The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. I’d never have had the ability to run whatever stupid, potentially harmful, hugely educational programs I could download or write. I wouldn’t have been able to fire up ResEdit and edit out the Mac startup sound so I could tinker on the computer at all hours without waking my parents. The iPad may be a boon to traditional eduction, insofar as it allows for multimedia textbooks and such, but in its current form, it’s a detriment to the sort of hacker culture that has propelled the digital economy.

Perhaps the iPad signals an end to the “hacker era” of digital history. Now that consumers and traditional media understand the digital world, maybe there’s proportionally less need for freewheeling technological experimentation and platforms that allow for the same. Maybe the hypothetical mom doesn’t need a real computer. As long as real computers stick around for people who do need them, maybe there’s no harm in that.

Wherever we stand in digital history, the iPad leaves me with the feeling that Apple’s interests and values going forward are deeply divergent from my own. There’s nothing wrong with that; people make consumer decisions every day based on their values. If I don’t like the product that the iPad turns out to be once released, I’m free to simply not buy it. These things have a way of evolving, and I won’t preclude the possibility that Apple eventually addresses concerns about the openness of the device.

For now, though, I remain disturbed. The future of personal computing that the iPad shows us is both seductive and dystopian. It’s not a future I want to bring into my home.

Source: http://al3x.net/2010/01/28/ipad.html

This quote (emphasizes are mine), perfectly reflects my concerns with regards to computing, but also our society in general, and the closed, proprietary direction some companies and people want to take us into. I belief that this direction will turn out to be a dead-end street and I hope we can prevent this from happening before causing it too much harm. This also highlights my arguments in favor of: sharing, openness, free software, accessibility and the right to play, destroy(mostly accidentally, sorry), create, tinker and experiment. In my humble opinion that is the only way to learn, innovate and work towards new, sustainable ways of living on this planet.

[...]Will only output the date if the current post’s date is different from the
previous one output.

Source: the_date() function in the Wordpress source code.

WTF! Why on earth is this function only returning a date when the post date differs from the previous one and does nothing if the two are equal. I don’t get this. I guess I’m going to supply a bugreport and a patch.

Ongelooflijk, dat men nog steeds dezelfde fout maakt en geen reactie geeft. Wie o wie kan deze mensen de link doorsturen van dit bericht en even uitleggen dat er agenda’s bestaan buiten de gesloten (geen free of open source software dus, waar deze beurs zich blijkbaar op zou richten!?) software Microsoft Outlook (welke niet eens draait op Linux, zucht).

VNU Exhibitions wellicht is het tijd om de communicatie strategie nog eens nader onder de loep te nemen?

For those of you whose Dutch is kinda rusty a quick summary in English
This is the third time (post 1, post 2) I posted about Linux World Netherlands endorsing Microsoft Outlook in their mailings. There are more types of agenda’s than just Outlook, really! Please somebody explain to the corporate robots at VNU Exhibitions that this is rather embarrassing and quite honestly I’m offended by the product placement of closed source software in a mailing directed at free, open source software professionals and companies. This results in me avoiding Linux World like the plague, which of course might be the hidden agenda of the organizers. In that case, do not worry usually I’m not interested in armies of sales zombies in suits talking jargon which they do not grasp nor share an interest in.

ps: This is the first time I translate my issue with Linux World Netherlands into English, so my friends and fellow free, open source software professionals outside of the Netherlands may take note of this. I’m curious as of what the situation is in other countries with regards to Linux World?

(bron illustratie: nicolasnova gelicenseerd onder cc-by op Flickr)

Beste KPN Hotspot / Horeca van Nederland

Internet in een cafe is hartstikke handig. Tenminste als het werkt. Voorheen had ik weinig problemen met KPN hotspots of wifi in een cafe, maar tegenwoordig is het eerder regel dan uitzondering dat de verbinding er om de haverklap uit valt. Niet heel handig als je ruim 3 uur tussen je afspraken hebt zitten en je even wat werk wilt (=moet) verzetten. Helaas heb ik daar veelal Internet bij nodig. Hierbij dus een verzoekje aan zowel KPN Hotspot alsmede de horeca bedrijven in Nederland om de internet verbindingen te verbeteren. Zorgen jullie voor goede Internet verbindingen en koffie dan kom ik graag langs. Lekkere vegatarische broodjes of soep zijn een pre, want dan lunch ik graag ook nog even bij jullie. Jullie blij, ik blij!

