Peter Cooper

Brain: A Book Cover

This is all a rather long way off and pending significant amounts of change, but I rather fancied sharing this in case it changed significantly later on. Just a book cover.

Update:

How To Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy on VMware Fusion

I was having problems installing VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) under VMware Fusion but got to the bottom of it.

The next problem was trying to get the mouse scroll wheel to work. I did some Googling and most of the guides suggested I change a single line in xorg.conf (namely, set the “Protocol” of the mouse device to “ImPS/2″). It didn’t work. On a limb I thought I’d try changing the driver from “vmmouse” to “mouse” and this solved the problem, but the mouse tracking and acceleration was TOTALLY different between OS X and Linux.. eugh!

With some perseverance, I’ve found a solution. You can use the vmmouse driver, keep the synchronized mouse tracking and acceleration, and use your mouse wheel as it was intended.

I have been told this technique works on VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too, but I haven’t tried it on there myself.

Steps to Enable Mouse Wheel Scrolling in Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion

Launch a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal).

Type:

sudo gedit /etc/X11/xorg.conf

Scroll down (it’s not far, perhaps 20 - 30 lines) till you see a block that looks like this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
[.. blah blah blah ..]
EndSection

Replace that whole section with this:

Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "Configured Mouse"
Driver "vmmouse"
Option "CorePointer"
Option "Device" "/dev/input/mice"
Option "Protocol" "ImPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Save the file, then close all your apps and hit Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. X restarts within a few seconds, and you’re back up and running. Scrolling should now be possible!

I haven’t gotten to the bottom of horizontal scrolling yet. I thought a ZAxisMapping of “4 5 11 12″ would do it, but I suspect either VMware Fusion’s mouse driver does things a different way, or maybe it’s mouse specific (not likely). I’ll update this post if I work it out.

How to Install VMware Tools on Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 under VMware Fusion

The latest version of Ubuntu (8.04 a.k.a. Ubuntu Hardy - the world’s most popular Linux distribution) came out yesterday on April 24th. I downloaded it right away to play with on VMware Fusion, my Mac virtualization tool of choice (though I’ve now been told this works in VMware Workstation and VMware Player on the PC too!). It worked pretty well out of the box, with even seamless mouse support working right away, but I needed, of course, to install VMware Tools too, as any good VMware user would do. From there, things turned sour, and I was bombarded with error messages similar to:

In file included from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/os.h:35,
from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.c:26:
/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/./include/compat_wait.h:78: error: conflicting types for ‘poll_initwait’
include/linux/poll.h:65: error: previous declaration of ‘poll_initwait’ was here
In file included from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/vmblockInt.h:40,
from /tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.c:29:
/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/./include/vm_basic_types.h:184: error: conflicting types for ‘uintptr_t’
include/linux/types.h:40: error: previous declaration of ‘uintptr_t’ was here
make[2]: *** [/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only/linux/block.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-2.6.24-16-generic’
make: *** [vmblock.ko] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/tmp/vmware-config8/vmblock-only’
Unable to build the vmblock module.

After banging my head against the wall for a while, trying a “vmware-any-any” patch that didn’t quite do the trick, and scouring the VMWare Fusion and Ubuntu Forums, I eventually came across a link to a page that described how to solve the problem. The credit for this solution rests entirely on the guy who wrote that page and a guy called Mufassa who posted a shorter explanation to the VMware Fusion forums.

I wanted to write this up into a proper blog post though for two reasons. Firstly, I wanted to show how to fix the problem in a more, direct line by line way (just in case you’re a novice or would rather follow some command line instructions). Secondly, I know posts on this blog appear in Google very quickly, so I want people Googling for “vmware fusion” and “ubuntu hardy” (like I was earlier) to find this page and have their problem solved! So, credit to those other guys, but..

Steps To Getting VMware Tools installed on Ubuntu Hardy under VMware Fusion:

Use the “Install VMware Tools” option in VMWare Fusion, and drag the .tar file (not the RPM!) to the Ubuntu desktop.

