Today was a little more lively than yesterday on nakedcomputers.org. So far there have been 2698 unique visitors (nearly 4 times the highest count I have ever seen on any planetlotus.org entry), most of them arriving from the home page of Linuxtoday.com so again a non-random sample. There is clearly a lot of windows XP still out there, but Ubuntu is close behind, with about 4 times the Vista numbers. I also had several people asking for their stores to be listed.

Firefox continues to be the leading browser by a country mile at 75% market share. IE7 and Iceweasel have been trading places for 3rd and 4rd with it being a draw at the moment.

So what does this say? Game over for Microsoft? Well not really. This is a really skewed sample. I think what it tells me is that I am talking to a bubble again. The Software Freedom bubble. Thats OK, I am used to operating in a bubble environment. This is just a much bigger bubble and it is growing fast.

overall a much quieter day today, but I think it will ramp up again.

Browser

Browser

I am not sure this means a vast amount, the sample set is just “the first 66 people who give a toss what Alan says”, but I was struck by the total dominance of Firefox. The numbers don’t add up because of search engine spiders.

We have a policy at our company to only purchase computers that come without Windows. We don’t like it, we don’t need it, we don’t want it and we certainly don’t want to be forced to pay for it. This restricts the vendors we can purchase from down to a very short list. Plenty of other people are in the same position as us, it is really quite hard to find a good selection of vendors who will allow you to just buy a computer. I am not interested in the whole refund malarky, I don’t want to jump through hoops to get a refund on something I don’t want to buy in the first place.

To help the community find and purchase these scarce pure and unadulterated computers we have started a directory of suppliers at nakedcomputers.org. If you know of any supplier, small or large, who will sell a naked computer then let us know about it, or register on the site and add them yourself.

If you are a supplier and want to get on the list it is very simple, just add a naked computer to your range and tell us about it, there is no cost to a normal entry on the list but we might add some kind of enhanced sponsored option at some stage.

The latest Quickr bug I hit. posting here because I think more IBMers read Planet Lotus than the partner forum.

Steps to Reproduce:

• Set up server and client correctly running in dd/mm/yyyy date format, as per normal in the UK
• Create documents in a Quickr place at various dates in the month, some before the 12th, some after the 12th.
• Observe correct creation dates for all documents in the view.
• Open the documents and observe apparently correct dates for dd<=12
• Observe incorrect dates in 2010 or 2011 for dd>12 such as 25/03/2009 turning into 01/03/2011

in the URL bar type
javascript:alert(QuickrDateUtil.convertStringToDate(“25/03/2009″)
and in the alert box you will see the wrong date.

Now, to shift the blame away from Quickr for just a second (don’t worry it will go back), try this one
javascript:alert(new Date(”25/03/2009″))

So Javascript itself is generating the odd date. There is some logic to it, but not much. If you consider 25/03/2009 to be in mm/dd/yyyy format then it is interpreting this to mean the third day of the twenty fifth month of 2009. Which is January 2011.
So the Quickr code in QuickrCommon.js QuickrDateUtil.convertStringToDate starts by passing the date as a string to Javascript to parse by creating a new Date object. If the returned object has a year component then convertStringToDate just returns the date that javascript parsed, even if it is mad.

So why do dates dd<=12 seem to work? Well they hit exactly the same bug when Javascript mis-creates the date object. For example if the document created date is 09/03/2009 then at line 7110 of the document opened through the qpbase form dCreated will be set to something like Thu Sep 03 2009 18:34:41 GMT+0100 (GMT) as it interpreted the date backwards. Then we move on to QuickrDateUtil.getDateTimeString which then uses DoJo to format the date in mm/dd/yyyy format thereby swapping it back again (two wrongs make a right). Quickr passes the locale of “en” to DoJo but not the date pattern of dd/mm/yyyy therefore DoJo uses the default locale date pattern for en which is mm/dd/yyyy (in something like /dojo/trunk/cldr/nls/en/gregorian.js)
So Javascript new Date(string) does not use the locale information, it uses ISO date format and others including mm/dd/yyyy, it will never use dd/mm/yyyy because something formatted as dd/mm/yyyy can always be interpreted as mm/dd/yyyy if mm is permitted to be more than 12.
Quickr javascript fails to account for this and also uses DoJo to format the displayed date in mm/dd/yyyy format thereby masking the problem where dd<=12.

(whilst you are on a tour of Quickr Javascript libraries be sure to visit qp_write_html.js and check the comment on line 491)
Work Around:
maybe patch the QuickrCommon.js file to correctly parse the date, that would leave everything in American format though. At least the dates would be understandably wrong. One could then patch the DoJo en locale file to put it in dd/mm/yyyy format. Really IBM need to recode it to correctly parse the date and correctly pass the date pattern to DoJo’s gregorian calendar handling routines.

This would appear to be a regression introduced between QPBuild=20080317.1550 and QPBuild=20080407.1630

The Dominux domain kind of changed into a scummy link farm for a month or so. Sorry about that and I hope nobody clicked any links. I have no idea why it happened, or why it has come back, I am not entirely certain my ISP is still in business and I am struggling to contact them and transfer the domain elsewhere. This has just been a surprisingly minor irritation to me and further underlines the point that I don’t really do Dominux stuff any more, The Open Learning Centre is where I have to spend my time and energy now.

And few people can rival Mr Buchan in a fair ranting contest, so I won’t comment much other than here it is, and he is mostly right.

This did put me in mind of something I have been pondering for a while. You see IBM business partners do have several ways to say things to IBM. We can email folk we know directly, as Bill was doing. In theory we can use Sametime but in practice not really because the gateway is still on a somewhat broken Sametime 3.1 server until the IBM change freeze ends (ever known an organisation with a change freeze that lasts four years solid?) We can also post in a private Notes discussion database called the Partner Forum. In this forum there are special forms for reporting possible bugs, and there are ways to report suggestions for improvement. The rants in the partner forum over the years have been on occasion rivalled any seen in the blogosphere. The good ideas for improvement have been more numerous and detailed than those in (the excellent) IdeaJam. Some partners are brought in a little closer as design partners, ostensibly to be listened to, but in practice just to be told what IBM are doing a few days before Vowe finds out. The rants here are even more juicy. All jolly good, but not very effective.

So does a public rant work then? Well I used to think so but I am not so sure now.  It certainly feels better, but is probably going to be ignored too, just like that rude Mac blogger who ripped into the rather pathetic IMAP support in the Notes client.

So polite constructive words or flaming rants in private or public don’t work. So who is in control of this relationship then? Who is out of control? Who has the freedom to make improvements? Who hasn’t got freedom? How does it feel?

• The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
• The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
• The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
• The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The software I like to work with gives me Freedom. It gives my customers Freedom too. It frees up some of their budget too, which is never a bad thing. Yes I still use Domino from time to time, because some of my customers still have it. There are still a few things that Domino does quite well, but there are more and more things these days where there is just no need whatsoever to be using proprietary software.

So as I continue to ease my way out of the yellow bubble I think I will share some of the things I have previously posted in the partner forum, not that I expect IBM to pay any more attention to them here than they have already, but to just throw them out for comment and perhaps to save anyone else the bother of wishing for them.

I am used to confusing and infuriating and just plain wrong dialog boxes, I have been conditioned to them over the years, as I suspect have you. Bet you haven’t seen one like this though, from the very clever Jigsaw download tool, the command line version of which is currently getting a nightly alpha build of Ubuntu Jaunty Jackalope for me.

I clicked on “Awesome!” which is a word that only really works properly when said with an American accent.