Blogger is Buggered?

Well, three posts in a row about Blogger is a little unusual, but I think this is merited.

From time to time I amuse myself by following the "Next Blog" links to get an idea of what was going on in the blog stream. If today's experience is typical then about one blog in three is complete spam, obscured by a pop-up ad window and full of links to pornographic sites. It seems clear that nobody is exercising any kind of critical control over Blogger content, and frankly it's got to the point where I am no longer sure I want to be associated with it.

I've been a web use for a long time, and it saddens me to see a potentially fantastic medium ruined by the swarms of lowest-common-denominator advertiser scum. If this is "what the people want" then they are welcome to it. I really don't think Blogger are doing themselves any favors by letting this situation continue.

Blogger Hoses Notification Emails

Just to underline my feeling that Blogger is the poor relation at Google, the confirmation emails that come through to let me know that people have made comments have recently been mangled badly.

Formerly I would get a properly-formatted text email saying something like

ScW has left a new comment on your post "Innovate and Get Sued by Apple?":
...

Now instead I see stuff like:

New comment on  Blogger
Behind the Curve?.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/alternative;
 boundary="----=_Part_28_25742053.1190124918523"

------=_Part_28_25742053.1190124918523
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Doug Napoleone has left a new comment on your post "Blogger Behind the Curve?":

I don't know what's happened, but I am pretty sure I haven't made any change to my email system that might be responsible. Of course, we never have, have we? I suppose it's possible I might be responsible, but I'd much rather blame Blogger. If nobody else is seeing this, however, then perhaps it is me. Am I alone, or have Blogger screwed up by inadequate testing?

Blogger Behind the Curve?

I am sure I wasn't the only one who greeted Blogger's acquisition by Google with enthusiasm. At last, I thought, I will be free of the editor applet, which has become rather tedious to use.

Alas not, though. While much has changed, and the AJAX-based layout editor is a great improvement, we are still left with a content editor that creates horrible HTML and whose toggle buttons easily lose synchronization with the editor's state.

A recent post by Paddy also highlights the fact that there is inadequate support for posting code. I realise this probably isn't a majority interest, but in this day and age you would think the the world's leading web company could do better.

ReStructured Text to Anything

I stopped using the "How'd I Get Here" Firefox add-on when I had to reload Windows last time, so I don't remember where I saw this, but there's an interesting new service that lets you convert your ReST documents to HTML or PDF with a choice of styles. Worth a look.

The authors give credit to many open source products including Docutils, Python, Django, MochiKit, LaTeX, ImageMagick, MySQL and Ubuntu.

It's good to see great services coming out of the Python community, and this is a nicely put together example of what you can do with open source.

Stock Quotes in Python

Corey Goldberg has been publishing some interesting blog posts lately. Today I spotted one that uses Google Finance to get a current price on a stock given its four-character ticker symbol. Good work, Corey, keep it up!

Innovate and Get Sued by Apple?

Yet more evidence came to light this week in my EFF newsletter about Apple's lack of will to compete. In fact, make that Apple's determination to stymie competition in any shape or form. They have never been an open systems company, and it appears now that they don't see any advantage in helping others to expand the market for iPhones. No sirree, that's Apple's territory, and Apple's alone. If you believe Apple, that is. But if Henry Ford had taken the same attitude to free market innovation that Steve Jobs does we would probably still be riding round on horses.

There was a major battle around the ability to have your iPhone load ringtones that you didn't pay Apple 99 cents for. The ModifyMyiPhone site detailed how to download "unauthorized" ringtones using two different pieces of software, iFuntastic and iRingtoner. Just before Apple's recent announcement of additional products including the iPod Touch a company called Ambrosia announced a product called iToner that also allowed the download of ringtones.

Apple's response? Version 7.4 of iTunes automatically deleted any non-approved (i.e. not purchased from Apple) ring tones. Ambrosia figured a workaround for this update, which iTunes version 7.4.1 again defeated, and so on.

