Marañando and Information Technology
Sunday, 20. September 2009, 11:54:37
(Back to blogging, and thinking about it)
Posts tagged with "internet"
Travelling grumbles
Sunday, 5. April 2009, 11:13:25
On my way home, slooowwwlllyyyy. Sometimes in a long trip, I get down.
Mobile in Maputo...
Wednesday, 1. April 2009, 15:46:58
I am in Maputo, Mozambique, in a W3C workshop about how the Mobile Web (in my mind the web in general) can help the developing world develop.
Interesting times...
Interesting times...
Grammar, people, really...
Thursday, 5. February 2009, 08:21:06
I work in a multicultural, multilingual environment. I understand that languages can be difficult to learn (you should hear me try to speak Russian if you want a laugh), and that it is worth trying not to offend people. But sometimes...
Spam and beef salami
Tuesday, 16. October 2007, 12:40:14
I get a lot of email. Sometimes it looks a lot like spam (I get a lot of that too) but is really very important. How do people learn to write email?
Damming the torrents?
Wednesday, 10. October 2007, 11:09:20
Or should that be damning? I really like the fact that Opera supports BitTorrent. I use it about once in a blue moon, for some big thing like installing neoOffice, but then I appreciate it. It doesn't let me watch each packet fly around, it just oves files. That's fine. I have work to do, but I appreciate being able to move files while I am working.
Recently I had to explain to someone setting up a computer that while it makes sense to get Opera and then get a handful of useful applications as torrents, you probably need to remember to turn them off after a while. And then that it isn't some terrible security risk, or a sign that you are a criminal. It is a way of moving files around the net - something that we do more and more. And if you don't want to hand over all the things you have to someone else in order to share them, it's quite useful.
It is amazing the FUD that is out there, and most of it is total rubbish. Yes, if you run a torrent you are sharing with people. So you should watch how much you share, and make sure you know that your bandwidth is being used.
That's it. I am not a criminal, I am not violating copyright laws or anything else. I am using the internet to get and give files to people - what it was made for in the first place.
Of course, since in many places you pay good money for bad bandwidth, there are still people who want to disable Opera's BitTorrent support either for themselves or for their users, or to use some other application for torrents. And of course, you ca do that if you want to. I think it is a shame that organisations use such blanket rules, instead of thinking about what their members are trying to achieve and the best ways to do that. But there you go...
Recently I had to explain to someone setting up a computer that while it makes sense to get Opera and then get a handful of useful applications as torrents, you probably need to remember to turn them off after a while. And then that it isn't some terrible security risk, or a sign that you are a criminal. It is a way of moving files around the net - something that we do more and more. And if you don't want to hand over all the things you have to someone else in order to share them, it's quite useful.
It is amazing the FUD that is out there, and most of it is total rubbish. Yes, if you run a torrent you are sharing with people. So you should watch how much you share, and make sure you know that your bandwidth is being used.
That's it. I am not a criminal, I am not violating copyright laws or anything else. I am using the internet to get and give files to people - what it was made for in the first place.
Of course, since in many places you pay good money for bad bandwidth, there are still people who want to disable Opera's BitTorrent support either for themselves or for their users, or to use some other application for torrents. And of course, you ca do that if you want to. I think it is a shame that organisations use such blanket rules, instead of thinking about what their members are trying to achieve and the best ways to do that. But there you go...
Twice one fifth...
Tuesday, 24. July 2007, 23:11:31
Paris - very far out
Tuesday, 22. May 2007, 15:41:10
I spent a few days in Paris. Lovely place, of course. Hung out with friends - lovely people. Went to Xtech - lovely conference. But why was there no internet??
Saving Our Selves
Sunday, 30. July 2006, 16:58:13
The US Congress are at it again. Another law attempts to protect children using the internet. This time the target is social networking sites and chat rooms, where children (and adults for that matter) can be approached and drawn into something bad.
It looks good for a politician to say "I'm taking concrete action to look after the children of [insert your home here]". Who in their right mind doesn't support the idea of protecting children from evil? But does this law really healp, or is it just like trying to lock them in Rapunzel's tower?
Children are inquisitive. They are, at their best, naturally inclined to learn about what it is to be an adult - those mythical figures who earn their own money, don't have an enforced bedtime, don't have to ask if they can go to a friend's house, and apparently have the kind of wisdom that makes "because I said so" a rational argument.
At some point they discover that among the things adults do which are forbidden to children is the one that caused them to exist in the first place. In our marketing-driven culture, it's hard not to learn that people do this because they enjoy it, and fortunately many discover it as an expression of love, a gift that people can offer again and again, and moreover one that comes from themselves, not from a shop.
Children are often sociable, friendly, and we try to teach them that giving is a positive thing. Shops, offices, homes, are filled with artwork that is not very good, but proudly displayed because it is a gift from a child.
As individuals we try to protect those we love from harm, and that naturally includes our children. We try to teach them to avoid the dangers in the world, from being hit by a car while crossing the road to being struck down by nasty diseases caused by smoking. Parents make an effort to know what their children are doing, to ensure that they are safe.
As a society we try to extend that protection to all the members of society. To do so, we make some very arbitrary decisions. We set age limits on all kinds of things, from leaving school to seeing violent films. We try to give people enough education to enable them to survive as independent adults and discourage them from surviving by stealing, from coping with difficulties by taking drugs we consider harmful.
None of these mechanisms are perfect, but that in itself does not mean they are unimportant. What we do try to ensure is that there is a reasonable balance between the freedom to live an independent and fulfilling life, making a sufficient contribution to the society so it can continue to function, and providing effective protection for society at the cost of restricting the lives of individuals - or in some societies by taking the lives of individuals.
From Algeria to Afghanistan to America, from Norway to Nuie to New Zealand, people have different ideas of the best way to do this, and governments have more or less success in reflecting those desires in the structures that they create. The key is to ensure that whatever we do is an effective part of maintaining that balance.
