Code Away

I was wondering why Mozilla refuses to support H.264 streaming video format while Chrome and Safari don’t seem to mind it, but Christopher Blizzard and Robert O’Callahan both make compelling arguments in favor of Ogg Theora codec (or rather, against all codecs which are patent-protected and can potentially charge licensing fees).

Both posts argued well against H264. Particularly Christopher Blizzard, who drew a fine analogy with GIF. The scary part is that both of them feel the “fallback” on Flash (from HTML5) is good since it ensures that users have minimum problems. Well, this is quite a surprise (as many point out in the posts’ comments) for someone advocating use of open standards.

Adobe, on the other hand, will definitely extract mileage out of the situation to stress the fact that Flash is the true technology for cross-browser support, be it video or generic rich applications. Nothing wrong with that, they need to fight the battle with everyone hailing HTML5 as a flash-killer.

A crazy battle with 3 sides (3 and a half actually- We forgot Silverlight and IE!) and the end user confused. Welcome to the web.

Last year around this time, I was shouting against the unsecure practices in credit card payments. A couple of friends had told me how “Mastercard SecureCode and VerfiedByVisa” are propping up to take care of this matter.

Needless to say, its a pathetic experience as long as security is concerned. I could set my password during shopping (one would expect logging into a bank or CC account on the bank site for such stuff) with very little information provided for my identification.

My wife has an add on card. She had no idea I had kept any password, and was able to reset and override my password while she was shopping. What a waste!

And around August, these stupid, stupid norms of SecureCode and VBV were mandated for all online payments in India, instead of asking the companies to build something secure rather than just building a database and calling it “securiteeee!”

Fortunately, I don’t have to rant much more. Ross Anderson has published an awesome research paper on this mess that pretty much covers most if not all aspects of this pile of stink. Hope this will someday be read by RBI here in India

They say you should never blog about how-I-was-so-busy-so-couldn’t-blog-OMG-so-sorry. One of the reasons is that there’s no one reading the blog anyway (especially this one), so just chill and get the (d)ucking useful posts out.

But seriously, it feels amazing to get back to this blog and write in some more gyan. My favourite pastime. Except that there’s no particular idiot who’s sitting in front of me actually feeling impressed.

More posts will hopefully follow. In the meanwhile, 2 awesome comics I found: Calamities of Nature and Abominable.cc. Both are excellent. Enjoy.