Khawaga Album Legacy

If you mainly use MAC or some *NIX system, you'll find most of this information inadequate. Even though I started with an Apple II computer - a tribute to this can be found with my 404 Page - and quite often have been working with Macs in job situations, my pile of software depends on MS Windows. I have seriously tried converting to Linux, and as for internet use it suits me well, but open source software has a significant lack of ability in grafical production. But still, you may read this, I hope. ME devoting my time writing this ... YOU scumming it. Deal?

KHAWAGA ALBUM has been out there somewhere for bloody ages, compared to the average lifetime of a "normal" webpage. It's a restless bastard. It's been hosted by several webhosts through these years, often for free. No such service still exists. Now it's come home at last, as I decided to merge it with my norwegian bulletin board on khawaga.com as the "Busker's Songbook" division. For many years it was very rarely updated. In 2001 I added the "Technical Stuff" section. In 2007 I quoted paragraph by paragraph and updated them. And already NOW, only *11* years later, I have to adjust it! Time sure passes by ...

I left XHTML as soon as HTML5 were accepted by the most common browsers. XHTML was a blind alley. And that CONTEXT editor was revealed to fuck up UTF-8. The project was discontinued before 2010 due to the developer's lack of license for Borland Delphi's newer editions. For Windows I use Notepad++, for Linux gVIM and for Mac nothing. I regard Mac-users as weirdoes.

Cockroaches will survive a nuclear war, as well as Keith Richards and Paul Lutus. He's still up and go, and that Arachnophilia is still strange. Who cares? In this bloggin' world only nerds and oldtimers build websites. That article was never translated, because MS changed their strategy from conquering the internet to occupation of the cloud.

That veteran PC and scanner was lost in a fire accident, but were stored away years before it happened. I got me an USB scanner, of course, as prices grew sane. I still use PS6 now and then: see next section.

Both Adobe and Corel software are now only available by *renting* them, not *buying* a license, and you have to be connected to the net to use them. This is exploitation.
I still use my licensed PS6 and Draw12. They serve me well, on OS < Win10. And the heck I want to move beyond Win7. About Inkscape and Gimp, they both have improved, and both will import newer files from that bloated cloudware. But there has been one major change in my habits: of French origin, XnView entered the scene in 2005, and the popularity rapidly grew. A clone of ACDSee, free for non-commercial use, it was originally only a picture browser, but is now almost a professional image editor. It still hasn't possibility for drawing and handling layers, but I bet it will come. The XnViewMP works on Lin/Win/Mac, and is even portable. Go for it HERE. Sorry, Irfan Skiljan: you're only second choise now.

Nowadays, it doesn't matter what browser you use. It all depends on who you want to be tracked by. What some call "private tabs/windows" is an illution. All your browsing data are destined servers controlled by either MS, Google or Apple. Maybe with the exception of Firefox, but that Mozilla creature is dumbfounding hard to deal with.
The company and browser OPERA is a tragedy. After the birth of Internet, norwegian web supplier Televerket (later Telenor) started a project building a new web browser. They lost interest, and two central persons in the project took the codes with them to form a new company. The result was "Opera", based on the kernel "Presto" and later on the java-script engine "Carakan", and totally different from Netscape and IE. It was standard-compliant to W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) unlike IE, user-friendly unlike Netscape and tiny, unlike both. It included features never seen in other browsers, and gained reputation as "webdesigners favorite". It stayed that way until version 12, 2012. By then, the founder Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner lost majority in the management. The company had grown too large, and profit had become first priority, not making a good product. His founding partner Geir Ivarsøy died in 2006, and he was the head of Presto. Jon quit as both stockholder and as a part of the management. Then the road was wide open: Opera dropped "Presto" and became chromium. They fired a lot of programmers, then sold out most of the company to China. Thank you very much. That's the way it goes; everybody knows.
I believe Jon could have taken the "Presto" with him, but he decided to go WebKit as well. He started up the Vivaldi-project, brought many programmers with him from Opera, but landed on tha same kernel as Opera did. And this is interesting: WebKit is the mother code of Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi and Safari ... even Konqueror, the native file manager and internet browser for Linux. Norwegian programmer Lars Knoll was important writing the KHTML-browser, which was the pilar for WebKit. Norwegians rule ...!
I use Vivaldi most of the time. I haven't seen a MS browser for many years. That "Edge" flopped. Users of Win10 prefer IE instead, or a common browser like Chrome and Firefox. And after all these lines: I don't care. As long as they stick to the W3C rules.

Only ZoneAlarm is left on my Windows system. I altered between AVG and Avast for years, and got more and more annoyed by their freaking wish to rule my PC behaviour, and finally kicked them out. Also the constant requests for upgrading and buying full versions made me furious; several times they perished my work, lurking in the background. I don't touch fishy sites, files and links, and anyway I hardly use Windows on the internet. And besides: in 2016 Avast aquired AVG, though still operating with separate brands. It looks like data companies have a strong inclination to eat competitors.

Nope, no Apple around here. That XP served me well for 10 years; the main disk finally broke down and I moved the content to a bastard I can't remember what I put inside. But it works well for me. I invested in a good video card, and there we go. That machine is silent, confident and lacks any modern outfit. It runs Win7, 32bit, making it able to keep all my good old applications up and go. For internet, I put together an almost similar machine running KaliLinux or Mint. I've never fancied the latest "innovations" as long as well-experienced outfit works as well.

They couldn't stop the show. Nowadays almost any song can be found around the incredible net, and unreasonable lawsuits are now objected. Khawaga Album was banned for years, but now I've noticed it's been registered again. My intension was never to circumvent neigther US copyright laws nor any other country's laws, but to collect my favorites, give them allright tabs, dig the history behind the songs, share it with the community and by all means: give credit to the ones who really wrote the songs, if possible. I won't pay nobody nothing for going lickety spittely down the sidewak, whistling and humming a tune coming down from my brain. Music has been a great part of my life, and it drops with the rain. There *is* a difference between private and commercial use, for music as well as software. Both are a result of individual development. Both are a part of human evolution. And I'm a human, not an exploiter, like the music industry.

Chuckle, for 11 years I haven't changed an inch. I'm not on any social media or platform. I thrive that way. Thanks for reading all the way down to here, and may The Big Cat bless you walking across the rainbow bridge.

khawaga, 23rd of August 2018.