Lawyers, Get a Life

November 27th, 2004 • Rants

The Court simply wants to scream to these lawyers, “Get a life” or “Do you have any other cases?” or “When is the last time you registered for anger management classes?”

Can’t wait to hear that on software patents, I mean for God’s sake, IS NOT Operator?!! Don’t these people feel ashamed of themselves by calling it an “Invention”?! Get a Life!

OOoFf!

November 24th, 2004 • Rants

It’s about time somebody gets really serious about bringing open-source to the desktop. Today! You, yes YOU, can buy a stuffed-and-packed CDROM featuring the one and only Microsoft Office rival, OpenOffice.org. Together with IE-killer Mozilla Firefox, they are, the incredible, the invincible, the OOoFf! Available EXCLUSIVELY through our retail channels for only $49.95 $29.95. Can you believe it?! What are you waiting for? Go grab yourself a brand new licensed copy of OOoFf!

Note: The author is NOT responsible for any injuries caused to poor misguided souls, geeks who bang their head against the wall, or linguists who fail to pronounce and/or properly capitalize OOoFf.

RSS, Browsing and Email

November 20th, 2004 • Rants

I just can’t understand why Firefox team decided to stuff RSS feeds in bookmarks folder. Is it because it’s easier to find there? Is it to blend the news reading experience with browsing? Or is it just because it looks cooler? I tried to like it, but to no avail; news just aren’t bookmarks, period.

For some reason, developers are confused, they don’t know whether news belongs to browsing or to email, although “regular” news aggregators seem to work (and sell) just fine.

Opera tries to be a bit more sophisticated, since it’s not just a browser, but a full package stuffed with an email client, RSS reader, IRC chat, and whole lot more. To some extent, RSS integrates nicely with both browsing and email. When Opera discovers an RSS feed it displays an icon, but you add the subscription to the mail client. Not the best work I saw, but still works.

For Firefox fans out there. Yes, I’m aware of Sage and Aggreg8. But for God’s sake, have you tried using a real news reader? Sage still gets confused once in a while by “Live” bookmarks, it doesn’t really know whether to treat them like a file or a folder, it downloads a site’s feed everytime its title is clicked! Weren’t we trying to solve RSS consumption issues earlier? Because that’s not the way a well-behaved aggregator works.

For now, I think I’m going to stick with stand-alone aggregators, and read my news my way.

Sinful Browsing

October 28th, 2004 • 3 comments Rants

So now standard-compliant browsers are sinners?! What happened to all the talks?!

A while ago there was a long debate about whether to be strict or loose when it comes to invalid markup, both camps had their points, and the problem is there is no right or wrong here, it’s all relative. Strict parsers have their advantage, namely making developers play by the rules, obey the standards, and make life easier. The catch? The user gets it, if a parser finds invalid markup that it won’t display, then it’s absolutely useless to the user. Users (oh great users) don’t care what the word markup means, what a parser is, or what’s with all the W3C hype; they expect results, and results they should get.

So does this leave us with loose parsers? After all, they deliver results too. But we’ve seen how Microsoft’s IE let all site-hell break loose, developers and designers started depending on IE being too forgiving, and now browsers like Opera and Mozilla bust their butts off in trying to understand the crappy markup of most IE-dependent site. Do we want that to happen all over again?!

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To Virus Writers

July 28th, 2004 • Rants

For the love of God, you can attack Microsoft, you can attack evil cracking sites, heck you can attack the UN, but you do NOT attack Google!!!

Sadly, Google was attacked yesterday by a MyDoom variant, it was down for a while, and when Google’s down, the Internet’s down. Even to non-geeks, Google’s almost the ultimate search engine, not because it gives a lot of results, but because it’s results are relevant. Some people don’t even know what searching is, they know “googling”, slashdotters misspell Yahoo, they have a hard time grasping a foreign concept like “Other” search engines, some think if Google goes down, it’s the end of the world as we know it.

So please, just don’t mess around with sensitive stuff, Google’s not a game you play, next time it won’t be down, and you might be banned forever from searching for “DoS Attack HOWTO” tutorials.