I miss my subscription to The Economist. They have an excellent little opinion piece on the copyright mess that congress has gotten us into. They argue that the terms on copyrights have gotten too long and that the current laws are actually hindering instead of fostering growth of artistic works.

However, I don't agree that giving copyright holders the kinds legislative backing that they are asking for is a good idea because it creates monopolies in the hardware and software spaces, and that's not good for consumers. You can't do copy protection without secrets and secrets create monoplies, which are almost never operated for the public good. I can't see a way in which that can't be implemented that wouldn't cause the computer industry, and open source in particular, to implode.

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"With fame often comes unwanted attention," Kozinski wrote for a three-judge appeals panel. He closed his written opinion with a warning to both companies to play nice. "The parties are advised to chill," he wrote.

Trying to land an airplane.

When I read an article like this one I get a bit annoyed because it completely ignores the fact that if it weren't for the lawsuit in the first place, Microsoft would have shut out competition of any kind immediately. Do you think that Microsoft would have let Dell roll out a competing operating system onto their systems if Microsoft were not being investigated for anti-trust allegations? Of course they wouldn't have. They would have just said that Dell could no longer ship Microsoft-licensed operating systems and pull all support for their platform, thereby essentially destroying Dell.

"Microsoft was right" is completely mis-leading. Microsoft is right to be concerned because the lawsuit opens them up to competition and will loosen their monopoly grip on the industry, if only by its very existence. But did Linux do this all on its own? No, of course not. The Federal Government opened the door to the possibility of another operating system by enforcing the law (sort of) and representing consumers who bear the ultimate cost.

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Whenever a programmer thinks, "Hey, skins, what a cool idea", their computer's speakers should create some sort of cock-shaped soundwave and plunge it repeatedly through their skulls.

Seriously. Every time I hear someone talk about themes for Mozilla I think of this truly inspirational phrase:

<[SA]HatfulOfHollow> i'm going to become rich and famous after i invent a device that allows you to stab people in the face over the internet

Another flying update.

Another flying update.

"It's for the people," Acosta said, and grabbed a malt drink. He drank it and belched loudly in front of television cameras.

Could be the AP wire. Could be The Onion. You be the judge.

Blizzard is nothing but a political double-talker, his propaganda laden piece is exhausting. It's sad to see developers reduced to this. Big thumbs up, dude!

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Another flying update.

Oh, yeah, and I managed to get real translations together for the Mozilla RPM that Red Hat is going to ship.

Well, Paul Festa couldn't resist writing an article about the fact that Apple decided to use KHTML instead of Mozilla. I love how he took a bunch of stuff from Mike's diary out of context and made it like Mike was only badmouthing the browser, when he obviously wasn't. You have to read the whole entry and it probably helps to know mike a bit to understand his tone there. There's a lot of missed context with the way that the article is written. Anyway, let's get down to business.

First of all, I don't think that we should be having the Safari vs. Mozilla/Chimera discussion at all. It takes our eyes off of the real prize and that which we all should be worried about. I mean, if you control the browser, you control the Internet. It sounds kooky, but it's true. When we squabble amongst ourselves it doesn't do us any good.

That being said, I do have a few things to say about the fact that Apple is going this alone. First, it's great that they decided to choose an open source solution, even if it isn't Mozilla. If they manage to engage the KHTML community and get well integrated with them then they have the chance to enjoy the fruits of that relationship, like as we have with the Mozilla project. The feedback loop of open source development will allow them to both enjoy the fruits of the labor of the community and the community benefits from the work that Apple does. Apparently, as I understand it, they haven't been able to do this yet and have been somewhat secretive about their involvement up until now. We'll see if this changes but if it does it's good news for both KHTML and Apple.

Second, another standards compliant web browser out there using the web is only good news for everyone, assuming that they do it well. Another browser means choice and choice means that everyone wins since there's not one company in control of everything and that means a more free Internet. From my understanding, KHTML still has a long way to go to catch up with rendering real web pages when compared with Mozilla but hopefully Apple will have those straightened out by the time they do a final release so they don't make life really rough for web developers.

