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Chris Hughes, who co-founded what became one of the world’s largest social networks and
then just a few years later orchestrated a social-media campaign that helped put Barack Obama to
the White House, has launched a new, non-profit startup that he says will create an “online
platform to connect individuals and organizations working to change the world.” He launched
the new entity, called Jumo, not on Facebook but through a post on his Tumblr blog and on Twitter. He didn’t provide many
details about the venture or what it intends to build, but said:
To do this well, I’m firmly of the mind that we have to foster relationships between
everyday people and issues and organizations that are personally relevant to them. It’s now
possible to provide each person with information and opportunities for meaningful action tailored
specifically to who they are. If Jumo can make sure that happens and offer opportunities for
meaningful engagement alongside it, I think we can speed the pace of global change.
Hughes told The Huffington Post in a
phone interview that he was looking for something to do after the Obama campaign ended, and
knew that “I wanted to do something at the nexus of what I call global development and
technology.” By global development, he said he meant a “broad umbrella including
everything from health care and education to agriculture. He said he spent the past year
“traveling and talking to people — researching, studying, learning everything I could
in the space.” Jumo is opening an office in Soho next week, Hughes said on his blog, and is
also looking to hire a developer, a design director and an “outreach director” who it
says will require a “wide-ranging, nearly unparalleled command of the global development
field and the ability to see through ideological constraints fairly and analytically.”
To some extent Jumo — whose name means “together in concert” in a West African
language called Yoruba — may wind up competing with Hughes’ former company once it
launches. Not only do many charitable groups use Facebook pages to gather support for causes, but
former Facebook president Sean Parker has a Facebook application called
Causes that has attracted millions of users. There are also several other Web-based platforms
that are trying to connect people interested in global development, including Ushahidi, which pulls together information to help in crisis situations
such as the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti.
Hughes left Facebook, which he co-founded with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and fellow classmates Dustin
Moskovitz and Eduardo Saverin, in 2007 to lead the social-media efforts for the Obama campaign,
including helping to develop My.BarackObama.com, and was the subject of a number of flattering
profiles in mainstream media outlets such as Fast Company magazine — which
called him a “boy wonder” — and
the Wall Street Journal. After the campaign ended he became entrepreneur in residence at
General Capital Partners in Cambridge. It’s not clear whether General Capital has funded
Jumo or not — a spokesperson said it is “a non-profit venture and we’re raising
funds from both foundations and individuals.” Hughes told Fast Company he is
looking to raise about $2.5 million.
Hughes said in an email sent to friends that he believes Jumo can “leverage the
participatory web to foster long-term engagement with the issues and organizations that are
relevant to each individual. Jumo has the potential to unlock a great deal of time, skills, and
financial resources previously unavailable to organizations around the world.” After the
“soft launch” of the startup, Hughes got a number of congratulations on Twitter,
including one from Charlie O’Donnell of First Round Capital in New York, who said that he was “excited
@chrishughes is back in the making the world a better place business.”
Thonet shift knobs for Volvo C70 - Click above for high-res image
gallery
We'll be honest - when we heard that a European contemporary furniture designer would be creating
something specifically for Volvo, our first
thought was, well, IKEA. (Very funny, we know.) However, the folks at Thonet (based in Germany, not
Sweden) have created special wooden gearshift knobs specifically for the 2011 C70, in partnership with Volvo tuner Heico Sportiv.
The shift knobs, made out of oak, beech or walnut, are said to reflect the design language of
Volvo's floating center console. Thonet has a long history of creating wood furniture designs, so
it was a natural fit for Volvo to select them to create this special gearshift specifically for the
Heico Sportiv C70. Hit the jump to read more in Thonet's press release.
Hey,
remember Taiyo's voice
controlled toy helicopter from last year? This is way cooler. Like, way cooler. It's
an autonomous quad-copter created by the Robust Robotics Group at MIT. It hovers and flies a bit like the AR.Drone that had us smitten at CES this past January,
but this one has a lot more brains. It response to natural (though slowly delivered) language voice
commands that look to be processed on an iPhone before being sent to the helo. In the video
embedded below you'll see it responding to the command "Fly past room 124 then face the windows and
go up." Sure enough, it does as instructed, and while we don't know how many takes that particular
feat of robotic subservience took to pull off, we're suitably impressed. Mind you, this is a
research project and not any product ever destined for retail, so after watching that video a few
more times we'll just go back to crashing our Picco Zs into the walls -- and each other.
In a world where you can download films legally and rent DVDs by post, indie video shops may find
opportunities in becoming more specialised or responding to the needs of a local area
Video killed the radio star, but what's killing the video store? My local, Prime Time Video in
Blackheath, London, is the latest in a long line of video shops to close down. Round here, you
could plausibly screen the Onion's mock
historical tour of a Blockbuster store on the evening news. A search for "video and DVD
rental" in my postcode area turns up van hire and dentists.
Without video shops, Mos Def and Jack Black wouldn't have remade a stack of films in Be Kind Rewind, Will Smith
couldn't "hit on mannequins at the video store" in I Am Legend, and Jean-Pierre
Jeunet's body-popping clerk would be working somewhere else in new film Micmacs. With more and more video shops
closing, will there come a time when they only exist in movies (which you won't be able to rent
from a shop)?
"There's an insane number of guns pointed at the few remaining indie video shops," says film-maker Jon Spira, who owned Oxford's Videosyncratic. "I think their fate's been sealed
for a while. Rental copies are more expensive and only produced once, so you can't replace them.
And supermarkets sell DVDs below wholesale price, so why go to a video shop? Hooray for the free
market."
With Prime Time gone, I'll miss rummaging through actual shelves and renting films within minutes
of deciding I want to see them. The postman doesn't have time to help me identify forgotten
movies from lines of misquoted dialogue. Tony Gunnarsson, an analyst at Screen Digest tells me
DVD rental peaked in 2005 and has been declining ever since. "You can buy a film for a few pounds
more, so why rent it?" Depends how many shelves you've got, surely. Mine are already full.
So I phone Neil Snowdon of Exeter's Read and Return
Bookshop, who ran video shop Brazil until May 2008. Why did it close? "We just didn't make
enough money," he says. "I went a year without being paid. Location was a factor
– we were at the wrong end of town. But there's a generation of people now for
whom renting is not normal."
"Rental shops are an anachronism in a world where you can stream and download films legally, or
order DVDs by post without having to physically return to the shop," says Branwell Johnson of
Marketing Week, former editor of rental magazine View. "Where I see surviving stores, they're
specialists – usually arthouse and foreign language." Neil Snowdon agrees:
"Our regulars wanted something they wouldn't get anywhere else. But people weren't willing to
walk the distance."
The last indie rental shops left standing deserve a medal, says Jody Raynsford, who edited Home
Entertainment Week. "When was the last time you heard an advert that said 'Rent this on DVD from
... '?" But he reckons it's not all doom and gloom: "If stores can tailor their offerings to the
needs of a local area with little competition, there's no reason why they can't survive."
So long as people use them, that is. "If you like something and want it to survive, you have to
support it," says Jon Spira. "Use it or lose it. The temptation to spray-paint that across my
shop's window is immense."
It is my pleasure to announce a new project to better the Ubuntu.com website experience,
specifically for users who prefer a language other than English. The new project, called Website Localization will put a short
(4-5 word) message on any www.Ubuntu.com <http://www.ubuntu.com/> web page directing users to more
resources in their preferred language.
This project has two main parts to it. The first part of the Website Localization project is the
technical aspect of the project. It is the goal of the project to create a script that will pull
out of a users web browser their preferred language. After obtaining this information, the script
will cross reference this language against a list of languages that have approved resources
offered, and then display a short link to their languages landing page.
The second part of this project is creating landing pages for as many resources as possible. This
part of the project will be done by LoCos and the i18n team. The landing pages will be on the
wiki, and will be ever changing to direct users to the best information that we can give them.
Currently, the goal is to have the project completed and implemented by the end of May. I would
also like to have a working demo of the project by April 19th so that we have plenty of time to
fix any problems that arise prior to the final implementation of this project.
I can’t do all of this myself, so I am going to need help from the Ubuntu community. At
this point, I need some assistance with the technical side of the project. I need a few people to
create the script that will detect the users preferred language, and then show them a link to the
landing page in their language. If you have the skills needed to help out with this Website
Localization project, please send me an email with your name, launchpad account, a little bit of
information about the experience you have and your general ability (time zone, and anything else
that may help me out). My goal is to get a group of a few people to work on the technical aspect
of this project and have a meeting in the next few weeks to discuss the project in a little more
detail, and determine the best way to make this happen.
As reported by Journalism.co.uk on Wednesday, the BBC will today depart from normal broadcast
methods and experiment with a global live translation event, using its 13 different language
services. The primary house rule of SuperPower Nation is that different languages must be used.
Will it work? The event’s editor Mark Sandell, who also [...]
70% of users on the web do not speak English. Considering how many web sites and services
are done entirely in English, obviously, this is a problem. Smartling thinks it has the solution. And now they have $4
million in funding to prove it.
There are professional translators out there that will convert your site into a different
language, but they’re usually expensive, and it can take a while. Meanwhile, services like
Google Translate are pretty much instantaneous and free, but accuracy is an issue. Smartling
attempts to find the middle ground. They offer fast, accurate translations at a low cost.
How? They use a hybrid model which essentially allows you to pick between professional
translators, machine translations, and crowdsourced translations. The key is managing it all,
which can be done with Smartling’s software. With it, you can pick and choose which part of
your site to translate which way.
