andcurve.weblog - The weblog of Kevin Teljeur. Somewhere within all the noise, there is a note you need to hear.

So I said I’d write something last night, and I didn’t. Instead, I decided I’d stick some curved corners onto the site here and there since that is a new trick which I got into at work very recently and which I was keen to give a spin. I think it fits the design, actually. Anyway, the thing about stuff like this, the curved corners, is that on the web this is a ‘next generation’ feature, and so modern browsers can see it and it all looks good. Modern browsers.

However, there is a common browser out there, widely in use, which isn’t modern, and which isn’t good. It is Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (Version 6, I’m looking at you. Step forward, boy!), which is still installed and actively in use on many systems (which are almost entirely Windows XP, with a few old Windows NT and Windows 2000 systems thrown in. It doesn’t run on anything that isn’t Windows). Once upon a time, many years ago, it was a reasonable browser but it long outstayed it’s welcome and now it is one of the things holding the Internet back. If you got a pop-up on the screen telling you to get a newer browser, then you have Internet Explorer and you should get a better browser.

If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or 7, please, do yourself a huge favour, do the Internet a favour, and replace your browser of choice. Here are some contenders:

Firefox: It’s been the gold-standard of browsers for a few years now, the benchmark against which browser progress is measured. It used to be Internet Explorer, but the browser ‘market’ is now measured in how Firefox’s share is progressing relative to Internet Explorer’s loss. It has been improving steadily over the last few years, always adding useful new features, it’s never the fastest but it does have a fantastic ‘add-on’ system to allow customisation of the browser (which has made it a powerful web development tool all by itself, helping enormously in displacing Internet Explorer). It’s a solid browser. Try this first, and judge other browsers relative to this.

Somewhat ironically, it’s based on the codebase that came from Netscape Navigator, the browser that was crushed many years ago by Microsoft in it’s attempts to control the Internet. Not crushed enough, apparently.

Safari: Apple’s browser, which not so long ago went cross-platform, based on an open-source browser platform. It was created to fulfil the need on the Mac for a good, fast browser, and it delivers in spades, making the PC version good too. The basic strategy for this browser is to get as much raw performance as possible, and it generally delivers.

Chrome: Google’s recent surprise entry to the market. A cut-down, spartan, high-performance browser. It’s an acquired taste, but definitely very, very fast, and stable. It shares underlying technology with Apple’s Safari, and a similar dedication to raw speed.

Opera: Meh. Apparently a good browser, but to be honest it has become very much a niche browser. It’s a standards-pusher, a browser at the forefront of where web standards are created, but in a tiny niche of usage. Still, some people swear by it, so it must have something going for it.

Oh, and last but not quite least:
Internet Explorer 8: The byline of this browser is probably ‘not as rubbish as the old versions’. I can’t install it myself because I have to keep installations of the old Internet Explorer versions for web development, although I’ll make the effort soon and try it out. By all accounts it has successfully caught up to the other browsers. Two years ago. So it still hasn’t gotten any of the newer features that the other browsers have, but it’s not as crap with dealing with the older features. I think I’ve just damned it with faint praise right there.

For the more technical among you that might, possibly, be reading this, I say this: yes, I’m playing fast and loose here, this isn’t aimed at the technically-minded reader. I know better, since I work with this stuff on a daily basis, for a living. But I hope it helps at least one Internet Explorer 6 or 7 user to do the right thing.

(Edited for punctuation)

Every now and again, it’s necessary for the good of the world to ‘flame-bait’ Tadhg on a matter close to his heart (Partly because it’s always a good warm-up exercise for writing my own material), and the matter I generally choose (Because it’s a subject of which I know just enough to get into a conversation about, have some mild opinions on it myself, and Tadhg has some very passionate feelings about it, all of which makes it the perfect combination for this exercise) is Open Source software.

To get some background on Open Source/Free software, you’ll need to read a bit about it (a couple of good places are gnu.org and opensource.org) but in a nutshell it concerns the licensing of software. By and large, when you buy a piece of commercial software, you buy a limited licence to use the software, not the software itself. Sure, you have a cd or a dvd, a box, a serial number and perhaps some manuals of varying degrees of quality, but the software is ultimately not yours to do with as you please. It’s yours to do with as you’ve agreed with the company that publishes the software. You don’t actually own the software.

