Is this thing on?

Last issue of New Scientist published a paean to IPhone named Appland: How smartphones are transforming our lives. It follows a traditional NS pattern of being ahead of the curve for science and behind it with technology. The author was elated, and there is a crucial distinction between things that make you happy and things that don't.

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That should more properly be "having left Opera", as I am no longer an Opera employee, but that doesn't work as well as a title. There is nothing dramatic about the decision, and I think Opera is an excellent employer, but I had been at Opera for seven and a half years and that was long enough.

Much of my work at Opera has been with standards, and standards don't matter. Having standards does, but as long as they are reasonably sane it doesn't matter what they are. The latest standards debacle in Norway wasn't related to browsers but with office products, word processors and the like, with the competing standards called ODF and OOXML.

ODF is not a good standard. You can read through the entire spec and will find nothing clever there. Anything ODF can do HTML5 can do better. Add cursor position to HTML5 and it could have been called ODF 2.0. What it has going for it is the absence of bad. Microsoft makes good standards, much of the time. OOXML is not one of those times, what it is lacking is the absence of bad. Could it be fixed? Probably, but to me it isn't worth it.

As for Web standards I think it should be an optional for Opera. Opera should encourage the presence of standards, and follow them unless they are bad, but it shouldn't necessarily form them. Opera should do what makes its users happy.

Opera Mini makes me happy. It lets me do things I couldn't do before. This entry was intended to be typed in on Opera Mini while I was on the move, but in the end it was typed in on a PC. It wasn't written in Opera Mini because Opera Mini isn't data loss safe, without copy&paste or save I can easily lose what I write, and data loss does not make me happy.

Being unemployed makes me happy as well, for now anyway. It's been a long while since the last time, as the last few times I changed jobs I went directly from one to the next. It is almost the same elated feeling as being homeless. I haven't actually been homeless in the sense that I own one flat and rent another, but I have adapted to a mobile lifestyle and from time to time I've not known where I will spend the next night and that is a strong feeling of freedom (until nightfall) — I can go whereever I want. I have used to claim that the bag in my one hand is my office, containing my laptop and other work stuff, and the bag in my other hand is my home, containing clothes and other private stuff. For now I can move with one bag less.

Opera phones, including my Sony-Ericsson P800, use the handheld media type allowing the page designer to make a customised style sheet for phones. If there is no handheld style sheet Small-screen rendering is used instead.

But what if a handheld style sheet is provided, but it is bad for you? On this phone, using the fairly old 6.31 version, you are stuck with what you have got. There aren't many sites yet that make handheld versions, but we do. www.opera.com has an excellent style sheet, while the My Opera forums have a bad one (this will change) including setting display:none on information you need.

And here is the tip: Toggle the Edit > Fit to screen option. The first time SSR is overridden by the handheld style sheet, but the second time the handheld style sheet is ignored and SSR is applied. This was not intended but has proven fortuitous.

Saw that Virgin had made an iPod competitor, and the low weight was welcome. But the reason I have never considered an iPod applies to this thing too. I don't care about PC synchronisation, I care about phone synchronization. A 5GB external harddisk/MP3 player is an attractive addition to a phone, especially when it weights less than 100g. The radio would have been a welcome addition if it hadn't been largely redundant with a phone.

There are other ways to get a GB external harddisk to a phone, not that it would make any sense even if I could.