As the web continues to grow quickly in places such as China, translation is going to be a very
important aspect of an increasing number of sites and services. Smartling, which only started
itself last year, seems to be in a good position to expand its operations now with the new money.
In the first series of comprehensive performance tests comparing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9
technical preview, released yesterday, to stable Web browsers in current use today, Betanews
confirmed superb speed gains by the IE9 chassis in specific categories. Not everything in the new
IE9 was faster than IE8, but in the computational department, the development team's Chakra
JavaScript engine shows much-needed gains.
In anticipation of IE9, Betanews has been developing a radically improved set of performance
tests to complement (and, in a few categories, replace) those we've used in recent months. Our
objective is to determine not just how much faster IE9 is, but how much better and more
efficient it will be, in computing data, in rendering on-screen objects, and in adapting to
varying workloads.
Betanews estimates that the IE9 chassis on Windows 7 offers 9.32 times better raw computational
performance than IE8 on Windows 7, on the same machine. That's a welcome number due in large part
to vastly improved scores in the widely respected SunSpider battery, as well as high scores in a
new set of variable-workload computational tests produced by Betanews. Specifically on the
SunSpider, the IE9 preview scored a 44.77 on Betanews' relative performance
index, compared to 5.59 for IE8. Our index is based on cumulative relative
performance in each category of the test battery, compared against the score posted by an old,
slow Web browser: IE7 on Vista SP2. This means, yes, IE9 (thus far) offers almost 45 times the
computational speed of IE7 on the older operating system -- easily the single largest surge we've
seen between generations.
A recent dev build of Google Chrome 5 on Windows 7 scored a 69.83 on that same
SunSpider index, followed closely by the first stable version of Opera 10.5 with
68.64.
As Microsoft embraces HTML 5, it's also managing to eke out some marginal speed gains in the
rendering department, although it must be noted that the IE9 chassis is running in an almost
feature-less window with very minimal overhead. As of now, the IE9 preview offers 23% better
rendering performance (CSS, DHTML, support for the Canvas element in HTML 5) than IE8.
Looking for the good
What Microsoft did yesterday was give outside developers, for the first time, direct access to
just the engine of its next-generation Web browser, long before the functionality and usability
features are attached to it. The reason, the Internet Explorer 9 product team says, is to elicit
real-world feedback so that the product can be fine-tuned.
That describes exactly what we intend to do. Over the last few weeks, Betanews has been compiling
a suite of next-generation browser tests, having taken into account the feedback we've received
from both our readers and browser manufacturers, Microsoft included. As rapidly as browsers have
evolved in just the past year, it's become clear to us that when we compare brands, at one level,
we truly are comparing apples to apple trees, or lawnmowers to bulldozers. When we concentrate on
the prowess or power angle, with all the adrenaline-rushing metaphors and superlatives, we
sometimes forget that sometimes, what the world really wants is an efficient lawnmower.
Last year, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch asked me to take a closer, fairer look at
Internet Explorer. Specifically, he said that there were architectural efficiencies to be found
in the product line, if only we took the time to look for them.
How I opted to respond to that challenge was to focus on one under-appreciated aspect of the Web
browser that will become more important as its components are transported to six-core desktop
systems on one end, and Snapdragon handsets and netbooks on the other: scalability.
Specifically, I started exploring whether there was a way to effectively measure how well a
browser handles increasing workloads, of ever higher orders of magnitude.
Mozilla helped to begin making scalability an issue with its introduction of the TraceMonkey
JavaScript engine in Firefox. Tracers make problems that appear complex in coding simpler for
their processing engines to execute, by pre-processing instructions ahead of time, converting and
optimizing long sequences into easily digestible, assembly language-like instructions.
Theoretically, the simpler and longer the sequences, the easier the digestive process should
become.
So in this new era, it becomes necessary to test the efficiency of a browser's capability to
digest those long sequences, to make harder problems simpler for themselves. This is the
scalability element which will represent 30% of the score in our revised Relative Performance
Index.
Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch played down the importance of just-in-time compiling as a factor in
improving browser efficiency, promoting instead the option of moving the interpreter to a
background process. But doing that alone, as we're discovering now, may not effectively combat
what has historically been IE's biggest problem as a Web apps platform: the ability to fall off a
cliff (see: "stack overflow") when problems get especially difficult. On new tests involving
sorting algorithms, for instance, where recursion easily becomes thousands of layers deep, IE8
can spin off into a coma. So far, we have not seen the comatose effect in the IE9 tech preview,
which could be the first sign of very good news for Web app developers.
What I was surprised to discover in crafting this new set of tests was that IE was not alone.
Chrome can fall off a cliff too, just several orders of magnitude later (after 10 million
iterations, for example, rather than 100,000). As the problem gets more and more complex, the gap
between Chrome or Safari or the new Opera's performance and that of IE becomes wider and
wider...and wider. And that's a problem because you could arbitrarily choose some point out in
space, where Chrome is a thousand times faster than IE rather than, say, ten. Wait long enough
and you might get 10,000.
And that, as IE proponents assert, would not be fair. It's actually the reason we chose not to
include Google's V8 benchmark battery in our tests: because there does not appear to be a
real-world correlation between the hundreds of times greater performance the V8 battery can
report over IE, and the differences we see in ordinary use.
So the goal of our scalability tests is to recognize that smaller engines can still be
efficient in what they do, even when they offer lesser horsepower. Maybe IE can't run a
10-million-iteration test. But the difference between its performance in 100,000 iterations and
in 10,000 can be compared to Chrome's difference between 10 million iterations and 1 million.
That factor may still be meaningful.
In the very first report of browsers' scalability compared to IE7 in Vista SP2, the IE9 tech
preview in Windows 7 scored a 6.57 compared to IE8's score of
1.13. That means, we believe IE9's new "Chakra" interpreter offers 581.4%
greater efficiency than IE8 at speeding up when workloads increase. Betanews is applying these
new tests to the latest stable browsers from the other Top Five browser makers; and yes, Ross
Perot fans, we'll have the charts ready when the numbers come in.
The human brain has to decode a lot of information and sometimes it just gets things wrong,
especially when it comes to language. Songs are a big example, mishearing lyrics is a huge
internet meme that’s worth exploring for a good laugh.
What I found amusing was what I keep on hearing in LeAnn Rimes’ “Right Kind of
Wrong”:
I should try to run, but I just can’t seem to.
Every time I run, your the one I run to.
Can’t do without… what you do to me…
I don’t care if I’m into Debian!
Of course I think it’s suppose to be “I don’t care if I’m in too deep,
yeah!” but the way it’s sung makes it sound like she’s into Debian and
doesn’t care. Anything to get FOSS out there into the media I guess.
It is my pleasure to announce a new project to better the Ubuntu.com website experience,
specifically for users who prefer a language other than English. The new project, called Website Localization will put a short
(4-5 word) message on any www.Ubuntu.com web page directing users to more resources in their
preferred language.
This project has two main parts to it. The first part of the Website Localization project is the
technical aspect of the project. It is the goal of the project to create a script that will pull
out of a users web browser their preferred language. After obtaining this information, the script
will cross reference this language against a list of languages that have approved resources
offered, and then display a short link to their languages landing page.
The second part of this project is creating landing pages for as many resources as possible. This
part of the project will be done by LoCos and the i18n team. The landing pages will be on the
wiki, and will be ever changing to direct users to the best information that we can give them.
Currently, the goal is to have the project completed and implemented by the end of May. I would
also like to have a working demo of the project by April 19th so that we have plenty of time to
fix any problems that arise prior to the final implementation of this project.
I can’t do all of this myself, so I am going to need help from the Ubuntu community. At
this point, I need some assistance with the technical side of the project. I need a few people to
create the script that will detect the users preferred language, and then show them a link to the
landing page in their language. If you have the skills needed to help out with this Website
Localization project, please send me an email with your name, launchpad account, a little bit of
information about the experience you have and your general ability (time zone, and anything else
that may help me out). My goal is to get a group of a few people to work on the technical aspect
of this project and have a meeting in the next few weeks to discuss the project in a little more
detail, and determine the best way to make this happen.
Bob Harris, the eight-time Jeopardy champ who wrote a terrific Peru travelogue a couple of weeks
ago for Boing Boing gave a great talk about the culture of joy as an international language. It's
on YouTube now. Last year IÂ was asked by Web Directions North, a gathering of assorted
bigshots from Google, Yahoo!, etc. -- people who literally convene to design the next phases of the
Internet itself -- to deliver the closing keynote. The subject? The
future of the Internet's influence on global culture and politics. Naturally, my take on it was
illustrated with people dancing in the streets, teenage males being given fake boobs, and coffee
made from civet poop.  I'm happy to tell you it got a long standing
ovation. And now you can see the whole talk online here. It's broken into bite-size pieces,
organized loosely by the point I'm making, each about the length of a pop song. The first chunk is
above. Bob Harris' Keynote Talk on the Web, Global Culture, and Monumental Screw-ups...
Patrick O'Connor / The Politico: Oberstar will back
final bill — Minnesota Rep. James Oberstar, an ardent backer of
the House abortion restrictions, will vote for the final package after a further review of the
Senate's language, giving top Democrats a critical endorsement as they lean on their
rank-and-file to back the Senate bill.
Google just launched a
new
stable version of Google Chrome, the company's
increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy
controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you
to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome
that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new
features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.
Sponsor
Read 52 Languages
Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar
appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that
is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind
Google Translate to automatically detect and
translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off
for those languages you don't need it for.
One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser,
while the translation itself happens on Google's servers. As with all automatic translation
algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to
easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.