Another battle is over video output. Presumably because they can, Apple has locked the video output on recent versions of the iPod classic and iPod nano. Vendors who want to provide compatible accessories are required to buy licensed chips from Apple and pay a fee of 10% of their wholesale price. Apple are charging $49 for a kit containing a video cable that has the activation chip along wiht a power supply. That sounds suspiciously like gouging to me.

The next laptop suddenly looks less and less like an Apple. How can we be for open source and yet condone this kind of behavior in the marketplace?

Yet Another Longhorn Delay

Why don't Microsoft just stop announcing product plans? Their releases inevitably turn out to be later than anticipated, and the resulting back-pedaling just makes them look like bad planners.

As you might have read, the Microsoft Server Division Blog has detailed another delay - it now looks like Windows Server 2008 will actually be released in 2008 (assuming they manage to avoid another 9 months of slippage).

It's interesting that the explanation for the delay tries to mask the fact that Microsoft are apparently not yet satisfied with product quality. If the quality of some earlier products is anything to go by then it doesn't bode well for Server 2008. Still, nobody said running the largest software company in the world would be easy.

Python 3.0 First Alpha Build Available

Guido has just announced the availability of a public alpha of Python 3.0.

Please remember there are several things this does not mean:

• Python 2.x is not obsolete. The series will continue through 2.6 (which will include backports of many Python 3 features) and probably 2.7. In fact the only guarantee is that there will be no releases after 2.9.x, as Guido has stated his dislike of the ambiguities inherent in a 2.10 release number.
• Python 3 is not ready for production work. The alpha series is expected to last a considerable length of time, and even when Python 3 comes into production (in around a year from now if Guido's original schedule is maintained) 2.6 will be the major platform.
• There should be no need to develop parallel source trees for your Python code. The 2.6 translator will have a "Python 3 warnings" mode, and if you ensure that this doesn't produce warnings you will be able to convert your code to Python 3 automatically using a conversion tool.

For a summary of other things you might like to know about Python 3 see Guido's blog.

Half-open Interval

Score two if you also noticed that there was no footnote for the asterisk in the preceding post.

Google's Spam Priorities?

So, this bunch of annoying little [expletive deleted]s have recently started spamming one of the newsgroups I haunt with messages about things like "Best Car Air Conditioners". For email my spam filters take care of a lot of this crap, but on newsgroups I pretty much have to take what my NNTP server delivers [and there's a market opportunity right there: millions of Thunderbird users are currently casting around for the next non-Microsoft solution to their problems, and if someone chooses to build a newsreader that integrates Spambayes or some similarly competent technology they could probably make a modest income). Score one if you noticed that I just wrote a half-open interval.*

Being a civic-minded netizen I decide that my only recourse is to make sure that at least these nasty little buggers will have to register new Gmail accounts (not that they will worry about that, as they probably register thirty-five new accounts a day, but anyway ...), so I decide to report them to the appropriate abuse address (even though I realize as I do so that I will either be ignored, or I will be one of several thousand irritated readers who are just as pissed as me).

So. CTRL/U gets me the message headers, and lo! I see

        Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com

Hooray! There's a large, responsible, "do no evil" company who is prepared to stand up and stop these little [expletive deleted]s in their tracks. Great. So I send a message (being careful to include all the headers) to the appropriate address and return to work basking in the warm comfortable glow of having done my duty and helped, as best I can, to put an end to the abhorrence of spam (really, sometimes I look at the human race and what I see depresses me: there really are people out there to whom money is so important that they will fund the exploitation of thousands, nay millions, of vulnerable always-on under-protected basement-dwelling computer systems to send out millions of messages a day about how someone is just waiting to transfer several million dollars into their bank account in return for a modest fee for their assistance. Give me a [expletive deleted] [expletive deleted] break).

Having taken the time to compose and send a message to the above-mentioned address, pointing out how the offenders are spamming a programming language group with inappropriate messages, I go about my business feeling virtuous. Only to see, when I next return to the computer, the following email:

This message was created automatically by mail delivery software.

