Beta Living by Chris Duckett
Living on the fringes of the software world is an exercise in character building - when you compile your entire system or think that GIMP is a useful image editing tool, it's best to have a sense of humour. Chris Duckett tries to maintain his as he dives into the darkened depths of 'mainstream-be-damned' software development.
Aug 27
Safari gets Gears
Google's Gears product has expanded its reach to the Safari browser. It's the bit on the end of the user string that's the interesting part. Gears in Safari is go!The announcement was made in a post to the Gears user group, with the warning that the software is likely to be buggy and most definitely is beta in nature. Since its release in May last year, Gears has supported only Internet Explorer [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: offline, internet explorer, opera, gears, safari, firefox, google
Aug 25
Going the extra step but not the extra mile
I've always been a big fan of going the extra mile with error messages, it's a good way to show that you actually care about the product to take the time to customise it even when things are amiss -- and yes, things will go wrong, you will not create the perfect application. The most recognised example would be the custom 404s that appear all over the Web. A good 404 can impress the user and take [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 5 comments
Tags: photosynth, errors, 404, customisation, mac, microsoft, linux
Jul 07
LCA09 Calls, OpenMoko and a little Gentoo
Here is a little weekend roundup of Linux related news that may have slipped under your radar. Tuz -- yet another great mascot(Credit: marchsouth.org)It's scary to think that the next Linux.conf.au is only six months away, but that is the case and the call for papers as being put out. If you've got an amazing linux or open source talk you are dying to get out then give it a go. There's also the [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Jun 19
Miss out on Google Developer Day? Fear not.
Yesterday in Sydney, Google Developer Day took place in the lovely surrounds of Wharf 8. But if you couldn't make it to the passenger terminal cum conference centre with the high scary fences, then fear not. A great majority (and then some) of the content covered yesterday can be found in the video and slides from Google I/O. Builder AU's coverage of the event will appear shortly, but in the [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: sydney, conference, google
Jun 04
WebKit's SquirrelFish canes Tamarin
The next generation of Javascript interpreter for WebKit, called SquirrelFish, has been announced and is already beating the competition from Mozilla and Adobe's Tamarin project.The SquirrelFish mascot, so that's what one looks like Graphs from Charles Ying's blog show SquirrelFish beating a vanilla Tamarin implementation by 1.9 times. In the official announcement of SquirrelFish is a graph [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: javascript, mozilla, adobe
May 28
Google decides to dominate javascript libraries
With each passing day Google begins to look more and more like a Trapper Keeper. The latest move for the Web behemoth is to store commonly used javascript libraries with Google AJAX Libraries API. The premise is that many sites serve the same common javascript libraries -- prototype, jQuery, MooTools, script.aculo.us and dojo -- and performance would increase if these libraries were served from [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
May 27
Confessions of an accessibility sadist
Inside my emerge.log lie some fateful lines that changed the way I interacted with my user interface: 1199579150: >>> emerge (3 of 15) x11-drivers/xf86-input-evdev-1.2.0 to /Innocuous enough on its own to most people -- but that Sunday morning emerge would remove the horizontal axis from my mouse. It's hard to believe that I managed to use my Gentoo box at all, let alone for five months! (I was not [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Tags: mouse, keyboard, accessibility, gentoo, google
May 22
Sending the Inbox into receivership
If you've got an e-mail inbox with thousands of e-mails just sitting there, chances are you are living inside your inbox and that you are a slave to mail notifications. To overcome this problem and get on top of your e-mail rather than vice versa, here are a couple of techniques. The first and most drastic is to declare e-mail bankruptcy. Delete everything, make a clean break with the past and [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: inbox, organisation, e-mail, junk, overload
May 14
Assumption-based Hacking 101
High-level thinking leads to assumptions, and assumptions are the mother of all mistakes -- consequently the best place to find a security hole is in a place where the programmer has made an incorrect assumption. Such a case came across my desk yesterday, one bad assumption has led to a site that has more holes than a cheese grater. The programmer obviously assumed that any authentication would [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: mistakes, assumption, hacking, internet, security
May 12
Google Developer Day yet to fill