To return to this law then. Is it going to achieve its stated goal, or is there a better way? Does it respect the need for freedom and help ensure people can achieve their goals in life (and our goals for them)? Does it recognise the realities of the world or is it based on assumptions whose unrealistic nature dooms it to failure? In short, does it meet that test of effectively maintaining the balance?
The American Library Association did not think so. In their submission (PDF 34kb) they pointed out that social networking provides an enormous value to education, and that the proposal paints a distorted view of the internet. I am certain that among the 65,000 members of the assocation not all of them are the wonderful people we would like our librarians to be, but equally sure that the overwhelming majority of them are in fact people who understand a lot about children.
I think they are correct. Not all parents are wonderful. Not all children will avoid being killed by cars. Not everyone will avoid smoking, or any of the thousands of other dangers in life. But this law will not stop inquisitive children from meeting inventive predators, nor even (in my opinion) significantly hinder the process. It will not teach children how to protect themselves from falling into such situations. It will reduce their ability to learn, by reducing many children's opportunities for educational social interaction. This is a net loss for socety, and a serious one.
There are nasty things, nasty people, nasty situations on the internet, just as there are in the physical world. There are more powerful ways of creating barriers, of making it clear to people that they are going to a dangerous place, and making it difficult to get in. They are not perfect. But they are, I believe, more effective than simplistic legislation.
One of the simplest and best-known today is "tagging". We can tell our children not to go to this or that dangerous place, but by the time they learn to read we can teach them that a variety of signs mean a place is dangerous and should be avoided. In the long run this is far more helpful. (Funnily enough, it is something that has long been advocated and adopted by large sections of the adult entertainment industry and by many schools and libraries).
Paedophilia is widely agreed to be evil and bad for children (although it wasn't always so), and the sexual predator in the park looking for little children is a familiar figure in the shared nightmares of our society. I grew up being warned about "danger stranger" and that the toilets at the park were a place where some men looked for children to do things that we probably wouldn't want to do. (I never saw any of these people, but their graffiti messaging system was familiar from similar examples in universities and libraries I had been to).
I had a very good teacher in primary school who was a known paedophile. I don't recall the details, but I knew at the time that no chldren were to be left alone with him. What I didn't realise until very much later is that another (not very good) teacher of mine was also a paedophile. I only discovered this because someone else's child discovered, too late, the very very hard way.
We cannot protect ourselves from all risks, and we cannot protect others from all danger. As adults, we freely and consciously engage in risk-taking behaviour, and children also do this. We can try to provide some basic protections, like ensuring that people are not driving cars in suburban streets so fast that it is impossible to stop if a child runs onto the road, or providing a raft of sanctions and proactively attempting to protect our children from sexual predators (or any other kind of sexual activity). But unless we equip them to make sensible decisions, by understanding the nature of the world, we are doing them a disservice and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to those who have found a way around our simple-minded approach.
I'm not a US citizen, I do not live there. It is not my place to decide, for them, how their society should run its own affairs. But I do hope that this law doesn't make it through the political process to become the law of their land, because I think it will harm the American people, and by further isolating them from the rest of the world will eventually have a negative global impact.
It looks good for a politician to say "I'm taking concrete action to look after the children of [insert your home here]". Who in their right mind doesn't support the idea of protecting children from evil? But does this law really healp, or is it just like trying to lock them in Rapunzel's tower?
Children are inquisitive. They are, at their best, naturally inclined to learn about what it is to be an adult - those mythical figures who earn their own money, don't have an enforced bedtime, don't have to ask if they can go to a friend's house, and apparently have the kind of wisdom that makes "because I said so" a rational argument.
At some point they discover that among the things adults do which are forbidden to children is the one that caused them to exist in the first place. In our marketing-driven culture, it's hard not to learn that people do this because they enjoy it, and fortunately many discover it as an expression of love, a gift that people can offer again and again, and moreover one that comes from themselves, not from a shop.
Children are often sociable, friendly, and we try to teach them that giving is a positive thing. Shops, offices, homes, are filled with artwork that is not very good, but proudly displayed because it is a gift from a child.
As individuals we try to protect those we love from harm, and that naturally includes our children. We try to teach them to avoid the dangers in the world, from being hit by a car while crossing the road to being struck down by nasty diseases caused by smoking. Parents make an effort to know what their children are doing, to ensure that they are safe.
As a society we try to extend that protection to all the members of society. To do so, we make some very arbitrary decisions. We set age limits on all kinds of things, from leaving school to seeing violent films. We try to give people enough education to enable them to survive as independent adults and discourage them from surviving by stealing, from coping with difficulties by taking drugs we consider harmful.
None of these mechanisms are perfect, but that in itself does not mean they are unimportant. What we do try to ensure is that there is a reasonable balance between the freedom to live an independent and fulfilling life, making a sufficient contribution to the society so it can continue to function, and providing effective protection for society at the cost of restricting the lives of individuals - or in some societies by taking the lives of individuals.
From Algeria to Afghanistan to America, from Norway to Nuie to New Zealand, people have different ideas of the best way to do this, and governments have more or less success in reflecting those desires in the structures that they create. The key is to ensure that whatever we do is an effective part of maintaining that balance.
To return to this law then. Is it going to achieve its stated goal, or is there a better way? Does it respect the need for freedom and help ensure people can achieve their goals in life (and our goals for them)? Does it recognise the realities of the world or is it based on assumptions whose unrealistic nature dooms it to failure? In short, does it meet that test of effectively maintaining the balance?
The American Library Association did not think so. In their submission (PDF 34kb) they pointed out that social networking provides an enormous value to education, and that the proposal paints a distorted view of the internet. I am certain that among the 65,000 members of the assocation not all of them are the wonderful people we would like our librarians to be, but equally sure that the overwhelming majority of them are in fact people who understand a lot about children.
I think they are correct. Not all parents are wonderful. Not all children will avoid being killed by cars. Not everyone will avoid smoking, or any of the thousands of other dangers in life. But this law will not stop inquisitive children from meeting inventive predators, nor even (in my opinion) significantly hinder the process. It will not teach children how to protect themselves from falling into such situations. It will reduce their ability to learn, by reducing many children's opportunities for educational social interaction. This is a net loss for socety, and a serious one.
