cat /dev/brain > /www/blog

What Google's Chrome OS means

2009-07-08T23:32:00.003+01:00

I've never had to do a software update on my dishwasher, remove a virus from my T.V., if I want to have a cup of tea at a friend's house I don't need to take my kettle and I'm unlikely to lose priceless memories if my microwave breaks down. The PC is by far the most complicated device in the home because it has all these problems.

Right now, if you work in a reasonably well run, large organization, I'd say your desktops are fairly well sorted out, backups are done automatically, you can roam with your login to any machine to get your desktop where you like, you can't mess much up or if you do the desktop can be reset within a day if not sooner. Data and/or desktop is available remotely. At least that's how I run the desktops I manage. Fundamentally I'd say in large organizations there is no real problem with desktop IT.

Now what about the other end of the spectrum? non-tech families, small non-tech businesses with no IT staff etc. How much backup is going on? can you roam from one machine to another in the house/organization? can machines be replaced quickly? what about remote access to documents/photos etc. - probably not.

It doesn't seem that either Microsoft or Apple have made massive inroads into this problem. Even with products like Apple's Time Capsule, your backups are in the same physical building as your Macs, so if your house burns down or your equipment is stolen, everything is lost.

I find that I already mostly have my data in the 'cloud' so to speak. I regularly switch between 3 systems my home desktop, my personal laptop and my work desktop. For any notes, lists, documents, spreadsheets I use Google docs & spreadsheets. I put photos on Facebook and Flickr. My bookmarks are in Xmarks and Delicious. My email is available via the web or IMAP. My programming code is generally stored on servers that I can SSH into from anywhere. In most cases I can get all the info I need, from anywhere in world, with a machine with a web browser and SSH terminal. There are a few exceptions, I can't easily access my music from anywhere and the photos I haven't published aren't available - though these are not unsolvable problems.

I think my experience has shown that you can store your data largely in the cloud. Google's Chrome OS, properly marketed, could popularize this type of computing. If Google provides a system on which you can't install programs, where all data is stored in the cloud, then people would start doing this. The benefits would be, the machine it's self is disposable, if the machine dies, you can buy another and no data would be lost - since it's in the cloud, being looked after by people who know what they are doing.

This is certainly not a new idea - though no-one of note has tried to push it. Microsoft and Apple were never likely to push it since it goes against the ecosystems they have created.

What do you think? is this Google's plan or are they are doing something else? What about offline? or does that matter anymore? Will people trust Google and others with their data?

Cutting features is not scaling

2009-05-13T21:03:00.007+01:00

In July 2008, Twitter limited unauthenticated requests to 100/hour by IP. This stopped people from working around the per user limit which by then had also been raised to 100.

In April 2009, put a limit of follows per day, the most obvious reason for this is so that it puts a cap on "spam" following. I can see some other reasons though. On reason is to stop people following large numbers of people, I could see the logic that people won't just be limited to following 365,000 new people a year, but more likely they will just give up on the practice altogether.

Now twitter is limiting who some of your updates go to, so that replies don't go to most of your followers. This of course has caused a massive backlash typified by the #fixreplies trending topic on twitter. Twitter initially said it was doing this because it was confusing for users, even though it had been the default for months. Now twitter is saying it is a technical issue which makes more sense. I can see that when someone posts a reply now they will have vastly fewer places to update that which will cut the load. I suspect that under the hood twitter are redesigning database and this change is baked into it (Marshall Kirkpatrick from RWW has some thoughts on why that might be).

I can only think of one reason they might be changing it, and that's to allow threaded replies. Twitter now has in_reply_to_status_id field and clients are being updated to support it so you precisely what something was a reply to. You can't currently get the thread of replies easily. I wonder if twitter is moving toward storing these replies to an entry somewhere for easy retrieval so we can get the threaded replies.

Twitter is known to have various scaling issues from time to time and with these changes and other they seem to be limiting several features in order to put off hitting limit until another day. They don't seem have definite plan for scaling and cutting more and more features is not a solution. If you look at facebook for example which must have similar issues, they seem to have solved how to scale since they are at 200 million users and rarely have any downtime.

Twitter has about 30 employees, it seems they could do with some people that really know how to scale big sites i.e. people from facebook, myspace, friendster etc. but if you look at their jobs page, there doesn't seem to opening for a scaling expert. It's perhaps because they have the right people for already, but if that's the case, they should be scaling everything, not turning off features they can't make work.

