On this day in 2011 I launched
FreeDeedPoll.org.uk, a site that tries to make it as easy as possible for British citizens to change their names (and have those new names
accepted as being legally-recognised).
Generate free UK deeds of name change at freedeedpoll.org.uk.
The thing that people often don’t realise is that, as a British citizen, you have the right to be known by pretty-much any name you like. You don’t need a solicitor to change your name. You don’t even need any
money. You can just start using it. A deed poll, which you can make all by yourself for free, is just a piece of paper on which you write a promise that you
consider your “new” name to be your primary moniker, and not your “old” one.
Over the last year, almost 3,000 deed polls have been generated using the site, including ones for my partner Ruth (who opted to keep her maiden name as a middle name after she got married) and my friend Jen (who now has among the coolest – and most hippyish – collection of names I’ve ever seen). As to how many of the other thousands of deed polls
have actually been used, I simply don’t know: as a commitment to privacy, no logs are kept of the names people enter onto the form, so for all I know there are 2,000 all the same and
998 “blank” submissions.
Looking Forward
I’ve become a minor Internet guru on the topic of name changes, it turns out. The other week, a transgendered stranger contacted me via the “chat to Dan” link, to ask about the legal
aspects of their (slightly more-complex than most) case for changing their name. And because I’m a fan of helping people, I did a little research with them in order to find the answers.
I felt the need to keep stressing that IANAL, but I’m
pretty sure I managed to help, anyway.
And over the New Year, when there were a few days of downtime for the site (I was part of an exodus of domains from my SOPA-supporing previous registrar, and they made the process
difficult), I received messages from people asking when it would be back up again, so it’s obviously getting some use.
Most recently, a few days ago, a stranger emailed me asking for advice on the legal issues in changing the names of his children. After doing the necessary research, I’m now thinking of
expanding the site to make this easier, too.
A (sample) deed poll document generated by freedeedpoll.org.uk.
A strange feeling for me has been that this project is, and has been for the last year, “finished”. I’m not very good at finishing technical projects: one of the biggest and most
important things that I’ve worked on – Three Rings – is
now
in its tenth year and shows no sign of being “finished”. So it feels odd to have developed a website that’s complete, done and dusted, and probably won’t require more than a modicum
of maintenance over the coming decades to keep it running.
It’s good, though, that I’ve been able to help people with something about which far too many are underinformed. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling, and I like it.
To mark the ocassion, I’ve updated the open-source version of the
tool so that it works “out of the box”: it now includes all of the (free) fonts you need to get started, and can be used without setting up reCAPTCHA if you like. For more information about the history of the project, see my project page about it.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on
years gone by.
The other week I built Tiffany2, New Earth‘s new media centre computer. She’s well-established and being used to watch movies, surf the web, and whatnot, now, so I thought I’d
better fulfil my promise of telling you about my other new smaller-than-average computer, Dana, whose existence was made possible by gifts from my family over Christmas
and my birthday.
Dana‘s size and power-consumption is so small that it makes Tiffany2 look like a bloated monster. That’s because Dana is a DreamPlug, an open-architecture plug computer following in the footsteps of the coveted SheevaPlug and GuruPlug.
A dreamplug (seen here with a two-pin power connector, which helps to give you a sense of its size).
The entire computer including its detachable power supply is only a little larger than the mobile telephones of the mid-nineties, and the entire device can be plugged straight into the
wall. With no hard disk (it uses SD cards) and no fans, the DreamPlug has no moving parts to wear out or make noise, and so it’s completely silent. It’s also incredibly low-power – mine
idles at about 4 watts – that’s about the same as a radio alarm clock, and about a hundredth of what my desktop PCs Toni and Nena run at under a typical load.
I’ve fitted up mine with a Mimo Mini-Monster 10″: a dinky little self-powered USB-driven touchscreen monitor about the
size of an iPad. Right now the whole assembly – about the size of a large picture frame – sits neatly in the corner of my desk and (thanks to the magic of Synergy) forms part of my extended multi-monitor desktop, as well as acting as a computer in her own right.
Dana's Mimo Mini-Monster touchscreen: Dana herself is completely concealed behind the screen.
So on the surface, she’s a little bit like a wired tablet computer, which would seem a little silly (and indeed: at a glance you’d mistake her for a digital photo frame)! But because
she’s a “real” computer underneath, with a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB RAM, USB, WiFi, and two Ethernet ports, there’s all kinds of fun things that can be done with her.
For a start, she provides an ultra low-power extension to my existing office development environment. I’ve experimented with “pushing” a few tasks over to her, like watching log file
output, downloading torrents, running a web server, reading RSS feeds, and so on, but my favourite of her tasks is acting as a gateway between the rest of the world and my office.
A network diagram showing the layout of the computer networks on New Earth. It's more-complex than your average household.
While they’ve come a long way, modern ADSL routers are still woefully inadequate at providing genuine customisability and control over my home network. But a computer like this – small,
silent, and cheap – makes it possible to use your favourite open-source tools (iptables, squid, sshd, etc.) as a firewall to segregate off a part of the network. And that’s exactly what
I’ve done. My office – the pile of computers in the upper-right of the diagram, above – is regulated by Dana, whose low footprint means that I don’t feel bad about leaving her
turned always-on.
That means that, from anywhere in the world (and even from my phone), I can now:
Connect into Dana using SSH.
Send magic packets
to Toni, Nena, or Tiffany2 (all of which are on wired connections), causing them to turn themselves on.
Remotely control those computers to, for example, get access to my files from anywhere, set them off downloading something I’ll need later, or whatever else.
Turn them off when I’m done.
That’s kinda sexy. There’s nothing new about it – the technologies and standards involved are as old as the hills – but it’s nice to be able to do it using something that’s barely
bigger than a postcard.
I have all kinds of ideas for future projects with Dana. It’s a bit like having a souped-up (and only a little bigger) Arduino to play with, and it’s brimming with potential. How about a webcam for my bird feeder? Or home-automation tools
(y’know: so I can turn on my bedroom light without having to get out of bed)? Or a media and file server (if I attached a nice, large, external hard disk)? And then there’s the more
far-fetched ideas: it’s easily low-power enough to run from a car battery – how about in-car entertainment? Or home-grown GPS guidance? What about a “delivered ready-to-use” intranet
application, as I was discussing the other day with a colleague, that can be simply posted to a client, plugged in, and used? There’s all kinds of fun potential ideas for a box like
this, and I’m just beginning to dig into them.
