The need for web accessibility has forced users to take matters into their own hands. This is why I’m working with Evergreen on accessibility issues, precisely because that work needs to be done in order to ensure access across the potential student population. It’s also why I’m starting to integrate that work into my own web sites. The need to be HTML and CSS compliant is bigger than ever — if you’re not compliant, you run the risk of losing visitors left and right.

That doesn’t mean dropping Flash, Shockwave, Java, or any of those flashy technologies — but you do need to provide an alternative, or else you might end up with a site that people can’t navigate without downloading a plugin. Ironically, the site I link to there should be accessible by everyone — that’s the web site for my own audiologist.

The moral: run HTML and CSS vailidity checks on any web site you create, at a bare minimum. If you really want to be impressive, check out the World Wide Web Consortium’s Web Accessibility Initiative or check out the links available through the University of Washington’s DO-IT program on accessible web design.

The Seattle Times today states that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer product is a major security problem and that it’s no longer worth using. This has been well known in the Internet community for quite some time, and led me to adopt Mozilla Firefox 0.9, which is far more powerful than IE, but provides a very easy transition from IE. Tabbed browsing is probably the biggest boost — forget opening multiple windows, just open a new tab by pressing CTRL+T. Beautiful browser with ongoing updates. Of course, there are other alternatives.

It’s doubtful, though, that Microsoft will drop what is clearly an ailing and outmoded product without a big fight. Computer experts are providing this fight by recommending people use alternative browsers. Microsoft’s upcoming Service Pack 2 for Windows XP is likely to cause even more frustrations with Microsoft products, since it’s quite possible that a lot of applications will be broken due to heightened security work.

I anticipate a lot of people who will likely begin to realize that alternatives to Microsoft products do exist, and that experts and computer-savvy users will begin to recommend those alternatives to others at a much higher rate. Hopefully, this will increase the visibility of open source, secure alternatives that work just as well as (or better than) Microsoft products.

It’s interesting to look at the status symbols of society — such as it is — and to see what is “all the rage”. At the moment, this seems to be accounts on Google’s Gmail service — at least online. This service is actually one of the best-sounding opportunities in free e-mail anywhere — minimal advertising, and even when there is advertising, it tries to be related to the messages you read and the content of e-mails.

Now, to offset the people who are saying this is an invasion of privacy: quite frankly, bullshit. By that logic, virus scanners or spam filters are an invasion of privacy. Oh, but we’d hate to have our privacy invaded in order to stop our computers from crashing, wouldn’t we? In my eyes, this is no different than Hotmail doing virus scanning or spam filtering, and that could be argued to be a violation of privacy as well, since it also scans the body of messages. We don’t hear about Microsoft being sued (at least, not on that issue).

Anyway, back to the point. Gmail accounts are, at this point, very much a status symbol — Google has been somewhat secretive about it, and those who use it could almost be concieved as an elite cadre. When Google opens the service to the public, it would be interesting to see if they keep the current system of requiring people to be allowed in via referral from another member. This would greatly reduce the chances of spammers being able to use legitimate accounts on the system to send out e-mail. They can still spoof, but there is an implicit trust relationship in relying on a referral sign-up system. LiveJournal used this kind of a system for a while, but switched off of it. It doesn’t perpetuate very fast, and to become a member, you have to know someone who is already a member. But once the number of users gets high enough, this isn’t really an issue.

The question that comes to my mind is what can be said of this group of beta testers. Are they simply beta testers, or the first ones in the door for what is quite possibly one of the biggest service launches in the history of the Internet? Do they report bugs, or are they somehow assuring that this service takes off? Being secretive while still allowing people in has this sense of enticing people into the middle of a mystery novel. You can’t really be sure where the story has been; all you can be sure of is that you’re a part of where it’s going. Of course, sooner or later the glitter will wear off and Gmail will simply be another free e-mail service, but until then, it’s a badge of social status. Let’s see what happens.

After Wired announces that your computer is bad for you because of certain toxins left over after manufacturing processes, I predict the following two possible responses:

a) “Okie dokie, then.”
b) “WE’RE ALL GUNNA DIE! WE’RE ALL GUNNA DIE!”

And, possibly,

c) “I run Linux. I’m immune to your propaganda.”

Now, am I better off because I use a laptop as my primary machine, or does that just make it worse? I admit to having three desktops at home, at least two of them reasonably old, with one of them having just been upgraded to a new case and motherboard. Hmm, how many toxins have I inhaled in the last few minutes…

Google’s initial public offering just got more interesting with 31 underwriters for the offering now named. Google’s been defying every tradition we know of for public stock offerings, and this just seems to take it one step further. Whether this will all work the way it’s intended or not, I suppose we have no choice but to wait and see.

In other news, a new study contests that Linus Torvalds is the father of Linux; since it took three years to write Minix, the study contends, it’s nearly impossible that Linux could be written in nearly half the time.

I quote from Linux Torvalds’ book Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary:

One of the original problems I had with Minix was that if you had five different programs running at the same time and they all want to read different files, the tasks would be serialized. In other words, you would have five different processes sending requests to the file system . . . Under Linux, which is a monolithic kernel, you have five different processes that each do a system call to the kernel. The kernel has to be very careful that they don’t get confused with each other, but it very naturally scales up to any number of processes doing whatever they want. It makes Linux much faster and more efficient. (99-100)

The fact is that linux is more portable than minix. What? I hear you say. It’s true-but not in the sense that ast means: I made linux as conformant to standards as I knew how . . . (105)

In brief, Linux is a completely different system philosophy and can’t be based under Minix without severe alterations to Minix code. Linus also discusses how Linux started out as a terminal emulator because he absolutely hated what was offered under Minix (which wasn’t really much of anything at all). Linux evolved from there.

