Lillesvin Networks

Politiken runs an article titled “EU action may cost you your internet connection” (article in Danish, Google Translation) about how European Windows 7 users may not be able to access the internet because of the EU’s intervention against MS’s browser monopoly, forcing them to ship Windows 7 without Internet Explorer pre-installed.

Now, talk about jumping to conclusions — not to mention the wildy exagerated title! I’m willing to bet that MS won’t ship Windows 7 without any means of installing IE8 (e.g. via something like curl or wget — or simly via FTP). I’m pretty sure there’ll be big fat icon in some prominent location saying “Install Internet Explorer”. Besides, it’s not really that hard (for anyone) to open Explorer and type in: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org and navigate to the Firefox EXE and double-click — especially if Mozilla would make a shortcut. (Hint hint!) Alternatively, if MS wants to be really cool, they could offer installation of either of the major browsers when installing Windows 7. I.e. something like: “Thanks for installing Windows 7, which browser(s) would you like to install? IE, Firefox, Opera, Safari or Google Chrome?” Or they could even go as far as saying “Would you prefer MS defaults or non-MS defaults?” Where MS defaults would be IE, Outlook, Windows Media Player etc., and non-MS would be e.g. Firefox + Thunderbird + VLC, Opera + VLC or something completely different. MS already had something like this in XP SP2, where you could select standard setups (either MS or non-MS), which would then affect settings such as the default browser, mail client, media player and IM client. Pretty un-MS-ish and ironically my all-time favorite feature in Windows.

This is typical of Politiken’s  IT section. They always pretend to be seeing stuff from the end-user’s, while apparently being even more clueless than the average (l)user. Or maybe they have ulterior motives. Maybe they don’t like the EU putting up a fight against the MS monopoly and messing with their precious Windows. Either way it’s “journalism” like this, that makes the least technically inclined users stick to Windows XP, 98 or whatever untill someone or something forces them to upgrade.

phpCF version 0.5 beta is just done (after almost 4 years!) and commited to the repository. Among the changes are a completely new and more managable rules system, that allows for easy rules writing while still allowing for even more flexibility than previous versions. I’ll tag a release, upload tar-balls and update the phpCF page as soon as I get home from work tonight. See the ChangeLog for a more detailed list of changes.

Update (May 5 2009 @ 4:32 AM): The phpCF page is now updated and with links to tar-balls, docs and stuff.

It really is true! When something’s too good to be true, it’s not! … Or whatever…

In this case it’s Microsoft’s (deliberately?) half-assed implementation of ODF rendering my previous predictions of doom and destruction more than just a little inaccurate. I guess my praise was a bit premature. I should have known better.

Yup — it’s here, I’m sure. Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 now supports ODF out of the box and has the option of using ODF as the default format. And just to add to that hell-freezes-over feeling, Office 2007 SP2 finally has a “Save as PDF” option. (Slashdot article with further links.)

So in this post-apocalyptic wasteland of a world it is now possible to actually use OpenOffice.org and send your ODF document to a Word user and expect them to be able to open it! While this is somewhat unexpected coming from Microsoft, it’s really a huge benefit to all word processor users of the world and a nice move from the people in Redmond. Of course, they’re not just doing it to be nice — there are certainly financial aspects to it — but still it shows that they are “getting it” even though it’s taken them some time.

Now, let’s sit back and watch how long it takes for Apple to implement native ODF support in Pages, Numbers, Keynote, etc. My guess is that it’ll be a while. Actually, I’m getting more and more tired of being held hostage by Apple’s ideas of what I want — and am allowed — to use my computer/OS for, while Microsoft seems to be heading in a more sensible and  Open direction. Of course, first and foremost I’m a Linux-user, but with Windows 7 getting rave reviews and these nice additions in Office 2007 SP2 (not that I do, or ever will, use Microsoft Office or any other office suite for that matter) I might just give Microsoft another chance after ditching Windows back in 2001. Kudos to the Redmond crew for going with what the users want instead of what they want the users to have.

Politiken has an article about how the EU wants to develop an emulator — KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable — in order to preserve video game history. (Original article in danish; Google translation.) According to the project description it should be able to handle pretty much any data from any platform and while I’m all for preserving video game history, I think €4.02 million ($5.05 million; £3.55 million) is a bit of a hefty price to pay, considering that there’s plenty of Open Source software out there that does exactly that.

So will KEEP actually be written from scratch? Or will they simply bundle whatever Open Source software they find into one neat package? The project description doesn’t say anything about it. The first is stupid, because a lot of the Open Source emulators available are of high quality, are quite portable, have been developed for many years now and are still maintained. Some shiny new software is likely to be less stable and compatible, and the project description doesn’t give any promise of the software being maintained in the future. The latter is simply too expensive. €4.02 million for bundling some Open Source software?

Also, while preserving the games is all well and good, there’s more to preserving video game history than just preserving the software. Playing Super Mario Bros. on the Wii with the Wiimote is NOT the same as playing it with the good old, unhandy NES controller (even though the Wiimote is quite unhandy for that purpose).