Software — Page 5

Upon further consideration,

November 14, 2000 by Michael Boyle

although Netscape 6 does work in broad terms – and what it does well it does very well – it is so rife with bugs I can’t even think of any commercial software or shareware that I’ve ever used that is as unfinished.

Luckily few of the bugs are crashing bugs, and my machine hasn’t frozen due to any of them. But they drastically affect the usefulness of Netscape as an alternative browser. Some examples of bugs I’ve found:

text entry boxes are flaky (text jumps around, spaces and soft wrapping is wonky);
it uses its own interface elements, not widgets from the UI, and so is very slow at rendering certain things, and when it does, they don’t conform with the OS under which it runs;
changes to preferences don’t always take;
new windows are quite slow to open;
some of the program’s other behaviour deviates both from what one would expect from the OS and from older versions of Netscape;
and the whole thing takes at least twice as long to load (in spite of having fewer plugins in my case) than IE;
the whole thing takes up twice the space (browser only, no email stuff included on my machine) and more memory than IE5;
and I can’t seem to drag and drop URLs or links onto the favourites bar.

Add to that the fact that I can’t scroll with the wheel on my mouse and their own skin updating/loading procedure doesn’t seem to work and it’s a mess. The worst though? They’ve buried their release notes so you can’t even make a reasoned judgement for yourself without downloading the installer. It should be online, and prominent. [I found the release notes after posting this]

As noted at

November 3, 2000 by Michael Boyle

Scripting News today, the U.S. Copyright Office has issued Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works. Which is the long way of saying that you can hack blocking software to figure out what it’s blocking. This rule neatly obviates many of the concerns that were noted by ACLU lawyer Chris Hansen in his excellent article in Writ Magazine, Do We Really Want a Secret Censorship System.

The question I have is about the second class of works specified in the Rule: “Literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage or obsolescence.” It’s hard for me to parse exactly what this means. But it’s interesting, and the possibilities are, to me, very positive. Anyone who still thinks the gov’t doesn’t get it is out of touch, in my opinion. As I’ve said before, the government gets it just fine (at least in the US), it’s just that things have to be worked out in terms of law and policy, which can take a while.

A touchpad company

September 27, 2000 by Michael Boyle

is bundling software (developed in Montreal, no less) that will embed a digital signature in a “token” which includes the actual image of the pen-n-ink signature itself. So the form factor will probably work – the digital signature won’t look odd – and the system will be easy to access – just use the trackpad built into your laptop. Hmmm.

Evhead pointed me towards

September 26, 2000 by Michael Boyle

a great story – John Tesh is suing Vignette, it seems, because the software doesn’t do what it was advertised to do. Are turnkey content management systems on the skids? It seems likely.

So the new machine

August 10, 2000 by Michael Boyle

is home and all put together. I’ve been playing around with different things for a couple of hours now actually – the whole thing took less than an hour to get up to speed – software installed, the ATA drive from my old machine put in, video, SCSI, and more RAM installed, etc. What they say about G4s is true – the easiest case to crack of anything I’ve seen. It took me longer to open my old machine to grab the HD out of it – that was actually the most time consuming thing of all.

There is one problem though – my old old 2nd video card doesn’t seem to be working. It’s an old ATI VR card with just 4Mb of memory – but it should be enough to drive my second monitor. But alas it may not be compatible or something (which is a bit weird cause of course it fits in the damn PCI slot). Anyhow – should be solved soon.