Past experience would suggest that if Google restricts access then people will clamour for it -- remember GMail invites back in the day? It is therefore surprising that places for Google's Sydney Developer Day have not been snapped up. Under 150 places remain for the one-day conference featuring Google's full arsenal of developer APIs -- OpenSocial, Android, Maps, YouTube, Gears -- which takes [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: alan noble, maps, conference, google
Apr 09
Quick Tip: Forwarding X11 to OS X
Every now and then I feel the need to spark up an application from my Linux machine and view it on my Mac laptop. The process is quite simple -- I just always forget it and end up trawling through search results for it. Prerequisites:X11 for Mac -- this package provides an X server for the Mac, while not completely integrated into the desktop it's "good enough".1 Linux box with an X server installedFirst [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Apr 09
AppEngine: Google's Python boost
Google announced its AppEngine yesterday and I just had to take a look. My initial impressions for this service are that it is going to be very good for rapid prototyping and creating toy applications. Paying for storage and IP space is something I do not do as I cannot be bothered to find a decent deal nor can I justify the cost for ideas that I find interesting for only a day or two. AppEngine [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Apr 01
Idiot Watch link of the day
It's April Fools again, that means thanks to time differences that we have two days to disregard what appears to be big news stories. One of the traditional homes of the well thought April Fools joke is Google. This year they've locally released a technology called "gDay with MATE" that can bring you search results from the future. Not a bad joke, and here is the page that tells you the truth. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: april fools, mate, google
Mar 28
Daylight saving changes are standard procedure
Stop the presses and inform the emergency agencies, the eastern state governments have extended daylight savings and there is nothing we or Microsoft can do about it. Duck and Cover! Sensationalist hacks are calling this a mini-Y2K -- they are more correct than they realise. Once again nothing will happen and life will continue, your calendaring will not implode and civilisation will continue. What [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Mar 18
Schmidt happens in Sydney
The scene was set: harbour views from the Sydney Opera House and Eric Schmidt , the Chairman and CEO of Google, was about to front the throng of media assembled. What could Google possibly be announcing that would warrant the attention of the CEO? Perth public transit timetabling coming to Google Transit, a partnership with Optus, and a movement of Google's Australian headquarters turned out [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Mar 07
IE8 tripping on Acid2
Here's how it's gone down: first, the IE8 team announced that the browser would pass the Acid2 test; then came the caveat that it would do so only if a new meta tag was inserted into pages; then it did pass the Acid2 test by default; and now comes the revelation that IE8 will not pass the Acid2 test by default. I seem to remember IE8 beta 1 passing the Acid2 test ( Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Tags: internet explorer, ie8, acid2, bugs
Feb 21
Do Vista users come from XP?
The old wives tale goes that most people in the "real world" will buy every second version of Windows. The theory being that those who used Windows 98 moved to Vista. Presumably leaving Windows 95 users to move to Windows ME? I have no idea how this is meant to work when there were two branches of the Windows line of 9x and NT. Using this idea as a basis, leads us the conclusion that people [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: windows xp, windows 2000, windows nt, windows vista, windows, vista
Feb 06
The typical Linux conference geezer
As an optional part of LCA registration this year, delegates were asked to pick their distribution, shell and editor of choice. This information was then printed on the badge, presumably to either avoid or facilitate flame wars. Here are this year's stats: Distro Ubuntu -- 254 Debian -- 156 Fedora -- 59 Gentoo -- 50 No doubt about the popularity of Ubuntu nowadays. It is interesting [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: distributions, debian, emacs, bash, lca2008, ubuntu, gentoo, linux
Feb 04
Linux lovefest wraps up in Melbourne and flies south
As the Linux.conf.au 2008 wrapped up in Melbourne last week it was time to reflect on the highlights of the last few days. What was hot and what was not? Hot: |>Anthony Baxter of Google gave the Friday keynote on the upcoming 3.0 release of Python. There was little new knowledge in there for people that have been keeping tabs on Python, but good showmanship can still be entertaining and the talk [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Jan 31
Melbourne clichés: Things of stone and code
