Musings – Abhay S. Kushwaha

Ever wonder how to deliver custom typefaces to people who don’t have them installed without using graphics?

It’s quite a catch-22 isn’t it? You use graphics and your search engine ranking goes down and in some cases, the page simply doesn’t show up since all the good stuff is in the images.

If you don’t use images, hey it’s getting the content across but does it have to look so ugly? Why are we stuck with a handful of fonts? How about a recently updated technique that will show proper text in the fonts of your choice, on majority browsers and yet render XHTML pages where not supported so that your page is fully accessible *and* search-able…

Introducing sIFR: Scalable Inman Flash Replacement. Very cool.

… and causes an uproar.

The official thread on the topic on xchat.org forums is nothing compared to the fiery stuff at IRC Junkie. Almost everybody is saying that GPL is being broken and those who contributed code are wondering about the licensing of their code.

This open letter to Zed, the core developer of X-Chat, and his subsequent reply also make for an interesting read.

Kitten-Fight.
– By way of Alex King

Today, I took another step in my linux education. For the first time, I compiled and installed a software directly instead of finding RPMs.

eMail takes up the largest time-slice in work. I have settled down to Sylpheed-Claws to be my mailer. When I was in Windows, I was using the Win32 port. The developers had just released an update and I was itching to get my hands on it. So today, I decided I would install it myself by hook or by crook. Got a lot of help from claws on #sylpheed and had to uninstall a few older components to compile and install GNU Aspell and the latest version of Sylpheed Claws. Ironically, I couldn’t get them to work together and there is currently no spell-checking on my email. I’ll look into it later when I have some more time.

It’s an awesome feeling.

UPDATE: August 30 (3:20am)
I got Sylpheed-Claws and Aspell to compile together. However, when I tried using the launcher, it wouldn’t start. I noticed that it launched from the CLI. Hoa on #sylpheed helped me reload the /etc/ld.so.conf and suddenly it worked like a charm! I also put up the long-pending signature in the relevant location to auto-insert signatures in my official mails.

When I shifted to Linux, I was using FeedDemon on Windows which unfortunately did not run on wine’s default installation. I looked around and came across Straw which sounded and looked almost like a Linux-avatar of FeedDemon. Unfortunately, no rpm of Straw existed and I managed to track down the SRC on Dag’s Apt/Yum RPM Repository and fulfilled a few dependencies. It still needed GTK2 >= 2.4 and libglade2 >= 2.3. Bummer.

Decided to go ahead with liferea after taking a look at Syndigator. Fortunately for me, FeedDemon kept it’s group info in OPML files and liferea easily imported these. So now I have all my feeds back! Catching up will be a slow process though, work first. For the first impression, I like liferea’s interface and usability. I’ll know better when I use it more though.

My good friend Gagandeep decided to treat me on his birthday. A dinner and a day later, I had food-poisoning while the ass himself was enjoying another party. There was blood in my vomit. Scared the birds out of my parents too. I’m better and getting better by the minute.

If nothing else, it was nice spending time with the family after so many months.

I have been away a few days. A lot has happened meanwhile:

