Nonsequittal Rumblings

Spyware on My Machine? So What? (found through slashdot)

This is a scary notion – people are giving in to the adware products willingly. They’re just giving away their personal informations, online behaviors, and what not… Where did the notion of privacy gone anymore?

As an opensource lover, it’s a pretty painful blow. People are very unaware of the free software that’s really free, with no catches.

On top of that, it’s scary that people are more willing to install these software on their work machines. Not only they don’t care about the privacy, they don’t care about the company confidentiality either? Hrm!

I’ve once used this quote in my blog:

Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning.

Now this quote is taking a completely new meaning. Whoa…

I’ve figured out the way to install Firefox extensions on this prototype edition – download the actual xpi file for the extension, unzip the file, modify install.rdf to matching target application version, zip it up as xpi again, and install. That was trivial. I’ve even managed to modify Pithy 0.2 so ctrl-Q will exit out of the application completely.

The version info in question is like this:
<em:targetApplication> <!-- Netscape -->
<Description>
<em:id>{3db10fab-e461-4c80-8b97-957ad5f8ea47}</em:id>
<em:minVersion>0.5.6+</em:minVersion>
<em:maxVersion>0.5.6+</em:maxVersion>
</Description>
</em:targetApplication>

Now that Firefox has been freed from its nest, Thunderbird is getting ready to follow the suit.

The change since version 0.9 is quite nice. The interface (especially the icons) are polished up. The bugs in RSS are worked out mostly. Yay, for Thunderbird!

It’s an exciting day today. Today marks the day 1 of the 2nd year of the relationship between and I.

We were talking last night how we really haven’t had major fight or anything. It’s quite amazing. It’s not that we avoid the fight or anything. If we have things that we need to confront with the other, we bring up the issue. We may leave the issue aside for a few hours sometimes – you can’t really do a good talking when you are too upset. Leaving it aside cools us off, and can talk about the issue in more civil manner. What a noble concept that is. I’m looking forward to keep up with this kind of relationship.

Cheers! for our new year!