This weekend, I integrated two new computers into the home network on New Earth. The first of these is
Tiffany2.
Tiffany2 is a small "media centre" style computer with an all-in-one remote keyboard/mouse.
Tiffany2 replaces Tiffany, the media centre computer I built a little under four years ago. The original Tiffany was built on a shoestring budget of
under £300, and provided the technical magic behind the last hundred or so Troma Nights, as well as countless other film and television nights, a means to watch (and record and pause)
live TV, surf the web, and play a game once in a while.
The problem with Tiffany is that she was built dirt-cheap at a time when building a proper media centre PC was still quite expensive. So she wasn’t very good. Honestly, I’m
amazed that she lasted as long as she did. And she’s still running: but she “feels” slow (and takes far too long to warm up) and she makes a noise like a jet engine… which isn’t what
you want when you’re paying attention to the important dialogue of a quiet scene.
Tiffany and Tiffany2. Were this a histogram of their relative noise levels, the one on the left would be much, much larger.
Tiffany2 is virtually silent and significantly more-powerful than her predecessor. She’s also a lot smaller – not much bigger than a DVD player – and generally more
feature-rich.
This was the first time I’d built an ITX form-factor computer (Tiffany2 is Mini-ITX): I wanted to make her small, and it seemed like the best standard for the job. Assembling some of her components
felt a little like playing with a doll’s house – she has a 2.5″ hard disk and a “slimline” optical drive: components that in the old days we used to call “laptop” parts, which see new
life in small desktop computers.
Examples of six different hard drive form factors. Tiffany2 uses the third-smallest size shown in this picture. The computer you're using, unless it's a laptop, probably uses the
third-largest (picture courtesy Paul R. Potts, CC-At-SA).
In order to screw in some of the smaller components, I had to dig out my set of watchmaker’s screwdrivers. Everything packs very neatly into a very small space, and – building her – I
found myself remembering my summer job long ago at DesignPlan Lighting, where I’d have to tuck dozens of little
components, carefully wired-together, into the shell of what would eventually become a striplight in a tube train or a prison, or something.
She’s already deployed in our living room, and we’ve christened her with the latest Zero Punctuation, a few DVDs, some episodes of Xena: Warrior Princess, and an episode of Total Wipeout featuring JTA‘s old history teacher
as a contestant. Looks like she’s made herself at home.
(for those who are sad enough to care, Tiffany2 is running an Intel Core i3-2100 processor, underclocked to 3GHz, on an mITX Gigabyte GA-H61N-USB3 motherboard with 4GB RAM, a 750GB hard disk, and DVD-rewriter, all wrapped up in an
Antec ISK 300-150 case with a 150W power supply: easily enough for a media centre box
plus some heavy lifting if I ever feel the need to give her any)
Long ago, I used desktop RSS readers. I was only subscribed to my friends’ blogs back then anyway, so it didn’t matter that I could only read them from my home computer. But then RSS
feeds started appearing on news sites, and tech blogs started appearing about things related to my work. And smartphones took over the world, and I wanted to be able to synchronise my
reading list everywhere. There were a few different services that competed for my attention, but Google Reader was the best. It was simple, and fast, and easy, and it Just Worked in
that way that Google products often do.
I put up with the occasional changes to the user interface. Hey, it’s a beta, and it’s still the best thing out there. Hey, it’s free, what can you say? I put up with the fact that from
time to time, they changed the site in ways that were sometimes quite hostile to Opera, my web
browser of choice. I put up with the fact that it had difficulty with unsigned HTTPS certificates (it’s fine now) and that it didn’t provide a mechanism to authenticate against services
like LiveJournal (it still doesn’t). I even worked around the latter, releasing my own tool and updatingit a few times until LiveJournal blocked it (twice) and I had to instead recommend that
people switched to rival service FreeMyFeed.
The new Google Reader (with my annotations - click to embiggen). It sucks quite a lot.
I know that they’re ever-so-proud of the Google+ user interface, but rebranding all of the other services to look like
it just isn’t working. It’s great for Google+, not-bad for Search, bad for GMail (but at least you can turn it off!), and fucking awful for Reader. I like
distinct borders between my items. I don’t like big white spaces and buttons that eat up half the screen.
The sharing interface is completely broken. After a little while, I worked out that I still can share things with other people, but I can’t any longer see what other
people are sharing without clicking over to Google+. This sucks a lot. No longer can I keep track of which shared items I have and haven’t read, and no longer can I read the interesting
RSS feeds my friends have shared in the same place as I read (and share) my own.
So that’s the last straw. Today, I switched everything over to Tiny Tiny RSS.
Tiny Tiny RSS - it's simple, clean, and (in an understated way) beautiful.
Originally I felt that I was being pushed “away” from Google Reader, but the more I’ve played with it, the more I’ve realised that I’m being drawn “towards” Tiny Tiny, and wishing that
I’d made the switch further. The things that have really appealed are:
It’s self-hosted. Tiny Tiny RSS is a free, open-source solution that you host for yourself (or I suppose you can use a shared host; there are a few around). I know
that this is a downside to most people, but to me, it’s a serious selling point: now, I’m in control of what updates are applied, when, and if I don’t like the
functionality of a part of the system, I can change it – I’m in control.
It’s simple and clean. It’s got a great user interface, in an understated and simplistic way. It’s somewhat reminiscent of desktop email clients,
replacing the “stream of feeds” idea with a two- or three-pane view (your choice). That sounds like it’d be a downside, until you realise…
…with great keyboard controls. Tiny Tiny RSS is great for keyboard lovers like me. The default key-commands (which are of course customisable) are based on
Emacs, so if that’s your background then it’s easy to be right at home in minutes and browsing feeds faster than ever.
Plus: it’s got a stack of nice features. I’m loving the “fresh” filter, that helps me differentiate between the stuff I’ve “saved for later” reading and the
stuff that’s actually new and interesting. I’m also impressed by the integrated authentication, which removes my dependency on FreeMyFeed-like services and (because it’s self-hosted)
lets me keep my credentials securely under my own control. It supports authentication using SSL certificates, a beautiful and underused technology. It allows you to customise the
update frequency of your feeds, so I can stalk by friends’ blogs at lightning-quick rates and stall my weekly update subscriptions so they don’t get checked so frequently. And unlike
Google Reader, it actually tells me when feeds break, so I don’t just “get no updates” for a while before I think to check the site (and it’ll even let me change the
URLs when this happens, rather than unsubscribing and resubscribing).
