Diary of a CrazyFrench

Mozilla is 15 and that's 15 years of fighting for the open web. I remember the source code release, I built it on in Pentium 166 with 64MB of RAM - a Debian box. I maybe less RAM than that, I forgot. It was huge.

Since, the web has gone forward big times, and Firefox helped users to take back the web by bringing down the IE supremacy and focusing on a standardized web technology.

I have great hopes for the future of the free web.

Google did shutdown Reader, their feed aggregator. Speculation is that it is to promote the use of the proprietary publishing silo that is Google+, and I'm not saying as a Google+ grudge I might hold, I actually believe it might be one of the considerations.

Imagine a second if all the content was pushed exclusively to a popular silo like Twitter, Facebook and Google+: it would be confined to these environments and people wouldn't be able to aggregate elsewhere. Now what if one of these hugely popular silos disappeared. It has happened, it can happen again, I have numerous examples. And I am still look for the Google+ or Facebook feeds, while it is clear that Twitter already removed them.

With RSS^[1] all we need is a different aggregator to pull the feed. It would still work. And that's what happening with Google Reader user base: they are moving to other platforms that offer the same feature, either web based, or using desktop software.

Let's have this a learning step and continue to focusing on open standards for publishing. Let's continue to provide feeds. Let's continue to request feeds. And more importantly, us software hackers, let's continue to provide awesome libre software to do the job and on which we can reliably build upon.

It is the new year. We have a tendency to put artificial starting points in time to want to (start to) do things, something like the "new year resolutions". I don't really abide to that because I believe you should do things when you want to, have to or can. You don't need a January 1st or some sort. This year it happens that the new year almost coincide with my timeline. Two weeks into the new house in Montréal, this mean that for once I can use that as the starting point ; or not.

Anyway.

Happy new year, and remember, be excellent to each other !

Broken Lock by lyudagreen, on Flickr

A big North American online travel booking system still store passwords in plain text. Worse: they claim they take your security seriously. Here is the excerpt of the confirmation email you get when you register:

USERNAME: USER@EMAIL.DOMAIN
PASSWORD:  We're serious about security. Since your
password is confidential, we won't repeat it here. However, if you ever
forget your password, you can always request a reminder

Yes, the email has been capitalized.

The other day I wanted to book some airline tickets, so I returned to the website. I had forgotten the password. No biggie, I follow the "lost password procedure" and chose the "email" instead of the still idiotic "security question".

Guess what? I didn't get a link to reset my password, or a temporary password. No. I got my password sent in plain text. Worse. It was in UPPERCASE and the passwords are case insensitive in the system. Wow. Just wow.

PS: this is not the corporate travel booking system we use at Mozilla.

In my previous post ''What happened to all the pioneers in personal computing?'' I forgot a few notable companies.

• Acorn: I mostly forgot to talk about Acorn Computers, probably because Acorn computers were only popular mostly in the UK and were quasi unknown in France. The BBC Micro is their most popular 8-bit computer, released in 1981. But what came later was the game changing for the industry today. In 1987, they released the Acorn Archimedes, a 32-bits desktop computer powered with a RISC processor. It was faster than most of the competition like the Atari ST and the Amiga. Its CPU was the ARM (Acorn RISC Machine). This led to the spin-off ARM Ltd, that was in charge of the development of the ARM CPU. A partnership with Apple that wanted something for the Newton led to further development and the first license ; the RISC PC became the last generation of Acorn computer. Today, ARM is the most used CPU design for embedded systems: cell-phone, DSL routers, iPod, smart phones, PDA, iPad, etc. Acorn Computers moved on to build set-top boxes, after selling the RISC PC business, and in the end was absorbed into Broadcom in 2000 to become the DSL unit. ARM Ltd is now known ARM Holdings and license the IP for the ARM CPU to manufacturers.

• Compaq: Compaq major achievement was to be the first manufacturer of 100% IBM compatible PC after they successfully cloned the BIOS via clean room engineering, 1982. The BIOS was the cornerstone of IBM PC compatibility as just running MS-DOS wasn't enough: the Disk Operating System has so little feature that programmers mostly called into the BIOS interruptions to write their applications. Phoenix Technologies who followed in 1984 offering their own BIOS clone. Compaq made the first 100% IBM PC compatible portable computer, and then manufactured lot of quality IBM PC Clones, including the first with an Intel 386, being ahead of IBM itself. After buying Digital Equipment Corporation, it was bought by HP in 2002 and the PC product lines were merged, where mostly Compaq products in the business line were rebadged HP.

