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Gerade stolpere ich über einen Artikel, der die aktuelle Fassung des IE6-Problems, nämlich die Fraktionierung des Web, durch die Marktmacht von Browsern auf Mobilgeräten anprangert. Im Kern geht es darum, daß WebKit, als Basis von allen Browsern von Apple und Google, den mit Abstand größten Marktanteil bei Mobilbrowsern hält, und daß die Webdesigner in der Folge nur noch für WebKit designen, nicht aber für andere (Mobil-) Browser. Damit sind wir wieder da, wo wir mit IE6 und FrontPage aufgehört zu haben glaubten: Diese Webseiten funktionieren nicht, wenn man sie mit anderen Browsern anschaut. Technisch liegt dem die unsachgemäße Nutzung von inoffiziellen Leistungsmerkmalen zugrunde, die Apple und Google längst hätten zur Standardisierung einreichen können und sollen. Daß sie dies bisher unterlassen haben, ist im Grunde unlauterer Wettbewerb und droht dementsprechend, einen Rückfall in IE6-Zeiten zu bringen, weil jeder Hersteller irgendwie “kompatibel” sein muß, dieses Ziel aber mit offiziellen Mitteln dank fehlender Standardisierung nicht erreichen kann.

Der Originalartikel erschien in dem Weblog des Autors, der Mitglied des des entsprechenden Standardisierungskommitees im W3C ist:

www.glazman.org

Ich kann seinen Aufruf, entsprechend kaputte Seiten zu boykottieren und nur im Zusammenhang mit diesem Fehler zu erwähnen, nur voll unterstützen, und hoffe, daß meine verehrte Leserschaft dies ebenso sieht.

I am using zc.buildout together with a virtualenv to generate my Plone instances. It turns out that Zope requires the Python Profile be installed. However, under Debian, the relevant package, python-profiler has made it to non-free instead of main, due to the licensing of that package. As a result, you only discover that testing doesn’t work until Zope tries to import the profiler, and falls over.

In order to get things to run, you need to do the following:

# Add non-free to the set of repositories that you want to use. Eg.:

  deb http://ftp.debian.org/debian stable main

would have to become

  deb http://ftp.de.debian.org/debian stable main non-free

# Run apt-get update (obviously). # Now you can apt-get install python-profiler, and you should be all set.

For some time, I have been annoyed by recent Firefox’s behaviour to truncate the front of URLs so that “http” or “https” are not shown. I would rather have the full URL shown, and so I poked around about:config and found browser.urlbar.trimURLs. Set this to false, and the full URLs are shown in the urlbar (formerly known as location bar).

There are two web browsers, based on the Google Chrome codebase:

• Google Chrome (of course)
• Chromium

The latter is a free-software-only version of Google Chrome, having the spyware features of the original Google Chrome ripped out, and that can be eg. installed in Debian using apt-get.

Today, I wanted to try the extensions, since the original browser is suitable for not much more than simply looking at a web page. But if you want any kind of extensions, like eg. maybe AdBlock, or the SpeedMeter, or the SessionManager, or whatever else would benefit you as a user, you immediately find yourself locked out of Google’s Webstore. By the way… the name is already giving away what the problem really is: Google, like about any other vendor I am aware of, wants to reduce you to a user, and cut down on your abilities to create, or use the software in ways you deem fit, instead of only ways they deem fit. So, there is eg. no simple way to download the extension to your hard disk drive, maybe for later digestion - no, you can, at best, install the extension online, into your current profile. And if you somehow lose that, you get to try again. So they can not only track every move of you, they can also manage the availability of their extensions to you as they choose. Like eg. Ad sales going down? Poof, no more AdBlock for you.

This way, you sell out your freedom and your privacy in the same way to Google than you probably did before, to Microsoft and Apple, and a plethora of other companies.

Now my question to you is: Are you prepared to accept that, and if so, why?

I’ve been asked to compare various issue trackers. While I don’t really feel qualified do to so, I have an opinion nonetheless. So here are my two cents about it:

• There are trackers for various use cases, various technologies, and licenses (eg. Jira is imho mostly commercial software).

• I’ve not yet found a package which is equally suitable for handling customer (self-?) support tasks outside of software development, and software development tasks.

• I don’t have real experience with Jira, and only a very cursory impression about eg. OTRS (Perl) and Mantis (PHP).

• From all trackers I have seen so far, OTRS, RT (Perl) and roundup (Python) are basically suitable to customer support tasks, but less suitable to software development tasks.

• OTOH, Trac and Redmine seem to support software development tasks much better (and Redmine, written with RoR, much better than Trac, written in Python, imho).

