It Ain't Over Until Blake Ross Sings

There are three names that most people would associate with Firefox. Ben Goodger, who works for Google, and whose blog is pretty quiet these days. Asa Dotzler, who has a articulate and bulging blog. And then there's Blake Ross, also with a lively blog, but probably better known for being the cover-boy of Wired when it featured Firefox.

Given his background - and the immense knock-on effect his Firefox work has had - Ross is always worth listening to. That's particularly the case for this long interview, because it's conducted for the Opera Watch blog, which lends it both a technological depth and a subtle undercurrent of friendly competition:

I think Opera is better geared toward advanced users out of the box, whereas Firefox is tailored to mainstream users by default and relies on its extension model to cater to an advanced audience. However, I see both browsers naturally drifting toward the middle. Firefox is growing more advanced as the mainstream becomes Web-savvier, and I see Opera scaling back its interface, since it started from the other end of the spectrum.

(Via LXer.)

Time Jumps When Microsoft Snaps Its Fingers

I missed this the first time around:

So, for most of the world, the Gregorian calendar has been the law for 250-425 years. That's a well-established standard by anyone's definition. Who would possibly ignore it or get it wrong at this point?

If you guessed “Microsoft”, you may advance to the head of the class.

Datetimes in Excel are represented as date serial numbers, where dates are counted from an origin, sometimes called an epoch, of January 1st, 1900. The problem is that from the earliest implementations Excel got it wrong. It thinks that 1900 was a leap year, when clearly it isn't, under Gregorian rules since it is not divisible by 400. This error causes functions like the WEEKDAY() spreadsheet function to return incorrect values in some cases.

Here are Rob's updated thoughts on the subject, and how the problem is being propagated by Microsoft's rival to ODF, OOXML.

He Gave Me of the Tree

And I did eat.

Wicked.

Alan Cox Stands up for Closed Source

These aren't words you'd expect to issue from the mouth of one of the most senior Linux hackers:

Cox said that closed-source companies could not be held liable for their code because of the effect this would have on third-party vendor relationships: "[Code] should not be the [legal] responsibility of software vendors, because this would lead to a combinatorial explosion with third-party vendors. When you add third-party applications, the software interaction becomes complex. Rational behaviour for software vendors would be to forbid the installation of any third-party software." This would not be feasible, as forbidding the installation of third-party software would contravene anti-competition legislation, he noted.

But, of course, he's absolutely right - which emphasises how lucky we are to have someone as sane as Alan representing the free software community when too many self-styled supporters present quite a different image.

Live a Little: Try Knoppix

How can anyone resist this sort of thing? Go on, live a little: you know it makes sense.

Maybe It's Because I'm a Londoner...

...and a geek to boot, that I love these kind of things:

We've taken a selection of maps featured in the London: A Life in Maps exhibition and converted them into a Google Earth layer.

(Via Ogle Earth.)

ScientificCommons.org

Access to all open access science? Ambitious, if nothing else, this:

The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. Currently ScientificCommons.org has indexed about 10 million scientific publications and successfully extracted 4 million authors out of this data.

(Via eHub.)

Blogs 2.0

This is the kind of stuff that John Battelle is best at:

A brief dip into nearly every blogger's referral logs shows that a very large percentage of readers - nearly 40 percent in some cases - come directly from search - someone who put "steve ballmer throws chair" into Google, for example, and lands here.

Now, this person doesn't have any frame of reference about Searchblog, or its grammar, audience, or ongoing conversation. He or she is most likely to hit the post in question, read it (perhaps), and move on. This site loses a potential new reader, and this community loses a potential new member, because, in the end, I, as the publisher of Searchblog, have done nothing to demonstrate to that reader the wonders and joy that is Searchblog.

Interesting (says someone whose Google referrals are rather higher than 40%.)

There is a There There

I had occasion to use Second Life in anger the other night, by which I mean I made a serious, business-related use of it. Taking up the kind invitation of the splendidly-named Gizzy Electricteeth (SL name, of course), I went to visit IBM's recreation of the Australian Open, which I had written about earlier (and which Gizzy had spotted).

