ChichaPlanet

(23:59:20) gabriel - pax americana: IB physics higher is tough
(23:59:29) Alvaro: it is not
(23:59:31) Alvaro: just write
(23:59:33) Alvaro: the answer is god

Everyone knows that ISP customer service is really bad, or non existent. Here are some quick tips in how not to suck majourly and lose customers.

1. Don’t fuck up so often. That’s easy. If you provide me with a connection which works, then I won’t call you to fix it. See? Easy profit!
2. Keep a record when you fuck up. If it’s the third time you receive a call from the same person on the same problem, which was “fixed” two times already, don’t just say “we don’t have a record of that”. That means that you suck.
3. Fix it quickly. If it’s the third time you receive a call from me on the same problem, you should know how to fix it.
4. If you’re going to put a captive portal for people who don’t pay. make sure that the only ones who are sent there are those who don’t pay (and make sure that if you accidentally send the wrong people there, that your crappy ASP script doesn’t fail because it wasn’t prepared to get people who don’t owe money).
5. If you are going to call back, at least do it in a 12 hour bracket. If you call back any time after that, you’ll have a pissed off customer.

These five easy steps will help you retain your customers and not force them upon your better, cheaper and faster competitor, which doesn’t suck as much. Thanks a lot!

Many creationists Intelligent Design proponents seem to have many misconceptions of evolution, its processes and how it works. Many of these are easily explained and refuted, and doing so would help those sitting on the fence a great deal. While I’m sure that I won’t convince many hard-core believers, I hope that at least we can have an index of some common misconceptions and what their responses are.

If we evolved from apes, why do they still exist?

This is one I’ve found many times. It mainly concerns the evolution of the different branches of primates. There are two main problems with this one. The first one is that it is a deliberate attempt at discrediting evolution because it reduces humanity to mere animals (which is what we are) which doesn’t bide well with many people. The second one is that it is a complete misunderstanding of how evolution works, and how we came to be.

While modern-day apes and Homo sapiens sapiens both share many characteristics, that doesn’t mean that humans evolved from chimpanzees. What it does mean, however, is that humans, chimpanzees, orangutans and gorillas, which make part of the Hominidae family of apes, all had the same ancestor, which then evolved due to the different environments it found itself into the different apes we all see today. This means that, we have not evolved from apes, but evolved with them, as if we were all cousins sharing the same grandparents.

Evolution occurs by random chance.

While some aspects of the creation of life are chance, such as the creation of the first monomers which would become modern life forms in the future — the explanation of when life began isn’t part of evolution, but of abiogenesis — the aspects which make one variation prevail over another is not random chance. As there are mutations and differences in the DNA inside a same species, the offspring inside the same species will not always be the same. The survival of one trait, and therefore the specialisation of the whole surviving species, depends entirely on the fact that the trait passed on is needed to survive.

If there are two giraffes, one which has a long neck, and the other one which has a short neck, which one will survive in a place where trees are tall? This way, the one which survives will have offspring with long necks, which will henceforth be the main trait in the species, as all which have short necks will die soon in their lives and never be able to reach adulthood and give birth to small giraffes. This, as we can see, is not chance at all, but the natural selection of the fittest in a specific terrain. If, perhaps, 100 kilometres away from the two giraffes there is another couple, and there are no trees, but low-lying bushes which the tall giraffe cannot reach, then the one with the short neck will survive, making short necks the prevalent trend in that region.

Evolution is a theory, just like the theory of Intelligent Design

This is a semantics misconception, just like the God of Einstein. There is a mayor difference between me saying that I have a theory that the 2006 Football World Cup was rigged by aliens and the Illuminati because Zidane would never ever risk his reputation and hit Materazzi in the chest, and the theory of evolution. One is a far-fetched, made up theory, and the other one is a scientific, verifiable theory.

A scientific theory has verifiable data, investigation and the ability to be testable, studied and verified by others. It is not just a hunch, or idea as it might mean in colloquial, everyday speech. However, both Intelligent Design and creationism do not have any proof, other than a the fact that humans are complex animals, which must absolutely mean that there’s a creator.

While I am sure we don’t yet have all the answers, I find that doing my part in clearing up some misconceptions and deliberate attempts at distorting the truth in order to fit the conclusion and facts into a pre-made hypothesis.

