Technorama

Even the EU shores up Adobe Flash now

2009-04-16T20:48:00.008Z

In a bizarre twist of fate, Viviane Reding one of the non-democratically elected EU Commissioners put up her weekly video entitled "Protecting privacy in the digital age", in the privacy invading Adobe Flash format. This gives a privacy problem like the following screenshot (example I'd saved, she's not using youtube from what I could tell):

I've written about the security and privacy flaws in Flash before. Due to Flash being a proprietary binary that the user has no control over, it can happily just ignore all the cookie and privacy settings in the browser. Happily sending and receiving cookies, as well as maintaining a large set of cached files and data locally that the user is unaware of.

All we need now is for the information commissioner to advocate Adobe Flash, seeing as he's already using unique google tracking cookies to monitor the populace for two years.

I wonder how much/commission_barroso/reding/_bin/favideo/skins/ClearOverAll.swf cost us all to make, on top of the £556 price for a copy of Adobe "Flash Pro CS4" (dabs.com price). Not a good use of our EU taxpayers money!

Keyboards identifying their keymap

2009-03-16T20:31:00.008Z

Every time I buy a Dell laptop, or run an Ubuntu live CD I find I am running with the wrong keyboard map file, which means it defaults to US layout typically (why do we all have different locations for punctuation keys anyway!?)

So my USB keyboard is detected I can see form /var/log/messages:

input: Dell Dell USB Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-2/2-2.1/2-2.1:1.0/input/input14
kernel: [ 9575.364318] input,hidraw0: USB HID v1.10 Keyboard [Dell Dell USB Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2.1
kernel: [ 9575.375861] input: Dell Dell USB Keyboard as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1d.1/usb2/2-2/2-2.1/2-2.1:1.1/input/input15
ubuntu kernel: [ 9575.404288] input,hidraw1: USB HID v1.10 Device [Dell Dell USB Keyboard] on usb-0000:00:1d.1-2.1

(Seems to detect it twice, USB1.1 and USB2.0)

So as it already has the name string "Dell Dell USB Keyboard", would it be any harder to also encode "en" in that? (or "en_US" etc)

Now we all just need to unify on one standard keyboard layout, probably adopting the international US one with some adaptation to add Alt+Number for every currency (rather than having £, $, 円, €. Also with good sized Enter and Space keys, and my small keyboard layout if on a portable.

Return Royal Junk Mail back to them

2009-03-09T23:09:00.006Z

Royal Direct Mail is at it again.. but this time I've got an idea.. if it comes together it could be quite comic:

The DMA "Your Choice" scheme is ineffective, and why should we have to register that we didn't want junk mail in the first place? Not least because they will write to you 2 or 3 times to get you to reconfirm you don't want junk mail, and then like TPS and DMA lists it will expire after 3 years. Door-to-door is what Royal Mail like to call their marketing scheme. I couldn't find the Yell, Thomson Local and BT opt-out, that would have saved another 8KG of junk mail per year.

Imagine if for every piece of unaddressed junk mail that Royal Mail pushes through letter boxes around the country, just 10% of us returned it to them in the red boxes they place around the streets? Rather than me paying the council refuse collectors to take it all way, Royal Mail would have to cover the costs, and it might just bump the price up sufficiently for them to call of their junk mail programme.

If you don't have any "Return To Sender" stickers, you could always just forward it back to them. See how they appreciate arriving and having a mound of junk mail to wade through each day like the rest of us!

Royal Mail Group Ltd
148 Old Street
LONDON
EC1V 9HQ

Ubuntu gnome memory wastage

2009-03-08T17:26:00.005Z

While looking into other Ubuntu performance issues and Compiz crash I noticed just how many wasteful processes are running by default. Feels like I'm back on a Windows machine!

gnome-settings
python (system-config-printer/applet.py)
update-notifier
trashapplet
seahorse-agent (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
evolution-alarm (succeeded in removing!)
evolution-exchange
gnome-power-management
evolution-data-
gnome-screensav
gvfsd-smb-browse (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
gvsfd-smb-network
gvsdf-dnssd
gvfsd-computer
gnome-vfs-daemon
bluetooth-applet (succeeded in removing!)
bluetoothd-service-audio
bluetoothd-service-input
compiz-decorator (succeeded in removing!)
gtk-window-decorator
b43 (runs regardless of if the Wireless is enabled, so enable/disable must be a software switch)
bonobo-activation-server (can't get rid due to ubuntu-desktop dep)
samba

I wish I could remove samba, I don't have any Windows machines on my network I need to transfer files to, but ubuntu-desktop has a dep on it.

