/dev/null/kevin

The Register reports the following story:

Microsoft has given up on trying to hawk its controversial Passport sign-on service to other companies.

Microsoft's decision to shut down its Passport partner program comes after one of its largest allies - eBay - said it would retire Passport in January and use its own service instead. Redmond will still offer up Passport as a single sign-on tool for its own services such as Hotmail. This move by Microsoft to give up on being a type of internet services middleman can be seen as a major victory for the rival Liberty Alliance, which is comprised of serious tech heavyweights such as IBM, Sun Microsystems, HP and Nokia.

The Full Story
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December 30, 2004 11:26 AM PST Permalink | |

I recently wrote about things I'm looking forward to. Here is some feedback on how things are going:

• Legend of Earthsea - Well, if you were a fan of the books, you probably didn't like this. I have not read the book yet, so from that point of view, the show was "just ok." It was obvious that there was a lot more going on because the screenplay seemed to skip a lot, so if anything, I want to read the books now just to get the real story. I didn't think Shawn Ashmore made the strongest Ged, but he grew on me over time. The show started weak, with some of the worst acting I've ever seen from Ged's father and lots of needless exposition to cover the parts cut from the books. I also laughed at the fact that "starring Amanda Tapping" means that she's in the show for three seconds (max) and utters one line! Talk about over promotion!

• Return of the King DVD - This was not a letdown. It was everything I hoped it would be, and more. I even took the time to watch all three extended versions back to back to back, just for the fun of it. I was also able to test my new multidisk DVD player, which made that process much easier. I haven't gotten to all of the DVD extras yet, but I will.

• Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, the Sith Lords - While I haven't played it yet, the XBox version is out, as I mentioned. The reviews are good so far. I had the expectation that they wouldn't change the game play or game engine much, since it was a new development team, and I was right. So, if all you want is to play the same game but with a new plot and new characters, then that's exactly what you get. Some were disappointed that the game isn't that different from a technical point. While true, I really don't know what those people were expecting. The concept of a good role playing game is the story and characters, all of which are new. I still await the PC release with great anticipation.

I see that several of my fellow bloggers have posted links on how you can help the survivors of this disaster. Honestly, there cannot be too much help, so here's one more: faithfulamerica.org. This group seems to really be about faith and caring and not politics. With the count now over 50,000, it's really important that the entire world help as much as possible. Thanks.

Update: Alan is absolutely correct. All Sun employees should take advantage of Sun's donation matching policy. See Alan's Blog for more details.

If you don't work for Sun, it's still possible that your company has a similar program. Please check into it. Thanks!
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December 28, 2004 10:42 AM PST Permalink | Comments [1] |

The most powerful earthquake in 40 years struck off Indonesia at 8am Sunday, local time. The quake triggered multiple tsunamis that are flooding large parts of the area. Hundreds, maybe thousands, are dead. I'm in shock watching some of this video.

[Update: Sadly, the death toll has risen dramatically. I added one more news link]

Here are some news links:

• Tidal Waves Kill More Than 700 in Asia
• Asian Quake 5th Largest Since 1900--USGS
• Asia Quake's Tsunamis Kill Nearly 10,000

Those of us from California are well aware of the Richter scale and know that 8.9 is huge. Huge! For those who don't know, the scale is logarithmic, so 7.0 is ten times more powerful than 6.0, 8.0 is ten times more powerful than that. So, 8.9 is almost 1000 times as powerful as a 6.0 earthquake.
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December 26, 2004 12:58 AM PST Permalink | Comments [3] |

Yes Richard, there are hockey fans at Sun. If you're into hockey, and need a fix due to the lockout, check out the IIHF World Junior Championship games this weekend. Team USA looks good this year.

The games are on Christmas Day and on Sunday the 26th. In the US, we can watch the gams on ESPN2.
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December 25, 2004 12:48 AM PST Permalink | |

When is grey not grey? When you're viewing it with Internet Explorer, that's when.

The following words should match their color: blue red gray green grey

With most browsers, the word "grey" is the color grey. But when viewed with Internet Explorer on XP, I see it colored green! You might assume that the parser sees "gre" and assumes "green" but the color displayed is a lighter shade of green that what is displayed for the the word "green" (did that make sense?).