Django and Ruby on Rails seem to have surpassed all other frameworks like Turbogears or Symfony and are the talk of the web developing blogosphere, RoR going as far as making Ruby notable again, making it known to many people, as this language was almost unknown in 2004, before RoR’s opening. When I tried to do a quick web app I had to do, I skimmed over the two frameworks, finally deciding with Django to do my work on. As I moved on, I saw that Django, while not as hyped and AJAXy as Ruby on Rails, is much better and workable with than it’s main competitor. Ten Eight reasons why Django kicks Ruby on Rail’s ass.

1. Python.

Python drives Django, as many would know. Each time you write a line of code in a Django app, if it’s not on templates, you’re writing Python. This means that you’re able to use the large base of Python developers worldwide, and also the amazing number of Python libraries, coming from it’s 16 years of being heavily used, going into places such as Google, NASA and even some games such as EVE Online or the great Civilization IV. Furthermore, since Python has a more active userbase and more frameworks, if Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan-Moss and all of the Django developers suddenly dropped dead after I finish writing this, the porting of the code would be much easier than if Rails’ development stopped, where you would be stuck in the middle of nowhere if you ran into an issue. And who doesn’t want a language which has an implementation called IronPython?

2. Documentation

Django’s documentation kicks everyone’s ass. Not just Rails’. Django has a pretty documentation, easily understandable by both newbie and expert developers. Then, if by chance there’s something which can’t be found in the official documentation, there’s always a great ticketing system where many people posted code snippets and small howto’s, and awesome blogs such as B-List which help a troubled user to do everything from extending the user model, to being a master over generic views. However, Rails’ documentation seems confusing at first, with external tutorials and a massively confusing documentation repository.

Furthermore, the main Django developers decided to make an open book, which they have posted on the web and is open for comments, using a Django based publishing site they built, and some of Yahoo!’s Javascript libraries. The main problem with the many Rails books that there are is that they do not try to complement the Documentation, they are the documentation.

3. Templating.

Since Django’s inception, the templates have been designed so that there is no need to be a programmer to know how to create the templates. This means that the design can be split, making for skinnable sites and the ability to outsource the design to a designer, and not need that designer to pick up a book on Ruby on Rails’ in order to make the site pretty. Furthermore, since Django tries to keep as much coding away from the template as possible, the template’s are most often much more readable than the ASPish or even Cthulhuian .rhtml syntax that Rails’ programmers and designers have to use to design and display the processed information. Django’s system makes for much better cleanness using filters, which modify the way your text will be rendered, and template inheritance, making it easy to make dynamic websites.

4. Speed

Both Python and Ruby developers pride on the fact that both programming languages are fast. While they are slower than C and Java, they are probably the fastest in development times, allowing the developers to see the clear picture and work as fast as possible, avoiding as many errors on the way as they can. However, while both compete fairly in development times, the actual processing speed for a Python program is much faster than a Ruby program, while they are working on this. However, the same thing happens in the frameworks, which clearly show that Django is faster than both Rails’ and Symfony, a PHP framework. This means that your apps will be able to take a hammering better if they’re programmed using Django than if they’re using Ruby on Rails.

5. Free, JustWorksâ„¢ Admin interface

Django doesn’t need any MySQL managers, SQLite command line interfaces or any way to change records on the database, because it already has one. Every app is able to, by uncommenting two lines, have a full fledged admin interface containing all the modules that were written and have been marked for inclusion in it. Not only that, but the models may be modified so they appear differently in the admin panel, as it is fully customisable, making it easy to show some choices as drop down boxes or radio, or filtering by fields, etc. This is why none of the Django screencasts nor any of the tutorials need anything more than Django and a text editor, while you see all of the Rails’ screencasts, which there are lots, always having an open MySQL manager. Oh, and the admin interface in Django is damn hotâ„¢, too.

6. Generic views and feeds

With Django, there is no need to program when the operations being done are listing or editing objects, listing entries by date, or any of the basic CRUD operations, which means that the developer’s time can be spent doing useful things, not just getting simple things from the database, or directly editing fields. Furthermore, since Django was made in a publishing environment, creating RSS feeds is as easy as choosing what you want to pull out from the database and into the feed, and choosing where the feed will be retrieved from. This manages to take away the boredom in creating web apps, which in many cases involves cutting and pasting a lot of code, to create, edit or view, sort and manage items which are mostly alike. Django takes away all of this.

Django also has what they call the Flatpages, making it easier to create and select the URL of unchanging information, such as an about or contact page. Furthermore, it can also be edited, all using the Django admin, which makes it even easier than using HTML, not having to create a file nor edit urls.py to point the URL desired to the flatpage.