It's fair to say that the weather in Melbourne has changed as often as speaker's laptops have failed -- and I'd expect nothing less. The highlight of today was the chat that we had with Linus Torvalds. Torvalds said that the "Linus does not scale" problems were a thing of the past but that there maybe a problem with Andrew Morton not scaling. Other topics covered were Linux's increasing focus [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Tags: melbourne, soc, lca2008, kernel, linus, samba, tridge, google, linux
Jan 30
Linux.conf.au hits top gear
The public holidays and mini-conferences are over -- it was time to move into the conference proper. Bruce Schneier, international security guru at large, gave a damning opening keynote on security and along the way told the sold out audience that security cost justifications are complete bullshit. Schneier described the IT security market as a lemon market and drew parallels between it and the [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Jan 03
Getting extensions working in Firefox 3
After installing a beta of Firefox, typically all the extensions will fail and the user is prompted to check for an update. However, not wanting to believe that I couldn't use Greasemonkey with Firefox 3 -- it turns out that there is a way to get your favourite extensions working again. And it is incredibly simple. Following the instructions in this comment thread will get your extensions back. To [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Tags: extensions, firefox, beta
Dec 06
Apple shipping the Mark Webber of hard drives
Any Australian with an interest in Formula 1 would know the exploits of Mark Webber. The boy from Queenbeayan can always pull out a mechanical failure or a random incident whenever he is in a good position -- I'm thinking especially of the Japanese GP this year -- which resulted in his nickname "the DNF man". (If you have no idea who Webber is, watch this "highlights" package. I recommend [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Tags: hard drive, mac, failure, apple
Nov 30
Silverlight 1.1 becomes 2.0
As covered earlier this week, even Microsoft were confused by their own versioning for Vista -- and the news is that they are at their old naming tricks again. At the time Silverlight was launched, it came in an inital 1.0 beta version but there was also a v1.1 in the works. Now because of the sheer gigantic implications of the feature set in Silverlight v1.1, it demands that it be named Silverlight [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: marketing, silverlight, microsoft
Nov 14
Clusters bucking Microsoft's desktop dominance
I doubt that Windows is the first operating system that one would think of when building a supercomputer. With the release of the latest TOP500 supercomputer list it's clear that I am not alone in this perception. The total number of systems using Windows is 6 and charting that data by performance is even more damning -- Windows gets heaped into the "Others" column. Obviously wanting to improve [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: cluster, supercomputers, hpc, microsoft
Nov 05
Google embraces and extends Facebook apps
With less effort than negotiating for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, has Google simply outmanoeuvred everybody? With the likes of LinkedIn, MySpace, and Salesforce onside with Google's new OpenSocial platform it certainly packs a punch to potential competitors before it's really even entered the ring. If Microsoft released a social networking application platform (SNAP) that locked out the up and coming [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Oct 26
Del.icio.us for the rest of us
One thing you can say about the people that make Opera, they never fail to innovate. I can cast my mind back to the days when Opera was small and lightning quick, downloads were handled sensibly and resumable (why do we still wait for this in the big browsers?), mouse gestures and tabs were brand new and it had yet to have the entire kitchen sink and the stove thrown in. Today the company from Oslo [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Oct 25
When simplifying becomes patronising
A new version of gimp came out today, and I gleefully headed over to the gimp downloads page this morning to see what support there was for OS X. None, nothing, not a crumb, jack all. All I can see is various options for installing it on various Linux distros. That's no good for me, it's compiling on Gentoo already, I want to know if I can finally have a proper gimp.app 2.4 version. Perhaps [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Tags: gimp, javascript, assumption
Oct 04
Adobe returns Silverlight's serve
At the end of September it was debatable whether Flash or Silverlight was a better solution -- by the end of the first days in October it is clear that Flash is once again the undisputed champion. It has been an exciting opening 72 hours of October for the Adobe faithful at the annual MAX conference, where all the big announcements have been made. One of the technical hills that Silverlight advocates [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Sep 25
So you want to buy Facebook?
