Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

I mentioned earlier that I had switched to Mozilla Firefox (then called Firebird) as my default web browser, from Mozilla (I still use Mozilla on Solaris). In the last few months, the Firefox bandwagon started becoming mainstream, probably due to exasperation with the continuing security holes in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer.

That said, I have also switched to the Mac at home, and Firefox on Mac OS X often feels like an afterthought. Several bugs have gone unfixed in the last three releases or so, even though patches have been submitted. I am not excessively fond of Safari, Apple’s default browser, and the ability to share profile data between my Windows machine at work and my Mac at home is a big benefit.

Two weeks ago, I tried Camino on my home machine. Camino is a derivative of Mozilla – it uses the same HTML rendering engine, but wraps it in a shell that leverages Apple’s technologies the way a cross-platform browser like Firefox or Mozilla can’t. Earlier versions had been unconvincing, but I switched for the 0.8.1 release. Firefox 1.0PR on the Mac is an unalloyed disaster, buggy and crash-prone, without any visible bug fixes (I switched back to 0.9.3 within a couple of hours), and that was probably the last straw.

The immediate benefits Camino brings me are the following:

• Middle-clicking on a link opens it in a new tab, the way it does for Firefox on all platforms but the Mac
• Navigating through Web forms using the tab key works perfectly, when Firefox and Safari will only let you switch between text fields, but not pull-down menus, radio buttons or the like.
• When minimizing windows using Exposé, there is no annoying Firefox or Mozilla ghost window cluttering the screen.

Of course, not all is perfect, and the migration entails these pitfalls:

• I have Firefox set up so if I type a few words separated by spaces in the URL bar, it searches Google. This avoids the need for two text boxes, one for th URL and one for searching (the way Firefox does in its default configuration, or Safari), which are redundant and not as usable. Unfortunately Camino does not support this directly and pops up a modal dialog box complaining about the illegal URL format. Fortunately, Camino does support Mozilla’s excellent keywords feature, so I created a keyword “g” to handle Google queries.
• Camino keeps bookmarks in a OS X style XML plist format, rather than the standard bookmark format used by other Mozilla variants. This makes synchronizing bookmarks a little bit slower, as you have to use the import utility instead of simply copying a file over. Bookmark imports are not perfect, moreover, as they tend to drop separators.
• The saved passwords are not interoperable, as Camino stores them in OS X’s Keychain manager instead of Mozilla’s encrypted database format (I don’t know if this means Camino and Safari can share passwords). I have started working on Python modules to read and decrypt the Mozilla files, however, and I have a low-priority password sync project on my back burner.
• Camino doesn’t have the wealth of extensions Firefox does, but then again since they seem to break with every release of Firefox (and many don’t work well on the Mac), this is less of a disadvantage than may seem at first glance.

I have been running Temboz, my home-made RSS/Atom aggregator, for half a year now, and it is interesting to take stock. I ran a report on the database to count how many items per day I read, how many are filtered out automatically, and how many I flagged as interesting.

The most obvious thing is the steady increase in the number of articles per day, while the number of articles I flag as interesting remains mostly constant (perhaps a sign of greater selectivity). The increase is primarily due to an increase in the number of feeds I subscribe to — as the ergonomics of the feed reader improved (at least from my perspective), I can read more feeds. The addition of filtering also allows me to read via RSS sources of information I used to check daily, such as the Photo.net forums. As time goes, I find I seldom regularly visit web sites on a daily basis any more, not even the New York Times (granted, the steadily deteriorating quality of their journalism might have something to do with that).

My filtering scheme is manual and rules-based. I am a bit leery of implementing something like Bayesian filtering, as articles I flag as “uninteresting” are not necessarily articles I would like to be filtered away – some are duplicates, some are worth a chuckle but not much more. The risk with the “Daily Me” is to lock oneself into a routine and self-reinforcing echo chamber, so I try and keep a balanced diet of information. Some subjects I am completely uninterested in, however, for instance one of my rules filters out anything sports-related from The Guardian.

As I enrich my library of filtering rules, the proportion of articles filtered is increasing steadily (the recent dip in September was caused by a flurry of feed subscriptions). A 20% time savings is nothing to sniff at. Fatigue plays a role — I dislike phones and finally got fed up with the plethora of cell phone reviews this week and filtered out all articles dealing with phones altogether.

One big win would be an algorithm that could reliably detect and group together articles that are on the same topic, the way Google News does (Google News has the potential to be the ultimate RSS/Atom aggregator). I experimented with a scheme to look for duplicated URLs inside the articles, but this didn’t work very well. Some form of statistical natural language processing would be needed, but that is more work than I am prepared to put in right now.

As is his wont, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer put his foot in his mouth when he accused iPod owners of being thieves. Actually, the journalists’ reports are not entirely accurate – while he used the iPod as an example, what he was really implying is that any music format that is not encumbered with mandatory digital rights management (DRM) restrictions induces “theft”.

Copyright infringement is certainly illegal, and should remain so, but merely repeating the mantra that copyright infringement is tantamount to theft does not make it so. This is beyond the point. Many stores have to deal with shoplifting, which is indeed theft. What if a store you were in accused you of shoplifting and performed a strip search? You would feel humiliated and enraged, certainly stop patronizing them and almost certainly sue them for false imprisonment. DRM is no different.

There is no acceptable form of digital rights management, period. And yes, that includes the iTunes Music Store’s AAC/Fairplay.

Britain is not known for being a gastronomic haven (although the situation has improved dramatically in London over the last 20 years or so). Still, they have some decent grocery products, like shortbread or Ribena blackcurrant drinks. US specialty groceries carry some, but by no means all British delights.

A few weeks ago, a small shop specialized in imported British foodstuffs opened in my neighborhood. The product it carries are the kind you would expect to find in a regular grocery store in the UK, don’t expect esoteric Fortnum & Mason luxuries here, but a solid and growing selection, and a good destination for anyone who would like a little diversity in their daily vittles.

You Say Tomato, 1526 California (between Larkin and Polk), 415-921-2828

Update (2021-04-15):

It closed a few years ago.

Gubernator Arnold Schwarzenegger signed on Wednesday a bill to ban the production and sale of foie gras in California in 2012. The bill was pushed by his outgoing horse-trading partner, Democratic state senator John Burton. The highly dubious rationale is that the force-feeding of ducks or geese to produce foie gras is “cruel”. I can think of many culinary preparations that would qualify, such as lobsters or crabs boiled alive. Then again, many more people eat crustaceans than foie gras, thus they are not as safe a target for a grandstanding politician who has no compunctions about trying to stuff his unwanted offspring down San Francisco voters’ throats.

I think the last thing San Francisco’s stricken economy needs is another coup de grâce to its’ restaurants, one of the few local industries that can (just barely) survive its business-hostile climate (our restaurateur mayor Gavin Newsom seems to agree). In the meantime, better to make your reservations at the French Laundry while you still can. In seven years’ time, the only place you will be able to get your fix will be from shady characters in the dark alleys of the Tenderloin, if its gentrification is not complete by then. If you think foie gras is expensive today…