Weblogism

Even though there is nothing funny about the situation which occurred here this morning (t’was mayhem), I must admit I was kind of jubilating. All the computers around me started to restart, hit by the ugly Sasser virus which spread at high speed. And as I always keep my PC up-to-date, I was relatively safe.

This is the result of an extremely stupid way of handling security in the vicinity. I complained a while ago that the antivirus updates were not regularly provided – in vain. I retaliated by connecting my antivirus to the vendor website so that it can do the updates itself. I also update my Windows via Windows update very often (something like every Monday I run it just to make sure I didn’t miss any security alert). Once again, I was accused of stealing too much bandwidth for my needs (!!!) and system administrators were thinking I was just being paranoid (!!!). They also thought I was a pain in the ass when I was requesting new stations with W2k and the already-installed updates – not just the plain version out of the box, ready to be attacked at any time. Therefore, you can imagine how pleased I was with myself when this morning those same people ended up struggling to stop the virus.

Forgent has decided to sue 31 companies for the use of a compression algorithm in JPEG, according to Wired News. JPEG could therefore have the same fate as GIF format – even though the GIF patent expired on GIF Liberation Day. Apparently, Forgent and Sony have come to a $16 million agreement: not to mention that prices will go up.

I don’t know how used is this algorithm in JPEG format, but think of all the programs as well as devices which use it: digital camera, image-manipulation software, web sites, etc. If Gimp were to drop JPEG as they had done for GIF, they wouldn’t be much left to it…

Well, well, well… Sad what you would do to finance your parties…

One has to be somewhat out of one’s mind to be willing to do this! Just brilliant. The CSS is somewhat hellish, with some li + li + li + li + li + li + li + li, #larchives li + li + li = or some =:before and :after along with content. Amazing.

I would have been tired before even starting thinking of doing such a thing…

Also, amongst the ones I missed, the one called “Deco” by Marc Trudel. Very elegant, I like the menu very much. I always find menus hard to do: they are either ugly or common. Marc’s solution is quite my idea of a nice menu.

Firefox has been a real pain, lately. It is very slow, when you think of it – especially for my 6-year-old computer which strives for retirement. That’s why I was all the more interested by the message posted on Webgraphics tonight, dealing with all the turmoil which currently shakes the fast-moving universe of browsers. Especially with eye-catching remarks such as:

…and a speedup that makes it a very worthy opponent to Firefox.

It sure hits the spot. My current plan as I’ve just installed Opera 7.5b1 is to use it for a few days and tell you about my personal opinion – for all it’s worth, that is. I’ve already used Opera in the past, but the functionalities offered by Mozilla were, to me, far superior to Opera’s. And I still don’t know whether there is something similar to AdBlock in Opera, but I guess I’ll soon find out…

The security risk mentioned today on
[[http://www.forbes.com/business/services/newswire/2004/04/21/rtr1339935.html][]] hreflang="en" title="Forbes.com">Forbes web site is something close to a nightmare for the Internet if it were to happen: apparently, TCP has a flaw that might allow a hacker to reset a TCP faster than it normally does. The results would be:

…that Web transactions would fail to go through, Internet telephone calls would drop and Web sites wouldn’t fully download…

according to Mike Pilbeam from Cisco. Groovy, isn’t it?¶

Back from holidays and I have to catch up on everything, after having relaxed so much. Here is some piece of information I missed – and I am really really late – and about which I read only today in my daily Irisa typography mailing-list digest: San Seriffe island was celebrating the 22nd anniversary of its discovery.

The Guardian’s article is 5 years old, was published on April 1st as you would expect. Excerpt from the message to the list (excerpted from somewhere else):

The success of this hoax was
largely responsible for the flood of April Fool’s Day jokes that appeared in
other papers in succeeding years. At the Guardian itself the island of San
Serriffe became a running gag in the years to follow. The island reappeared
on April Fool’s Day in 1978, 1980 and 1999. Moreover, each time it
reappeared the island had changed location. It began in the Indian Ocean,
moved to the South China Sea, and ended up in the North Atlantic

Another successful joke was Porchez announcing the closing down of Typofonderie. I wonder if he got a few bobs from it? =;-)=¶

Q. Hiya. As you’re about to go on holidays, I thought it was just about time for a second talk with you. Do you mind?

A. Not at all. Just keep an eye on the watch, my train won’t wait for me.

Q. Fair enough. Well, seb, how’s it going?

A. Better. I can’t really tell you what’s going on right now in my life – you know, I have to protect my privacy, that sort of things. But things are going fine. As you’ve just said, I’m about to go on holidays. Time to relax. To read.

Q. And how is Weblogism?

A. Not bad. Still developments going on, actually, so I don’t really have time to really write in here. But time will come. Anyway, there are quite a few people coming around, that’s good.

Q. Oh. I thought you’d said you didn’t look at statistics.

A. (embarrassed) Well… Eeeh, yes I do. But that’s too see how people found my site. I must admit “JBoss”, “getelementbyid” and “Vincent Connare” are quite successful. About Mr. Connare, funny how times have changed: popularity can now be measured only by looking at the number of times a name is typed in in Google… (he smiles)

Q. Who are you really, seb? What do you do?

A. I’m a J2EE consultant, even though I’m playing with Swing at the moment and worked with .Net for quite a while as well.

Q. So, why your interest in web design?

A. I’ve always been fascinated by typesetting. I’ve done my fair share of LaTeX in the past, even translating documents for the docfr project – I wonder how they get on, by the way. I’m also quite fond of typography and read books about it – Oh, man, remembering I’ve forgotten to put the picture of that book online. Web designing is just yet another way of expressing this passion. An easy way, that is.

Q. What about writing? Are you still doing a bit of that

A. I’m afraid I don’t. But you’re right, I should think of writing again. You’ll be the first informed should that happen.

Q. Delighted to hear that.

A. (nodding)

Q. What are the next steps for Weblogism?

A. First of all, I must finish that book-listing interface, which works fine but cannot be modified yet. I plan to put also a gallery online, write a few articles about web-designing, and then make a real site of this place – not only a blog. But I don’t see that happening any time soon. Too much to do with Le Sauna already.

Q. I think I’d better let you go and catch your train…

A. Thanks. See you soon, I guess.¶

If you haven’t read the news today, a hunter was killed by a rabbit this morning. This rabbit was armed with a gun apparently snatched from an IRA dump. Reportage by Chantal Goya.¶

Tonight, as I wandering on the net for my regular night trip, I happened to type in Google (probably for the zillionth time) “Helvetica”. And decided I would quench my thirst for resources about Arial and Helvetica.

• First of all, a little game: you’re Helvetica and you have to “crush” Arial. A funny Flash animation. And the comments about it on kottke.org, which I have been reading for quite a while, now.
• Then, once you have wiped Arial away, you can decide to learn how to spot the differences between the two in How to Spot Arial and read their history.
• Now that you know everything about Helvetica and his naughty brother, go and test yourself in iliveonyourvisits.com

Now that you know everything about Arial and Helvetica, I think your last step will be to go there.¶