Web brands, e-mail, and their centerpiece services

As an anonymouse reply to a thread

For many things, e-mail is now one of those infrastructure/utility things that is now one of many that complements a different centerpiece service, such as music video delivery and stuff.

My case:
For Yahoo, it used to be GeoCities (remember, that GeoCities offered their own e-mail address, too), and they migrated their GeoCities userbase over. E-mail was then a useful add-on to the Yahoo portal and search. For a time, Yahoo's e-mail was great, until spam overwhelmed everyone.

Yahoo later bought Launch, and became the first large-scale music video delivery service—with ads and all, and the difficult ways to get Windows Media Player to play for sure on Mozilla and then Firefox 1.0. But Launch.com was the property that made Yahoo great. Until they began putting ads between each music video, which was horrid.

(Yahoo later bought flickr and tumblr, and while these have added value, then Yahoo has had a haphazard time getting to monetise those two.)

After Google bought YouTube, which quickly became the primary music video delivery service (along with Vevo), the Yahoo Launch site lost relevance. Maybe only die-hards swear by it. While Flash at the time was way more resource-intensive than a plug-in, then Flash was available for Mac and Linux, and arguably cross-platform on the desktop, thus managing to play videos without a hitch (YMMV). Using Flash from the outset made YouTube great. YouTube is now the centerpiece of all of Google's web properties.

A similar service to YouTube was msn video, but it was a pioneer vaguely similar to Launch; while msn video had plenty of user-created videos, I don't recall it ever having music videos.

* For Google, the centerpiece is YouTube. E-mail is still great, and many people also use Google Docs, and some even Google+. Android complements and extends the whole bunch.
* For Microsoft, it's probably a combo of Office Online, OneDrive, Skype on the web and a few other tidbits.
* For Yahoo, the centerpiece services are news, flickr, and tumblr (in no particular order).
* Apple could be best described as a non-service. It does offer services all right, but none of them has killer web features compared to above players.

Both Yahoo and Microsoft did social networking, and for a time, both were reasonably good, but seemed to have been shuttered after Facebook became a thing.

The Google Plus app won't work in Android 2.3 any longer. Use Firefox.

This came up as an issue for me recently, and I wrote this as a reply to another person who wasn't able to access Google+ content in their app anymore. This post is meant for seasoned Android users.

Since mid-to-late February 2017, the Google Plus app wouldn't work any longer in my phone, which runs on Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread, and can't be upgraded to a newer Android version.

While the Google Plus website still works on the mobile web, the stock web browser ("Internet") is far too outdated to visit Google+ and other modern sites.

The solution — or workaround, if you will — is to download and install Firefox for Android. Try from Google Play Store first. If that doesn't work, you need to download Firefox from the Mozilla archive.

• Temporarily switch on third-party app installs.
• Below is a breakdown of which Firefox version is compatible with which combination of ARM CPU architecture and older Android version. Each Firefox version links to the appropriate Mozilla archive directory.

ARMv6 devices —

Android 2.2, 2.3: Firefox 31.3.0esr

ARMv7 devices —

Android 2.2: Firefox 31.0

Android 2.3 (on a slower phone, <1 GHz): 44.0.2

Android 2.3: Firefox 47.0

Then from the Mozilla Add-ons website, install an adblocker to block ads. I suggest uBlock Origin, because it has built-in support for anti-adblock lists; this needs to be turned on separately, but works.

A small ARM primer

Android devices' CPUs are by and large ARM microprocessors, as these were chosen for their low-power features.

The ARM family consists of different architectures, each of which is named ARMvX, where v stands for 'version', and X is the architecture version number.

CPU architectures can be incompatible with one another, as each have different instruction sets, and programs made for one architecture won't run on the other (or there's a heavy performance penalty).

Most Android device CPUs are based on ARMv7-A (usually shortened to ARMv7) or greater, but a bevy of older devices have ARMv6.

Consequently, not all Android device CPUs are based on ARMv7 or greater, and that's why it's important to pay attention to which architecture an app was compiled for.

ARMv7 is subdivided into a series of architecture profiles, of which Android devices use ARMv7-A (Application profile). The ARMv7-A grouping is also known as Cortex-A.

A deeper subdivision in each architecture is a core, and these are named differently. Cores within the same architecture are mostly compatible between one another, but differ in performance.

Each device manufacturer or maintainer of a compatible Android fork makes their own compilation of the operating system; first for a particular architecture, and then optimised for each processor type, graphics adapter (GPU), and other hardware features.

I'm specifically pointing cores out because of naming similarities between cores and architectures; for example, ARMv7 should not be confused with ARM Cortex-A7, since the former is an architecture, and the latter a core that uses said architecture.

Respectively, ARM11 is the microprocessor core using the ARMv6 architecture; as ARM Cortex-A5 and ARM Cortex-A7 are under ARMv7.

Some URL entry line edit commands in Lynx for Windows

Ctrl + a — move cursor to start of line
Ctrl + e — move cursor to end of line
Ctrl + d — delete next character

Ctrl + b — delete one word back (to left) from cursor position
Ctrl + f — delete one word forward (to right) from cursor position
^ These are useful for long URLs

Uploading files via Firefox in Android 2.3

This is very much a quick-and-dirty post, so that I wouldn't forget about it. As my phone is also currently charging while off, I can't check out some information pertaining to this post. Some time after the phone will have charged, I'll update this post accordingly.