Put simply: all of my major gripes with Google Reader over the last few years have been answered all at once in this wonderful little program. If people are interested in how I set up
Tiny Tiny RSS and and made the switchover as simple and painless as possible, I’ll write a blog post to talk you through it.
I’ve had just one problem: it’s not quite so tolerant of badly-formed XML as Google Reader. There’s one feed in my list which, it turns out, has (very) invalid XML in it’s
feed, that Google Reader managed to ignore and breeze over, but Tiny Tiny RSS chokes on. I’ve contacted the site owner to try to get it fixed, but if they don’t, I might have to hack
some code to try to make a workaround. Not ideal, and not something that everybody would necessarily want to deal with, so be aware!
If, like me, you’ve become dissatisfied by Google Reader this week, you might also like to look at rssLounge, the
other worthy candidate I considered as a replacement. I had a quick play but didn’t find it quite as suitable for my needs, but it might be to your taste: take a look.
The new sidebar, showing what I'm reading in my RSS reader lately.
Oh, and one more thing: if you used to “follow” me on Google Reader (or even if you didn’t) and you want to continue to subscribe to the stuff I “share”, then
you’ll want to subscribe to this new RSS feed of “my shared stuff”, instead: it can also be found syndicated in
the right-hand column of my blog.
Update:this guy’s made a
bookmarklet that makes the new Google Reader theme slightly less hideous. Doesn’t fix the other problems, though, but if you’re not quite pissed-off enough to jump ship, it
might make your experience more-bearable.
Update 2: others in the blogosphere are saying good things about Reader rival NewsBlur, which recently turned one year old. If you’re looking for a hosted service, rather than something “roll-your-own” like
Tiny Tiny RSS, perhaps it’s the tool for you?
From an elevated position in the exhibition room, I run a few tests of the technical infrastructure whilst other staff set up, below.
In particular, something I’ve been working on are the QR codes. This
experiment – very progressive for a sometimes old-fashioned establishment like the Bodleian – involves small two-dimensional barcodes being placed with the exhibits. The barcodes are
embedded with web addresses for each exhibit’s page on the exhibition website. Visitors who scan them – using a tablet computer, smartphone, or whatever – are directed to a web page
where they can learn more about the item in front of them and can there discuss it with other visitors or can “vote” on it: another exciting new feature in this exhibition is that we’re
trying quite hard to engage academics and the public in debate about the nature of “treasures”: what is a treasure?
A QR code in place at the Treasures of the Bodleian exhibition.
In order to improve the perceived “connection” between the QR code and the objects, to try to encourage visitors to scan the codes despite perhaps having little or no instruction, we
opted to embed images in the QR codes relating to the objects they related to. By cranking up the error-correction level of a QR code, it’s possible to “damage” them quite significantly and still have them scan perfectly well.
One of my “damaged” QR codes. This one corresponds to The Laxton Map, a 17th Century map of common farming land near Newark on Trent.
We hope that the visual association between each artefact and its QR code will help to make it clear that the code is related to the item (and isn’t, for example, some kind of asset tag
for the display case or something). We’re going to be monitoring usage of the codes, so hopefully we’ll get some meaningful results that could be valuable for future exhibitions: or for
other libraries and museums.
Rolling Your Own
If you’re interested in making your own QR codes with artistic embellishment (and I’m sure a graphic designer could do a far better job than I did!), here’s my approach:
I used Google Infographics (part of Chart Tools) to produce my QR codes. It’s fast, free,
simple, and – crucially – allows control over the level of error correction used in the resulting code. Here’s a sample URL to generate the QR code above:
500×500 is the size of the QR code. I was ultimately producing 5cm codes because our experiments showed that this was about the right size
for our exhibition cabinets, the distance from which people would be scanning them, etc. For laziness, then, I produced codes 500 pixels square at a resolution of 100 pixels per
centimetre.
H specifies that we want to have an error-correction level of 30%, the maximum possible. In theory, at least, this allows us to do the maximum
amount of “damage” to our QR code, by manipulating it, and still have it work; you could try lower levels if you wanted, and possibly get less-complex-looking codes.
0 is the width of the border around the QR code. I didn’t want a border (as I was going to manipulate the code in Photoshop anyway), so I use
a width of 0.
The URL – HTTP://TREASURES.BODLEIAN.OX.AC.UK/T7 – is presented entirely in capitals. This is because capital letters use fewer bits
when encoded as QR codes. “http” and domain names are case-insensitive anyway, and we selected our QR code path names to be in capitals. We also shortened the URL as far as possible:
owing to some complicated technical and political limitations, we weren’t able to lean on URL-shortening services like bit.ly, so we had to roll our own. In
hindsight, it’d have been nice to have set up the subdomain “t.bodleian.ox.ac.uk”, but this wasn’t possible within the time available. Remember: the shorter the web address, the simpler
the code, and simpler codes are easier and faster to read.
Our short URLs redirect to the actual web pages of each exhibit, along with an identifying token that gets picked up by Google Analytics to track how widely the QR codes are being used (and which ones are most-popular amongst visitors).
By now, you’ll have a QR code that looks a little like this.
Load that code up in Photoshop, along with the image you’d like to superimpose into it. Many of the images I’ve had to work with are disturbingly “square”, so I’ve simply taken
them, given them a white or black border (depending on whether they’re dark or light-coloured). With others, though, I’ve been able to cut around some of the more-attractive parts of
the image in order to produce something with a nicer shape to it. In any case, put your image in as a layer on top of your QR code.
Move the image around until you have something that’s aesthetically-appealing. With most of my square images, I’ve just plonked them in the middle and resized them to cover a whole
number of “squares” of the QR code. With the unusually-shaped ones, I’ve positioned them such that they fit in with the pattern of the QR code, somewhat, then I’ve inserted another
layer in-between the two and used it to “white out” the QR codes squares that intersect with my image, giving a jagged, “cut out” feel.
Test! Scan the QR code from your screen, and again later from paper, to make sure that it’s intact and functional. If it’s not, adjust your overlay so that it covers less of the QR
code. Test in a variety of devices. In theory, it should be possible to calculate how much damage you can cause to a QR code before it stops working (and where it’s safe to cause the
damage), but in practice it’s faster to use trial-and-error. After a while, you get a knack for it, and you almost feel as though you can see where you need to put the images so that
they just-barely don’t break the codes. Good luck!
