Journal entries in the "Computing" category
Legal Implications of Internet Filtering
Five years, eleven months and some 5 days or so after my very first lecture on law, I have handed in my final contribution to my six years of legal studies. As it is a work of some importance, both academically and personally, I publish it here.
Here’s the non-legal intro to show you what it’s all about. Or you can omit reading it here, and read it in the document itself: Legal Implications of Internet Filtering.
Aquaffic & “iTunes 8 mod” updated for iTunes 9.2.1
The iTunesque packages of Aquaffic and the “iTunes 8 mod” by Josh Janusch have been updated to work with iTunes 9.2.1 (at least, that’s the theory).
If you use Aquaffic or Josh’s mod, download the updates (and let me know if they work for you) on the iTunesque page.
Tutorial: Multi-page, multi-column web pages
At some point in the redesign process of Arpia.be, I started to consider the idea of a “book-like” feel, where the content would be presented in two columns, and users could flip to the next page of content seamlessly.
The way I see it, this is something that has so far only been done using Flash, so it may be of interest to web designers & developers to see how they can achieve this without Flash, in a cross-browser compatible manner.
Arpia.be design refresh
As 2010 kicks off, it is time for me to unveil a new website design on which I have been working for a few months. It was a long process, involving several radically different ideas and long hours getting it all to work (especially on Internet Explorer), but here we are, finally.
I recommend trying things out, to find the hidden easter eggs and so on, to get used to the new functionality.
[Tested in Firefox 2-3, Safari 4, Google Chrome 4, Opera 9-10, Internet Explorer 7-8]
But to truly understand the design, I think a more extensive portrayal of the design process is in order.
Big cats and themes
As of yesterday (Thursday) evening, my MacBook runs Snow Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. I’m very pleased of the functionality changes, even though I was saddened to see that the user interface hasn’t changed one bit.
There had been rumours of the “Marble” interface, but nothing (I repeat: nothing) has changed visually as regards the general interface (bar a few luminosity adjustments and the changes required by the new functionality). Icons, scrollbars, list headers, the “traffic lights”, …, everything with which Mac OS X themes generally deal, it’s all unchanged.
Except that Apple decided to change a couple of things in the structure of its theme files, which means that a) we can’t simply copy our theme files from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and b) we haven’t a clue how to decode one of the core UI files, “SArtFile.bin”. Hopefully there will be a decoder soon.
In the meantime, I’ll be using my external drive every now and again to boot under Leopard, because the only theming tool we can use (Themepark 4) works only under Leopard.
If you are an iTunesque user, expect a bunch of new packs for Snow Leopard in the coming days/weeks.
Edit: many iTunesque packages are now available. See the iTunesque page for more details.
Free speech on the internet
In my 14 effective days of internship so far in a large law firm, i.e. at the 2/3rds of the internship, I have mainly worked on one single, important case involving freedom of speech on the internet. Though there were times during my research when I felt despair for lack of tangible results (basically, few people seem to tackle the subject in a manner of interest to us in the case), the subject was truly interesting, and the occasional golden find encouraged me to keep going.
This research, mainly focussed on internet liability (legal responsibility, for non-lawyers), was a true eye-opener, because I had never thought of the internet from that angle: how free is speech on the internet?
Website errors hopefully over
Over the past few months, the quality of the hosting provided by my current provider, OVH (the largest hosting provider in France, apparently), has steadily decreased. I’ve seen an increase in database connection errors, in “HTTP 500 – Internal Server Error” messages, and so on.
It had become bad to the point where in IE6 and Firefox, I seemed to systematically get an error when trying to access the ARPIA2 and iTunesque pages. Why on earth they worked fine in Safari and Opera, I do not know.
Anyway, as I saw the quality of OVH’s service decrease, I entered into contact with ICDSoft, a company with servers in Germany, the USA and Hong Kong, and whose reputation seems excellent.
In a moment of frustration, I finally decided to make the move. Hopefully all problems should be over. Let me know if you experience anything weird!
Edit: sometimes I feel so stupid. I forgot to check all caching systems. *hits himself on the head*
A new webboard design: critique?
Now that I have defended my Master Thesis, I “only” have three exams to prepare (one of which is basically a 15-page paper). As such, the Master Thesis was by far the largest work to be done for university, and I therefore took a small break from working.
That break turned out to be spent on another kind of work, web design. In July, I will normally become the administrator for our Law Faculty student webboard & website, and I grew somewhat tired of the Cobalt theme for phpBB2, which is currently used.
I therefore got to work on another design, something fresh.
The result is a working board on www.arpia.be/droides/, only a test so far. The board is in French, but I’m looking for feedback on the general design, which shouldn’t require a great deal of linguistic skills. There’s a test user, “Test”, with the password set as “testpass”.
Anything that desperately needs changing? Suggestions? …?
There are two working themes, and you can switch between them in the footer (“Droïdes – Droïdes2″). Just click, and a whole new layout appears.
Edit: updated.
Having fun with maps
The subject of my “Mémoire”, the 60-page “Master Thesis” I have to write for university, is linked to European law, and I therefore use the europa.eu portal a lot (read: the EU institution websites and EUR-Lex were by far the websites I visited the most these past weeks).
The problem is, they all use text to get users to select their language. If it were a bilingual website, it would be easy. But there are 23 official languages in the EU, and so it takes time to figure out which string of text is “yours”.
The worst front page, in my opinion, is the Council’s homepage, which I find impossible to use under five seconds.
I therefore decided to try (during a small break) my hand at another system: maps.
The billionth download in the App Store
If you keep up with Apple-related news, you’re bound to know that Apple is approaching 1 billion downloads at the App Store, and will be giving 13.000 USD worth of gifts to whomever either downloads the billionth app, or sends a form right after the 999.999.999th app has been downloaded.
So, the question is: when will that be?
Turns out the counter can help us have a certain strategy.