Even with my internal wireless disabled (Fn+F2) I still see the b43 driver task running and taking up memory.

It's no wonder with all this running it takes 4 secs to load Firefox3 on a 1.6Ghz CPU with 1.5GB ram. It should be up in less than a second. OpenOffice Writer is even worse, around 8 seconds.

Remove Evolution:
# apt-get --purge remove evolution

^ It isn't mentioned, but the tasks are all still running, so another reboot is necessary (another Windows reminder..)

# apt-get --purge remove gnome-screensaver

Why is a screensaver running all the time anyway? The system could run the process from a gnome timer when it needs to start.

Let's see how it goes with this lot removed, I'll be tempted to install Xubuntu (XFCE desktop) if performance is still hogged!

Remove Compiz from Ubuntu

2009-03-08T17:14:00.004Z

If like me you're running one of the recent Ubuntu releases (8.04 LTS) you'll still be experiencing the unfixed bugs in Compiz Desktop Effects, for me this results in Totem and Xine crashes, taking out the whole machine (power switch restart).

So as no official fixes have been made (even though its LTS!), disable and removing compiz is the workaround:

Right click on the desktop, select "Change Desktop Background".
Click "Visual Effects", click the "none" option.

Then issue these commands to remove the Compiz packages:

# apt-get --purge remove compiz compiz-core

^ It doesn't tell you, but compiz is actually still running, so you will need to reboot to benefit.

Tip: Want to track down that rogue process in the "top" or "ps aux" output? Track it back to the package it came from, so you can unisntall it:

# dpkg -S /usr/bin/compiz-decorator

Laptop is quicker, and no more video playback crashes (yet!) ;).

Remove Bluetooth from Ubuntu

2009-03-08T17:07:00.004Z

If like me you are running on a laptop or desktop without Bluetooth, you'll notice that Ubuntu is still running around 1.5MB of Bluetooth packages, wasting drive space and memory at run time.

We could could ignore the disk space loss, but the fact that it stays resident after it sees no bluetooth hardware connected is far from ideal. It would have been trivial for them to exit the daemon when it found no hardware connected, so its probably just sloppy QA (or lack of any QA again..) that let this one slip into a release. Should anyone plug in a USB bluetooth adapter, HAL should then swawn the daemon etc.

So simply disable and uninstall/remove bluetooth from Ubuntu.

# apt-get --purge remove bluez-utils bluez-gnome

The --purge removes the installer files from your drive, recovering the space again ;)

Ubuntu USB NTFS filesystem bugs

2009-03-02T21:33:00.004Z

Seeing as I need to transfer >4GB files between computers running GNU+Linux as well as Mac and Windows I'm stuck with the only option of NTFS filesystem on that USB stick. The problem is how poor Ubuntu support is (well it even has support now, so things have moved on a lot in the last few years).

Windows causes a lot of problems, because it does not unmount filesystems which are not in use, so if a friend pulls out hte USB stick without going through the "Safely Remove" (or the duplicate "Edject" menu item on Vista) Ubuntu will refuse to mount it. With an error as follows:

How Ubuntu developers expect average users to achieve this I have no idea. Ubuntu should fix the process to be simple and clear as follows:

External drive icons are visible on Desktop.
If one fails to mount due to this NTFS flag, the user should be prompted to check it and then mount.
Context menu on each drive icon should offer "Safely remove" as well as "Scan for errors" and "Format".

