I’ll defend it to the end, but I’d never use it myself
Jonas Luster: “Today I fired my Butler.” No FUD (beyond what’s reasonable, anyway). No fallacies. No attempt to control you. That’s what we’re capable of, on a good day.
Jonas Luster: “Today I fired my Butler.” No FUD (beyond what’s reasonable, anyway). No fallacies. No attempt to control you. That’s what we’re capable of, on a good day.
I understand your position. And I guess I’d argue differently, if the generalized position out there wouldn’t be one of ”can do no harm”. There’s one righteous argument, and that’s the ”let me do with my browser what I want”. It’s a working one, and in the context of an educated user-base, it’s even a very powerful one.
Yet, aside from it, there’s the ”benevolence” argument, and that one I don’t buy. Not for a second. If I were to condemn any approach of changing the presentation and/or behavior of a site on the client end, I couldn’t argue in favor of running proxies that strip Google Adwords or other ads, that allow visually impaired users to browse, etc. Hey, I’ve most likely written favelets/booklets that screw with pages in a much more insensible manner. That’s not the issue, at least not in my book.
The problem arises, for me, when the argument (and that one isn’t yours, at least I don’t understand you to argue this) shifts from ”I can do what I want with my browser” to ”Google knows best”. The ”Butler” argument is such a slippery slope. It insinuates, by visual proxy, a complete benevolence on the side of Google. And that one I don’t buy. What do I buy? I buy into the right of every client out there to render as its master commands. I even agree with the behavioral changes, based on the fact that there’s a conscious act involved to trigger them.
Where we disgree, it seems, is on the question wether Google is doing the ”Right Thing” or just something that’s OK. I believe the implementation is flawed, the arguments are the same I keep hearing from Spammers, and the question is, if I should be thrilled about it. I am not. If you’re checking my site, I am not disallowing it, I am not even attempting to circument it. But that doesn’t mean I am not seeing similarities to trends I was, and am, opposed to.
I never quite seem to get the right number of words: it feels like I’ve written ten thousand, so I decide to go for pithy for a while, and wind up sounding like I’m saying something completely different.
There never was any possibility that I would use Google’s toolbar, because it doesn’t work in my browser. If it did work in my browser, I still wouldn’t use it, because it’s lame and limited. Linking ISBNs to just Amazon is like autolinking raw URLs in comments: better than nothing, but still pretty lame. I’m idly fiddling with a Greasemonkey script to run them through the xISBN resolver, and then let me go where I want, libraries, Powells, abebooks, half.com… the UI is going to be awful, and it’s going to make me bounce up and down in my chair and point at the screen and giggle. Google’s version is boring.
But even if it worked in my browser, and wasn’t boring, I wouldn’t use it, because it’s closed. I installed WinPCap and Ethereal, because I wanted to know what it was phoning home about when it autolinks, to see whether I could borrow any of its methods for looking stuff up to see if it’s worth linking, but it’s going back over https, and I don’t know how to find out what it’s saying. I don’t remember where IE toolbars install, but wherever it is, it’s a binary, not interpreted, and not source. If I want to change it, I can’t; if I think it’s broken I can’t fix it.
But I don’t have to use it: I write terrible code, but when I don’t get bored too quickly, it’s effective enough code: anything I really want to autolink I can autolink myself. That’s great for me, but not for most of my friends, or for people I don’t know, who need someone else to write their software. It would be cool if someone would write an extensible butler for them, with a non-geeky UI for changing to link to wherever they want, and if it was someone who didn’t want any money whatsoever, and was also someone with such a reputation that they wanted to preserve that it would be safe to assume they weren’t pulling any tricks. That sounds to me like the sort of person who tends to only barely exist, and generally working on open source stuff, not IE. For the IE masses, their best bet is probably someone who is willing to write it in exchange for just a fair shake at getting some more traffic from it, with a reputation to preserve. Like, say, Google.
But what I actually wanted to say was just ”hey, Jonas actually looked at it, and has actual reasons why he personally chooses not to use it; we aren’t all just fearmongers and slippery-slope threateners! yay us!” Some days, just seeing a well-reasoned post, whether or not I agree, is enough to make me claim it as a victory, or at least a counterbalance, for the whole medium.
A comment on my site in a thread about Trillian suggests that you can use a debug version on wininet.dll to see what is going over SSL sessions.
Seems hopeful, but no luck so far, thanks to rather odd behavior trying to replace the locked
wininet.dll- I rename the existing one, it seems to accept being renamed, but when I try to copy in the debug version, it claims there’s already something with than name, and indeed there is: both the renamed version, and the undead original are still there, and saying ”yes, please copy this over that one” doesn’t actually do it.But surely someone else will do it, before long, and save me the trouble?
You need to turn off Windows System File Protection.
Since I don’t know which OS you’re on, you could try this: Turn Off File Protection In Sp2
Phil, regarding the xisbn book resolver:
I want to do the same thing with Greasemonkey.
Want to compare ideas and/or work on it together?
I realize that in general, user scripts are so simple as to not need collaboration. ;)
Please reply to the email addy if you’d like to.