Facebook pages vs. Twitter

2009-03-05T23:24:00.004Z

Continuing the theme from my last post (which was 4.5 months ago!), people are now saying that Facebook's new "pages" features will compete with Twitter (and here)

It doesn't sound like what Facebook is doing will be much different than before, that said, often initially boring changes turn out to have interesting effects. Facebook is essentially improving it's pages system, so that you can follow various brands on Facebook. This is similar in way to going to a company's site and posting a comment on their forum, though without the sign up hassle, different interfaces and presumably I will be able to track replies better. Even with these simplifications, however, it will not be as easy as posting to Twitter. Facebook's approach is akin to looking up something using Yahoo's directory rather than searching for it on Google. On Facebook I will have to find somewhere appropriate to post my message (if it exists) and then post and probably not post if someone has made a similar comment.

User Interface
Twitter's system is, no system. It's the simplest system, since it a text box and button (like Google). So on Twitter I just post. I don't need to read what others said before I post. It's likely my followers haven't seen that yet and even if they have, multiple people saying the same thing strengthens the message anyway. Even though I haven't categorized my message through the power of search.twitter.com people will be able to find it, it may appear as part of a trending topic and someone from the brand can find if they so wish as can anyone else via keyword searches.

Immediacy
I can't imagine that Facebook's system is going to allow quick comments due to not having a limit on the message length and the categories system (as mentioned above). It seems for this reason Twitter is likely to remain the home of breaking news.

Discussion Types
There is another key difference in the way I expect people will use the sites other than the interface. On Twitter I am primary broadcasting messages to people on a variety of topics as they are to me. In Facebook's system, much like in a forum, I will be talking to a community of people that know the topic very well. This will make the process more daunting and less rewarding. For example, imagine going to a Britney Spears group to complain about her music when you know the group is full of Britney's Fans. You still want to make the comment but probably to a similarly like minded set of friends (such as your Twitter friends).

Freedom of speech
On Twitter I can say anything and only I can delete my comments. On Facebook, I expect as in common with most of their site, page owners will control the discussion allowing them to delete comments they don't particularly like. Brands will like this since they have some control, but users are likely to get frustrated by it.

In general Twitter and Facebook are so different I can't see the two competing on this. Twitter is going to have more regular, quicker, critical comments which are publicly searchable. Facebook's method is likely to attract a smaller proportion of it's users, who may in turn maybe more detailed due to Facebook's lack of message length limits and probably less critical.

Flickr shouldn't fear Facebook

2008-10-20T23:28:00.002+01:00

A few days ago Stan Schroeder of Mashable posted a entry entitled Facebook Trumps Most Photo Sharing Sites With 10 Billion Photos. In it he says about Flickr that "ultimately people use Facebook for the same thing - sharing photos with their friends" and that "It’ll be interesting to see what photo sharing social networks will do to differentiate from Facebook".

It is possible that Stan still uses Flickr in this way, but I suspect many people already use large social networks (like Facebook) if they only want to share photos with their friends.

This is not a problem for Flickr, however. Flickr has established a community of people who want to share their photos with the world. Links to photos on Twitter or blogs often use Flickr for that purpose because twitter and blogs are by their nature public and Facebook is not. Through Flickr I have (re-)discovered photography, Flickr has a fascinating array of photos on it which can be easily found by going to the interestingness pages or one of numerous groups. Flickr also has a number of features which support it as a place to share photos with the world, not just your friends:

Tags
Public Groups
The API and various applications built on it (e.g. bighugelabs)
A community of photographers
Geo tagging
Search

(Facebook also has something called tags but that is for tagging people, which makes it useful for sharing with friends but is not the same as what Flickr uses tags for)

In short, Flickr is a way to share your photos with the world and Facebook is way to share photos with your friends.

Disqus

2008-05-02T17:02:00.002+01:00

It seems everyone is talking about disqus these days so I have added it to my blog.

Updated Digg stats

2008-04-16T23:14:00.003+01:00

There is a new article on ReadWriteWeb now featuring updated Digg graphs that I gave them, "The Decline and Fall of Tech on Digg".

phpMyAdmin 2.11.5 / PMASA-2008-1

2008-03-01T13:41:00.001Z

phpMyAdmin 2.11.5 has been released today which contains the fix to a security bug I reported, details are in the security announcement.

