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Opera BrowserOpera 8 is out, and their website is swamped so badly they replaced their home page with a stripped-down version pointing to download sites. That’s a first.

Unfortunately I can’t get the Linux download link to get me anywhere except back to the splash page, so I’ve only managed to grab the Windows version so far.

I used to be a big fan of Opera back in the days when Mozilla was still in beta, Netscape was obsolete, and IE was… well, a security hole waiting to happen and the dominant browser as a result of monopoly abuse instead of just making a better product. But then two things happened: Mozilla got a lot better, and Opera started to get bloated. And by bloated I don’t mean in code size, I mean in user interface. It was so cluttered that after a while it was just a pain to use.

I still buy new versions as needed (The reg code for 7.x seems to work fine on 8.0), and I’ve got active licenses on both Windows and Linux. But in the last few years I’ve mainly used it for testing (compatibility, small-screen rendering, etc.) and for keeping multiple accounts logged into the same website.

The 8.0 betas have been very nice, though. With all the extra toolbars hidden, I can just use the web. This is one of their selling points: their press release is titled “Speed, Security and Simplicity,” and states “The default UI design is cleaner, more intuitive and allows for easy navigation.”

I don’t think it’ll get me to switch from Firefox just yet, but I may find myself using it more often. And while it’s nice that I don’t have to pay for the upgrade, I wouldn’t mind it if I did.

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Going through the spam traps today, I noticed one message which was sent to 5 addresses on our system. Those addresses broke down as:

  • 1 actual person’s email address.
  • 1 long-dead account used to collect spam.
  • 3 dedicated spamtrap addresses seeded solely by unsubscribing from spam sent to other accouts.

Is it any wonder that people don’t trust opt-out directions?

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It’s taking me longer than I thought to post all these Hawaii photos. North of Kona there are miles of old lava flows, the most recent of which were in 1801 (from Hualalai, the volcano above Kailua) and 1859 (from Mauna Loa, the second-higest peak on the island). Because the island is right in the middle of the trade winds, and has sizable mountains in the middle, the clouds all bunch up on the eastern side of the island, dropping several hundred inches of rain a year before stopping—rather abruptly—halfway across the island. The west side of the island, especially in North Kona and Kohala, gets closer to 10 inches of rain a year. That’s not far off, climate-wise, from Southern California. It also means that there’s not enough plants to break up a lava field in only 200 years, and large chunks of the coast look like this:

A‘a lava flow in Kohala (with coral graffiti!)
That’s not dirt, that’s rock! You may be wondering about the white bits. They’re a sort of temporary graffiti. All through this area, people have dragged out bits of coral to spell out messages ranging from “Hi Mom” and “Aloha Dolly” to “In Memory Of…” For some reason it’s almost universally good-natured. Katie’s got some interesting pictures. that we’ll be posting later.

Here’s a view of the coast itself. Continue reading →

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I’ll always remember a line from a play I was in during college. It was an original musical, and the composer couldn’t come up with a good line by the time he had to hand out the scripts, so he filled it in with “Come around and schmoo” just to keep the rhyme in place. Oddly, I can’t remember the line he finally replaced it with.

And of course, Firefox’s cookie preferences were labeled “Cookies are delicious delicacies” for so long during the beta period that by the time they wrote a real description for 1.0, someone wrote an extension to put it back in!

Well, sometimes dummy text makes it through “rehearsals,” so to speak. Jim Heid found live sites with various kinds of filler text. Not just the ubiquitous “Untitled document” (millions of pages), but samples of “lorem ipsum” filler and even ~250 hits for “this is placeholder text” (whoops, I’m gonna skew those results a bit.)

(via Scobleizer, who recommends using “xxxxx” exclusively for placeholders.)

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Standard yellow diamond road sign on a post, featuring a silhouette of a long-necked bird. Below it is a smaller, rectangular sign reading NENE XING. Leaning against the base is an orange-and-white portable traffic barrier with another yellow diamond caution sign, this one with a more detailed line art drawing of a goose and a much smaller gosling, labeled SLOW above and NENE XING below.The Nene (roughly nay-nay), a.k.a. the Hawaiian Goose, is Hawaii’s state bird. It’s also endangered. There’s supposed to be a (comparatively) large population in Hawai‘i Volcanoes National Park, but we didn’t see a single one all week. All we saw were a zillion of these signs warning us to avoid hitting them. Maybe it was the wrong time of year, the wrong time of day, or they’re all hiding away from the road.

They warn you not to feed the Nenes either. The concern is that it will encourage them to hang out near roads where they’re more likely to be killed. This reminds me of another bird we did see a lot of. Whatever it was, they were either very stupid or very confident in drivers’ abilities to avoid them, because they would just amble across the road, pausing occasionally, making no effort to dodge the cars zooming at them at 35, 45, or 55 MPH. It was several days before we saw one actually bother to fly a few feet!

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Here’s a candidate for Engrish.com if I ever saw one… except it’s aimed at the US market. This is from the back of a small metal Justice League figurine:

Warning: Small parts may be generated

OK, I understand what they’re saying, it could break into small parts that could be a choking hazard. But the phrasing is awkward at best, and sounds like it belongs in a tech manual, not on a simple toy.