A message that you sent could not be delivered to one or more of
its recipients. The following addresses failed:

 

SMTP error from remote server after RCPT command:
host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[64.233.167.114]:
550 5.1.1 No such user v66si6536119pyh

--- The header of the original message is following. ---

Received: from [12.47.149.104] (helo=[12.47.149.104])
 by mrelay.perfora.net (node=mrus1) with ESMTP (Nemesis),
 id 0MKpCa-1INdGx0Vee-0007V8; Tue, 21 Aug 2007 19:36:44 -0400
Message-ID: <46cb7706.4050206@holdenweb.com>

[... etc., etc., ...]

It can't be easy running a large company. If it was easy then I guess I could do it too. So much for help with abuse. I guess we have to turn to the federal government for assistance now. Oh, sorry, that's no good. The federal government stopped taking an interest in the spam problem when it was pointed out that over 50% of the world's spam originated in the USA (though this is now an out-of-date statistic).

I guess it's up to us vigilantes, then. Whar's mah gun?

Close Enough?

I have long admired the formula often known as Euler's identity. It was probably known before Euler's time, but it is associated inextricably with his name because it is a special case of a more general formula, with π as the value of the bound variable. The identity asserts that


To me this is a thing of beauty and a joy forever, but I have long since given up trying to explain to other people why or how I perceive beauty in mathematics. Anyway I thought I would see how close my trusty laptop could get to emulating this mystic identity (it's amazing what I get up to when procrastinating), and naturally chose Python (though I believe the results would be just as disappointing in any other language). Here's what I got:

>>> math.e**(math.pi*-1j)
(-1-1.2246467991473532e-16j)


Definitely not quite the same mystical properties there, even though numerically quite close. No wonder I never liked applied mathematics!

SCO's Fate Is Sealed

A preliminary ruling in SCO's battle against users of the Linux operating system has decreed that the rights SCO was licensing actually belonged to Novell. There is along way still to go before all issues are resolved, but it's my belief that this judgment sounds SCO's death-knell. It is now a company with no prospects and precious few products, and a completely discredited CEO.

If SCO survives long enough to see all legal questions resolved I will be surprised. Novell can now choose to force SCO to waive its claims against IBM and Sequent, and the war chest that SCO had hoped to use to fund legal actions is likely to be needed to pay Novell fees that SCO have received for licenses it had no legal power to levy.

I wonder what Darl McBride's next job will be?

Electronic Voting? Just Say "No"

Because Ka-Ping Yee was involved, and because I have a professional interest in information security, I have been keeping my eye on the California Secretary of State's investigation into electronic voting machines. I'm afraid the initial results are not at all promising for the future of American democracy. Here's the most telling quote from the source code review of the Sequoia system:

Of particular concern is that virtually every software mechanism related to counting votes is exposed, directly or indirectly, to compromise through tampering with equipment that is deployed in the field. In many cases, tampering sufficient to cause compromise requires only brief physical access and may leave behind little or no evidence.

This is hardly a surprise to those who have studied computer intrusion techniques, but clearly wasn't taken into account by the system's designers. The list of vulnerabilities makes me wonder whether the people who designed the system actually had any security training at all. Yet I just know, before I look for it, that the inevitable response of the vendors involved will be to try to minimize the impact of the security issues, just like Microsoft used to (they know better now).

As far as the voting public is concerned all of this might just as well not have happened, since they are neither educated nor encouraged to value their participation in democracy. As a result I fully expect that electronic voting systems of dubious security and with no paper audit trail will be even more widely deployed in the next election, with the result that victory will go to the least scrupulous, and no challeneg will be mounted by an apathetic populace.

The depressing thing is that the majority of voters (hey, aren't they supposed to decide who gets elected?) would rather leave the dirty business of politics to someone else. It's easier to keep their heads buried in the sand than engage with the endemic corruption of the democratic process. Perhaps you really do get the government you deserve.

Because I live in the USA I can't really claim to be disinterested, but for the record I am at present merely a disenfranchised immigrant. So I am asking all the citizens I know to take an interest in these issues and force the politicos and bureaucrats to implement a more rigorous and respectful approach to secure voting. There would be a real value to open source voting machines.

