Archive for the ‘Linklog’ Category

“mainstream, WiFi, mobile platform”

Ah, Apple does get it. Thank the heavens.

Better late than never, IE 8 passes ACID2

Your guess is as good as mine as to when this will see the light of day and hit real users’ machines, but it’s a positive step nonetheless. Everything I said in my open letter to Microsoft holds true until we have the goods: let’s just hope the path suggested is the one they take. If IE 8 is as lackluster as IE 7, I daren’t imagine what the web development community will say in response; I doubt it’ll be repeatable in mainstream news.

Microsoft needs to do more like this, and far more than this. More “look, we’re producing something that doesn’t suck”, but they need to start pushing nightlies out there or something. Microsoft bloggers have told us about their build infrastructure, so we know it’s (technically) feasible. So, how about it, Microsofties? Finally, you guys are learning that supporting the Web is an awful lot harder than supporting corporate setups, especially when you’ve abused a monopoly to make yourselves dominant. I’m sure plenty of people at Microsoft would retch at the suggestion of automated public nightly builds, but it might actually prevent the IE team’s reputation from being torn to shreds in the end. Keep the builds coming, and slow and steady progress is fine. Go all quiet on us and we’ll assume that (a) you’re not doing anything worth telling us about, and (b) you don’t care what your customers think.

Go on, do it. The (web development) world will give you a big fat “thank you”.

Correo - a new mail client for for OS X

This could very well be the single most promising Mac application to come from the Mozilla family—it blends Camino’s superior (as compared to Firefox) OS integration with Thunderbird’s e-mail engine, to produce an e-mail client for the Mac that both doesn’t suck, and feels like it was written for the Mac.

It’s currently at version 0.3, with Keychain and Address Book integration in there already. I imagine it’ll be a long while before they reach 1.0, with both the stability and levels of integration that entails, but when they do it should be worth it. Mail.app and Thunderbird would do well to learn a lot from each other (Mail.app has a superior interface, whilst Thunderbird seems to have the edge in technical terms—especially when it comes to IMAP), and Correo will hopefully result in the best of both worlds.

Bill Thompson, professional moron, on the recent Mac trojan

Failing to have anything actually concrete to say that will help his cause, he resorts to outright lies and scaremongering. Bear in mind that this trojan is distributed solely on porn sites, and that most popular ordinary video sites consumption are all Flash-based. Also bear in mind that there isn’t actually a flaw in OS X that allows this to happen: Mac OS X actually does a lot better than Windows in this respect. There’s no deluge of ActiveX dialogs which convince people to press “OK”, it’s a normal download link to a normal disk image with an (almost) normal installer that prompts for your administrator credentials. The snag is that the installer lies about what it’s installing—and Mac OS X has no way to know that’s the case.

Bill writes:

This one spreads through online video sites, taking advantage of the fact that there are many different ways to display video, each requiring slightly different software to encode and decode moving images.

That puts my son right in the middle of the vulnerable population because he likes to watch video clips via sites like YouTube and Flixster.

So essentially, it’s the trojan Bill’s worried about here, not his son’s surfing of porn sites. Glossing over this fact (the BBC wouldn’t like that to come out on its site, after all), he continues:

Click “ok” and enter your systems adminstrator’s password and it will be installed on your computer with full system access after which you are, to use the jargon, “pwned”, or scuppered.

Missing a few vital steps (mounting the disk image, running the installer) to make it sound like it’s an almost automated installation, he also manages to mention the fact you have to enter the system administrator’s password without dwelling on it for even a split-second. If he’s so concerned for his son’s welfare, why is his son the administrator? On the other hand, if his son’s big and ugly enough to look after himself, then he’s got nothing to write about in the first place.

This is “journalism” at its lowest, and I’m pretty sure this isn’t the first time I’ve said that about Thompson. Why does he still have that job, exactly?

STIX Fonts

The STIX beta is out: a comprehensive set of OpenType fonts designed for scientific publications.

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