Better Privacy Controls
In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a
number of new privacy controls. Through the new "Content Settings" option, Chrome users on
Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and
JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some
sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these
relatively complicated controls.
What About the Mac and Linux?
With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of
Chrome isn't easy. While these new features aren't available for Mac and Linux users yet, it's
likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time
being, Mac users on the
dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which
finally brings a usable
bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.
Comedian Zach
Galifianakis’s edgy celebrity interview web show Between Two Ferns attracted a big movie star
in its latest episode. Ben Stiller came on the show, and the Funny or Die-hosted video has been spreading quickly
in blog posts and tweets today.
Between Two Ferns is nominated for multiple Streamy Awards this
year. Each episode features recent SNL host Zach Galifianakis (known for his work in Comedians of
Comedy and The Hangover) awkwardly interviewing a deadpan celebrity guest while
sitting between two ferns. Usually he passive-aggressively does something extremely
unprofessional, causing the guest to become increasingly flustered.
This viral vid with Ben Stiller follows a similar pattern. Galifianakis opens the interview by
botching Ben Stiller’s last name, then suggesting he change it to “There, Done
That” — it goes even further downhill from there.
Here’s the video, but be warned that it has some NSFW language, so you might want to plug
in those headphones.
On March 16, Fox News anchors during their self-described daytime "news hours" repeatedly
forwarded the false suggestion that, by using a legislative procedure known as the
"self-executing rule" to finalize health care reform in the House, Democrats would be passing
health care reform "without actually voting for it." In fact, implementing the proposed procedure
requires a majority vote.
The New York Times
reported on October 11, 2009, that Fox News claims its news hours are objective and defined
as "9 a.m. to 4 p.m. and 6 to 8 p.m. on weekdays." Those weekday hours include America's
Newsroom, Happening Now,and America Live, which replaced Live
Desk in early 2010.
America's Newsroom: Procedure "actually pretty simple," but not for Fox's
Hemmer
Hemmer: The self-executing rule "does not require a single
vote." On Fox News' America's Newsroom, co-host Bill Hemmer
blog post, The Washington
Post's Ezra Klein explained that the legislative process Democrats are considering
using, theself-executing vote "functions as a vote on the Senate bill" because "the House will
pass the fixes under a rule that says the House 'deems' the Senate bill passed after the House
passes the fixes." Klein wrote:
Here's how that will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the
House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after
the House passes the fixes.
The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill.
They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package
functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the
bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed,
even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never
specifically voted on the Senate bill.
It's a circuitous strategy born of necessity. Pelosi doesn't have votes for the Senate bill
without the reconciliation package. But the Senate parliamentarian said that the Senate bill must
be signed into law before the reconciliation package can be signed into law. That removed
Pelosi's favored option of passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the Senate bill. So
now the House will vote on reconciliation explicitly and the Senate bill implicitly, which is
politically easier, even though the effect is not any different than if Congress were to pass the
Senate bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after.
CRS: Self-executing rule requires House's approval. A 2006
Congressional Research Service (CRS) report
makes clear that passage of a rule by the House is required for the "self-executing" rule to be
adopted. From CRS:
Definition of "Self-Executing" Rule. One of the newer types is
called a "self-executing" rule; it embodies a "two-for-one" procedure. This means that when the
House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is
specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete
policy proposal is deemed to have passed the House and been incorporated in the bill to be taken
up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an
opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically
agreed to when the House passed the rule. Rules of this sort contain customary, or "boilerplate,"
language, such as: "The amendment printed in [section 2 of this resolution or in part 1 of the
report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution] shall be considered as adopted in
the House and in the Committee of the Whole."
Don Wolfensberger, former
chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republicans, stated in a 2006 Roll
Call
column:
Almost every major bill must obtain a special rule, or resolution, from the Rules Committee
permitting immediate floor consideration. The resolution also specifies the amount of general
debate time and what amendments will be allowed. A special rule also may contain other bells,
whistles, gizmos and gadgets.One of these optional attachments is a self-executing provision,
which decrees a specified amendment to have been adopted upon the rule's
passage [emphasis added]. In other words, once the House adopts the special
rule it effectively has adopted the amendment before the bill has even been called up
for consideration [emphasis added].
Fox News previously misled over budget reconciliation process
Fox News repeatedly falsely labels reconciliation as "nuclear
option."FoxNewshosts and guests have repeatedly pushed the falsehood that
the "nuclear option" refers to the budget reconciliation process. The Fox Nation and Fox News
personalities like Hannity, Van Susteren, Dick Morris, Bret Baier, and Bill Sammon have all falsely compared reconciliation to the
"nuclear option," and the Fox Nation has previouslycoupled its headlines with images of a
mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb:
In the video above you’ll see two of our favorite things combined, a quad-copter that is voice controlled. The
robot responds to natural language so you can tell it to “take off and fly forward six
feet”, rather than rely on a cryptic command set. The demonstration shows both an iPhone
and a headset used as the input microphone. Language is parsed by a computer and the resulting
commands sent to the four-rotor UAV.
This makes us think of the Y.T.’s robot-aided assault in Snow Crash. Perhaps our inventions strive to
achieve the fiction that came before it.
Firefox:
LangLadder is a smart Firefox extension designed to aid you with your foreign-language studies,
teaching you vocabulary and improving your reading skills.
More »
Firefox:
LangLadder is a smart Firefox extension designed to aid you with your foreign-language studies,
teaching you vocabulary and improving your reading skills.
More »
Usually the purpose of a virtual private network is to establish a secure, tunneled route between
two points in an IP network. Is the idea that such a network could be secured using two
encryption layers rather than one, and without the need for a user to log in first, worthy of a
patent? These were questions central to the latest Tyler, Texas patent infringement case for
Microsoft to lose: VPN technology provider VirnetX was awarded $105.75 million yesterday, in a
case closely
followed by the Seattle P.I.'s Nick Eaton.
It's clear from a reading of VirnetX's key patent on VPN technology, issued in 2002, that it is an attempt
to go one step further with the VPN concept. The firm calls its system Tunneled Agile Routing
Protocol (TARP). Here, the communications between VPN hosts are encrypted at one level, but then
the routing information is hidden behind a second level. The intent is to hide not only what's
being talked about or shared over a VPN, but who is sharing it, and what route it's taking to get
there.
"Each TARP packet's true destination is concealed behind a layer of encryption generated using a
link key," reads a portion of the summary from US Patent #6,502,135. "The link key is the
encryption key used for encrypted communication between the hops intervening between an
originating TARP terminal and a destination TARP terminal. Each TARP router can remove the outer
layer of encryption to reveal the destination router for each TARP packet. To identify the link
key needed to decrypt the outer layer of encryption of a TARP packet, a receiving TARP or routing
terminal may identify the transmitting terminal by the sender/receiver IP numbers in the
cleartext IP header. Once the outer layer of encryption is removed, the TARP router determines
the final destination."
Microsoft implemented its own interpretation of VPN technology for Office Communicator, the
endpoint for the company's bold Unified Communications project -- its effort to render the phone
networks, and PBXes that support them, obsolete. To make the Internet work more like a phone,
people using a telephone console need to be able to pick up the receiver and dial. They shouldn't
have to go to some dialog box and log in. Avoiding that option is what UC tries to do, and is one
of the acts for which VirnetX cried foul.
In hearings last July (which Eaton also covered closely), Microsoft defended itself by asserting that the
whole point of a VPN is to establish both secure and anonymous communications between
points, so the idea that VirnetX was somehow inventing the addition of anonymity was absurd. If
you doubt that a VPN is supposed to be anonymous, counsel argued, just look it up in a glossary.
Which the judge did, and that got into a wholly separate argument over the quality of glossaries,
resulting in the judge in the case issuing his own glossary for the jury to interpret as fact.
An excerpt from Judge Leonard Davis' opinion last July shows the extent of the argument over how
deeply a glossary may define a concept, especially if that concept may be proof of "prior art"
that could invalidate a patent (PDF
available here, from SeattlePI.com): "Microsoft cites the portion of the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary
definition for 'virtual private networks' that states, 'IPSEC [Internet Protocol Security] is not
the only technique available for building VPNs, but it is the only method defined by RFCs
[Request for Comments, Internet documents??"some of which are informative while others are
standards] and supported by many vendors. VPNs [virtual private networks] are by no means the
only thing you can do with IPSEC, but they may be the most important application for many
users.'...Microsoft points out that IPSEC is the only method defined by RFCs and supported by
many vendors. Microsoft argues that this narrow language shows that the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary does
not identify Secure Sockets Layer ('SSL') or Transport Layer Security ('TLS') as methods for
building 'virtual private networks.' Microsoft then argues that VirnetX's proposed construction
is overly broad because it allows for a network using SSL and TLS. However, Microsoft's cited
excerpt is an ancillary portion of the 'virtual private network' definition and is set apart in a
different paragraph from the primary portion of the definition...Also, Microsoft selectively
asserts that IPSEC is the only method defined by RFCs and supported by many vendors and ignores
that its cited excerpt states that, 'IPSEC is not the only technique available for building
VPNs.' Thus, Microsoft's cited excerpt does not support that the 'FreeS/WAN' glossary restricts
'virtual private network' to IPSEC."
If Microsoft could have proved that VirnetX's contribution to VPN architecture was so obvious
that it would still be covered by a published glossary definition of the term, then it might have
persuaded the jury that no patent should have been issued in the first place. But that assertive
defense became problematic (at best) last summer when it was revealed that Microsoft itself
attempted to patent the same technology, in an application that was denied by the US Patent
Office. The basis of the denial was prior art -- specifically, the pre-existence of patents
issued to VirnetX.