Now, there’s been a new way of doing this in the last few years, which is the Open Source/Free software movement. Even if you buy and perhaps pay a lot of money for a piece of software, the Open Source licence means that the code of the software is open and available for you to do with what you want, inspect, modify, and a number of other things. Now, there’s still a licence of course, but that is there to protect the author of the code. Again, if you want to know more about it, have a read at the links above and maybe it’ll explain a bit better and in a lot more detail. Personally I think this is a good thing and it’s good for the software industry.

The thing is that this has developed for some into a sort of religious movement, where there is a Right and a Wrong. You can probably see where that might lead. And also, a sort of alternative eco-system of developing Open Source/Free software alternatives for just about any software you can think of has developed. Not that I think that this is a bad thing, it isn’t, but the people doing this are often doing this in their spare time, and tackling big projects which require expertise which they don’t have available to them (And a lot of the time, that expertise is in non-software development areas, such as user interface design and project management). The upshot is that while some projects are incredibly good and innovative, there are others which are technically good but not great, and lack the polish, finish and depth of design of a commercial ‘closed-source’ product. I mean, that’s something you can expect, if you try to create your own alternative to a piece of software which has been designed and created by a team which has access to everything they need, including money, quite possibly working together in an office. It doesn’t guarantee success (There’s an awful lot of very, very bad commercial ‘closed-source’ software out there.) but it’s definitely a big advantage for a commercial ‘closed-source’ product development team.

So, with all that as a background, have a read here (‘FUD about open source Flash’) to get an idea of where Tadhg stands on this. Make sure to read the comments; and I was pleased to see I’m not the only person out there trying to get Tadhg worked up about Open Source/Free software issues.

It came up again recently and somewhat unexpectedly here (AutoHotkey Script for Last.fm). Now, It’s unlikely you’ll want to read the article; not because it’s a bad article, but it’s not really relevant to this story, it concerns some scripting for the (Quite beautiful, actually) Last.fm website. No, what pushed my button was a recent comment by Tadhg about his choice of music playing software and (The important bit) the influencing factor in making that choice. The ‘discussion’, naturally, started from there and I decided just for the hell of it that I’d reproduce my analogy here on choosing software based on the licence.

I’m aware, incidentally, that it has at this stage lost all context. And this post has become one of what Oana describes as ‘the boring ones about software or something’. Still, that’s part of the fun, isn’t it?

You’re going to put up some shelves. So, you need a hammer, and you go to the hardware store. In the hardware store there is a good quality Stanley hammer, some other medium-quality hammers, and a cheap but somewhat shoddy G00znr hammer from some guys who make them part-time (during the day-job they make saws for… Stanley) which you’ll have to assemble yourself. Anyway, to make the ethical choice, you buy the G00znr hammer, take it home, spend a couple of hours assembling it and setting it up, and eventually get 2 of your 4 shelves up (one has been destroyed during the learning process, and you ran out of time and got too fucked off before putting up the last one). But you know what, if everybody used a G00znr hammer, we’d get used to putting less stuff on shelves, and the world might be a better place. The guys at Stanley would be out of jobs, and have more free time to improve the G00znr hammer. Maybe we might find we don’t need shelves, and we can start asking ourselves “Where do nails come from?”.

And just for bonus points:
Q: How many Open Source advocates does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: Maybe the real question is, ‘do we need light?’, because the lightbulb is a proprietary non-open system, we should explore alternatives to light which negate the need to use lightbulbs…

You know the way ‘They’ say, on food packaging, ‘serve while piping hot’? It’s too hot to eat then! They’re morons! It’s not relevent to anything, I know this, but I had to get it off my chest. It was bothering me.

It’s time for linkage! That’s right, after not posting for weeks on end, I return from the darkness only to irritate everyone with links to stuff they’ve already seen elsewhere three weeks ago, and it was a lot funnier then too! Oddly enough, people actually started asking me what was up, which suggests I may have more than two and a half readers out there. I’ve been beavering away (You like that, huh? Beavering away? Beaver? Makes you think of something else, right? You dirty scumbag!) and up to all sorts of things, which I surely promise I will explain with tedious attention to detail in a follow-on post for my long suffering, moderately loyal readers (Really, if it’s bothering you then check out Dave’s blog. His RSS feed seems to be broken but he makes jokes and seems to do some cool stuff. Just ask Tony.) Yes, I’ve been pretty busy, and some big, interesting things are afoot in my life, but we shall speak of them no more at this time. There are dark forces at work, and we must be wary of them…

Incidentally, this is my second time writing this post. It’s bigger and improved. I lost that last one due to some silly modifications I made to my Firefox browser which I use at work. I still recommend Firefox as the way you view the internet (instead of, for example, Internet Explorer), and some of the extensions are great but be careful. You can really fuck things up with them too.

