Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

Just a quick heads up that I won’t be around much the next few days (until about Thurs evening) as I’m moving back to school, and don’t have a working laptop (IBM didn’t really repair it, just said they did). Hopefully IBM will redeem themselves by providing good customer service and getting it back quick. Phone support has been great, but this last “depot repair” experience was a bummer. I left a nice long letter in the “Inventory Control Sheet” for the tech who gets it. I’m shipping it tomorrow, meaning they have it Thursday morning, so hopefully by Friday they finish and ship so Saturday it’s at my door. I’m not holding my breath, but do hope it happens. Between school and catching up on some coding… it’s a system that I rely on.

So hopefully someone at IBM ’s Depot repair will ensure my laptop comes back in working order (for real this time), and quickly.

I do like my Thinkpad (despite being a Mac Zealot) it’s a hearty laptop, well constructed as typical of IBM’s quality and craftsmanship, but I don’t really like sending it for service, and getting it back without it being fixed correctly. I don’t think that’s such a high standard I’m holding them to is it? Phone support is very helpful though. They did go the extra mile trying to help me out, giving me the info I need and everything. It’s just getting the machine physically repaired.

Hurricane Katrina took part of the gulf coast and smashed it yesterday. I remember a little over a year ago in Environmental Biology watching a video about the effects of the marhes near New Orleans erroding could cause a Hurricane to have catastrophic effects. Yesterday those theories became 100% solid fact. New Orleans being below water levels didn’t even the the protection of some extra land around it. Rather sad.

It’s amazing that the media can have so much bias while giving the news (Found this via Fark and expanded on it). Take a look at the following two examples:

Two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store after Hurricane Katrina came through the area in New Orleans, Louisiana.(AFP/Getty Images/Chris Graythen)
From Yahoo

A young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store in New Orleans on Tuesday. (AP/Dave Martin)
From Yahoo

It’s absolutely amazing to see something like that. Because the indidual is white, it’s theoretically impossible for looting to be involved, just like it’s bonified fact that only African Americans particpate in looting activities. [pause for collective sigh) Just shows how the media loves to influence the American public.

Update

The author of the ‘finding’ caption responds.

The above photo’s and captions are copyrighted and copied here for the academic purpose of illustrating media bias

According to download.com:

For one day only, you can get an ad-free version of Opera. Simply e-mail registerme@opera.com to obtain a registration code. This offer is valid from 12 a.m. Tuesday, August 30 to 12 a.m. Wednesday, August 31 2005 (PDT).

Now is a great time to fire off that email, it’s a great offer for a really good browser. There’s a rumor Mozilla will follow by providing a similar offer for an ad-free browser withing a given time period. It will be something you don’t want to miss.

Ok, Firefox is always ad free. But seriously, give it a go. Opera is a really good browser, especially for low end computers that don’t have much CPU. It’s fast and standards compliant.

Now that I’ve basically stabilized the new reporter tool for the branch, I’ve been planning for what will come in the next version. Quite a few neat little enhancements, some small, some larger.

Client Side

• Screenshots - you will be able to attach a screenshot when sending a report. The option will be disabled by default (likely a button or a checkbox on send) to prevent submitting screenshots of things you shouldn’t for security reasons, you can send when you want.
• Remember Email Address - I’ve been debating if this is necessary. It would just remember your email address for you so you don’t have to type it in again and again.

Server Side

• Adjustable Columns - you can choose what columns to show in the results page, making it much more useful to analyze. [Done]
• Reporter Proxy - this will give the ability for a company to host it’s own reporter server, capture reports within their intranet, and forward the rest to the mozilla reporter server. Perfect for companies who want to improve the Firefox experience on their intranet. [Work In Progress]
• Screenshots - see above, this is pretty much the same thing.
• Mark Invalid - some reports are on occasion totally bogus. We don’t need them in the database. We’ll have an option to report bogus reports, and an admin can confirm and get rid of them. This will keep everything as accurate as possible.
• Bugs for Host - we’ll have the ability to view related bugzilla bugs on a particular host.
• Reporter Toys - yea, I’ve been tinkering. I won’t say what this exactly is, but it’s a variety of extra code and stuff that could be fun to play with.
• Templating - on the technical side, were moving to templates so the HTML is separate. Much easier to manage from a programming point of view. [Done]
• Bug Fixes - during the above templating, a bunch of bug fixes and other small changes. [Done]
• Stats - some statistics are always fun to have. Basic right now, we may expand as time and ideas become available. [Done]
• CSS Design Love - reporter’s webtool is rather pathetic visually. I’m the first to admit it. I’d love an improved stylesheet. Something that makes reporter look cleaner, and more professional.

Roadmap

Some of the server stuff already landed. Some is in the works (in particular proxy). I’m not promising any particular feature in any timeframe at this point. Some of the above may be bumped to another milestone, or scratched all together. If you have any ideas, or feel like contributing, feel free. I’d love to get some good CSS, or perhaps some patches for reporter.

That basically serves as the roadmap/status update of where the tool is right now. We’ve got some great feedback, and close to 5000 reports already (and were only at alpha 2 in the release cycle).

Macworld notes that the W3C objects to the Copyright Office Browser Compatibility plan (I mentioned this a few weeks ago). There are two particular quotes I wanted to share:

While stressing that the W3C is not criticizing Internet Explorer, the W3C officials said the office would be placing limitations on users of the Mac OS, Linux and Unix, who may have incompatible browsers. Cell phone and PDA users, and persons with disabilities also may be affected, Berners-Lee said.

So well said of Berners-Lee. What about Linux users? Where do they download the latest Internet Explorer? The Mac version is the same as the PC version in name only.

The W3C also stressed that the Web “was born and achieved widespread use only because of a commitment to open, vendor-neutral standards.”

I think that sums things up rather well. Not just about the problem with this proposal, but the problem facing the Internet in general. It applies to some patents, and to some monopolies.

You can find the complete W3C letter here.

Looks like Yahoo redid it’s TV guide, using some CSS. Interestingly looks like it might be a win for microformats. I’d love to know what someone like Tantek Çelik has to say about the new code. I’m no pro, but it looks like an improvement over the old system.

An ironic quote in this article about the Flying Spaghetti Monster:

“Clearly, these are just supreme satirists. What they are doing is pointing out that there is no more sense to intelligent design than there is to a Flying Spaghetti Monster,� Wagnon said.

That’s right. He called Flying Spaghetti Monster satire. I’m curious why he feels it’s OK to dismiss other’s belief as “satire”. One could say the same for any other belief: Creationism, Intelligent Design, Darwinism. I think it’s time people bombard him (you can get his email address there) with outrage demanding an apology for dismissing people’s beliefs as satire.