As the jury no doubt heard from plaintiff's counsel, if Microsoft didn't know about the existence
of VirnetX's patents before, it did when it received its rejection notice. No haggling over
glossary definitions could save the case at that point. In a statement, Microsoft continued to
assert the invalidity of VirnetX's patents, and will begin the long and arduous process of
appealing to overturn the verdict.
Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson asserted that the Democrats are working "to
achieve the congressional equivalent of the Immaculate Conception - a law without a vote" and
that the self-executing rule would allow health care reform "to slip by the House." In fact, the
self-executing rule requires a majority vote in order to pass and, as the Post's Ezra
Klein has noted, "the effect" of passing it "is not any different than if Congress were to pass"
the Senate's health care "bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after."
From Michael Gerson's March 17 Washington Post
column:
As of this writing, a president who seems willing to interrupt prime-time programming on the
slightest pretext has not scheduled a speech from the Oval Office to make his final health-reform
appeal. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is working her parliamentarians overtime to achieve the
congressional equivalent of the Immaculate Conception --
a law without a vote. One gets the impression that Democrats would prefer health reform to
slip by the House in a procedural maneuver on a Friday night during the
NCAA basketball tournament -- which it might.
The most visible Democratic domestic priority of the past 40 years must be smuggled into law,
lest too many Americans notice. Politicians claiming the idealism of saints have adopted the
tactics of burglars. Victory, if it comes, will seem less like a parade than a heist.
FACT: Bill would not pass without majority vote on self-executing rule
Ezra Klein: "[V]ote on the reconciliation packagefunctions as a vote on the Senate
bill." In a March 15
blog post, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein explained that the
self-executing vote "functions as a vote on the Senate bill" because "the House will pass the
fixes under a rule that says the House 'deems' the Senate bill passed after the House passes the
fixes." Klein wrote:
Here's how that will work: Rather than passing the Senate bill and then passing the fixes, the
House will pass the fixes under a rule that says the House "deems" the Senate bill passed after
the House passes the fixes.
The virtue of this, for Pelosi's members, is that they don't actually vote on the Senate bill.
They only vote on the reconciliation package. But their vote on the reconciliation package
functions as a vote on the Senate bill. The difference is semantic, but the
bottom line is this: When the House votes on the reconciliation fixes, the Senate bill is passed,
even if the Senate hasn't voted on the reconciliation fixes, and even though the House never
specifically voted on the Senate bill.
It's a circuitous strategy born of necessity. Pelosi doesn't have votes for the Senate bill
without the reconciliation package. But the Senate parliamentarian said that the Senate bill must
be signed into law before the reconciliation package can be signed into law. That removed
Pelosi's favored option of passing the reconciliation fixes before passing the Senate bill. So
now the House will vote on reconciliation explicitly and the Senate bill implicitly, which is
politically easier, even though the effect is not any different than if Congress were to pass the
Senate bill first and pass the reconciliation fixes after.
CRS: Self-executing rule requires House's approval. A 2006
Congressional Research Service (CRS) report
makes clear that passage of a rule by the House is required for the "self-executing" rule to be
adopted. From CRS:
Definition of "Self-Executing" Rule. One of the newer types is
called a "self-executing" rule; it embodies a "two-for-one" procedure. This means that when the
House adopts a rule it also simultaneously agrees to dispose of a separate matter, which is
specified in the rule itself. For instance, self-executing rules may stipulate that a discrete
policy proposal is deemed to have passed the House and been incorporated in the bill to be taken
up. The effect: neither in the House nor in the Committee of the Whole will lawmakers have an
opportunity to amend or to vote separately on the "self-executed" provision. It was automatically
agreed to when the House passed the rule. Rules of this sort contain customary, or "boilerplate,"
language, such as: "The amendment printed in [section 2 of this resolution or in part 1 of the
report of the Committee on Rules accompanying this resolution] shall be considered as adopted in
the House and in the Committee of the Whole."
Don Wolfensberger, former
chief of staff for the House Rules Committee under Republicans, stated in a 2006 Roll
Call
column: "Almost every major bill must obtain a special rule, or resolution, from the Rules
Committee permitting immediate floor consideration. The resolution also specifies the amount of
general debate time and what amendments will be allowed. A special rule also may contain other
bells, whistles, gizmos and gadgets. One of these optional attachments is a self-executing
provision, which decrees a specified amendment to have been adopted upon the rule's
passage. In other words, once the House adopts the special rule it
effectively has adopted the amendment before the bill has even been called up for consideration
[emphasis added]."
CongressDaily: House would still have to vote on corrections to the Senate
bill. NationalJournal.com's CongressDaily
reported (subscription required) that the rule would require that the "House approves a
corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version" for passage. From CongressDaily:
House Rules Chairwoman Louise Slaughter is prepping to help usher the healthcare overhaul through
the House and potentially avoid a direct vote on the Senate overhaul bill, the chairwoman said
Tuesday.
Slaughter is weighing preparing a rule that would consider the Senate bill passed once the House
approves a corrections bill that would make changes to the Senate version.
Some time ago we published an article and a YouTube video about the PhotoTranslator application
which we have developed. We were surprised of the attention it gained. Many people asked us, when
will it be available and we have decided to release an alpha version of PhotoTranslator. So if
you want to test it, you can install it directly from Maemo extras devel repository AT YOUR
OWN RISK.
PhotoTranslator Alpha Features
As you probably have understood already, the PhotoTranslator is not a final version yet and it
lacks features. It may, or it may not work as you expect, but as stated before, use it at your
own risk. We also needed to remove bunch of languages from the application because they
 increased the package size to 95M.  PhotoTranslator supports only the
following languages from tesseract i.e. the languages that it can read from the
images (OCR) at the moment:
English
Finnish
German
Spanish
Portuguese
NOTE: This means that you can translate, but you can only use the OCR for the languages listed
above. The workaround for this is that you can write the text manually and then translate it.
PhotoTranslator Beta Features
For beta version we are planning to implement the following set of features:
Separate package for each supported language
User can download different language packages via PhotoTranslator
Disabled buttons for languages that are not installed
Support for capturing images with PhotoTranslator
We are also investigating if we could open source the application at some point. More details
will follow later.
Installing PhotoTranslator
The only thing you need to do is to enable extras-testing repository from your application
manager. Check the details below.
In the Application Manager:
Navigate to the application menu (tap the title bar)
We would like to receive feedback of your user experience. You can give your feedback about
PhotoTranslator in comment section. We will also later provide an email address, which you can
use to send your feedback directly.
Media reports have repeatedly clouded the health care reform debate by uncritically reporting on
false claims that the Senate health care bill provides federal funding for abortion beyond the
limited cases allowed by current law: rape, incest, and conditions that endanger the life of the
pregnant woman.
Senate bill does not allow federal funding for abortion in cases other than rape,
incest, and danger to the life of the mother
Senate bill forbids use of federal subsidies for abortion services except in cases
allowed by the Hyde amendment. The health care reform bill passed by the Senate
states that if a "qualified health plan" offered under the health insurance exchange provides
coverage of abortion services for which public funding is banned, "the issuer of the plan shall
not use any amount attributable" to the federal subsidies created under the bill "for purposes of
paying for such services." Public funding is currently banned by the Hyde amendment for all
abortions except in cases of rape, incest, or if the life of the pregnant woman is in danger.
Senate bill requires insurance plans that cover abortion to segregate funds to ensure
that federal funds are not used to pay for abortions. The Senate bill
requires issuers to "collect from each enrollee" in plans that cover abortions a "separate
payment" for "an amount equal to the actuarial value of the coverage of" abortion services. All
such funds are deposited into a separate account used by the issuer to pay for abortion services;
federal funds and the remaining premium payments are used to pay for all other services.
Additionally, as Slate.com's Timothy Noah noted,
the Senate bill requires that "every insurance exchange must offer at least one abortion-free
health plan," so people who do not want to pay the "fee" "can simply choose a different health
plan offered through the exchange, one that doesn't cover abortions."
Current law permits abortion coverage through Medicaid so long as funds are
segregated. According to a November 1, 2009,
study by the Guttmacher Institute, 17 states provide coverage under Medicaid for "all or most
medically necessary abortions," not just abortions in cases of life endangerment, rape, and
incest. Those states "us[e] their own funds" -- not federal funds -- "to pay" for the procedures.
Therefore, in 17 states, Medicaid, a
federally subsidized health care program, covers abortions in circumstances in which federal
money is prohibited from being spent on abortion.
ABC World News "Truth Squad": "[T]he bill makes it clear there can be no federal
money for abortion." On March 4, The ABC World News "Truth Squad" investigated Stupak's claim that "the federal
government will directly subsidize abortions" in the Senate bill and found "the bill makes it
clear there can be no federal money for abortion."
Mainstream media fail to report fact that bill bans federal funding for most abortions
Wash. Post reports: "Antiabortion Democrats say it would permit federal funding
for abortion." A March 16 Washington Post
article reported that "House leaders have worked for days to round up support for the
legislation, but the Senate measure has drawn fierce opposition from a broad spectrum of members.
Antiabortion Democrats say it would permit federal funding for abortion, liberals oppose its tax
on high-cost insurance plans, and Republicans say the measure overreaches and is too expensive."
However the Post article did not note that the bill's abortion restrictions
are consistent with the current law, which forbids federal funding for abortion in most
cases.
AP: Some Dems "won't support the legislation without a prohibition on paying for
abortions with federal money." On March 11, The Associated Press
reported that a "dozen socially conservative Democrats say they won't support the legislation
without a prohibition on paying for abortions with federal money. [Rep. Bart] Stupak [D-PA] wrote
a provision to their liking for a House bill approved last November, but the Senate replaced it
with wording he considers unacceptable." However, the AP did not note that the Senate bill does
not allow federal funding for abortion.