There are nasty things, nasty people, nasty situations on the internet, just as there are in the physical world. There are more powerful ways of creating barriers, of making it clear to people that they are going to a dangerous place, and making it difficult to get in. They are not perfect. But they are, I believe, more effective than simplistic legislation.
One of the simplest and best-known today is "tagging". We can tell our children not to go to this or that dangerous place, but by the time they learn to read we can teach them that a variety of signs mean a place is dangerous and should be avoided. In the long run this is far more helpful. (Funnily enough, it is something that has long been advocated and adopted by large sections of the adult entertainment industry and by many schools and libraries).
Paedophilia is widely agreed to be evil and bad for children (although it wasn't always so), and the sexual predator in the park looking for little children is a familiar figure in the shared nightmares of our society. I grew up being warned about "danger stranger" and that the toilets at the park were a place where some men looked for children to do things that we probably wouldn't want to do. (I never saw any of these people, but their graffiti messaging system was familiar from similar examples in universities and libraries I had been to).
I had a very good teacher in primary school who was a known paedophile. I don't recall the details, but I knew at the time that no chldren were to be left alone with him. What I didn't realise until very much later is that another (not very good) teacher of mine was also a paedophile. I only discovered this because someone else's child discovered, too late, the very very hard way.
We cannot protect ourselves from all risks, and we cannot protect others from all danger. As adults, we freely and consciously engage in risk-taking behaviour, and children also do this. We can try to provide some basic protections, like ensuring that people are not driving cars in suburban streets so fast that it is impossible to stop if a child runs onto the road, or providing a raft of sanctions and proactively attempting to protect our children from sexual predators (or any other kind of sexual activity). But unless we equip them to make sensible decisions, by understanding the nature of the world, we are doing them a disservice and leaving them more vulnerable than ever to those who have found a way around our simple-minded approach.
I'm not a US citizen, I do not live there. It is not my place to decide, for them, how their society should run its own affairs. But I do hope that this law doesn't make it through the political process to become the law of their land, because I think it will harm the American people, and by further isolating them from the rest of the world will eventually have a negative global impact.
Let the torrents flow...
Monday, 24. April 2006, 01:46:54
Opera 9 includes support for BitTorrent, a file-sharing protocol.
No, it isn't a piracy tool, except in the sense that any other technology (disc drives, photocopiers, pencil and paper) is. It's a way of moving large popular files around the Web that is more efficient than the traditional HTTP. (For small files, that only one or two people are interested, it isn't more efficient. Using the right tool for the job is a big part of technology).
The rough idea is this. You have a very large file, and thousands of people are going to want it. So you split it into bits, and as soon as someone gets a bit they share it, so you don't have to be the primary source for that bit any more.
In traditional HTTP, they each connect to your server, and get the whole file from you. If you have a limited bandwidth, or a limited nummber of connections available (and in general, you do), this means people have to wait until others are finished.
Imagine that you have a thousand page manuscript you're trying to sow to a dozen friends, and you have to photocopy the whole thing, page 1-1000, in a single copy, and take it to the first person before you can start again. And that they can't share any of it, either.
In BitTorrent, you hand out a bit to each of the people on the list, and they can re-copy that bit, hand it to others on the list, so the strain on your photocopier is reduced massively. And because people can be getting a dozen pieces at once from different places, they get it faster.
The nice thing is that a connection doesn't have the same maintenance cost as a photocopier. The cost to any person of sharing a bit of their connection is usually trivial, if any, and the processor power (you don't have to think about anything to make this happen, the machine does it for you
) really is almost free.
Obviously for a small web page, or something that only one person wants, the extra effort of splitting it up and reassembling it isn't worthwhile.
So where do you find torrents? Well, you can get one from Opera that's a video of a talk I gave recently. But if that doesn't sound very interesting (other people say it's good, but to be honest I only got it to test torrents ) you might like to look at the music and trailers from SXSW this year - lots of music and film trailers, made available by the artists.
Warning: These are big files. the film is 557MB - a CD full, one of the biggest downloads I have attempted.
On the other hand, I will be sharing it too, when I am connected.
http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ is another source for a variety of legal downloads - an efficient way to share software and other large popular files.
Like photocopiers, people probably use this to share stuff that isn't theirs, in breach of copyright. Like photocopying, please don't. If you think copyright laws suck, vote. If you think somebody should give away their copyright material, ask them too. Same goes for their car - the fact that you find their keys on their desk doesn't mean you have discoverer's rights to take their car...
No, it isn't a piracy tool, except in the sense that any other technology (disc drives, photocopiers, pencil and paper) is. It's a way of moving large popular files around the Web that is more efficient than the traditional HTTP. (For small files, that only one or two people are interested, it isn't more efficient. Using the right tool for the job is a big part of technology).
The rough idea is this. You have a very large file, and thousands of people are going to want it. So you split it into bits, and as soon as someone gets a bit they share it, so you don't have to be the primary source for that bit any more.
In traditional HTTP, they each connect to your server, and get the whole file from you. If you have a limited bandwidth, or a limited nummber of connections available (and in general, you do), this means people have to wait until others are finished.
Imagine that you have a thousand page manuscript you're trying to sow to a dozen friends, and you have to photocopy the whole thing, page 1-1000, in a single copy, and take it to the first person before you can start again. And that they can't share any of it, either.
In BitTorrent, you hand out a bit to each of the people on the list, and they can re-copy that bit, hand it to others on the list, so the strain on your photocopier is reduced massively. And because people can be getting a dozen pieces at once from different places, they get it faster.
The nice thing is that a connection doesn't have the same maintenance cost as a photocopier. The cost to any person of sharing a bit of their connection is usually trivial, if any, and the processor power (you don't have to think about anything to make this happen, the machine does it for you
) really is almost free.Obviously for a small web page, or something that only one person wants, the extra effort of splitting it up and reassembling it isn't worthwhile.