7. Better support and server

While both frameworks do not have much usage of big enterprisey databases, Django goes further than Rails on database support, as it supports MS SQL without having to do ugly hacks. Of course, its support for SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL is top-notch, with Postgres being used in all of Lawrence’s sites, which get millions of visitors each day. Furthermore, Django supports, thanks to the Python WSGI more webservers, as it gives more choice for the admin and more flexibility on setup. It does work on mod_python, which is a problem Rails has, as when it is used with mod_ruby, it has some security problems when running multiple sites on the same server, or just using FastCGI, which is not always optimal, especially due to configuration.. Further on, each Django process ends up being cheaper than having Ruby processes, meaning faster web apps.

8. Django is (mostly) buzzword free

Django isn’t plagued by buzzwords, as Rails is. Rails’ is to much that it’s own name, RoR has become a massive buzzword everywhere, even by people who will never program anything. Now that programming Rails is what the cool kids do, there is a lost value on a language, as the hype goes on and on. Especially having things like AJAX, Web 2.0, XML-RPC. Ruby on Rail’s ends up coercing developers into using too much AJAX, because “it’s way too easy”. The problem is that you get people trying to use AJAX where it doesn’t belong, and you get the complaints that the Web is going backwards in speed and loading times. However, Django is the balance. You can use RSS, if you want to. You can use AJAX, if you want to. You can even have sitemaps, if you want to.

If you want to be cool, and have loads of friends, snazzy AJAX for login scripts which end up failing when you forget to provide a fallback, or you can try the techie way, and bask in the tub of good code, simple design and choice, while not losing speed or reliability. Not at all.

EDIT: My apologies to Adrian Zolovaty Holovaty. It is Holovaty, as the developer himself says.

El cine peruano está creciendo, y ahora parece que hay una ley en la cual el Perú le deberí­a dar siete millones de dolares a los cineastas. Tabo habló de esto, Pedro también. Yo estoy de acuerdo con los dos, sin embargo, me parece que algo si se puede hacer. No es darle plata discriminadamente a gente, sino darle un grupo de incentivos de impuestos a la gente que hace sus peliculas en el Perú, no solo para promover el cine peruano.

Esto lo hacen otros paises, que ya han liberalizado mucho su economí­a como Irlanda. Ellos proponen que cualquier, no solo irlandeses, que gasten un 20% dentro de Irlanda y un 30% dentro de la Union Europea tendrí­a. Algo parecido hace el Reino Unido y hasta Ghana.

El cine hecho por peruanos no ayuda a nadie si no lo hacen bien. Especialmente no ayuda a nadie si el dinero que le darían a los cineastas termina siendo perdido en “costos administrativos” y otras perdidas. Además de ser plata que no es del gobierno para usar, ya que además de los 12 cineastas peruanos que llegarian a conseguir este subsidio, no mejorarían. Además, el mayor problema que tienen los cineastas no es que les cueste conseguir dinero para hacer una pelicula, ya que hay gente que ha logrado hacer peliculas por menos de 1000 dolares. El mayor problema es conseguir que los cines las pongan en sus carteleras.

Al darle incentivos a los cineastas de hacer sus peliculas en el Perú, y a los cines de promocionarlas y publicarlas, ya que estas tendrí­an un mayor margen de ganancia con las peruanas que con las otras, llegas a promover la industria verdaderamente, no simplemente darle plata a gente, haciendo que estas no sean competitivas, dandole incentivo a la gente de sobrepresupuestar y darle “regalitos” a sus familiares y amigos en sus peliculas.

El estado, como dice tabo, no deberia “ser la teta de nadie”. Esto es verdad. El estado sí­ debe, por el otro lado, incentivar a la industria. Sin embargo, al darle dinero discriminadamente a la gente, no esta ayudando a nadie, ni a los mismos cineastas que terminarí­an peor. Promuevan al cine, no lo hagan estancarse y aburrirse.

I thought this’d be a good idea. It’s kinda dysfunctional, but at least the music’s good. Put your playlist in shuffle, and each song you get is added sequentially.