The following code was used to display the colored words above:

<font color="blue">blue</font>
<font color="red">red</font>
<font color="gray">gray</font>
<font color="green">green</font>
<font color="grey">grey</font>

I'd be interested in hearing people's explanation for this. I did find this link that describes the same behavior, but doesn't offer any insight.
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December 24, 2004 12:57 AM PST Permalink | Comments [5] |

CNET reports that Mozilla has released Sunbird 0.2, a.k.a. project Lightning. Sunbird is a calendar program that is meant to work with Thunderbird and Firefox and is targeted at the Microsoft Outlook community.

I downloaded this release candidate and tested it on Windows XP. It's certainly a nice program, but it's still lacking some of the features that are required to really be a primary calendar program. That's not to say that those features aren't planned, but they're not there yet (it is only release 0.2 after all).

The main feature that is missing for me is Palm Pilot support. Yup, it's planned, but it's not there in this release. Unlike email and web access, calendar support isn't about creating a useful client that uses a common API to access remote data. A truely useful calendar program is about being able to synchronize with a varied set of other calendar apps and being able to grok all of the various formats. There aren't just one or two calendar standards like there are in the email and web world, there are dozens. Hopefully Sunbird will start a calendar protocol war and the number of competing protocols will lessen and people gravitate to the stronger and more common ones.
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December 23, 2004 10:48 AM PST Permalink | Comments [1] |

The custom theme is finished! However, unless you're me, or very skilled in noticing detailed changes, you probably won't notice. Just have faith that it is Better, stronger and faster. The main things to note are:

• Comments work - Not sure when these stopped working, but my guess is that all of the anti-spam measure broke the "twisty" comments feature. It's a little-used, but highly cool javascript comment system that redered the comments form dynamically. That all worked, but the submit failed.
• More readable fonts - The base font, while small, is readable. However, all of the code fonts were too small.
• No overlap - The original theme author miscalculated and the right column would overlap the main section.

I'm curious to get some feedback on the font size (or anything else). Is it too small? Just right? Too hot? Too cold? And just to get it out of the way, I'll make the first "size matters" joke so you all don't have to! :-)
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December 22, 2004 07:28 PM PST Permalink | Comments [4] |

I'm trying to fix some problems with my theme, mainly that you can't leave comments. There is a bug filed against the base theme and some otheres where the comments silently go into the bit bucket.

So, if you see lots of changes to the blog theme, or some weird formatting, it's due to my experimenting. Thanks!
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December 22, 2004 10:20 AM PST Permalink | Comments [2] |

A moment of silence, please.
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December 22, 2004 09:22 AM PST Permalink | |

Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 1.0 are now out (as I hope you know) and really making an impact. There are literally dozens of reasons why you should switch to these products from either Internet Explorer or Netscape/Mozilla (speed and security to name just the two on the top).

That said, there are two problems that Solaris users face when trying to switch (Linux, too). The problem is that, by default, these two programs don't know how to invoke each other. If a mail message contains a URL it won't call Firefox, and Firefox doesn't handle mailto links at all. If you search for these fixes on the web, you will find a variety of fixes, most of which apply to different flavors of Linux, or to mozilla. It doesn't take much to extrapolate these solutions to Solaris, but I've done it anyway.

Note: These solutions are for Thunderbird 1.0, Firefox 1.0 and Solaris 10. Also, when referring to the thunderbird and firefox commands, I am referring to the top level shell script, not the binary. It's important to use these shell scripts as they create the proper environment, and automatically handle the remote access. For these examples, it is assumed that these commands live in /usr/local/bin. Make any changes accordingly.

Thunderbird: Handling URLs in mail

You need to edit your local prefs.js file and add the following line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/local/bin/firefox");

This file can be found here:

$HOME/.thunderbird/<PROFILE>/prefs.js

The <PROFILE> value is a random string, that may have .default appended to it. If you only have one profile, then it should be the only directory in there. If you have more than one profile, you'll need to change each prefs.js file.

Firefox: Handling mailto links

This fix is slightly more complicated since you need to create a wrapper script. We'll be calling this script mailto in this example.

Here is the code for the mailto script:

#!/bin/sh
# script to be called by firefox when mailto: links are clicked.

