OneAndOneIs2

Somebody called Steve Barnes has written a piece for Times Union about an American politician trying to introduce a bill to completely ban all salt in restaurant cooking.

Right from the first couple of paragraphs, you're left in no doubt that this bill is disliked by Mr Barnes:

A new bill in the state Assembly would ruin restaurant food and baked goods as we know them.

In a deeply misguided gesture that is also an abuse of the legislative process, a New York City Assemblyman is pushing a nanny-state bill

Don't hold back there, Steve, tell us what you REALLY think! :o) (There's also a picture of a dunce cap in the main body of the text)

Don't get me wrong, I completely agree with him: the bill is insane and the dangers of salt - an absolutely vital substance we can't live without - are hugely overstated, mainly by the writers of faddy diet books.

But in a world that usually insists on at least some pretence of balanced, unbiased journalism, I found this to be a very unusual piece: Well-researched and completely biased. Those two don't often go together.

I'm impressed :o)

Maybe it's because the first language I could sit down and program in was C.. but I've generally found it phenominally easy to get stuff done in PHP.

So why, in discussions on sites like Slashdot, do I see so many people sneering at it? Elitism? (or should that be l337ism?) Familiarity breeds contempt? What's the big problem?

I recently began a determined effort to get into , an open-source content management system. I've been impressed with what I've seen so far - so much so that I'm considering sitting down and working through the necessary database headache that would be incurred in transferring this whole blog across to Drupal.

But that's some way off yet. In the meantime, I've got pages and pages of notes I've been making as I work through books, articles, online resources, and just churning through the code itself.

I can either leave it in my own personal shorthand, which does the job as a one-stop at-a-glance resource for my ever-failing memory. But if there's any interest, I'll consider transcribing the notes across into blog posts in a slightly more coherent form than my existing scribbles.

Anyone..?

So following my last post on how Firefox has been annoying me by being buggy lately, I came across something I didn't know about FF version 3 that I thought was worth commenting on.

Because of a misbehaving extension, Tina lost all her bookmarks. In the hopes of restoring them, I took a look at her profile, and didn't see the expected plain-text bookmarks file. But I *did* discover a directory called "bookmarksbackup"

It turns out that FF saves backups of all bookmarks on a daily basis. About a week's worth. So you can always go into the bookmarks manager and restore your bookmarks from yesterday, or the day before, or the day before that..

And that was handy, and something worth knowing, and I was quite impressed, since that never used to be a feature - if you lost your bookmarks, you lost your bookmarks.

But what I found even *more* noteworthy was that, when I was looking for where Firefox stores bookmarks now, I found that it was stored in a file named places.sqlite

Yep.. as of version 3, they stopped using a plain-text file for bookmarks, and shunted them into a database instead. And not just bookmarks: Browser history, favicons, and even input history - when you type something into the awesomebar, it makes note of it for future use.

You might think it's a bit pointless, putting bookmarks into a database - who has THAT many bookmarks?? And I'd tend to agree if that were all they'd done.

But putting HISTORY into a database.. that I can understand. I keep quite a long history (90 days) and I visit quite a lot of websites. So there's a *lot* of data. And when you think about it, your browser needs to be able to check through your history *every time* it loads a web page: Many pages render links differently depending on whether or not you've visited them.

So a history database makes perfect sense: It can be big enough to justify it, and it needs to be FAST for a page to be loaded and displayed quickly.

And if you've got a database anyway, you might as well shunt as much stuff as you can into it. Like bookmarks.

Like so many things, this is one of those features that's completely invisible to the end user: I'm on version 3.5.7 and I only just discovered that FF has been using a database for history & bookmarks since 3.0.0 today.

But the combination of FF keeping bookmark backups; and the fact that it uses a database instead of plain text for all this stuff; I was impressed by. It's two very good ways of doing things, that probably took a lot of work on Mozilla's part and yet would have gone completely unnoticed by 99% of their users. So kudos to them for that. I'm impressed.

No, but this is an answer!

:o)

Anyway. I saw this question on the NYtimes: Why is it that Microsoft "no longer brings us the future"?

The writer, being an ex-microsofty, has some interesting insights into some of the problems MS has to deal with - internal sabotage being one that, I suspect, suprises nobody.

But it puzzles me, because an an ex-MS employee, I'd expect him to know their past product line pretty well. So can somebody tell me: When did MS ever "bring us the future"?

I'm serious. My basic view of MS is that their general strategy is to see what the rest of the world does, and then copy it & try to make it better. Their most successful software is Windows, Office, and IE. But they didn't invent the GUI, the PC desktop, the word processor, the spreadsheet, the browser..

So, seriously, what products is this guy talking about when he talks about MS being the innovators? I'd like to know.

Anyone?