Data Circle

For those of you running WordPress blogs, you might be interested to know that version 2.6.1 has been released. The highlighted improvements for additional languages, IIS users and installations with lots of plugins don’t provide much benefit to me personally, but it’s good to see that development is still pressing ahead at a decent speed. As always, a full list of changesrent a car bulgariaландшафт is available, and my advice would be to upgrade as soon as possible.

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– Paul, today, after spending several days trying to get JTidy to work, only to realise that the documentation is out of date and he had to checkout the latest SVN, compile the classes manually (no build scripts provided), create a jar file and copy this over the existing one before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

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.

As 2007 comes to a close, I thought it would be interesting to reveal some of my predictions of what will and won’t happen in the technology sector over the next 12 months. These are only predictions and my personal opinions, so please feel free to disagree with me!

What will happen

Huge surge in demand for online video: Following the launch of the BBC’s iPlayer service, I expect all the major UK channels to follow suit if they haven’t already, and to consider making their players Flash-based so as to work on any platform, albeit in a non-free format, as the pressure starts to build from people who aren’t using Internet Explorer in Windows XP.

Crunch time for Digital Rights Management: With so many companies abandoning DRM and offering their content without any built-in software restrictions, I think 2008 will represent crunch time for this much maligned technology. It might survive beyond the year, but unless there is a major development in this area (most likely some form of court case somehow coming down in favour of DRM) I expect DRM to be on its way out in twelve months.

Victory in the format war: Either Blu-ray or HD-DVD will emerge victorious in the format wars. It’s difficult to guess which one will be the eventual winner, as the VHS vs Betamax wars demonstrated that technical superiority doesn’t necessarily guarantee success. Blu-ray seemed to have more support last time I checked, but only by a small margin, and probably not enough to put it well ahead of HD-DVD (several Blu-ray supporters are also backing the other format anyway).

What won’t happen

Linux on the Desktop: Every year since 2000 has been hailed as ‘the year of Linux on the desktop’, and every year this hasn’t happened. Whilst I’m sure the likes of Ubuntu will continue to grow in popularity and ease of use, I don’t think Linux will take a significant proportion (say 10%) of the desktop market in 2008.

Super-fast broadband in the UK: We lag far behind America and most of the big European countries in terms of our broadband speeds over here, and I don’t think this will change in 2008, despite claims from some ISPs and cable companies. The old copper cables between our houses and the local exchanges are simply not up to the job, and BT doesn’t seem to have a commercial incentive to spend the millions of pounds required to upgrade them.

Predictions from other people

IBM Reveals Five Innovations that Will Change Our Lives Over the Next Five Years – can’t say I agree with most of these, other than the green technologies issue.

Economist: Technology in 2008 – I’m fairly at ease with most of these predictions, although they’re modifying existing situations (e.g. surfing will get slower) rather than anticipating any major new technologies (which is a perfectly valid viewpoint, albeit a bit boring).

JasonSlater.co.uk technology predictions for 2008 – I disagree with the ‘Year of the Zune’ suggestion, as I think Apple’s iPod is so ubiquitous and entrenched that it will take more than a shoddy MP3 player from Microsoft to change this dominant position. Home robots won’t be the next great thing either, at least not in my opinion.

Technologies on the rise in 2008 – Not entirely convinced by the IPTV prediction, mainly because it seems to be based on faster broadband speeds which, as I’ve already mentioned, I don’t see happening in 2008. The VoIP prediction, however, I think is more realistic and something which I genuinely hope happens.

I’m afraid I’ve been a bit remiss in updating the site over the past few months, largely due to having too many other things to work on. However, Data Circle is now back up and running, and will be regularly updated throughout 2008 with my commentary on the best technology news stories that the Web has to offer. Hopefully Akismet will continue to improve its spam protection facilities, as it missed over 300 spams this year which I had to clear out manually. Having said that, it has caught over 75,000 spam comments on this blog since I started using it, so it’s definitely worth deploying.

I’ve finally got around to upgrading the WordPress installation for Data Circle from version 1.5.2 to 2.0.4. I was surprised by how simple the whole process was, although I cut a few corners because I knew what I was doing for the most part and I had the advantage of being able to download WordPress directly to my server rather than saving it to my desktop and then uploading via FTP. For the most part it was just a matter of installing all the new files and then copying back my config file and .htaccess rules for mod_rewrite.

The Akismet plugin is great, all I had to do was enter my API key and click ‘activate’, and someone else takes care of the rest. Not only does it catch the majority of my comment spam, there’s also the option to train the filter so that if it mistakenly flags a legitimate comment as spam you can alert Akismet of this, and likewise if it misses an obvious spam (which it occasionally does, at least on Rogue Tory) you can flag this as well.

The dashboard has also been improved and everything seems easier to find. I’m not keen on the visual rich editor myself, but you can turn that off easily so it’s not too much of a problem. The fact that you can properly preview entries without having to publish a post is also a highly useful feature.

I remember the first time I tried WordPress, it was around version 1.2 and I was unimpressed to say the least, which resulted in me writing my own blogging software for my personal blog. It’s really come along since then though, and with the release of version 2 I think it beats all other software hands down if you just want a weblog (as opposed to the likes of Drupal as a CMS, which has more features but is overkill for something like Data Circle). Now I wouldn’t think of using anything else for any of my blogs, with the exception of perhaps my personal site where I like to write things myself for various reasons.

Theme wise, I’m still looking for a design that I’m happy with, so for the moment I’ve switched back to the WordPress default. I’ll have a play with the various themes offered by Wordpress.com over the weekend and see if any of them take my fancy. I’m looking for something fairly clean and minimalistic, preferably with a technology theme, so if anyone has any ideas of ones which would be good for the site please let me know.

Anyway, hopefully now that I’ve got all the backend stuff sorted and I’m not spending forever trying to keep up with comment spam (there were over 30,000 pending comments in the database when I upgraded, and more than 10,000 other comments which I’d previously marked as spam), I’ll be able to update the site on a more regular basis. I’ve already got one idea for an article that I hope to get written tonight, and I’m sure I’ll get another couple done by the middle of next week.

As always, if you’re interested in writing for Data Circle just give me a shout and I’ll get you set up.

K Desktop Environment 3.5.1 Released at KDE Dot News

The latest version of KDE has been announced. You can find out more information from the release notes and the changelog. Being a minor release, most of the changes are either performance improvements or bug fixes, but it’s good to see development on one of the two most popular desktops for X Windows proceeding at a steady and fruitful pace.

Site tracks F/OSS coding bounties via Slashdot

The Participatory Culture Foundation has launched a site for listing free and open source software coding bounties. When I first looked at the site, I was surprised by how many bounties are available for completing certain open source tasks. The concept isn’t all that new – I first heard of it some time ago when the Mozilla Foundation offered cash rewards for finding security holes in the Firefox browser – but the sheer number of bounties available now is staggering. You might not be able to make a living from doing the work required to claim the rewards, but it’s a good incentive to get programmers to work on the parts of software that are often useful but seen as boring to implement. Let’s face it, fixing a memory leak in Firefox is never going to be as sexy as adding window transparency in X.org, but with a bit of financial compensation it might suddenly become the preferred project to work on.