The answer is actually rather complex.

The Free Software Foundation in France argues that the French government considers a ban on free software. Taking into account the possible implications (namely controversy), I initially believed this to be an overstatement or a case of quote-mining.

Will the French be forced to use Internet Explorer (bearing in mind that Opera is now free)? I am not sure what the motive of the government actually is, but I can only speculate. Perhaps it is shielding people’s jobs — primarily in the software industry, that is. Maybe it is the realisation of that DRM and the like suffer from OSS (if not vice versa).

Clarifications soon emerged in a newsgroup that I regularly read (posted by 7):

What they are trying to say is that a new law passed in France will allow those that publish any software to access protected content will face prosecution from those that are harmed by that software. Because any software can become a target, even free software is also a target.

It seems fatally flawed, because you could publish it as two separate modules and have the thing working only when they are brought together by the user as happens now with certain codecs.

In any case, the whole world is running away from DRM because it denies mind share and contributes to elimination of public interest in a companies product, and thus eliminate their revenue!

The day is coming when DRM is burned along side the word hate in the public’s mind.

And nobody will want to touch it and instead opt to go with sharing friendly companies that allows media to be downloaded and stored permanently and transferrably on hard disks and players.

In other (and better) news, the 2008 Olympic Games aim for an Open Source migration.

Contextually-related : No Software Patents in Europe

More options and parameters to fine-tune

Firefox has hidden options, which can be unveiled and altered by entering about:config in the address bar. For example, the browser can be configured to better exploit pipieling or put an end to the most stubborn pop-ups. What is this good for? Avoidance of arbitrary choices of values which are otherwide hard-coded and this immutable. Hidden options are allowing these to be changed, using some loose UI or commands syntax, shall that ever become a necessity.

Hidden options are an excellent idea in principle. Thunderbird enables you to enter a variety of statements into JavaScript files, thereby customising the mail client quite endlessly (introduction phrase, symbols, etc.). Whether these hidden option are implication of an advanced option that is not yet implemented, I can’t tell. Either way, it is a selling point to anyone who feels passionate about hacking or even requires certain customisations.

For example, I know I would be deterred by a client that does not handle exectutable/dynamic signatures and I also feel uncomfortable having no control over the X-headers. I currently use 3 mail clients in tandem (KMail, Thunderbird, Horde) because none offers all the required features. Thunderbird with its hidden options and plug-ins is yet the most powerful/flexible.

As regards hidden options in general, the only issue I can think of is increased complexity in the code. Many conditional statements and more parameters/values which are not hardcoded make code flow harder to keep abreast of. Support for multiple languages has a similar effect. Having said that, since broadly speaking, those to ever look at the code know what they are doing, I think it is balanced by the positive points, if not overwhelmed by them. Many would disagree nonetheless.

When names collide

ACK in 2002, I chose to work on a project which dealt with the game Othello, also known as Reversi. To put rigour into development, I chose a name for it. I did so without paying much thought to any future potential. A careful and exhaustive investigation of name collisions simply did not seem worthwhile at the time.

Having searched the Web at a shallow level, I did not know of any name collisions when I chose the title “Othello Master”. I even explained about the choice of the name in my report and proposal. It refelects on the way I viewed the choice of the name at that time:

This project has been set to produce an application which will be titled Othello Master due to some visual similarity to an older game called Chess Master. It will require knowledge of game theory and advanced computer graphics.

The name was therefore conceived in a most innocent way. It was only less than a year ago that I became aware of a name collision, for which I am to blame. Search engines had revealed a game from the mid-eighties, which suddenly resurfaced in results from archival pages. It ran on the Amiga, but perhaps on other platforms too.

I sometimes wonder if I should get a hold of this game and play it. Mine is Open Source and GPL‘d so no-one is prevented from playing it for free. In fact, the downloads page is always there for those interested. As for the number of downloads, I believe it itches 1,000, but I rarely keep track of the numbers. It can run on all platforms and there is even a Windows executable.

Other items on Othello Master:

• Collaboration Sought
• OM Gets a Home

As an arbitrary set of useful links:

• An academic homepage provides a description and listing of mathematical symbols in HTML.

Nice examples like the following equations have been put together:

∆u  =  Δu  =

n ∑ i = 1

∂2u/∂xi2

+∞ ∫ −∞

exp(−x2) dx

=  √π

The above is valid HTML, but as expected, it makes heavy use of tables although data is not truly tabular. From a standards perspective, this may be frowned upon.

