Author Archives: John

Laurence Parent

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Another photographer’s website worthy of checking out is Laurence Parent‘s. In particular, the photos from US National Parks are beautiful (don’t miss the second page of these). My favourites include the shot from Redwood National Park, the sunset shot in Saguaro National Park, the reflection shot from Yosemite National Park.

Interestingly, it was the photo from Joshua Tree National Park that I saw printed on the cover of a magazine that drew my attention to Laurence’s work, but the online version looks washed out (at least on my machines) compared to the print which had much more saturated colours in the sky.

Most, if not all, the other galleries are worth the time to browse through too. The inspirational, water and mountains are my choices after the parks. What are yours?

Racoons Again

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Racoons Late last night (around 3am), there were noises coming from the tree outside my bedroom window. Wondering what it was, I got up and went out on the balcony to see shapes moving in the tree. Getting a torch (US:flashlight), I managed to catch sight of three racoons in the tree. They were pulling the cones off, eating whatever part they liked, and then throwing the remainder down onto the concrete path three floors below.

The shot on the left is not stunningly high quality (OK, it is stunningly low quality), but it was the best I could do on short notice and with limited tools (basically my little Canon S100 and a torch for some additional lighting). The racoons were not bothered by the light I was shining at them constantly, or by the flash I used on the camera. They were even less disturbed by me being there, and apart from a few inquisitive looks when I first turned on the light, they just carried on with the task at hand. In fact, I got the feeling one of them was taking advantage of the additional light I was providing to look for new cones.

User Agents

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A quick analysis of the top ten user agents in the https://bluedonkey.org statistics seems to suggest that not many people have actually installed Microsoft’s Windows XP SP2. My top ten real browsers (i.e. excluding search engine bots) for the first seven days of October fall out like this:

MSIE (no SP2 tag) 67%
Mozilla 1.7.x 19%
MSIE (with SP2 tag) 14%

All the top ten real browsers were running on Windows machines. The first non-Windows entry was for MacOS X, but not running a browser; instead, it was the NetNewsWire RSS news reader software from Ranchero Software. Linux appears in third place in terms of OS share (though it is pretty close to MacOS X).

Software Patents

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It has been a busy week for the patent lawyers out there who are trying to extort money for what they claim is an invention, but is in reality only another arrangement of binary bits in the memory of a computer.

Top of the list, at least in terms of headline grabbing appeal, was the Eastman Kodak vs Sun case over Java. Kodak, the company known for photographic products, attacking one of the premier server companies, Sun, over a freely available object-oriented programming environment, Java? Yes. Seems that Kodak gained three patents when it acquired Wang Laboratories a while back, numbers 5,206,951, 5,226,161 and 5,421,012. These relate to certain aspects of object-oriented programming, and a jury in Rochester, NY decided that Java infringed them. Kodak was planning to ask for over $1B in damages. You can read more about this in an article at Groklaw.

In a surprising turn though, Sun has settled with Kodak out of court for $92M (less than a tenth of the damages Kodak was asking for). So, what some were hoping would become the test case that got software patents off the books again, seems to have escaped quietly.

In other patent news, Acacia, a company of lawyers that buys patents with the sole intention of “enforcing” them to make money, has acquired a patent from LodgeNet it believes it can use to extort money from wireless hotspot owners. An article at Wi-Fi Networking News has more information on this one. This is one of two patents in the area of browser redirection, the other being held by a company called Nomadix. Many believe that both of these are essentially worthless though as there were other browser redirection systems up and running before either one was filed with the patent office. One such claim comes from Jim Thompson, former CTO and VP of engineering at Wayport, who claims that Wayport had their portal up and running before the LodgeNet patent was filed. He also goes further in claiming that the idea is ‘obvious to one “skilled in the art”‘ – i.e. something that does not belong in a patent in the first place.

It is not all bad news though. Much less widely publicised was pubpat.org‘s success in getting all claims in the Microsoft FAT patent rejected in a re-examination. So, if you know of a patent that is clearly bogus, especially one for which there is well documented prior art, send all the information you have to the folks at pubpat.org and perhaps they can get it overturned. Even better would be to get the whole concept of software patents (and their close relatives the process patents) back off the books, but I don’t think that is likely to happen without a high profile test case, like the Kodak vs Sun one could have been.

Drive-by hackers get residents’ hackles up

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An article on an Arizona news site suggests that drive-by hackers are worrying residents in an upscale area of Scottsdale. The article is nothing more than FUD, or at least it should be.

If these users are really worried about these war-drivers accessing their networks then they should enable the highest level of security supported by their wireless devices.

For most people today that will be WPA (though even static WEP is better than nothing at all – and only a really determined war-driver will waste the time trying to crack the encryption on an unknown person’s network). Very soon people will be able to enable WPA2, with very secure AES encryption.

As for credit card numbers, nobody should be posting these online unless the site they are sending them to is already encrypting the link. In which case it does not matter whether the wireless network is encrypted or not – the SSL tunnel between the browser and the remote web site will protect the card details.

Windoze users are probably much more at risk of being attacked through the numerous flaws that it contains than they are from a drive-by “hacker” using their unprotected wireless network.

Apple @ Stonestown Galleria

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Alameda sunset Saturday was the opening of a new Apple store at Stonestown Galleria. According to the report at IFO Apple Store people were in line at 5:30am. I turned up at the doors to the mall just before 10am (already early for me on a Saturday morning!). The line at that point was from the front of the actual store to the main mall doors, but it took less than an hour to get into the store.

The store itself is pretty small (half the size of the Victoria’s Secret store that used to occupy the space before they moved over the other side of the walkway). Not everything they sell is on display either (e.g. the Canon digital SLRs) – they do stock some of them though, and will get them out if you ask.

The specials for opening day were a minimalist black t-shirt (nicely boxed) and entry into a sweepstakes to win a bundle of stuff, including one of the new iMac G5 systems.

Alameda Sunset

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Sunday night I went for a walk along the shoreline near Crab Cove (never made it that far as the gate was locked by the time I reached it). On the way though I snapped a few shots of the sun setting. The best place would have been over the other side of the island where the sun was turning the relatively heavy clouds over the Oakland hills pink & red, but I was on the bay side of the island…

This shot, with the crescent moon overhead and the amazing gradient from burning reds just over the skyline up to the deep blues, appealed to me. What do you think?

Alameda sunset

San Francisco at Night

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Heading home from work tonight I noticed that the sky over the city was unusually clear, so I stopped off at Treasure Island and snapped a few shots with my little Canon S100. (Tonight is one of those nights when I wish I had bought the nice digital SLR that I’ve been looking at.)

Still, a couple of the shots are not too bad. They are not as sharp as I’d like, but I didn’t have a tripod with me, nor is the tiny lens on the S100 really ideal for long distance night photography. Better than nothing though.

San Francisco at nightSan Francisco at night

As always, click the thumbnail for a popup window with a larger shot (something that WordPress does not make as simple to achieve as MovableType did – but I can fix that…).

Get Firefox?

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Get Firefox!Finally I decided the time was right to switch from Mozilla 1.7 to the new Firefox browser. As a browser it is impressive, but I do still miss having the integrated email client (the main reason I reverted back to the mainstream Mozilla version last time I tried Firefox. I now have Thunderbird as my email client, which again is great but separate.

Part of my reason for trying Firefox again now though was to see if it has the same memory leak problems that seem to be present in the Mozilla 1.x series of browsers. So far it does seem to be better, but only time will tell. If you’d like to try the latest version, whether you run Windoze, MacOS, Linux, Solaris or even AIX (and I’m sure more will follow), click on the button above.