Another of my “damaged” QR codes. I’m reasonably pleased with this one.
Give it a go! Make some QR codes that represent your content (web addresses, text, vCards, or whatever) and embed your own images into them to make them stand out with a style of their
own.
In my review of my new HTC Sensation earlier this month, I tried to explain how
my new phone – with it’s swish and simple interface – didn’t feel quite… geeky enough for me. I picked up on the way that it’s process management works, but I’ve since
realised that this is only symptomatic of a deeper problem. This is entirely to do with the difference between traditional computers (of which my old N900 was one) and modern consumer-centric devices (which, inspired by the iPod/iPhone/iPad/etc.) try
to simplify things for the end-user and provide strong support for centralised repositories of pre-packaged “apps” for every conceivable purpose.
To take an example of the difference: my N900 ran Linux, and felt like it ran Linux. As a reasonably-sensible operating system, this meant that all of the applications on it
used pretty much the same low-level interfaces to do things. If I wanted, I could have installed (okay, okay – compiled) sshfs, and be reasonably confident that every application on my phone, whether it’s a media player or a geocaching application
or whatever, would use that new filesystem. I could store my geocaching .gpx files on an SSH-accessible server somewhere, and my phone could access them, and my geocaching
app wouldn’t know the difference because I’d have that level of control over the filesystem abstraction layer.
Similarly, if I installed a game which made use of Ogg Vorbis to store
its sound files, which therefore installed the Vorbis codecs, then I can expect that my media player software will also be able to make use of those codecs, because
they’ll be installed in the standard codec store. This kind of thing “just works”. Okay, okay: you know as well as I do that computers don’t always “just work”, but the principle is
there such that it can “just work”, even if it doesn’t always.
On these contemporary smartphones, like the iPhone, Android devices, and (I assume) modern BlackBerrys, the model is different: individual applications are sandboxed and packaged up
into neat little bundles with no dependencies outside of that provided by the platform. If you have two applications installed that both use sshfs, then they both have to
include (or implement) the relevant bundle! And having them installed doesn’t automatically give sshfs-like functionality to your other filesystem-accessing tools.
It’s not all bad, of course: this “new model” is great for helping non-technical users keep their devices secure, for example, and it means that there’s almost no risk of dependency hell. It’s very… easy. But I’m still not
sure it quite works: I’ll bet that 90% of users would install an application that demands dubious levels of permissions (and could, for example, be stealing their address book data for
sale to scammers) without even thinking about the risks, so the security benefits are somewhat nullified.
In summary:
Pros
Cons
Traditional-computing device (e.g. N900)
User actually “owns” device
Applications to be combined (e.g. pipes, automation, new middleware)
More secure (in theory) as platform exposes little
Centralised “app store”/”marketplace”
Potentially limiting for technical users
Only as secure as the user is savvy.
Centralised “app store” store can act as a “lock in”
Needless to say, the new model devices are winning, and already tablet computers powered by the very same platforms as the mobile phones are beginning to be seen as a simpler, easier
alternative to conventional laptops. It’s to be expected: most of today’s users don’t want a learning curve before they can use their smartphone: they just want to make some calls, play
Angry Birds a bit, keep up with their Facebook friends, and so on.
But I hope that there’ll always be room for a few folks like me: folks who want to tinker, want to play, want to hack code for no really benefit but their own pleasure… and without
having to shell out for a developer license in order to do so!
I’ve recently gotten a new phone – a HTC Sensation running
Android 2.3, and I thought I’d offer up a few thoughts on
it. But first…
Hang on: what was wrong with your old phone?
Well-remembered! You’re right, of course, that last year I got a Nokia N900, and that it was the
best mobile communications device I’d ever owned. I don’t care so much about a slim profile or an “app store”, but I do care about raw power and geeky hardware features, and the N900
delivers both of those in spades. I’ve had several phones that have, at the time, been the “best phone I’ve ever owned” – my 7110 and my N96 both also earned that distinction, whereas my 7610 and my C550 – the latter of which had only one redeeming feature – fell far short.
Nokia N900 with keyboard extended
Awesome though it is, with it’s beautiful hardware keyboard, mighty processor, FM receiver and transmitter, Bluetooth and IR, etc., and completely unlocked,
tamper-friendly architecture, the N900 suffers from one terrible, terrible flaw: for some reason, the engineers who built it decided to mount the Micro-B USB port (used for charging,
tethering, mounting etc. the phone) not to the hard plastic case, but to the fragile inner circuit board. Allow me to illustrate:
A cross-section of a Nokia N900, showing how the USB port is mounted directly to the circuit board, and doesn't touch the hard plastic case.
Why is this a problem? Well, as Katie explained to me at the New Earth housewarming party,
most of her other friends who’d had N900s had encountered a problem by now, whereby the USB cable used to charge the device eventually puts a strain on the connection between the port
and the board, tearing them apart. “Nope,” I told her, “I’ve never had any such problem with mine.”
A cross-section of a Nokia N900, showing the USB port snapped off by the USB cable.
Looks like I spoke too soon, because that very week, I managed to break my N900 in exactly this way. My theory: that girl is cursed. I shall be attempting to
exorcise the anti-technology demons in her the very next time I see her, possibly in some kind of ceremony involving high-voltage direct current. In any case, I found myself with a
phone that I couldn’t charge.
So you replaced it?
No, of course not. My N900 remains a fantastic palmtop and a great device. It’s just got a minor problem in that it’s no longer possible to charge or “hard”-tether it to anything any
more. The latter problem was an easy one to fix: a separate battery charger (I already carry a spare battery for it, so this was no hardship), bought for about £4 on eBay, made it easy
to keep the device rolling. The second problem’s not so much of an issue, because I tend to do all of my synchronisation by Bluetooth and WiFi anyway. But even if
these were an issue, it looks like a pretty
simple job to re-solder the USB port (and epoxy it to the case, as it should have been to begin with!). I might give it a go, some day, but my current soldering iron is a little big
and chunky for such fine and delicate work, and I’m a little out of practice, so I’ll save that project for another day.
The repairing of a Nokia N900 USB port
However, I’m a big believer in the idea that when the Universe wants you to have a new phone, it finds a fault with your current phone. Perhaps this is the geek equivalent of thinking
that “When God
closes a door, He opens a window”.