More Digg stats

2008-02-08T17:36:00.000Z

As a follow up to my last entry, Tech stories percentage dropping on Digg", I thought I would do some more digg stats.
First up is the digg stories by number of popular stories rather than percentages:I also looked at what Technology is made up of. It perhaps not surprising that a lot of the news is about Apple (dark blue) or Linux (light blue), with the generic "Industry News" making up the majority:
and here is the same data by percentage:
I wanted to get some of the data for submissions though it seems I can't get data from the API for that from before the 30th December, last year.

Tech stories percentage dropping on Digg

2008-02-05T19:39:00.001Z

There was a story on Mashable today about the number of tech stories on Digg dropping, though the method they used was by looking at wayback machine results. However since Digg have all this information available in their API, we can get a much more accurate picture of what has happened. So here is a graph of the percentage of stories in each 'Container'. Each data point is for a full week of stories, so this should cover every story since the 1st of January 2006 until the 3rd of February 2008. (click on the image to view it full size)

Loss of 25m child benefit records

2007-11-21T21:15:00.000Z

I couldn't quite believe it when I heard that HM Revenue and Customs have 'lost' 25 million child benefit records. It does seem that the data was password protected, but that presumably means something like a zip file or MS Excel password, then this is akin to losing a suit case with millions of pounds in it and then mentioning it had one of those tiny suit case padlocks on it.

It should be clear to any organization, that handles this kind of data, especially in this volume, that security is of paramount importance. Here some the security measures I think should have been in place and would have prevented this from happening:

No one should be able to download large portions of the data without special procedures for data security being enforced (say more than 1,000 records)
Any data that is transfered should be encrypted with strong cryptography. The key(s) to this encryption should be sent separately to the data and only after the data is acknowledged to arrived safely.
All data of this type should be sent by a secure transportation company such as Securicor.
If at all possible the data should never leave the secure site where it is normally resident
If anyone requests data the bare minimum that they require should be provided with no extra fields.
Anyone who goes anywhere near this kind of data should be given comprehensive security training.

Even if all but one of these measures were to fail, this breach would still not have happened.

The sad fact is that any security professional or group should have been able to tell them this (and whole lot more for other scenarios), but for some reason HM Revenue and Customs didn't take this type of advice or maybe didn't implement it properly.

Before this story surfaced I had already been very skeptical of the ID cards project. It would be very hard to keep this data safe. If the data were ever lost it would be a lot more serious than what has been lost in this case, both in the number of people and the amount of data about each person. I am now even more skeptical since it seems the government can't even handle quite basic data security concepts like the ones I have outlined.

What is Oracle's Linux strategy?

2007-08-07T23:19:00.000+01:00

On the 25th of October 2006 Oracle announced it's 'Oracle Enterprise Linux' program, which essentially takes RedHat's work from RedHat Enterprise Linux and recompiles it to make Oracle Enterprise Linux. This has of course been done before and is perfectly legal. It has been done before for free in the form of CentOS and others. Oracle's main selling point seemed to be a reduction in support costs, though many people pointed out that at the time, this is small potatoes compared to Oracle's massive costs (Enterprise Edition costs $40,000 per CPU), so what was the point?

Recently Mark Shuttleworth was quoted as saying "They are hiring too many people just to deliver patches. My assumption is that they are on track to fork and build their own distribution." Now you have to wonder if they really want to get into distribution race to compete with RedHat and Novell (the most established enterprise players).

Oracle don't have much experience selling operating systems, so, what I think they are doing instead is creating a platform that the Oracle Database and other applications can run on.

I imagine most big companies have local staff that know Oracle and they put it on whatever machines they normally use for that type of thing be that Linux, Solaris, Windows or something else. These companies then have all the staff and infrastructure to maintain it.

In smaller companies, what they do seems less clear to me, they might not have a full time Oracle person or even a systems person. Given these types of failings they might go with something they think they can handle such as Microsoft's SQL server or MySQL.

As an alternative in these smaller companies Oracle could provide a complete software stack with a configured OS, Oracle and management facilities. Oracle could then maintain this system remotely (for a fee) for the company. The advantage of this approach is that Oracle can push their products to anyone who can afford them regardless of what local staffing they have.