Your Life: Friend of a Friend - Yes.
Opening Credits: Catholic Girls - Frank Zappa (Hm).
Waking Up: Bring me to Power - Yes
Falling in Love: Skylines - Camels
Fight Scene: Hilf mir - Rammstein (Very appropriate)
Breaking Up: Badge - Cream (Kinda funky, and starts with Thinkin’ ’bout the times you drove in my car. Thinkin’ that I might have drove you too far. And I’m thinkin’ ’bout the love that you laid on my table.)
Getting Back Together:New York City Cops - The Strokes (WTF)
Secret Love: Island Girl - Elton John (Very very freaky)
Life’s Okay: Profugos - Soda Stereo
Mental Breakdown: Lullaby - The Cure (Hey, the Cure _is_ mentally unstable)
Driving Flashback:All Along The Watchtower - Bob Dylan (Depends on the movie, but it would be suitable for some.)
Partying: God Save the Queen - Sex Pistols (FUCK YES)
Happy Dance: Sure Thing - Laurent Garnier (Pretty chilled out)
Regretting: Cancion Animal - Soda Stereo.
Long Night Alone: Cocaine - Eric Clapton (Very funny, dudes.)
Final Battle: Mr. Jack - System of a Down
Death Scene: Status Seeker - Dream Theater (Weird place for a Progressive Metal band to be, especially when the song starts with weird 80s synthesisers.)
End Credits: Who Wants to Live Forever - Queen (See Partying.)

Now, apart from the amazing coincidences in the End Credits, the Long Night Alone and the Partying, it’s all pretty cool. I’d watch that movie.

Flash Player 9 for Linux has been released. While there’s none for Linux PPC or AMD64, it’s a start.

To quote the great Mark Pilgrim.

Although, I have to say that trading my freedom for a bug-riddled, closed source bunny player was the Best Decision Ever.

Yes, Mark. Best decision ever.

A man whose name I had forgotten and only recently remembered was this man, Mister Rogers. Mister Rogers was TV host, who hosted children’s show for 32 years, the longest an American series, which is not a soap or a news program, ever ran for. The show didn’t sugar coat life, avoiding topics which people felt that children should be sheltered from, instead choosing to actually take a hands-on approach, teaching children how to deal with things like divorce, death and competition. Rogers always showed the children how to become calm after being angry, as he taught them that one should deal in diplomatic ways to solve problems.

Mister Rogers never lectured the viewers of his program, but actually spoke to them, always in a soft, teaching voice, never devoid of a lesson. I remember watching the same couple of videos over and over as a child, never growing tired of these, especially as even if it was the same episode over and over, it seemed like I was learning different lessons and seeing different things. However, he always started and ended the program in the same way, coming in from the street, putting on his cardigan and some comfortable shoes.

People think that these education shows are dull and boring. However, the topics Mister Rogers touched on were sometimes, and many times, very fun. Things like ice skating, how many things were manufactured, or even video games. Even if they are a 1983 version of Donkey Kong.

Mister Rogers got into television for a reason many would not. He got into TV because he disliked it, and he thought that he might help make it into something that would help children and adults around. This hearing, in which Mister Rogers spoke, on the funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is probably one of the most touching things I have ever seen. See if he got the money in the end.

In a world of partisanship, ethnic conflic, social problems and all, it’s always nice to see someone like Mister Rogers. Rest in peace.

People are going very crazy about the Debian Firefox fork. People seem to hate the new name, the new logo. It seems that Debian is taking a lot of flak because of this, when it isn’t even Debian’s fault. Debian is just following the DFSG, which is one of the things which makes Debian great. However, the Mozilla Corporation (yes, Corporation), whose delegates obviously seem to just use Windows, by the solutions they present and the way that Firefox is released, has decided to play against the Free Software community by introducing a set of anti-Free Software rules.

This all started with this email by a Mozilla representative. While Debian had already been given an approval to be able to use the Firefox name but not the official graphics, it seems this representative, Mike Connor, was either unaware of this, or Mozilla’s policies have changed since then. Debian cannot, do this another way, as the graphics, which are protected under copyright law, are not redistributable. This creates a problem, as according to Mozilla, the name must go with the graphics. However, this is not the only issue, and this is something many people are skipping. While Debian might break the DFSG, and redistribute this graphic, Mozilla Corporation is asking that Debian send all of their patches for revision by Mozilla. That would mean that Debian would have to wait until Mozilla’s beaurocracy sifts through the patches before being able to release a security fix, something implausible when the Firefox included in stable, for example, is not supported anymore.