So let's get Ubuntu right, and fix the "unfriendlyness" it suffers :)

p.s. Also Ubuntu shouldn't copy files and directories with excluded Windows characters, like ":", because the user will only arrive at their friend's house and find that their friend who is stuck using Windows can't access the files.

p.p.s. Windows no-longer unmounts drives when shutting down, so if you take out your USB stick formatted NTFS from a machine that is off you will find it also won't mount on Ubuntu.

Panasonic TX37LZD81 TV runs GNU+Linux!

2009-03-02T21:29:00.003Z

Wow, I saw the software license screen on my Panasonic TX37LZD81 TV shows it is built on top of lots of GNU+Linux components, there is even the download link: http://www.am-linux.jp/dl/EUIDTV6/.

Sources are provided for autofs, dhcpcd, findutils, glibc, linux, mount, mtd, netkit, nettools, procps and sash on that link above :)

Mobiles run GNU+Linux too.

How long till an open iPlayer box?

2009-02-22T12:51:00.002Z

Like everyone else in the UK who watches TV, I've been funding BBC iPlayer (and also Creative Archive "initiative") sine 2003, I've still yet to see any accessible version of the iPlayer product available though.

If you have a Freeview decoder you will know the streams are all transmitted over the airwaves in MPEG2 format, with no Digital Restrictions Management impeding the accessibility of the content. BBC iPlayer streams content, post-broadcast, and because of this they argue they need Digital Restrictions to convince rights holders to let them stream -- it is a shame the BBC argeed to this strategy.

What I'd at least like to see now is an iPlayer box, like I have a Freeview and Freesat box (well and our Panasonic TX37LZD81 includes both Freesat HD and Freeview). At roughly the same price point as a router box (£40), just needs the BBC to freely licence iPlayer so vendors can bring to market open iPlayer boxes for us to connect to our TVs ;)

Switch to Theora video

2009-02-09T23:37:00.008Z

A lot of websites do rely on the Adobe Flash Plugin to provide Video playback. Fortunately now that isn't necessary as we have the Theora codec. Theora is a completely free codec, no costly MPEG-LA patent licenses, or even software licences, it is all free, it's also available at no-cost online -- which is all great! As I've noted before, availability is worthless if it is not accessible, so distributing videos in Theora content is the future ;)

So skip the harmful tags (embed and object) that youTube try get you to use, display an frame of your video, with a play icon instead. Make it an onclick= action, to change the play icon colour. Then make that link to the Theora Ogg file. Something like Amazon are doing:
Install the codecs now, and be part of the future: Mac QuickTime, Windows DirectShow, Windows command line.

Example ffmpeg2theora command-line:

$ ffmpeg2theora -a 8 - v 8 my_input_video.mp4 --title "Documentary title" -o output_video_theora.ogg

It's a shame people like Cory Doctorow and Larry Lessig are still shoring up Adobe's proprietary Flash format by embedding in into their otherwise open web pages. At least when I pointed out that EFF was shoring up the proprietary WMV format, they fixed it..

A few other links on this topic, w3c video consultation, and the why video tag won't work (apparently!).

HTML email considered harmful (TV Licensing)

2009-02-01T12:58:00.004Z

The problem of companies sending out HTML emails is getting worse, certainly in the UK I just received my TV License email, and the email only said "Your TV Licence is available". I needed to switch Thunderbird to view the message body as HTML to be able to get to the rest of the information. (Thunderbird Message Body naming isn't ideal either).

The automated email from TV Licensing now also uses a from address indicating they don't even want me to contact them, donotreply@tvlicensing.co.uk, their sender address bounces@tv-l.co.uk actually bounces when I tried to reply to them. Visit the TV Licensing site and you're presented with this link "Click here to fill in a short email form", a contradiction as the web-form is worse than usual, a tiny box which they try to give an automated answer, shifting yet more cost saving on to my back when I only wanted to let them know they were sending out empty emails.

Most spam I get uses HTML tricks to get through my ISP filters, a good reason if any not to support HTML email. HTML email is useful for sending tables of information, but then we could all just attach the OpenOffice file to the email!