While on the issue of rarely-used symbols, below lie my related ‘pocket links’:

• HTML accents table
• HTML symbols

ODULARITY or compartmentalisation, at least in the context of programming, are important and fundamental concepts. They accommodate for easy extension or change of any piece of software. In the context of Web design, elements to be dealt with apart are layout and content, as the former virtually ‘wraps’ the latter.

Design for the Web and typesetting must be treated just like programming. Almost no exceptions. Why rule out WYSIWYG paradigms and interfaces? Because Abstraction is lossy. Since even bloated application can never faithfully read one’s mind, they result in mistaken outcomes which make assumptions that should not be made. The issues are also ambiguity-driven. Below lie a few examples:

Cascading Style Sheets (CSS): What is the motivation? The idea of maintaining one single file to rule them all — a magic wand to manipulation of files, which facilitates consistent change of layout in a variety of pages. Separate content from presentation is the core rationale. This accommodates for flexibility that is inherent in themes. Styles adhere to a given standardised mechanism/syntax, much like API‘s in the programmatic domain.

If you develop a software product, you can have someone else extend your code, add themes or utilise your services, e.g. Google Maps API, which are now trailed by Yahoo equivalents. Also worth noting are the number of Firefox and Thunderbird themes and extensions (plug-ins). WordPress provides a genrous number of plug-in ‘hooks’ as well, which encourages outside contribution. All extensions are attributed to good support to foreign involvement and modularity which separates the trunk of an application from its add-ons.

L^AT_EX: TeX styles are a similar scenario where consistent styling is easily achieved. Change can be applied to entire document where semantic structure has been embedded by the author. This, in fact, is why many books and eclectic conference proceedings are assembled using L^AT_EX.

Fortunately, more and more people begin the comprehend the value of this approach and the mantra which is not only inter-operability-motivated. It is also guided by the emerging importance of structural composition of documents, which must not differ. In the absence of serapate styles, many files need to be changed consistently, which can become a labour-intensive task. Such operatings are possible, e.g. using recursive search and replace, yet they should be considered nothing but a fallback option.

have already introduced my latest Open Source project (namely Iuron, the Semantic Knowledge Engine) a few times in the past. This afternoon I will be meeting who is questionably the father of the Semantic Web to discuss this project. However, I begin to suspect that Google have picked up on similar ideas by now. From the article which can be found in the Edge (among other places):

“We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

There is a certain hint in that Web site as to long-term intentions and goals at Google. Overall, I don’t know if Google have beat me to it, but I suspect it was not something too crypic or far-fetched. Anyone in the field of machine learning must have thought about it at one stage or another. I hope that my speculation is mistaken and that Google will stick with naive indexing of unreliable Web content.

Speaking of threat from the giants, Google Reader, being an AJAX-rich Web application for reading feeds, has had direct impact on Feedlounge, which is an application I help test. Ever since the launch of Google Reader, Feedlounge development has been in a rather idle and fragile state. I hope Iuron will tread strongly despite the known perils. It is a non-profit, Open Source initiative after all.

UPDATE: I have been told that knowledge representation might be a greater barrier than I had imagined. My preconceptions regarding its maturity were slightly optimistic.

HERE are a variety of technique for summarising page content. Excerpts may be considered one of them, metadata in the (X)HTML header might be another. There is also a sharp rise in the use of tags, which can easily infer the ‘theme’ of a page a and can cohesively reflect on trends across sites (confer tag clouds or see image below).

I am discovering more and more services that are beginning to rely on a succinct collection of keyword, much like tags in Technorati, del.icio.us or the new meta search service gada.be. To each page, a concise representation simply gets bound. Prepare for more of that tagging phenomenon to be seen in the future. In its absence, pages become less desirable as they are more bandwidth-consuming.

Contextual tags cloud in July 2005

Finally, and perhaps more interestingly, advertisements in a page can be made more relevant by using tags, having manually embedded them in the page. This avoids advertisement from appearing where they would become a contextual misfit. Thus far, however, I have only come across support for tag-guidedads in WordPress. As tags are often generated automatically, e.g. derived from the page using scripts/tools, I can envision the same ideas being extended and exposed to the entire World Wide Web. Google AdSense makes an attempt at finding out for itself what a page is primarily about. It does so off-line or ‘on the fly’. Why not involve the user and use his/her knowledge for assistance? That is where tagging, as in the example above, bears tremendous potential.