As I had surmised when reading about it, this is an impressive virtual construction, not just for what it is, but mostly for what it portends. The ability to capture a ball's path in real time, and then recreate it in Second Life - and a rapidly-moving ball at that - means that other, more sedate sports like football and cricket will be even easier to reproduce in this way.

As a result, fans of those sports (I'm told there are one or two) will not only be able to watch matches as they happen, but also replay them, watching from different angles. They could even join in - for example, taking the viewpoint of the umpire/referee, or one of the players (even I found myself "playing" tennis, with balls careering towards me at high velocity - and magically being returned).

I think this alone makes IBM's work important, because it may well be enough of a hook to get couch potatoes off their sofas and staggering towards their PCs (until, of course, somebody produces set-top boxes for TVs specifically designed for Second Life.)

But impressive as all this work was - knocked up in less than a month by a small and clearly dedicated team including said Gizzy - what really struck me most was something quite different. This was the fact that I was engaged in this immersive experience while I sat at my computer, late at night in a wintry London, as Gizzy sat at her computer, mid-morning in Australia, in the summer, and while both of us "met" in that somewhere land we call Second Life.

Whereas my previous experiences of SL have been purely of an exploratory kind - and hence retained an element of being "there" only in a shallow, unengaged sense - my visit to the IBM site, which involved me being myself, a journalist asking questions, as I do in ordinary life, was far truer, far more real. Not because of where I was, or what I saw, but because of what I was doing, which was a seamless extension of my life in another place that was neither here nor there, but simply was.

Argo Sets a New Course

The rather fine Argo Genome Browser,

Broad Institute's production tool for visualizing and manually annotating whole genomes

has now been released under the LGPL.

O, to be in Hamburg...

...now that Google Earth is there.

Even though I've been writing about the coming convergence of online games, virtual worlds, and 3D systems like Google Earth, for a while, I'm still amazed at how quickly it's happening. Here's the latest milestone:

Hamburg wird als erste Stadt weltweit als 3D-Modell in das Programm integriert - inklusive der Häuserfassaden.

(Hamburg has become the first city in the world to be integrated into the 3D-program [Google Earth] - complete with building facades.)

...

Franz Steidler, Chef der Cybercity AG, die von Paris und Florenz bereits auf eigene Kosten 3D-Modelle erstellt hat, träumt bereits von ganz anderen Anwendungen: Man solle auch in Häuser hineingehen können, etwa in Geschäfte, um virtuell einzukaufen. "Da ist vieles denkbar."

(Franz Steidler, the head of Cybercity AG, which has already made 3D models of Paris and Florence at its own expense, already dreams of other applications. People will be able to go into buildings, for example shops, in order to make virtual purchases. "All kinds of things are imaginable there.")

Buying virtual goods in virtual shops: now where have I heard that before? (Via Ogle Earth.)

I Urge You to Urge EU Urgency on OA

Open access is important, but for most of us, it's hard to do much about it. So I urge you to vote for the following EU petition, whether you're in the EU or not:

I urge decision-makers at all levels in Europe to endorse the recommendations made in the Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of the Scientific Publication Markets of Europe in full, in particular to adopt the first recommendation A1 as a matter of urgency.

(Via Open Access News.)

Becta: Must Try Harder

Despite Becta's fine words, that guardian of the free software spirit, Mark Taylor, wants more action:

"This is the perfect opportunity for Becta to reject accusations that it is in bed with big suppliers by offering serious support to Linux and open source software as valid alternatives.

"Becta's own evidence says it will save schools money, so let's see them provide at least equal opportunities for schools to buy open source software through their e-Learning Credits and the new Learning Platform Framework Agreements."

Go for 'em, Mark.

Gene Geni

This is quite clever - although it's a pity it uses Flash. You start to build your family tree on-screen, adding emails to the names where available. These are then sent info about the site, and obviously encouraged to add their own local knowledge of the tree. So the system is viral, and is based on two networks: that of family connections, and that of the Internet.

It's easy to foresee the day when we know all our public genealogical connections in this way - a stage before our genomes are used to show all the private ones, too.... (Via TechCrunch.)