NPR cast debate as he-said, she-said without reporting that Senate bill doesn't allow for
federal funding of abortion beyond current law. In a March 12 All Things
Considered
story headlined, "Abortion Language Still Sticking Point For Health Bill," NPR health policy
correspondent Julie Rovner reported on Stupak's claim that the Senate bill uses federal tax
subsidies for abortion coverage, followed by Rep. Jan Schakowsky's (D-IL) statement that "[i]t
does not":
Abortion opponents, led in the House by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-Mich., say the Senate bill would
loosen current restrictions on abortion funding. He cites specific language on specific pages,
"which basically says that your federal tax subsidies can be used to pay for abortion coverage.
That's contrary to current federal law."
For example, Stupak says, the language gives federal officials discretion to allow abortion
funding in the future. And Stupak says he has as many as a dozen other Democrats who oppose
abortion-rights who won't vote for the Senate bill unless their concerns are addressed.
But abortion-rights supporters, like Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., say Stupak's interpretation is
simply wrong.
"I don't know why he persists in saying that somehow the Senate bill allows for federal funding
of abortion," Schakowsky says. "It does not."
However, Rovner did not report that Schakowsky was correct in stating that the Senate bill "does
not" allow for federal funding of abortion, except in cases allowed by current law.
NY Times blog uncriticially reported Stupak's suggestion that the Senate bill
does not "keep current law." In a
post on The New York Times' Prescriptions blog, David Herszenhorn reported Stupak's
suggestion that the Senate bill does not keep current law, writing: "Mr. Stupak said he would
continue to fight for tighter abortion restrictions in the health insurance legislation."
Herszenhorn then quoted Stupak saying: "My intent is not to hold up this legislation. ... My
intent is to keep current law. Eight different pieces of legislation currently say no public
funding for abortion. That's all we're saying. No public funding for abortion." However
Herszenhorn did not note that the Senate bill does indeed maintain current law.
NBC's Gregory falsely suggested "there's ... federal money paying for
abortions." On the March 7 edition of NBC's Meet the Press, host David Gregory
aired video of Stupak stating that the Senate bill "says you must offer insurance policies
that will be paid for by the federal government that covers abortion." Gregory then asked Health
and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: "Will you make the fix that he's talking about so
there is no federal money paying for abortions?" As Sebelius noted, "there is no federal money
paying for abortions."
Conservative media have repeatedly advanced falsehood about federal funding for abortion
Fox's Cameron: Senate health bill "does not contain any legislative ban on using tax
dollars for abortion services." On the March 5 edition of Fox News' Special
Report -- one of Fox's
self-described "news programs" -- Cameron falsely asserted that the Senate bill "does not
contain any legislative ban on using tax dollars for abortion services." He went on say that some
Democrats "oppose the Senate bill because it lacks a ban on tax dollars for abortion services."
Van Susteren let McCain falsely claim that "federal funding would be involved in
performing of abortions." On her March 5 Fox News show, Greta Van Susteren let Sen. John
McCain falsely claim that passing the
Senate bill "really would be the first time, since the Hyde amendment many years ago, that
federal funding would be involved in the performing of abortions, and most Americans I think
resoundingly reject that." Van Susteren also let Stupak falsely claim that his amendment does not go
beyond the current law as defined in the Hyde amendment.
Rove: Senate bill contains "abortion funding language." In a March 11 Wall
Street Journal editorial, Fox News contributor Karl Rove falsely suggested the Senate bill allows for
federal funding of abortion. Rove wrote: "Pro-life House Democrats are deeply disturbed by the
Senate abortion-funding language."
Fox's Doocy falsely suggested Senate bill allows for federal "funding of
abortion." On the March 15 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host
Steve Doocy falsely suggested that
the Senate health bill contains "language that does allow for" federal funding for abortion
beyond what is currently allowed under the Hyde Amendment.
Fox News' Johnson: Senate health bill includes "federal funding of abortion." On
the March 2 edition of Fox & Friends, Fox News' Peter Johnson Jr. claimed the Senate health bill allows
"federal funding of abortion.
Rush Limbaugh: Health care reform "hinges on" deciding by Easter whether U.S. "will pay
for the killing of babies." Limbaugh announced on his March 4 radio show that he found
"some irony" in the idea that health care reform "all hinges on whether the federal government
will pay for the killing of babies or not -- deciding that by Easter."
Conservative media figures have recently claimed that the use of a legislative procedure called a
"self-executing rule" to pass health care reform in the House is unconstitutional. However, Yale
law professor Jack Balkin has explained that the procedure in question would pass constitutional
muster; additionally, federal appeals courts have recently held that the constitutional
requirement that both houses pass a bill has been met when the House speaker and Senate president
attest the bill has passed.
Right-wing media claim Dems are "slaughtering the Constitution" with rule
Beck: "How is this even constitutional?" Discussing the "Slaughter rule" on the
March 16 edition of his show, Beck asked: "How is this even constitutional?" Beck similarly wrote
in his newsletter that Democrats are "slaughtering the Constitution" and that "the Constitution
is being thwarted" if the health care reform legislation passes using the self-executing rule.
BigGovernment: Congress is "violating the Constitution" with Slaughter rule. A
March 11
post on Andrew Breitbart's BigGovernment website stated that the "Slaughter Solution has one
very large obstacle -- the Constitution Article I, Section 7," and that "if this Congress
continues down this path of violating the Constitution, the 'people' will have a viable case,
class-action or otherwise, in the US courts because it is going to be extremely difficult for a
judge to ignore that the 111th Democrat-Progressive led Congress violated Article I, Section 7 to
the most obscene extent."
Jim Hoft: "Democrats will use the unconstitutional 'Slaughter Rule.' " In a
March 14
post on his Gateway Pundit blog, Jim Hoft wrote: "Democratic leader Rep. Chris Van Hollen
admitted today on FOX News Sunday that democrats will use the unconstitutional 'Slaughter Rule'
to ram their pro-abortion nationalized health care bill through Congress. Democrats announced
this tactic last week. They will pass the bill without voting on it. They will take over
one-sixth of the US economy without even voting on it."
Hot Air: House is using self-executing rule "for the first time in U.S.
history." A March 14 Hot Air blog
post stated: "We're hours away from Slaughter revealing the strategy and Democrats have no
other mechanism to pass a bill other than using an extra-Constitutional procedure. They don't
have the votes to pass the Senate Bill, so they are -- for the first time in U.S. history --
about to rule that they actually passed a bill they never voted on."
Malkin calls Rep. Slaughter a "Constitution-butcher." On March 13, Fox News
contributor Michelle Malkin displayed the following graphic on her
website under the headline, "Constitution Butchers: Stop Pelosi's Slaughter House":
Legal scholar Balkin debunks claim that rule is unconstitutional
Yale Law professor Balkin: Self-executing rule is constitutional if done
properly. In a March 15
post on his Balkinization blog, Balkin wrote:
[T]here is a way that "deem and pass" could be done constitutionally. There have to be two
separate bills signed by the President: the first one is the original Senate bill, and the second
one is the reconciliation bill. The House must pass the Senate bill and it must also pass the
reconciliation bill. The House may do this on a single vote if the special rule that accompanies
the reconciliation bill says that by passing the reconciliation bill the House agrees to pass the
same text of the same bill that the Senate has passed. That is to say, the language of the
special rule that accompanies the reconciliation bill must make the House take political
responsibility for passing the same language as the Senate bill. The House must say that the
House has consented to accept the text of the Senate bill as its own political act. At that point
the President can sign the two bills, and it does not matter that the House has passed both
through a special rule. Under Article I, section 5 of the Constitution, the House can determine
its own rules for passing legislation. There are plenty of precedents for passing legislation by
reference through a special rule.
Federal appeals courts recently decided that constitutional requirement is satisfied when
Speaker and Senate president attest that identical language passed both houses. In
Public Citizen v. U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that if both the House speaker and the Senate president attest
that identical bills have passed both houses of Congress, the courts must accept that the
constitutional requirement has been satisfied. (Malkin and other conservatives have pointed to
the Public Citizen case to falsely accuse Democrats of hypocrisy.) From
the
decision (which quoted from the Supreme Court case, Marshall Field et
al. v. Clark):
The Court crafted a clear rule: "[I]t is not competent for [a party raising a bicameralism
challenge] to show, from the journals of either house, from the reports of committees or from
other documents printed by authority of Congress, that [an] enrolled bill" differs from that
actually passed by Congress. Id. at 680, 12 S.Ct. 495. The only "evidence upon which a court may
act when the issue is made as to whether a bill ... asserted to have become a law, was or was not
passed by Congress" is an enrolled act attested to by declaration of "the two houses, through
their presiding officers." Id. at 670, 672, 12 S.Ct. 495. An enrolled bill, "thus attested," "is
conclusive evidence that it was passed by Congress." Id. at 672-73, 12 S.Ct. 495. "[T]he
enrollment itself is the record, which is conclusive as to what the statute is ..." Id. at 675,
12 S.Ct. 495. [alterations in the original]
Ornstein: Conservative complaints of rule is "hypocrisy," "disinformation"
Congressional scholar Ornstein: Conservative criticism of self-executing rule is
"hypocrisy," "feigned indignation," and "disinformation." From a post by Norman Ornstein
on the American Enterprise Institute's blog, The Enterprise, titled, "Hypocrisy: A
Parliamentary Procedure":
Any veteran observer of Congress is used to the rampant hypocrisy over the use of parliamentary
procedures that shifts totally from one side to the other as a majority moves to minority status,
and vice versa. But I can't recall a level of feigned indignation nearly as great as what we are
seeing now from congressional Republicans and their acolytes at the Wall Street Journal, and on
blogs, talk radio, and cable news. It reached a ridiculous level of misinformation and
disinformation over the use of reconciliation, and now threatens to top that level over the
projected use of a self-executing rule by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the last Congress that
Republicans controlled, from 2005 to 2006, Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier used the
self-executing rule more than 35 times, and was no stranger to the concept of "deem and pass."