The other problem they would avoid with this approach is, trying to get fixes against MS Windows. With Linux they know they can develop a fix in house and push it directly to the customer, if they need to, but with Windows they need to wait on Microsoft to provide a fix which probably takes a long time. Also Microsoft competes with them in the same market so they have no reason to co-operate particularly well. This would not be problem if these small companies were using Linux, but it seems a lot of small businesses use Windows exclusively. If Oracle provides and manages the Linux box, then it can sell to these companies that would otherwise be using Windows, as all the customer needs to know is that it is the Oracle Box and Oracle will fix it if it breaks.

Vertical integration is the term for this I think.

RedHat doubling cost to desktop users?

2007-07-27T16:08:00.000+01:00

We have been using RedHat Enterprise Linux 4 Desktop at work for a couple of years now, it starting to get a bit old so we were looking to upgrade our systems to version 5. The problem is that even though RedHat claim on their website that version 4 and 5 are comparable for the Desktop version, really they are not.

RedHat have taken virtually all of the development libraries out Desktop and put them in the 'Workstation Option' so you can't really compile anything. Gcc is there, but is missing g++ so you can't compile any C++ programs. Emacs, PHP, Subversion and Nmap have also gone into the Workstation option.

I can't really understand this, surely most users of desktop are going to use these applications, and compile programs from source, as it is you can't even install the Nvidia binary driver due to the lack of the kernel-devel package. So basically now if you were using RHEL4 Desktop you now need RHEL5 Desktop with the Workstation 'option' which costs over twice as much ($179 vs. $80)

Safari for Windows

2007-06-16T21:35:00.000+01:00

At a fairly otherwise uneventful WWDC this week Apple released a beta version of it's Safari web browser for Windows. Apple claims that it wants to grow Safari's market share.

Even if Safari was to gain mass popularity on Windows I can't see that it would help Apple very much, they couldn't for example introduce adverts like Opera did as this would annoy users and charging for a web browser is almost unthinkable nowadays. Firefox made a rumoured $72m in 2005 from Google by using it as the default search engine, though Apple which has a revenue of around $21bn a year is unlikely to be very interested in this particularly, especially after the browser development and marketing costs have been taken out.

I think the main reason for pushing Safari onto the Windows platform therefore is to create more website compatibility with Safari. At present I imagine that a great number of sites do not work in Safari due to the difficulty of testing a site for Safari compatibility if you don't have a Mac. Introducing Safari for Windows will mostly cure this since I expect most web designers who don't have a Mac use Windows or at least have fairly easy access to a Windows machine. This should already be making a difference with this weekend almost being 'the weekend of Safari fixes for vanity sites'.

Steve Jobs claims that Safari has 5% of the browser market and he wants to get to 15%, currently 2% seems to be a much more realistic estimate at Safari's market share from the sites I looked at. The penetration of Firefox is such that it seems very unlikely that someone starting or redesigning a website now would not make it work in Firefox and generally assume that sites that don't work in Firefox now a due to the design being done several years ago and the company that runs the website does not have anyone to fix the site in house. If Safari can get this magic 15% of browser users the same would happen for Safari in that people wouldn't think of designing a site that didn't work in Safari.

So why is this important? Well of course the Mac needs a browser that works, but if that was the only problem then Apple could have just converted Firefox to be more like a Mac application, or they could support or, more likely, fork the existing Camino project. So that can't be the reason.

Firefox however, is probably too heavy to go on a mobile device, so it's obvious therefore then that the only reason to have Safari as a well supported platform would be for it's use in the iPhone. If Safari works with as many sites as Firefox does now it would be very good for the iPhone, in fact if you think about this for a while it is absolutely essential that the iPhone support virtually every website out there and this is a least part of the plan to do that, if not the whole plan.

Bill Hilf Interview

2007-05-14T22:35:00.000+01:00

There is a article on the Bangkok Post in which the head of Microsoft's Linux Labs, Bill Hilf apparently sets out some 'Controversial statements' and presumably these are supposed to hurt Linux and open source in some way. However looking at what he says, he doesn't really say anything bad or wrong about Linux except when he just doesn't make any sense.