As I was writing this second, post, Ars Technica published From Altair to iPad: 35 years of personal computer market share where they relate the 35 years from the Altair to the move to the iPad as a personal computing device.

The Commodore 64 is 30. The TRS-80 is 35. But what happened to all the pioneers of the Personal Computing era?

• MITS. They made in 1974 the Altair 8800. It was a micro-computer sold in kit (or assembled), running the Intel 8080 processor. The first one ; it sold quite well, but was not, at first, usable out of the box as it didn't have software. Also it is the Altair that led to the creation of Microsoft who sold their BASIC to MITS. For Microsoft, we know the rest, for the Altair, the computer is almost forgotten, so is MITS, as the company got sold. One notorious clone of the Altair was the IMSAI 8080 ; if you have seen the movie Wargames (1983), you have seen one.

• Tandy: The TRS-80 appeared in 1977 and become quickly one of the most popular PC, selling until being discontinued in 1981, replaced with the Model III. It was much cheaper than the Apple 2 and was widely available in the Radio Shack stores (several thousands in the US). Zork, the text adventure game was ported and released on the TRS-80 first. Tandy was so serious about making computers that they bought GRiD, and later started making IBM PC clones. Tandy sold off the computer division to AST in the early 90's. The TRS-80 was nicknamed Trash-80 probably because of all the quirks in its design.

• GRiD Computing: GRiD is not that well known from the general public, but they were the first company designing laptop computers that were attaché-case sized. The GRiD Compass was released in 1982 and was marketed to CEOs. The GRiD Compass 110 featured the clam-shell design so well known today that GRiD patented. In 1989, the GRiD Compass 1101 was the first laptop to fly on the Space Shuttle. GRiD also pioneered in tablet computing. They got bought by Tandy.

• Commodore: The Commodore 64 was not Commodore first computer, nor their last, but was hugely popular, both in North America and in Europe, a best seller with between 12.5 and 17 Million units sold. It just celebrated its 30 years. In 1984, Commodore International founder Jack Tramiel left the company. After that, Commodore went on to buy a startup called Amiga Corporation to make the Amiga line of computers, that ended up competing with the rival Atari. The company filed for bankruptcy in 1994. Today the ghost of the Amiga still lives in the heart of fans and hobbyists. I wish my brother had preferred getting a Commodore 64 rather than a TI99/4A at the time.

• Atari: The story of Atari is more convoluted. Atari Inc. was the company that sold the first video game: Pong. In 1979 they released the Atari 400 and 800 8 bits computers. In 1984, Warner Communication, Atari Inc. owner, sold off the home computing and console division to Jack Tramiel - Commodore International founder - to form Atari Corporation. This is how the Atari ST end up being released in 1985, competing directly with Commodore's Amiga. It was more popular in Europe, with Germany being the key market, than in the US. The whole line was cancelled in 1993, and in 1996, Atari reverse merged with another company, to be sold to Hasbro in 1998, mostly for the IP (game rights) and brand.

• In Europe, there was Sinclair, Amstrad, etc. None of these make personal computers anymore.

So what is left from the pioneers?

• Microsoft, that sold BASIC to MITS (and several other manufacturers including Apple), and later MS-DOS to IBM is still here, doing mostly the same thing.

• IBM is still around, after launching the IBM PC in 1981, using Microsoft MS-DOS (and BASIC), they failed to gain traction in the OS market with the failed OS/2. IBM sold the PC division to Lenovo in 2005.

• Apple, after the Apple 2 gained traction with the Macintosh they launched in 1984. After catastrophic mid-90's, they got put back on track and are now the number 1 laptop vendor in a market dominated by Microsoft Windows machines, and make the best selling smartphone, the iPhone.

Am I missing anything?

Update: part deux

Firefox 16 uplift to Aurora is today. This version will have Accessibility enabled on Mac, finally, but you must either force enable or use VoiceOver. It should work for basic tasks, albeit there is some serious performance problems with VoiceOver I'm investigating.

Also, coming soon for Firefox 17: handling properly image maps.

One thing puzzling with YouTube HTML5 support is the message "this video is currently unavailable" which could mean a lot of things. The actual translation is "we need to show you ads and you need Flash for that".

If should be noted that there is no problem on mobile platform, Android or iOS, the video is shown.

I don't know if you noticed, but when you connect a Nexus One or a Samsung phone (Gingerbread or ICS, tested with a SGS 2 or Galaxy Note) to your Mac, the phone isn't recognized as a camera.