A Great Resource Ruined

I recently visited the SourceForge web site, as I am taking another look at the mingw toolchain. What a disaster the site has become. It seems like it is now organized with the principal intention of maximizing the number of page views, and hence the revenue that can be gained from advertising. All thoughts of user convenience appear to have been banished.

Back when SourceForge was the major repository for open source work it was easy to find a project and download it. The interface wasn't particularly glitzy but it was usable, and you could get where you needed to be with relatively few clicks. Now even a relatively simple download forces you through a chain of links.

I take Inkscape as an example, because I was interested in obtaining an up-to-date copy. The project home page has a friendly-looking link on it that says "Download Inkscape." The first glitch is that although there's a green graphic to make the link look like a button, the graphic isn't part of the link so you have to click on the text! Clicking doesn't download anything, however, it merely takes you to the download page. This page contains a list of files, each of which has a friendly green button (that again isn't really a button) labeled "Download".

You've guessed it - clicking on the text link doesn't download anything, it takes you to yet another download page. Then, finally, you get to download your file by clicking on its name. I don't think the people who designed this site read Jakob Nielsen's work much.

What's even worse is what they have done to the mailing lists. I was having trouble with Msys apparently not actioning the /etc/fstab file so I searched for msys ignores fstab using Google. The first hit was on SourceForge, but the page I obtained by following the link was not only completely useless, it also bore absolutely no relationship to the cached copy page that Google provided, and appeared to be badly broken. There's probably a reason for it, but I was no longer prepared to give the site the benefit of any doubt.

I am so glad that the Python development team took the decision a long time ago to migrate away from SourceForge's repository (they wanted to use Subversion, and SourceForge were taking way too long to offer it as an option). I hope that the final migration of the issue tracker will soon mean that Python development is no longer dependent on what appears to have become a sadly broken system, though I understand there may be issues with content migration.

I suspect that SourceForge's justification for the changes was that they needed to generate revenues to pay for the continued operation of the site. Just the same I will be very surprised if they haven't completely lost their dominant position in five years. Given the right resources it would be so easy to do a better job. Someone is going to see this as a business opportunity and eat SourceForge's lunch before too long. This is a great pity considering the service that the site provided to so many open source projects through the end of the twentieth century.

Python Further Embedded in the Animation Industry

Python's inexorable march towards world domination* continues with the recent announcement that visual effects provider The Foundry plans to incorporate a Python programming interface into the next version of its Furnace product. The UK broadcast industry news article that brought this to my attention also (correctly) says Python is

an extensible programming language, which is becoming widely supported by other application vendors and forming the backbone of many studios pipelines

It seems that Python's origins in "computer programming for everybody" has allowed it to become a default choice for embedded scripting capabilities in many areas. It is fast becoming the standard in the film industry. It would be nice, now the secret is out, to see that industry contributing a bit more to the development of the language and its community.

* Just in case you wondered, there are no such plans!

Obscurantism

I may have mentioned before that I have started to use the C# language. Overall it isn't bad - it uses static typing, which I have always found irksome, but the language is reasinably expressive and compact compared with something like Java or C++. Because it is heavily promoted by Microsoft there are any number of tutorial and example web sites, not all of them by programming experts.

Somehow the Java message that it's bad to allow direct access to instance and class attributes appears to have permeated the C# world, I have no idea why. I have just been reading one of the better-written tutorials, which offers the following code as an example if instance creation and manipulation.

static void Main(string[] args)
{
Person Michael = new Person();
Person Mary = new Person();
// Specify some values for the instance variables
Michael.Age = 20;
Michael.HairColor = "Brown";
Mary.Age = 25;
Mary.HairColor = "Black";
// print the console's screen some of the variable's values
Console.WriteLine("Michael's age = {0}, and Mary's age = {1}",
                 Michael.Age, Mary.Age);
Console.ReadLine();
}

As code goes that isn't bad, and apart from the different comment styles and the declarations it could almost be Python. Unfortnately the author has tasted the Java Kool-Aid, and shortly after this example writes

So each object now contains different data. Note that we directly accessed the variables and we put any values we wanted, right? But wait there is a solution to this problem. We will use properties.