So where do you find torrents? Well, you can get one from Opera that's a video of a talk I gave recently. But if that doesn't sound very interesting (other people say it's good, but to be honest I only got it to test torrents
) you might like to look at the music and trailers from SXSW this year - lots of music and film trailers, made available by the artists.Warning: These are big files. the film is 557MB - a CD full, one of the biggest downloads I have attempted.
On the other hand, I will be sharing it too, when I am connected.
http://torrent.ibiblio.org/ is another source for a variety of legal downloads - an efficient way to share software and other large popular files.
Like photocopiers, people probably use this to share stuff that isn't theirs, in breach of copyright. Like photocopying, please don't. If you think copyright laws suck, vote. If you think somebody should give away their copyright material, ask them too. Same goes for their car - the fact that you find their keys on their desk doesn't mean you have discoverer's rights to take their car...
Aaaarne!!!
Saturday, 15. April 2006, 05:12:27
I'm at The Gathering, an event where 5000 mostly norwegian folks (maybe 500 come from overseas), mostly 15-21, get together with their computers and geek on...
Actually a big part of what people do is gaming. Fair enough, there are a lot of people who like gaming. But Opera came here as a sponsor playing an active part. Some people came and ran games competitions. We came and ran a competition for making widgets. Which are not that much of a stretch, but are cool. And put up a heavy-duty games machine for the best one that gets done this weekend.
I've slept for two nights on a shelf, been up to see the sunrise, given a talk about standards and an online tutorial from 2am, eaten only junk food for two days, written a few widgets (most are rubbish for playing around, but I like my SVG clock), given away t-shirts and squeeze-balls, cleaned up around something close to a shanty-town (but in a real shanty-town there are people who care more about keeping it clean), and even been outside a couple of times.
A few people here have done some really cool stuff (apart from the crew who put the event on - they have actually done a really great job. The only thing I can fault them on is the food available here - not a piece of fruit to be seen without walking a mile). Some neat widgets, people doing standard geek stuff (world record for making a picture, playing huge multi-player games, sleeping on their keyboards, sitting until teir eyes are falling out of their heads and they are seeing triple), lots of people being helpful in almost anything you can think of, and Arne.
Arne is a tradition. Maybe it started in 2001 when Arne forgot his lunch, and his mum came in to give it to him walking around yelling "Arne", since it is hard to find someone if you don't get teh systems that are used to organise places. Maybe it was because he was underage and being told off for something. (That's not hard in Norway). Maybe it was because he had run off with some other girl, and his poor distraught girlfriend was wailing for him, back in '97. (But I don't think so. It isn't that kind of gig. There are maybe 15% women here, which is high, and they are generally girlfriends, but they are generally unlikely to have to chase their boyfriends down).
So somehow or other, as is the way, the gathring got a tradition. Calling for Arne. Which happens throughout the day and more particularly the night, as 5000 people call out. There are t-shirts. There are official announcements about him.
One day I'll come to the gathering, in a decade or two, saying "Hi, I want to get in free. I deserve to, I am Arne".
In the meantime it's fun. And there are nice people here. If I hae to work overtime, it isn't a bad way to do it.
Actually a big part of what people do is gaming. Fair enough, there are a lot of people who like gaming. But Opera came here as a sponsor playing an active part. Some people came and ran games competitions. We came and ran a competition for making widgets. Which are not that much of a stretch, but are cool. And put up a heavy-duty games machine for the best one that gets done this weekend.
I've slept for two nights on a shelf, been up to see the sunrise, given a talk about standards and an online tutorial from 2am, eaten only junk food for two days, written a few widgets (most are rubbish for playing around, but I like my SVG clock), given away t-shirts and squeeze-balls, cleaned up around something close to a shanty-town (but in a real shanty-town there are people who care more about keeping it clean), and even been outside a couple of times.
A few people here have done some really cool stuff (apart from the crew who put the event on - they have actually done a really great job. The only thing I can fault them on is the food available here - not a piece of fruit to be seen without walking a mile). Some neat widgets, people doing standard geek stuff (world record for making a picture, playing huge multi-player games, sleeping on their keyboards, sitting until teir eyes are falling out of their heads and they are seeing triple), lots of people being helpful in almost anything you can think of, and Arne.
Arne is a tradition. Maybe it started in 2001 when Arne forgot his lunch, and his mum came in to give it to him walking around yelling "Arne", since it is hard to find someone if you don't get teh systems that are used to organise places. Maybe it was because he was underage and being told off for something. (That's not hard in Norway). Maybe it was because he had run off with some other girl, and his poor distraught girlfriend was wailing for him, back in '97. (But I don't think so. It isn't that kind of gig. There are maybe 15% women here, which is high, and they are generally girlfriends, but they are generally unlikely to have to chase their boyfriends down).
So somehow or other, as is the way, the gathring got a tradition. Calling for Arne. Which happens throughout the day and more particularly the night, as 5000 people call out. There are t-shirts. There are official announcements about him.
One day I'll come to the gathering, in a decade or two, saying "Hi, I want to get in free. I deserve to, I am Arne".
In the meantime it's fun. And there are nice people here. If I hae to work overtime, it isn't a bad way to do it.
Ping...
Tuesday, 4. April 2006, 15:44:43
When I want to find someone on IRC (the chat thing that was probably the clincher for me using, and therefore later working for, Opera), I often write "ping" in a message. (Lot's of people here write some abbreviation of "you there?").
It's a geek thing I guess, since there is a unix command (you can do it in DOS/Windows now, too) called
I think it comes from submarines, where they send a "ping" and measure how long it takes to bounce off another submarine. At least, that's what they do in submarine movies. I have no real idea about what happens in a real submarine.
When I am using a dodgy voice connection - either a bad phone line or a bad VoIP line, I use it too. If I say "ping" and the other person says "pong" as soon as they hear it, on a good line it is more or less instant. But on a bad line it can take several seconds, which is pretty noticeable. (People who are used to IRC often say "pong" instead of "yes" when you ping them, too).
