Recent blog entries for ssp

Self-signed certificates

Johnathan Nightingale explains why Firefox makes you jump through a series of annoying hoops before it will show you a self-signed web page. As he points out, the jump-through-hoops design is actually old. It is only the number of hoops that has changed in Firefox 3.

The main problem with this design is well known: People are trained to just do whatever it takes to get the web page to display. When they finally do get a malicious page, they do what they always do, which then results in a completely normal-looking bank page where they type in their password as usual.

Here is a better idea:

Show the page without asking questions, but draw it with a weird red glow and a yellow warning. If the user actually enters any kind of information, then show a speech bubble saying that the information could be intercepted. Like this:

If the user then goes ahead and submits the information, show a final warning, then send it.

The big benefits:

Users get to see the page without being grilled

This means they are not trained to override the certificate because that won't usually be necessary to do what they want.

The page looks wrong

If a familiar bank page is suddenly annotated with yellow warning bars and red speech bubbles, that will get people's attention. Much more so than having to first click OK to a gobbledigook question. Imagine that: Web security that actually has a chance of working ...

Technical users are not frustrated

Because the details window would have an override button for people who have to use a self-signed web page on a regular basis.

The weird thing about the decadence discussion is all the talk about how we made this "awesome desktop" which is like totally awesome and the only reason nobody uses it that they are just happy enough with Windows or OS X.

The problem with that is that GNOME is not awesome; it is in fact a pile of junk where basic stuff DOES NOT WORK. It is not not even competitive with Windows 95, let alone Windows XP or OS X.

Maybe that has something to do with why nobody cares.

Power Information

The AC Power has been unplugged. The system is now using battery power. To celebrate, let's frantically seek the harddisk for several seconds.

"o hai i made u a notafication bubble"

An extremely interesting blog about algorithms, data structures, parallel programming etc.

Sysprof 1.0.8 is out with a fix for an embarrassing bug that caused panics and lockups on preemptive kernels.

Randall Hyde writes about The Fallacy of Premature Optimization and how Tony Hoare's original quote is widely misunderstood.

Found via Rico Mariani's blog

Wobble Me Harder
Ever since Kristian introduced them in Luminocity, Wobbly Windows have been an indispensable part of the modern composited desktop. Now they are also available in Metacity/AIGLX, the compositing manager for the adult in you:

This is how they work:

The Composite and Damage extensions don't work all that well.

Make it Boring

Vincent, it's true that users don't get passionate about GNOME. But they also don't get passionate about Windows, even though you can get boatloads of crack for it. Would users get more passionate about Windows if it shipped with a little pig that would sit in corner of the panel and sometimes make funny sounds? Would it be really cool if the pig was called Henry and was actually some internal joke from Microsoft?

Sorry, but users don't give a flying fuck. Only people who already believe that "GNOME is teh best desktop environment on the planet" (and actually understand what the that sentence means) will think that Wanda is cute. It's not that I think the fish is really harmful. It's an easteregg and that's fine -- just don't kid yourself and think that it's building any passion or loyalty in (real) users, because it isn't.

The way to get loyal users is to make GNOME reliable, useful and fast, write more applications like Evince, fix the session manager, somehow convince distributions that they should scrap Firefox and ship Epiphany instead, get rid of retarded "This application can't be automatically restarted" dialogs, make GNOME office competitive, first with OpenOffice, then with MS Office, and fix all the annoying bugs.

Behdad, what is most likely going on is that your X server is running software fallbacks to draw the antialiased glyphs.

To draw one pixel of an antialiased glyph, the X server has to (a) read the existing pixel, (b) blend that pixel with the alpha value for the glyph pixel, then (c) write the result back to the screen. The killer is (a). Reading pixels out of video memory is really, really, really slow. Perversely enough, the better video card you have, the more likely it is that it has lots of memory, and the worse performance you get.

Try running the antialiased test again with

     XAANoOffscreenPixmaps       False

in your xorg.conf file. This will cause gnome-terminal to draw to system memory which is much faster for antialiasing. Unfortuntately it will also cause other stuff such as painting the background to become slower.