I just got a message on my WordPress dashboard that Markdown On Save Improved, a plugin I use quite a lot due to its ease of use and flexibility, will no longer be updated. The following message has been added to the description of the plugin on its wordpress.org page as well: "This plugin is deprecated. Use the much-better-supported and more-frequently-updated Markdown module in Jetpack, by the same author. This plugin will not receive any updates or support from here on out."
Here's the problem. I've looked at this Jetpack plugin, and it appears it does way more than I would ever need or even want, and it appears to rely quite heavily on third-party products and services to do many of the things it does, including some of the things I’m already using other plugins to do, such as e-mail subscriptions and social features, many of which I handle internally rather than using a third-party API, with the obvious exception of the social networking stuff, which communicates directly with the sites involved. If I wanted all kinds of third-party products and services, external API’s and bloat, I would still be using Tumblr as my primary blogging platform, rather than hosting my blog on my own. My entire reason for the move was to be able to host my blog myself and customize it exactly the way I want it, with only the features I need, and none I don’t. However, I feel that I’m being pushed more and more toward wordpress.com and Akismet, which although they are run by the same people who wrote WordPress, are still external products and services that perform functions I should be able to handle internally, either with the base WordPress code or with a stand-alone plugin that performs the functionality I need without an external API.
At this point, I have dismissed the notice on my dashboard, and will not be converting my posts to work with the Jetpack Markdown module. However, as WordPress gets future updates, there may eventually come a time where Markdown On Save Improved no longer works. I can only hope that by that time, someone will fork the code from this quite useful plugin, or just maintain what is already available, so that it can continue to be used without the need for a much bigger and less manageable plugin. Otherwise, I would hope that a better stand-alone ([Markdown]https://daringfireball.net/markdown) plugin becomes available, if it isn’t already. I will be looking out for it.
I just got a petition in my inbox today, stating that I should be concerned with the fact that Google reads my e-mail and uses it to sell targeted advertising. While I do think that reading my email, even via computerized methods, and using it for targeted advertising is a bit shady at best, I just can’t convince myself to sign this one. The problem is not the wording of the petition, nor is it the idea that Google should stop reading email and using it to show targeted advertising based on its content. Privacy is indeed a major concern for me, and under most circumstances, a petition like this would have gotten my signature immediately. My problem, however, is the fact that this specific petition didn’t originate from a group of concerned Gmail users, nor did it even originate from any consumer advocacy or similar type of organization that should be concerned with the privacy of its members. No, this Care2 petition lists its author as outlook.com which is of course a Microsoft website that redirects to a Microsoft Live account login page. I have to question Microsoft’s motives at this point, and even question the validity of their claim that Google is in fact reading my e-mail and using it to sell ads. While I’m sure Google does some shady stuff, Microsoft definitely does shady stuff as well, so I wouldn’t put it past them to do something as underhanded as putting a petition on Care2 that accuses their competition of violating my privacy. "Look here. See? we raised concerns about our competitor's business practices that directly affect you, our prospective customers, even though we don’t give a care that our business practices leave a lot to be desired as well, and even though our competitor may or may not even be engaging in the evil business practices that we want to accuse them of doing." So because of this, I refuse to sign this otherwise worthy-looking petition. I’m not about to sign anything that basically says that a company wants me to agree with them that their competitor is doing something wrong. That is unfair to me, it’s unfair to the competitor, and it certainly gives an already disreputable company an unfair advantage in the e-mail market which, I should add, is an area where Microsoft is definitely struggling, and has been for many years. It certainly does remind me of other ways Microsoft has attempted to grow its market share by trashing the competition, and I refuse to be a party to that kind of dirty dealing.
Sonar 2014.1alpha3 is out
First of all, for some months now, I’ve been working alongside Jonathan Nadeau and the ([Manjaro]https://manjaro.org/) team to redesign Sonar GNU/Linux around the Manjaro distribution, which is based on Arch Linux, adding ease of use, stability and a great out-of-the-box experience to the already great and venerable Arch Linux. I am pleased to announce that the redesigned Sonar 2014.1 has reached alpha3, and now includes the long-awaited talking login screen via gdm. It can be downloaded at the Sonar GNU/Linux SourceForge page. As always, it is available for both 32-bit (i686) and 64-bit (x86_64) systems.
