Month: November 2011

Egypt Violence on Eve of Elections

I’ve been quietly watching the events unfold in Egypt as they headed towards their elections. Admittedly this was because I was interested in seeing how Mahmoud Salem (better known to many online as Sandmonkey) fared in his attempt to become the parliamentary representative for Heliopolis. Despite the recent troubles, I do hope he succeeds. I think he’s a dose of sanity that Egypt needs to rebuild from the Mubarak regime and the military council.

I’m disappointed and saddened at seeing violence erupt in Egypt again such a short time ahead of their elections. My hope is that the current military junta (which has allowed the violence to occur, IMO) will not use this as an excuse to subvert democracy in Egypt out of fear, ignorance, or desire to to hold onto power or play king makers. The military’s reputation has already been damaged in Egypt with recent attacks (both militarily and in the state run media) against Coptic Christians and their Muslim supporters (yes, you read that correctly. Not all Muslims hate Christians.) resulting in their deaths and once more now attacking protesters legitimately frustrated with what is happening in their country.

Hopefully, all of this will work out. We will simply have to wait and see. It is looking dim though with the fresh violence in Tahrir.

ScribeFire

I have to say I despise the new ScribeFire Next (i.e. ScribeFire 4), particularly it’s UI layout (especially since there’s no option to change it atm. I know, I’ve checked). Worse is the options section doesn’t even have a button to confirm changes, so you have to go recheck it to see if the changes you wanted went into effect. Complete fail.

The part that really pisses me off is it updated to v4 without my input. Unrequested updates are my number one pet peeve with any product regardless of whether its a small blogging app or a major corporate CAD package, particularly with regards to applications on the internet since it is so easy to have malicious code.

I suspect I’m going to look for a new blogging app just on principle for the unrequested update alone. I don’t condone anyone changing anything on my computer without my knowledge. Makes me understand better why Firefox 8 automatically disables third-party apps until users give the go ahead.  May not stop the unrequested update BS going on but still nice to think at least someone seems to get it. As it is I’m waiting for a bit before going to FF8, just to make sure some of the add ons I prefer have had time to update to the newest release of the browser.

Okay, enough useless ranting.