looks like me. I do like to think that I served as the inspiration for his hairstyle since it does look exactly like mine. He’s growing sideburns as well. Maybe I’m starting a trend!

Ever since I’d upgraded Ubuntu to version 8.04, I’ve encountered a problem with a certain font in Firefox. When the default sans-serif font (DejaVu Sans) is in a justified paragraph, the lowercase letter “f” overlaps with the letters around it, making words like “office” annoying to read. It’s only for justified paragraphs, and only with that font. I should have realized sooner that the solution is to change Firefox’s default sans-serif font. Bitstream Vera Sans is practically identical, except that it doesn’t suffer that problem. Just thought I’d throw that out there for anyone else who may be experiencing the problem.

News out of Eugene, Oregon: On Friday, a peaceful demonstration against pesticides turned ugly when a protester was subdued and tasered. It started when a University of Oregon student wearing an exterminator suit was spraying water at his surroundings and asking people if they’d like to be sprayed with poison. A plainclothes police officer who was driving by told him to stay off the street, so walked out of the street to sit down. As he was sitting, police officers allegedly dragged him away by his hair. They tasered him at least twice. Two others were arrested for trying to stop the police officers’ actions. The young man and one of the others have concussions. The reasons for his arrest are ambiguous.

Now, Crazy People for Wild Places, a student group at the university, is trying to get the protesters’ charges dropped. My friend Luke is friends with some of the protesters who were present. He calls the actions “politically motivated” and “uncalled for,” and he’s helping to get the word out by starting a web site for the CPWP.

In my opinion, this all really boils down to one issue: Is saying that you’re spraying poison the same as yelling fire in a crowded theater, or should the context matter? After all, my parents always said, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it.” This young man was dressed as an exterminator at an anti-pesticide rally. It would seem to me that poison would be the last thing he’d want to be spraying on a city street, and my gut reaction is that the police took their ever-expanding authority too far. Power corrupts, my friends. This I have learned. Even if they police are legally right, I believe they’re morally wrong.

Once again, here’s the link for Crazy People for Wild Places, and if you’re in the greater Eugene area, check out the list of their upcoming events and media appearances.

[Update Tue Jun 3, 2008 19:50 UTC -5: Here's a video that features eyewitness testimonies and footage of the incidents.]

Okay, now this is pretty ridiculous. You all know Digg, right? It’s a social bookmarking site. You bookmark a site with Digg, and other Digg users can comment on the page and vote it up and so on and so on. Okay, so Wikileaks posted a copy of Kappa Sigma Fraternity’s secret book of secret rituals, and one person Dugg it. But it was enough for Kappa Sigma’s lawyers to send Digg a takedown notice because they were linking to a page that was linking to the copyrighted material.

Incidentally, I know a guy who joined that fraternity. He wanted to show me what they did to his dorm room right after he was initiated. They completely trashed it — mattress on the floor, flour in the dresser drawers, papers everywhere, posters torn down, tiny objects on the floor that you’d have to pick up individually because they’d break the vacuum, etc. — and left him to clean it up himself. They also marked the place with “ΚΣ” and the initials of the secret motto. It was about 3 in the morning when he showed me, and he was drunk and still working on cleaning everything up then.

On to lighter topics: How about Office Space recut as a thriller? Watch the fake trailer. There are a lot of crappy recut trailers, but this one’s pretty good. I promise.

And finally, some Intricate and Realistic Lego Creations. My favorite is the Lego portrait of The Beatles from the Sgt. Pepper album. It’s very well done. I wonder where they got the idea…

All rites reversed

My old high school’s prom was this past weekend. The photos have started to come in on MySpace and Facebook. It looked like everybody had a good time. And of course, it got me thinking about my own prom, which was last year. I could go on for a while about how great it was. I could mention more details that I didn’t add to the original post. For example, one of the songs I remember dancing to was “Hey Ya!” Everyone went crazy immediately upon hearing the count-in. I could also mention how the only regret is that I didn’t get the nerve to talk to Jannike sooner. But I won’t. I just hope the Class of ’08 had as good of a time at their prom as I did at mine.

Anyway, what I really wanted to talk about today was copyleft. What’s that, you ask? Before we answer that question, we have to ask: What is copyright? Mr. Webster says:

For example, the above quotation is from the 1913 edition of Webster’s dictionary, which is no longer protected by copyright. As such, I can quote as much of it as I want in this blog post, and everyone in general can do anything with it that they please. If it had been copyrighted, I wouldn’t have been able to quote very much without first requesting permission from the copyright holder and likely paying a large fee.

Over the years, copyright protection has become much more widespread in several ways. First, it is much easier for works to be copyrighted. Instead of having to file a form with the U.S. Copyright Office and include a copyright notice in your work, anything you create in a tangible form is instantly copyrighted whether you include a notice or not. Second, the control that copyright holders have over their work has been extended to include not only copying but also adapting, performing, translating… basically everything but quoting brief passages. Third, copyright terms have been extended drastically, from 56 years in 1975 to 120 years or more in many cases today. The effect of all this is that it’s getting harder for people today to follow in the footsteps of generations of innovators in science, business, and entertainment, who advanced our culture by building upon material that had little or no copyright protection.