'He said that most customers run a distribution - RedHat, Novell, Suse or Mandriva. Most of the work on maintaining the Linux kernel is done by developers working for these distributions, he noted'

Well this is good isn't it? What he says means that people work full time on maintaining the Linux Kernel to make and keep it the highly reliable, fast and stable workhorse it is today. It's a bit like what Microsoft do except the Linux kernel doesn't require every PC you buy to come with it loaded whether you like or not, is very stable, works on lots of CPU architectures, doesn't try to lock you into to anything and it's Open Source.

"They are full-time employees, with 401K stock options. Some work for IBM or Oracle. What does that mean? It means that Linux doesn't exist any more in 2007. There is no free software movement. If someone says Linux is about Love, Peace and Harmony, I would tell them to do their research. There is no free software movement any more. There is big commercial [firms] like IBM and there is small commercial [firms] like Ubuntu,"

If Linux isn't about Love, Peace and Harmony then what do you call lots of companies big and small getting along and putting their collective efforts into something they all benefit from (the Linux Kernel). It's quite possible on the Microsoft Campus they don't have a word for this type of thing since it doesn't come up in anything they do. As for 'Linux doesn't exist in 2007', well that's clearly not true, I'm using it right now and latest kernel prepatch was released only yesterday (2.6.22-rc1), so it definitely alive, in fact I imagine the Linux kernel is being worked on at a much higher rate than the Windows kernel is.

"People ask me, why are you doing this? Why did you do the Novell deal? Why aren't you doing Office on Linux? The summary is quite simple. Growth of the ecosystem equals growth of the [Windows] platform,"

How does that answer relate to the question at all? The first question depends on the context. The second is I imagine is because Novell had some patents that Microsoft infringed and that needed sorting also Microsoft wanted to help spread some FUD buy creating a cross-licensing deal around Linux. The reason they don't do Office on Linux is that it would cut into their Windows sales. Though these probably aren't the answers his one doesn't even make sense for those questions.

"That's the dirty little secret. When I talk to open source developers, at least half are talking about Windows, from SugarCRM, MySQL, PHP. Every single one,"

Well why wouldn't they? I mean Microsoft doesn't want their products to run on Linux because it would hurt Windows, but Open Source projects have no such conflict of interest and are for creating what the users and developers want from them. In fact people running open source programs on windows is a great way for people to try open source out and migrate or inter operate with Linux they can use Tomcat, SugarCRM, PHP, Apache all on Windows for testing before putting it on Linux box for production for example. Microsoft doesn't let you do anything like that with their products and even explicitly blocks attempts to use wine to do that sort of thing. It's not like this is a secret either since the Windows downloads are available from the same place the Linux one are.

"Standards is the first thing you go to in the competitive strategy playbook. Of course, IBM and Sun won't say that on the record. You create a problem that didn't exist and use standards to force a problem,"

The first part could be true but the problem definitely did exist before, Microsoft doesn't document the DOC file format or the others used in Office which makes interoperability hard for anyone else. The only reason it might not of existed before was that almost everyone uses Microsoft Office due in part to the lack of an open standard and the problems that creates to anyone who wants to compete.

Blair stepping down and interest rate rises

2007-05-10T20:01:00.000+01:00

It seems interesting that Tony Blair chose to announce he was stepping down as prime minister on the same day that the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee was due to meet and was widely expected to increase interest rates, which they did. The BBC news website has the Blair story first and apparently Blair wanted this to be a day of "no-spin" so I think it is unlikely he thought his leaving would be a good way to distract from the interest rate rise.

Blog move

2007-04-16T22:26:00.000+01:00

I've moved source of my blog to blogger, it will still appear be kept in sync (automatically via RSS) at http://www.richardcunningham.co.uk/blog/ and the RSS link should still work, though all of the IDs will have changed so I'm not sure what effect that will have. I have imported (by hand) all of my old blog posts which took several attempts because blogger seems to sort by first published date and not the retrospective dates I was trying to enter. Well anyway after re-imported the whole lot once I found a better way is to use the "save as draft" feature followed by "publish" which is bit of a hack really, but worked. The blogger URL for the blog is http://blog.richardcunningham.co.uk/

Linux progress limited by closed source software?

