Arizona Legislature Out of Control

This is blatantly unconstitutional, right? OK, just checking.

The Firefox Version Naming System

I don't understand how Mozilla comes up with the version numbers for new releases. Would it be so difficult to use a Debian-style six month release cycle? Why not steadily increment the version number? Why are the nightlies of Firefox 4 called 3.7? Will there be a 3.8? A 3.9? How is Chrome wich was released several years after the first version of Firefox already on version 5? Safari, is on version 4, and it too is younger than Firefox.

Stop the Music

It occurs to me that people who listen to others' music all day can get "burned out", and not want to hear any music. Setting aside the argument that the canned music you get in stores invariably shows poor taste, I think it is safe to say that no one wants to listen to someone else's choice of music all day, every day. Retailers who play music in their stores may be able to do a couple of things to get a little more milage out of their employees.

First, if they play Christmas music towards the end of the year, they might want to consider playing instrumentals. I've noticed that some retailers refrain from playing actual Christmas carols for fear of being religiously insensitive. Of course that doesn't stop them from playing other Christmas music...but that's another post. Retailers can safely play those traditional Christmas carols as instrumentals. It expands the rather limited number of songs that can be played during that particular time of year, but nobody has to hear horrible words like "Jesus", "Lord", and "angel". And "the". Well, maybe not that last, but you get the picture.

The second thing retailers should do is turn the music off sometimes. The fact is, some of the biggest retailers in the U.S. don't play any music at all. Ever. Whatever the studies (and I'm sure there are tons of studies) say, the lack of music blaring overhead throughout retail outlets hasn't hurt Target. Even if they decide to can the piped in music for only a month out of the year (the month of January seems appropriate), retailers would give their beleaguered employees a much needed respite from listening to someone else's music. And customers, if they notice anything, might just be grateful too.

Heads in the Sand

It seems like the government could be doing more about the BP oil leak. If a private citizen were caught dumping a single barrel of crude oil into the ocean, I'm fairly confident that he would be taken to court, fined, and possibly jailed. Why isn't the federal government, perhaps under the auspices of the EPA, being more proactive with BP? A hefty fine, per day or per gallon, should be incentive enough to get the job done.

On a slightly less realistic note it would go a long way towards building good faith if some of the other oil companies publicly stepped up and offered a hand. Exxon, I'm looking at you. I remember Valdez. That's probably too much to hope for. You don't see commercials for gas stations on TV too much these days. No, everyone is trying to distance himself.

Background Size Matters

Was anyone else wondering what happened to -moz-background-size in Firefox nightlies? No? Just me? Well, for future reference it would appear that it was removed in favor of supporting the unprefixed property background-size.

Browser Check

"Browser Check" circa 2007

Every couple of years I feel compelled to write a new test suite for detecting browser versions and capabilities. This is something I started in 2006 or so. Part of the suite (actually, most of it) tested for plugins. My old employers used a variety of plugins, including Flash, QuickTime, and even Real Player. Naturally, we had to test for each plugin. To make matters worse, we were using certain other non-standard technologies which rendered some applications incompatible with even modern browsers. Like Firefox. And Safari. Looking at those old tests now gives me the willies. Looks like it's once again time to replace the old with the new.

Browser Check; new and improved

Vulnerablity Found in Flash

Steve Jobs must be laughing so hard his sides hurt. Yesterday Adobe released a security advisory detailing a "critical" vulnerability in Flash (as well as Acrobat and Reader). To make matters worse, Adobe has yet to come up with a fix. According to the bulletin users can upgrade to Flash 10.1RC. So it looks like I have two choices: upgrade to a non-production software release, or remove Flash altogether. I think I'll opt for the latter.

When I first saw the security bulletin I wondered exactly which version of Flash I had. First, I tried finding a Flash movie and clicking on "About Flash" in the context menu. That sent me to a page on Adobe's website which didn't even detect my Flash Player. Nice. My solution was to write a bookmarklet in JavaScript. This works fine in browsers other than IE. making it work in Microsoft's crappy browser would simply require more work than I'm willing to put in.

Check Flash Version

Balancing Passion and Perspective

So, the baseball world is up in arms once again. This time an umpire blew a call on what should have been the final out of a perfect game pitched by the Detroit Tigers' Armando Galarraga. Jim Joyce, the umpire who made the call, later admitted he made a mistake. Ok, so he made a mistake. People do that sometimes. We can move on now, right? Wrong.

Joyce's call came at a critical moment in the game, and that's why baseball fans are so distraught. If the blown call had come on the very first play, and Galarraga had gone on to retire the next 27 batters in order, would fans be so angry? I suspect that if it had come as late as the fifth inning, the public outcry would be much more muted. In addition to that, the play was not a very close one. If the difference between the runner being safe or out had been detectable only on freeze frames in replays, people would have to cut Joyce some slack, but there was no question that the runner was safe, even at full speed.

There was a movement, ultimately denied, for Bud Selig, baseball's commisioner, to retroactively reverse the call. Selig was right in declining to act. Joel Sherman nails the reason why.

There is a call now for Selig to retroactively restore a perfect game for Galarraga. It feels right. But it is so wrong. Ultimately, Joyce's blunder cost Galarraga history, but not his team a game. If Selig reverses this call what happens the next time there is an umpire’s mistake that literally costs a team a game? How do you fix, for example, Galarraga's spot in history, but not Phil Cuzzi's miserable call in the playoffs last year that possibly cost the Twins' a game against the Yankees?

Human error is an indelible part of the game. In fact, it is a part of every sport where a human is expected to make an impartial judgment on what happened (or didn't happen). Sometimes these judges are going to make a mistake. One can hope that Major League Baseball gets the best umpires available, but if you think about it, the best judges are already in our federal, state, and local courts (hopefully). At the end of the day, that's OK. Joyce's blunder was critical to the game, but it certainly was not of critical importance to Americans in general. That fact is lost by casual fans and congressmen in the passion for a game loved by millions.

I understand the frustration of Tigers fans. The Tigers have never pitched a perfect game. I'm a Mets fan, and the Mets have never even thrown a no-hitter. Believe me, I understand. Keeping that in mind, it's understandable that Tigers fans should stay disgruntled longer than most, but nobody needs a congressional resolution. The rest of the baseball world just needs to get over it.

The Windows vs. Linux Security Debate

I've been reading some of the coverage of Google's supposed move away from Windows in its offices. Mashable reports that the change is due, in part, to security concerns after Chinese hackers were able to compromise some of Google's systems. The initial response to the story seemed to be "Big deal, everyone knows that *nix is more secure than Windows." Microsoft got its feathers ruffled responded, though, and once again the age-old "Microsoft is the most popular OS, so it get attacked the most" argument has risen its head.

The argument goes something like this: Windows security is actually pretty good, but Windows machines are, by far, the most popular desktop computer platform, so hackers concentrate their malicious efforts on it. The argument, at first, seems pretty sound, but it got me wondering how many servers are running Linux. Certainly the number is significant among the world's total computers (according to Steve Ballmer "Forty percent of servers run Windows, 60 percent run Linux"). I think it's possible, maybe even likely that the number of discrete desktop systems in the world is higher than the number of servers, but still, that is a huge number. Consider also that the potential payday from successfully hacking a server, which may hold millions of users' sensitive information (rather than just a single user's), and it seems to me that Linux systems probably endure their fair share of malicious attacks.