Open a Terminal (Applications menu -> Accessories -> Terminal). We’ll do all the work from the Terminal. First, we need to install some dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk2.0-dev
sudo apt-get install libproc-dev libdumbnet-dev xorg-dev
cd Desktop/

wget http://mesh.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/open-vm-tools/open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182.tar.gz

Next, we need to unpack the tar files we have at hand:

tar xzvf VMware*.gz
tar xzvf open-vm-tools*.gz

Next, we’ll build the open-vm-tools:

cd open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/
./configure && make
cd modules/linux/

In the modules/linux folder we have the vmblock, vmhgfs, vmmemctl, vmsync and vmxnet modules that we need to tar up and place into the official VMware tools tarball:

for i in *; do mv ${i} ${i}-only; tar -cf ${i}.tar ${i}-only; done
cd ../../..

mv -f open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-87182/modules/linux/*.tar vmware-tools-distrib/lib/modules/source/

Now we can run the regular VMware tools installer:

cd vmware-tools-distrib/
sudo ./vmware-install.pl

Once this is done, the best tactic is to restart Ubuntu entirely. Once you boot back up, things should seem a bit smoother. The resolution of the VM will stick to the size of the VM, etc, and you can now drag files directly into Ubuntu Hardy from your Mac desktop!

Note: A few of the lines of code you need to use above are single lines of code but spread over multiple lines on your screen when viewing this blog. Either make your browser wider, or copy and paste them into a text editor before continuing.

Liberation Mono - Ultimate Coding / Source Code Font

There have been a few Twitter messages about various “coding fonts” today, so I thought I’d put up a little demo of Liberation Mono (or download the tarball directly). I’ve used Bitstream Vera Sans, Inconsolata, Consolas, and a few others, but Liberation has proven to be streets ahead of any of those for both its neutrality and elegance. It’s also under the LGPL so is “truly free” in many respects.

Liberation Mono at 13 pt:

Liberation Mono at 11 pt:

No idea what it’s like without anti-aliasing, as I don’t roll that way.

But.. it has one flaw that may well be fatal for some programmers who don’t use syntax coloring. Zeroes and the letter O are somewhat indistinguishable. Typically a non-issue if you have syntax coloring, but could be a deal breaker. I’m willing to put with it, although it’d have been great if the zero had a dot in the middle or something.. but the font’s LGPL so it’s possible to hack it.

Thanks to Matt Pruitt for encouraging me to actually link directly to the downloadable files.

Just Launched RubyFlow: Yet Another Ruby News Site!

I’ve just launched RubyFlow, my new community-driven Ruby news / links site. As is typical for me, I bashed it together in a day, and then went live tentatively yesterday. Just now, however, I turned the taps up to full by posting about it on Ruby Inside. Visitors are now flooding through at a good clip!

It might seem a bit weird that I’m competing directly with myself (RubyFlow vs Ruby Inside), but RubyFlow is meant to be a higher quantity, rawer and more grassroots outlet for Ruby news than Ruby Inside. There’s some overlap with Ruby Inside, but there’s also a more grassroots audience to go for. It surprises me how many well known and established Rubyists aren’t that familiar with Ruby Inside (despite it having over 15,000 subscribers now!) and perhaps they’re looking for a less sanitized experience. RubyFlow is it.

The software behind RubyFlow is a basic Rails application. Not much code. It still uses the default SQLite3 database (!) but it’s working very well so far. No advanced features, no search (actually, there is, but it’s not exposed yet), and it’s really clean. It’s deployed using SwitchPipe which makes it easy to scale later on and keeps it fast now. I could roll out similar sites for other niches pretty quickly now.. so if you want to work on a collaborative weblog (in the classic sense, a site where you link to other stuff) with me, get in touch!

(Update: And PythonFlow too..)

Whatever Happens, Sifl and Olly Are Still The Coolest Sock Puppets Ever

That said, Loren Feldman’s attempts are pretty hilarious in their own right.

Google App Engine’s Limited Beta Disadvantages Those Who Count Most

Sometime in the small hours, Google launched Google App Engine (and more info), a Web application hosting stack/service hosted by Google. Released in the Californian evening, by British morning-time all the beta places were taken.

Cleverly, Google has made the SDK available to all, so we can still get a glimpse at it, but the first 10,000 or so people to sign up got a strong first mover advantage. It’s like the early players in an MMORPG like World of Warcraft. They know the lay of the land, have the exposure, and have key advantages over newcomers.