2006-12-08T18:51:00.000Z

Linux distributions are having difficulty gaining widespread popularity. Many interested people have theories for this, which usually cite usability problems incompatibility with Microsoft applications such as Office, lack of games or GUI/usability issues. I actually have an alternative theory, which is that the people who are actually using Linux state these as problems as reasons they sometimes use Windows or why they won't give it to their girlfriend, mum, grandad etc. to use. The reality is that there is a lot of people out there who are interested in Linux who are going to at some point try it. If they then try it but can't get it to work with their hardware easily, they are likely to give up at that point at least for now.

As I see it, the main problem is that when people do try Linux they are beset with problems from the start. One type of problem is that the distribution the use doesn't support their some part of their hardware. Another problem, is that even if the hardware is supported, typical day-to-day items don't work out of the box such as Flash, videos/DVDs, music (MP3s) and Java.

So why don't these work out of the box? Well mainly to do with copyright and monopolistic reasons - Adobe's Flash is popular but, in contrast to other popular web technologies, is not based on a open standard. Other implementations exist but Adobe's implementation remains the only truly usable version. Java has had some redistribution limitations in the past but those should get better with the GPL release which is due soon from Sun. DVD, video and MP3 support is widely available for Linux using open source software, however, it is not supplied in most distributions because the distributor's have concerns that the software infringes patents.

Also now Linux has a wizzy new OpenGL based desktop, like MacOS X has had for a while, which is called XGL. However this requires OpenGL support in the graphics card which mostly comes in the form of binary only drivers for ATI and Nvidia cards. Wireless is now very popular but a lot of devices are only supported by running the NDIS wrapper (which enables loading of Windows drivers on Linux). Other devices seem to have 'acquired' an extra requirement where by they do not permanently store their own firmware. These devices require a binary blob to be stored in the OS and sent to the device when the OS boots. It is this binary blob that represents a problem since the hardware supplier often prevents it's redistribution meaning it cannot be provided as part of a Linux distribution.

Linux has started to depend on these proprietary additions to it's otherwise open source system - this is especially apparent with XGL which is practically useless without a proprietary driver from either ATI or Nvidia. The problem with these additions is that they do not integrate well with the Linux system and neither are unlikely ever to. Another problem is that vendors providing typically only support their devices for a relatively short time, for instance Nvidia has dropped circa 2000/2001 hardware from it unified driver which makes you wonder how long it will be before they drop support all together (also Nvidia looks set to drop even more hardware next driver release). This is at odds with a Linux kernel which still supports MCA bus, the original 386 and Panasonic interface CD-ROM drives (all last seen in the early 90s).

I've heard many people say they just want a stable and secure Linux system that just works and they don't care if it is proprietary or not. Well actually the proprietary bits prevents all three from happening. For one the systems we have now are mostly stable because of the 1000s of hard working open source contributors fixing bugs all over the system. The ATI and Nvidia binary drivers undermine this as these can crash an otherwise stable system and cannot be fixed without the support of the hardware supplier (which maybe unwilling to help). The security cannot also be assured, there is no peer review of code and updates are often not applied to proprietary software bits if the were installed independently. The just works bit is also out of the window since the GPL prevents linking proprietary code to GPL code. Also some other benefits of Linux are lost for example Linux runs on many different architectures and can be re-purposed for tasks it wasn't originally intended for (e.g. WRT54 Wireless access point, the Linksys NSLU2 and the Nokia N770). However proprietary modules typically target the most popular architectures and do not support modification. For many people this kind of use is not directly relevant to them, however it is relevant in the sense that these limitations reduce the number of programmers which are fixing bugs and creating software for their systems. This in turn devalues Linux to the point that companies that previously supported Linux may stop.

Fortunately for many of these problems presented in the blog entry there is at least one project to solve it, here are some of the main ones:

Gnash - Is alternative to flash
The Nouveau project seeks to create an opensource driver for nvidia graphics cards
OpenGL support for many ATi cards is available in the DRI project.
Sun is going to release Java under a GPL license
The Ogg Vorbis project seeks to create viable alternative to MP3 that does not have patents associated with it
The BBC is creating a codec called Dirac which should not have any patent libilities

IE7 and Firefox 2 go head to head

2006-10-27T22:57:00.000+01:00

It must be a PC magazine's dream come true, with Microsoft's IE7 and Mozilla's Firefox 2 released within a week of each other. I can see it now when I next go to the newsagent next there will loads of magazines with a headlines like "IE7 and Firefox battle it" (probably with a small headline on the same page "100 ways to remove spyware from Windows XP" as seems to common on Windows centric magazines)