Met vriendelijke groet,
Bjorn Wijers

ps: Ik maak ook gebruik van mijn telefoon icm laptop voor Internet, maar dat is zo traag dat ik bijna zelf de modemgeluidjes wil gaan maken tijdens het wachten op verbinding. Dat is dus echt een nood oplossing.

RiP: A remix manifesto is a documentary film about copyright and remix culture.

So I went to their download website and went looking for a dowload option. Instead I got this message:

I interpreted this message as: the people inside the gated community may download a documentary on remixing and download culture and for those outside you may jump through some more hoops before you will be able to watch the same film streaming. As you might understand I am confused and even insulted by this difference in treatment. Why treat your audience outside (in this case the US) differently from those inside the US? Especially when the subject of the documentary is about remix and download culture. A global culture. Not just a North-American culture. What are the arguments that support this difference in treatment?

Update: Huh? Found this snippet in Brett Gaylor’s bio on the ‘global’ website, which makes the difference in treatment of the audience even weirder:

He is also the web producer of the Homeless Nation.org, a web project dedicated to bridging the digital divide – allowing everyone to participate in online culture.

(emphasis is mine)

Update2: You can find the documentary also here in case you’re not willing to be treated differently from our North-American friends. Yes, controlling downloads based on geography is a failure.

Update3: Brett Gaylor (as far as I can tell it is genuine) responded in the comments and I have responded on his comment.

Update4: Brett’s email bounched. Brett, if you’re reading this I tried to email you at your first name at opensourcecinema dot org and it did not work.

A word dreaded by every programmer including myself. In order to solve problems there needs to be a pattern. Something like: “press the red button and the screen goes blank”. Without the ability to reproduce a problem it is really hard to solve the problem or confirm that the actions you took to solve it were indeed the (right) solution and not some fluke.

In this case a user visited the website and got access to it, or the user visited the site and got an arcane error message:

“Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://<Web site>.com. Operation aborted.”

I never saw this message before and after some testing we could confirm it only happened with Microsoft Internet Explorer. There were no problems with any other browser, but somehow Internet Explorer sometimes spat out this utterly useless error message and prevented the user to visit the client’s website.Together with some engineers from the hosting company I sat out to find and solve this issue. So we started to have a look at the web server’s  log files.

At first the engineer from the hosting company suspected it might have something to do with some HTTP 500 error codes, missing images (so you would expect HTTP 404 errors) and some rewrite rules. According to his first thesis this combination might have caused a redirection loop and Internet Explorer could not cope with it. After quickly fixing the missing images (a typo in a path) we could dismiss this thesis and we continued our quest. Luckily a colleague of one of the engineers remembered a similar issue creeping up with a different client of them and pointed us in the right direction. A quick search (note to self don’t try to be smart, first search for the error message on the Net, then analyze logfiles) later gave use quite a lot of links pointing towards Microsoft.

Apparently Microsoft’s engineers think that its a good idea to confront a user of their browser with an arcane error message and prevent the user from accessing the website when the visited website in question does something less smart (maybe even stupid). While any other browser would at least try to let the user access the website and cope with the issue. I wonder where the Interaction Design people were during this decision.

No, I’m not making this up. Microsoft states in the knowledgebase article on this issue: “This behavior is by design.” What are the arguments for doing it this way? Interestingly in the same article they claim:

How do I fix this problem?
The easiest way for you to fix the problem is to upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. This problem no longer occurs in Internet Explorer 8.

So the behavior is by design, yet they advice you to solve it by upgrading your browser. Interesting, to say the least.

Anyway, after reading the article and doing some more debugging (which is a lot more painful then it ever should be using Internet Explorer) I found the culprit to be a piece of JavaScript (swfobject.js in this case) trying to access an element before the parser was ready. A bug and certainly something we needed to fix, but Microsoft did you really have to abort loading the webpage and preven the user from accessing it? Why can all the other browsers cope with this and still allow the user to visit the website? Would it have hurt to show a less obtrusive error message in the status bar?