That strategy, then decried by the House Democrats who are now using it, and now being called
unconstitutional by WSJ editorialists, was defended by House Republicans in court (and upheld).
Dreier used it for a $40 billion deficit reduction package so that his fellow GOPers could avoid
an embarrassing vote on immigration.
[Today's delay in Betanews bringing you Internet Explorer 9 news was brought to you as a
public service by the Cable Modem: Your Best Friend When It's Crunch Time. Remember, where
there's smoke, there's a Comcast cable modem. Smell one today.]
It is perhaps the unlikeliest scenario any technologist could imagine as recently as two years
ago: Microsoft evangelizing developers to embrace Web standards by helping it to build its Web
browser. Although one of the first browsers to be distributed for free, Internet Explorer has
never been open source. Historically, it's always been ready when it's ready; its value
proposition has been to the consumer who prefers convenience over adaptability; and when the fact
that it was dirt slow was pointed out, the response typically was, the consumer isn't going to
care.
Today, the value proposition started to take shape for IE9, the browser that in an earlier era
didn't need a value proposition. Microsoft's strategy, which premiered today at MIX 10, was to
seize control of tomorrow's key talking point, HTML 5 compliance and compatibility -- to make
HTML 5 identifiable with Internet Explorer. In fact, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch's
greeting sentence to MIX 10 attendees this morning wasn't without the term "HTML 5."
"When we started looking deeply at HTML 5, we saw that it enabled a whole new class of
applications," was Hachamovitch's second sentence. "These applications will stress the browser
runtime and hardware, as today's sites just don't. We quickly realized that doing HTML 5 right --
our intent -- was more about designing around what HTML 5 applications will need, rather than a
particular set of features. Done right, HTML 5 applications will feel more like real apps than
Web pages, and our approach to HTML 5 is to make standard Web patterns that developers already
know and use, just run faster and better by taking advantage of PC hardware through Windows."
Developers have always known that Microsoft has always had the capability to leverage its mastery
of Windows APIs to build smoother applications. But as other Microsoft applications have weaned
themselves off of the old Win32 dependencies, such as rendering using the old GDI and GDI+
libraries, Internet Explorer has fallen further and further behind. In fact, you could make the
case that Silverlight gives Web developers opportunities to use the modern rendering libraries
that IE should be using now natively.
Soliciting general developers' help in improving IE (some will say for the first time), Microsoft
today began distributing the bare-bones chassis of the IE9 Web browser -- no frills, no features,
not even bookmarks. Just a rendering engine in a window. With Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and
now even Opera having made effective cases for the Web being "the platform," Microsoft
desperately needs to resume defining the platform before someone else ends up defining it
instead.
But one element of Microsoft's IE message remains the same even today: Those areas where the
competitors say they have the advantage, may not be all that important to end users. Case in
point: just-in-time compilation, the factor that has catapulted Mozilla Firefox and WebKit-based
browsers such as Safari and Chrome into today's speed race.
For example, Hachamovitch did cite the IE9 chassis' speed improvement on the widely accepted
SunSpider performance test, created by the originators of the open source WebKit engine. On
Microsoft's chart, Opera is the fastest performer on the SunSpider, followed by a Chrome 5 dev
build, a Chrome 4 stable build, and the latest Safari 4.0.5, released late last week by Apple
(apologies for the fuzzy screenshot of Microsoft's chart). So yes, IE9 comes in fifth, rather
than dead last. But the difference isn't that much of a difference, he said:
"It's interesting to note that the gap between IE9 and some of the other browsers to its right is
about an eye-blink -- it's about 300 ms. And it took 70 seconds to identify that 300 ms
difference."
When it comes to HTML 5, Microsoft wants to be perceived now as leading that standard.
But with respect to standards at large, the company's position remains unchanged from
last year: As long as Web standards are up in the air, compliance is a foggy term anyway. Today,
Hachamovitch implied that if the goal of standards bodies were the same as Microsoft's goal of
one language, the fog would be lifted:
"Developers want to use the same HTML, the same script, and the same markup across browsers.
That's the goal of standards and interoperability. No need for different code paths for different
browsers. That's a key goal for HTML 5. We love HTML 5 so much, we want it to actually work. In
IE9, it will. We want the same HTML, the same script, the same markup to just work across
browsers. So in IE9, we'll do for the rest of the Web platform what we did for CSS 2.1 in IE8.
Now, at the same time, we want to be responsible about the standards that are still emerging, the
standards that are in committee, and the standards that are partially implemented, often in
different ways across browsers. So to make decisions on this front, we started from data."
As an Acid3 test runs in the background (it's not done yet), Dean Hachamovitch demonstrates
how 'standards' support varies between even Firefox and Chrome (lower right) for the same
markup.
The IE9 team leader went on to describe an internal tool that measured the script activity on
7,000 active Web sites. The telemetry that it received showed, for instance, that the #1 method
in use was indexOf(), on 94% of sites measured. Number 17 on the list, used by 65% of sites, was
addEventListener, a method that's key to W3C's advanced event registration model, but not yet supported in IE8.
"Because we started from data, what developers like you really use was our starting point for
what to support." As a result, the IE9 chassis passed 578 out of 578 in the CSS3.info selectors
test, putting it now on a par with Firefox. That's important, Hachamovitch noted, because
developers want that one language -- one CSS, one HTML -- to work with for all browsers
across the board.
Meanwhile, the IE9
preview posts a 55% score on the Acid3
standards compliance test -- up from 20% for IE8, and 12% for IE7. The latest stable Firefox,
by comparison, scores 94% on this test; and Safari, Chrome, and Opera all score 100%. Could the
CSS3.info test be fair, and the Acid3 test unfair?
"Some people use Acid3 as shorthand for standards support. Acid3 is kind of interesting, it
exercises about a hundred details of a dozen different technologies. Some of them are under
construction, others less so," Hachamovitch said. He added a promise that Acid3 scores will
continue to improve "as we make more of the markup that developers actually use, work."
Next: Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU...Offloading processing to the background and to the GPU
The architectural development that helped Firefox and others vault from banana-like bars such as
those on the left of Microsoft's SunSpider chart, to peanut-like bars like those on the right,
was the implementation of just-in-time compilation (JIT) -- a concept first implemented in Java
and .NET, re-engineered for JavaScript. Today, Hachamovitch's tactic was to characterize JIT
compilers as "JIT-ters," complete with the wimpy sound and unstable connotations, similar to how
AMD characterized Intel's introduction of "hyperthreading" five years ago.
"In the beginning, the Web had lots and lots of HTML, and little pieces of script here and there.
And an interpreter was good enough for that. Over the years, different browsers have added
JIT-ters and different kinds of JIT-ters, many different kinds of JIT-ters. The problem with JIT
today is that so much time and energy goes into managing the time and scope that the JIT-ter
operates in. Users have to wait if the JIT-ter JITs too much, because the JIT-ter is sitting
there compiling the code, and you don't get to run it. And the user has to wait if the JIT-ter
JITs too little, because then the JIT-ter did a little bit, and the user is stuck running a
slower interpreter."
Something vaguely similar to the phenomenon Hachamovitch described is what we at Betanews have
seen in a recent round of high-level browser testing, on IE and other platforms, in preparation
for today's release of the IE9 tech preview. JavaScript interepreters, by today's design, are
single-threaded. Their ability to run JavaScript very fast depends, to a great extent, on the
relative complexity or simplicity of the instructions. JIT compilers produce much simpler machine
code, but only in situations where the JavaScript instructions are relatively simple to parse,
and not entangled in competing loops with unsightly timeouts. Long stretches of uniform code --
100,000, one million, even ten million iterations -- are like butter candy to browsers like
Chrome, smooth, silky, and easy to digest. But break up those instructions with interruptions
(for instance, updates of an on-screen timer at one-second intervals), and what once seemed like
butter now processes like rock-filled concrete. And sequences that Chrome could execute in under
30 seconds, all of a sudden, could take (by my estimate) days to execute if left
unattended. It's in situations like this where the JIT-ter is jittering, to borrow Dean's
phrasing. But about the only place you're going to find someone trying to do 10 million
iterations of an algorithm in succession, is at Betanews, where the guy doing the testing is on
his sixth cup of coffee and is jittery anyway.
Still, in anticipation of the types of advances Dean described today, we've been working to
create a new class of tests that would enable IE9 to shine if it truly does what Dean
says it does. Today, he described how IE9 moves the JavaScript interpreter to a background
process:
"Compiling in the background puts hardware to use here without having to re-code the site. And
the key here is to bring the best technology to the most important language you use, JavaScript."
HTML 5 in large
print, SVG in small print
Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), a W3C standard since 1999, has never been actively supported by
Internet Explorer even to this day. During today's demonstration of what he called, on the
surface, "HTML 5 applications," Microsoft's Dean Hachamovitch was joined onstage by Windows
Division President Steven Sinofsky to jointly demonstrate the IE9 technical preview's new
GPU-assisted graphics rendering support, with Sinofsky on the new browser and Hachamovitch
playing catch-up with Chrome.