So: I’ve got myself a HTC Sensation, which narrowly beat the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc after carefully weighing up the reviews. I’d always planned that I’d try an
Android device next, but I’d originally not expected to do so until Ice Cream Sandwich, later this year. But… when the Universe closes your USB Port, it
opens a Gingerbread shop… right?
The New Sensation
After a few difficulties relating to my name – it turns out that my mobile
phone network has recorded my name correctly in their database, and I can’t change it, but whenever I use their web-based checkout it asks me to enter a longer surname even though I
don’t have a surname field to change – I finally received my new phone.
HTC Sensation seen from the back, front, and side.
The first thing one notices about this phone is that it’s fast. Blindingly fast. I’ve used a variety of Android-powered HTC devices before, as well as other modern
touchscreen smartphones like the iPhone, and I’m yet to use anything that consistently ramps up high-end graphics and remains slick and responsive like this does. Its mighty dual-core
1.2GHz processor’s the cause of this, little doubt. I originally worried that battery life might be limited as a result – I don’t mind charging my phone every night, but I don’t want to
have to charge it during the day too! – but it’s actually been really good. Using WiFi, GPRS, GPS, playing videos, surfing the web, and other “everyday” tasks don’t put a dent in the
battery: I’ve only once seen it dip to under 10% battery remaining, and that was after 40 hours of typical use during a recent camping weekend (with no access to electricity).
It’s also been really well-designed from a usability perspective, too. Those familiar with Android would probably just start using it, but I’ve not had so much exposure to the platform
and was able to come to it with completely fresh eyes. Between Android 2.3 and HTC Sense 3, there’s a nice suite of “obvious” apps, and I didn’t have any difficulty synchronising my contacts, hooking
up my various email accounts, and so on. There are some really nice “smart” touches, like that the phone rings loudly if it thinks it’s in a bag or pocket, more quietly after you pick
it up, and silences the ringer completely if you pick it up from a table and flip it from face-up to face-down. These simple gestural touches are a really nice bit of user interface
design, and I appreciate the thought that’s gone into them.
Browsing movies for HD streaming on the HTC Sensation.
The Android Marketplace is reasonable, although I feel as though I’ve been spoiled. On the N900, if there was an application I needed, I usually already knew what it was and where I’d
find it: then I’d either apt-get it, or download the source and
compile it, right there on the device. For somebody who’s already perfectly confident at a *nix command-line, the N900 is fab, and it feels a little restrictive to have to
find equivalent apps in a closed-source environment. It’s not that the pricing is unreasonable – most of the applications I’ve wanted have been under a quid,
and all have been under £4 – it’s just that I know that there are FOSS alternatives that would have been easy to compile on my old device: I guess it’s just a transition.
On the other hand, the sheer volume of applications so-easily available as the Android Market is staggering. I’ve been filled with app ideas, but every idea I’ve had but one or
two already exist and are just waiting to be installed. It’s a little like being a kid in a candy store.
It’s also taking me quite some time to get used to the way that process management works on an Android device. On Android devices, like the iPhone/iPad, returning to the home screen
doesn’t (necessarily) close the application, but it might – that’s up to the developer. If it doesn’t, the application will probably be “paused” (unless it’s
a media player or it’s downloading or something, then it’ll likely keep going in the background). And when you re-launch the same application, it could be
simply unpausing, or perhaps it’s relaunching (in which case it may or may not restore its previous state, depending on the whim of the developer)… You see
all of the keywords there: might, probably, likely, could, perhaps. Great for most users, who don’t want to have to
think about what their phone is doing in the background, but it feels like a step backwards to me: I’m used to being able to ALT-TAB between
my currently-running applications, to know what’s running, when (and I can always use top and find out exactly what resources a process is eating). Putting all of this process management into the hands of
developers feels to me like giving up control of my device, and it’s a challenging change to undergo. Yes: despite the openness of the platform, Android feels just
a little out of my control compared to what I’m used to.
Hacker's Keyboard, my preferred keyboard layout for SSH, etc.
Switching from a physical to a virtual keyboard for the first time is a significant change, too, and it’s slowed me down quite a lot, although applications like SwiftKey X – with its incredibly intelligent personalised predictions – and Hacker’s Keyboard – which gives me back some of the keys I was “missing” – have helped to ease the
transition a lot.
In summary: the HTC Sensation seems to be a fantastic device, and I’m really enjoying using it. I’ve got a few niggles to contend with, but these are all things that were destined to
catch me out upon switching away from a platform as open as the N900, and they’re not severe enough to make me give up and get an N950 instead: I’m reasonably confident that I’ll come
to love the Sensation and we’ll go on to be very happy together.
But will it become my latest “best phone ever”? Time will tell, I guess.
On this day in 2003 I first juggled with flaming
clubs! But first, let’s back up to when I very first learned to juggle. One night, back in about 1998, I had a dream. And in that dream, I could juggle.
I’d always been a big believer in following my dreams, sometimes in a quite literal sense: once I dreamed that I’d been writing a Perl computer program to calculate the frequency pattern of consecutive months which
both have a Friday 13th in them. Upon waking, I quickly typed out what I could remember of the code, and it worked, so it turns out that I really can claim to be able to
program in my sleep.
In this case, though, I got up and tried to juggle… and couldn’t! So, in order that nobody could ever accuse me of not “following my dreams,” I opted to learn!
About three hours later, my mother received a phone call from me.
“Help!” I said, “I think I’m going to die of vitamin C poisoning! How much do I have to have before it becomes fatal?”
“What?” she asked, “What’s happened?”
“Well: you know how I’m a big believer in following my dreams.”
“Yeah,” she said, sighing.
“Well… I dreamed that I could juggle, so I’ve spent all morning trying to learn how to. But I’m not very good at it.”
“Okay… but what’s that got to do with vitamin C?”
“Well: I don’t own any juggling balls, so I tried to find something to use as a substitute. The only thing I could find was this sack of oranges.”
“I think I can see where you’re going wrong,” she said, sarcastically, “You’re supposed to juggle with your hands, Dan… not with your mouth.”
“I am juggling with my hands! Well; trying to, anyway. But I’m not very good. So I keep dropping the oranges. And after a few drops they start to rupture and burst, and I can’t
stand to waste them, so I eat them. I’ve eaten quite a lot of oranges, now, and I’m starting to feel sick.”