What Mozilla is asking Debian is impossible to do, for the two reasons stated before. Debian has always taken its social contract very seriously, always supporting Free Software, and making sure that main is 100% Free. Free code, free documentation, free graphics. However, Mozilla is asking Debian to break this contract, for very childish reasons, as having an open source without trust is impossible, and Debian has always been committed to its users, and would never actually change the true Firefox for something else. Again we see that the Firefox project is Windows-centric. Furthermore, many people have been pressuring Debian to do what OpenBSD does, which is to distribute a “Community Edition” Firefox. However, as stated by their policy, this does not include the ability to change the source code, even if it is one line.

Mozilla is also asking Debian to do something that is impractical, and would seriously hinder Debian users. By forcing the submittal of patches for review, the patching of security bugs, which are not few, would become very slow, destroying the reality that stable is as secure as possible, and making the bug fixing process much secretive. Still, Mozilla asked something that is not only impractical, but plain idiotic. Mozilla suggested that, instead of backporting fixes, that they upgrade when a new version is released, as that is what “other vendors” do, and that this was”progressively more difficult and risky in the face of ongoing security-driven rearchitecture”. However, this email shows the hole in the reasoning of the Mozilla stance, as the other vendors have done this as they “realized it was less work to migrate customers”. Debian does the work it needs to do in order to protect its “customers”, which in fact are not only the users of Debian, but also those of Ubuntu, Mepis and others.

Now that Debian has said that they would change the name of Firefox, people are going apeshit at the fact that they are going to fork it. However, people do not realise that Debian has already forked Firefox. Mozilla has said that the patchset that they used on top of Firefox was effectively forking it, and they did not have the right to redistribute a “forked” Firefox with the same name, even if these forks just fixed bugs that Debian fixed for the good of both its users and of the Mozilla Corporation, Foundation and users. Mozilla would have a point if Debian started including new features, or purposefully removing them in order to make the Firefox brand weaker. However, Debian is not.

While the Debian stance was “hoping we can find a middle ground somewhere”, the Mozilla stance was not. They are not interested in helping the open source community thrive, but only to break the trust of many and go on their own goals, making them no better than their competitors. I hope that not only Debian changes the name of the browser, but also other distributions in order to force Mozilla to rethink its policy and where its friends are at. It sucks that Mozilla rethought their old position. This has not made the Debian brand weaker, but has only made the Firefox brand weaker. Way to go Mozilla.

Everyone knows that the digg effect is very strong, bringing down websites. What amazing is not just the actual traffic that one gets directly from digg, which is a large amount, but the popularity and publicity that comes from being digged, pushing up in traffic charts everywhere. This is not about the charts or load that I got from digg, but from the effect that that has had in my site.

The digg effect pushed me up in my country’s blog chart, putting me in the 9th most visited blog in the last two weeks, and giving me the top visited post of the whole continent. Not only that, but I showed up on the frontpage of the Peruvian blogs’ site, something that had never happened to me.

The actual traffic was staggering. While I was on the frontpage, the traffic went from 68 at 3 pm, to 1,700 at 4 pm to 5,246 one hour later, at 5. It then went gradually down to 3,221 at 6 pm, at then stabilised at 7, when it was at 1779. It stayed in the 1000-2000 range for a couple of hours. At 5 am of today, sixth of October, it went to its lowest, which is something to be expected since everyone is asleep. It appears to now be going up again, as I’m now on LinuxToday.

The traffic source has also changed substancially. After going off the frontpage of digg, the percentage of traffic from digg has gone down, from being 80% of my total traffic to being 40%, as the direct links from other pages go up. This doesn’t only come from the fact that I’m not the at the frontpage anymore, but also is helped by the fact that I’ve been linked by many blogs, as shown here on Technorati.

My feed’s subscribers number has skyrocketed. Right now, I have 1,202 subscribers, of which 87% use Firefox Live Bookmarks. Amazingly, 67 people use Flock to subscribe to the feed. However, I think that will go down in recent days, as people realise I am not as cool as they think I am.

The best part of having been digged wasn’t the traffic, but the popularity. One of my old articles on Epiphany was added to LinuxToday, something I would never have thought possible before. I was even link from a Reuters Blog. Now, I only need to be linked from a blog I have on my RSS reader to be really amazed about how digg really puts you out there.

It’s known that programmers swear a lot. There’s always fucks, shits, cunts, bitches, crap. There’s the kernel fuck count, for example, which shows the number of findings of “fuck” and “love” in the Linux kernel, over different versions of the kernel.
Google recently released the Google Code search (beta, of course), which searches through open source tarballs and zips, and tries to find the number of occurences of a specific query, and then showing them. So, nothing more than a Google which searches through code. Of course, what other use could there be than searching the number of occurences of fuck. In different languages.

