was travelling to London the other day and something out of the ordinary happened on the journey back to Manchester. This has me think of the possibility of a subsequent rant, which is something that I can never help doing.

So, we were all prepared to leave Euston Rail Station, but the train got stuck. Once it was time for it to depart, the brakes could not be operated. They didn’t permit the train to move. The manager soon said that the local engineers were called in and later added that the train needs a reboot. All the lights went out and the train was virtually disabled for several minutes. Then, even after the reboot, the breaks did not work. Delays have begun to accumulate as the train remained in the station for almost half an hour longer than it should have.

Eventually, the problem was fixed and we rode to Manchester faster than usual, still to no avail (it was late). I slept the entire time fortunately, so not all was bad. The occupancy of the train was low. I couldn’t help but wonder: are these new-ish Virgin trains driven by anything from Microsoft? Windows in particular as a possibility? Or is it specialised UNIX? This reminded me of a very recent deal involving Microsoft and all the Formula 1 teams. I asked somebody who might know the answer, but he could only suggest the following:

“I’d kind of doubt that they’d have windows, but it is just possible. I’d suggest you contact virgin to find out. If it’s true, it could well be a serious safety hazard which should be highlighted anyway.

Personally, I’ve truly no idea…”

Eventually, I decided to contact the company and find out. I doubt Virgin would even reply to any such as enquiry. If they use Windows, they’ll probably deny it. Nobody wants their train systems hijacked, using the flaw du jour, right?

IET is a tricky thing. It’s harder to commit to it than it is to decide to get it started. I still believe in controlling one’s diet by supervising ‘fridge inventories’. It’s essentially done by abstaining from buying undesirable foods or sharing food with others too openly. Shared fridges are a disaster, speaking from experience, as you are no longer restricted to a narrow range of foods (variety is good on the other hand). I find that avoiding the temptation at the stage of purchase leads to a more balanced diet at the end of the day. This expands beyond the ‘realms’ of the fridge. Also dried and long-enduring foods fit this argument. Even sugary drinks and alcohol.

Managing SPAM with the Horde
Web-based E-mail client (click image to view in full size)

N many contexts, no proprietary application can beat Open Source software where development is cumulative — that which stands on the shoulders of giants. I quite like using SpamAssassin as an example.

Spamassassin has captured and isolated tens of thousands of messages for me and never once flagged any genuine message as SPAM. On the contrary, off-the-ground commercial software performs far more poorly, despite its price and its shrink-wrapped package. Many times in the past, messages from myself actually reached the recipients’ SPAM boxes. They actually expected and welcomed that mail, which at time was important. This led to serious inconveniences and communication gaps.

So ask yourself today: in this industry of software, where production costs are inexistent or negligible, should price be indicative of quality? Co-founder of Apple seems to concur with the opinion that some of the worst software comes from large commercial companies.

E often face the need to compromise and rearrange priorities. We do so in order make better use of our time, but there are trade-offs involved. A few months ago I said I would give up on blogging pace, which stood at about 3 posts per day. According to one blogger, this deems quite reasonable. At present, neglect of pace appears like the right strategy, for a wide plethora of reasons.

Daily posts are a legacy of a Web 1.0 mindset and early Web 2.0 days (meaning 12 months ago!). The pressure around posting frequency will ultimately become a significant barrier to the maturity of blogging. Here are 10 reasons why.

I already addressed ad blocking controversies several times in the past, the context being slightly different each time, e.g.:

• Firefox Pop-ups Block
• Google Ads Go Graphical
• Ad Blocking

With blocking often comes some guilt, as it is resistance to the developer’s intent (much like modification of source code). But to me, the bottom line has always been that I am never (or rarely) interested in the content of the ads, all of which are promotional and often urge the visitor to expend money (if not merely get exposed to and absorb some brand name). Thus, any click that I am ever likely to make would probably verge the line of click fraud (assuming pay-per-click programs) and this revenue money goes towards many sides. It will most likely pay off authorities through taxation, the advertiser (or mediator, e.g. Google, Yahoo/Overture), and the Webmaster. So, everybody is essentially gaining at the expense of the client of these ads. If you are not genuinely interested in ads, never follow the link. It is probably as unethical (if not more) than the exclusion of ads altogether.

Digg.com is no exception to all of this. It recently seems to have adopted Google ads that are rather stubborn in the sense that most plug-ins or rules cannot hide them well away from sight. When Digg version 3 launched (only a few weeks ago) it took only minutes for me to get irritated by the waste of space at the top — that which is assigned purely for contextual ads from Google. None of my 3 blocking mechanisms in Mozilla Firefox was enough to wipe it off the page, much to my misfortune as I use Digg very heavily and my Web browser is small in terms of its height dimensions (due to kpager at the bottom of the screen). Either way, there was a simple way to suppress those ads, merely by excluding the div in question. This can be done using a simple selector in Firefox, which makes that top banner ad disappear, never to be thought of again.

Find your chrome directory under your main installation:

• /Applications/Firefox.app/Contents/MacOS/chrome in Mac OS X
• C:Program FilesMozilla Firefoxhrome in Windows
• firefox/hrome in your Linux local installation directory

You might also find it convenient to do this on a per-user basis, by locating your chrome settings under individual profiles, e.g. ~/.mozilla/firefox/1ixj9tdk.default/chrome on my SuSE Linux box.

Edit (if already existent) or create a file named userContent.css and add the following selector:

*[src*="banner_ads"] , div[id="top_ad"] { display: none !important;}

This was inspired by Firefox AdBlock, which is far more comprehensive, but appears to be no longer available (it older URI is now broken). You can always append new rules by looking at the source code of pages and add selectors for exclusions, even using simple wildcards.

will be in London all day today, which is why I am up so early in the morning/night. A Structure and Function meeting will take place and encourage discussion about some recent research among our inter-site collaboration (Manchester, Imperial College, University College London, Oxford).

The journey to London will be roughly as long as the stay, which is somewhat disappointing, if not a real pain. It is also quite disruptive to the normal daytime activities, so I will go to sleep late at night. It is definitely going to be a heck of a long day!

KDE with a theme that I am particularly fond of

As KDE gears up towards the release of version 4, users continue to contribute innovative ideas. Below are a few examples, all of which are mockups and brainstorms.

1. Show Progress in Title Bar. This one shows the pragmatic effect one can achieve by embedding extra information in the title bar of a shaded window.
2. System Notification. Here we see an illustration of system and task status centralised under a single widget.
3. Tasks Info in Less Windows. Lastly we have yet another similar example where information gets condensed, which saves some screen ‘real estate’.

Related items: KDE: User-Driven Innovation, KDE Receives Praises for Innovative Features