UbuntuCat

Most people who know me in person (what some people refer to as “in real life”) don’t know that I have an online alter ego. Participating in a social networking site like Facebook does not mean you have an online alter ego (unless the people you are “friends” with are people you’ve never met in person). Your online alter ego is the person you are to people you have “met” online and even befriended online and had arguments with online but have never met in person.

I try, believe it or not, to make my online alter ego as much like the in-person me as possible, but somehow people who “meet” alter ego me don’t always react to me the same way in-person people do. A number of factors contribute to the difference in reactions:

• Whether we admit it or not, when we meet people in person, we judge them by how they look—and not just their facial features: we judge them by physical stature, mannerisms, gestures, tonal inflections, eye movements, and other social cues.
• Online venues tend to cut down on a lot of the small talk that happens in in-person social situations. People online have shared with me their sleeping habits, political opinions, sexual orientations, pet peeves, angers, and joys without asking me where I went to school or how long I’ve lived in the Bay Area.
• Online venues offer anonymity, which leads to more honesty… and sometimes unwarranted abuse.
• Written language allows you to put more thought into what you say. You can edit, you can proofread, and you can mull over before anyone even has an idea that you are even considering offering an opinion.

You’d think that with all those factors involved, people would think more highly of my online alter ego than they do of me. Such is not the case most of the time. I’m a friendly guy. People in person tend to like me (or at least do an awfully good job of pretending they do). Online, though, I’ve had people accuse me of being sexist, racist, homophobic, too politically correct, pedantic, lacking in a sense of humor, and enforcing draconian policies (I’m a moderator of an online forum). Oddly enough, I’ve had people accuse me of opposite things. Some people have said I’m anti-Linux. Others have said I’m a Linux fanboy. Some have said I’m too pro-Gnome. Others have said I’m biased in favor of KDE. Some have lorded over my newbieness with their “leetness” (re: elitism), and others have considered me to be very knowledgeable in the geek realm.

All of this makes me wonder if some of the people online whom I’ve grown to like and respect would actually get along with me in person. I suspect probably not. Many of the people I connect with in the Ubuntu world or even through this blog are anti-gay gun-toting right-wingers, or at least present themselves that way. Some of them drink too much beer.

Well, such is life… and online life. I’ll close with a message from my online alter ego: If you don’t read me laughing, it’s not because I lack a sense of humor; it’s because your joke wasn’t funny.

In The Ethics of Adblocking, I talked about not liking obnoxious ads (Flash and banner ones). When I started getting close to exceeding my bandwidth allocation for the Psychocats web hosting, I started moving the images to ImageShack, which worked for a while, but their image hosting can be a bit unreliable. I’ve considered switching to another web host, one which has a higher default bandwidth allocation, but making the move would be extremely complicated.

So I’m opting to go with some less obnoxious ads on my site (text-based, unobtrusive). I’m hoping that will help generate enough revenue that I can actually start hosting images (and larger ones) on my own host and then pay for the bandwidth costs. We’ll see how it turns out. If it turns out well, I’ll move all the image hosting back to my own host. If it doesn’t, I’ll keep it all on ImageShack.

For Linux distributions, Firefox seems to be the web browser of choice. It also is the most popular non-Internet Explorer web browser for Windows users. Sometimes people gripe about Firefox, though. It’s slow. It’s a RAM hog. It crashes.

Well, I hear a lot of hype about Opera (a closed source web browser that is W3C-compliant), and I thought I’d give it a go. Here’s what I found.