Tucked away in the background of that clever little duel was the fact that IE9 was, for the first
time, directly and openly supporting SVG.
It's difficult to see from the screenshot of Microsoft's presentation above, but Sinofsky's IE9
browser at the upper left is rendering 100 simultaneous 3D extrapolations of 2D logos from
various browsers, at 64 frames per second. Hachamovitch's Google Chrome, meanwhile, is rendering
about 36 simultaneous logos at about 8 fps.
HTML 5 may have had little or nothing to do with this result. The real takeaway from this demo is
the following: For years, Web developers have relied on Adobe Flash for vector graphics that are
scalable, mainly since it's the only platform that can be plugged into all the major browsers and
that can run uniformly within all of them. The reason for that is IE's reluctance to embrace SVG.
Well, now that embracing SVG is necessary in order for Microsoft to demonstrate its graphics
processing prowess, this could change the ballgame for Web developers, who may soon have at their
disposal, at long last, a single open standard for animating Web sites.
Who better to celebrate that news with than the lovable Clippy character we all adored
from Office XP? In a demonstration not only of processing prowess but of standards compliance,
the two executives enlisted Clippy as the hero in a 3D game of Asteroids, where the targets were
multi-colored circles of translucent plastic. Rendered properly, Clippy could hold his own; but
stuck in Google Chrome, which doesn't appear to apply relative opacity properly, it looks like
Clippy may be in trouble. And it looks like he's writing a letter of distress.
Microsoft has posted links to the tests Sinofsky and Hachamovitch demonstrated on stage, on its
special site devoted to
the IE9 developers' preview. There you're also likely to find the stunning IE9 video
carousel, which HTML 5 has everything to do with. Here, four HD videos of underwater
scenes are rendered on translucent screens, that simultaneously travel along an invisible
carousel-like path. Of course, you may always have known this kind of rendering power existed in
your GPU, but you might never have seen your Web browser go this far to exploit that power.
The IE team has always been careful to say that the advances that matter are the ones that users
see and feel. Last year, the company advanced the argument that millisecond differences were
imperceptible. Which they are, unless they become fruitful and multiply -- and in a Web
applications environment, that will happen. The news from Las Vegas today is this: Microsoft is
building a Web applications platform. Finally.
Clown_BD will enable you to extract (on the fly) the Blu-ray main movie and language streams of
your choice, resulting in either transport streams (for Media Jukebox), an ISO image (for PowerDVD)
or even a burned BD disk (for standalone players). GUI for eac3to, tsmuxer and aften. Requires
JAVA.
This is quite literally what happens when you spend the entire week chatting on a
videogame-related newspaper blog...
"I'm too full of pizza to do anything constructive this afternoon, so I thought I may as well
submit it now." And with those gallant all-too descriptive words Office Pest emailed his Best Of
text to me on Friday afternoon, no doubt assuming that nothing of gargantuan importance
would hit the Chatterbox past 3pm on the last day of the working week.
Fortunately, plenty happened before hand, including Final Fantasy XIII, great game quotes and how
to become a meat-up regular. That sounds wrong, doesn't it?
Final Fantasy XIII – tempted?
On Monday morning, a beautiful weekend had just passed – clear blue skies and
lovely bright sunshine. Such a shame that FFXIII didn't arrive on most people's doormats (myself
included – hrumph), which meant we couldn't spend the whole sunny 48hr period
indoors, in the dark, sat in our underpants, crouched over a controller. Or would that just have
been me? [Regretably, I'm thinking, no - Keef]
Tuesday (release day) spawned a few early blogger reviews of FFXIII for those of us lucky enough
to get it a day early (w00t!). Plus points seem to be the shiny visuals, impressive cut scenes,
frenetic battle system (when you eventually get it). Negative points are the very slow pace (20
hours of linearity for a start) and typical angsty-teen and fluffy-girlie characters. It seems
like this one needs time to settle in, but has already done a good job in dividing the blog.
Heavy Spoilers (again)
Despite Heavy Rain only being out for just over a week, many people had already completed it and
the blog was resplendent once again with posts headed 'HEAVY RAIN SPOILERS'. This was frustrating
to say the least for those waiting for the Qauntic Dreams masterpiece to hit the bargain bins,
and it all got too much for Bigworv – "Can you go and talk about Heavy Rain
somewhere else. One of you f****rs will forget spoilers and ruin it for me."
Bargain Spotters
In between talk of Modern Warfare 2, football and mugs, PhilosopherK1ng managed to find a great
bargain on Valkyria Chronicles – only £19.95 from ShopTo! Chubster2010
later spotted another bargain buy – Chinatown Wars on PSP for £4.99 from
play.com. Sadly this one was quickly whacked back up to £24.99, but a couple of people did
get their orders sent out at £4.99. Good bargain spotting fellas – keep
it up!
What a bunch of mugs...
On Wednesday morning Be4ch expressed a desire to have his own Gamesblog mug, as his company now
requires people to bring their own mugs to work for... you know... 'green' reasons. He even
mocked up several and has linked them to a Wiki page that he also set up.
What a legend! He clearly has too much time on his hands (as do the rest of us I guess, else we
wouldn't be on the blog all day).
Great London Pubs and Worst Places to Live
See Wednesday's box for a full list of the best London pubs. As for the worst places to live,
honourable mentions go to Feltham, Canary Wharf, St Mary's (Southampton), Hull and Stockport.
Apparently PipSickness once found a dead lady on his bonnet when he lived in St Mary's, which led
us all to wonder whether he is in fact the famous Southampton Ripper.
Favourite game quotes
On Wednesday we got to discussing the best gaming quotes of all time, including such beauts as
"You were nearly a Jill sandwich!" from Resident Evil (actually, it was
"almost, a Jill sandwich" - Keef), the synthesized voice that said "Good
luck!" as you exited the tunnel in Starwing, the garbled voice that says "Treasure Island Dizzy!"
in the game with the same name and the all-time classics "Rise from your grave!" and "Welcome to
your doom!" from Altered Beast. (I would add "Another visitor, stay a while, stay FOREVER",
"Welcome to the stage of history" and "Game over, yeah!" though the latter is technically a song
lyric - Keef)
Get bitten by the bug...or dog
On Thursday our resident abstainer timthemonkey regaled us with his story of the night prior:
"Gaming – None, as I went for a nice jog in the evening sunshine in an effort
to get slighter fitter before Cricket season starts. This, however, turned out to be a poor plan
as it lead to me getting savagely bitten by a dog on the back of the calf. 12 stitches and a
three hour wait in A&E and the fitness kick had lost its appeal. Looked at it this morning
and the surrounding area has gone a wonderful shade of purple as well. Feet up tonight!"
Cue jokes over purple, swollen limbs. There was of course plenty of advice on how to sue the
owner. Or take revenge on the dog.
Let's meat up...
On Thursday morning, as people trickled onto the blog, there were some confessions of feeling
rather ropey after the previous night's blog meat up. Somebody chundered but nobody seemed to
want to 'fess up to it. Worryingly, these nights seem to be becoming a regular occurrence. What
have I done?!
If you want to join up to one of the London-based blog meat ups – generally a
night to sit, drink and chat games (and war dollies if you want) – speak to
resident organiser CunningStunt.
Friday Ranting – adverts
The usual Friday vitriol was reserved for the terrible adverts we see on TV nowadays. Here are
some examples:
"Moonpig. Think it's the only way I can get a card to my mother before Sunday. However, their
constant looping of the same annoying advert for years has built up my lava pit of hatred for
them." SuperSmashIn voices his wrath at the personalised greetings card industry
"Adverts. Go compare, We buy any car/gold, Moonpig - take a back seat. Has anyone seen the new
Dove for men advert? Good. F*****g. Lord." Uncle3en lets loose
"I've always reserved a special hatred for the poorly dubbed Glade adverts. If your products that
good, why haven't you shelled out the money for decent advertising instead of getting the
receptionist to speak over the smug German woman?" Timthemonkey goes ape (see what I did there...?)
"Those Ray Winstone Radio Adverts for Volkswagen Veeeeaaaaans. '20 poun' a mumf' 'Vowkswagin
Transpowtah.' Get out." KayJayM quotes an advert I've never seen, but sounds very annoying.
This went on for some time and eventually evolved into hatred of Sunday morning show 'Something
for the Weekend'. The language was such that it cannot be repeated here. (Thank goodness, my
delete finger is getting tired - keef)
Quotes of the week
"Cashback - Went to the cashpoint at lunchtime and got out twenty quid, and it gave me four
fivers! Incredible scenes. Had to check I wasn't in 1987 by mistake." An exciting afternoon for Limni.
"@Whoever mentioned it was Chuck Norris' Birthday. He shares his birthday with Osama Bin Laden.
Coincidence or something more sinister...?" Robotron2000 goes all 'conspiracy theory' on us.
"Has Cunning died? Or is he still going up and down the Northern Line?" Henrypootle's worried concern after Wednesday night's meat up.
Also discussed
Games: Battlefield Bad Company 2, Heavy Rain, Final Fantasy XIII,
Films & TV: Avatar, Hurt Locker, District 9
Welcome to: Albatri, CobraOB
Pour les besoins du boulot, je me suis récemment plongé dans les différents
logiciels de gestion de projets. J'en avais sorti quelques uns du lot en fonction de
critères qui nous sont propres, à savoir : Redmine, DotProject, Collabtive,
...
Une seconde, puis une troisième sélection ont laissé en lice Redmine et
DotProject.
