A week ago Microsoft’s IE8 team announced that they passed the ACID2 test. Now - nice present for Xmas - Safari for Windows Beta 4 renders it correctly as well.I checked with Firefox 2.0.0.11 and it is all but OK:Anyone tried it with other browsers?

Social networks allow a new way of spamming. Today I got followed by a “network” on twitter. I don’t really use twitter at all, luckily there is a block function on followers. I wouldn’t mind (and I really don’t) if someone is folling me, but doing so just to make me click his website. This is pathetic.  The name of the site is

E x p a t a c u l a r

Sorry for the horrible layout, but I want to avoid that this page will show up even on position 85  in a Google search. Yes, these jerks are horribly successful, 84 hits in Google - and perhaps 3-4 related to the site…

The clever thing thought is that they chose a name that is distinguishable from ordinary expressions. For example: You write a great Webframework and name it lift - googling for it is difficult, because there are so many stories and services about elevators.

Spam belongs in the kitchen…

One of the few sites I check every other day is Ehrensenf (an anagram of “Fernsehen” = TV, where “Ehrensenf” is something like “Mustard of Honor” - “mustard” is also used in some expression “seinen Senf dazu geben”: to make an irrelevant contribution). There I learned about Jango and immediately became a big fan.

Ehrensenf is feature on the website of the German news magazin Der Spiegel, which also hosts the german edition of Last.fm.  To close the list, also found by Ehrensenf Social.fm. This is how the web works - the good old web 1.0. It simply works.

Let me compare these. Last.fm is for me important as the broadcast as well German music - I swear it got better in the last years; now where thay stopped copying the style of british/US music and use rhytms that fit the German language  some really good bands pop out (Wagner knew this more than a hundred years ago)

Social.fm

Well, I would say it is file-sharing via streaming. Hard to find any social component in it. Yes, you share you playlists with friends, but besides that you don’t get anything back. Their player for Windows looks nice though. The use of the site - simple incomprehensible. I ask myself if they actually have any users besides me. Only mainstream music can be found, if you enter anything not yet streamed by a user the website gets a bit confused - or is it justme?

 Last.fm

Very broad choice of music. Social component virtually zero. But good music anyway. But barely customizable. You can’t specify what you want to hear 80% of the music played would be considered as spam if sent as email. No wonder that the buy-button is always well exposed, especially if you are looking for something specific. Good point Wikis for the bios.

Jango.com

No fm-domain, these guys have no clue… But their site is the best. Some rough edges in the handling of the back buttons, but atleast they are honest enough to say that they’re still beta. You can create many “stations” which are fuzzy playlists, nice visualization of your likes(by a tag-cloud - as here in the sidebar). For each song you play you see other user that play the same at the very moment, a click and you see what else the like, this gives youone or the other idea - I discovered “We are Scientists” by that

Conclusion Jango gets the cake, despite them having the smallest repetoire of all. But they know toleverage the social graph by creating it. It is more interesting to learn something new on the net than just re-reading what you already know about your friends & family.

Social.fm has even an application for facebook. YAFA (Yet Another Facebook Application). I think this kind of social networking serves only the owner of the site for targeting advertisment - I haven’t seen any facebook app that could make any use of the great social graph - at best the social graph is used to invited friends of your to use the same stupid app you are using at the moment.

Joe Walker had some ideas on how you may manage your passwords. I am not really covinced:

The idea of using a password core and a mangle procedure with the site name is dangerous. You assume that this PWD is compromized, thus the attacker might get behind your mangle style and can guess other site’s passwords.

The counter for password versions defies even the reason for frequent password changes: You want to know at least approximately when the passwort had been stolen.

IMHO a pretty stupid idea, because to have meaningful data from a theft, the expire period must be rather short. This in turns requires the user to change that often that they will use the simplest password possible.

My advice: No I won’t even tell you how I think passwords should be created - Be paranoid!