First mover advantage leads not just to tiered communities, but disadvantages for those offering limited betas. On Ruby Inside, I’m offered scoops or exclusive news ahead of time. If I then see the story elsewhere before publishing date, I’ll drop it. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch does the same, as do many in various media (especially newspapers!) I bet if Google had broken embargo with Arrington, he’d be playing down the story today.

Similarly, if I can’t get access to a technology while a whole group of other people are raving about it, I’m not going to be all that interested. Yahoo Pipes, Blogger, Skype, Twitter and Flickr are good examples of services that were open in their early days and went on to rock. Orkut, Joost, I’m In Like With You and Jaiku are good examples of services that were locked. Precisely. I can’t evangelize something I can’t use.

There is a need for some segregation. Google doesn’t have infinite resources, and allowing 10,000 people in on day one is a ballsy move. The problem is those who rely on intimate, up to date industry knowledge are missing out. Writers, developers, advisors, and analysts need early access to stay on the ball in their field. Apple and Microsoft do a good job of this with their membership programs, but we need the same tiering in the Web industry. I’d pay $x per year for early / beta access to the key releases from Web companies, because I’ve always been one to evangelize, promote and use new and cutting edge technologies. I’m not just “curious,” but an active participant in the game.

Even if pay-for-play seems distasteful, why not give long-term users of other Google services a quicker route in? They did this with Adwords (and, I think, Adsense) and it allowed long-time users, those who are most likely to understand the service and evangelize it, in fast.

As it is, I’ve lost most of my interest in it already. Sound like sour grapes? Maybe, but I’ll always admit I’m human, and Google have a lot more goodwill to lose than I do.

How To Be Content With Your Life in Tech (or Why Your Work With Web 2.0 Is Not A Waste of Time)

A couple of weeks ago, Paul Robinson, the organizer of the excellent BarCamp Manchester, wrote “The Vision Thing“, a piece where he ponders on the banality of the Web-related industry. Andy Mitchell quickly followed up with “10 Reasons I Hate Where the Web is At” and encouraged me to post a response. This discussion somewhat echoes two posts I wrote a year ago, Why I’d Leave The Web Industry: It’s Hard to Excel and Why I’d Leave The Web Industry: It’s Ephemeral, but I want to recover the issues since my personal views have changed significantly since I wrote those posts.

Both Paul and Andy talk about “what people want” quite a bit, so let’s start there.

What People Want

The science of “wants”: First comes the self, and the extension of the self in the forms of family and friends. Our innate, animalistic goal is to satisfy the self and, generally, to perpetuate the self through reproduction. Those modern men who ponder on the meaning of life typically come up with one of three possibilities: nothing, contentment in the present, or the advancement of humanity.

I do not personally choose just one of those possibilities, but treat them as a collective whole in as close as I can currently get to my written life goal:

There’s no pre-defined or currently deducible meaning to life, so aim for contentment. To be content, advance humanity.

Unfortunately, people without the amounts of spare time needed to come to a similar conclusion for themselves tend to focus more on the short term buzz. That’s usually by beating other people at things, whether by accruing more money, possession or fame than their perceived competition. In animalistic terms, and particularly in the way our brains are wired as animals, this behavior is very natural, and was necessary for us to get to where we are now. The drive to beat others got us to the moon and resulted in the creation of the Internet (originally conceived to provide a communications system that could withstand significant attack by others).

From Resource Competition to Species Advancement (or from Star Wars to Star Trek: TNG)

With the advent of the Internet, however, we still live in a competition driven world, but the Internet changes the dynamic of life to such a great deal that we should move more to a system driven by personal contentment in the form of advancing humanity. It’s no longer necessary for us to be better than someone else in absolute terms to eat or to have enough money to survive. The bar is set very low for survival in the West now.

Consider that the technology advancements between 1600-1850 meant the average European citizen no longer needed to farm their own land for personal sustenance (indeed, it became inefficient for them to do so). In the same way, advancements in the last 50 years should mean that the average citizen no longer needs to be ruthlessly competitive or wealth-driven to live a good life.