• I have shifted to Linux. Karan advised me to use Whitebox Linux. Since my only experience with Linux dates to ’99-’00 when I was managing a 27-node cybercafe with 24 machines running Caldera, and he’s not touched Windows in a *long* time, I didn’t think much and went with his advise. Got it running in the first go which was a nice feeling. I had anticipated booting into Windows a lot. Since my move about a fortnight ago, I’ve booted into Windows only twice. Karan has been an awesome help, a patient mentor and an excellent guide. I am confident about using Linux because I know that when anything goes wrong, I can look towards him and he’ll help me find a solution and once in a while when I’m really dense, even hand-hold me along the way. I’d like to think that I’ve not given him much reason to regret agreeing to help me out in this.
• I have written an application in ColdFusion MX with a MySQL backend. I used an Excel spreadsheet to track work handled by my team, listing various things of importance to me in various columns. But this kept the Excel sheet contained to me and the rest of the team members were always in the dark about what tasks they had to perform next (the work in my team goes through quickly and the assignments shift rapidly). I needed to keep Excel running when I was on Windows and on Linux, it meant I had to to keep OpenOffice running all the time. This was an unnecessary waste of resources. Plus, there was a formula that highlighted stages of work that was not handled very well by Calc (Office Office counterpart of Excel) and meant I had to edit it or remove it since I didn’t really use it. After thinking about it for a day or so, I decided to make an web-based application counterpart to do this. This would enable all members of my team to stay current with assignments, status, priorities, etc. while I would also save some resources since I always have Firefox open all the time anyway. I planned to do it in PHP initially but a colleague at work inspired me to use ColdFusion MX (I succumbed to the dark word called RAD). I wrote the entire thing over 3 nights in office. I am feeling pretty proud of it since it works really well and I didn’t even know how to set up a MySQL table or how to write a single ColdFusion tag when I started. Plus, now that the team has started using it actively, it has actually proven itself as a good idea. Now I’m planning on enhancing it slightly and then coding a parallel version in PHP as an exercise.
• Work has grown tremendously. I usually used to get some time in the day to do something new but these days, despite my better organisation and the team improving every single day, becoming an even better, tighter unit, I’ve had lesser time for myself. The little time I sometimes do manage to scrape out is taken up by trying something I’d like to do in Linux. The latest of such is running a mail server. In Windows, I had an old version of MDaemon. On WBEL, sendmail worked out of the box. Fetchmail is also pre-installed and I’m sure I’ll get the time to write the configuration file to set up mail retrieval sometime in the next 72 hours. My clients have been extremely patient with the small hiccups that came when I shifted from Windows to Linux. They are an awesome bunch in any case. Sometimes we Project Managers compare notes and I know for a fact that the best ones always land up with me. I’m really lucky in this.

Well, I guess time’s up and work calls. I’ll be posting more often like before now.

I completed 26 years today.
Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me. *toot* *toot*
…
*sigh*

Okay, this is news for me. I didn’t know that Longhorn would have 3D graphics driving its interface.

That means an incredible number of things — for software and hardware alike. Given the amount of GPU resources we have available in various corporate environments, to rely so heavily on a major hardware upgrade by the maximum number of users who’re actually paying for the licenses (the corporate world), is wishful thinking by me. Given the reluctance I’ve seen in India to upgrade hardware which I suppose is present in all environments, I don’t foresee many upgrades.

Another fact is that most of the vendors that sell PCs do so with utterly bare minimum hardware specs. Most low-end systems have an attrocious amount of RAM (DELL still has 128MB systems on it’s catalogue with WinXP preinstalled AFAIK). Longhorn will significantly up the ante for hardware resources that would need to be pre-installed in a retail PC thereby increasing the cost of an entry-level PC. So, does that mean WinXP units will continue to be the entry-level PCs for the masses? I think so. I guess we’ll see Windows XP Service Pack 3 in winter 2006. 😉

C|Net’s News.com has a story about HP’s h6315, co-developed with T-Mobile, which not only is a regular tri-band GSM phone, but switches over to Wi-Fi when it’s available, has GPRS, bluetooth, a built-in camera, a detachable keyboard and can store and play MP3s. Nokia 9500 Communicator is a similarly able phone but that’s not planned to come out till the 4th quarter of this year. So I suppose HP has a lead on this segment of the market.

Today looks like Day of Cool Gagets.

This guy called Logan “Shadow” West made a All-In-One Nintendo Entertainment Console which combines NES, SNES, Nintendo 64 and GameCube in a single housing. Awesome. What a mean dude!

Whenever we open the office, it stinks of pigeon shit thanks to about 50-60 pigeons living on the false roof of my office. We sometimes encounter bugs and other little crawlies that have somehow managed to crawl between the fixtures and fallen down in the office. My boss says it’s the responsibility of the landlord (we’re a govt. facility for crying out loud!) and they say that it’s the tenant’s. Meanwhile, we learn to live with the pigeons. :-/

InfoWorld is reporting that Microsoft has decided to enforce Sender ID on all email sent to its Hotmail, MSN & Microsoft.com email addresses from October 1.

Microsoft will begin matching the source of inbound e-mail to the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of e-mail servers listed in that sending domain’s SPF record by Oct. 1. Messages that fail the check will not be rejected, but will be further scrutinized and filtered, said Craig Spiezle, director of Microsoft’s Safety Technology and Strategy Group.

Though I’m running my SMTP server on my PC, I’m still happy about this development.