There is a difference between the Nexus One (stuck to Gingerbread) and the Samsung. The Nexus is USB Mass Storage (ie the phone is seen as a USB disk) while the Samsung is MTP (a variant of PTP, the USB standard for still image cameras). But in both case, the MacOS digital camera support (Image Capture, iPhoto or Aperture) recognize it but do not show anything. Adobe Lightroom is in the same boat (I'm not sure if it uses the OS capability or reimplemented it). This is because Android butcher the implementation of the Design rules for Camera Filesystem. See Android bug 2960 where you'll notice that it was largely ignored by Google despite even having a patch.

For the Nexus One this does not prevent from manually copying the images. But Samsung.... one would think they would have fixed that, but obviously they didn't. To make things worse, Samsung doesn't use Mass Storage but MTP, which mean that there is no way to just copy files from the camera^[1]. That last bit is utter fail.

Update (June 21st): from the comment, apparently I can set the Galaxy Note to be as USB Mass Storage. It is complicated, needs to be done manually, require disabling USB Debugging (it will do it for you, but not reenable it), etc. In short they turned something relatively simple to something overly complex and unfriendly. Worse, it is so many to reach the dialog where like on the Nexus One, you can tap to enable Mass Storage. The positive side is that you can't enable Mass Storage without unlocking the phone, which is a security feature.

Some update about Firefox accessibility on Mac:

• Accessibility on Mac has been disabled in Aurora 15 (and Nightly) shortly after the uplift early June. This was done because accessibility seemed to be instanciated for more than just accessibility clients, causing several unforeseen performance issues.
• Accessibility on Mac has been re-enabled in last night Nightly 16 build for Mac. The changes are that now we whitelist VoiceOver before starting accessibility on the Mac. We also added a switch in about:config to force enable (bypass the white listing) or disable.
• I have a current patch queue that include dealing with tab panels properly (bug 750612), text reading (bug 718625) and WAI-ARIA landmarks (bug 718700).

Using about:config: accessibility.force_disable. This option has 3 values:

• 0 (default): do as usual
• 1: disabled. Accessibility will not be started.
• -1: force enabled. Accessibility will always start when requested, even without voice over.

This also works on Windows (the value -1 is unused) and soon on Linux with atk (I have to finish it)

I hope to get more rolling before we uplift Aurora 16.

Yep, I deleted my LinkedIn account. Despite the fact that I got no value from it, the leak of 6.5M unsalted password hashes was just the icing on the cake. For so long they had a deficient SSL support, they ask to decrypt a captcha to login and lot of other stupidities. And their mobile app steal or leak personal info like your iPhone calendar.

I should have done that a long time ago. When they asked a reason I typed in "too dumb with security"

You know where you can find me.

How to take a screenshot on an Android phone, a Google Nexus One in my case. I have to document it, because "home + power" like on an iPhone (or any iOS device) is far too complicated.

Warning: this post contain whole parts of ranting and sarcasm.

1. Configure your phone to allow USB debugging.
2. Install the Android SDK
3. Connect the phone over USB
4. Start ddms from the Android SDK
5. Select your phone.

Kaboom. It crashes.

01:42:04 E/ddms: Failed to execute runnable (java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1)
org.eclipse.swt.SWTException: Failed to execute runnable (java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1)
	at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.SWT.error(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Synchronizer.runAsyncMessages(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.runAsyncMessages(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.readAndDispatch(Unknown Source)
	at com.android.ddms.UIThread.runUI(UIThread.java:517)
	at com.android.ddms.Main.main(Main.java:116)
Caused by: java.lang.ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException: -1
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.AbstractTableViewer$VirtualManager.resolveElement(AbstractTableViewer.java:100)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.AbstractTableViewer$1.handleEvent(AbstractTableViewer.java:70)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.EventTable.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Widget.sendEvent(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Table.checkData(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Table.cellDataProc(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Display.cellDataProc(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.OS._gtk_list_store_append(Native Method)
	at org.eclipse.swt.internal.gtk.OS.gtk_list_store_append(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.Table.setItemCount(Unknown Source)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.TableViewer.doSetItemCount(TableViewer.java:217)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.AbstractTableViewer.internalVirtualRefreshAll(AbstractTableViewer.java:661)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.AbstractTableViewer.internalRefresh(AbstractTableViewer.java:635)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.AbstractTableViewer.internalRefresh(AbstractTableViewer.java:620)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer$7.run(StructuredViewer.java:1430)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer.preservingSelection(StructuredViewer.java:1365)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer.preservingSelection(StructuredViewer.java:1328)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer.refresh(StructuredViewer.java:1428)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.ColumnViewer.refresh(ColumnViewer.java:537)
	at org.eclipse.jface.viewers.StructuredViewer.refresh(StructuredViewer.java:1387)
	at com.android.ddmuilib.logcat.LogCatPanel$LogCatTableRefresherTask.run(LogCatPanel.java:1000)
	at org.eclipse.swt.widgets.RunnableLock.run(Unknown Source)
	... 5 more

En voila. You still haven't taken a screenshot.