Call to publish freely ISO standards & scientific papers

2009-01-03T12:00:00.005Z

It is ironic that ISO standards aren't freely available, you have to actually pay to get a copy. So if I wanted to write an ISO C++ compiler that would be pretty hard without paying ISO in Switzerland 102 CHF (£66).

It's now time for ISO to modernise, move with the internet generation and publish ISO standards online for no-charge. Other standards organisations like the Khronos Group (and the previous ARB group) with their OpenGL standards have been published online for decades! This has furthered the adoption of those standards ;)

Scientific papers suffer the same problem, when scientists want to publish a papers they assign copyright to a publishing Journal. The Journal organises the peer-review of the paper, and then charges for the final version in the form of journal subscriptions and one-off payments.

It's now also time for a new paper publishing model too, as Journals have ramped up prices so much it is now financially economical to look for a fairer model which cuts out those greedy Journals! This means we get all the papers in nice electronic form too ;)

The LHC (Large Hadron Collider) at Cern is taking steps to provide freely all data and papers from its experiments. So we have a great organisation taking the lead, setting the standard to follow!

Redhat ditch RPM for DEB apt-get in 2009?

2009-01-02T14:56:00.005Z

One of the common problems installing software on GNU-Linux machines is the variety of different packaging systems. Redhat is still persevering with its own RPM packing system, when others have already adopted the standard DEB package format.. how long till they make the switch to DEB and apt-get online repositories?

RPM is notorious for dependency problems, I've suffered with Mandriva and Fedora in the past when trying to get extra software packages working. It's now time for consolidation Redhat! They're losing out to Ubuntu.. so this might even tempt some users back ;)

Dropping RPM would save Redhat development costs, and make it easier for customers to move to Redhat from all the DEB based distributions of GNU-Linux (Ubuntu etc). SuSE should also migrate their YUM front end to DEB!

Encyclopædia Britannica's missed opportunity

2008-12-28T18:37:00.001Z

Encyclopædia Britannica must be kicking themselves now, they've all but completely lost their market share to Wikipedia -- if only they had updated their business mode back in the 90s, they could have controlled online encyclopædias, and profited from adverts on every page!

Instead Britannia pages like Brythonic languages, suffer popups which obscure the text every 10 seconds -- that's not going to win them any friends or users!

Ubuntu fixes for 2009

2008-12-27T00:25:00.004Z

Here's my list of fixes I'd like to see made in Ubuntu during 2009:

Resize icon fix, a proper sized icon (not single pixel anymore) on all windows, including Thunderbird.
Font fixes, OpenOffice should be able to save documents with fonts like "DejaVu Sans", and have them appear correctly on a Windows machine as Ariel, at present they come out in random like Webdings. OO could even show "Ariel" in its list, even if it is rendered as DejaVu.
Stablity, if compiz or other drivers are flakey, they need to be fixed. Ship the distro with debug symbols and generate proper backtraces for us to submit bugs too.
Respond to bug reports, and don't just close them after not dealing with them because they are now out of date.
Fix the clipboard, still after closing an application window the clipboard contents has disapeared.
Install the clipboard history by default.

Let's hope Ubuntu QA improves too, I'll pay too if there is a plan to sort out the QA testing :)

Ubuntu HP Deskjet 930C printer fix

2008-12-24T14:25:00.009Z

Ubuntu isn't ready for the lime light yet, it's still detecting my printer and setting up with a broken driver! The dodgy driver is "Foomantic/hpjis".

If you leave it like this, your logs will be full of:

Dec 24 13:56:24 laptop DeskJet_930C?serial=HU0B21G0G9JJ: prnt/backend/hp.c 496: unable to connect hpssd socket 2207: Connection refused
CUPS will display: DESKJET_930C (Default Printer) "/usr/lib/cups/filter/foomatic-rip failed"

The workaround, after Ubuntu detects the printer (after you plugged it in via USB) is to delete the printer and create the working setup:

1. Go into System->Administration->Printing
2. Select "Deskjet_930C" and click Delete.
3. Then click "New Printer", select the "HP Deskjet 930C USB ...".
4. Don't accept the [recommended] "Foomantic/hpijs", click the "Foomantic/cjd550".

