I know most of this blog’s readers don’t write in Vietnamese, but for the few who do, I spent a bit of last weekend writing an extension for Firefox and its companion e-mail program, Thunderbird, that checks your Vietnamese spelling as you type. Unlike the last piece of software I released, this one requires hardly any explanation. You know if you need it.

Ohio has struggled with immigration from Hispanic countries more than the small number of immigrants would indicate. Late last year, four illegal immigrants from a poor village in central Mexico were found stabbed to death inside their home, vividly symbolizing the hostility that immigrants face in that part of the country.

It gets better (read: more entertaining) with non-cognate languages, like those from the Near- and Far East. None of the major online translation services, like Babel Fish or Google Translate, offer automatic translation to or from Vietnamese, and it’s a good thing they didn’t. As I mentioned a couple years ago, even linguists can get the translation humorously wrong.

Starting in mid-Feburary, Vietnamese users of Mozilla’s open source Firefox browser were at risk of infection from malicious Trojan Horse code seemingly accidentally embedded in a language pack available on its Add-ons site.

…

The add-on’s author is not suspected of intentionally booby-trapping the file, but instead had his own system infected. That Trojan inserted a banner-ad displaying script into any html [sic] file on his system, which included the help files for the language pack.

Ironically, the HTML files have been removed altogether from the forthcoming Firefox 3, because Mozilla has decided to use an online, wiki-based help system, rather than the static help files that come packaged with Firefox 2.

Application security is still important these days, but as software vendors race to embrace add-ons and RIAs, Web technologies can no longer be considered confined within a tight security “sandbox”. It’s not even just a security issue, either: with phishing- and other fraud-based attacks so prevalent, software developers need to be especially vigilant about any user interface details that could be used to deceive.

As the author of a similar extension for Thunderbird, Firefox’s companion e-mail client, I should note that the Vietnamese localization pack I wrote for Thunderbird is not affected by the trojan. The current version was released in 2005, long before the Firefox localization package.

By the way, an updated version of that localization pack is in the works, based on the Firefox extension. Although I did consult some parts of the Firefox extension’s source code to resolve some tough-to-translate terms, there was no code sharing of any kind. (Not even copy-pasting.)

You can track my progress by pointing your Subversion client (such as TortoiseSVN) to http://version.1ec5.org/vi/. And if you happen to be thạo tiếng Việt, please contact me; I’d be more than happy to accept your help.

To clarify, only advertising banners were inserted, not actual worm or trojan code. See Asa Dotzler’s explanation.

Occasionally you’ve seen some of my work illustrate blog posts here, but that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Eventually, I hope to add my actual art and website portfolios to the gallery, but for now it’s just photography. Since the gallery doesn’t show full-resolution images, you wouldn’t notice that the equipment I’ve been using is, well, lacking.

Until last year, all the photos were taken with a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P72, a now-antiquated digital camera that takes photos at a resolution of 640×480 pixels. A resolution that low would’ve been acceptable several years ago, when we bought the camera. In contrast, the newfangled gigapixel cameras these days can probably discern strange quarks from top quarks.

Because the Cyber-shot was the family camera, I only had access to it during family vacations. But last spring, I was forced to replace my trusty, non-flip, cameraless Nokia phone with a battery-draining Samsung Sync, weighted down with no end in pay-to-unlock gimmicks. (I also had to swap my reliable Cincinnati Bell service for Cingular, but that’s a sad story for another day.) At least the new phone comes with a decent camera, which means I can snap photos on a whim. For a phone camera, it’s not half-bad: the resolution is 21^st-century, and the quality isn’t much worse than the film cameras we used to operate.

(Remind me to tell you about my family’s hardy Canon film camera some day.)

I know my “photography” doesn’t hold a candle to that of some of my dormmates, but I’ve at least established that I can operate a camera. Maybe some day, I’ll prove myself worthy of moving up to a disposable digital camera. They didn’t have those around when I was growing up, y’know.

Normally, I’d be quite skeptical, but it snowed a ton there last month, and plus, this program is seriously smart. It even deduced (from the school’s event calendar) that some events would have to be postponed or canceled, so it added a helpful link to the school website for details on schedule changes.

(By the way, you should see what my alma mater’s doing for the 1^st of April!)

So pX is back to normal now, though I’ve archived the prank in case you feel like getting a catchy song stuck in your head today. As for me, this little experiment in inane Internet memes is definitely over. Ah, sanity.

