yamahito

less than a month after Microsoft announced Silverlight, an open source linux variant, Moonlight has been announced.

Miguel de Icaza, part of the team who wrote Mono (the linux framework equivalent of .net) announced it earlier on his blog.

I think this is a good thing for Microsoft. Not only will it give market penetration, it will force them to keep a good pace with features and implementation. Whether they see it the same way, I don’t know

you think being the Cop/Janitor/Sewer Worker of the tech revolution is some kind of glamor job?

Don’t get me wrong. I love IT. I love building systems and infrastructures that make the job easier, or better, or both. I get excited by the idea of being involved in innovation. But I’m sick of my job. Why?

Well, reading John C Welch’s post (quoted above) gives you a clue.
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I’ve been looking at changing how I view RSS. Instead, I’ve found a way to integrate my web presence.

At the moment, I use my IM client to also read my RSS feeds. With friends’ blogs, news sites (topical and technical), technical interest groups and forums, there’s quite a few posts bubbling under, and it slows the IM client down a lot. Plus it’s a bit of a pain synchronising feeds at home and at work (OPML files would make it a little easier).

At the same time, there are things I haven’t yet started using RSS for: sites like flickr (and if they ever add syndication, facebook) take up too much of my time to go and read individually.

So, having noticed that iGoogle (google homepages was a better name) would give me better access to some of these features plus my under-used google calender, I decided that perhaps I should have another go at configuring it. Naturally, that let me to google reader.

I’m a fan of gmail, so I can see the interface for skim-reading posts very advantageous, but it doesn’t end there: by aggregating and sharing threads I can collate my activity across those various sites into a single handy feed.
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Someone’s written a Magic Eye Tetris game…

I don’t have the problems seeing it that some people are reporting, but the control keys are a pain: I found that the numeric keypad (non num-lock) 8 would rotate, and the ‘normal’ non-keypad 4 and 6 would move left and right respectively.

Awkward to play, but still neat.

How useful are most glossaries in Technical Manuals?

I’ve got a manual here on Open Directory Administration. It’s not the simplest thing in the world to do: you’d expect someone implementing any sort of LDAP or domain to be a relatively experienced system admin. As a techie who’s never administered a domain before, there’s a fair amount of learning curve for me (especially when you consider that what I’m actually trying to do is extend my university’s Novell eDirectory for a suite of macs that will benefit from the extra management capabilities of OS X Server).

So I think it’s kind of funny when the glossary is full of terms like:

• FTP File Transfer Protocol…
• Administrator A user with server or directory domain administration privileges…
• group A collection of users…
• IP Address …!

You might not expect the man on the street to know what those sorts of terms mean, but the idea of someone expecting to be able to set up directory services not knowing them is… well, silly at best and scary at worst. Plus, the definition for ‘administrator’ relies on the use of the noun administration: in other words, it’s recursion rather than definition.

I had to lose four pages for the thermal binding machine to cope with the manual. I don’t think I’ll miss the glossary.

Just to prove Microsoft can still do some things better.

Does anyone know if there’s any reason why font rendering would be different on different platforms?

–Edit–

Codinghorror seems to be slashdotted or otherwise down. Here’s a graphic from the original post which shows what we’re talking about: the top line is safari, the bottom line is IE with ClearType.

I need help for an idea for the first picture on the Cardiff Photomarathon I talked about back in April

Looking at the gallery the first picture has traditionally been the entry number - mine is 153.

My first idea was a couple of guys in rugby shirts, shot from the back, with the numbers ‘15′ and ‘3′ on it. Nice tie-in to cardiff, with the Millenium Stadium and all. Except that no-one will admit to owning a numbered shirt.

I did think about setting an analogue clock to seven minutes to two, but I thought that the chances were a) it’s probably been done (almost but not quite in this picture) and b) it’s a bit too obscure to stand out much.

Doing the same thing on a digital clock is almost certainly the most unoriginal thing in the entire world since some cleverdick first made a hyperbolic comparison for effect.

So does anyone have any suggestions?

Cool Earth is a new charity aiming at preserving the rainforest by selling it - to you and me.

An Acre is going for around £70-£100.

Interesting - I’m often banging on about wishing to reduce my carbon footprint - I wonder how much that would reduce it by? Nothing at all? A fixed ‘one off’ amount? Or something I can continue to count year by year? Either way, a good idea.

More from an article at The Register or at the Cool Earth Website.

OpenID is an open decentralized framework for identity management. In other words, it’s a scheme for a single sign on username and password that any website can use.

It’s an interesting idea. I like the idea of it, the thought of having a single definitive presence online. However, I can think of many more reservations:

Security is an obvious one. The most secure safe system in the world is still potentially useless if the human being at one end is willing to share their credentials (e.g. their password) willy nilly. I’ve seen too many office workers who stick their system password to their monitor on a post-it note, let alone the hoards who seem content to swap their passwords for chocolate. And even IT Professionals aren’t immune from being tricked into giving their passwords. In fact, according to some beer-mat statistics, they might even be worse. If one password is all you need to access many resources, the potential damage when/if that password is compromised is that much higher.

Privacy is another issue. If log-ins are unique on a per-site basis, it’s harder for a profiler to collect information from multiple sources and tie them to an individual. If you know that individual has the same identity on multiple sites, collecting that information becomes trivial. Privacy is a funny one, though, because that ability to link data across different contexts is potentially a powerfully useful one in terms of user enablement.

There are pragmatic issues to consider as well: in order for such a system to be a success, it has to be popular and widely implemented. This requires some big companies to overlook significant corporate advantages in having their own authentication data. It might be somewhat naive to hope this will happen without some considerable advantages to reward them for doing so.

I’m sure commenters can think of several others; despite that all, though, I’m still cautiously liking the idea: I can’t help it, I’m a romantic fool cursed with cynicism.