For those having similar issues please see these urls for more info:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/927917/
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2008/04/23/what-happened-to-operation-aborted.aspx

‘Wilt u de beurs niet missen? Blok de beursdata alvast in uw Outlook-agenda’

Nu brak mijn klomp. Waar ik de vorige uitnodiging nog hoopte dat het door een tikfoutje was misgegaan krijg ik nu de indruk dat de organisatie eigenlijk geen flauw benul heeft wat Linux, open source / free software inhoudt. Het is toch erg vreemd om een applicatie naam te koppelen aan een algemeen bekend gegeven als een agenda. Waarom Microsoft Outlook applicatie koppelen aan agenda? Denkt de organisatie soms dat er geen andere agenda’s zijn? Mag ik het niet noteren in Thunderbird-Lightning? Of in mijn papieren agenda?

Deze vorm van sluikreclame voor propriëtaire software schoot in ieder geval bij mij in het verkeerde keelgat en inmiddels heb ik onderstaande email verzonden aan de organisatie:

Geachte meneer/mevrouw,

Hoe kan ik nu een beurs over Linux en dus over open-source en free software serieus nemen als de organisatie van deze beurs deze tip geeft:

‘Tip: Wilt u de beurs niet missen? Blok de beursdata alvast in uw Outlook-agenda.’

Mocht het u niet zijn opgevallen dan wil ik u er graag op wijzen dat Microsoft Outlook geen open source of free software is. Wellicht was het een beter idee geweest deze tip als volgt te omschrijven zonder daarbij sluik reclame te maken voor propriëtaire software:

‘Wilt u de beurs niet missen? Blok de beursdata alvast in uw agenda’

Ik vind het nogal vreemd om de naam van een applicatie zoals Microsoft’s Outlook te koppelen aan algemeen gegeven als een agenda. Waarom Microsoft Outlook? Denkt u als organisatie soms dat er geen andere agenda’s zijn? Mag ik het niet noteren in Thunderbird-Lightning? Of in mijn papieren agenda?

Ik ben erg benieuwd naar uw reactie hierop. Deze email is ook gepubliceerd op: http://www.burobjorn.nl/blog/?p=405

Een eventuele reactie zal ik daar eveneens publiceren.

ps: Dit is ook niet de eerste keer dat ik een uitnodiging van u ontvang met deze vreemde ‘tip’ (zie http://www.burobjorn.nl/blog/?p=394). Toen hoopte ik stiekem nog op een typefoutje, nu neem ik u en deze beurs op het gebied van Linux en open-source simpelweg niet meer serieus.

Afgezien van een reactie op deze email wens ik geen verdere mailings meer van u te ontvangen. Ik wil dat u mij verwijdert uit uw bestand.

Met vriendelijke groet,
Bjorn Wijers

Ik ben benieuwd of ik een antwoord krijg en wat het antwoord zal zijn…

Hoe serieus kun je een conferentie met de naam LinuxWorld nemen als in de uitnodiging de tip staat:

Wilt u de beurs niet missen? Blok de beursdata alvast in uw Outlook agenda.

Ik schreef al eens eerder niet zo positief over LinuxWorld. Zonde dat een evenement met deze naam mijns inziens meer fout dan goed doet.

Since its kinda hard to know which of the myriad of distributed revision control systems (DVCS) complies with my demands I’ll start using some of the ones that looked most promising.  The features I’m looking for are:

• can handle binary files efficiently (I need images and other binary files in a repository as well)
• is cross-platform (I do not want to be tied to one platform, nor do I want to force other to use my preferred platform)
• ease of use (yep that’s a feature in my book)
• tools (it needs to be extensible preferable in a language I already know)
• documentation (also a feature in my opinion)
• off-line usage is just as good as on-line usage
• has community and support options available

I’ll be checking out Mercurial (I hope to contribute to this project for my Neuro OSD and learn a bit of Lua), Bazaar (also checking it out with a small project) and maybe I should have a look at Git.

Off course, the DVCS of my chosing needs to be FLOSS.

Any hints and tips are appreciated!

update: Slashdot is also wondering about the horrible state of Flash on Linux. Is it a strategy from Adobe?