Since the bar for absolute survival is so low now, we can focus on personal contentment through advancing both ourselves and the human species. Sadly, our cultural evolution is not that quick, and we’re trapped in a mindset of competing with others for plentiful resources. This will change, and it’s not too far fetched to imagine humanity, in the future, acting in the somewhat utopian fashion of the humans in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a world with a hierarchy defined by experience and knowledge, and a shared drive to advance the state of humanity. Even Bill Gates has realized this, and he deserves an immense amount of credit for taking the evolution from personally being driven by competition to being driven by helping to advance humanity, but it’s taken many tens of billions of dollars and a lot of missteps for Bill to get that far.

Sidebar: Wikipedia has been a very small demonstration of how a significant minority can advance the state of humanity (in a very small way) while implementing systems to prevent the domination of competition.

Good Techies are Better Than Doctors (And Here’s Why)

Technology is the answer to man’s problems, and technology has been the main driver of social change and quality of life improvements in the last 500 years. There’s no distinction to be drawn between altruism, philanthropy, and technology. To push forward the state of technology is to push forward the state of humanity. Without the right technologies available, society can not operate at a higher level.

Working in the technology industry, therefore, is extremely noble, as long as you are working with a team, company, or on technologies that truly advance the state of things. If your work helps to advance technology, you are ultimately helping the human species develop further and ultimately improve the quality of life for billions of people down the line. You might not consider yourself as noble as, say, a routine doctor or a care worker, but in terms of improving the state of the species (rather than resolving the personal problems of individuals) you are actually doing a lot more for the species!

If this sounds like wet, liberal, techno-optimism, consider the history of technology so far. Advancements in one field have encouraged or led to bigger advancements in other fields, which then lead on to further advancements, and so on. If it were not for, say, the invention of just the printing press, our quality of life now would be significantly reduced from the reality. If it were not for, say, the invention of the transistor, ditto. Such arguments can be made regarding all but the most useless of technologies.

Web 2.0 Is Just A “Tag” - Don’t Blame It!

The interactions between technology, society, and our animalistic human nature relate to the here and now of the Web industry, though it takes a big mental jump, but much like the segue between the monkey throwing the bone and the space station shot in 2001, I’ll crudely jump straight to Web 2.0, the here and now of the Web technology industry.

If you’ve been using the Web in an involved way over the past few years, you’ll be familiar with the concept of folksonomies or tagging. Let’s say you want to bookmark this essay. You might give it tags of blog, english, british, opinion, society, evolution, culture, and technology. In much the same way, we “tag” eras, events, people, and movements in an implicit way.

The movement behind social Web applications, the proliferation of advanced JavaScript and XMLHTTPRequest usage has been given the tag of “Web 2.0.” Web 2.0 is not a specific thing, event or technology. It’s a vague concept, like the tags blogs, evolution, culture, technology or funny. “Web 2.0″ is a tag we use to relate technologies, people, concepts and ideas as a single unit.

As such, Web 2.0 does not deserve condemnation. People do. If someone is developing useless technologies or appropriating the generous contributions of others for solely personal financial gain, condemn them. Don’t condemn “Web 2.0″ because the technologies and advancements made under its name are helping to benefit the human species. The social ties invigorated by sites such as FaceBook are bound to result in significant social advances, whether in the way they allow like-minded people to co-operate on more important projects and new technology developments, or even in the way they improve the social outlook and morale of non-technical workers.

Geeking for Geeks? It’s All Good

Andy Mitchell complains a perceived “loss of direction” in the Web industry, along with a focus on geek-to-geek developments. That is, he feels geeks are primarily developing new technologies primarily for other geeks. When you look at recent Web industry technology developments like RSS, OPML, AJAX, and Rails, this is an understandable viewpoint, but misses the point in my mind, because even currently insignificant technologies can have significant future effects.

Donald Knuth, perhaps the world’s most respected computer scientist, recently said that he does not consider any events or developments in computer science to be “significant.” He says “all progress [..] has been incremental.”

The development of various forms of metallurgy had, at the time, no significantly conceived uses for the general populace. Many involved with the early development of computers, likewise saw no significant advantages for humanity in their development. When you’re close to the coal face, it’s easy not to anticipate what the future may do with your work. Fortunately, it’s not necessary that you anticipate for this either. Charles Babbage didn’t invent the Internet. Alexander Graham Bell didn’t invent the cellphone or text messaging. And Dave Winer (inventor of RSS) certainly won’t have been the inventor of whatever technology people use in 50 years to subscribe to news (if they still do so).

