lots of people say "gosh it's a long time since i last posted" - like confessionals, "bless me father it has been xxx years since my last blog..." but no, it just _feels_ like a long time...

what the heck's happened...

moved

we're moved. stanwell. just south of heathrow (out of flight path) and east of staines. both are 15 minutes by bus. joined westminster housing coop. building's scheduled for demolition in december, but because there are 60 families in 4 blocks of flats, the chances of that happening are... fairly remote.

no carpets, no cooker. actually - no water for 36 hours until we found the tap. i bought 8 1-gallon bottles of water. destroyed a morrison's heavy-duty bag by trying to attach it to one of my two backpacks: it dragged against the wheel of my bicycle. why i even tried to carry 36 kg of water on a bicycle is beyond me - in the end i got off and walked.

3G USB HSDPA on linux</a>

the 3G usb modem is working out well, under linux. i keep forgetting to switch it off. i documented the process of setting up a huawei K3565 with HSDPA under linux.

Saving money and bandwidth using HTTP proxies

i have _six_ levels of HTTP proxies. squid, privoxy, ziproxy and rproxy are chained and installed on my server; rproxy and polipo are chained on my laptop. rproxy can't cope with AJAX responses of zero size (assert data > 0 keeps appearing on stderr...) so you have to use "older" versions of gmail.com, and occasionally, google searches result in a "BIN" download but work the second time.

... but i don't care! i'm looking also to block all swf and java files. i did mess up a bit at one point: i wondered why i was getting popups and adverts (i'm used to running privoxy on my laptop) but i'd messed up the chains a bit and should have installed privoxy on the server _anyway_... duh.

rproxy 0.5.7 works surprisingly well for an abandoned (due to patents) project.

webkit and the glib / gobject bindings

ahh, my favourite project. apple decided to lay down the law. without explanation, without discussion, without consultation, they have "decided" that language bindings shall conform to W3C standards. unfortunately, strict compliance with W3C standards makes it difficult or impossible to use language bindings.

what's especially hypocritical is that the javascript bindings in webkit get "special treatment", because of the large number of users who would otherwise complain.

i've requested seven times that evidence showing that all other major web browser engines provide language bindings on an equal footing with javascript: no exceptions are made just because one language is javascript. so, all language bindings have "toString" across all objects; HTMLAppletElement and HTMLEmbedElement have width and height as strings which can, contrary to the W3C specification, accept "1px" which is converted to numeric 1.

on this latter, the W3C specification specifically states that width and height on <embed> elements MUST be a long integer: unfortunately, so many people wrote piss-poor javascript specifying width="100px" that every single browser engine - including webkit itself - accepts "px" and does some conversion.

now - that's all fine, right up until the point where people start writing browser apps that can both be compiled to javascript (from e.g. python) or can be run as native python (by e.g. using python bindings to webkit DOM). a developer writes an app that gets compiled to javascript, it uses javascript DOM manipulation to create an "embed" node, adds a property element['width'] = '100px' all is fine. then they try to run the same app, native under webkit and FUCK it doesn't work.

why? because FUCKING apple dictates that from language bindings other than javascript, it MUST be how THEY say it is, and THEY say that an embed node's width property MUST be an integer, because the W3C spec said so, _despite_ having specific, realistic exceptions to cater for real-world usage (in javascript).

seven requests for a review of the evidence presented, and total silence. i'm thinking of ways to escalate this so that they are forced to review the evidence.

long post. i'll leave it at that.