As noted by Bob Sutor, an IBM employee, Mozilla Firefox will now be the default browser for the entire staff at IBM. He stated that a few thousand employees used Firefox by choice on their Linux, Mac and Windows machines, but the browser will now be installed by default on all their laptop and desktop images, extending to their ~400,000 employees.

Sutor has even stated,

Any employee who is not now using Firefox will be strongly encouraged to use it as their default browser. All new computers will be provisioned with it. We will continue to strongly encourage our vendors who have browser-based software to fully support Firefox.

This is significant because, working as a computer technician for a local school board in the past, we had to run software such as IBM/Tivoli Remote Deployment Manager and IBM/TLC School Connect to provision Windows images to broken thin-clients and manage their Active Directory set up, respectively. When I used my Ubuntu laptop to connect, Firefox would struggle to display a couple pages and I would be forced to use a working thin-client just to connect.

Did it make sense that School Connect only worked with Internet Explorer? Well, maybe, since it connects to a Windows-only Active Directory server, but that's really restricting your audience, like DRM for web browsers (you buy an MP3 on an iPod and you can only play that MP3 on an iPod, not any other music player or device). Was this Firefox's fault? No. I looked at the source code (don't forget, I'm a web developer) and noticed the software's dependence on archaic Microsoft technologies and closed standards. IBM pushing Firefox internally will only force this software monolith to program web-based software with open standards, which will allow fair competition between web browsers and not lock any user out from using their software (including us dolorous computer technicians). I am hoping this will also push my local school board and former employer into not only adding Firefox to their Windows images, but making Firefox their default browser for thousands of students and staff in due time. I have noted to the Manager of Information Technology, my former boss, that Google has dropped their support for Internet Explorer 6, so at least they'll be getting rid of that non-open-standard-complying piece of &%$! technology.

I find this not only a win for Firefox, but a win for open standards in web development, allowing us web developers to breathe a little easier while programming and designing web sites, knowing that all our features are supported once it is released into the wild.

Many people are sick of Facebook and their lack of care for privacy. Websites have been setup to make users aware of privacy policy changes, new features Facebook has added (for better or worse) and even JavaScript programs that analyze how open your Facebook profile really is.

A group of four young programmers from NYU's Courant Institute have started a Facebook-killer project to decentralize the web, called Diaspora.

They have raised almost $200,000 using KickStarter.com when there goal was a mere $10,000. They have plans to make the software distributed (very git-like, if you're a programmer), allowing users and companies to set up their own servers, all running off what I assume will be diaspora.com (except that domain has already been squatted).

The project will be licensed AGPL, hosted on GitHub and feature end-to-end encryption for communication between servers and the clients that use the software. Their plans for the first release are:

• Full-fledged communications between Seeds (Diaspora instances)
• End to end GPG
• External Service Scraping of most major services (reclaim your data)
• Version 1 of Diaspora’s API with documentation
• Public GitHub repository of all Diaspora code

Followed by:

• OpenID
• Voice-over IP
• Distributed Encrypted Backups
• Instant Messaging protocol
• UDP integration

for their future releases.

That's a lot of nerd speak for:

Diaspora knows how to securely share (using GPG) your pictures, videos, and more. When you have a Diaspora seed of your own, you own your social graph, you have access to your information however you want, whenever you want, and you have full control of your online identity.

So if you are sick of worrying about Facebook privacy and believe in open source software, why not pledge a dollar or two to their cause or simply tell your friends?

They plan to have their first release up and running by September 2010.

Work Environment

For work, I have to set up my own development environment that is able to run my employer's code on my own laptop. It's PHP/MySQL, so it's a simple LAMP setup.

sudo aptitude install apache2 php5 mysql-server libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql php5-curl phpmyadmin

Of course, then I have to modify some config files, pull down the MySQL DB for testing and change the document root.

But wait, what about the settings in PHP? Remember magic quotes or register globals? Well installing PHP 5.3 in Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, these are of course turned off by default, but my work requires them. What about other settings though? I don't want to have to keep chasing bugs as I try and develop/hack on my employer's code. Luckily I had this exact same problem with another employer and came up with a solution: compare two phpinfo files.

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

This function is a special function in PHP that dumps environment and config information into a table. The problem is, when it comes to comparing two from different servers, it's long and the markup is extensive.

The Script

The code I use are recycled functions found on the Internet (referenced of course) mixed in with some cURL and loops. The script is able to fetch two phpinfo files from any web accessible URL, including ones that need an htaccess (also known as basic authentication) password, and spit out differences between the two files.

You can download the code and see an example of two readily accessible phpinfo files found on the Internet (note: don't make your phpino file readily accessible on the Internet). Just make sure to edit lines 313 and 314 to the two phpinfos you need to compare and run.

If you see a blank screen, it's probably because php5-curl isn't install. Run
sudo aptitude install php5-curl

Good luck!