Technologies designed “for geeks” have a canny way of being used in the development of softer, mass market tools and technologies that have more significant benefits to humanity. RSS, OPML, and AJAX might not be having any significant benefit on humanity outside of the geek sphere right now, but the questions such technologies raise have powerful, far-reaching effects. RSS led to podcasting, and podcasting has led to the concept of allowing people to subscribe to radio shows on-demand. Lots of people do that now, but do they care about RSS? Not one jot!

The continual improvement of technology occurs, and will continue to occur, on a much larger scale with other niche technologies. If you develop a niche technology for geeks only, you can still pat yourself on the back. One day, someone might use your technology, or might be inspired by your technology, to develop something that stands on the shoulders of giants and helps the rest of humanity in a far more direct way. Without your work, however, that progression may not occur.

Making The Bleeding Edge Sharper and the Tech Echo Chamber

Andy Mitchell opines:

We on the bleeding edge are effectively just making it sharper, and in the process further distancing ourselves from the mainstream (and I’ve been as guilty as the next bloke…). This creates an echo chamber, where only other occupants of the bleeding edge are talking/regurgitating; whipping up more enthusiasm for the aimless evolution. More disconcertingly from the POV of our well-being, this disconnect from reality creates an unpleasant sensation that what we do doesn’t actually matter to our friends and peers; and the truth is, it doesn’t.

As much as most technological advancements help humanity (or will - which is just as good), sometimes people promote particular ideas as being more important than they should be and fail to see the big picture. This is particularly true of most people in the Web 2.0 / Web development sphere right now. While most technological advancements will have an incremental benefit at some point down the line, these benefits are more likely to be realized by newcomers to the industry or those who work outside of it, rather than those in the “echo chamber” Andy considers.

Consider Steve Jobs. In the 1970s, Jobs could not have been called a geek or a technologist in any forms of the words. Yet, with his confidence in his personal style, his appreciation of both form and function, and his general knowledge of what a computer could do (or could be made to do), he managed to steer Steve Wozniak to develop the Apple II, and later, with a much larger team, the Macintosh. Jobs was not a member of any sort of technology elite or involved in a geeky echo chamber. Jobs was not at the bleeding edge and making it sharper. He was starting a whole new game, fuelled mostly by his own personal style and ignorance of how the “tech world should be!”

The Steve Jobs’ of the future, who will take our existing technologies, and turn them into something magical and new, are also unlikely to be existing well-known tech luminaries. Instead, they’ll be people with broad interests, a deep understanding of how humans think (or at least a very deep sense of how they think - and believe other people should feel the same way), as well as an understanding of how current technology can be forced into the new roles they’ve envisioned.

As such, the people who are “making the bleeding edge sharper” need to feel better about their work. They might not become a famous tech luminary who radically changes an industry, but like anyone involved in the development and advancement of things like Linux, RSS, electronics, and programming languages, they’re helping progress everything at an incremental level.

Become an Advancer and Be Remarkable

So, at the end of this essay, we’re back to “what we want.” Let’s try and nail down why some people are unhappy and work on a solution.

If you’re unhappy with the tech industry, as so many seem to be nowadays, it shouldn’t be because you feel that technology doesn’t advance the human race (it does). If you’re unhappy it should be because you’re not advancing. Become an advancer!

Being an advancer doesn’t mean you can’t be doing a regular job. You don’t need to be a Dave Winer, a computer scientist, or an entrepreneur. Someone needs to maintain the networks and PCs for motor insurance companies, or write the stock control system for Wal*Mart, but if you sit at the same job for ten years without actively contributing to the advance of technology, of course you’ll be unhappy with the tech industry! If you’re working on the stock control system for Wal*Mart and you consistently fail to innovate or improve anything, you’re not advancing! Doing these jobs is not a bad thing in and of itself. It’s only when you’re implicitly committed to not advancing at all that you’re dying on the inside.

(source)

In 2003, Seth Godin, a well known marketer and inventor of numerous marketing concepts, wrote The Purple Cow. In the book, he stresses that it’s necessary for you and your business to be “remarkable.” You need to be, as Seth Godin says, a Purple Cow.