Recently we got a ping-pong table at work. No, not some technical spec, an actual object with a net where 2 or 4 people hit a little plastic ball back and forth. It's great for a brain-starter if I am feeling extra slow, and it can be suprisingly energetic (or maybe I am even less fit than I feared).
I'm a long way from the best player at Opera, although I am not the worst either. It seems that people can learn pretty quickly to play reasonably well, although only some of course are really really good. I watched the CEO playing today after lunch - I suspect we're somewhere about the same level. But he's taller than me, so probably has better reach. Mostly I play people who beat me by a little. But after a beer and a couple of glasses of wine on friday night I managed to win three games in a row, playing doubles. Perhaps it was my partner.
This morning, coming in to work fairly early and going to get a coffee, I could hear the ping-pong table. Only nobody was playing - it was like a ghost sound. I wonder if I have heard it before and not noticed, or if it will just come and go, or if I will never hear a phantom ping-pong game again.
So long as I get a turn at it every so often, I don't mind. It did wake me up again today, after lunch. Although I lost 21-18 to someone who apparently hasn't played for a few years.
It's a geek thing I guess, since there is a unix command (you can do it in DOS/Windows now, too) called
ping. That sends a little bit of information to some other computer on the net, and measures how long it takes to get back, if it does.
I think it comes from submarines, where they send a "ping" and measure how long it takes to bounce off another submarine. At least, that's what they do in submarine movies. I have no real idea about what happens in a real submarine.
When I am using a dodgy voice connection - either a bad phone line or a bad VoIP line, I use it too. If I say "ping" and the other person says "pong" as soon as they hear it, on a good line it is more or less instant. But on a bad line it can take several seconds, which is pretty noticeable. (People who are used to IRC often say "pong" instead of "yes" when you ping them, too).
Recently we got a ping-pong table at work. No, not some technical spec, an actual object with a net where 2 or 4 people hit a little plastic ball back and forth. It's great for a brain-starter if I am feeling extra slow, and it can be suprisingly energetic (or maybe I am even less fit than I feared).
I'm a long way from the best player at Opera, although I am not the worst either. It seems that people can learn pretty quickly to play reasonably well, although only some of course are really really good. I watched the CEO playing today after lunch - I suspect we're somewhere about the same level. But he's taller than me, so probably has better reach. Mostly I play people who beat me by a little. But after a beer and a couple of glasses of wine on friday night I managed to win three games in a row, playing doubles. Perhaps it was my partner.
This morning, coming in to work fairly early and going to get a coffee, I could hear the ping-pong table. Only nobody was playing - it was like a ghost sound. I wonder if I have heard it before and not noticed, or if it will just come and go, or if I will never hear a phantom ping-pong game again.
So long as I get a turn at it every so often, I don't mind. It did wake me up again today, after lunch. Although I lost 21-18 to someone who apparently hasn't played for a few years.
The standard dancefloor from 35 000 ft
Friday, 25. November 2005, 16:23:07
Well, for the first time I am writing live in an aeroplane. It's still ridiculously expensive, but now it is just a luxury and not a ludicrous idea that has nothing to do with real people.
From up here, you don't always see a lot. Clouds below, sky in front, burning sun utside and air that will snap freeze you. But you get time to think, between teh noise of teh plane, the fact taht I haven't slept properly and have been too close to the sun for too many hours already.
A little while ago now, Hallvord wrote a beautiful blog entry about browser compatibility with the web, and how the compatibility is like dancers being used to each other.
It made me think about standards. Partly because my job is to think about standards, of course. But if the browser is a dancer, then standards are the floor. It is possible to create a unique dance for a unique occasion. Artists do this with the Web, too, making something that only exists once, and isn't really meant to be captured but to be participatory. But most of the web is about something that anyone can get.
In dance, and especially in things like rhythmic gymnastics, there are people who know the size of the floor to n inch or two. They rely on it being the same size and having the same spring, in the way that dancers rely on their partners doing what they do. Those are the standards.
On top of the standards, people are building brilliant individual performances, extending what we thought of as possible. Sometimes those are the one-offs that require a particular setup. Sometimes there is no reason it can't be repeated but it just happens to be an uncommon setup. Sometimes, people do things that rely on particular configurations that aren't possible for everyone. Accessibilty is like this - a page that relies on tiny fonts and having good colours is like a dance performance that relies on being up 16 stairs. It doesn't matter how good it is, you can't get there in a wheelchair.
Which is another important point about standards. They have to be reproducible. W3C does a god job of checking out how to make standards work in different environments, in different languages. I think WHATWG does a better job, although probably over a more limited range of circumstances. In general, these two are ahead of most of the rest of the various groups trying t odevelop things that get taken up as standards for the Web (but not always).
So we try to dance, first on the floors everyone dances on. And then we do a few special things. We dance on floors few people can dance on with Opera mini. We put a bit more into the browser on the stnadard floor.
And some of us try to figure out more about the floor, or look at ways that we can make it better - preferably without breaking what everyone already knows. And that's some of where I spend my time. Dancing.
Well, it's a nice way to think of it. And I don't have to do the physical training that dancers do.
From up here, you don't always see a lot. Clouds below, sky in front, burning sun utside and air that will snap freeze you. But you get time to think, between teh noise of teh plane, the fact taht I haven't slept properly and have been too close to the sun for too many hours already.
A little while ago now, Hallvord wrote a beautiful blog entry about browser compatibility with the web, and how the compatibility is like dancers being used to each other.
It made me think about standards. Partly because my job is to think about standards, of course. But if the browser is a dancer, then standards are the floor. It is possible to create a unique dance for a unique occasion. Artists do this with the Web, too, making something that only exists once, and isn't really meant to be captured but to be participatory. But most of the web is about something that anyone can get.
In dance, and especially in things like rhythmic gymnastics, there are people who know the size of the floor to n inch or two. They rely on it being the same size and having the same spring, in the way that dancers rely on their partners doing what they do. Those are the standards.