Enter copyleft. First devised for computer software in the 1970s, “copyleft” refers to any form of copyright licensing in which the copyright holder revokes some of his exclusive rights to the work and requires anyone who modifies the work to do the same. So you can be sure than any work that is covered by copyleft will always be free for other people to use, no matter how it is changed. (Until the copyright expires, at least.)

Maybe you’ve heard of the GPL, a copyleft software license. It’s the license under which Linux-based operating systems are distributed. The GPL and similar licenses allow a group of people to collaborate on software, and that’s part of what has made Linux so popular. Software development under the GPL advances rapidly because it allows people to adapt and extend other GPL-licensed programs. And there are many thousands of them. It’s exciting stuff. What’s more exciting (if you can believe it) is the recently released version 3 of the GPL, which closes a lot of loopholes that companies have discovered in the previous version in recent years.

Recently, it’s become easy for people to apply copyleft to other works. This is largely due to Creative Commons, an organization that provides licenses for people to “easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry.” These licenses can apply to most anything you create, whether it’s a web site, a book, a painting, a song, or something else entirely. Say you took a photo and posted it on the Internet, and you’ll let anyone use it for any purpose as long as they give you credit. Just say it’s licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Then, if somebody uses your photo without attributing you, they’ve violated the legalese of the license, and you can sue them. Other licenses prohibit making derivative works and/or using the work commercially. There are fun mix-and-match combinations to suit just about every need.

You may notice that these requirements themselves do not constitute copyleft; that is, someone who modifies someone else’s work and just gives credit or uses it non-commercially can declare “All rights reserved” in their new version. But several Creative Commons licenses require users of the work to “share alike.” I used to have this site licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, meaning that anybody could use my work for noncommercial purposes if they gave me credit and released their new version under the same license. Then, I got some requests to use some of my images for commercial purposes. I had to give them permission explicitly because the license forbids it in general. But I thought about it, and I realized that I wouldn’t really mind if my works were used for commercial purposes. As long as they remain under copyleft (“ShareAlike”), it doesn’t harm me or the general public. So recently, I re-licensed the content of this site under an Attribution-ShareAlike license. (Check out the sidebar and the footer to see those links you’ve never noticed!)

But I have to admit, folks: I haven’t always been this attentive to copyright issues. I wrote The Dvorak Keyboard and You almost 6 years ago, when I was 13. When I needed an image of the Dvorak keyboard layout to illustrate the article, I searched the web and found high-resolution scan that someone had made from an MS-DOS manual. I prettified it, and other people copied it when they linked to me. That’s no way to respect someone’s copyright, even if it is Microsoft’s. Yesterday, I finally decided to correct this indiscretion. I searched Flickr for a diagram of a keyboard that I would be able to use under the terms of the Attribution-ShareAlike license. I found one with an Attribution license, modified it for my own needs, gave the author credit according to the license, and relicensed the new work under the Attribution-ShareAlike license. (This is allowed because the original author is still being attributed and has not restricted the right of others to require sharing alike down the line. At least, that’s what this table says.) Now, if someone comes along wanting to use my modified image, they’ll have to give me and the original author credit and allow others the freedom to modify it for their own purposes. That’s copyleft.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, has some interesting things to say about copyright in his book Free Culture, which I’m currently reading. It’s pretty cool stuff, but I’ll hold off on it until I’ve finished reading it. Besides, this has been enough for one post. And now, the links.

Here’s an Animated History of the NYC Subway. It’s an animated map that shows each line in the order it was built.

Math humor: 36 Methods of Mathematical Proof. This reminded me so much of my differential equations professor (what with his ingenious math tricks and all) that I sent him the link. I’m not sure whether he liked it or not.

Firefox Logo Spied in Deep Space? Okay, the image is a little modified from the original, but there’s still a resemblance if you look at it the right way. At least it doesn’t look like a woman wearing long robes or a guy with a beard.

Studying?

Final exams have begun. I had my first one today. Physics, it was. I did pretty well, too. I got an 85. According to my calculations, this means I’ll have a B in the class, which is good. I didn’t even have to study that much. Now I need to study for Differential Equations, which I also spent time studying for last night. I’ll need all the studying I can manage to make myself do.

Last night, my roommate, Adam, was reminiscing about Nickelodeon‘s Super Toy Run, the annual sweepstakes in which the winner would go to Toys ‘R’ Us and have a few minutes to fill a shopping cart with anything they wanted. I mentioned how it reminded me of “Supermarket Sweep,” a ’90s game show which was about exciting as it sounds. For old times’ sake, we watched an episode on YouTube. Check out the description for the video. The uploader (who appears as a contestant in the episode) says that the audience consisted of paid extras who were only present for the taping of the beginning of the show. So the rest of the applause throughout the show is canned. We noticed how strange it was that the contestants would clap for themselves when they got a question right; it’s because no one else was actually clapping for them.

Boring technobabble follows.