For me, so far only Roundup and RT mattered for the customer-support space, but I intend to take a look at OTRS, now that they claim to support ITIL-conformant processes (whatever that means, but it’s a requirement of some potential customers). When I talk about RT, I mean RT 3.x, not RT 4.x. I also ignore all PHP stuff for principal reasons.

• Roundup’s advantage, compared to RT, is that it is very lightweight.

• Roundup’s permission system seems to be more flexible than RT’s, but all-in-all, changing anything requires rolling out a new revision of the installation (eg. to include the new permissions). This stuff is highly intertwined with the rest of roundup, and I’ve yet to see (didn’t try) how to eg. migrate the database from one version of the software to the next.

• RT’s advantage is the much larger functionality out of the box, and esp. support for distributed workflows, with auto-escalation, re-assignment, hierarchical tickets with dependencies, statistics, multiple external authentication sources and what-not. It’s much more heavy-weight, though, and the UI is clumsier, too. RT can be scripted, and the scripts seem to end up in the database, making it comparatively easy to migrate an instance. It’s Perl, though, and the main author(s) are afaik on the forefront of Perl development themselves, so you frequently find that you have to pull in brand-new versions of modules from CPAN that you’ve never heard of, and that have had little exposure.

• OOTB, RT’s permission system is much more powerful than what is distributed with Roundup, though.

• Roundup seems to be much more geared towards a “one customer project, one tracker” situation, where eg. general access control is of not very high importance.

In the software development space, integrating a tracker, a wiki, and a repository browser was popularized probably by SourceForge, and has led to the creation of packages like Trac and Redmine, the latter allegedly being a clone of Trac (imho it isn’t, if you run the two side-by-side).

• Roundup has no integration with either a wiki or a repository browser out of the box, so one would have to do manual work to use it in that manner. One also has to find suitable wiki and repository browser software to integrate with, first, and except for the wiki (MoinMoin), there are imho no obvious candidates.

• Of the remaining two, Redmine imho has much better support for multi-project scenarios, seems to support a broader range of databases, and also provides much more functionality.

• It can also be much easier extended by Joe Average User because of a plethora of plugins, supporting popular use cases.

• Redmine appears to be easier to host than Roundup, using thin.

Links:

• Roundup
• RT
• Trac
• Redmine
• OTRS
• Jira

As per the author’s statement, using ZopeProfiler together with Plone4 is unsupported. It really is. First, get a current version of ZopeProfiler instead. Implement in your buildout as usual and run buildout. In the relevant instance’s (eg. secondary) zope.conf, one has to enable it, too:

enable-product-installation on

You also need to fix the output from the pstats module. In Debian, this is located at /usr/lib/python2.6/pstats.py. Copy to your virtualenv’s lib/python2.6 and manually apply the patch mentioned here: http://bugs.python.org/issue7372

After that, following the instructions generally works, except for that the site now runs orders of magnitudes slower, and (at least) I get this error when trying to view the stats (sample traceback):

2011-05-04 13:47:56 ERROR Zope.SiteErrorLog 1304509676.940.218731970327 http://localhost:9082/Control_Panel/ZopeProfiler/showHigh
Traceback (innermost last):
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 127, in publish
  Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 77, in mapply
  Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 47, in call_object
  Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 324, in __call__
  Module Shared.DC.Scripts.Bindings, line 361, in _bindAndExec
  Module App.special_dtml, line 185, in _exec
  Module DocumentTemplate.DT_Let, line 76, in render
  Module DocumentTemplate.DT_Util, line 202, in eval
   - __traceback_info__: stdnameRe
  Module <string>, line 1, in <module>
  Module Products.ZopeProfiler.ZopeProfiler, line 237, in getStatistics
  Module pstats, line 353, in print_stats
ValueError: I/O operation on closed file

I’ve seen the latter error on various other occasions as well, esp. when a long time has passed between the original activity and the display of results (eg. when running ExternalMethods). If someone has a fix for that, I’d highly appreciate it!

Recent press articles like indicate that today’s users of smartphones are effectively under possibly real-time surveillance for their whereabouts. This, in my opinion, greaty diminuishes the value of such gadgets, as that is a gross invasion of privacy. It does illustrate, however, that free software projects for mobile devices really need a push, and that the users should insist on rooting, or jailbreaking, their phones to gain the ability to install their own operating system software. Now we “only” need viable operating system software for our phones, but on that front, things look a little dim.

After the downturn in the OpenMoko project, the best bets may be a community-administrated version of Android, or a current version of SHR, if Google should obstruct the creation of a “Community-Android”. But in the longer run, there’ll be no alternative to having fully-open operating systems for mobile phones, like we already have on the desktop or on server. Let’s hope that the developers achieve that before companies manage to finally lock down all devices.