I am using a fairly fresh install of Opera right now, with more default settings than I normally would use. One of these was the PDF file handling, like with other browsers (at least for Windows) Opera uses the Adobe Acrobat plugin by default. I do read quite a few PDFs, particularly work-related, and Acrobat is a fine program, but I really don’t like the plugin. In theory integrating PDF files with the browser sounds good, but it takes away my control over my browsing environment, for instance I can’t go back with Z (or a mouse gesture), and the plugin can’t do all what the full Acrobat program can do either.

Fortunately this isn’t hard to fix. What you need to do is to change the PDF settings.

1. Open Tools > Preferences > Advanced > Download (Ctrl+F12,D should do it)
2. Type PDF in the Quick Find field, application/pdf will show.
3. Hit the Edit button
4. Change the option to Open with default application

In some cases you might want to open with another program than the default. Personally I prefer, instead of just opening the PDFs, to store them in a particular directory and then open them. That will mean that junk files will accumulate in that directory as all PDF files will be saved there, but I don’t read much junk PDF anyway, so cleaning up the directory isn’t that much of a challenge.

The same issue of New Scientist had a report from an evangelical rationalist science congregation, under the theme of the atheists strike back.

But my question is: Is this good for science? Richard Dawkins’ foundation, based on much the same idea, is discussed in the forums, the God-gutting comment in my previous post also elicited a reaction.

My magazine of choice, (The) New Scientist, released its first issue 50 years ago, and more recently followed up with a hefty anniversary issue.

Reading news (or watching or browsing them for that matter) is a waste of time if you want to be informed or enlightened. I have argued before that instead of following flickering interpretations of what just happened it is better to use sources like New Scientist get an insight into what is going to happen.

Self-conscious at 50, New Scientist looked backwards for its New Zeitgeist in news articles past, as well as forward in inviting predictions for the following 50 years. While both are good reads, true to form it is the present, in the “Big Questions“, that this issue shines. One present but unasked question is the role of science itself.

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17 years ago, in a Friday November 17 far far away, the seminal event for the soon-to-become Velvet Revolution happened. The event itself, a sanctioned student demonstration ostensibly celebrating a martyr against the Nazi invasion 50 years earlier, mattered less than its aftermath: a fairly brutal police repression, augmented by a staged death by a secret police agent.

To my then jaded eyes, the depth of moral outrage among Czechoslovak citizen about this seeming police murder was endearing. This was shortly after Tiananmen Square (making everyone aware what was at stake), and even in Western Europe death by demonstration was not unheard of, or indeed 20 years earlier they had the self-immolation of Jan Palach and the 70-some killed in the 1968 Soviet invasion.

For me November 17 is connected with a fairly subdued plaque at the spot where the demonstration was stopped by the police. I don’t remember when it was made, I think it was some time in 1990, probably at the anniversary. I do remember that in 1990 everyone would go out of their way to show you that spot, even if you had passed by a dozen times before. In the beginning were the revolutionary posters I mostly couldn’t read at the time, then the candles, and finally the official plaque which was more or less the end.

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IE7 is now done and out. It is of course tempting to be glib and say “too little, too late”. While undeniably true, this upgrade matters. In part because there is an upgrade, giving hope of more to come, but also because many of the issues that are actually fixed have held back web design.

The poster example is transparency in PNG, the obvious selling point of that graphics format relative to GIF. While IE6 must be classified with “as little as we can get away with” (even then I couldn’t understand why they couldn’t fix this minor but important shortcoming), IE7 is “making the most of what we have got”. Yes, they will have to do a lot of running to catch up with the rest of the world, but at least this signals an intent to be in the running.

David Baron, of the Mozilla organisation, has a well-written entry starting with SVG 1.2 and continuing on how the W3C works, arguing that “We should work on, and implement, the standards that we think are appropriate for Web browsers, and ignore the rest. We should spend our time improving what Web developers and users want, not waste our time improving what is less important or criticizing what isn’t going to work in the first place.”

Handling risks is a core part of any business. A company that does this badly is unlikely to survive for a long time, a company that does this well has a competitive edge over other companies. Naturally there is a great interest in this topic.

Risks also affect other parts of our life, whatever we do or don’t do has its inherent set of risks. However all research show we are very bad at judging risks, this is an abstraction our brains have not been properly adapted to. Evaluating risk has been a crucial part of our personal survival (if you see a leopard you are in grave danger, if you stand at a cliff falling down is a bad idea), but our psychology greatly overestimate the spectacular danger (the leopard, the cliff, the plane crash, the drive-by murder) and similarly underestimate the persistent killers (the stumble, the allergic reaction, the flu).

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Prague is uncomfortably hot in July and August, making its inhabitants looking for a way out in those months. I had finished a trip to Silesia in the northeastern part of the country ending up in in the castle at Hradec nad Moravicí.

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A Debates & Discussions forum thread:

How has the Internet changed (or changed your life)? How will it change in you lifetime?

I can recall as a kid in the seventh grade, in Montreal Quebec, in our computer science class we had access to a time-sharing computer based somewhere else in the country. The method of data input/output was an enormous Telex teletype machine that sounded like a jackhammer when printing. […] My vision of the future for Internet is not all rosy. […] What I’m sure of is that the Internet will continue to become part of our lifestyle and those who are Internet illiterate will slowly be left behind as progress marches steadily on. […] I invite any and all to send their ideas.

Opera 9.0 Beta is now available for download. For those of you who have regularly tested the 9.0 previews and weeklies the difference from those isn’t that great (except in stability), but from 8.5 it is huge. There are new features and advances in standards. One that has truly progressed since 8.5 is SVG. While we don’t have complete SVG Basic support yet, with full styling and scripting, we are close. Getting here has been a long journey.

The first version of SVG, SVG 1.0, became a W3C Recommendation in September 2001. We had an interest in SVG even earlier, but the sheer size of the specification made us decide against it, it was hard to justify putting so much effort into a format that was going to need years to get a foothold in the market. We had done it with PNG before, but that was easy. The arrival of the Adobe plug-in decided the matter, why should we spend our remaining resources on SVG when there was a viable alternative?

We weren’t looking for a Flash competitor, which seemed to be Adobe’s main drive until they bought Flash several years later. It definitely wasn’t to make a Purity of Essence markup language not sullied by the real world like the HTML harlot – many working group members at that time were deeply hostile to the Web. The mobile companies were the next to turn on to SVG, and while there are clear benefits with SVG on phones, the gains can be even larger on a larger screen.

We saw a vector graphics markup language as an adjunct to HTML, together they would become more than they were separately. Each language could provide what the other one could not. HTML augmented with CSS could do both text, layout, hypertext, semantics and more. But it couldn’t do the simplest illustrations (except through brutal hacks), or graphs, or fancy boxes or headlines. As HTML was a W3C language and SVG was a W3C language you would have expected that these two were well integrated, that you could easily use one to enhance the other.

That certainly isn’t the case and this is a tremendous unfulfilled promise. It isn’t all bad, the two languages do integrate with each other after a fashion. They can be looked at as feuding siblings, having them in the same room will cause torment, but they are family. Hopefully some years from now they will both grow up.

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