DotProject - en dehors de son interface pour le moins vieillotte - avait semblé
répondre à nos attentes, mais voilà : la dernière version
stable n'est pas compatible PHP 5.3, et la branche 2.0 du logiciel ne semble plus évoluer
au profit de la future version 3 qui sera basée sur Zend Framework. Cette
ré-écriture n'en est qu'à son tout début. Pas très engageant
que tout cela...
Redmine de son côté semble bénéficier d'un développement
très régulier, et d'une communauté relativement importante et vivante. Un
hic : c'est du ruby-on-rails ; et je ne connais pas le moins du monde
cette technologie.
Autre «Â souci » à prendre en considération, le
serveur sur lequel devra tourner cette application est sous CentOS et non sous
Fedora ; je vais y revenir sous peu...
Donc, je me lance, je récupère une version 0.8 de Redmine que j'essaie d'installer
sur mon PC du boulot, en Fedora 12. Pas trop de problèmes à noter, j'ai
balbutié un peu et me suis complètement cassé les dents lorsque j'ai voulu
brancher apache sur l'installation...
Entre temps, je découvre qu'une demande de revue a été faite sur le Bugzilla pour
redmine ! Youpi En y
regardant de plus près, la page des pré-requis de
Redmine m'apprend que la version de Rails de Fedora 12 n'est pas suffisante
(2.3.4)Â ; de même que la version de Rack (1.0.0). Je vérifie sous Fedora
13, on a un Rails en 2.3.5 et un Rack en 1.1.0. Ça devrait aller.
Oui, mais... ça devrait La version
de Rack requise est la version 1.0.1, strictement. Ni la version 1.0.0, ni la version 1.1.0 ne
fonctionnent ! En local et à des fins de tests, il est toujours possible
d'installer la bonne version du composant avec la commande :
$ gem install rack -v 1.0.1
Il est bien entendu hors de question que je lance une telle commande avec un utilisateur
privilégié, la bonne version de rack reste donc installée sur un compte
utilisateur local ; du coup, l'intégration dans apache ne fonctionne pas (ben
oui, la version système de rack n'est pas la bonne, suivez un peu ). Un petit
coup d'oeil sur ma CentOS m'apprend que de ce côté je ne dispose pas non plus de la
bonne version de Ruby, etc. Y'a plus qu'à ; comme dirait l'autre.
Dans un premier temps, je crée un utilisateur dédié à ce
service :
# useradd -r -m redmine
Ensuite, je récupère la dernière version du trunk de Redmine
(récupérer cette version n'est pas une obligation, bien loin de
là ; mais l'intégration il y a quelques jours de la notion de
sous-tâches directement dans Redmine m'intéressait au plus haut point :-p ).
$ svn co http://redmine.rubyforge.org/svn/trunk ./redmine
Voyons à installer les versions de Ruby et consorts dont nous avons besoin. J'ai
re-compilé un certain nombre de paquets sur mon dépôt personnel EL5 (en
version 64bits uniquement) à cet effet :
ruby
rubygems
rubygem-actionmailer
rubygem-actionpack
rubygem-activerecord
rubygem-activeresource
rubygem-activesupport
rubygem-fcgi
rubygem-mocha
rubygem-rack
rubygem-rails
rubygem-sqlite3-ruby
ruby-mysql
ruby-RMagick
ImageMagick-6.5.8.10
Pour bénéficier de ces versions, vous pouvez soit les récupérer sur
mon dépôt à l'adresse http://rpms.ulysses.fr/el5/x86_64/Â ; soit
installer mon dépôt :
Pour ensuite installer les programmes (ruby-RMagick n'est requis que pour l'export PNG des
diagrammes de Gantt. Vous pouvez l'omettre si cette fonctionnalité ne vous est pas utile
)Â :
/! ATTENTION /! Ce dépôt personnel est intrusif et remplace des paquets de
base de CentOS. Ne l'activez pas par défaut, ou alors à vos risques et
périls.
Nous voilà parés ; tous les composants logiciels sont présents,
nous pouvons procéder à l'installation. Dans un premier temps, créons notre
base MySQL (PostgreSQL est également supporté, référez-vous à
la documentation de Redmine pour connaître la procédure à
suivre)Â :
$ mysql -u root -p mysql> create database redmine character set utf8; mysql> create user
'redmine'@'localhost' identified by 'my_password'; mysql> grant all privileges on redmine.* to
'redmine'@'localhost'; mysql> flush privileges;
Depuis le dossier où vous avez stocké votre Redmine (/var/www/redmine dans mon
cas), copiez le fichier config/database.yml.example vers config/database.yml puis
éditez-le de la sorte :
Les variables sont bien entendu à renseigner en fonction des choix que vous avez faits.
Notez l'ajout de l'entrée socket sans laquelle je m'étais heurté
à de jolies erreurs (il semblerait que ce soit un bogue d'un des composants ruby).
Redmine permet l'utilisation de diverses instances (production, développement, ...). Vous
devrez donc dupliquer les informations relatives à la base dans les différentes
instances que vous souhaitez utiliser. Une fois de plus, référez-vous à la
documentation de Redmine pour en savoir plus à ce sujet.
Puisque j'ai utilisé une version SVN ultérieure à la révision
3055 ; j'ai eu à lancer la commande :
$ rake generate_session_store
Initialisons ensuite la base de données, et profitons-en pour y placer quelques
données par défaut :
$ RAILS_ENV=production rake db:migrate (in /var/www/redmine) == Setup: migrating
========================================================== -- create_table("attachments",
{:force=>true}) -> 0.0812s [...] $ RAILS_ENV=production rake redmine:load_default_data (in
/var/www/redmine) Select language: bg, bs, ca, cs, da, de, el, en, es, eu, fi, fr, gl, he, hr, hu,
id, it, ja, ko, lt, nl, no, pl, pt, pt-BR, ro, ru, sk, sl, sr, sv, th, tr, uk, vi, zh, zh-TW [en]
fr ==================================== Default configuration data loaded.
Fort bien ! Nous avons désormais une installation de Redmine fonctionnelle
Certains répertoires doivent être accessibles en écriture, mais le checkout
svn ayant été fait avec l'utilisateur redmine qui se chargera de lancer le
serveur de tests, nous n'avons pas à nous en préoccuper... Lançons donc ce
fameux serveur :
$ ruby script/server webrick -e production => Booting WEBrick => Rails 2.3.5 application
starting on http://0.0.0.0:3000 => Call with -d to detach => Ctrl-C to shutdown server
[2010-03-16 20:15:58] INFO WEBrick 1.3.1 [2010-03-16 20:15:58] INFO ruby 1.8.6 (2010-01-11)
[x86_64-linux] [2010-03-16 20:15:58] INFO WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=14469 port=3000
Et voilà ; en vous connectant à http://monhote:3000 vous
accéderez à votre instance Redmine. admin est le login et le mot de passe
par défaut. Vous aurez peut-être à ouvrir le port 3000 pour la durée
de ce test, ne l'oubliez pas
Vient ensuite la mise en ligne de l'application... À des fins de tests, je me suis
risqué à essayer une technique très peu orthodoxe depuis apache... Mais qui
n'a pas fonctionné comme escompté. Voici le fichier de configuration que j'avais
utilisé (en substance)Â :
Un peu barbare, certes, mais c'était pour tester «Â rapidement ».
Cette configuration a d'ailleurs fonctionné... Sur certains postes Sur d'autres,
j'avais la page de login correcte ; et une fois loggué ; plus de
CSS ni de JS. Pas top donc. J'ai décidé de pousser le test plus loin, et d'utiliser
le mod_fcgid pour accéder à cette application. Il faudra pour ce faire
installer les composants qui vont bien :
N'oubliez pas de spécifier ensuite quelle instance de Redmine devra être
démarrée (production, development, ...). Pour ce faire, éditez le fichier
config/environment.rb puis décommentez (et éditez au besoin) la ligne :
ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'
Pour vérifier que ça ne va pas vous claquer de suite entre les doigts, essayez
simplement de lancer le dispatch.fcgi en ligne de commande (vous pouvez ignorer sereinement les
erreurs sur les accès aux fichiers de log pour l'heure)Â :
$ /var/www/redmine/public/dispatch.fcgi
Enfin, une fois que tout est OK, relancez votre serveur apache :
# service httpd restart
Et admirez le résultat
Il m'est arrivé, en fonction des configurations, que ça ne fonctionne pas comme
escompté... Dans ce cas, l'une des premières choses à faire, est de
commenter les ifModule (et leur contenu, évidemment) pour les mod_cgimod_fastcgi ; ça ma «Â sauvé la
vie »
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70% of users on the web do not speak English. Considering how many web sites and services
are done entirely in English, obviously, this is a problem. 
Google just 
Comedian Zach
Galifianakis’s edgy celebrity interview web show 
Meanwhile, the IE9
preview posts a 55% score on 
HTML 5 in large
print, SVG in small print
En y
regardant de plus près, la page des 
La version
de Rack requise est la version 1.0.1, strictement. Ni la version 1.0.0, ni la version 1.1.0 ne
fonctionnent ! En local et à des fins de tests, il est toujours possible
d'installer la bonne version du composant avec la commande :
). Un petit
coup d'oeil sur ma CentOS m'apprend que de ce côté je ne dispose pas non plus de la
bonne version de Ruby, etc. Y'a plus qu'à ; comme dirait l'autre.
)Â :
Sur d'autres,
j'avais la page de login correcte ; et une fois loggué ; plus de
CSS ni de JS. Pas top donc. J'ai décidé de pousser le test plus loin, et d'utiliser
le mod_fcgid pour accéder à cette application. Il faudra pour ce faire
installer les composants qui vont bien :
Billet original de 
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