Roo’s Ramblings

Power of Nightmares is a fantastic documentary investigating the climate of fear. I remember seeing it when it was originally screened (a couple of years ago, IIRC). It’s a three parter - an hour each. Some bright spark has uploaded to Google Video. I’m not condoning the breaching of copyright, which this is a clear case. However, as I’m a UK TV licence payer, I, along with every payer, contributed to this, and I think it ought to be seen by everyone.

Check them out whilst they’re still online.

• Part 1 - Baby It’s Cold Outside
• Part 2 - The Phantom Victory
• Part 3 - The Shadows In The Cave

Part 1, perhaps the most important, as it sets out a lot of the foundations for the thesis, is not the most exciting. Parts 2 and 3 were fascinating.

I don’t use Linux 100% any more like I used to, which is a shame. It’s largely because I do a lot of work from home and it I need to be in Windows. And when I have booted in to Arch Linux, I tend not to pacman -Syu very often - I don’t know why, I guess it’s a it ain’t broken thing. Anyway, upgraded yesterday and I had 200Mb of stuff waiting to be upgraded, including Firefox 2. I’ve been using FF2 since it was released on Windows and I was happy to see it has graduated out of testing in AL. However, I forgotten about all the fuss about FF branding, and now AL has ‘Bon Echo’ instead.

A few things struck me:

1. What a silly name.
2. What a silly logo - not even SVG.
3. That silly name is now in the user-agent.

I dare say that no-one else cares about the first two points - and fair enough. However, point three is something that slightly grated. It’s only a name, for god’s sake! Within 5 mins of launching FF2 (or BE2) on AL I was on YouTube, and whilst it seemed to work ok, I was constantly distracted with a little message about an unknown user-agent. It made me think about the fact that there are many websites looking out for that user-agent string for reasons other than browser stats.

As annoying as it is, browsers are not 100% compatible and so web devs have worked hard to try and ensure their site works great on the main browsers. Web devs know about Firefox. “WTF is Bon Echo”, I imagine they are saying.

It didn’t take me long to dive into about:config and change the user-agent back to what it should be. In hindsight, perhaps I should have left it to see if there were any possible side-effects: does gmail work properly? What about Hotmail? Meebo? And so on. So now I will need to change this manually each time pacman upgrades FF/BE, right? Bugger that, I think I’ll just download the official binary and have done with it.