Wheeee.... WEEE?

Art installation draws attention to consumer waste. This has just been installed on the South Bank, London. My view - artistic, and draws the attention nicely to the problem. Top marks to those who thought this one up.

Google Maps - UK seems to be coming along

Looks like Google is starting to roll out UK maps. Go to the Google Maps page, and search for 'London, W1' (or similar). It also works with full UK postcodes.

Bugs? In Firefox - no, surely not!

Just reading Bill Thompson's recent posting for the Radio show 'Go Digital'. He quotes the company Secunia - who said:

The Firefox open source browser is full of bugs, some of which are rather serious...

In fact the little red button that tells you a "critical" update is available appears almost weekly, sending users off to the website to get the new version and fix yet another bug or security hole.

Which I have a problem with. Yes, Firefox has bugs (doesn't everything). Yes, the update process leaves a lot to be desired. But No - the little red button has only appeared on my machine (Mac OS X) a couple of times with reference to an update to the actual Firefox engine... excluding any updates to extensions.

I've got a feeling, Bill, that this is somewhat unbalanced for Secunia to say this (and I understand that Bill was trying to be ironic) - lets face it, Microsoft offers updates to the Windows kernel/Outlook Express/Office (which usually has a knock on effect to IE) several times a month.

I also think that the audience for Firefox usually are experienced enough not to click on dodgy phising schemes, or such like. So once more people start using Firefox, no doubt more problems will appear. Also - let's not forget that Firefox is built on Mozilla... and Mozilla came from Netscape... and many ex-Netscape employees work on the codebase - so, I guess what I'm trying to say is that Firefox's pedigree is a good one considering that Netscape invented many of the underlying services that even IE leverages.

In terms of the update procedure - yeah, it would be good to provide some sort of patching software to update code incrementally (a la Microsoft's installer service that runs under the Update service). But then it would have to work across all the platforms that Firefox works on - not exactly easy perhaps. Right now, I can live with it - that's why you have a profile directory that is different. Currently when a new Firefox comes out - all I do on my Mac is open the image and drop the new Firefox file on top of my old one. Simple as that. Ah... no DLL hell!

More about Bill's article on his blog.

[Edit: minor rewording based on comments - 2005-04-25 20:49 GMT]

Bailout for ex-employees at Rover?

Something that has really wound me up, and I know it sounds kinda harsh - so please don't hate me for it. Why is it that a standard redundancy situation turned into a political spin crisis?
I'm talking, of course, about the recent MG Rover group trip-and-fall. Having followed the news reporting, I found it unbelievable that the spin placed on the situation by the Media and the Politicians turned it into 'saving jobs'. Why?
If a company has to do it, then they have to do it. There may be an enquiry about the MG Rover group's directors and accountants for letting the company trade whilst possibly insolvent. I know it's harsh but by the sounds of it the 500 staff who's jobs were on the line probably had a decent chance of being re-hired elsewhere - apparently they are highly trained in engineering-style manufacturing lines.
Anyway, my biggest problem was why did the government promote public money to pay for the wages for a week (and I'm sure this wasn't the only thing they did)? I'm sorry - but why should 500 staff of a company be supported like that. Is it to avoid the fact that 500 start claiming for DSS benefits? Really? I would suggest that the cost of providing benefits might actually be less than their salaries - but since we don't know how much that came to exactly, we'll never know.
Plenty of people are made redundent but I don't see the government running to help them every day. Actually - Littlewoods has just made this annoucement and over 3,000 staff will be made redundent across the UK - go on, Mr. Governement... go spend more public money.
Remember the Dot Com crash - how many people went redundent during that. Then there's the Miner's strike... anyway. I'll stop now. There are plenty of bad situations... but when it happens around the General Election people start spinning it.
Also, not that I'm a business analyst, but since it's the turn of the financial year (April 5th) - isn't there more companies that make dramatic decisions (like Littlewoods, for example) around this time? Perhaps the Election should be held in Autumn instead to avoid this?

Google Maps (US Only)

Another BBC News article that is basically a press release, at least the writer hasn't really looked around at the other Map / Aerial Photography crossover websites. Like the UK's Multimap (which is my favourite mapping tool for UK maps) - take a look at the Albert Hall in London and notice that there is an overlay map as you move your mouse over the photography - something that Google Maps doesn't [currently] do. Multimap released this version of their website a couple years ago (I think) - why the BBC's coverage of Google Maps makes no mention of it I don't know... one can only assume that it was just a press release.

MetaBlog: Microsoft's IEBlog starts to talk about the future of Internet Explorer

I've been reading Microsoft's IEBlog off and on, yes... I admit it. I suppose it's supposed to be the Microsoft Developer's editorial newsletter-style blog, targeted at Web Developers and such like.

Around the start of March 2005, a new posting about possible improvements to the standards support of IE6 began.

The poster, a developer at Microsoft within the IE team, seeks input about possible improvements from the customers (web developers, etc). What ensues is interesting to read but, in general, is complaints about 'why have you done nothing since IE3.0' and similar comments.

Let's hope that Microsoft listens, although it is a little late (as I mentioned before in my Blog regarding Internet Explorer 7 and why Firefox is popular.)

'Geek speak' - more acceptable

I see today that 'Geek speak' is being criticised. I'm not sure that's fair - why not criticise any other non-familiar register. The definition of a register is: any of the varieties of a language that a speaker uses in a particular social context. Hence 'Geek speak'... and further a Geek isn't necessarily related with the innards of the computing community - a Geek. (In fact there is quite an interesting discussion about what a Geek is here.) You could be a Language Geek, talking of only didactic synchronicities or something.
What I say is - learn the language, look up the meanings of things. Don't complain about your lack of understanding.