I wasn’t overdosing on vitamin C, it turns out – that takes a quite monumental dose; perhaps more than can be orally ingested in naturally-occuring forms – but was simply
suffering from indigestion brought on as a result of eating lots and lots of oranges, and bending over repeatedly to pick up dropped balls. My mother, who had herself learned to juggle
when she was young, was able to give me two valuable tips to get me started:
Balled-up thick socks make for great getting-started juggling balls. They bounce, don’t leak juice, and are of a sensible size (if a little light) for a beginning juggler.
Standing with your knees against the side of a bed means that you don’t have to bend over so far to pick up your balls when you inevitably drop them.
I became a perfectly competent juggler quite quickly, and made a pest of myself in many a supermarket, juggling the produce.
So: fast forward five years to 2003, when Kit, Claire, Paul, Bryn and I decided to have a fire on the beach, at Aberystwyth. We’d… acquired… a large solid
wooden desk and some pallets, and we set them up and ignited them and lounged around drinking beer. After a little while, a young couple came along: she was swinging flaming poi around, and he was juggling flaming clubs!
Fire poi! They look fantastic when they're flying around you; scary when they're flying towards you.
I asked if I could have a go with his flaming clubs. “Have you ever juggled flaming clubs before?” he asked. “I’ve never even juggled clubs before,” I
replied. He offered to extinguish them for me, first, but I insisted on the “full experience.” I’d learn faster if there existed the threat of excruciating pain every time I fucked up,
surely. Right?
Juggling clubs, it turns out, is a little harder than juggling balls. Flaming clubs, even more so, because you really can’t get away with touching the “wrong” end. Flaming
clubs at night, after a few drinks, is particularly foolhardy, because all you can see is the flaming end, and you have to work backwards in your mind to interpret
where the “catching end” of the stick must be, based on the movement of the burning bit. In short: I got a few minor singes.
But I went home that night with the fire still burning in my eyes, like a spark in my mind. I couldn’t stop talking about it: I’d been bitten by the flaming-clubs-bug.
Looking Forward
I ordered myself a set of flaming clubs as soon as I could
justify the cost, and, after a couple of unlit attempts in the street outside my house, took them to our next beach party a few days later. That’s when I learned what really makes flaming clubs dangerous: it’s not the bit that’s on fire, but the
aluminium rod that connects the wick to the handle. Touching the flaming wick; well – that’ll singe a little, but it won’t leave a burn so long as you pull away quickly. But after
they’ve been lit for a while – even if they’ve since been put out – touching the alumium pole will easily leave a nasty blister.
Me juggling flaming clubs at the barbecue I mentioned, in 2007. I almost look like I know what I'm doing. And more importantly, I feel like a badass.
Still: I learned quickly, and was still regularly flinging them around (and teaching others) at barbecues many years later.
Once, a Nightline training ended up being held at an unusual location, and the other trainers and I were
concerned that the trainees might not be able to find it. So we advertised on the email with the directions to the training room that trainees who can’t find it should “introduce
themselves to the man juggling fire outside the students union”, who would point them in the right direction: and so I stood there, throwing clubs around, looking for lost people all
morning. Which would have worked fine if it weren’t for the fact that I got an audience, and it became quite hard to discreetly pick out the Nightline trainees from the
students who were just being amused by my juggling antics.
Nowadays, I don’t find much time for juggling. I keep my balls to-hand (so to speak) and sometimes toss them about while I’m waiting for my computer to catch up with me, but it’s been a
long while since I got my clubs out and lit them up. Maybe I’ll find an excuse sometime soon.
This blog post is part of the On This Day series, in which Dan periodically looks back on years gone
by.
A few years ago, I talked about a pet hate of mine that still seems to be prevalent: that is – that when
people send me a screenshot, they’ll sometimes send me it in a Word document, for no apparent reason. They could just send me the picture, but instead they send me a Word
document containing the picture, thereby increasing the file size, requiring that I have a program capable of viewing Word documents, and making it more-complex for me to
extract the picture if I need to use it somewhere. And on top of all of that, it takes longer for them to do it this way: everybody loses!
Today, I saw somebody take the abuse of screenshots to a whole new level. My first clue that something was amiss was when the email arrived in my Inbox with a 300K TIFF file in it. “Well, at least it’s not a Word document,” I thought. And I was
right. It was something more convoluted than that.
My only explanation for the contents of the file is as follows:
Print Screen. The user took the screenshot using their Print Screen key. So far, so good. They captured their whole screen, rather than just what they were trying to
show me, but we’ll let that pass.
Open Paint. The user opened Paint. At this point, they could have pasted, saved, and emailed the file to me, and still been doing perfectly well. But they didn’t.
Resize canvas. The user expanded the canvas to an enormous size. Perhaps they didn’t know that this would be done automatically, if required. Or maybe they thought
that I could do with a lot of white space in which to make notes on their screengrab.
Paste and reposition. The user pasted the screenshot into the Paint document, and positioned it near the centre, making sure to leave as much whitespace as possible.
Y’know, in case I was running out of it on my computer. They could still at this point have just saved the file and emailed it to me, and I wouldn’t have complained.
Print Screen again. For some reason, the user pressed Print Screen again at this point, thereby taking a screenshot of themselves manipulating a screenshot that
they’d already taken. Maybe the user has recently watched Inception,
and decided that “a screenshot within a screenshot” was more likely to make an impact on me. We need to go deeper!
Open Photoshop. Paint obviously wasn’t going to cut it: it was time for a bigger graphics program. The user opened up Photoshop (waiting for a few minutes while this
beast of a program warmed up).
Create a new document and paste again. Now the user had Photoshop open, containing a picture of Paint being used to display an (oversized) screenshot of what they
wanted to show me.
Crop. This was a good idea. If the user had cropped the image all the way back down to the screenshot, I might not even have worked out what they were doing. Sadly,
they didn’t. They cropped off Paint’s title bar and half of its toolbar. Then they added another few layers of whitespace to the bottom and right, just to be really sure.
Save as a TIFF. They could have saved as a PNG. Or a GIF. Even a JPEG. They could have saved as a PSD. But no, for some reason, an uncompressed TIFF was the way
forwards.
I N C E P T I O N. A screenshot of a screenshot within a screenshot.
