I came across a blog claiming that we’re at war, based on Eskil having a good partisan gloat on a negative review of the Konqueror-based Nokia browser (“A special circle of Hell needs to be created…”). The blog entry is somewhat unfair as it discounts Small-Screen Rendering for reformatting pages and then goes to criticise horizontal scrolling, the very problem SSR was designed to counter (if you don’t reformat the page on too small screens, you will get horizontal scrolling which wrecks havoc with readability), but I liked the site-by-site comparison.

I am fine with our “war”, just like press coverage of the “second browser war” is good for anyone caring about browser rendering on the Web. That is, as long as the story is IE vs Firefox vs Opera vs Safari/Konqueror (vs the other browsers if the journalists are thorough enough). IE vs Firefox stories are less interesting, obviously for leaving out Opera, but in particular because as long as the story is about two boxers in the ring, why should anyone care about open standards?

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This image, the phone blogging equivalent of a lens cap snap, was posted with Opera Mini 3, released today.

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I decided to go through the regular process, entering my phone number (which I never remember, but fortunately my phone remembers it for me), guessing what the damn captcha said, and submitted. Sure enough I got an SMS giving me an URL to click on (it would be easier to enter the URL directly, but at least I know that the system worked, in the Czech Republic too). After downloading/upgrading and after running the selftest and entering the cryptographic seed, I clicked on the phone blog link (confirming that I wanted to get on the Internet and would allow Opera Mini to abuse the camera, two Java midlet application warnings you can’t get around).

Then I discovered that midlets have no inhibitions against taking pictures with the shutter closed, unlike the regular camera application, so I just had to do it and posting the result was automatic.

This comment I wrote later as writing longer text from Mini isn’t that fun.

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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