If you’re working as that fictional programmer working on the Wal*Mart stock control system, and you’re an “advancer,” you’re the one on the team who sees new ways to solve the old problems. You’ve got ideas on making the system more parallel. You’re the one looking into new technologies, new programming languages, and new protocols, to see if there are existing technologies you can tailor to make your life easier. You’re not the guy who just goes to work to make money to afford grits each morning.

Now, some people who are entrepreneurs, tech luminaries, or generally intelligent people like most of those in the Web 2.0 industry like to think they’re Purple Cows. But in terms of the tech echo chamber, they’re not. Some of these people think they’re advancing, but are really just chasing money or fame. Inventing yet another social networking site that doesn’t really push the industry forward is not advancement. Sucking up to your chosen tech luminary of the moment by flattering their latest creations is not advancement. Trying to convince people that the programming language or IDE you use is the best is not advancement.

Don’t Measure Deltas: Look Back Over Years

Paul Robinson says:

What the hell are we doing in this industry? Why do we spend so much time talking about Ajax and definitions of “Web 2.0” and virtually no time whatsoever trying to work out what people want? Is this just all an aspect of the industry being over-run by complete geeks, or is the industry lacking any sense of philosophy? Are we being over-run by ideas and concepts from the advertising industry and mass media generally, because they’re becoming more dominant in the industry? Should I turn my dev environment off and go and do something less boring instead?

Paul is a Purple Cow who doesn’t know it. He put on BarCamp Manchester (at some personal sacrifice), an amazing event that had significant effects that he did not anticipate. Like the unrecognized developer of a minor technology that gets magnified into something greater in the future, he sees things from the coal face. He’s so “into” the tech industry that he cannot see the woods for the trees. This is natural because humans are hideously bad at noticing incremental changes!

The lack of ability to notice incremental changes, especially those we have effected ourselves, is a reason why goal setting is a great improvement technique. If I do something that benefits the technology industry by a tiny increment, I might not feel it, but if I have a goal in place that means I’ll commit to more improvements for, say, a year, then I should notice the difference over that year. Likewise, Paul might not recognize his own incremental contributions on a one-by-one basis, but it he keeps hammering away at it, he’ll be blown away after a while.

I think Paul (and Andy, for that matter) needs to recognize that he’s a Purple Cow, he’s an advancer, and he’s done some good, but that as an advancer, he needs to keep the heat turned up. He needs to keep advancing, whether by creating more tech events, or by retreating and developing some new technologies, or just by posting inspiring blog posts to keep the rest of us going.

I’ve recognized this issue in my own work with Ruby Inside, Feed Digest, and Code Snippets. I’m no tech luminary (far from it!) but it’s only two years on that I can now see what a massive effect Ruby Inside has had on the Ruby community (and, dare I say it, “industry”). There are companies, libraries, and applications that would not exist today if it were not for Ruby Inside. This does not mean I deserve the credit for “creating” them, but that I had a tiny, incremental part in the whole chain. It’s like how Bill Gates’ great-great-great grandfather couldn’t claim any real credit for building the biggest software company in the world, even though if it were not for him, Microsoft would not exist.

The same goes with Feed Digest. I developed it just for myself, but a few years on, I can see how tens of thousands of people have used it to advance their own situation. Some people swear by it, and others use it for reasonably important uses (for example, it came in very useful in one instance just after Hurricane Katrina for publicizing feeds regarding mission persons.) It is very hard, but I can recognize that while I’m not famous, not rich, and have no real respect in the “echo chamber” I have made significant contributions within certain areas of the tech industry. This encourages me to keep advancing. In a very small and incremental way, I’m improving the world, by helping to create new technologies and services, and I’m ultimately a tiny, but essential, brick in a very big wall of human improvement.

So, take one thing from all of this:

When you advance, no matter how little, you take humanity with you. Go with it.

Addition: Think of Hugh McLeod when you think about being remarkable. I don’t know him personally but he doesn’t seem to have much technical talent, design talent, or anything like that (even his drawings are crude by “artistic” standards), but he’s still well known in this industry because he’s a Purple Cow. He says things you’re “not meant to say” and he says them in a convincing, exciting way. He’s fresh, original, and his talent shines through that avenue rather than in any traditional way. We can try to do this too.

