Quick note from a hotel reception in Prague, a couple hours before after the second preview of Opera 9 and labs.opera.com launched and a couple hours before my flight to Oslo will do the same. The preview offer all the goodies like native search editors, BitTorrent, and of course Widgets. But I wanted to point out an Opera 7 feature that we knew wasn’t yet up to its full potential, namely User Style Sheets. We are not quite there yet, but we are closing in on it (as will undoubtedly the airport gates if I don’t get going).

Since the late 1980s I have been among those predicting the end of the Personal Computer, and that end is now in sight. The PC is going the way of the typewriter, but not overnight. It took the PC about 15 years to completely replace the typewriter, and we can expect a similar interval before it finally disappear, possibly ending up among the same hobbyists where it started.

This transformation is less fundamental than the replacement of the typewriter was. It is like the T-Ford replacing the horse carriage, and modern cars replacing the T-Ford. Apple may score points for experimenting with the “Any color you like as long as it is beige” formula, but the Mac is still a T-Ford.

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I came across the yearly survey over Norwegian vacation habits. The City Weekend is becoming a fixture, every other Norwegian do two and a half such trips on average. This is a direct consequence of low-fare airlines making direct travel cheap and convenient, and that the European cities are close by when travelling by plane. Australia and Africa are where people would like to go but don’t, while USA has become dramatically less popular as a tourist destination.

Weekends are popular as you use up at most a couple vacation days, while I like the short trips for not having to bring a full set of clothes, thus lugging closer to the ideal nothing. The most desirable city in Europe according to this survey is Prague, edging out Rome, the previous favourite. Outed. I was in Rome last week and I am in Prague right now. Rome and Prague have much in common. Both are friendly cities to ease in to, you adapt to them as you arrive. Rome with its layering of time, place, and food, Prague with its architecture of hospitality, both merging an intricate past with a live presence, unafflicted by the monoculture of lesser cities.

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This post is also a part of a forum discussion.

Fred Hoyle commented that it makes more sense to be unorthodox than orthodox in science. I fully agree with that. If a thousand people are looking in one direction and you are looking in another, more will be found in the orthodox direction but you have a much higher chance of discovering something yourself.

The reason why scientists and wannabes goes “oh no, not again” whenever a pseudo-scientific idea crops up is that there are so many of them, the idea is so nebulous, and the proponents are almost incapable of admitting to themselves that they might be wrong no matter the argument or method. This reaction is perfectly natural but in excess it is damaging. It doesn’t help that to successfully promote a scientific theory you have to be pretty thick-skulled, and that doesn’t go well with admitting defeat. Like other human beings scientist tend to cling to their convictions until they die.

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Early in December a Yahoo story spread quickly across the web, MAN DATES GAL ON INTERNET FOR SIX MONTHS — AND IT TURNS OUT SHE’S HIS MOTHER!. Yesterday, almost three weeks later, the story was published unchecked by Dagbladet, Norway’s third largest newspaper where it became the most widely spread and read story that day. The only problem was that this story wasn’t true and it wasn’t intended to be true either.

Writing infective stories is largely to follow a formula. One such story with a seemingly reliable source is all that is needed for it to pass. The source of the Yahoo page was Weekly World News, but the apparent origin was Yahoo! Entertainment. Until the WWN Yahoo stories are better marked it will lower the trust in Yahoo News! (or for that matter Dagbladet) as a reliable newssource.

A few days later a blog came up with the story that Google could buy Opera. That story was just about believable as a rumour. The blogger had connections, and while you could wonder why the anonymous source would spill the beans, but a titillating rumour all the same. The story made the rounds and within a couple days had mutated into that Google actually had bought Opera (but to my great disappointment nobody told us what our price was). That the original was in French added mystique and frisson to the story.

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A weekend in Glasgow. Scotland is neighbouring Norway and a direct flight from Oslo (though this being Ryan Air the bus ride to their airport takes longer than the plane trip itself).

The physical and cultural closeness makes it easy to forget that they live by different standards than we do. The difference is slight, phones work, they use 230V, they even switched to metric. All is fine until you try to put your round pegs in their square holes.

The phone is fine, but the laptop is getting progressively more needy. All for competing standards in the user interface.

Henry Sivonen has summarised a HOWTO Spot a Wannabe Web Standards Advocate. (Parroted from Anne’s Weblog)

It was an accident that may cause some damage to the wildlife, but a white river looks nice. While I would prefer the river au naturel most of the time, a white river/black lights event once in a great while wouldn’t be too bad.

Now that Opera is feeling free, inevitably the question of open source comes up. There is nothing wrong with open source, even if I sometimes wonder about some of its evangelists, but still we have opted for having the Opera source code closed.

Could Opera benefit from being open source? Yes. Does it benefit from not being open source? Yes. To us the benefits from being open source are small, the benefits from not being open source large. For other products, maybe one of ours if we had any, the bottom line might be different. This is a commercial decision and not one of ideology. Maybe we are netheads with a cause but fundamentally we are in it for the money, and not to promote purity of thought. If we don’t make money from producing a browser, we will do something else.

One reason an open source Opera wouldn’t be such a good idea is that there are already two healthy open source browser projects out there, based on the Gecko and KHTML layout engines, and three would be a crowd. If we all were the same browser under different names, there would be no variety or competition left except for the respective marketing departments. It is real, open competition we need (something that has been hard to get on the Windows platform).

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