Last I wanted to respond to some of the criticisms that are levied at Mozilla in that article and in people's blogs as of late. When I hear quotes like:

"When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out," Safari Engineering Manager Don Melton wrote. (KJS is KDE's JavaScript interpreter.) "Not only were they the basis of an excellent, modern and standards-compliant Web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open-source projects."

it really gives me pause. They are talking about Mozilla from over a year ago. They are talking about a pre-1.0 Mozilla release. Mozilla has gotten a lot better since that evaluation, especially in the form of the Chimera project for OSX, which has grown in leaps and bounds over the last few months. It's like comparing a modern sedan with your 1976 Ford Pinto. Of course, it's going to look better and drive better, it's newer. We're not your mother's Pinto anymore.

Now, is our layout engine huge and ungainly and hard to understand? Yes. Yes it is. And, at least to some degree it's important to understand that Mozilla's layout engine has warts because the web has warts. It's an imperfect place and that leads to imperfect code. Remember that while KHTML is a good bit smaller than our layout engine, it also doesn't render a lot of sites anywhere near as well as Mozilla does. Over time, they are going to have to add many of the same warts to KHTML as we have to our layout engine. They might be able to do so in a more clean way, but they will still be there.

Second, Mozilla's layout engine does so much more than what KHTML is trying to do. We're rendering our entire application with it so of course it's going to be bigger. Can we do better with our layout engine in the future? Yep. Will we? Yes, I think that we will. There's lots of interest in cleaning up the mess of layout.

In any case, I welcome Apple's entry into the web browser field, even if it isn't using the software that I think is best suited for the job. They can only make the web a better place. Unless they screw up, of course.

It's the end of the week and I am still making a lot of progress on translations. I hope that by the end of the day I will have automatically generated translations available for Mozilla, at least from the command line. We-based is going to have to wait a bit. Part of that is that I need to find a place to host it where I can do things like install something newer than perl 5.8.0 which I think is required. As one person has told me, it's one of the first versions which managed to get UTF-8 support correct. I'm also hoping that I can get .po files generated for translators to translate.

Shaver comes into town today and I'm looking forward to meeting my tall Canadian friend at the airport. This way I figure I will get at least a few minutes with him before phik manages to get his claws into him and they will vanish into a haze of UML, compilers and bugs.

Oh, yeah, and I went flying yesterday and it was wonderful.

I can't let a day go by without buying something these days.

I would also like to point out that I miss my friend Dave Mason.

Yet another flying update.

I've been working hard on trying to do something with Mozilla's translations. Red Hat has never been able to ship a properly-translated Mozilla because the translations that are out there are scattered to the wind and aren't regularly updated for each release. I've decided that I want to do something about that.

I've imported all of the translations into a common database. I've also got a good set of perl-based libraries that know how to take one of Mozilla's jar files, tear it apart, parse all of the .dtd and .properties files and insert the translations into the database. This means that you will always know what needs to be translated for any particular language for any particular release.

I figure that I'm a day away from being able to generate a translation from the database directly. It would only be a small bit of work from that point to be able to automatically generate .xpi or .jar files on the fly, using a web interface. Also, we could update the translations entirely using the web which would probably make everyone's job much easier and lower the bar for translators who want to be able to translate mozilla into their particular language but don't want to have to set up one of the tools that's out there. Just fill out a form, and that's it.

In addition this will allow me to be able to make regular announcements to the correct newsgroup about what needs to be translated. We might even see localization packs available at the same time a release is made. Think about that for a moment.

Another flying update.

I just read the latest dnalounge club update and Jamie linked to the Club Drugs page on the DEA's web site. He talks about the logo (Dancing with Darkness!) which is awesome, but I personally loved this image myself:

I guess I need to change my fetishes so I'm not confused with ravers who are all hopped up on marijuana cigarettes and ecstasy.

I hadn't realized what a busy year it's been for the Mozilla project.

Not a lot going on here, really. I'm still coming off the long holiday so I'm not terribly productive yet. I'm still digging through Stick and Rudder and the Mozilla book. I actually spent a couple of hours last night reading. I hardly do that anymore. Maybe I should make a regular practice of it. (Damn that tivo.)

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Everyone should watch Scrubs at least once for one reason: John C. McGinley.