What I like in Opera:

• It’s fast, undeniably much faster than Firefox in initial load, in page rendering, in browsing back to previous pages.
• Cookie management is better. I like the ability (as in Galeon and Konqueror, too) to accept or reject every cookie as it comes and make decisions about sites to blacklist or whitelist as I’m visiting those sites.
• I like having an integrated email client and web browser. And Opera’s email client also has a universal inbox (like Mac OS X’s Mail and unlike Thunderbird), which is a great thing for people like me who have four or five accounts we check regularly.
• Key letter searches. I love the “I’m Feeling Lucky” search in Firefox, but it’s also cool to be able to do searches with key letters. That way, I can do multiple searches from the address bar without needing to have a separate seach window with a whole bunch of search engine icons to scroll through.
• Theme installation and preview is easier. I can install themes and see how they look without restarting the web browser.

As you can see, Opera has a lot going for it.

What I’m lukewarm about in Opera
Some features may appeal to others, but they didn’t mean much to me—Speed Dial and Widgets, for example. I don’t dislike those features, but I’m not impressed by them either. Speed Dial offers me nothing over bookmarks, and widgets just confuse me, since they are not like extensions. They appear to exist outside the browser. And some people make a big deal about mouse gestures. I tried them once, and I don’t see what the hoopla’s about.

What I dislike in Opera:

• I’m now a Gnome user, and Opera is a QT application and doesn’t integrate well. And, even though it is a QT app, it still suffers from the same inability to preview images in the file upload dialogue that Firefox suffers from.
• The tab-closing behavior doesn’t jive with my browsing method. I often keep a link open that I’ll get back to later, and I open other links and browse those. In Firefox, I can do this. In Opera, I can’t. Every time I close a tab, it’ll keep returning to the one I’d left open for later. And, yes, I’ve tried all the different options.
• Opera has an annoying system tray icon that won’t go away.
• If I do Control-click in Firefox, the link will open in a new tab in the background. In order to get the link to open in a new tab in the background in Opera, I have to Control-Shift-click. Since opening tabs in the background is something I do quite often, the need for this extra keystroke is annoying.
• The built-in image blocker doesn’t allow you to block certain images. Not a big deal, since it gets most images, but I like the control of being able to block any image on the page, not just the ones Opera considers block-worthy.
• Even though I like the email client, I don’t like the way it’s visually integrated into Opera. I would love to have a tab that’s the full email client, including the list of mail folders. The way it is now, Opera includes the list of mail folders as part of the web browser sidebar. So if you have that sidebar open, it’ll be open for every tab you look at. And if you close the sidebar to get rid of the annoying sidebar icons, you also end up closing the folder list.
• I like the search by key letter function, but adding search engines isn’t intuitive. I had to do a search to find out how to do it.

My verdict: It’s pretty good, but I think I’ll stick with Firefox. It has more to do with personal habits than actual empirical deficiencies, but personal habits matter. After all, I’m the one using the web browser, so it should fit my needs. If I ever were to move away from Firefox, I think Seamonkey might be more to my liking than Opera. But if you’ve ever been curious about Opera, there hasn’t been a better time to try it. It is loaded with features.

Just now, one of my co-workers asked me (over the cubicle wall) “Did you hear about the security flaws in Firefox?” I told her that I had. Then I composed the following email to her:

You can read more about the flaw here:
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/securityfix/2007/07/…

Flaws are constantly discovered (usually a few every month) in every web browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera), and they’re usually patched pretty quickly. Mozilla tends to patch flaws within a week of their having been discovered. Microsoft sometimes takes months to patch their Internet Explorer flaws.

No matter what browser you use, it’s always a good idea to avoid any sites you don’t trust and to keep your browser version up to date.

You can see from the release notes of the previous versions of Firefox that almost all the new releases are due to the patching of security flaws in previous versions:
http://www.mozilla.org/projects/security/…

Hope that helps!

I don’t ever want to make it sound as if one company (Mozilla or Microsoft) is the “good guy” or the “bad guy” or that one browser is a good browser and the other bad. Firefox vulnerabilities, for some reason, tend to make headlines more than Internet Explorer ones, even during the times that Internet Explorer has more vulnerabilities, more severe vulnerabilities, or a longer time between patches. I don’t want people getting the impression that Firefox is inherently more insecure than Internet Explorer (when some might argue the opposite to be true… and actually have a good case).