On top of the standards, people are building brilliant individual performances, extending what we thought of as possible. Sometimes those are the one-offs that require a particular setup. Sometimes there is no reason it can't be repeated but it just happens to be an uncommon setup. Sometimes, people do things that rely on particular configurations that aren't possible for everyone. Accessibilty is like this - a page that relies on tiny fonts and having good colours is like a dance performance that relies on being up 16 stairs. It doesn't matter how good it is, you can't get there in a wheelchair.
Which is another important point about standards. They have to be reproducible. W3C does a god job of checking out how to make standards work in different environments, in different languages. I think WHATWG does a better job, although probably over a more limited range of circumstances. In general, these two are ahead of most of the rest of the various groups trying t odevelop things that get taken up as standards for the Web (but not always).
So we try to dance, first on the floors everyone dances on. And then we do a few special things. We dance on floors few people can dance on with Opera mini. We put a bit more into the browser on the stnadard floor.
And some of us try to figure out more about the floor, or look at ways that we can make it better - preferably without breaking what everyone already knows. And that's some of where I spend my time. Dancing.
Well, it's a nice way to think of it. And I don't have to do the physical training that dancers do.
Security Blankets
Tuesday, 22. November 2005, 22:56:46
Note: My security work has mostly been in dealing with service architectures and intrusion detection (and partly in bars, which is surprisingly similar in most of the basic concepts and approaches). I haven't got a monopoly on making mistakes, so I intend to revisit and edit this any time I learn something should be changed... (Also, it's not really necessary to be a heavy security and web geek to understand the ideas in here, I hope. Whether that makes them intreresting or not is another question).
Security on the Web is pretty important. At Opera we work hard on in, and according to Secunia (who watch over this area pretty carefully we are normally better than either Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Firefox at not exposing ourselves to new attacks, and at fixing problems fast and effectively.
The early Web didn't really address security - it left it to a seperate layer (primarily SSL - the https URIs that you often see are the most obvious example) that was developed as the need arose, and could be put in place because of the clean seperation of layers. For many years the US government stopped this being available to the whole world, but as newer and better systems became available they could be dropped into place. This seperation of layers is an important theoretical principle, with some practical benefits - you can be surer of your security when it is not bound up with every other function that you are developing, and testing is more straightforward.
As the Web has become more complex and dynamic, to offer more useful services, new types of security requirement have appeared. When pages were static, or had a simple form that could talk to the server that gave it to you, SSL was fine. "XSS" (cross site scripting) actually appeared with forms that would pretend to be one site but were really talking to another, giving, say, your address and phone number to badguys.com instead of to niceFolks.org. Technologies like Frames and Javascript, as well as offering new possibilities, made it easier for a site to pretend to be something else, and even to use a real site as a kind of "trojan horse" to fool the user into trusting it.
At the same time users have learned more about how the Web works, and browsers have developed ways of helping them check that they are not being tricked. The little yellow bit in the Opera address bar tells you who owns the site you are connected to, and how good the security is (on a scale of 0 to 3). Browsers also block the most obviously dangerous cross-site access. In general, a script from dodgyDevelop.com cannot access your information on myBank.com unless the site itself has a copy of the script that it delivers because it trusts it. When these blocks are not in place you can get the kind of problems Jim Ley has noted recently in development projects.
(Development is like this - the trick is to release a service in a way that doesn't expose other risks by getting the layers right. One of the common processes is to use expert crackers to find bugs before releasing software - this is standard QA. In the Open Source world, the theory is that so many people look at the work that problems are picked up and solved. In some cases this works well, in others not, according to the actual results).
Although this security approach is helping to keep us from being caught out by a malicious attack, it comes at a price. The idea of the Web is that you can use a service you find. Of course you need to know, when anyone in the world can offer a service, whether you can trust it. This is not new to the Web. Most people are already wary about b eing offered millions of dollars by someone they don't know who says they were stolen in a far-off country, and many are wary of giving money to people who claim to be collecting for some good cause, but can't show who they are. Trust networks are things people have in the real world, but interfaces and systems for building them on the Web are not yet mainstream, and are not necessarily simple to create at the moment. So we live with the cross-site restrictions as a simple answer, winning something and losing something.
In accessibility, I have had a long-running discussion with my good friend John Foliot about how to deal with making keyboard access better for people who need it. A key disagreement we have is on whether it is better to get rid of existing content along with broken implementations, or whether we should take an architecture that is clearly flawed, and adapt it in ways that let us keep using the existing web, at the price of taking longer to work towards the system we would like. In that case I believe that the value of the existing Web is high, and we should keep it, since we can minimise the practical cost.
In this case, the security model is not yet built into the specifications that describe how the services themselves can be built. It seems to me that we are better keeping it out - making sure that we can change the model we have now for a better one (both in actual security and in minising the downsides of the implementation) as soon as it is readily available. The idea of writing the security model we should be using into the specifications for the formats we use strikes me as wrong on two levels.
In other words, I am worried that we are giving ourselves the relatively comforting protection of a security blanket instead of growing up and thinking about real security as adults who decide for themselves what to trust.
Comments are actively sought here. This is complex stuff, and more brains working on it is a good thing IMHO.
Security on the Web is pretty important. At Opera we work hard on in, and according to Secunia (who watch over this area pretty carefully we are normally better than either Internet Explorer or Mozilla/Firefox at not exposing ourselves to new attacks, and at fixing problems fast and effectively.
The early Web didn't really address security - it left it to a seperate layer (primarily SSL - the https URIs that you often see are the most obvious example) that was developed as the need arose, and could be put in place because of the clean seperation of layers. For many years the US government stopped this being available to the whole world, but as newer and better systems became available they could be dropped into place. This seperation of layers is an important theoretical principle, with some practical benefits - you can be surer of your security when it is not bound up with every other function that you are developing, and testing is more straightforward.
As the Web has become more complex and dynamic, to offer more useful services, new types of security requirement have appeared. When pages were static, or had a simple form that could talk to the server that gave it to you, SSL was fine. "XSS" (cross site scripting) actually appeared with forms that would pretend to be one site but were really talking to another, giving, say, your address and phone number to badguys.com instead of to niceFolks.org. Technologies like Frames and Javascript, as well as offering new possibilities, made it easier for a site to pretend to be something else, and even to use a real site as a kind of "trojan horse" to fool the user into trusting it.