Safari 3.1 and Gmail: Unusable?

Not a very exciting post this, but I just did the latest Apple Software Update to Safari 3.1 and.. Gmail is now totally unusable. Whenever you press Shift or Cmd while in the main composition window, it jumps the focus to whichever previous text box you used. Sometimes if you use Cmd+A to select all of the text in the e-mail, you end up with the whole page getting highlighted and selected instead. Naturally, I’m unable to type any capital letters in my mails either, since pressing Shift sends you off somewhere else.

I’m really hoping this is something specific to my install, but I have nothing wacky installed, and Gmail works fine in other browsers (even other Google services seem to be okay - Calendar is fine for example.) The trouble seems to be constrained to the “rich text” view, with the regular text boxes working okay. If you switch from using a rich text composition style to “plain text” then that also works okay.

Update 1

On the plus side, this has forced me to give Firefox 3 Beta 4 a go, and.. it’s really good! It’s a real leap forward for Firefox on OS X. So, heck, I might just switch to Firefox and leave Safari to sort itself out (or Google, who might well be at fault here.)

Update 2 - I’m sticking with Firefox 3!

Okay, after an hour of use, I want to thank Apple and Google! Firefox 3 is so much better than Safari (and Firefox 2) that I’m going to stick with it full-time. It uses less memory than Safari, feels a lot faster, has a nicer interface, supports multiple search engines, and currently gets my thumbs up as the best browser of the moment. I can’t believe it feels faster than Safari, but there you go.

Update 3 - Lots of other people are having the same issue

There are already other references to this problem online. Firstly, at the Apple Discussion boards. There’s also a reference here and a video demonstrating the problems here.

The Police’s Disturbing New Campaign: If You Suspect Anyone Of Anything, Dob Them In For Being A Terrorist

The Metropolitan Police (London’s police force) is actively “asking members of the public to report any suspicious behaviour” in a bid to counter terrorism. They’re doing this with a poster, sticker, and radio campaign. The radio ad is particularly creepy. Listen to the MP3 or check out this script:

FEMALE: How d’you tell the difference between someone just video-ing crowded place and someone who’s checking it out for a terrorist attack? How can you tell if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or if they’re planning to make a bomb? What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously? How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person, or a terrorist?

MALE: The answer is, you don’t have to. If you call the confidential Anti-Terrorist Hotline on 0800 789 321, the specialist officers you speak to will analyse the information. They’ll decide if and how to follow it up. You don’t have to be sure. If you suspect it, report it.

When I first heard this on the radio, I thought it was a parody, until it ended without a punchline. The Metropolitan Police, or whichever fascists came up with this campaign, are out of their tree. Remember that these “specialist officers” are the same jokers who couldn’t figure out the difference between a Brazilian and an Ethiopian! What chance they have discerning between someone taking a picture of the pigeons at Trafalgar Square versus a terrorist strapped up with C4 is anyone’s guess.

The poster campaign also highlights ways to spot a terrorist. Terrorists apparently “use computers” and “need to travel.” Do you know someone who travels but is vague about where they are going? If you do, they could be a terrorist and you need to grass them up! Of course, they could just be having an affair, be embarrassed about being a country dancing club, organizing a surprise birthday party, or going to get the results of an HIV test, but there’s nothing like helping the fascists screw up someone’s life with unnecessary surveillance and intrusion.

The Met might start to regret this campaign when people are dobbing in their “suspicious” neighbours and co-workers for trivial misdemeanours, although callers beware; calling the police with information could quite easily put YOU on their radar too! What a great system.

Amongst all the fear-mongering, however, the Met have a positive message for us:

Terrorists won’t succeed if suspicious activity is reported by members of the public, and that somebody could be you.

It’s lucky, then, that 9/11 and 7/7 didn’t “succeed,” because suspicious activity was noted in both cases. Wait, those terrorist attacks actually did succeed? This campaign is just another reminder, then, that the Met Police, along with our own government, are attempting to give everyone the heeby-jeebies about something that a) rarely happens, b) has killed less UK civilians than UK soldiers who have died in Iraq since 2003, and c) is a cute political pawn that keeps the British public fearful and suggestible.