I have to give another congratulations to the NetNewsWire team – I just realized I’d been taking advantage of a very simple but very clever piece of user interface design.  The contextual menu in the NetNewsWire browser has two “Reload” menu items in it, one at the top and one at the bottom.

Regardless of where you click on the page and whether or not the contextual menu pops up or pops down from your mouse cursor, the reload item is always right next to your cursor so it’s easy to hit.  Now you might think that it would be better to just detect which way the contextual menu popped and move the refresh menu item to that end, or even flip the entire menu so that the distance to all the items is unaffected by how the menu pops.  The downside of doing that though is that it makes it much harder to find the items because they keep moving around.  With the duplicated item, the menu is always the same so it’s very quick to identify which way it popped and then move to the item while still keeping the most commonly used item close at hand.

The engineers at work are starting to find reasons to have an news feed aggregator running on their machines at work, mostly so they can keep track of changes being made to the wiki, but it provides a convenient mechanism to push content out to the entire team without being too intrusive.  For some reason RSS feeds seem to be able to handle more information flowing past before it all becomes to much to sort through.  As we get more of the engineers with RSS aggregators running, there’s a much lower barrier to entry for new information feeds and a much higher pay-off for developing them.  For instance, when I get a few free moments I’d like to set up an RSS feed for CVS commits (this is harder than it seems since somehow we wound up using CVSNT instead of just putting the CVS repository on one of our Solaris boxes).  If I’m the only one subscribing to that feed it’s probably not worth setting up, but if half the engineering team is subscribed then it can really start to increase the chances of stupid mistakes or missed scenarios being picked up.

I finally got around to purchasing a full copy of NetNewsWire and am very happy with the decision.  I never thought I’d like opening web pages in NetNewsWire instead of in Safari (it’s a configurable option) but I’m really starting to like it.  It makes it easier for me to keep pages open for a long time while they wait for me to get a chance to read them while still allowing me to get on with work in Safari without winding up with a million open tabs and not being able to find anything.

I haven’t had a chance to read everything that’s been going around about Jonathan Schwartz’s latest comments about the GPL but I wanted to pick on David Jericho for a moment because his response irked me a little.

The problem with attacking something like the GPL is that it makes the attacker generally look stupid.

And the problem with defending something like the GPL is that it makes the defender generally look like a zealot.  There are multiple valid viewpoints for this argument, suggesting that the GPL is infallible and beyond criticism (which is how I would interpret David’s statement) is a pretty tough argument to sell.  The key difference here is one of philosophy, the GPL was explicitly created to force software to be open and kept that way.  It was created on the belief that all software should be free.  If you agree with those principles the GPL is very clearly a fantastic license and probably is from your viewpoint, infallible.  If however you happen to believe that intellectual property should be leveraged to make money and that this process fosters innovation then you probably think the GPL is bad for innovation or bad for the economy.  Neither side can be clearly proven to be right or wrong at this stage, and it’s quite possible that there will never be a definitive answer.  There are however plenty of opinions going both ways, but they are just opinions.  There are also case studies supporting both sides.  David mentions India and China as examples of the GPL doing wonders for the economy, I’d mention the current economic super powers as examples of traditional intellectual property approaches doing wonders for the economy.

Hadley Stern raises a bunch of questions about how much time kids should be spending in front of computers (and TV and video games etc).  I’m not sure why this is such an issue for people.  Growing up I spent a huge amount of time in front of computers and I’m (at least reasonably) normal.  The key element isn’t so much restricting a passion for computing or even TV and video games, it’s more about encouraging other activities.  Kids won’t enjoy other activities much if they do them because they are no longer allowed to be doing what they really wanted.

Particularly when the ceiling drops from being about 20ft high to about 6ft high.  Even worse if it happens to be in a narrow passageway…  in the dark… and the ceiling is painted black.  It would probably have still been okay except that I’m about 6'4″.

Theatre’s are dangerous places I tell you.  Particularly when the stage manager thinks that the dark, narrow passageway with the dangerous roof (and the power switch for the sound system at the end of it) is the ideal place to stuff all the props.  I now have a rather large lump on my head.

It’s been quiet around here of late because I’ve spent pretty much all my spare time at rehearsals for a new play debuting in Brisbane titled The Last Of The Red Hot Irish Lovers which is probably best described as a light hearted drama.  I’ve been put in charge of the technical side of the show – mostly focussing on sound.  If you’re near Brisbane I strongly recommend you go see it, the opening night was tonight and there are shows Friday and Saturday from 7:30 and Sunday from 2pm as well as Thursday, Friday and Saturday of next week from 7:30.  All at the MetroArts building in Adelaide street.  Tickets are available at the door or bookings can be made by contacting me (contact details are in the sidebar).  I think it’s about $15 a ticket or $10 concession.   If you need further info give me a yell.

Pretty much no-one used them.

Yeah it’s right out there in the conspiracy theory side of things but I’m pretty sure that’s the main reason Apple hasn’t been too keen to put engineering time into developing Java wrappers for the Cocoa APIs.  Lots of people thought they were a cool idea and started using them, then one by one they realized it would just be so much easier to use Objective-C since that’s what the APIs were designed for in the first place.  Jump on Apple’s java-dev list and ask whether or not you should use the Java-Cocoa bridge for an application and the advice that you’ll get is to just learn Objective-C and you’ll be much better off.

Monsieur Scoble asks:

Finally, I’m gonna ask a provocative business question of Opera (and other browser manufacturers): What’s your business again? If all the browsers have the same underlying features, and they should only add things that are standards, what differentiation are you offering your customers and investors? Are you saying Firefox’s developers can’t propose anything new that’d push the Web forward? Hey, how about some linking technologies like Greasemonkey? Is Firefox not allowed to add anything like that that the W3C didn’t propose and that the WaSP didn’t approve of?

He’s popping up in a few interesting places of late.  He’s been hired by Sun to work on the Swing team and promptly showed up on the WinLAF mailing list to talk about moving their bug fixes to the Windows L&F into the official Swing codebase for release in Mustang (accompanied by talk of how to make it easier for the WinLAF folks to contribute fixes more directly to the Swing codebase.  Then today he turned up on the Mac Java-Dev list asking questions related to making Java apps look right on OS X.  Then of course he’s behind the Flying Saucer pure Java XHTML renderer which is really quite awesome (it was very strict about standards compliance last I checked so should make even Byron happy).

There used to be a time when if a security advisory came out you should pay attention and take immediate action – it seems more and more these days most security advisories should be ignored because it’s just some brain-dead, wanna-be security company desperate for attention.  The most recent example of this is the so called “infection” is this piece of trash from Vital Security.

People, when a security dialog comes up with 3 exclamation marks you probably shouldn’t say yes.  I mean seriously, if you’re stupid enough to run untrusted code with full permissions, I just have to link to a .exe to own your machine.  Users should be allowed to use their computers, they just have to be taught not to trust unknown sources of software and not say yes to random dialogs that popup.  This is not a technological issue, it’s a problem of education.  Previously you used to have to teach people not to delete the Windows or System Folder because if they did the computer wouldn’t boot.  Now you have to teach them to not trust things by default.

Well that’s not true, there’s a lot going on in my life – I’ve been really busy, but there’s not much going on in the tech industry and the “blogosphere” that’s interested me enough to post anything.  There haven’t been all that many posts recently that I’ve really read either, mostly I’ve just been skimming everything that comes through the RSS feeds.

Oh well, at least the offline world is interesting at the moment.