I'd happily pay for a company to sort out the QA problems in Ubuntu releases, if 1,000 others would as well :) While Mark Shuttleworth is still sponsoring the Ubuntu project.. I'd hope he would come up with some funds too!

Other system lockups I've had this week are from some Compiz dodgyness:

Dec 20 20:47:12 laptop kernel: [ 1585.909259] compiz.real[6722]: segfault at 00004972 eip 08055a6d esp bfcdabb0 error 4

Xorg.0.log seems to have captured the flaw:
tossed event which came in late
mieqEnequeue: out-of-order valuator event; dropping.

Totem dodgyness is a whole system lock-up when playing a video file in Firefox, (totem-pl)ugin-viewer 2.22.1 or GStreamer 0.10.18 dodgyness?)

It's issues like these that will really put people off switching to Ubuntu, QA definitely needs to improve, and bug reports responded too when filed, not closed after six months (which I had recently on a crash I reported on launchpad -- why should we bother reporting..?).

Firefox 3 fixes needed

2008-11-02T17:24:00.002Z

Firefox 3 is now released, I've written up a list of the fixes I'd still like to see, to make the browser it deserves to be:

Form buttons that don't "click" properly, and end up just looking like they've been highlighted.

Option to stop sites disabling scroll bars, and block detection of any right clicks.

A decent sized window resize on lower right hand corner (This could just be Ubuntu/KDE/GTK bug).

URL completion doesn't work from the character after http, currently I have to type https:// before it will offer me mail.google.com. At least it offers the SSL site from the history when I just enter mail.google.com.

Some passwords aren't saved always (http/s ones), currently every once in a while I need to log in to my netgear router, but sometimes Firefox doesn't populate the password fields, even though they are stored passwords! AutoAuth is one workaround for a few of the cases :)

Save Page button that I've commented on before. Currently needs a way to save the page as a PDF file!

Quicker (or configurable) time-out on loading iframes, images etc from hosts which are down. let the rest of the page load. The problem is visible on any google cache of a site where the site is presently offline and the iframes/images still try and load!

Native support for common image types like TIFF which is still missing despite many sites using TIFF files in the IMG tag.

When a webmaster embeds an MP3 or Vorbis file into a browser page using the EMBED or OBJECT tag this gives an error if the mimetype isn't supported. The error is at the top of the page "Click here to download plugin.", and there is the green jigsaw icon where the embedded file is. The green jigsaw icon is not ideal, a download link would be much nicer, e.g. "Embedded file not supported, click here to download", or be able to right click on the jigsaw icon and download it is another option. Workaround at present is to delve into the HTML and try and figure out the src URL, or if not generated by JavaScript try and get it from the Page Info (Ctrl+I doesn't work in recent Firefox unfortunately). If there is an EMBED error, my feeling is Firefox should display the mime-type, or a string describing the mime-type so we know it is a "Windows Media Video" file etc, without having to go through the plugin detection wizard to find what format it is.

Unfortunately links stop working on a page the moment we click one, so even though the new page hasn't loaded, all the page is still readable, and links clickable, but none of the links work! Often we click a link, then see another, but we can't middle-click it to open in an additional tab, as would be handy :)

Firefox3 is great as it is though, a great development from Netscape and Mozilla Suite which went before :)

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 adopts keyboard

2008-10-27T22:29:00.005Z

Good review of Dell Inspiron Mini 9 inch laptop, up to the point where they say the keyboard layout is actually a negative:

"Perhaps the loudest complaint heard against the Mini 9 is its keyboard. The unit’s small footprint necessitated a tweaked keyboard layout which repositioned some keys, shrunk others and dropped some entirely."