I've had a look at both and I'm using Firefox 2 now. Microsoft's IE page says "Internet Explorer 7 is a major step forward in ease of use and security" which compared to previous versions of IE this is true but it certainly isn't compared to other browsers. Microsoft have added tabbed browsing, a search box in the top right corner as far the user interface goes the Phishing filter seems to be only new one for browsers, though this has been also been added by Firefox 2. A lot of the interest around IE7 seems to be from web developers wondering which of the many 1000s of rendering bugs they have to work around on a daily basis will be fixed, on this count it seems not to have really astounded anyone either way with some bugs fixed and plenty still to do.

Firefox 2 seems to be viewed in a completely different light, in that the support for web standards is already very high and the number of bugs in the rendering is very low with many people not being able to use the new standards because of lack of implementations of them by IE. Firefox 2 instead builds on a solid base tweaking the experience a bit to make it better with a new "Undo Close Tab" feature, spell checking, search suggestions (like Google Suggest) and others like "live titles" which I'm not sure how useful they will be.

When Microsoft first announced IE7 some people though people would switch back from Firefox to IE though I think at least with IE7 that's not likely to happen.

RichieMaps

2006-08-25T20:30:00.000+01:00

I have put up the first version of the map data for places I have been to around the world, check out the RichieMaps page for details.

Unlikely headlines

2006-07-17T22:56:00.001+01:00

I saw a tag line for a article I didn't think I would ever see, "we can safely say: believe the hype", what's that? a product that actually lives up to it's hype? The article is of course is about Intel's new Core 2 Duo processors which do sound very good indeed. I am now expecting to see the following previously unlikely headlines in the near future "big Government IT project declared a success", "Linux version of MS Office goes on sale", "Weapons of mass destruction found in Iraq", "World Peace Declared" and so on.

2006-07-17T22:23:00.000+01:00

I wish I hadn't said there would be a part 2 to the previous blog since, obviously I haven't got around to doing it.

Mexico Retrospective [Part 1 - leaving Guatemala]

2006-04-26T23:42:00.001+01:00

Since I arrived back from Mexico on Monday last week (17th April), I've realized that my blog got severely neglected towards the later part of my trip, in particular as it does not mention Mexico. I have decided to rectify this situation by writing about the three weeks I spent in Mexico (the second half of my trip - the first being the 2 weeks in Guatemala) retrospectively.

So I'll start from when I was in Xela, Guatemala. Andy & I had knackered ourselves climbing the Santa Maria volcano, we had followed this with a day of light sightseeing to San Andres Xecul. The following day Andy had to travel back to San Pedro La Laguna to get back to work. This was the point at which Andy and I would part ways so on Monday morning we headed into town, we said our goodbyes, Andy went to the bus stop and I walked off to sort out some things out. It was at this point I realized that despite being in Guatemala for almost 2 weeks the fact that Andy had mostly been there to organize accommodation/food/tours etc. for me had made the trip fairly easy for me. I found that despite 14 or so hours of one to one Spanish lessons in San Pedro la laguna I actually knew very little Spanish. This was made apparent to me minutes after Andy left. I entered a restaurant to get something to eat, no one in the restaurant knew any English and the menu was in Spanish only. Later this was also highlighted when I tried to book a trip to Mexico from one of the tour companies. Despite these obvious difficulties I managed to muddle through with a mixture of broken Spanish, pointing and gesturing. Over the next few days in general my communications with the locals were slowed down compared when Andy was helping me. I learnt a lot of Spanish in these few days out necessity.

A couple of days later it was time to head to Mexico. I was picked up from my hostel by a taxi driver (I was expecting a bus) who seemed to know who I was and what he had to do. He eventually got the message across that we were to meet a bus that would take me the rest of the way. This gelled with what I had been told. We met the bus and I was on my way to Mexico. The people on the bus seemed to be there for one of two reasons, surprisingly over half weren't actually intending to stay in Mexico for more than a few days. The reason for this was that they had been in Guatemala for almost 3 months and the visas they had been granted on entry were about to expire. The Guatemalan authorities will grant a further 3 months provided you spend 72 hours outside the country, and this was the intention of these people. The others (the minority) were like myself travelling to Mexico because we wanted to stay there.