Many of this weeks links have been filched from Memepool, which is a great place to find weird shit.

Life and nightlife (working and going out) in Harbin, China.
Exactly what it says on the tin, all delivered in pithy prose learnt in Celbridge!
http://haharbin.wordpress.com/
Dylan used to work in Parallel IT, where I work now, but during the rough and tumble of the post-dotcom boom when it all went pear-shaped for a while he founf himself doing a bit of this, a bit of that and made the fateful decision to go and teach English in China. We’ve always kept in touch though, and traded stories (and I still can’t get over his story about him walking in to his local Chinese store on a visit back to Celbridge not so long ago). I discovered a while ago that he actually reads my blog; in fact, I might have inadvertently planted the seeds of an idea, to write about his experiences, when I asked him to write something on this site; instead he went off and set up his own site! So go check it out, it is well written, entertaining and informative.

The best blonde joke on the Internet
The funniest, bestest blonde joke on the Internet, ever!
http://weblog.burningbird.net/2006/01/12/the-joke-is/
Follow the link to get to the best blonde joke on the internet ever.

Random Garfield cartoon generator
Garfield as zen philosophy!
http://www.cs.washington.edu/homes/natetrue/gar.html
Remember Garfield? Of course you do, Garfield is the poster-child of inane drivel, publisher as a syndicated cartoon the world over; it’s a bit slower these days but there was a time when is was practically a cult. The thing is, Garfield was actually funny once, when the cartoon started (I still have the first three books in the series, before Jim Davis got into a tedious formula) but there’s only so much you can do with a cat before it all gets repetitive. I checked out the website; they’re a real money-making machine with this drivel.

Anyway, the point of this link is that you can, with a random generator, create your own Garfield cartoons. Since it is repetitive, meaningless drivel, it actually works quite well.

Google video selection
The craziest, insanest video collection ever!
http://homepage.mac.com/pockyrevolution/Personal25.html
As some of you are aware, Google recently started putting up videos, and within a short space of time a vast amount of… stuff… was uploaded to their servers, converted to Flash video, and you can go and browse it, such as here. Some of it is, in some people’s eyes, pure gold and the link above is a ‘best of’ compilation by some guy of stuff that really did it for him. Saves you the trouble of having to browse it all yourself.

Incidentally, this whole video venture is Google getting into the ring with Apple and their iTunes Store to see if they can do a better job of selling videos. By all accounts, so far it’s not going very well. Time will tell.

Car Stuck Girls
Scantily dressed girls with cars that are stuck in stuff!
http://www.carstuckgirls.com/
Let’s not mince words here. It is porn. Sick, evil porn! Bad! Evil! But fun.

Right, I better start writing meaningful stuff soon, or people will get irritated.

(edited 21.12.05)
That didn’t work very well, did it? This is a re-edit of an accidental posting I made using the Flock browser which is based on Firefox but has some fancy features for working with blogs. However, it’s apparent that it doesn’t do it very well despite seeming to be able to, and so I ended up putting live a test post. It just goes to show that I shouldn’t try to muck about with pre-release software, as exciting as it all seems.

I’d have taken it down, only now people have commented so it’s too late. Poo.

More adventures to be written about later, we had the company Christmas party on Friday and today I was in the UK on a business trip, all very exciting, and Friday (my first day of Christmas holiday) I’ll be in hospital for some sort of examination. Nothing too serious, but doubtless I’ll be walking funny for a few days. Let your feeble imaginations run riot with that one. Also, there have been many more entertaining posts over on www.ideasforcheapstuff.com with the ever-delightful Tee and her girleens so get over there and check it out.

If any of you, my loyal and ever diminishing readership, want to come over to Los Blancheles for a drink over Christmas, or to meet up for a pint in Dublin, let me know; you’re not only welcome, I invite it.

(edited 21.12.05)
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