DIRNAME=`dirname $0`
DIRNAME=`cd $DIRNAME ; pwd`
thunderbird="$DIRNAME/thunderbird"

args=`echo $* | sed -e 's/ /%20/g'`

if $thunderbird -remote "ping()" > /dev/null 2>&1
then
	args=`echo $args | sed -e 's/mailto://'`
	$thunderbird -remote "mailto($args)"
else
	$thunderbird "$args"
fi

The mailto script should be placed in the same directory as the thunderbird script. If not, you'll need to alter the script accordingly.

The second step is to add the following line to your firefox preferences, similar to how you did the same for thunderbird. Add the following line:

user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.mailto", "/usr/local/bin/mailto");

To this file:

$HOME/.mozilla/firefox/<PROFILE>/prefs.js

Same comment for <PROFILE> as for thunderbird.

You'll need to restart both apps for these changes to take affect.

PVP Comics notes that there are no new Christmas specials. The networks continue to air the same classics from my childhood. Not that this is a bad thing, since shows like A Charlie Brown Christmas, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer still work and even get reasonable ratings.

So, why no new shows? PVP's Scott Kurtz says that we want to look up past Christmases, not present ones. Maybe that's true, but it's not like in the 60s and 70s, when these shows were made, that things were all cheery and problem-free. The fact is that in spite of all of the turmoil of the 60s, they still made shows that stuck to the basic and timeless themes of Christmas. I think the real problem with any attempts at creating new "classics" is that they aren't classic or timeless.

It's actually not accurate to say that there aren't any new shows. There have been plenty, but they all fade away and never achieve that "classic" status, regardless of what the marketing department says ("An instant classic" --raves CBS President, Les Moonves). There have been unpopular sequels to the popular classics (Frosty Returns, I Want a Dog for Christmas, Charlie Brown, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer & the Island of Misfit Toys), all of which failed to capture the magic of the originals. I'm not sure why anyone would expect to change the voices, animation style, songs, and pretty much everything else and expect people to love the sequels instantly.

Then we have the attempts at creating new and original shows. While that's certainly the way to go, these shows usually fail in onr of three categories: real originality, timelessness and quality. Take the Robbie the Reindeer series and Olive, the Other Reindeer. Obviously, originality is not a strong point here, but neither is timelessness. Using famous actors to play the part is a good selling point - now - but not in 20 years.

I think the most successful "new" Christmas story is The Nightmare Before Christmas. While it's little creepy to appeal to really young kids, it has a lasting value that should survive the test of time. Unfortunately, it's appeal is limited. We also have the new Polar Express movie. If Roger Ebert is to be believed, it's going to be around every year, like It's a Wonderful Life. I haven't seen it yet, so I can't comment, but even if it is good, at 99 minutes (120 with commercial), that's too long for a kid's movie. We still won't have a nice half hour Christmas special.

Speaking of being too long, this post is way too long. Maybe someone should turn this blog into a Christmas special! The Blog That Saved Christmas Hmmm... It has promise.
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December 20, 2004 11:17 AM PST Permalink | |

I'm always interested when an urban legend it true. Snopes.com has a nice story about how the Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer story was created for the Montgomery Ward department stores.

What's particularly nice (being a Christmas story and all) is how the actual creator, who could have been Scrooged out of any money, actual did make some money from it all. Also interesting is that, like so many movie adaptations of books, the TV version is different from the written story.
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December 19, 2004 06:32 PM PST Permalink | |

A problem near and dear to the hearts of the Sun blogging community, comment spam, is gaining visibility. Slashdot mentions a Netcraft article about spam attacks on bloggers (we use Roller, but are no more protected, for now). At least we have the author of Roller , as well as a whole cadre of bright and vocal engineers working on solutions.

My hope is that I get comment spam on this post, just for the pure ironic value.
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December 18, 2004 02:54 PM PST Permalink | Comments [3] |

I loved the Tintin comics growing up, but I never noticed all of Captain Haddock's colorful curses. David's Favorite Captain Haddock Curses site is an awesome collection of the Capn's best. A twisted mind was needed to even think these up. I may start using them as I need to watch my swearing around my 19 month old daughter. Like all kids, she really picks up on the things we say now.

I get a laugh reading though some of these. I'm sure they are even funnier if you've been drinking some Loch Lomond.
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December 17, 2004 11:11 AM PST Permalink | |