Agylen

I just upgraded my installation of Firefox 3 to the latest Beta 5 version, after having used Beta 4 for a while. I must say that Firefox 3 on the Mac is miles above version 2, especially with respect to speed and memory usage, and it has immediately become my browser of choice, despite the unavailability of most add-ons for this version.

Beta 5, however, has this very annoying bug, at least on my Tiger-powered MacBook Pro: The Back and Forward navigation buttons are duplicated in the toolbar. Urgh!

Update: customizing the toolbar using the appropriate dialog box (View > Toolbars > Customize) to remove the extra navigation control fixed it.

From the balcony

Originally uploaded by Carlfish.

Charles just moved into his new apartment and the view from the balcony is just… well, judge by yourself.

Only thing I can say is that I’m envious. Does Atlassian have any job openings in Sidney?

Photo Attorney: New Travel Restrictions Affect Photographers: “Beginning January 1, 2008, the U.S. Department of Transportation is changing how and how many extra lithium batteries we pack for our flights (such as those for cameras and computers). In sum, you may not pack extra lithium batteries in your checked luggage, but you can put them in your carry-on bags”

And so they started 2008 by making the life of everyone who travels just a little bit more miserable. Especially if one reads what the original advisory says:

Whether in checked or carry-on baggage, ensure that devices remain switched off, either by built-in switch/trigger locks, by taping the activation switch in the “off” postion, or by other appropriate measures.

If I read this correctly, it means that devices using lithium batteries (effectively almost every electronic device with a rechargeable battery made recently) must remain switched off, even if carried on. Does this mean that we cannot use laptops, cameras, iPods, etc. anymore during flight? I sure hop this is not the case.

Suddenly the prospect of traveling to the US became much less pleasant, as if it wasn’t already unpleasant enough. The sad thing is that these kind of regulations tend to be adopted all over the world very quickly (witness the scare over liquids) so we Europeans are probably not safe from lithium-induced madness either.

James Hibberd - ABC’s New ‘Lost’ Trailer - TVWeek - Blogs: “A closer look at the fourth season, not to be confused with last week’s 32-second teaser. ABC made headlines Friday when it announced the show will return on Thursday nights starting Jan. 31.”

I was totally enthralled by the third season and can’t wait to see the fourth one. Unfortunately it will be months before it is aired in Italy.

Note: This is a new kind of online protest that uses blogs to spread a petition globally. To participate, just add your blog by following the instructions in this blog post.

This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy in Burma by adding your blog and asking others to do the same.

By passing this meme on through the blogosphere hopefully we can generate more awareness and avert a serious tragedy. As concerned world-citizens this something we bloggers can do to help.

How to participate:

1. Copy this entire post to your blog, including this special number: 1081081081234

2. After a few days, you can search Google for the number 1081081081234 to find all blogs that are participating in this protest and petition. Note: Google indexes blogs at different rates, so it could take longer for your blog to show up in the results.

3. If you know how to add tags to your blog posts, add the Technorati tag 1081081081234 to your post as well. This will make your post findable sooner in Technorati.

THE SITUATION IN BURMA AND WHY IT MATTERS TO ALL OF US

There is no press freedom in Burma and the government has started turning off the Internet and other means of communication, so it is difficult to get news out. Individuals on the ground have been sending their day-by-day reports to the BBC, and they are heartbreaking. I encourage you to read these accounts to see for yourself what is really going on in Burma. Please include this link in your own blog post.

The situation in Burma is increasingly dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters, including monks and nuns, are risking their lives to march for democracy against an unpopular but well-armed military dictatorship that will stop at nothing to continue its repressive rule. While the generals in power and their families are literally dripping in gold and diamonds, the people of Burma are impoverished, deprived of basic human rights, cut off from the rest of the world, and increasingly under threat of violence.

This week the people of Burma have risen up collectively in the largest public demonstrations against the ruling Junta in decades. It’s an amazing show of bravery, decency, and democracy in action. But although these protests are peaceful, the military rulers are starting to crack down with violence. Already there have been at least several reported deaths, and hundreds of critical injuries from soldiers beating unarmed civilians to the point of death.

The actual fatalities and injuries are probably far worse, but the only news we have is coming from individuals who are sneaking reports past the authorities. Unfortunately it looks like a large-scale blood-bath may ensue — and the victims will be mostly women, children, the elderly and unarmed monks and nuns.

Contrary to what the Burmese, Chinese and Russian governments have stated, this is not merely a local internal political issue, it is an issue of global importance and it affects the global community. As concerned citizens, we cannot allow any government anywhere in the world to use its military to attack and kill peacefully demonstrating, unarmed citizens.

In this modern day and age violence against unarmed civilians is unacceptable and if it is allowed to happen, without serious consequences for the perpetrators, it creates a precedent for it to happen again somewhere else.

If we want a more peaceful world, it is up to each of us to make a personal stand on these fundamental issues whenever they arise.

Please join me in calling on the Burmese government to negotiate peacefully with its citizens, and on China to intervene to prevent further violence. And please help to raise awareness of the developing situation in Burma so that hopefully we can avert a large-scale human disaster there.

Technorati Tags: burma, myanmar, 1081081081234.

If you have five minutes to spare, go to this collection of 9 interactive color games and test how good your sense of color is. Even though I didn’t think much of my color sense, I managed to get them all right at the first try. So maybe the games are really easy or my color sense isn’t as bad as I thought.

I’ve never been much of a gamer (apart from being addicted for some time to Tetris and later to the pinball game that was first included in Windows NT) and especially not one for RPGs, but a few days ago I learned that World of Warcraft is available for the Mac, it can be downloaded from the Web and you can test-drive it for free for 10 days. I would never buy such a game in a box from a store, but downloading stuff to try from the Net is second nature to me, so I figured I might give it a try.

