Out of the way

Really. I am writing on the bus, which is maybe a nice thing to be able to do.

I've been travelling a fair bit. Some notes and thoughts...

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I am in Azerbaijan, on the outskirts of the capital, Baku. (The title is from the first line of Banjo Paterson's "Bush Christening"). I read a book recently, and I am at BarCamp Caspian, talkng about some new things we have shown recently...

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I was working on a paper about mobile access, and I noted that in the "State of the Mobile Web" report, top devices for mini included "desktop" as number 3 in Zambia and number 4 in Swaziland. Then I ran across instructions to use Opera Mini on Windows and on Linux, but not Mac. So here is the recipe...

The nice thing is it seems to be slightly simpler As far as I know, this requires a mouse to work (I skimped on testing so far in my rush to write)

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Well, at a wild guess. I finally flew on the A380 super-monster-giant-american-meal-size-jumbo...

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I got one of the One Laptop Per Child project's XO laptops. I have been playing around with it a bit, but it might suddenly become my work machine...

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When I was a kid, this meant sweets that were usually lemon flavoured. Then I discovered that before I was a kid this could also mean taking a particular drug. But now I am a geek most of the time, so it means dealing with very complicated tests.

This week's tempest in geekland was about the Acid3 test - we were first to announce we had got to 98/98, and just afterward first to score 100/100 on the test (with Webkit in each case hot on our heels). Now you can get a special preview testing build (for Windows or Linux) that gets the right rendering and 100/100 on the test.

But what does that really mean...?

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I've been on a travel-meeting-travel-talk-travel jag for what seems like forever (but it was really only three weeks).

While I was away, a whole lot of cool Opera things came out. MathML, Mini 4, A video build with 3D canvas, ...

So in roughly chronological order...

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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...

Thanks mostly to White_Lynx and the Core developers, you can now try out MathML in Opera 9.5 alphas. My major contribution was writing the article that explains it so Chris could publish it while I am at Web Directions South.

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If you read my blog obsessively, checking every 15 minutes to see if I wrote something new and reading it immediately, you should probably relax a bit. On the other hand, thank you (it would be nice to think that someone likes what I write enough to do this) - and as a reward you find out that we just made a public alpha version of Opera 9.5 - the new "Kestrel".

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