And for the record, I'm aware that Android 4.0 can do it, but Google still hasn't provided an update for the Nexus One (their first flagship device) and is unlikely to do it. That's not really encouraging into buying a newer device.

Update: upgraded to platforn tools version 11 and still the same problem.

This morning we learned that Facebook bought Instagram, and that Facebook paid something like 1B$. I'll skip the part where I find that this acquisition is highly overpriced, and I'll leave the speculation of who might have participated into a bidding to the analyst.

But one thing I'm sure is that they didn't buy Instagram for its revenue. What is being said is that Facebook paid 33$ per user, and quite a number of users. But what will they do with that? Simple. Monetize. And this might by the solution to my criticism of Instagram: adding a web frontend to it. A web frontend is IMHO the easiest way for Facebook to track their users. In the announcement Facebook promised to keep Instagram a separate entity, but even the owe anybody but themselves to hold that promise, they can do that and track users using a web based frontend, like all the "Like" buttons to all over the Internet. Similarly I don't see why they should remove the function to Tweet the picture. Quite the opposite, keep it, people click to view the picture, "leave" Twitter to go to that Instagram page, and voila. Checked in.

In the end, it will be a bit more like the Hotel California: you can check out anytime, but you can never leave.

If you don't like that, you can still go and request your account to be removed.

Mandatory Instagram. Deep Cove, BC.

Instagram just released the Android version of their application. Instagram allows you to take pictures with your phone, apply some filters, upload it to their service and then have user that follow you comment or favorite them. A sort of Twitter for images.

This led me to rethink why I dislike Instagram.

I dislike Instagram not because of the photographic aspect of applying random filter to random pictures to try to let them look cool, not because it is (was) an exclusive club for iOS users, users that are self entitled and angry^[1] as there are also plenty of talented people whose work I have a lot of respect for. No, it is not about that ; well it could be but that would be a very opiniated rant that would make me look like a hater. It is about the technical aspect: it is not the web.

Let's see.

If I go to the main website of Instagram, I get offered to download the app for iPhone, for Android, and beside info about them, their blog, their jobs, all I can do is edit my account. Yes you got that: it is about taking and posting picture, and from there I can't even view anything. WAT?

Now when people share their Instagram picture on twitter, you get a link like this http://instagr.am/p/JAqNexzGZr/. At that URL, you can see the picture, the comments if any, and that's it. You can not decide to start following the person even if you have an account nor can you browse through the other pictures. And to get that URL I had to "share" the image view e-mail or Twitter. There was no other way to get it.

That's exactly where my issue is. One has to use the app on your phone (previously only iPhone - even though it worked with other iOS devices including iPad) to view the pictures and the people. It is not a web application, it is Instagram. Imagine if Facebook or Twitter was like that? It is not like technology is missing. All the browsing and social features can be done as a web application, and modern browser today would allow even the editing part of the picture, and soon the taking a picture part.

And, yes I have an Instagram account, yes I have posted a few pictures from my iPad and from my Nexus One, one having a better camera than the other. Suddenly I got a surge in follower with the Android version released. But what if I wanted to use it from b2g^[2]? Even Flickr I can.

Mandatory Instagram:

See part 1 if you haven't.

As of this week, some changes in b2g cause more breakage in the build process on Fedora. Plus some various bugs.

First, if when doing the make config-galaxy-s2 you get the following error:

cp: cannot create regular file `../../../vendor/samsung/c1-common/proprietary/etc/mdnie_tune_bypass_mode': No such file or directory

in the B2G directory, do a

mkdir ./glue/gonk/vendor/samsung/c1-common/proprietary/etc

and try again.

Also, make gonk will want to run a pre-build xulrunner in 32-bits

• freetype.i686
• fontconfig.i686
• alsa-lib.i686
• dbus-glib.i686
• pango.i686
• gtk2.i686
• libXt.i686

Ideally, the fix would be to actually get a 64-bits xulrunner instead. Patches welcome™ I was told. On your copious-spare-time™.