The report itself makes a very interesting read and gives a pretty good overview of the whole anti-spam scene and how Sender ID ties into the scheme of things.

According to an article on PC Magazine:

Microsoft launched its MSN Hotmail Plus subscription service in 30 markets worldwide today. The upgraded service, as announced in June, offers subscribers, for $19.95 a year in the US, 2GB of storage, the ability to send 20MB attachments, no account expiration, and no graphical advertising.

That is 4 cents saving over Yahoo! Mail Plus but then you don’t get all of Yahoo! premium services. The biggest differentiator is that Hotmail simply doesn’t POP mail and nothing I’ve read indicates they’re going to add that feature.

Another interesting fact was that the earlier report last month that Hotmail would upgrade it’s mail quota to 250Mb is also true. I had become confused about that recently. That apparently applies to free users, meaning Hotmail will offer 150 Mb more than Yahoo! to free users. That is quite significant. However, Hotmail will launch their upgrades in a controlled, phased manner with MSN Hotmail Plus rolling out first.

My experience and conversations over the last month have indicated that very few users will switch just because of the extra space at Hotmail or Gmail for that matter. The general credibility and ease-of-use rating of Hotmail seems to be pretty low. Yahoo! on the other hand has been making significant upgrades to their services. Their marketing and PR teams have been performing extremely well in making sure the word goes around. Plus, their integrated services are far more powerful and intuitive to use than any other service provider.

The latest salvo from Gmail has been the launch of 3 new features:

1. Import Contacts
2. Signature options
3. Safari browser support

Of these, #1 is the most significant. Now those users who were holding back because they did not have their Address Book at Gmail can easily import it from Yahoo! Mail, Outlook, etc. and start using Gmail’s advanced auto-complete feature. Oddly, Yahoo! Mail has recently launched its version of auto-complete but it is actually a standalone application that must be downloaded and installed on the PC before it can be used with the webmail interface. Quite a chore for people on the move esp. if the user does not have installation rights in newer Windows environments.

For some reason, only Hotmail, Yahoo! and Gmail are being referred to as the major providers in this. As I noted earlier, an Indian company Rediff has also increased their free email quota to 1GB (1024 Mb). I also noticed that they have upgraded their interface a bit from the atrocious and nightmarish one that they had a few months ago though I’m not sure when they did that.

The webmail wars are hotting up and once Gmail formally launches and the dust settles, the eventual beneficiary will be the common web user. All good.

I have a new keyboard! TVS Gold tactile mechanical keyboard.

Well at least right now most of Lagos (that’s the commercial capital of Nigeria) believes that if you answer a call from certain numbers, dubbed ‘killer numbers’, you will drop dead immediately. Immediately. Right there. Poof! Gone!

Us humans seem to lose our capacity of individual thought in masses. We easily believe in and will readily do something that we will probably laugh at in our more saner individual moments. Everybody is superstitious on some level but when entire cities are taken over, it’s a pretty wow thing.

When an entire community around the world is taken over, it’s supa-incredulous! I admit, I was a part of the gang in that one. Hey, it happened, okay!!! 😉

The Register is reporting the existence of Duts, the first PocketPC virus.

Remember the European virus writer collective 29A Labs I talked about while talking of Cabir earlier today? The same group has created Duts.

Just like Cabir, Duts is a proof-of-concept and exists only in the laboratory, not in the wild. Similarly, the virus was mailed directly to the anti-virus firms.

Duts is a traditional parasitic virus but it’s hardly much of a threat because the virus asks for permission before spreading to other files. Once an infected file is launched, it displays the following dialogue box: “Dear User, am I allowed to spread?” If the user clicks yes, Duts infects executable files located in My Device (root directory) of a PocketPC. Duts does not appear to have any destructive payload.

In theory, Duts can reach mobile devices by email or the Internet, through removable memory, by synchronization with a PC or through Bluetooth. The virus is also capable of infecting mobile phones running ARM-based version of PocketPC.

Viruslist has put up the details on Duts including a screenshot of the prompt mentioned above.

Wow.

I just ran into two reports on BetaNews about Hotmail.

The first reports that in the first moves towards competing in the email business, they have enabled Anti-Virus scanning. Now existing users might remember that they already had a tie-up with McAfee but they have apparently expanded from scanning attachments being downloaded to scanning entire incoming and outgoing mails.

