Out of the way

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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I tend to have my laptop on a lot. I work a lot - and sometimes I have it for doing fun stuff too, like playing music. So I often sit it on the corner of my bed when it is charging overnight. (I have a bad habit of waking up, grabbing it, starting to work, and then thinking about putting on my glasses, or getting up, and so on).

So I was a bit upset this evening to find that I had a problem. Specifically, I was about to finish work, unplug and go home, when I noticed that the charger had stopped. And then I looked more carefully and saw that actually the cable was burning itself. Which is not a cheery thought really.

So, hopefully I will be able to get it replaced quickly. I have a spare battery (which I already had to have replaced - they actually recalled them), but no spare charger. Also, I don't like the thought of that happening somewhere I wouldn't notice a fire developing. Still, handy to know that with a little more concentration I could have made the place nice and warm...

I have a photo but I will upload it tomorrow (assuming I have power, of course ).

The beta version of Opera mini 4 is out today.

It has some cool features, like the kind of adaptive zoom that the iPhone, and Nokia's browser for high-end phones before it, was supposed to use to revolutionise the web. Except of course that this runs on the $50 pre-paid phone I bought when I realised that I had forgotten my phone, not just on some $500+contract superphone. On the other hand, it is a beta, so it isn't everything that mini4 will be.

I normally run the very latest builds of Opera on my desktop - the internal builds that we get in the development process - so I am not scared of our beta software. I even have my mail in it. But I am not quite so pushy about the phone browser. Mini Just Works™ for the stuff I do (looking up songs and lyrics, buying travel tickets, a bit of reading news, and looking up pointless things at parties).

The new version is nice. I have played around a bit with the "desktop mini simulator" - there is a simulator that runs the same program on a desktop, where it draws an imaginary phone around it so you can get an idea of how it works.

I am not so fond of the zoom thing for everyday use. But then, I hate it on the other browsers I have tried it on, too. When I browse on a mobile, I want something that really really works for mobile, and I don't find it hard to understand the way that things are adapted to best suit mobile. Some usability testing suggested that people prefer having a full-screen mode that made the layout like desktop, so there are plenty of people out there who love it.

Certainly, it can be useful. It is nice to see a mouse pointer on so many cheap phones. It should handle some really badly written systems that are monstrously hard to adapt, too. And it is properly written to dynamically fit as columns wobble around and change size.

Am I just an old fuddy-duddy, wanting things to be the way they were, or is it really easier for someone who uses mobile a lot (It is about 3 years since I first bought a plane ticket on my phone)? I don't know. Even in "old-fashioned" mode (which of course it still does) the new beta feels even faster. Maybe it is just that I am not a very visual person.

One warning (Hey, it is a beta!): in the beta, they have not yet enabled the always-on security that made Opera mini a really cool application for me - one that I use for buying real stuff. So I either have to leave off putting my credit card about until the next update is out, or stay with the current release version. And that is the real dilemma....

... because actually I want to upgrade. Maybe I will just do it on the phone that has Opera mobile with SSL, Password management, Ajax and so on, and leave the cheap phone I bought at a train station with the secured release version for now...

I have new glasses. This is lovely, because it means I can actually see well again.

My left eye is not bad. My right eye is not very good. A couple of months ago I lost my glasses, and had to revert to my "emergency" pair. Which had become my emergency pair becaus the right lens dropped out and was lost forever.

A month of working with those (and needing them, because my right eye was so often useless that I was really pushing the left) had me wondering if I would have learned to favour one eye.

At Gregory's place, the courier delivered my glasses. They are new, funky, don't have real frames, just arms and things stuck onto the lenses. They sit high, and they are amazingly light. (I have worn glasses for about ten years. When I was younger my eyesight was just as bad, but I had more energy to strain my eyes. I started with glass lenses, and have moved to ever-lighter glasses bit by bit).

Funnily enough, the courier also delivered my privacy screen to Gregory. It's a bit of plastic, made by the same people who invented those little yello sticky notes that are everywhere now. It is almost transparent, so long as you look at it straight on. From about 45˚ it is hard to see much at all, so I can sitin a meeting and read confidential mail in large type without worrying about who else is having it waved in front of them.

I wonder if the couriers thought about this, as they asked a blind guy to sign for a package. When I was younger I delivered televisions and the like around the suburbs of Melbourne for a while. Occasionally I would be asked to explain how to operate a new television or video recorder - and I remember that while blind people would ask for detailed explanations, they would also actually be good at remembering them. It struck me that having a couple of video recorders and a couple of TV's, all connected together, it would make sense to be good at remembering how each one worked. I don't think I had thought about it much before, but it seemed reasonable for people who had a lot of spare time to want to copy video cassettes, and record a lot of stuff.

Someone recently asked what blind people do with a photo website. I recall going to buy my first digital camera, with a blind friend who was replacing his (I should have just bought his old one, I guess), and asking him where he put his photos. He collected them, asked a bunch of friends to tell him which were good and which weren't (and what was in them), and then he stored them or sent them to people. Same as anyone does. After all, there are only a few things you can do with photos.

The web, and particularly the rise of the "blog", has enabled more people than ever before to publishto a global audience. And while there aren't necessarily more great writers than before, there are more people trying to get a bit of attention and love online. Or share something. Or just get something out of their system...

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