My feeling is that Dell have made a good call on this, I've proposed my design in the past, and it is a good step in that direction! If you're reading this Dell, drop the: CapsLock, WinKey, WinMenu, RightShift, Delete and F-key overlay too :)

Anti-italic font

2008-10-27T21:42:00.000Z

We all use Italic fonts day-to-day, but why don't we have an anti-italic formatting button? (North American readers may call it counter-italic!?) I've posted on rich web typography before, I hope in the future we will have finer-grained control of our typography, including features like anti-italic!

Ubuntu Mic still broken

2008-10-25T11:34:00.003Z

Over six months after I had to fix my Mic configuration so it even works in Ubuntu I see the latest Ubuntu release still ships with it broken. Poor QA is the only reason holding Ubuntu back!

Ubuntu ships with the Mic disabled, so you need to manually fix it. The default Mixer configuration has Mic Capture disabled. So you need to go into the Terminal and make these changes to fix it:

$ alsamixer

You will see the [Playback] sliders. Use the arrow key to move right to the column named as "capture", at the top left of the screen it will now say Capture Mux. Set it to "25==25" which should be 1/4 white bar.

Next press Tab key, press arrow key to move to the first "capture" column, at the top it shows "Capture", set it to "7==7". Press Space bar to enable it and show "CAPTUR" in red.

Press right arrow key to move to the next "Capture", at the top left it shows "Capture Mux", set it to "25==25".

Next press right arrow key to move to "input", press up/down arrow key so this shows "Mic" and not "Front Mic" or "Line".

.. and we're done :)

Ditch imperial measurements

2008-10-18T23:19:00.002Z

Unfortunately the UK is still using imperial measurements despite introducing metric in the 70s. Now the government is even urging councils not to pursue traders who still insist on selling goods in imperial measurements with no conversion into metric. When really we should be moving towards replacing Pints and Miles with Litres and Kilometers!

Why web forms are bad (compared to email)

2008-10-13T21:17:00.006Z

Don't you just hate it when you click on the "email" link on someone's website and it takes you to a tiny web-form which only fits about 6 words per line, cramped into a small box? After struggling to write your message you invariably click "submit" and it says Error.. you click the "back" button optimistically and of cause the whole message is gone. Webmasters got overexcited and tried to run internet messaging through a web page, when really it should be left as standard email or IM.

Short run down of why web-forms are bad for messages:

Tiny form boxes, pledgebank is a great example, limited to 7 words per line.
Often arbitrary restrictions on the text that can be written. Lincolnshire NHS trust have a secret blocked character list including ",', and ; then they limit to 255 characters.
Often fails to "Submit" and when you click back of cause it has lost all your text.
Leaves me with no record in my Sent folder of what I've written.
No way to forward the message I have sent to a friend, or another department at the organisation.

All these problems make it very difficult to send a website a message telling them one of their pages has broken links or typos etc. Web-forms can always be a secondary contact option, but email should always be the first option as it is the best. See Email 101 for tips on writing to the point.

T-Mobile G1 (Google Android) mobile phone

2008-09-26T11:57:00.003Z

Good to see the T-Mobile G1 announced. I wanted to get an OpenMoko phone, but the lack of camera (and MMS?) means one of my most common uses is ruled out. Great that HTC who make the G1 have gone with a modern keyboard design like I proposed a while ago too :)

Tigra from nVidia looks good, hope to see some actual models out in the future.

Vodaphone O2 stifled number migraton

2008-09-20T20:00:00.004Z

Sadly Ofcom have not succeeded in their effort to get mobile number portability in under 7 days. Established market controlling companies Vodafone and O2 teamed up to prevent 3 (who have a smaller market share) from gaining migrating customers. Of cause Vodafone and O2 do transfers in 20 mins over the water in Ireland!

Apple iPhone App Store

2008-09-20T17:30:00.002Z

Apple iPhone App Store is the central location, the only location to get iPhone software. The problem is that it's not a software meritocracy, it's autocratic and Apple dictates what is approved for sale. It's not possible to buy software which runs on any mobile handset.

Hopefully other mobile vendors will wake up and agree an open standard for mobile software soon :)