So I registered an account, downloaded the game (a handful of GBs, so you have to be patient, but it sure beats getting a box from a retailer), created a character, and started playing. I have to admit I’ve been hooked from the beginning and especially captivated by the sheer immensity and variety of the virtual world you end up being immersed into. I did some quests, killed a huge amount of monsters, and got killed in the process many times. To finish the hardest quests I teamed up with people whom I have later added to my friends list, so we can get together easily again every time we go online. Probably appearing as a young, attractive, female mage instead of a burly warrior or a dwarf made it somewhat easier to find people eager to help me in my quests in a world that—I presume—is mostly inhabited by young males ;).

Anyway, my 10 day trial period just ended and I’m not bored yet, so I wanted to buy some “real” play time. There are two ways you can do this: you can buy a pre-paid card from a store (even Amazon has them) or you can, I assume, buy an activation key online from Blizzard’s web site. Since getting the card from Amazon or other online vendors means having to pay shipping and wait a few days or weeks, I obviously tried to buy a key online. I wrote “I assume” when I mentioned buying it online because that’s the thing everyone would assume when one sees a big, red button with the words “Buy a Key Online” on the Account Management section of WoW’s website.

Unfortunately, when I click on it, I either get an unspecified error or a 404 (Not Found) page. I figured it might be some transient problem with their system, so I tried the day after, with the same result. Frustrated by this, I looked for ways to contact Blizzard’s support. Turns out there’s a form you can compile for requesting support; at the end of the form there’s one of those obnoxious CAPTCHA checks for keeping bots away. The code is very readable, so I think even the dumbest OCR can read the code, but I wasn’t able to. Well, actually I was perfectly able to read the code and type it back in the control field, but no matter how many times I tried or how many permutations of upper- and lower-case characters I used, the stupid form kept telling me I wasn’t getting the right code.

In desperation I turned to the support forums, where you have to be a registered user to post. The problem there is that the forum login system kept refusing my username and password. Do I have to register another account just for the forums? I’ll mention as an aside that, judging from the URLs it shows, WoW’s website is using JA-SIG CAS, which is a Single Sign-on system. I wouldn’t care much about Single Sign-on in this case, but at the very least I expect to be able to reuse my username and password across different services from the same company.

So I’m here, frustrated by a company that doesn’t seem to want my money while at the same time boasting having recently reached a 9 million user base. Go figure! I should probably take this as a hint to stay away from World of Warcraft and avoid staying up late at night just to play a stupid game.

Update: I finally managed to submit a support request and got this reply:

Thank you for your email. To upgrade your trial account to a standard version you will need an unused non-trial authentication key for World of Warcraft which you can find either under CD 3 in your box or on the front of the manual in all full game boxes of World of Warcraft. You will need to log on to the account management page at http://www.wow-europe.com/account and select “Upgrade account” then enter the standard authentication key from your box.

You will keep all of your original characters and receive a free month of play time.

The online upgrade facility is not currently available. We don’t currently have any further information about when this service will be available again.

If you have any further questions or concerns please don’t hesitate to contact us again.

Technorati Tags: blizzard, world of warcraft, wow, rpg, mmorpg, games.

… according to TorrentFreak. And indeed it is not responding right now.

While it lasts, you can still find everything that was on AllOfMP3.com on MP3Sparks.com, including your account and any credit that you previously had. Same service, different name.

Technorati Tags: music, allofmp3, mp3sparks, russia, wto, riaa.

… and all I got was this lousy picture.

OK, to be honest, I got quite a bit more than that ;). First of all some nice food, thanks to the chef of the Ditirambo restaurant.

Second, we got some good conversation, which unfortunately ended a bit too soon, as Dave has a flight early this morning, so he did not want to go to bed too late. In a couple hours, however, we managed to talk about growing up in the Bronx, living in America, what coming from a family of eastern European refugees means (on this point Dave and Gaspar had some stories to share), American politics (Dave seems to expect something radically new before the next presidential election; as for us, we weren’t so optimistic), artificial organs (Roberto, who is a physician and an engineer, told us about working for the team that made the first, partially successful, artificial heart and meeting Barney Clark), Twitter (every other person at the table seemed to be a Twitter user and told me that I have to try it to really get it) and of course blogging.

With respect to blogging, I noticed how Italian bloggers appear to be split in two, mostly disjoint, groups. On one side, we have bloggers who write in English, mostly geeks who do IT for a living and constantly write about technology, using English to reach out to and connect with a global network. On the other side, we have bloggers writing in Italian, usually on a much broader range of topics. My impression is that interconnections between the two communities are very sparse, but I don’t have much hard data to back up my claim. What’s certain is that, at that table yesterday, me and Gianugo were the odd ones out.

Italian-language bloggers also seem much more prone to meet up frequently and do camps and unconferences. We IT guys, of course, have our conferences and trade shows already where we can meet.

As for Dave, he can be a very nice guest, always trying to fire up the conversation, involve everyone (not that easy with people sitting at a long table, which tends to create at least two separate groups) and ligthen up the evening with songs. He also seems to be quite outspoken, though always using a soft voice tone. It’s not surprising that he manages to make quite a few enemies. Even though he says he never picks fights with people, he has no qualms about kicking around their ideas.

Since Dave Winer is in town (that is Milan), Paolo Valdemarin is organizing a dinner with him for tomorrow, Wednesday. So far, a handful of bloggers have shown interest, but if you’d like to come, add your name to the list.

Even though I often—and publicly on this blog— disagree with Dave, I think we can have a productive discussion and he’s a man worth listening to.