Daily Archives: August 31, 2007

cURL and libcurl

curl on Fedora uses NSS

I noticed curl on Fedora suddenly started using NSS for TLS/SSL, as I believe the first distro out there.

I’ve been under the impression that Debian is the only distro shipping it built with GnuTLS.

I must admit I enjoy seeing more use of curl’s wide support of various underlying technologies, and it also makes it more certain that they will remain working and even get improved as we go. When we add support for things and they never really end up getting used those features just risk serious bitrotting and slowly dying away when the code changes but nobody uses them.

Technology

LED letters on buses

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This week, me and my family have rented a house in the Stockholm archipelago and I’ve been commuting back and forth to work using buses I don’t normally go with (670 and 603 to be precise).

In many of the Stockholm buses there’s a rather big LED-display situated in the ceiling in the front and often somewhere in the middle of the bus, normally displaying the route number and end station and at each stop it displays the name of it while a recorded voice reads out the name of the stop in the speaker system.

While sitting there I noticed how it would display “Pülsundsvägen” instead of “PÃ¥lsundsvägen” (that is with a German letter ü instead of the Swedish letter Ã¥) but I didn’t think much more of it then.

LED display

Another day I happened to go with a complete different bus through a different area and yet again I noticed how the display used the ü instead of Ã¥ while the recorded voice used the letter Ã¥ and I was convinced someone in the bus company must’ve bought a German system or similar and very strangely got satisfied with this very strange-looking graphical choice of letters. The fact that ü was chosen is funny, since we’re kind of used to simply use a in Sweden when Ã¥ isn’t available. I also find it funny that so few people seem to mind.

This morning on the bus when I decided to mention my recent findings to a friend, I was shocked… now this bus actually showed Ã¥ just like it should.

This makes me so puzzled. Was I only dreaming? Do they use different displays/drivers in different buses? Did they do a software upgrade exactly this week that is removing this flaw?

IT Politics

SIS declares voting invalid

SIS logo
IDG reports that yesterday SIS announced that the voting on August 27 was invalid since they say that they have information that indicates one of the voting organizations participated with more than one vote.

With the big official ISO voting coming up already now on Sunday September 2nd, there isn’t enough time for SIS to make a revote so the Swedish official take on the OOXML will be… “no vote”.

With the proved very inefficient working methods of SIS, I figure this is the best outcome anyway since a revote now would just make a senseless race from both camps to register new members to be able to buy the outcome of the next vote!

Also on slashdot.

Microsoft announced that an employee of theirs offered monetary compensation for voting their way and one suspects it has something to do with this invalidating business…

It seems the French OOXML discussions was a lot of fun as well: “something resembling a bar-fight” !