Microsoft is the latest company to go a-courting Facebook, that worldwide office productivity menace, with the intent of purchasing a 5% stake for half a billion dollars. That puts the Facebook evaluation at $10 billion, although Reuters says that Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has the company's valuation at a cool $15 billion. $500 million is an awful lot of money for a small stake in a Web [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Sep 06
How Microsoft dealt with GPLv3
The news of Silverlight 1.0 being released allows some insight in the way that Microsoft will work with GPLv3. In simple terms, Microsoft will not work with GPLv3. That is the line that they have drawn, and their rhetoric and actions now show this to be so. The easiest way for Microsoft to avoid the snare of the Free Software Foundation is to step around GPLv3 and leave it to their partners. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 9 comments
Tags: gplv3, moonlight, silverlight, novell, microsoft, linux
Aug 27
How to make a brand homeopathic
There was once a time when the word Java was used another person knew what you were talking about. It was either the language, the island or the coffee -- it was hard to take either of those three definitions out of context. Then the marketing masterminds at Sun decided to make up for lost time after past diddy-daddling with Java had only resulted in confusing people with crazy version numbers. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Aug 06
OS X + NFSv4 == SSHFS + open bitterness
Has anyone, who isn't a die-hard Darwin fanatic, ever tried to recompile their kernel in OS X? If you answered yes then you are among a rare breed of user indeed. Congratulations, I hope that you were better for the experience, and that it worked. Meanwhile any sort of reality distortion field that I may have been previously emersed in is well and truly gone. The cause was NFSv4 and a touch of [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 5 comments
Tags: nfs, fuse, apple, open source, osx
Jul 18
Who really owns your open source code?
In the wake of Apple's purchase of CUPS, there is a simple lesson to take away -- if you are a developer committed to open source and you wish for your contributions to always remain open, do not reassign copyright to an external party. As the new holder of copyright to all CUPS code, Apple is able to re-license and add non-open functionality into CUPS if it so wishes. This situation is not unheard [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 3 comments
Tags: licensing, cups, apple, fsf, open source
Jul 06
US Navy stole my Internet
It's a typical Thursday afternoon and suddenly your Internet connection goes down. That's not good. As they have innumerable times before, a sysadmin calls up the ISP to file a fault and returns with this information: "Our Internet provider has informed us that the issues were are experiencing with our primary Internet link are being caused by the arrival of the US Navy’s air craft carrier Kitty [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 30 comments
Tags: kitty hawk, lame, excuses, internet
Jun 19
The return to the king
For the past three weeks I have been in computer exile -- cast out into operating system purgatory while the previously trustworthy and beloved Apple PowerBook had a hard drive replacement. I had intended to document the time spent using a machine with the lowest Vista rating possible, a sizable 1.0, and rant about the frustration created until I was blue in the face. But now I shall do no such thing. The [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Jun 07
Google Gears Stuck in First
There was the hype, there was the coverage -- Google Gears had arrived to save us all and boldly take Web apps offline. Gmail and YouTube would be taken offline and the potential to ditch Outlook in the future was hard to resist. Then the fourth of the Fates, Irony -- she's the one that takes your thread of life and makes a cat's cradle out of it -- stepped in. The chorus asks "How does this [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: opera, gears, apple, safari, mozilla, microsoft, firefox, google, adobe
May 24
Mixed Emotions
It’s been a couple of weeks since the full announcement of Silverlight took place -- now that other players have shown some of their cards and the dust begins to settle, what can be taken out of it? The one point that is screaming out and demanding attention is that no matter how much good that Microsoft does, invariably someone, somewhere and ultimately from within, will shoot them in the foot. Allow [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: silverlight, betamax, java, microsoft, mobile, adobe, flash
May 10
Java's client-side defibrillator
Do you remember the "Bring out your dead" scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail? The undertaker is collecting plague victims when a customer appears carrying a corpse. Just before it is is placed on the undertaker's wagon the corpse says "I'm not dead yet". (No idea? Then check out: http://youtube.com/watch?v=kuvB7j9n-II) The reason I bring up all this imagery is that, for a long time, [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
May 01
Live Blog: MIX 07 Keynote
9:14am The punters continue to file in as we wait for the keynote to begin. "Entertainment" is provided by a band featuring accordians, banjos and saws. For a conference to the future, playing "Hits from the backwoods" circa 1890 makes as much sense as these lyrics. Thankfully my mp3 player is numbing the pain with Trent Reznor. 9:15am The usefulness of twitter appears, on a screen to the [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Apr 23
Anti-social Web 2.0 to save your bacon
Let's face some brutal facts -- I am not the prettiest person you will ever meet, I am not even the 2nd or 3rd prettiest person you will ever meet – in fact, I am probably the most inphotogenic person I know. Therefore the idea of taking what few photos I have and putting them on flickr has never appealed to me. This probably has more to do with the fact that the shelf-life of photos seems to be about [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Apr 11
Google Developer Day comes to Sydney
Hot off the wires! Here's a chance for developers to meet and learn from Google staff at its Sydney office. Places at the event are sure to go quicker than hotcakes, so get in quickly. First dibs on the invitation are as follows: Google announced today that on May 31st, Google offices in ten countries will host "Google Developer Day", an event featuring workshops, keynotes and breakout discussions [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Apr 10
Do you speak Pidgin?