At the same time users have learned more about how the Web works, and browsers have developed ways of helping them check that they are not being tricked. The little yellow bit in the Opera address bar tells you who owns the site you are connected to, and how good the security is (on a scale of 0 to 3). Browsers also block the most obviously dangerous cross-site access. In general, a script from dodgyDevelop.com cannot access your information on myBank.com unless the site itself has a copy of the script that it delivers because it trusts it. When these blocks are not in place you can get the kind of problems Jim Ley has noted recently in development projects.
(Development is like this - the trick is to release a service in a way that doesn't expose other risks by getting the layers right. One of the common processes is to use expert crackers to find bugs before releasing software - this is standard QA. In the Open Source world, the theory is that so many people look at the work that problems are picked up and solved. In some cases this works well, in others not, according to the actual results).
Although this security approach is helping to keep us from being caught out by a malicious attack, it comes at a price. The idea of the Web is that you can use a service you find. Of course you need to know, when anyone in the world can offer a service, whether you can trust it. This is not new to the Web. Most people are already wary about b eing offered millions of dollars by someone they don't know who says they were stolen in a far-off country, and many are wary of giving money to people who claim to be collecting for some good cause, but can't show who they are. Trust networks are things people have in the real world, but interfaces and systems for building them on the Web are not yet mainstream, and are not necessarily simple to create at the moment. So we live with the cross-site restrictions as a simple answer, winning something and losing something.
In accessibility, I have had a long-running discussion with my good friend John Foliot about how to deal with making keyboard access better for people who need it. A key disagreement we have is on whether it is better to get rid of existing content along with broken implementations, or whether we should take an architecture that is clearly flawed, and adapt it in ways that let us keep using the existing web, at the price of taking longer to work towards the system we would like. In that case I believe that the value of the existing Web is high, and we should keep it, since we can minimise the practical cost.
In this case, the security model is not yet built into the specifications that describe how the services themselves can be built. It seems to me that we are better keeping it out - making sure that we can change the model we have now for a better one (both in actual security and in minising the downsides of the implementation) as soon as it is readily available. The idea of writing the security model we should be using into the specifications for the formats we use strikes me as wrong on two levels.
- Using a new format specification will mean copying the security information into that specification. This seems like a bad approach
- More seriously, it makes it harder to replace the model with a better one, since it needs to be teased out of the specification, and in the worst case replaced with a new set of specifications, something that takes a very long time to put in place.
In other words, I am worried that we are giving ourselves the relatively comforting protection of a security blanket instead of growing up and thinking about real security as adults who decide for themselves what to trust.
Comments are actively sought here. This is complex stuff, and more brains working on it is a good thing IMHO.
Sliding into mobile phones
Monday, 21. November 2005, 23:35:56
I gave a talk in London last week, at the W3C's Mobile Web event there. Lots of the folks were talking about the future, how some day people with super-expensive phones would be able to get the Web to do stuff for them.
In the meantime, I had decided to do some work on my style. I'm not really a great one for design, as many people know. I like pretty simple layouts, plain colours, and I tend not to do much to adjust whatever default style I get (except to make text bigger, which I nearly always do).
(This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):
I managed to get the same slides to appear in fullscreen mode (the OperaShow presentation mode), in a different style for normal on-screen reading, and to show them on my phone in a presentationoptimised for the phone. It wasn't rocket science, and I thought I would share how I did it. (Thanks Tommy for the photographic evidence that this works on a real phone running Opera Mini)
(The next bit involves digging into the HTML source code. If you think that's boring, skip to the slides themselves - if you have Opera you can switch from fullscreen (which won't work before December - only the mobile version is uploaded) to small screen rendering and see how it comes out, then write a comment saying "Oooh, Aaaah" and I will be grateful ).
So what did I do? The first thing was to write some slides, to use OperaShow. I originally did this with the online tool, because it made the stylesheet for me. I copied the entire stylesheet into a seperated file, and I edited it a bit. Then I started to look at my own slides. I had some simple XHTML - this is what OperaShow is based on - its structure is the one I got from teh generator, and it works well for me even after hacking around. I added a link to the external stylesheet I had created, and said it was for several media types:
<link rel="style" type="text/css" href="slides.css" [B]media="print, tv, projection, screen"[/B] />Then I added an internal stylesheet:
<style type="text/css" [B]media="handheld"[/B]><[CDATA[ /* Style rules go here */ ]]> </style>(Why the funny extra brackets? Because this is real XHTML, following real XML rules. Just in case someone wants to build a really basic browser that only understands real XML, and skips all the error-correcting that Opera does to make the web that's out there actually work).
What rules do I actually put in? The following isn't exactly the same as the source. I've improved a bit, left out a few repetitive things, but you should get the idea. The first ones are to reduce the margins, padding and so on to something more obvious for mobiles, and remove the big bullets from lists. Stuff like:
ul,ol,ul li { margin: 3px ; padding: 3px ; list-style: none }
There are a number of images used in the screen and projection version. Most of them are more than 50kb, they are fairly large, and they are not really cool for mobiles. Fortunately, they are all styled with a couple of classes. I added a link to a very small, mobile-optimised picture, and gave it a special class that is set not to render in the linked stylsheet. While I was there, I decided to tell a logo image to show itself small (it's not too heavy, but its normal size was much too big), and I decided the first slide was not worth seeing as a slide. Those two things have an id, so I styled them too.
