Execute Permissions on Directories

Tom Schneider, who does cool stuff at the NIH, just passed me this question:

> Ok I used chmod a+X regulon. Didn't know that directories had to be
> executable, that's kinda odd.

I agree, it is odd. It would be interesting to know why that is the case.

I'll cc this to Jeff Haemer, my friend who may know.

Sho 'nuff.

It doesn't make sense to "execute" a directory, so Unix used the extra bit for something else: searchability. Watch:

$ mkdir /tmp/foo
$ echo Molecular machines > /tmp/foo/toms
$ chmod -r /tmp/foo
$ ls -l /tmp/foo
ls: cannot open directory /tmp/foo: Permission denied
$ chmod +r-x /tmp/foo
$ ls -l /tmp/foo
ls: cannot access /tmp/foo/toms: Permission denied
total 0
-????????? ? ? ? ? ? toms

Seeing Digital Diffs with Firefox Downloads

Well, it's nice that Firefox set a new world record -- out of the gate they got 4% of the browser share -- but, to be fair, anything would have been a new Guiness world record. It's a category that never existed before.

This, however, is an interesting graph. Who'd have thought Lithuania would see three times as many downloads as Russia, and that Austria would be an also-ran?

Dead-Tree Lists

I've been keeping to-do lists in RememberTheMilk, and recommend it.
But lately, I seem to have shifted to pen and paper. I don't know what that's about, but yesterday I went to the supply room and got a bound notebook to do it in. I don't really like the feel of the paper, but I'll try that for a while.

On the Other Hand ... Google Docs Does PDF

On the other hand, Google Docs now does PDF, too. Still, just read, but let's see if they beat Open Office to letting me write it. :-)

Yesterday, I got email with an attached .odt document. Gmail asked whether I wanted to look at it as a Google document. I said "Yes," and it came up fine. Another recipient asked for a copy in Word format "so people could read it."

I saved it in "Word format" -- Word 6, Word 95, and Word 97 -- and sent him all three. The first two were only 6 times the size of the .odt document. The third was ten times the size.

Gears Back in Firefox 3

Gears seems to be working in Firefox 3, finally.

It was said that Firefox 3 was going to create its own "Google-Gears-like" stuff, whatever that means. That's nice. I want Gears now, and it was irksome that it stopped working in Firefox 3.

It's back, and I'm glad. It looks like Gears could turn into a bigger deal than I'd imagined, and I thought it was a big deal.

PDF in OpenOffice

You can now edit PDFs in OpenOffice.

Adobe's been noxiously reluctant to give us a PDF writer for Linux. Perhaps this'll fix it. Unfortunately, the extension needed for this requires PDF3.0, and I'm still at 2.4.

Little, Scratch Spreadsheets

I want to do some experiments to time my access to CVSDude. Google Spreadsheets gives me a good place to stash the data.

Access speed for CVSDude has been very slow, in bursts. Is it our internet access, or is it CVSDude? I want to do a bunch of experiments, both at home and at work. Not earth-shaking data, but it's nice to have a place to stash them while I'm doing the work.

Google Docs lets me pop them into one spreadsheet, either place. Nice.