Let’s look back at this sad, sad tale published in the WSJ.

From the article:

Dr. Miller’s data reveal some yawning gaps in basic knowledge. American adults in general do not understand what molecules are (other than that they are really small). Fewer than a third can identify DNA as a key to heredity. Only about 10 percent know what radiation is. One adult American in five thinks the Sun revolves around the Earth, an idea science had abandoned by the 17th century.

I guess, then, it’s no surprise that the brilliant minds at the FCC have stated that a closed-source, security through obscurity model is more secure than open source, concerning data transmissions.

From the FCC’s findings:

The Commission hereby states that it is its policy, consistent with the intent of Cognitive Radio Report and Order and Cisco’s request, that manufacturers should not intentionally make the distinctive elements that implement that manufacturer’s particular security measures in a software defined radio public, if doing so would increase the risk that these security measures could be defeated or otherwise circumvented to allow operation of the radio in a manner that violates the Commission’s rules. A system that is wholly dependent on open source elements will have a high burden to demonstrate that it is sufficiently secure to warrant authorization as a software defined radio.

Late last night, I submitted my first patch ever for an open source project. It was a language string fix for yumex.

It was a very minor change, and in fact probably would’ve been easier just to say, “this bug exists in files A, B, C, D, E and F”, and would have taken less net time for discovery and ensuing fix by the developer than for me to find it, learn how to create patch files, assure that those patches work…. and then scratch the itch which made me figure out how to concatenate them (easy) and test the process all over again. However, I look at the latter part thereof as a learning experience. Now that i know how to do this, I won’t necessarily be so intimidated at submitting patches in the future.

I don’t know that he’ll use my patch — this being my first time, I still don’t really even know if it will work outside my home box, although I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t. In any case, even such a minor bit of participation like this, it feels good.

Been listening to the Librivox.org reading of Aldous Huxley’s Crome Yellow. I keep imagining it as a movie, which I guess, to me anyway, is a sign that the book is pretty good.

I don’t know that they would/could make a movie out of Crome Yellow though… there’s a lot of internal dialogue. I guess that hasn’t stopped anyone before, but it’s a good listen (and generally speaking, would be a good read, too) as is, I am not sure how modifying it, or getting rid of any of the internal dialogue would work.

I guess they could make a miniseries out of it, narrated.

Anyway, Huxley is quite descriptive of his characters in this book, and I keep imagining who might play the roles. For example, I imagine Mackenzie Crook as the brooding, self-involved Denis… and despite the description of his “rich, rather unctuous voice”, I keep picturing Mr. Barbecue-Smith looking something like Wallace Shawn.

I have an image of what I’d expect Mary to look like, too, but I can’t think of any particular actresses offhand who resemble this.

So, I touted 25 Million, so I might as well cheer twice as much about the news that Firefox has achieved 50 million downloads.

Was talking to a coworker about it yesterday. I think he’s planning to install it on his laptop this weekend.

Sorry, don’t have any new favourite extensions to recommend this time — these milestones are coming along so fast that I haven’t had time to find new extensions that I like, between them!

And to tack on my 2c… these are the extensions that I tend to use:

• Adblock, for more enjoyable web browsing.
• NukeAnything, to clear up the few and far-between annoying flash ads that Adblock might happen to miss.
• Prefbuttons, to set up fine-grained controls and preferences in seconds.
• Sage, for my RSS aggregator.
• Context Highlight, for making my searches a bit easier.
• ForecastFox, for weather. I hadn’t even seen this one until a recent fluff article came out on PCWorld or something, regarding the “top ten Firefox extensions”; now I use it a ton… and it’s not as annoying as my wife’s “Weatherbug” install. In fact, she’s also using this extension now, too.

Nothing brings on the hounds faster than a Microsoft Developer admitting that IE’s PNG rendering sucks.

I wonder if the comments were closed after a specified amount of time, or whether it got too hot in the kitchen.

It goes w/o saying that this website employs a lot of PNGs. If you’re not using something like Firefox, you’re missing out, not just on my weblog, but a lot of other sites.

I may have to switch back using mutt for my mailreader. Not because I don’t like the client that comes with Mozilla, but really just because Phoenix is way more responsive than Moz — it just doesn’t have a mailreader, however [yet].

I. !Sex = !Mozilla
I ran across this bug report. I guess now we know why the mozilla project has turned into such and arduous task.

II. “Who is Keyser Soze?!”^*

In reading the recommended fixes, I looked up references to Keyser (albeit improperly spelled again). I found this somewhat amusing, if not slightly insightful as well..

I have almost never in my life used an HTML editor. I did, for about 15 minutes when I first started learning it, back in 1995 or so, but then I realized how easy it was, and never turned back.

Until this week.
Desiging testcases, and refusing to use MS-Word (as it seems to crash on me when I use lots of tables — and it’s not really portable), I started making some HTML tables…. and it is a pain in the ass if you have to make lots of ‘em. Now, I’m a table kinda guy. I like my HTML nicely organized, and for years, I have done the stuff by hand. But for something mass-produced such as this, I just want to get it done…

So what am I saying?
I’m saying that Mozilla‘s HTML editor is quite nice. It’s not pretty, or fancy, but it gets the work done — and it make nice, clean HTML.

I’m not saying that I’m gonna switch over for everything – there’s just too much I like to fine tune by hand. However, for making usable documents, it’s a nice piece of work.