The Zero Room

I'm in shock. I've just heard from Slashdot that the LugRadio podcast is soon to be no more. I've been a sufferer of LugRadio Syndrome - inappropriate giggling fits in public places - since series one, and while I can't say I've ever aquired any useful technical information from the programme, it did once render me breathless and weeping with mirth while in a doctor's waiting room, which I think got me in to see the doctor sooner than I otherwise would have. I've also learned that the proper response to, for instance, Novell announcing an exciting new product is to exclaim "Beard!", or "My chin!", and that you shouldn't give the actor who plays Harold Bishop in Neighbours a hard time about his weight, because he (allegedly) has a blisteringly funny riposte.

I haven't enjoyed a podcast so much since the Slashdot guys did Geeks in Space (of course it wasn't called podcasting back then, and we had to listen to it by piping the output of NCSA Mosaic to an eight-track cassette recorder via a SCART connector). I'm not sure what I'm going to do without LugRadio. The Rissington Podcast is amusing and geeky, but the presenters are, it must be said, Mac users, so there's a bit of a cultural divide to get over. FLOSS Weekly has some great interviews from time to time, but there's even more of a culture problem there (American). Can anybody suggest some others?

I've been using Firefox 3 for the past few weeks, and today it's officially released. I've found most of the new features to be unobtrusive and generally useful, so I'd recommend it to anyone. The folks at Spread Firefox are calling today "Download Day", and are attempting to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. You've got till 5:00pm UTC (2:00 am tomorrow morning our time), so get downloading!

Things that don't work are much more intriguing than things that do. At least, that's the premise of the Revealing Errors blog, a site devoted to those moments when a gust of wind disturbs the curtain and you catch a tantalising glimpse of a flustered little man frantically pulling levers.

If you are planning a non-trivial website, this twenty-five minute presentation by Paul Albert, Digital Services Librarian at Weill Cornell Medical Library which compares Drupal, a free Web Content Management System and Application Framework, to FatWire, a proprietary Web CMS, should be required viewing.

Many of the arguments presented here in favour of Drupal also apply to any of a number of popular free systems, and most of the arguments against FatWire apply to any proprietary system. In this case the systems were evaluated for their suitability for use by a Medical Academic Library, but any situation where management of a great deal of information via the Web is required might be considered broadly comparable. The staff at Weill Cornell Medical Library found that:

• Drupal is and will be cheaper
• Drupal is robust, extensible, and enterprise ready
• Other departments in their college are already using Drupal, as are other colleges and libraries, and many are dropping equivalent proprietary systems
• Drupal supports "perpetual beta" (continuous improvement of a site)
• Drupal has a much more active support and development community, and "a culture of sharing solutions"
• Drupal has been paired with other technology in proven ways
• Drupal has a gentle learning curve (compared to other development environments)

Someone's done a really nice home usability test on Ubuntu 8.04, using his girlfriend as the experiment. Apart from the good old-fashioned flame-bait value of this, I'm finding usability studies increasingly fascinating. From my own experience, it's remarkably common to find features that seem an obvious good idea from one point of view can be intimidatingly bewildering from another (and often I'm the bewildered one).

For example, I have one website that allows anonymous users to post content, although for obvious reasons each post has to be approved by an administrator. When content is submitted, the user is redirected to the site's front page, and gets a message in a little box with a different background colour to the rest of the page, telling them that their post is awaiting approval. Clear enough, you may think. However I got some feedback today from a user saying that the site is broken, because every time they try to post anything, all they get is an error message. You might say that the user should at least stop to read the message, but on the other hand something is wrong from a usability point of view if a message telling the user that everything is working perfectly fine looks at first glance like an error message. Usability is hard.

This appears to be a technology demonstration (requires Adobe Flash), but the intended purpose of the technology is a mystery to me, as I can't read Japanese.

Poor Sony. It's as though they're deliberately setting out to upset as many people as possible.

The latest scandal is their generous offer to remove "bloatware" (or more properly, "craplets"), the software you never asked for, but which you get whenever you buy a new computer. Software vendors typically pay hardware vendors handsome sums to add partially functional "lite" or time-limited trial versions of their software to the systems they ship. The idea is that instead of being incensed by having to manually remove all this awful software, you will instead be so impressed with it that you'll want to pay money for the non-crippled versions.

Sony heard the cries of aggrieved customers over this practice, and very generously offered to charge it's customers $50 for the service of not delivering the software they never wanted in the first place. Predictably (to anybody not on the Sony payroll), this has gone down about as well as many of Sony's previous initiatives.

Sensing yet another customer backlash, Sony has acted swiftly to pour oil on this fire, by gamely admitting their mistake and offering to waive the fee for this "optimization", but it's still only available to customers who pay for the $100 Windows Vista Business Edition Upgrade. Can't you feel the love and respect for their home suckers... er customers?

Robin 'Roblimo" Miller has an interesting bit of flamebait over at Linux.com, talking about why it's so hard to switch operating systems or desktop environments withing the one operating system. His point seems to be that our deeply-held preferences are established by first impressions (or even chance), then entrenched by habit, no matter how vigorously we might argue that we have a rational basis for them.

I'm not sure I agree with him; GNOME is a better desktop environment than KDE; both are easier to use than the WIndows or Mac user interface; nano is a sensible choice for a programmer's text editor, because... ah... okay, maybe he's got me there. ^O ^X

In the lead-up to Document Freedom Day, a couple of interesting articles related to Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format have surfaced.

OOXML is currently being proposed as a standard at the International Organisation for standardization (ISO), widely seen as push by Microsoft to dethrone the already-ISO-approved OpenDocument Format, and a decision on OOXML's status is expected from the ISO by the end of the month.

Tim Bray, the co-author of the XML specification has offered his thoughts on the pros and cons of Microsoft's proposed standard. As he is understandably anxious about being misrepresented or quoted out of context, i stongly recommend reading his piece in full, but here is my understanding (I stress my understanding) of what he's saying:

On it's own merits, OOXML is not a particularly good format, but neither is it as bad as it could be. The problem is that if it is approved by the ISO, Microsoft will use this as a propaganda weapon against the existing and technically superior standard. Microsoft has already made as many concessions to openness as they are likely to ever make just to get the format this close to standardisation, so there looks like is nothing to be gained from actually approving it, and no downside to rejecting it.

On a related note, one of the benefits said to have arisen from the standardisation process is the "Microsoft Open Specification Promise:", a covenant not to sue third parties for developing software that implements a number of Microsoft technologies, including OOXML, which may (or may not - software patent holders are notoriously cagey about specifics) be covered by patents held by Microsoft. The Software Freedom Law Centre has just published an analysis that suggests Microsoft's benevelolent gesture is indeed no more than a gesture, and third-party software developers who try to make software that interoperates with Microsoft's software are in practical terms not significantly safer from legal action than they ever were.

The Register reports that it's now ten years since people began ruining their hearing with portable MP3 players, rather than the portable cassette players we had to use for that purpose in my day.