#mwi {width:55px;height:58px}
.r {float:right; padding:0px; margin:0px}
.topleft, .right, #s1 {display:none}
Then I decided I wanted to make the slides stand out a bit. Put a box around them, add a little slide number to each box, like a real slideset (This uses some CSS 2 - the counter won't work on some basic browsers, but the content is still there):
div.slide { counter-increment: slide; }
.slide { border: 1px black solid; padding: 4px; margin: 0px 0px 5px}
.slide:before { content: "Slide " counter(slide); float:right; }
By this time, I was messing around in the depths of stylesheets I never really understood before. (I found things like background images included through the use of data: URIs and all sorts of wierd and wonderful stuff). One of the things I found in the print style was that it put lots of metadata into the print version, but I was too slack to add metadata yet. (I'll dig back in and do that, because it is pretty useful as well as cool to see it printing). But I did use a couple of rules I found to add some simple metadata:
head { display: block; border: 1px black; padding:5px; width:100%}
title { display: block; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;
text-align:center ; font-weight: bold;}
If you look at the real source, you'll see the slight differences. You can look at how the other stylesheets work, too. But you're better off asking a different expert about the details of those - all I did that was special is trim them down to something I can manage, and make the mobile-friendly version work. (Even then, I could have done a bit more... maybe next time I'll explain that instead).
The price of freedom
Friday, 28. October 2005, 14:55:03
I have been in a meeting for three days, to try and develop an open, free specification for the Web. The particular meeting was the W3C Compound Document Format Working Group - trying to ensure that when documents are mixed together browsers do the same thing, so that authors can rely on something.
In a quiet moment I did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation of what this meeting cost. It's a fairly typical meeting for the W3C - about 20 people from 4 continents working about 9 hours a day (officially - a fair bit more work gets done in the evening thrashing out complex issues over a quiet beer or orange juice, according to preference) for three days. Not surprisingly in this male-dominated industry the people are mostly male (and in this particular case everyone was), and each one of them is looking over a laptop screen and talking over a constant hum of fingers tapping keyboards.
This is actually important. People have work to do, and in quiet moments most people can follow a bit of the rest of their work, which they have been away from for the best part of a week. There are also a few tools that are used to manage the process of having a meeting - tracking the agenda, following up on "action items", maintaining a list of issues and decisions, keeping a queue, taking minutes in real time that people can look at and respond to if they are not able to be physically here.
This exercise in mental gymnastics and saving the Web doesn't come cheap. A very rough calculation suggested that overall spending on this meeting itself is 3000 euros / hour, or so (taking into account travel costs, paying people for a day's work each day, but not the follow-up that is done). That means that a quick joke and laugh can easily cost the same as a round of drinks. A misunderstanding over the topic, that has to be explained, can cost the same as a new bicycle. A heated shouting match, a couple of insults, an effort made to bring people back to behaving a bit calmer, and we could all have gone out for a fancy dinner on the money spent.
Thousands of these meetings take place around the world, on thousands of topics. Billions of dollars are being spent on treating questions from how to create sewerage treatment infrastructure to ways of convincing more people to buy toilet paper, and everything in between. I spend a lot of time being one of the handful of people in a room working on the thing I am working on that day (and usually for some time every week, week in, week out). Some very clever people are trying to solve a whole set of complex problems. And someone is running this meeting - chairing, deciding when we take a decision, keeping the group to the agenda, stopping people from talking on and on about nothing but letting them explain something that is hard to understand.
So the chair has a â¬50/minute hose, that they use to control a group of 20 cats, in an attempt to come up with a specification that people can use to make the web work better. And these cats are nice guys, working for companies or for themselves, trying to make things better. As they understand "better". So are the chairs, doing a pretty tough job. It's surprising how well many of the people I have worked with actually do this. It's surprising when they are not valued for or measured against the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are directing well or ineffectively.
So thank you to everyone who has ever decided not to repeat what the last person said in a meeting, or has chaired effectively, or taken minutes, or thought about how to explain their point a little faster and more clearly...
In a quiet moment I did a quick back-of-the-napkin calculation of what this meeting cost. It's a fairly typical meeting for the W3C - about 20 people from 4 continents working about 9 hours a day (officially - a fair bit more work gets done in the evening thrashing out complex issues over a quiet beer or orange juice, according to preference) for three days. Not surprisingly in this male-dominated industry the people are mostly male (and in this particular case everyone was), and each one of them is looking over a laptop screen and talking over a constant hum of fingers tapping keyboards.
This is actually important. People have work to do, and in quiet moments most people can follow a bit of the rest of their work, which they have been away from for the best part of a week. There are also a few tools that are used to manage the process of having a meeting - tracking the agenda, following up on "action items", maintaining a list of issues and decisions, keeping a queue, taking minutes in real time that people can look at and respond to if they are not able to be physically here.
This exercise in mental gymnastics and saving the Web doesn't come cheap. A very rough calculation suggested that overall spending on this meeting itself is 3000 euros / hour, or so (taking into account travel costs, paying people for a day's work each day, but not the follow-up that is done). That means that a quick joke and laugh can easily cost the same as a round of drinks. A misunderstanding over the topic, that has to be explained, can cost the same as a new bicycle. A heated shouting match, a couple of insults, an effort made to bring people back to behaving a bit calmer, and we could all have gone out for a fancy dinner on the money spent.
Thousands of these meetings take place around the world, on thousands of topics. Billions of dollars are being spent on treating questions from how to create sewerage treatment infrastructure to ways of convincing more people to buy toilet paper, and everything in between. I spend a lot of time being one of the handful of people in a room working on the thing I am working on that day (and usually for some time every week, week in, week out). Some very clever people are trying to solve a whole set of complex problems. And someone is running this meeting - chairing, deciding when we take a decision, keeping the group to the agenda, stopping people from talking on and on about nothing but letting them explain something that is hard to understand.
So the chair has a â¬50/minute hose, that they use to control a group of 20 cats, in an attempt to come up with a specification that people can use to make the web work better. And these cats are nice guys, working for companies or for themselves, trying to make things better. As they understand "better". So are the chairs, doing a pretty tough job. It's surprising how well many of the people I have worked with actually do this. It's surprising when they are not valued for or measured against the hundreds of thousands of dollars they are directing well or ineffectively.
So thank you to everyone who has ever decided not to repeat what the last person said in a meeting, or has chaired effectively, or taken minutes, or thought about how to explain their point a little faster and more clearly...
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