So, what language is the most sweared one? I used Python, Perl, PHP, C++, C and C#, to get a wide range of programmers. I recorded the number of found and also the number of entries found without anything, to have a rough view of how many packages in a specific language there are, as Google might not have indexed all, and there may be more packages of C than of C# and others. Of course, there will be more fucks in 4′520,000 results I got for C than the 62,800 that the search returned when searching for C#.

Now, the results.

Here, we can see that, while the number of fucks never even gets to 1% of the results, in the highest one, PHP, 0.5% of all the packages found by Google code contain the word fuck, or any of its derivatives, such as fucker, etc. Furthermore, after PHP, which is the language with most occurences of fuck, almost doubling the other two which compete for the second place, those being C and Perl, something not unexpected. The lowest ones, which is no surprise, are C# and Python, Python probably being the cleanest programming language of the ones sorted here.

Update: Surprisingly, Java is down there with C# and Python in the cleanest languages.

Now, the results for fucks by license.

It can be clearly seen that LGPL makes people swear, while GPL and BSD still do, but in a reduced manner.

I’ve recently moved to Epiphany, GNOME’s official web browser. I used to use Mozilla Firefox, but I never really liked it, and always fought with it, especially when used on Linux. However, since the whole “waa waa” scandal made by Mozilla about the usage (or lack) of the official Firefox icon, since it was trademarked and not included in many distros, I politically decided to switch to a browser which in the end resulted in being even better than my old one, one over which Diego had nagged me over the last few months. After a couple of hours of small problems while my brain was adjusting, I got out with a better browsing experience than the one I had when using Firefox.

Features

Epiphany, or Ephy, uses the Gecko engine to render pages, so it has the same accuracy than Mozilla or Firefox, provided it is a version which uses the Gecko 1.8 engine. However, it is especifically developed for the GNOME environment, and does not suffer from windowsitis. There is no need to use specific themes for the browser, as it automatically adapts to the one used in GNOME, to provide with cohesion, which many times other browsers do not provide. Also, as expected, Ephy has tabs, and even the ability to drag and drop tags wherever needed in order to rearrange them, something Firefox only recently got, or had to be provided by extensions.

Epiphany also has a very innovative way to work with bookmarks. Instead of placing them into folders, it tags them, like Gmail does. So, instead of having to decide if an nVidia Linux kernel thread goes in graphics or in kernel, it can be tagged in to graphics and kernel, so it shows up in a search for any of those two terms. It also has smart bookmarks, which allow creating one for the debian package search and just easily typing clex, selecting the correct entry on the address bar, pressing enter and voilá, instant package search. It has many smart bookmarks by default, such as Dictionary, Wikipedia or Google.
Ephy is very integrated with the desktop. You can easily subscribe to a desktop reader like Liferea when getting an RSS feed, and complete integration with the GNOME Deskbar, allowing it to index the history and bookmarks for easy searching using it. Raphaël Slinckx, the dude with the weird hackergotchi on his site and also a developer of the Deskbar applet explains more about it.

Extensions

The browser does not have a centralised repository for extensions, and there is no way to easily install them but downloading the epiphany-extensions package or download them from the web and put them into the .gnome2/epiphany/extensions directory. However, while I can’t get a GoogleTabs extension, or show the time in Timbuctu, I can get extensions which do what I need, such as run Greasemonkey scripts, block ads, allow me to browse using gestures. As Epiphany is very basic by default, there are also many extensions which help configure the browsing environment, such as selecting which tab to focus after closing one, or to make the tab border smaller. This are all very small extensions, and only have 379 lines altogether, counting all the extensions I downloaded and activated. Furthermore, writing extensions is extremely easy, as in a few lines of python, an extension is ready to run.

Super Tab Extra

Basing myself on the Only One Close Button, I created Super Tab Extra, an extension which resized the width of the tabs when there are too many. The name comes from Tab Mix Plus, a very famous Firefox extension which deals with tabs. Well, without further ado, here it is, Super Tab Extra. I hated the way that tabs were managed first, as “due to a GTK bug”, the tabs would not resize. However, apparently Firefox is going to use it too.

Asimov on the future of humanity

It is amazing how many things there still apply to today. He got to the conclusion that

Major Premise: The volume of coal and oil are finite.

Minor Premise: We are burning some every day.

Conclusion: We will use it all up eventually.

Still, we still have some people who have not reached this conclusion yet.