Open Aladdin4D

I've written before about the example of Blender, and how it was freed from its proprietary shackles. Now it seems that another modelling program, Aladdin 4D, may also receive its manumission:

What is Aladdin 4D? It's a powerful, but extremely easy-to-use, 3D modeling, rendering and animation package that includes the 3D tools that you'd expect as well as many unique features like relative time-based animation, an amazingly powerful particle system, and one of the fastest rendering systems on the desktop.

Nova originally purchased Aladdin 4D in the mid-1990s from Adspec, Inc. and then heavily upgraded and modernized to make it even more powerful and easy to use. Aladdin 4D has many advanced tools for professional 3D animation, yet its interface was designed to be easy for anyone to use. The source code for Aladdin 4D was designed to be as portable as possible. Adspec, under contract, once ported Aladdin 4D to the Transputer board and also did a special Intel processor rendering engine. Aladdin 4D has already had it's rendering engine test-compiled (a quick hack job) under Linux, MacOS X and other platforms in the past. The source code is highly standard C source code.

This would be great news. Great, because it reinforces this as a model for expanding open source; great because competition is good; and great because with the rise of virtual worlds (especially open ones), 3D modelling packages are going to become as common as HTML editors.

Blog Perdurability and the Information Commons

Simon Phipps raises an important point: what should be done about corporate blog pages when their owner has, er, passed on (as in to another company)? Sun's solution:

When we started blogs.sun.com, we had a long discussion about what we should do when employees left. The conclusion we all reached, supported strongly by Jonathan Schwartz who attended the meeting, was that they should simply be left in place, merely closed for further changes. Our view was that, if the blog text had been acceptable when it was published, there was no reason a change of employment status should vary that. Not to mention the desire by Tim to preserve URIs. Interestingly, one of Jonathan's motivations for this was also so that people could pick up where they left off when they rejoined Sun!

But I'd go further. I think that companies have a responsibility to maintain the availability of any materials that they make public. This is because of the changed nature of information these days: it's inherently interconnected, and snipping out a weft here and a warp there isn't good for the rest of the data tapestry.

Publicly-available information forms a commons; removing it constitutes a destruction of part of that commons. Ultimately there should be laws against it, just as there are against chopping down historic trees that form part of the landscape commons.

Microsoft Enterprise Open Source

Well, that's what it says here, although what this really means is something like this:

Aras Innovator enterprise software solutions take advantage of the Microsoft enterprise service-oriented architecture [SOA] technologies to deliver applications that are scalable, manageable and secure.

Aras Innovator solutions are Microsoft enterprise open source combining the flexibility and control of open source with the affordable Microsoft infrastructure. Together Aras and Microsoft deliver a Total Cost of Ownership dramatically lower than conventional enterprise systems.

Not quite so dramatic, but nonetheless an interesting move from a company that seems hugely proud of its mongrel heritage:

Aras Corporation is the Microsoft enterprise open source software solution provider for companies that want the control and flexibility of open source and have Microsoft skill sets and infrastructure.

(Via TheOpenForce.com.)

Just Say Something

If I had to name the biggest problem with Second Life, it would not be lag or all the other usual stuff (or even unusual stuff like flying penises), but the lack of voice communication. Currently, Second Life is a mute world, which makes it rather eerie (at least for those of us fortunate enough to be able to hear).

So news that Centric are adding a voice chat system in a rather clever way caught my attention:

Centric today announced Second Talk, an easy-to-use voice communication system for Second Life. Second Talk "headsets" automatically scan for other Second Talk users nearby, and offer instant voice chat for groups of up to 10 users through Skype, a popular Voice over IP communication platform.

..

Second Talk offers significant benefits in terms of convenience and cost. Since voice chat is facilitated by Skype, use of the system is free and virtually unlimited. In addition, Second Talk does not require the installation of proprietary software or SIP server setup. Finally, Second Talk does not require a base station to designate a chat area or manage chats - the headset is wearable and fully portable.

Hm: if this works, I might even sign up for Skype....

Gating Technology: The E-Factor

I'm starting to write more posts about energy efficiency, since it obviously feeds into issues surrounding various environmental commons. But it's increasingly clear to me that its impact is going to be much more direct on the technologies I consider on a regular basis.

Take this, for example:

In a piece of research that could have implications for the future of mobile broadband, a US analyst firm has claimed that new mobile applications will make pure cellular technology too energy-inefficient to be practical in the future.

