For some reason, Google have decided to put large images as the backdrop to their search engine. Not only are they large and grating, but they change over time and it’s horrible.

I’ve turned this off by putting the following in Firefox’s userContent.css:

This gets rid of most of the nasty. However, sadly, the file you need to edit may or may not exist, and could be in a variety of different places, and of course there doesn’t seem to be any good way of doing this easily. First, you need to find your profile folder – and once you’ve located that, the userContent.css file goes in the chrome directory.

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It’s only been a couple of months since I last wrote about the future of Thunderbird, but I’ve been thinking about it again recently. The immediate issue which prompted me to write this was the disturbing news that a potentially bad crasher bug in Thunderbird has gone unfixed in Fedora even though a patch was submitted about a month ago because of sensitivity over trade marks. Although some users on the devel list appear to be dealing out their usual standard of hyperbole on this, it is an extremely difficult position to defend: who knows if the maintainer would have actually released an update by now, but the immediate problem is the mark.

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Release time is coming again soon: Fedora 13 will be out in beta form in around a week, and it’s difficult not to get excited about this release. Fedora 12 went extremely well, at least in my opinion, and thus far my experience with 13 is that it will not be the unlucky-for-some release. For some reason, though, there tends not to be as much buzz around Fedora releases as they really deserve.

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Occasionally there are things that I read about on the web which happen to fit perfectly with some need I have at the time: and “Open Data Protocol”, or just oData, is one of them. I think I got hip to this by reading Miguel’s post on oData, but looking around it has been mentioned in a few other blogs I follow.

What is oData? Put simply, it’s a bit like being able to do SQL queries over the web – for non-technical people it’s deeply disinteresting, but what it effectively promotes is an ability for web-based services to open access to their databases in a pretty straightforward and standards-compliant method.

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Tbird is a software product quite close to my heart: I think it’s important for a number of reasons, not least because it’s one of the few cross-platform mail clients that works well on Windows, and feels comfortable for use in a commercial context. Having Mozilla Foundation spin Thunderbird out to a new commercial entity didn’t fill me with cheer because they were essentially cutting it loose, and Thunderbird 3 didn’t excite me before it was released and hasn’t done since it was released.

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Since the news about Google demanding unfiltered search came out earlier today, I’ve speculated in a number of places that Google have broader reasons for wanting out of China, and that the issue of search – and, by extension, free speech – was not exactly #1 on their list of priorities. In particular, I mentioned on LWN my thoughts on what kind of an effect Chinese infiltration of Google Apps would have on the customer base they’re trying to build.

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The new covenant covering Novell’s Moonlight is up, and unfortunately it looks like people who weren’t happy before still won’t be happy. In a lot of ways, this is the classic caught between two stools situation: one side wants to give up as little as possible, the other wants something as unambiguous as possible.

So, what are the problems? Jason from “MonoNoNo” gave his thoughts here. While I disagree with much of his analysis – e.g., the Media Pack issue is essentially irrelevant for free software users, and the GPLv3-hate is also basically not a problem – many of the points raised are valid. I don’t think they make Moonlight non-free itself, but they prevent people re-using the code, which is not ideal.

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It has been great to see Fedora 12 release this week. Apart from the major kerfuffle over PackageKit (which I understand, even if I don’t recognise the problem), it seems to have gone really well – especially since the reaction in the critical press has been surprisingly un-critical. Hardware support seems to be good, including graphics, which is slightly surprising given the huge amount of change in this area, viz.:

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As part of doing some testing of the upcoming Fedora 12 release, I decided to put it on my EeePC 901 netbook. I had a feeling it would be relatively well supported, and indeed the installation was extremely smooth. I was going to also test the work Peter has been doing on the Moblin packages, but instead I got detoured into Gnome-Shell: my Fedora 12 laptop runs Nouveau (no 3D for me!) and my desktop is ATi but not Fedora 12 yet.

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Years ago, Mitch Kapor invested large sums of money into the OSAF – Open Source Applications Foundation – to come up with a new personal information manager called Chandler. Having burned through the $8 million they got via various means ($5M from Kapor originally), most (all?) of their developers were cut loose early in 2009 as I understand it, leaving the Chandler project – and associated projects – somewhat in limbo.

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