renehollan's Journal: Opps! Missed a day

I got busy yesterday. Hope this isn't the start of a trend of ignoring my journal.

pmbread and RMS

Well, RMS has found my GPL restriction on pmbread not to his liking (as it adds a restriction). Personally, I think that restricting Paytru$t to not benefit from this work unless they free everything else that they aggregate with it would increase freedom (as defined by RMS) and not decrease it. However, I don't feel so strongly about this that I'd mind doing what RMS asks in this case. I'll change it shortly.

Java applet web proxy server

In my attempts to make the PayMyBills reader more portable, I thought to do the image and summary data decryption in a java applet instead of a local standalone application (which relies on a JRE installed -- something the browser provides for applets). The trouble is that applets can't open connections to their local host without running into security problems (unless they are loaded from that host). So, do I require the applet to be downloaded, or do I find a way to share the information using something like LiveConnect? Basically I need to feed .html, .img, or .pdf files into a browser window. The first two are easy, but the latter would be a problem -- I can get the browser to render pdf if it has an appropriate plugin (not my problem), but then I need to provide a URL and not raw PDF.