This is going to happen again and again, changing the course of technology development just when everyone thought they knew where it was going....

Becta Late Than Never

I've been a bit remiss in not posting this earlier, but it's still worth underlining the major shift that's going on here, at all sorts of levels.

A while back, I was moaning about Becta not giving free software a chance in UK schools. Well, they've obviously been on holiday to Damascus, because in the recently-published interim report on Microsoft Vista and Office 2007, Becta seems to have seen the light:

The report found that whilst the new features of Vista add value, there are no “must have” features in the product that would justify early deployment in schools and colleges. The technical, financial and organisational challenges associated with early deployment currently make this a high risk strategy. Early deployment is therefore strongly recommended against.

...

As the costs of deployment of Office 2007 would be significant, Becta has not identified any convincing justification for the early adoption of Office 2007. Recognising that many schools and colleges already have perfectly adequate office productivity solutions there would need to be a strong case to justify the necessary investment.

...

The report compared Office 2007 with a range of competitor products and found that many of them delivered about 50% of the Office 2007 functionality, enough it is believed to meet or exceed basic office productivity requirements of many schools.

Becta therefore calls on the ICT industry to ensure that computers for the education marketplace are delivered with a choice of Office productivity suites available, which ideally should include an open-source offering.

The ability for schools to exercise choice is further restricted by interoperability difficulties and Becta is calling on Microsoft to improve its support for the ODF interoperability standard.

There is also concern that the current lack of support for Microsoft’s new file formats in competitor products (particularly “free to education” products) may exacerbate “digital divide” issues. Becta therefore advises that schools and colleges should only deploy Office 2007 when its interoperability with alternative products is satisfactory.

Definitely better late than never.

Shining Mirrored Pages: A Visual Commons

This is art, right?

Thus, by making a public display that is attentive to its community of users, a Visual Commons, it becomes possible for the community to escape the present hegemony of one-way communication, or "broadcast," of generic information (such as the time, or stock prices) or the barrage of mass-media advertising (such as occurs in New York City's Times Square). In effect, dynamic processing of community feedback regarding the contents of the display enables it to become more than just a billboard.

What would Tulse Luper say? (Via OnTheCommons.org.)

We Are All Modular Now

One of the central theses of this blog is that for things like software, modularity produces more and better code, because it allows a kind of Darwinian selection to kick in on an atomistic basis.

But wait: isn't another of my theses that openness is appropriate across a whole range of activities - notably content production? And so...that would suggest that content should become more modular too, allowing a similar kind of winnowing process to take place.

Eek!

Horde Groupware (Also for Humans)

This sounds rather good:

Horde Groupware is a free, enterprise ready, browser based collaboration suite. Users can manage and share calendars, contacts, tasks and notes with the standards compliant components from the Horde Project. Horde Groupware bundles the separately available applications Kronolith, Turba, Nag and Mnemo.

And I can't help feeling that the timing is perfect....

Of WikiSeek and Digital Tyrants

WikiSeek sounds a good idea in principle:

The contents of Wikiseek are restricted to Wikipedia pages and only those sites which are referenced within Wikipedia, making it an authoritative source of information less subject to spam and SEO schemes.

Wikiseek utilizes Searchme's category refinement technology, providing suggested search refinements based on user tagging and categorization within Wikipedia, making results more relevant than conventional search engines.

It does, of course, replace one digital tyrant (Google) with another (Wikipedia).

Real Knowledge of Virtual Worlds

If anyone has the right to pontificate about virtual worlds, it's Howard Rheingold. Fifteen years ago, Rheingold wrote Virtual Reality: The Revolutionary Technology of Computer-Generated Artificial Worlds - and How It Promises to Transform Society. We're still waiting, of course, but that only makes his historical perpective on things even more valuable:

Some things about online social behavior seems to be eternal and universal--trolls and griefers and the eternal meta-debate about what to do about them, for example. There's a widespread amnesia, as if these kinds of cybersocializing were new. Not many people online have much sense of history. That's probably true of just about everything. What I really like is that it's so easy to roll your own these days. It used to be a big deal to set up your own chat or BBS or listserv. Now it's part of the tool set for millions of people, and it's mostly free.