The second second reports that Microsoft will increase their storage. We know that already. But the interesting part is a quote from Blake Irving, corporate vice president of MSN’s Communication Services.

We are going to respond in a big way and will eliminate email storage as an issue for our users.

Wasn’t that Yahoo!’s war cry? Hmm… Either way, the fact that they took so long and called it ‘wait and see’ could also be a reason that they just saw more revenue drop issues and didn’t know quite what to do. I wonder if they thought of closing down Hotmail altogether… nah! Let’s see how things pan out. From the sound of it, Hotmail will probably offer more than 250Mb reported by ZDNET a few days ago.

I just gave aDesigner a test run. Simply put, I am damn impressed. Let me organise my thoughts:

What is aDesigner?
IBM has an emerging technologies initiative called alphaWorks. Here they develop, showcase & distribute new ‘alpha-code’ technologies till they are licensed or integrated into IBM products. (Read more)

aDesigner is a disability simulator. It lets web designers, or rather web page engineers (as I sometimes like to call this breed) to test, analyse and view for themselves whether their pages (online or offline) are accessible and usable by the visually impared.

What is my opinion about aDesigner?
The interface is split into 5 panes. One quick look tells me immediately where the action is.

Pane 1: Browser view
This pane shows the page as it is displayed to a regular-vision user using a normal browser. There are navigation buttons and an address bar to help me navigate back and forth between pages and quickly load up online/offline pages.

Pane 2: Simulator view
This tabbed pane visualises the page for blind users and simulates the page as it would appear to a person with low vision. Using the mouse over the simulation provides me with some important information like how long does it take the user to reach a particular information on the page, etc.

Pane 3: Error totals
Lists total number of Essential and User Check errors. Clicking on either filters out the rest in Pane 4.

Pane 4: Error list
Lists the type, line-number, guidelines for which the error is (WCAG, Section 508, JIS and IBM Guidelines), and the actual languagge from the guidelines.

Pane 5: Overall rating
This shows a graphic and lists the overall rating of the page for accessibility and usability.

I did not RTFM before starting with the software. It took me about a minute to grasp how to use it and in the next 8-10 minutes I spent on it, I knew exactly what to do to get what I wanted. That speaks a lot about this software’s UI. I have not tested it yet or compared its results with that of Bobby but they appeared to be alright from the few pages I did simulate. I will look into this software much deeply over the next few days and let’s see how that pans out.

Overall, like I said in my opening, I’m damn impressed.

What accessibility checks can aDesigner perform? (From the product FAQ)
First, it checks regulations and guidelines such as Section 508 of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act, the W3C WAI Web Contents Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), JIS (Japan Industrial Standard), and IBM’s checklist.

Second, it checks usability problems faced by people with visual impairments, going beyond compliance. An author can experience how low vision users see the Web pages by using “low vision simulation” modes, and an author can also understand how blind users listen to and navigate through the pages by using “blind visualization.

Who should use it?
For one, this should be in the inventory of all web designers. When we are coding pages, we frequently render pages and then validate the code. Browsers and our eyes handle the former, and there are quite a few tools out there that validate the markup. There aren’t many tools that help with WCAG/Section 508 compliance though. Though Bobby is the most popular service yet, comparing the two is like comparing Ford Model-T with a modern car. Agreed the former was a pioneer and has since been retrofitted, the experience and ease of use provided by aDesigner is phenomenal. The biggest advantage of aDesigner is that it’s a standalone desktop application (Yes, I know Bobby is available on a CD but that’s paid).

QA teams in web-development teams will love this. Though testing is generally done by those who code the pages, in a production environment, the responsibility lies with the QA team to stamp it OK. For the reasons quite similar to the ones I’ve listed for Web designers, these people will love this application.

Web Standards advocates also finally have a tool that will help show the non-believers solid data based on a common index. Call it emperical data if you will.

How much does it cost?
Currently, alphaWorks is making aDesigner available to everybody for free to get feedback and improve the product. But like other emerging technologies, it will eventually be either a licensed product or be integrated into another product.

Requirements?
aDesigner requires Windows 2000 or XP with Java Run-time Environment (JRE) 1.4.1 or higher installed. It does not support any other platforms currently.

I suffer from N.A.D.D.