There is no attempt to explain what the "problem" is, and you will probably not be surprised to learn that the "solution" involves making the attributes private to the class and then providing public getter and setter methods for instance users. This turns a five-line class declaration into a 32-line one (though to be fair to the author, he does at least include checking code that demonstrates the value of properties in applying class-based logic during assignment).

I have now read any number of texts where instead of something like

class Person
{
public int Age;
public string HairColor;
}

that allows direct access to the instance variables by client code, readers are encouraged to write horrendous code like

class Person
{
private int age;
private string hairColor;
public int Age
{
  get
  {
      return age;
  }
  set
  {
      age = value;
  }
}
public string HairColor
{
  get
  {
      return hairColor;
  }
  set
  {
      hairColor = value;
  }
}
}

which actually offers no benefit over the short version at all. Python users are used to accessing attributes directly in their code, which clearly has performance benefits, and then implementing properties if and when they are required to add logic to the setting or retrieval of attribute values. I just wish that C# users could see that empty getters and setters offer no measurable benefit over direct access to attributes.

Misunderstandings

Here's a quote from an article about agile programming which is otherwise quite well-informed:

But because of their simplicity, languages such as Python and Ruby are better-suited to writing small applications.

This is the kind of myth that really needs to be squashed at the source. Unfortunately the source in this case is a journalist who has written an article and moved on with her misunderstanding of the issues and the facts completely untouched.

It's difficult to know how to attack this problem, because even the Python Software Foundation's advocacy coordinator were to contact the journalist in question and correct the mis-impression the damage is already done, and another opportunity to gain the wrong idea about dynamic languages is out there to be used as "evidence" by those looking to press the advantage of some other technique. It must have annoyed David Goodger (one of the Foundation's directors) to be quoted shortly after that misstatement.

In this particular case the author of the article did manage to get a lot right - technologies should come second to business needs, agile methods can save money by delivering business value faster and avoiding large amount of rework, and so on. So the content wasn't all bad, but the misunderstanding of Python's suitability for large projects spoiled it for me.

But then, I (and, I presume, most of thios blog's readers) already know that Python can be used successfully to build very large systems indeed.

Developers Migrating Away from Windows

In a research report from Evans Data Corporation we learn that last year's decline in the targeting of Windows as a primary development platform has been repeated. John Andrews of Evans says "it's clear that a shift away Windows began about two years ago, and the data show that this migration is now accelerating. Linux has benefited, but we also see corresponding growth in niche operating systems for non-traditional client devices. The landscape is changing."

If I were a Microsoft shareholder I might be happier if I could see Microsoft engaging more aggressively with the open source community. It's difficult to steer something with the inertia of a large organization like Microsoft, though, so perhaps they are changing course as fast as is practical. Ultimately even Microsoft will have to realize that they can't do everything by themselves, and specifically that they can't dictate standards (e.g. WSDL) to the rest of the world.

Python Magazine Coming Soon

As Brian Jones has just announced, there will be a new Python magazine (imaginatively entitled Python Magazine) out before the end of the year.

It's encouraging that the publishing world is taking Python seriously enough to produce magazines . There's already the online PyZine and the more academically-inclined Python Papers, and I may have missed some.

This will tend to encourage further interest in Python, which I feel is kind of on the brink of mainstream significance. After a mere 17 or 18 years in development Python is about mature enough to become widely adopted - it took UNIX about the same length of time to appear as a commercial operating system.

If you have any ideas about what you'd like to see in Python Magazine, or if you're interested in writing for it, they would be happy to hear from you! I have agreed to provide a regular column, and so I have to get back to putting four months' material together.

Wing IDE Editor Video [Test]

So, today's exercise is to embed a ShowMeDo video into my blog. I'm thinking of extending the wxPython series - do readers think there could be a demand for such videos?
I use Wing IDE quite a lot, so I chose that one, but ShowMeDo now have over 100 Python-related videos.

Get the Flash Player to see this movie.

This video originally comes from here
at ShowMeDo from the Python category.