After several hours we arrived at the Guatemalan border. Before arriving I had expected the land border to be constructed very much like an airport with strict security, professionalism and efficiency. I found none of these qualities at the border. There seemed to be people wondering all over the place, locals doing currency exchange and people selling things just outside. It didn't seem that it would be too hard to walk though with out having you passport checked by any officials. In any case I got an exit stamp for which I to pay 10Q (about 77p or about an hour's local pay), which I can only assume went into the guy's pocket. For simplicity I decided to pay this rather than to cause a fuss. Though despite this payment one of the girls in our group did not get the exit stamp at the first attempt (which is essential to get a new visa some 72 hours later, when she re-enters Guatemala), the guy said he forgot, fortunately for he remember to collect the backhander off us all but forgot to actually do his job.

Entering Mexico was much more organized and there were no backhanders to be paid. On travelling from the Mexican border to San Cristobal we had stop numerous times to be "checked" by immigration officials, it was not at all clear what they were checking, often looking inside the van, however we were never asked for our passports or any other type of ID.

Santa Maria Volcano

2006-03-27T03:52:00.002+01:00

The day starts at 4:30am, Andy cheerfully announces that is time to get up, I grown. Half an hour later we are at the pick up point to leave for the base of Santa Maria. After a short car ride we start the assent up the volcano in the dark.

Not long ago we had climbed volcano Pacaya which overall all I had found quite easy going, I realised that this one was twice as far but I didn't know the half of it...

The base of the volcano is at an altitude of about 2500m which is about the same as the altitude at the top of volcano Pacaya (for comparison the top of Snowdon in Wales is 1085m). This affects you more that you would imagine. So what followed must be the hardest piece of physical exercise I have ever done. The main reason for this, is that the altitude, just walking up a short way would cause me to have to breath heavily and my heart rate to go very high, though if we stopped for just a minute it would return very quickly to normal.

Once we reached the top, at a attitude of 3772m, some three and half hours later we were greeted with a view down onto another volcano, Santiaguito, and a view down onto the clouds. However the view was slightly disappointing because the reason we had set off so early was to avoid the mist that comes at about midday, however the view was quite misty from first light so we couldn't see as far. Though after a short while Santiaguito started to erupt at first we could just hear it and then we could clearly see the smoke rising through the mass of clouds.

The descent wasn't hard physically but was tricky as my feet would often slip on sand and mud, I would then have to catch my balance or grab onto some thing such as a tree root, branch or a particularly strong plant.

When we arrived at the bottom we were so tired all we could really do for the rest of day was sleep and eat.

Update See my brother´s account of the same day

Guatemalan buses

2006-03-18T00:47:00.001Z

The buses here in guatemala are a bit of adventure. You start off not really knowing where the bus goes from unless you goto the bus depot, since there are no bus stops, times or route information. Buses tend to drive along the relavant route shouting out the destination as they go.

When you do find the bus you want you are confronted with a repainted US style school bus. If your lucky you´ll be able to take your bag inside, but some insist on putting your bag on the roof. This would be ok if it wasn´t for the habit of these bags to fall off around bends. When you get inside the seats seem to have been designed for at most three small children or two bigger ones and the isle is just big enough to fit walking sideways down the bus. Typically these buses, called chicken buses, fill up with 3 adults per seat so that the one on the end has about half a seat.

Soon after the bus sets off it will stop again and pick up a few more people until every one is so squashed they can hardly move. It is at this point someone will enter the bus having bought a job lot of nuts or some type of sweet and they will go down the bus giving some to people on the way down. Shortly after they come backup the bus asking for payment or they take their merchandise back again and get off to board another bus.

Once the bus gets out on the open road all hell breaks lose, slow lorries on some very windy roads just get in way. This gives rise for the driver to over take everything in sight including cars on blind bends typically tooting the horn to make up for the lack of being able to see where the driver is going.

All this said and done you tend to get there in one piece after spending less than a pound for a hour´s journey.

P.S. I´m adding my guatemala pictures to my guatemala set on flickr.

Amsterdam

2006-03-01T19:07:00.000Z

I've just got back from a few days in amsterdam, see the pictures here.