It seems that the posts by Mikkel and Daniel were April fools jokes. My sense of humor was broken by about midday so I missed the gag. Next year I will avoid the internet all together on the 1st of April.
My broken sense of humor
April 4th, 2008Attacking those who don’t expect it.
April 1st, 2008A few years ago I had an unpleasant experience with the police over here in the UK. My mum was contacted about a car accident that had taken place in the car park of a fabric store. She had no idea what had taken place, apparently a car had been damaged while someone was maneuvering. My mother’s number plate had been taken and she was going to be charged. The whole thing was utterly overblown, and she was never convicted. (For anyone’s reference, you apparently can’t be charged for most motoring offenses if they take place on private property.)
My part in the affair was accompanying my Mum to the police station for questioning. When we got there she was fingerprinted, had her DNA taken, and was questioned somewhat aggressively by two police officers. (Remember this is for possibly scratching a car in a car park).
I was so mad at myself for a long time afterward. The police were taking advantage of us because it was new and unexpected. What happened to Mikkel and Daniel, who were contacted unannounced by legal representatives of Apple, sounded like something similarly abusive, and bought back some of the anger.
Digital spring clean
January 28th, 2008Its a mess
I’ve been worried recently about how secure I am online. There has been a huge amount of news coverage over here in the UK about personal digital security. As someone who works as a software engineer, I always feel slightly smug when such stories are reported.
I really shouldn’t have done. On spending time looking at where account were held:
31 separate logins.
3 passwords used.
4 sites I could no longer log in to.
Although I had tried to separate out junk and secure passwords, there were some relatively insecure sites using the same password as places that had access to financial details. All in all, very insecure and a complete mess.
What can be done
As time goes by I think this situation may just get worse unless websites wise up. I felt much better about the e-commerce sites I had been to that offered paypal payment methods, or simply payment without having to open up an account. OpenID certainly has a role to play, although seems pretty flawed without some improvements in the phishing situation.
Until then I’ll have to spend the time, dull time, organizing my digital identity. As will everyone else.
A week of head scratching and ranting
December 19th, 2007I’ve taken part in a couple of phone calls this week, a quick conversation with Michael Meeks and a conference call with the open a11y group. Both about AT-SPI D-bus. There was a week of silence after my initial e-mail to lots of accessibility lists, and after that something of a storm. It was good to actually hear everyones opinion, I think people care, and AT-SPI D-Bus will probably happen sooner rather than later.
Thats pretty good news as Rob and I have spent LOTS of time discussing this one, with some of it being rather heated. Its all about “standardising” the AT-SPI interface, what constitutes a “component” system, and whether accessibility really needs object lifecycle management. 
Could anyone really have raised voices in a conversation about that?
I’m going to put together our thoughts / proposals for everyone to go through. (With heavy input / modification from Rob Taylor) Hopefully it will be up to scratch.
Unexpected results
December 2nd, 2007I really enjoy profiling and optimization, mainly for those WTF moments when results pop out the other end. Systems rarely behave the way anyone expects, and I doubt anyone would have expected this:
The graph is showing time taken to pass many many messages of different size fixed arrays over D-Bus and ORBit. At about 120k message size, Libdbus hits a performance brick wall. Its really hard for me to imagine whats going on here, but as soon as I have the time I’ll go back and do my best to find out.
D-Bus performance and AT-SPI
November 21st, 2007As part of work we (Codethink) are doing for the Mozilla foundation I have been looking, at the performance of D-Bus vs ORBit. Its a well traveled road with Ross Burton, Havoc Pennington and Frank Dunigan all having posted results before. As far as AT-SPI is concerned though its Frank’s results that are quoted on the Open A11y wiki. “An alpha version of the D-Bus bindings for glib has been tested to be 18x slower than ORBit2″. Well this is no longer true, the tests were repeated and the results show a big improvement over time. D-Bus is now roughly 6 times slower. Its a wonder these haven’t been repeated before over the years. I guess the main thing is performance of the IPC for most apps just isn’t important. It might be for AT-SPI though, from the initial tests done on Orca, its a pretty heavy user.
All of the results can be found at:
http://live.gnome.org/GAP/AtSpiDbusInvestigation.