Back in 2009, I predicted that Windows Vista/7’s new “Snipping Tool”, which finally brought screen captures to the level of more-competent operating systems, would see the end of this
kind of nonsense. Unfortunately, Windows XP remains the standard at my workplace, so I doubt that this’ll be the last time that I see “matryoshka screenshots”.
Last week, we updated to the latest version of the CMS that powers the Bodleian‘s web site. During the process
of installing and testing the new version, we initiated a “content freeze”, disallowing the 100+ regular content editors access to the administration sections: any changes they’d have
made wouldn’t have been replicated in the new version, and we didn’t want a discrepancy in content while we were testing that the change had taken! We still had back-end access, of
course, and a few minor “emergency” changes were made (on both the old and the new version), but in general, the site was in a read-only mode for several days.
A similar thing happened to my head during this weekend’s house move.
While running a van-load of stuff from Old Earth to New Earth, Ruth, JTA and I stopped off at Argos to buy a few bits and pieces for
our new home. We parked in one of the few remaining parking spaces capable of accommodating our extended wheel-base van. Unfortunately this brushed us up very close to an
unfortunately-placed tree, whose branches reached in through the door as I clambered out. I spent a while trying to reposition them so as not to slam them in the door while Ruth and JTA
walked ahead, towards Argos, and so when I was done they were quite a way ahead. I turned and ran to catch up with them…
BAM! Something struck me on the top of my head. We’re still not all in agreement as to whether it was a branch or the wing mirror of the van, but it hurt like hell. My knees buckled up
and I collapsed into a heap.
Before long I was on my feet, but as I began to feel dizzy and nauseous, we started to worry that I might be concussed, and Ruth took me to the hospital. By then, I was unable to keep
my eyes open without feeling like the world was spinning and I was going to throw up, and I kept feeling like I was moments away from falling asleep.
By the time I’d seen a doctor, about three hours later, I was starting to feel a little better. We took a leaflet of “things to watch out for after a concussion”, which advised that I
shouldn’t lift any heavy things (“But I’m moving house today!”) nor use a computer or drink alcohol (“This is my life you’re talking about!”), all of which I ignored
to some degree or another.
I napped on and off for a lot of Sunday and some of Monday, but it was on Monday that the amount of damage I’d done became most apparent. I got out of bed and staggered downstairs to
find that Ruth and JTA had at some point bought a shoe rack. They weren’t around, but neither was the van, and I reasoned that they must have been out collecting more boxes, but I
thought I might as well make myself useful by assembling this shoe rack they’d gotten. It was of the variety that hangs on the back of a door, so I spent some time deciphering the
instructions and putting it together… only to find that it wouldn’t actually fit onto any of the (quite thick) doors in our new house.
That’s when Ruth & JTA arrived. “I saw you’d bought a shoe rack,” I said.
“Yes,” they replied, “We bought it yesterday. We told you about it.”
“Oh. I don’t remember that. Anyway, I built it, but it turns out that it won’t fit any of our doors.”
“Yes, we know: we told you that too. We were about to take it back to the shop.”
I have no recollection whatsoever of that conversation. Or several other conversations, it seems. In the hospital, I remember that Ruth talked to me for an hour or more (I
wasn’t capable of conversation myself, some of the time, but it was nice to hear a familiar voice), and I still can’t remember any of it except for snippets (something about her
father’s new house?).
For much of Sunday, my brain went into “content freeze”, too. A read-only mode where my memories worked fine, except that I couldn’t construct any new ones: everything just went in one
ear and out the other. Maybe this is to be expected: a quick look at some maps of brains and an examination of the bump on my head indicates that the blow came to a point squarely in
the centre of the middle frontal gyrus (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) of the right hemisphere of my brain: an area associated with
emotional self-control, social judgement, lateral thinking, and the transfer of working memory.
Still: it was certainly a strange experience to be told about events from only a day earlier that I simply can’t remember. It also made Tuesday interesting: long weekends are confusing
at the best of times, but parts of my memory made it feel like I’d had only a two-day weekend (as parts of Sunday are simply missing from my memory), and so it was even harder than
usual to shake the feeling that it was Monday when I arrived at work on Tuesday. That’ll be a pleasant surprise on Friday, anyway, when the weekend “comes early”: maybe I should bang my
head every time there’s a long weekend.
This week, I was reading the new EU legislation [PDF]
which relates to, among other things, the way that websites are allowed to use HTTP cookies (and similar technologies) to track their users. The Information Commissioner’s Office has released a statement to ask website owners to review
their processes in advance of the legislation coming into effect later this month, but for those of you who like the big-print edition with pictures, here’s the short of it:
From 26th May, a website must not give you a cookie unless it’s either (a) an essential (and implied) part of the functionality of the site, or (b) you have opted-in to it.
This is a stark change from the previous “so long as you allow opt-outs, it’s okay” thinking of earlier legislation, and large organisations (you know, like the one I now work for) in particular are having to sit up and pay attention: after all, they’re the
ones that people are going to try to sue.
The legislation is surprisingly woolly on some quite important questions. Like… who has liability for ensuring that a user has opted-in to third-party cookies (e.g. Google Analytics)?
Is this up to the web site owner or to the third party? What about when a site represents companies both in and outside the EU? And so on.
Hey! I didn't opt-in to any of these cookies, Mr. Information Commissioner!
…not what I was looking for: just more circular and woolly thinking. But I did find that the ICO themselves does not comply with the guidance that they themselves give. Upon
arriving at their site – and having never been asked for my consent – I quickly found myself issued with five different cookies (with lifespans of up to two years!). I checked their
privacy policy, and found a mention of the Google Analytics cookie they use, but no indication about the others (presumably they’re not only “opt-out”, but also “secret”). What gives,
guys?
Honestly: I’m tempted to assume that only this guy has the right approach. I’m all in favour of better
cookie law, but can’t we wait until after the technological side (in web browsers) is implemented before we have to fix all of our websites? Personally, I
thought that P3P policies (remember when those were all the rage?) had a
lot of potential, properly-implemented, because they genuinely put the power into the hands of the users. The specification wasn’t perfect, but if it had have been, we
wouldn’t be in the mess we are now. Perhaps it’s time to dig it up, fix it, and then somehow explain it to the politicians.
It’s World Backup Day, folks. That means it’s time for you to look at your data and check that you’re backing it
all up to a satisfactory level.
Have a look at the computer you’re sat at. If it’s hard drive(s) broke, irrecoverably, or if it were stolen: what would you lose?