TalkingArch gets a new team and a new website
In addition to my work with Sonar, I am very happy to be one of the new maintainers of TalkingArch, an unofficial respin of the Arch Linux live CD/USB image that adds speech and optional braille output so that blind and visually impaired users can perform eyes-free installations of Arch Linux. Chris Brannon, who faithfully maintained the TalkingArch iso since 2008, has named Kelly Prescott and myself as his successors, as he was no longer able to consistently maintain the project. This live image will still maintain consistency with the official install media as much as possible, but should now be synchronized more often, in time with the snapshots of the official install image. I am also providing hosting for the new TalkingArch website and the new support email, as well as seeding the torrent for the iso file. Currently, we still have the iso from August 5, but we are planning to release the next build to coincide with the February Arch snapshot. 2014 will indeed be a great year for Linux, especially Arch and Arch-based distributions.
I've been playing around with SimpleWebRTC.js and the very interesting-looking Talky website, which allows anyone to create a video chat room on-the-fly by entering it in a form or putting the name of the room at the end of the URL. I also looked at the SimpleWebRTC demo, because it seems to be a simpler version of Talky that I could use to get started. Apparently, something like this is extremely easy to implement, and can be set up in as little as 5 minutes. Sadly, it seems they were exaggerating just a bit when they said it could be set up in 5 minutes.
According to the website, SimpleWebRTC.js is a very simple modular library that allows developers to get a very basic WebRTC application up and running quickly and easily. There is some very basic documentation on the front page of the site that shows just how easy it can be, and a link to fork it on GitHub. All good so far. So I figured it would be fun to put a copy on my vps and play with it there. But the HTML and JavaScript on the page for some reason didn’t work for me. No problem, I decided that just for testing purposes, I would rip the source from the demo page. After all, it works there, so it should work on my VPS with minimal modifications. No such luck. Every time I enter anything into the form that is presented on the page, it just loops back to the same page with the same form, unlike the demo, which reloads the page, attaches the room name entered from the form to the end of the URL and appears to start the WebRTC chat room.
The SimpleWebRTC.js website does mention that if I’m planning to do anything other than development or testing, I need to set up my own signaling server. It recommends using a very small JavaScript library called SignalMaster. Fine, at this point, I’m thinking that my problems are caused by the fact that my copy of simplewebrtc.js is still configured to use the development signaling server that is provided for demo/testing purposes only, so I decided to try SignalMaster. And now I find an entirely new problem. I have read just about all there is to read about SignalMaster, which only has a GitHub page and a couple of very short blog posts around the internet, none of which tell me how I’m supposed to get this thing running as a server listening on a port. I did see something that mentioned that I may need node.js, but there were no instructions on how to get the server up and running. In the SignalMaster source tree, there are only 2 json files, a server.js file and the README.md file that shows up on GitHub, which contains very little other than a very short explanation of what it does.
Conclusion
I like the idea, and I like the fact that it's open source, but it took less time to write this rather extensive blog post than it took to find out that there was no way I was going to be able to make SimpleWebRTC.js work on my server. So I guess since it took me several hours of messing with this thing only to find that something that is said to be usable within 5 minutes doesn’t work at all no matter what I try, and since there is too little documentation on how to make the signaling server run, I will have to table this project for now, and hope that the situation will improve with time.
As some of my readers may be aware, I am a huge fan of Markdown, because it makes writing much easier, and because it is human-readable. After all, people have been writing email using something very similar to ([Markdown syntax]https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax) since before Markdown was created, so the transition is quite natural.
I never would have moved my blog to WordPress if not for the Markdown On Save Improved plugin, because I was quite accustomed to writing my posts using Markdown. A big thankyou goes out to Matt Wiebe for putting all the pieces and parts together that make this version of the plugin truly rock!
Now for the good stuff for everyone else. For the first time in it’s 4-year history, The Kyle File now supports Markdown in comments, thanks to Evan Solomon's GitHub-Flavored Markdown Comments plugin, so everyone who reads my posts can easily write comments using Markdown syntax. If you have been writing your comments in plain text or HTML, don’t panic, nothing has changed for you. This is just a third option that can make adding links, lists, headers and other nice formatting to comments much easier. Go ahead and try it out by adding a comment on this post. Have fun!