So, yesterday, I had this need to upload a file to a project in Github via Firefox in Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

Now, Github is quite a modern website, and in Android 2.3, the logical browser for visiting Github and other state-of-the-art sites is Firefox for Android or a derivative, such as GNU IceCat, Orfox, or Adblock Browser.

I have two browsers in my phone: GNU IceCat 38.8 and Firefox 44.0. Both have NoScript installed, and Github servers were whitelisted in both. Separate issues with uploading are covered at the end of this post.

The crux of the problem is having a filepicker that works.

Typically, an Android user gets a file activity dialog to pick an app through which to select a file; such as Gallery for photos and videos, or somesuch.

For a simple text file, things are a bit more complicated, but I've discovered two kinds of filepickers that I associated with after having installed two separate apps.

• One filepicker, "Choose file" with blue folder icons, seems to be related to VimTouch, a version of Vim for Android, because I noticed that filepicker after installing this great text editor.
• Another filepicker, "Find file" or "Find command" (I might err with its title) is adorned with the Terminal Emulator icon.

Both VimTouch (alternatively spelled 'Vim Touch') and Terminal Emulator were installed through F-Droid, a repository of free and open source apps for Android.

The filepicker that works, is the one I associate with Terminal Emulator.

Unfortunately, I don't know beyond my memory of my app installation activities, and beyond one app icon about how to find out which app or handler these two particular filepickers are actually associated with.

Upload issues.

Resolved on 28.04.2017.

With IceCat, there were issues relating to uploading files to GitHub, whereby file upload failed with an error. File upload to GitHub worked with Firefox for Android, but for some odd reason, did not work in IceCat.

Now, I use NoScript in Android Firefox and in IceCatMobile (based on Firefox with very small changes). Since both have slightly different NoScript whitelists, then I attributed the issue to an incomplete NoScript whitelist in IceCatMobile. But it was not at fault, and the problem was much simpler, though no less esoteric.

Turns out, that all other things being almost equal, GitHub does not recognise the Firefox-based GNU IceCat browser when uploading files, if an IceCat-only desktop user-agent (UA) string is used.

The solution is to change in IceCat's about:config page the Gecko-based user-agent override affecting the Github domain to that of Firefox, leaving the version number intact.

<Moot:> Possible issues wrt NoScript

The reason for that, is, that I edit NoScript whitelists in Vim Touch so as to get a very fine-grained whitelist on a subdomain level (3rd-level domains and below, such as sub.domain.tld ), because the browser extension in Android does not provide such functionality.

The rationale for subdomain-level whitelisting is, that my phone is rather underpowered, and subdomain-level whitelists in Firefox/derivatives make it possible to allow advanced site functionality, and at the same time, to block script-based ads and trackers. In addition, it's possible to switch off very resource-intensive site functionality by blocking certain subdomains of a website. Such features are impossible in the stock Android browser, the rendering engine of which dates back to 2011.

(I'm often contemplate writing a separate post about all that.)

So, the NoScript whitelist for IceCat is typically more fine-grained; yet oddly, file upload to Github actually worked with Firefox.

Posting URLs with multiple concurrent dots in YouTube comments

In a YouTube discussion under one of the Star Trek-related video clips, a commenter ha posted an address to a Memory Alpha page into the comments, but the address to the article was truncated, because it contained three concurrent dots:

Intended address:

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek_is...

and as it turned out in truncated form:

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek_is.

Note, that the two last dots are gone, and if the address is clicked on at YouTube comments, the browser is taken to a "404/Not found" page in Memory Alpha.

The article about what Star Trek is, actually does contain three dots at the end of its address, but the YouTube comments system doesn't like it, as I found this out through my Google+ notifications on the desktop and the (linked) comments at desktop YouTube.

The somewhat unorthodox solution to avoiding dots from being truncated is to insert the URL with those three ending dots and replace the two last-most dots with their percent-encoded representations. Case in point:

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek_is.%2E%2E

That one dot there may remain.

The percent-encoded values are available from Windows Character Map, a similar program in UNIX/Linux, or through any Unicode character table available on the web.

One can also try with

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Star_Trek_is.%2E.

— with "typed dot | precent-encoded dot | typed dot" after "_is", but there cannot be any two or more concurrent normally-typed dots.

Truncation of characters in addresses pasted (or typed) into YouTube comments can also apply to other web addresses with multiple concurrent characters, but I do not know, which types of characters are more affected or less. I could lay a claim, that special and non-alphanumeric characters that are used in programming, are treated with a greater level of scrutiny.

Long-lasting designs

This is a reply to a post on YouTube discussing the longevity of Miranda-class ships in the fictional Star Trek universe.

Long-lasting old designs in various complex technology branches is really nothing new.

wrt this and the car industry, then off the top of my head, I can cite as examples the Volkswagen Beetle (1938–2003, 65y), the VW microbus (1949–2013, 64y), and Citroën 2CV (1948–1990, 42y).

Fiat 124 (1966) was transmogrified into Soviet Zhiguli/Lada cars, production of which design ended in 2012 in Russia, but continued well into 2014 in Egypt. With 2014 in mind, that's 48 years of mostly continuous production, though in that same year of 2014, the plant in Egypt had a fire

With trams, it's the PCC Streetcar (1936), numerous modifications of which are still in service. I don't know, whether any new PCC-spec trams are still built.

The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress had its first flight in 1952, and these planes are still in service.