Although Mac versions of these browsers were generally made available, I had to emulate the Windows versions instead, since most of these browser versions were released before Apple released Mac OS X and made the switch to Intel-based processors. Although things mostly work, there are some kinks preventing you from seeing these browsers as they were intended to appear. For instance, the emulated programs don’t recognize my computer’s copy of Times New Roman, so they instead default to Marlett, the font that contains Windows’s “close” and “maximize” symbols. This problem is most apparent in NCSA Mosaic (below the fold), since it offers no way to change the default font from Times New Roman to, say, Tahoma.

(Your teacher may forgive you for handing in your homework typeset entirely in Wingdings, but you just try that with Marlett, and said teacher may choose to apply the clue-by-four procedure.)

Well, it’s because of 9/11. We want everybody to guess. … We’re not putting out more information than we have to put out.

That just gives the bad guys a 50/50 chance of getting it right. Thanks a lot. (See also: security through obscurity.)

But in this case, the problem doesn’t lie between the keyboard and the chair. Rather than fault the user, I find issue with MonoBook, the default skin for sites that run on MediaWiki, notably Wikipedia. MonoBook relegates the important history and edit links to a tiny, non-descript row of tabs at top, whose labels are all lowercase. At the time, it seemed like a neat way to deal with the sea of links that had been crammed into the Standard skin’s left sidebar, but MonoBook ended up being so minimalistic that everything but the current article text and the unnecessarily prominent list of translations got marginalized.

Speaking of minimalism, I tolerate Facebook for two reasons: it provides me with an audience and it has a really clean, efficient interface compared to comparable sites. (And it’s blue. I like blue.) Now the second reason is about to go away, as Facebook looks to reorganize its profile pages. They’re going the way of Wikipedia and adding tabs to separate the profiles into three sections: Wall, About, and Photos. Near as I can tell, these tabs will be utterly easy for newcomers to ignore, and the rest of us will notice them only because we’ve grown accustomed to our friends’s half-hearted attempts at being photogenic and writing witty “About Me”s.

Don’t get me wrong: I love tabs. Tabs make Web browsing bearable these days, and it makes using Internet Explorer 6 nothing less than torturous. But other than the occasional 300-pixel tabbed box, tabs belong in full-fledged desktop applications, like Web browsers, not in websites. It’s far too easy for visitors to ignore tabs in websites, because they’re not really discoverable unless they’re accompanied by ’90s-style rainbow-swirling effects as you hover over them, and by then you’ve been scared away.

Though I usually find his brand of usability unnecessarily strict and bland, usability expert Jakob Nielsen’s guidelines for tabs are worth taking a look at. If the tabs are right above the small content box that is affected by them, they’re quite discoverable. But place them at the top of a webpage, and the visitor’s eyes will immediately drift down to the heart of the page, the content.

Not all of Facebook’s redesign is so problematic: I like the idea of combining the wall with the poorly-named “Mini-Feed”, because you’ll often get wall posts in response to changing your profile picture or status, actions that are currently displayed out of context. But I still don’t know about continuing to call it the “Wall”. It was a Wall when you could devowel every Wall post that your friend had ever received. (The old version was kept around in the “History” section, of course.) It was a neat concession to Facebook’s otherwise orderly site. Now it’s just a corkboard: all your changes have to be fully contained within, basically, a boring little sticky-note.

As for replacing Wikipedia’s tabs, I don’t have a solid answer. I would however suggest adding an “Action box” to – of all places – the bottom of each page. Given a generous amount of space there, the action box would list in large font a few key ways for users to interact with the article: edit the article, discuss it, view its authors and history, and cite it. Any other actions, like renaming the article, can be listed below that in smaller text. As it is right now, a visitor is likely to see the article’s title up top, think that’ the beginning, and read down from there. A list of what to do next makes sense at the end of an article. After all, do you tell your friends to comment on your latest adventure before you even tell them the story?

Yes, I’m making a big deal out of a trifle, but it bugs me when websites are more tedious to use than they have to be.

The command is accessible via a convenient keyboard “shortcut”: ⌃⌥⇧⌘B. (Hover over each symbol to see which key it stands for.) That’s a whopping four keys to hold down and one to press! Sure, you don’t want to accidentally start backing up your computer while Norton’s running in the background and you’re playing a scintillating game of… Chess. But you need the skills of a virtuoso to trigger a backup that way – you might as well just use a mouse.