In addition to this, the article also states that Andrew Tanenbaum, author of Minix, even contests this study.

Hopefully, this gives some insight from Linus’ side of it.

Additional References:

Andrew Tanenbaum’s Response
Followup to Andrew Tanenbaum’s Response
Linus’ flippant response
ZDNet: Is Torvalds really the father of Linux?
Linux News: Open Source: Accusatory Study: Many Open-Sourcers Steal Code

Movable Type Developer Edition was announced several days ago and caused an immediate stink because of new pricing schemes. Six Apart was really quite stupid — they didn’t clarify everything and went with a licensing scheme that even they probably didn’t understand. Apparently, they’ve lost a lot of users because of this stunt. Now, I run this blog on Movable Type 2.661, and never intend to upgrade, so this doesn’t affect me. I do say that they could have handled the issue so much better than they did. It was unprofessional and potentially costly in terms of their user loyalty.

Luckily, I simply don’t care. The new features that MT 3.0 introduces aren’t things I need. Even if they were, I qualify as a personal blog (one author, one blog).

In other news, it’s Google’s corporate blog!

Interesting. I must admit, I find Google very appealing business-wise — it’s unorthodox, to say the least, and that’s a good thing. It should be nice to see how they work out this blog stuff. As C|Net puts it, it’s a blog that’s “somewhat less than bloggy“. For some reason, that headline conjures up the phrase “let’s get jiggy with it”. I’ve always hated that phrase.

There was also an article on ZDNet recently about the SoBig and MyDoom viruses and how they succeeded because of greed. A related article, also from ZDNet, covers AOL’s field testing of a program called SPF, or “Sender Permitted From”, a form of authentication for e-mail that ensures that the sender of an e-mail really exists. This has really interesting implications for users of e-mail, and, from my perspective, is badly needed. Now if some other people would jump on the bandwagon…

Current Music: Kathy Mattea – Roses – The Slender Threads That Bind Us Here

Ah, a nice weekend of sitting around and procrastinating heavily. As usual, the procrastinator gets to pay with work, work, work, and more work when that work is done. Well, it was worth it — my stress level is a little lower than it was. I needed it after three weeks of developing cabin fever sitting around on this campus (maybe it’s supposed to be campus fever).

Not all that much impressive happened — I managed to install SuSE Linux Professional 9.1 on darwin, my 1.8GHz home desktop computer. I initially installed it with Gnome’s desktop manager, but it didn’t work very well and was incredibly buggy, so I reinstalled with the default KDE. I have nothing against KDE, I just like Gnome.. but not when it doesn’t work right out of the box. The wireless card in darwin (which, I’m fairly certain, is a D-Link DWL-520+) doesn’t work under Linux, but then, almost no D-Link wireless cards work under Linux. I knew this when I installed and was hoping to download and install some drivers to fix the problem, but that may be a much bigger project than I’m willing to take on.

So here’s what I’m looking for: a reasonably cheap (but good quality) Linux-compatible wireless PCI card, as well as a new ISA (card slot) card for my laptop, autumn, which will likely be converted to SuSE over the summer at some point. If anyone has any recommendations, contact me.

I got to see Amanda this weekend too, which was really nice. There’s something calming about having the girl you love around, even if you aren’t doing all that much together. Her birthday is next week, so we’re both looking forward to that.

An unrelated thing — I was browsing the Web early Friday morning after 1AM because I couldn’t seem to get to sleep and stumbled across something via Memepool which I thought was rather interesting: a listing of abandoned and little-known Western Washington airports (as well as Eastern Washington and all of the 50 states, though I’m showing Western Washington here because, well, that’s where I am). This was an interesting read — check it out if you have a lot of time on your hands.

And if you aren’t procrastinating on a lot of schoolwork.

Kind of like me.

To hear it told by Ping Identity Vice President of Strategic Marketing Eric Norlin, “the Net’s gettin’ messy”:

“The bottom line is this: the sundry schemes, scams, and shams that now dominate the Net are quickly dragging us toward a future where the Net as we know it is basically unusable. Put plainly: the Net’s getting messy.”

He goes on to argue that the Internet is simply a step in the evolution of networks. If that’s true, what comes next? I’ve been studying one possible answer as part of my computer science curriculum: the Semantic Web, as proposed by Tim Berners-Lee, the original creator of the World Wide Web. As glossy as the Semantic Web sounds, though, it’s not good enough to serve as the next step up. It was always intended to coexist with the WWW, not replace it.

We can make all the claims we want and point out the obvious — the Internet is becoming harder and harder to navigate and manage on a personal level. But making these claims is a lot like announcing that you’re offering something that you aren’t really offering: while it adds insight, it does nothing to solve the problem. If someone’s finally tired of the Internet the way it is, start trying to come up with ideas as to how to fix it or replace the current technology so that it actually makes sense. Patching a problem temporarily only delays the leak later on (and may, in fact, make the leak much larger).

The Internet may be aging, but there’s nothing else stepping up as a better alternative with higher security, better features for commerce, or more intuitive interfaces. Go invent something great. Make a ton of money selling it as the next big thing. Griping about it won’t get any of us anywhere.

(For more information on the Semantic Web, you can check out the Semantic Web Colloquium series, held weekly at The Evergreen State College from March 30 to May 25, 2004.)