Me? I like my backups to go “offsite”, so I use online redundant storage to shunt my important stuff to (I use a personal Amazon S3 bucket and some software I’ve written for that purpose, but you don’t have to be that geeky to use online backups – just check the
World Backup Day website for suggestions). If you’re not quite so paranoid as me, you might make your backups to CDs or DVDs, or onto a pendrive. It doesn’t take long, and it’s
worth it.
Backups are like insurance.
Now go celebrate World Backup Day by making some backups, or by checking that your existing backups restore correctly. You’re welcome.
If you see me in person, you’ll know that this is something I rant about from time to time. But that’s only because people consistently put themselves and their friends at risk,
needlessly, and sometimes those friends include me. So let me be abundantly clear:
If you’re reading this, there is at least a 95% chance that your passwords aren’t good enough. You should fix them.
Today.
Let’s talk about what what we mean by “good enough”. A good password needs to be:
Long. Some of you are still using passwords that are shorter than 8 characters. The length of a password is important because it reduces the risk of a robot “brute
forcing” it. Suppose a robot can guess 1000 passwords a second, and your password uses only single-case letters and numbers. If you have a 4-character password, it’ll be lucky to last
quarter of an hour. A 6-character password might last a week and a half. At 8-characters, it might last a few decades. Probably less, if your password makes one of the other mistakes,
below. And the robots used by crackers are getting faster and faster, so the longer, the better. My shortest password is around 12 characters long, these days.
Complex. Remember how long an 8-character password lasts against a “brute force” attack? If you’re only using single-case letters, you’re reducing that by almost a
third. Mix it up a bit! Use upper and lower case letters, and numbers, as standard. Consider using punctuation, too. There’s no legitimate reason for a website to demand
that you don’t have a long and complex password, so if one does seem to have unreasonable requirements: write to the owners and threaten to take your business elsewhere if they don’t
get with the times.
Random. If your password is, is based on, or contains a dictionary word (in any language), a name or brand name, a date, a number plate or (heaven forbid) a national
insurance number, it’s not good enough. “Brute force” attacks like those described above are usually the second line of attack against properly-stored passwords: first, a robot will
try every word, name or date that it can think of, with and without capitalisation and with numbers before and afterwards. Many will also try common phrases like “iloveyou” and
“letmein”. WikiHow has a great suggestion about how to make
“random” passwords that are easy to remember.
Unique. Here’s the one that people keep getting wrong, time and time again. You should never, never, use the same password for multiple different
services (and you should be very wary of using the same password for different accounts on the same service). This is because if a malicious hacker manages to get your
password for one site, they can now start breaking into your accounts on other sites. Some people try to get around this by keeping two or three “levels” of passwords, for low-,
medium-, and high-security uses. But even if a hacker gets access to all of your “low” security sites, that is (these days, frequently) still a huge amount of data they have
with which to commit an identity theft.The other big reason to make sure your passwords are unique is that it makes it safer to share them, if the need arises. Suppose that for some
reason you need to share a password with somebody else: it’s far safer for everybody involved if the password you share with them works only for the
service you wanted to give them access to. Every person you trust is one more person who might (accidentally) expose it to a hacker by writing it down.Even if you have to memorise a
complex “master” password and keep in your wallet a list of random “suffixes” that you append to this master password, different for each site, that’s a huge step
forwards. It’s also a very basic level of two-factor
authentication: to log in to your Twitter account, for example, you need your master password (which is in your head), plus the Twitter suffix to the password (which is
written down in your wallet).
There’s been a wave of attacks recently against users of social networking websites: an attacker will break into an insecure web forum to get people’s email addresses and password, and
then will try to log in to their webmail accounts and into social networking sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) using those same credentials. When they get a “hit”, they’ll explore the
identity of the victim, learning about their language patterns, who their friends are, and so on. Then they’ll send messages or start chats with their victim’s friends, claiming to be
their victim, and claim some kind of crisis. They’ll often ask to borrow money that needs to be wired to them promptly. And then they’ll disappear.
In this interconnected world, it’s important that your passwords are good not only for your benefit, but for your friends too. So if you’re guilty of any of the “password
crimes” above – if you have passwords that are short (under 8 characters), simple (don’t use a mixture of cases and include
numbers), predictable (using dictionary words, names, dates, etc.: even if they include a number), or re-used (used in more than one place or
for more than one site) – change your passwords today.
SuperGenPass – a very good way to use a strong, unique password for every website without having to remember multiple
passwords. Free.
KeePass – a great way to use a strong, unique password for every site and service without having to remember multiple passwords.
Free.
LastPass – another great way to use a strong, unique password for every site and service without having to remember multiple
passwords. Free (or cheap, for the premium version).
Microsoft recently tweeted: “It’s not
often that we encourage you to stop using one of our products, but for IE6, we’ll make an exception”. This coincides with the launch of The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown, a website that tries to encourage people to drop this hideously old and awful browser in favour of better, modern,
standards-compliant ones, thereby saving web developers heaps of work.
Internet Explorer 6 usage stats, from IE6 Countdown. I'm honestly shocked that the number is still as high as 12%. Where are they getting that from?
That’s not strictly true; they’re encouraging people to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8 and 9, presumably, which are still a little lacking in support for some modern web standards. But
they’re a huge step forward, and everybody who’d like to stick with Internet Explorer should be encouraged to upgrade. There’s no excuse for still using IE6.
They’re even providing a tool to let you put a “Upgrade now, damnit!” banner on your website,
visible only to IE6 users. It’s similar to the IE6Update tool, really, but has the benefit of actually
being supported by the browser manufacturer. That has to count for something.
Will it make a difference? I don’t know. I’m frankly appalled that there are modern, high-tech countries that still have significant numbers of IE6 users: Japan counts over
10%, for example! We’re talking here about a ten year old web browser: a web browser that’s older than MySpace, older than Facebook, older than GMail, older than YouTube.
Internet Explorer 6 was released into a world where Lord of the Rings that would take you a long time to read, rather than taking you a long time to watch. A world where in-car
CD players still weren’t universal, and MP3 players were a rarity. Do you remember MiniDisc players? Internet Explorer 6 does. The World Trade Center? Those towers were still standing
when Internet Explorer was released to the world. And if that’s making you think that 10 years is a long time, remember that in the fast-changing world of technology, it’s always even
longer.
Just remember what Microsoft (now, at long last) says: Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6.