Ich hatte ein paar Probleme mit WP in Firefox und Safari - vornehmlich mit dem Editor, der langsam wurde und/oder nur noch HTML angezeit hatte.Der Upgrade war nicht so schwierig, einige API-funktionen hatten sich geändert, aber das konnte ich in ein paar Minuten fixen.Es geht nicht über ein gute API - ausser einer gut dokumentierte API.

Naja, das geänderte Verhalten für home.php hat mir etwas Kopfzerbrechen bereitet.

Der Safari Browser ist nun - in einer Beta Version - auch für Windows verfügbar. Schnell ist das Biest wirklich - Kompatibilität ist OK.

Ich habe einen neuen Lieblingsbrowser.

Die Beta ist noch nicht lokalisiert - was mich weniger stört.

Hoffentlich wird die WebKit API bald auch für Windows verfügbar sein. Idealerweise auch als API für Java, wie es Apple schon mit Quicktime gezeigt hat.

Many companies have a policy in place on the use of internet, phone etc. Normally a limited private use is tolerated, because it is not a real probelm in terms of volume (and cost).

If there are serious concerns about the non-professional use (and even the professional use!) there are two possiblities:

1. The communication need is excessive.
2. The responsible manager is simply an idiot who wants to be known as cost-aware

Reason 1. has to distiguish professional use and private use:

• If the professional use cost serious amount of money there is something wrong with the structure or the training of the employees
• Excessive private use simply says that the employees seek distraction from their job (that is then likely to suck)
• If the private use is small, but still outnumbers professional use you surely have internal communication problems

So if it is not reason 2. (a reason I recommend to simply ignore as this will simply go away), the message should go only to the managers whose job it is to enable and motivate people.

Today I had a job interview - in french, this is what makes this most remarkable; the interview drifted a bit off and I stated the following (I’ll give the english transcription, as my french writing is terrible)

You can reify the internal flow of a software-system by looking at the social network of the people who build it. The opposite is also true.

If you look at a sufficiently large piece of software, you’ll find different components and of course interface between these components. The developers of components are likely to form clusters, while over the interfaces you’ll find (occasional) communication that is more formal than within a component’s clique.

As a corollary to this observation I’d like to state: If you have an interface it will be working if and only if (iff - for mathematicians) the cliques hav a working communication.

I explained this to my girl-friend over diner (rest assured, she tells me about her professional poker experiences in turn) and we agreed that this is the key for the success of open source software.

An open source project can only exist if you have a working network and good communication among the subgroups. The mere fact that you found a group of people capable of forming such a network assures (at least) the necessary condition to create a good piece od software.

The existence proves statistically the need and the compliance with the mainstream of such a solution. Otherwise the likehood that such a group can find itself in the vast space of the internet will be zero.

(we had wine with and some calva after the dinner - so I am not capable to tell if this observation is just trivial or perhaps a real deep insight - anyway I am proud that I’d been able to express it after only three years of french)

I started playing with Google Web Toolkit beta- actually I didn’t really start. Because I had to uninstall IE7 (which I don’t use at all), but hey I’d been curious.

The screenshot above is a ‘warning’ from the uninstall. I think they inserted it to deter people from stopping using it (interesting though how this compares to trailware).

But at the end the best one:

It is always more confusing to offer a negated phrase (”Are you not sure if you don’t want not all files lost on harddrive not being formatted [Y/N]”), instead of defaulting a reasonable choice.

The alert reader might have spotted that I use a french edition of XP (with the Vista L&F) - but everything comes in english?!

BTW: I think IE7 sucks. It is IE6 with tabbed-browsing, a terrible layout of controls and all known bugs. Worst of all: The anti-aliasing. Looks like s**t - if you happen to use Office 2003 you know this reading-layout - just like this, just a tad worse.

They should steal the anti-aliasing from Mustang, that works and looks really good.

PS: I now believe Microsoft invented the browser: It just took them longer than Netscape to come out with it:-) If the big battleship Microsoft is in hurry, some things might go over board