The news from the project formally known as gaim over Easter was that it now wishes to be known as Pidgin. Thanks to the helpful lawyers at AOL, the open source instant messenger of choice now has a name that is not tied to a specific protocol. Yes we all know it is multi-protocol and has been for some time, but if the project was known as gYahoo! instead, would you expect to be able to use Jabber [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 2 comments
Mar 22
Microsoft tips for pitching to Linux geeks
Sometimes something appears that makes you scratch your head so much that you fear that you may inflict a self-imposed scalping, such was the dandruff clearing delusion caused by this site: www.linuxpersonas.com. In my opinion I think the way to beat a competing operating system is to make a technically superior one that is easier to use and more secure. As the market share leader I would assume [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 11 comments
Mar 08
Widgets - Revenge of the shiny things
A milestone was passed this week: Opera announced it has a thousand widgets in its widgets.opera.com repository. Congratulations to the Opera community and specially the people who created the widgets; I'm sure that there is a dedicated group who enjoy them and look forward to trying out the latest widgets -- I am not one of them. The theory is sound, years ago I could not live without seeing gkrellm [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Tags: widgets, dashboard, sidebar, os x, bloat, gmail, vista
Mar 02
Sun mimic Ubuntu
Sun freely admit that they are copying Ubuntu with the announcement that people can now receive an OpenSolaris Starter Kit that contains OpenSolaris, its source and associated documentation for free, worldwide postage included. And why shouldn't they admit it? It was a good idea for Ubuntu and similarly it can do well for OpenSolaris. Check it out at http://get.opensolaris.org/. 56k OpenSolaris [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 35 comments
Tags: opensolaris, dvd, free stuff, ubuntu, sun
Feb 27
Scratching an Itch
In the wonderful world of software it is unlikely that your next big idea is original. In the modern world of collaborative development over the Web it's also likely that someone has belted out some code for it too. Recently I've been pondering the idea of a "Youtube Jukebox" that would play all the clips you want in a playlist, hopefully fullscreen and preferably without the Youtube controls. [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Feb 16
64 bit me
Perhaps deep inside many developers and tech enthusiasts there is a little sadist that enjoys frivolous installations. Or maybe the attention span of those developers is so low they constantly need to be entertained by new things as they remain on the bleeding edge. Whatever the exact reasoning, my entertainment for the weekend was a Vista installation on an AMD64. I have real issues installing [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 1 comment
Tags: 64-bit, windows, onecare, anti-virus, gentoo, flash, linux
Feb 13
Competition: Send me to WebDU
If you are into the latest and greatest that the Web has to offer and happen to be in Sydney on the 22nd-23rd March, then you will want to get to WebDU! Builder AU has 5 passes to give away for the upcoming webDU conference. To receive one of these five passes simply send an email to edit@builderau.com.au and tell, link to or present Builder AU with your favourite or least favourite examples of [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 0 comments
Tags: webdu, competition, flash
Feb 06
What's hot with Linux Luminaries
What is Sucks or Scores? Sucks or Scores is a game where the player/victim is asked their opinion on a topic. The response is either "sucks" or "scores", sucks being bad, scores being good. Another option exists, that being "pass", but it ruins the alliteration in the game's name. #bVideo2, #bVideo_container2{width:320px;height:320px;} directLink = '/builder/builder_linux_sucksorscores';directStillFrame [...] Read more »
-- posted by Chris Duckett | 8 comments
Tags: philip ruddock, dmca, vista, linux.conf.au, virtualisation, open solaris, ubuntu, mono, one laptop per child, novell, gplv3, sucks, scores, iphone
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Club Builder: Space, Ubiquity and Microsoft Tri-Soapbox
In this episode of Club Builder: a new Firefox plug-in makes browsing more powerful, computer viruses enter orbit, and Microsoft gets a three-way serve of soapboxing.
