Data Circle

The Open Rights Group have recently launched a fundraising drive, under the name ORG-GRO and the slogan “Protect your Bits”. Conceived three years ago at OpenTech 2005 with 1,000 people pledging £5/month in financial support, the ORG is often seen as the UK’s equivalent to the Electronic Frontier Foundation—a well-known US lobby group working for digital freedom.

At present, the organisation seems to be doing a lot of good work on a very small budget. The only thing that worries me at the moment is that ORG gets their office space for free. Whilst this is obviously a fine thing in theory as it saves the organisation a significant amount of money which can be spent on forwarding the aims of the group, it does raise the possibility that they could be kicked out of their office at short notice and forced to find somewhere else.

I personally don’t support the Open Rights Group at the moment, because environmental organisations seem to sweep up most of my spare funds, but if you have a fiver a month to spare and want to see your digital rights protected, then you should sign up to support ORG now. Just one minor note though, if at all possible you should setup a standing order rather than a PayPal subscription, otherwise a proportion of your donation goes towards propping up a credit institution in Luxembourg.

Other people supporting the Open Rights Group

• John Leach

“You spend 50% of your time hacking scripts to get around bugs in other people’s poorly documented and unmaintained code, and the other 50% cursing the users of your system.”

– Paul, today, after spending several days trying to get JTidy to work, only to realise that the documentation is out of date and he had to checkout the latest SVN, compile the classes manually (no build scripts provided), create a jar file and copy this over the existing one before everything would work.

Linux 2008 is the latest in a series of conferences run by the UKUUG. This year it is going to be held in Manchester, so I will probably be around, and the Call For Papers is now available. The closing date is the 18th August, so you have some time to submit an abstract, and the final papers are due by the 20th October (which, coincidentally, is my birthday).

“I think the OpenBSD crowd is a bunch of masturbating monkeys, in that they make such a big deal about concentrating on security to the point where they pretty much admit that nothing else matters to them.” – Linus Torvalds, Post to linux-kernel mailing list

I saw this a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure whether Linus is having a joke or being serious. I see his point about OpenBSD—they are rather obsessed with security—but I think it’s bad form for someone as well-known as Linus to go around bashing other projects, particularly when Linux systems use some of the same software (e.g. OpenSSH). This is part of the problem with geeks running large projects—you combine egos, technical smugness and superiority, and often a lack of social skills and put them into a forum (mailing lists) where you can say what you want with no immediate indication of whether you’ve offended someone or said the wrong thing.

I’m actually surprised that no one has picked Linus up on this, so perhaps he was just having a laugh, or no one dares to upset the Lord and Master of the Kernel.

Up until today, whenever I wanted to edit a file on my server under OS X I would open a terminal, ssh to my server and run vim. However, whilst this generally did the trick, copying and pasting code was tricky, and it just wasn’t the same experience as using a graphical editor (which is what I would usually do). Thankfully, I discovered that TextWrangler, a superb piece of freeware from Bare Bones software, will allow you to open remote files on a server and edit them as if they were stored locally (which effectively they are, as the software takes a local copy and then overwrites the server version when you save).

N.B. Technically TextWranger works over SFTP, which is included as part of the openssh package but might need to be enabled in order for this to work—just plain ssh access might not be enough.

For those of you who keep up to date with browser releases, Firefox 3.0.1 has recently been made available. If you’re currently running Firefox 3, you should be prompted to download the update at some point, or you can force an update by going to Help->Check for updates. Amongst other things, this release fixes three critical bugs, so updating as soon as possible is highly recommended.

If you’re still using Firefox 2, version 3 is now labelled as stable and so you might want to consider upgrading in the next couple of weeks. The third major version of the browser fixes lots of bugs and introduces a whole swathe of new features, and is well worth upgrading to. Unfortunately, the update function won’t allow you to update from version 2 to 3 automatically, so you’ll need to download the relevant binary for your system or wait for your package management tool to receive the update.

As always, the full 3.0.1 release notes are available (the link points to the European Mozilla site, but it contains the same information and remembers that I might want to download en-GB instead of en-US).

WordPress 2.6 is now available for download, with a fantastic array of new features, including:

• Wikipedia-style tracking of changes.
• Support for Gears, to allow static files (stylesheets, images etc.) to be downloaded to your local drive for faster access – though I’m not entirely sure how this differs from having files stored in your browser cache.
• The ability to preview themes before pushing them live.

From my own point of view, I’m not sure that I’ll get a great deal of benefit from any of the major changes, though I do like the automatically updating word count feature, and of course I’m glad to see nearly 200 bugs closed in this release.

As always, my advice is to upgrade as soon as possible, if only to take advantage of the security fixes. Upgrading is fairly simple, though you may need to be careful if you have lots of plugins or themes installed, and of course you should always take a backup of your database and existing installation, just in case something does go wrong. Naturally, if you have a WordPress.com blog, all of this will have been taken care of for you anyway.

37signals, the Web company best known for Basecamp and Ruby on Rails (which I believe all of their products is written in) has recently announced that it is to phase out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all of its product lines, starting from August 15th.

From a Web standards point of view, I’m happy to see this sort of action being taken by a reasonably influential company. I completely agree with their argument that IE 6 is a last-generation browser (released in 2001), and that having to support it means that some new features will be difficult or perhaps even impossible to implement. Furthermore, it’s hardly difficult to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer, or download an alternative such as Firefox, Safari or Opera (all have free versions), and perhaps if a company has to upgrade for Basecamp it will appreciate the benefits of faster and more secure browsing on other sites too.

However, from a business perspective, I’m not so sure that phasing out support for a browser which still commands a significant proportion of the market is a sensible idea. Perhaps 37signals have virtually no clients using IE 6 (they claim “below a small minority threshold of our customers”, though that could mean anything really), but this is a fairly major change to make given only a month’s notice. Having said that, any company which relies on the services provided by 37signals will probably just upgrade their browsers anyway, so perhaps it’s not going to impact their bottom line too much. The general feeling on the Web seems to be that people are glad that 37signals are taking a lead on this, but that not everyone is in a position to drop support for IE 6 as a larger percentage of their customers are still using that browser and can’t upgrade, either because of policy restrictions (using their browser at work where application installations are controlled by a central authority) or simply not knowing how to.

Further reading

• IE6 Independence? – Matt has some interesting statistics from WordPress.com, which suggest that around 27% of people visiting that site still use IE 6.