The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 or “Hardy Heron”) came out on Thursday. I suppose the difficulty of downloading updates when a new version is released is a testimony to Ubuntu’s growing popularity. This time, I couldn’t get through the download. It took about three hours to get a third of the way done, and then it stopped. What’s more, I couldn’t re-connect, so I had to wait. But in my Googling, I found out that you can download the alternate install CD, mount it as though you’ve burned it to a CD, and use that to upgrade. So I tried downloading the CD. It was just as slow, if not slower, until it timed out.

By that time, a number of other mirrors had come online, so I was able to choose one that was a lot closer (and less overloaded). I downloaded the CD image from Georgia Tech at a rate of 4 MB/s. Yes, four megabytes per second! The 700 MB download was done in a few minutes. (I’m going to miss having a university Internet connection, but I wouldn’t have had to resort to such drastic measures if they allowed BitTorrent traffic in the dorms.)

After mounting the CD image (sudo mount -o loop ubuntu-8.04-alternate-i386.iso /mnt/) and running the upgrade utility (gksudo "sh /mnt/cdromupgrade"), I was good to go. Or so I thought. Apparently you still need to connect to a server to verify the upgrades or something like that. Since I couldn’t connect to the servers at all, it wouldn’t work. But then I thought of going to System -> Administration -> Software Sources and choosing a different mirror. I let the system choose the fastest one to me, but it didn’t seem to be working well. Russia? Belgium? I couldn’t connect to either of them. I tried a third time. Georgia Tech. Aha.

Now that the upgrades could be authenticated or whatever had to be done, the upgrade went smoothly. After the reboot, I surveyed the virtual territory. There were the inevitable annoyances. For one, my default system font (DejaVu Sans Condensed) was uninstalled, but it was no problem to reinstall the ttf-dejavu-extra package. Another annoyance was that I would get a system beep whenever the computer booted up. I managed to turn this off by adding the line blacklist pcspkr to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist. I’ve also noticed a couple of times that the bootup process gets to a plain black screen and stops with no hard drive activity. A perusal of the system log suggests that this is a network problem.

The main issue (unless I’m forgetting one) is that I couldn’t have two applications using the sound card at the same time. If I were listening to music in Rhythmbox and I paused it to watch a YouTube video in Firefox, I wouldn’t get any sound from the video. After some digging, I found that installing libflashsupport fixed this problem, but I still couldn’t use Audacity if another application was playing sound. A friendly person from the Ubuntu Forums suggested I install libasound2-plugins. After doing that (and rebooting, just for kicks), I would be able to use OSS with PulseAudio, which is new in Hardy. So I set Audacity to use OSS, and when I run Audacity with padsp audacity, as suggested in the forums, it won’t want to have the sound card all to itself. Problem solved… mostly. This doesn’t work for Ekiga because I can only set Ekiga to use ALSA, not OSS, but it’s a start. I haven’t used Ekiga much lately anyway.

(Standard disclaimer: I don’t know that much about computers. I learned the above information by searching the Internet and asking people.)

The Ubuntu developers made a pretty controversial decision when they decided to make Firefox 3 Beta 5 the default browser in Gutsy. Beta software in a release that’s touted to be especially stable? It doesn’t add up. I did my homework and found that some of my favorite extensions wouldn’t be compatible, so I made a copy of my Firefox profile folder (~./mozilla/) before upgrading. It’s a good thing, too. While Firefox 3 did seem to use less RAM, I noticed that it almost froze a few times. It did have some cool features, like the new location bar with its frecency algorithm, the new download manager, and the ability to zoom in and out of entire pages like IE 7 (I think). But the lack of useful extensions was the show-stopper for me. I uninstalled Firefox 3, reinstalled Firefox 2, replaced my profile folder with the copy, and all is well again.

Except for the fonts. Now in Hardy, Firefox equates displays the clones of Times New Roman and Helvetica/Arial whenever those fonts are called for. Previously, it would just show the default serif and sans-serif fonts (DejaVu Serif and DejaVu Sans), which I think happen to look better. They scale better, for one, and I think they better suited for the screen. I don’t think this font thing is specific to Firefox, and I don’t know to change it, but I’ve changed this site’s stylesheet so DejaVu Sans precedes Arial. It shouldn’t make a difference to anybody except certain Linux users (or anyone else who has DejaVu Sans?), but if it has caused the sky to fall on your head, please let me know.

So, what’s actually new in Hardy? Updated versions of all (well, most of) my favorite programs, like Rhythmbox music player, Pidgin instant messenger, the GIMP image editor, and the OpenOffice.org office suite. Some of the more basic default programs have been replaced with more sophisticated ones; the BitTorrent client and the CD burner come to mind. Plus, this new Tracker search tool seems pretty handy although I haven’t needed to use it yet. I’ll probably discover more new and exciting additions as I continue to use the operating system.

Wikipedia has a list of pigs, although it also includes hogs and wild boars.

For your entertainment, here’s a slow-motion video of a tomato in a blender.

And here are some cool photos of striped icebergs that apparently look like some British candy. I wouldn’t want to eat one, though.