At least you can take as long as you want to master that key combination: in Windows 95, there was an Easter egg that would display Bill Gates’s horse, Nugget, on your desktop. Unfortunately, you had to press Ctrl+F6+RtShift+Del and the right mouse button, simultaneously, before your wallpaper loaded.

Sounds like a job for Mavis Beacon.

Thanks to John Gruber for linking to the Macworld review.

I didn’t vote yesterday. I received a few snickers from peers who found out I’m planning to vote in a month, in the Ohio primaries, because by then the nomination would’ve already been settled.

As it turns out, although California will award more of its delegates to Clinton, the “settled” race is far from over, so look to the Other Super Tuesday on March 4^th, when Ohio, Texas, and a few other states actually decide who makes the cut. Wouldn’t be ironic if – in an election cycle where the states tripped over each other to be the first to hold primaries – the states that, undeterred, kept their late contests mattered more?

I predict Iowa will feel mighty irrelevant come the party conventions. As for California, enjoy the 15 minutes of fame.

• Finally, there’s a solution to the troubling trend of small logos: Make My Logo Bigger Cream.
• Wired Magazine details the pains Apple went through to make the iPhone happen, and the lasting effect it had on the phone industry.
• For the last three years, one man, Alexander Clauss, has pretty much single-handedly competed against Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple. Although his Web browser, iCab, looked horrendous for the longest time and never gained even the market share that Opera had, it until this month supported decade-old Macs and modern Web standards at the same time. In case you’re wondering: yes, my computer has a copy installed.
• Those fortune cookies you get from any of the hundreds of Chinese buffets in Cincinnati? They’re Japanese.
• My first quarter out here at Stanford, I joined a few hundred freshmen descending on downtown San Francisco for the school’s annual Scavenger Hunt, essentially a denial of service attack on the city’s mass transit infrastructure. Caltrain, the regional commuter railroad, was resilient enough to stuff everyone onboard successfully (albeit unconfortably), but once we got downtown, the Muni bus system was a different story altogether. Apparently Muni’s semi-subway system isn’t any better.
• Today’s big corporations would be ashamed of what their Web presence amounted to back in 1996. My favorite is Nickelodeon’s site, where a pre–Web 2.0 vlogger is stuck in the back seat of the family car “with only her goldfish, Rover.” Yeah.

Thanks to John Gruber and Steve Baldwin.

Also of note are a brief look at Microsoft Bob – which I happen to run on my computer occasionally – and the angry fruit salad known as Windows 1.0.

Incidentally: Windows 2.0 – with Reversi! I love Reversi.

Via Ina Fried of C|Net.

Maybe I’m increasing the signal-to-noise ratio at Facebook?

Those of you who’ve known me for awhile probably know of my contempt for so-called “social networking” sites. If they were merely about getting in touch with long-lost friends and looking up someone’s e-mail address, and maybe even bragging about how many favorite colors you have, I’d have no problem with MySpace, Facebook, and the like. But they’re run by for-profit companies, of course, and that means they need a way to monetize our eyeballs. My eyeballs don’t want to be monetized.

I once described social networking sites as “one giant, conflated popularity contest”. I still think that’s the case with MySpace, but Facebook has since been more cunning about its whole business. You can easily find fault with a service where you’re encouraged to maintain a tell-all profile, add as many “friends” as possible, and chitchat with them, but do nothing much else. Facebook, however, caters not only to the super-vain among us, but also to those who have something better to do there. Applications. Facebook is a bazaar, and there’s something for everyone at a bazaar.

This blog has been my soapbox for nearly six years, but after high school, its readership declined considerably, not helped by the fact that Google relegated it to the second page of results for my name. That’s where Facebook came in. Although I was initially wary of its terms of service, Facebook was an irresistible distribution channel for my blog. I relented, and now it’s where the majority of my readers come from.

People are quitting Facebook cold turkey. But as much as I’d like to follow suit one of these days – having already backed up everything I’ve ever done on the site with the glory that is ScrapBook – I can’t quite leave yet, because along with Facebook would go my audience: you. My profile stays, for now. As much as I dislike their tactics, I know how the record labels must feel, so beholden to Apple for sales.

Soapboxes exist to tell everyone what they didn’t know they wanted to hear. If you stand on one, you scream at the top of your lungs, at every chance you get. It’s too bad Facebook just happens to be holding the donation hat.