Bottom line: most end-users are not going to install NoScript and whitelist sites one by one. Even I’ve grown tired of doing that. It’s always a fine line between convenience and security, so I think the advice I gave was the most sound I could give in trying to find that balance—Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what browser you use. Just don’t visit fishy (or phishy) sites, and always keep your software up to date.

Anything anyone want to add?

I hate ads. Radio ads. TV ads. Billboard ads. Internet ads. Advertisements bother me, especially when I catch myself singing McDonald’s’ stupid “da-da-da-da-da” jingle.

Back when my wife and I (way before we were even engaged) first started exploring basic website design (HTML… not even with CSS), we used to use money-cost-free hosting sites. These sites were usually short on space (5 MB or 20 MB) and completely lacking in reliability (host here today, gone tomorrow). The difference between a “free” and a not “free” host? Banner ads. The “free” host would have a banner ad (usually flashing), and the not “free” host would allow you to make your website look the way you wanted it to.

We soon realized it was worth shelling out to a real web host to get real web space that wouldn’t have a flashing banner ad on it. So now we use ICDSoft to host our websites. It isn’t really that expensive when compared to other things we shell out for (DirectTV, cell phone calls, groceries, bus passes, etc.), and it makes sense that we would pay for it.

Do I want to pay for every site I visit? Of course not. But here’s the thing—most sites want you to visit. They’re not going to charge you to visit the site, because creating any kind of deterent to you visiting the site is contrary to the site’s goals (unless it’s someone’s relatively private blog that she wants only friends and family to see).

Ads are like bonus revenue. “Hey, they happen to be visiting our site anyway. We might as well make some money off of it.” And, really, websites (unlike magazines, TV shows, and movies) are pretty cheap to host. If you’re really that hard up on cash and have something valuable to offer the web-viewing public, how about just putting a nice (and inoffensive-looking) little donation button at the bottom of your page? I’ve donated to sites that are worthwhile.

I’ll be honest. There are a couple of times when Psychocats almost went over its bandwidth limit because of the screenshot tutorials for Ubuntu that I host there. I had a few options:

1. Ask for donations.
2. Put up ads
3. Pay the extra money for the exceeded bandwidth
4. Make the tutorials screenshot-less
5. Host the images elsewhere

In the grand scheme of things, if people are going to donate money to something Ubuntu-related, I’d rather they donate to the forums or directly to the Ubuntu project. Even though I don’t mind paying for some basic hosting, I don’t want to pay the penalty for exceeding the allocated bandwidth. This is coming out of my own pocket, after all. The whole point of the tutorials is to have screenshots (for most of them, anyway), so I couldn’t get rid of the images. So I ended up hosting the images at ImageShack, which is, of course, ad-funded (partially, at least).

So why is ImageShack okay in my book? For the same reason that Google is okay in my book. ImageShack and Google are not obnoxious about their ads. Google’s ads are text-only and off to the side. ImageShack has ads only if you click on the thumbnail to get a bigger image, and even then the ads are below the image.

That’s what it really boils down to, though. If you’re going to use ads, you need the right balance of content (to draw them in) to advertisements (to keep them away or adblocking). The only reason AdBlock was developed in the first place was the web deteriorating to the point of being nigh-unusable. Flashing banner ads were everywhere. They were covering (on top of) the actual text of news stories. Pop-up ads were popping up, popping under. You expect to see ads in a magazine, but rarely do they have pop-up ads that don’t allow you to read actual magazine articles.

So, no, as both a webmaster and viewer, I do not find anything unethical about blocking advertisements. If your site is worth visiting, charge people actual money, put in unobtrusive ads, or ask for donations… or just suck it up and pay for it yourself.

Further Reading:
AdBlock revisited
Is Ad Blocking Ethical?
Why Adblock is bad for the “free” Internet