July 2002 Archives

I've put some new art up at the Mozilla development roadmap. I also updated the table that covers the dates for the different parts of the development cycles. Get your mozilla dates fix at http://www.mozilla.org/roadmap.html

Deanna posted some of the photos of our trip to Japan (China pictures still to come).

Once again I'm turning to the millions of readers that visit my blog each day. I need your help. I'm on a new laptop and the native resolution is 1600X1200. At any other resolution the fonts get a bit blurry and start to give me a headache. To avoid the headache I'm now doing a lot of web surfing at 1600X1200.
Because most of the web was written for 800X600 displays and because many sites divide the horizontal real estate between navigation, advertisements and content, browsing at this resolution is painful. I crank up my font display size but with body tags and tables hardcoded at 750px I'm still trapped in this narrow view of the web.
My first stab at a fix was to use a user style sheet to set the body to 100% and any tables to 100% but this only seems to help about half of the sites I visit and makes the other half much worse. This led to my second attempt which was to create a bookmarklet that set my user style so that I could use it only on sites where it worked. I'm doing much better on a few sites but this is still just painful. If you've got any creative solutions to this problem that don't require moving to somee other client please let me know.

It keeps coming back to this again and again (and matthew will sooner or later have to fess up that he was wrong). People love tabbed browsing. As reported on the front page of mozillaZine.org, Timothy Dyck of EWeek says after 32 days of using Mozilla exclusively:

First, there are two things Mozilla does better than IE, and both are compelling enough to me to make the switch: tabbed browsing and pop-up-window blocking.

Tabs are beautiful, beautiful things. I often have 30 or more browser windows open for days as I research several stories in parallel. Now I have four or five Mozilla windows open, each devoted to one particular topic, and each with several tabs open. This really suits the way I work. This was an Opera invention, but they're well done in Mozilla.

26 months of (almost) daily comments at the BuildBar Forum have come to an end. I've tried to stay on top of it but I've just run out of time and run out of steam.

OK, I just found a very cool feature in Shareaza (in case you hadn't noticed, I really like this application). You can select a file or group of files and create a set of links to those files in an HTML file. Very cool.
To use this feature you simply select the files in your Library view, context click and select "Export URLs..." A dialog will pop up that allows you to customize the output of the URLs. Select from the Preset list "Gnutella HTML" and hit OK. A file save dialog pops up and you name the file and save it. If you don't like the structure or name of the link you can customize them to inclued more or less information. Now go to the resulting saved file and add additional data (or copy the URLs and paste them into an existing page) and post to the web. If you just want the URL for one file you can context click on the file and select the item "Copy URL" and you're ready to paste it into blogger :)

I just found this post at slashdot which seems to address my idea for sharing trustworthy Mozilla binaries. I see that I need to read a lot more but it looks like I'm pursuing something that is doable.

I have no idea if this works or not but it seems like it should. I've added Mozilla 1.1 Beta binaries to a folder I share on the Gnutella network. You should be able to access this network, and my files on it, by installing one of the many free Gnutella P2P clients. I don't have much experience with any of these but I've tried a dozen windows clients, a couple of mac clients and one linux client and right now I recommend Shareaza for Windows users, the still in beta Acquisition for OS X, and LimeWire on Linux.

The files I've made available for sharing are automatically hashed using the Secure Hash Algorithm, a w3c Digital Signature Iniative. I've [posted links to the files below using a URI in the format of GNUTELLA://SHA1:<the file's hash>.

In theory you should be able to click on the links below and that would start up your P2P client, search out and download the file. I'm new to this whole P2P world and as of this posting I'm the only one sharing these files so don't expect much but I think that this could be a potential distribution mechanism for open source software and this is my first stab at seeing if it could work.

If anyone reading this knows a lot about Gnutella, hashing, directories like Bitzi or anything else that might help me pursue P2P file sharing for Open Souce binaries please email me at asa@mozilla.org with any help (or smack me down for a silly idea that would never work).

mozilla-i686-pc-linux-gnu-1.1b-sea.tar.gz

mozilla-win32-1.1b-installer.exe

mozilla-mac-11b-full.bin

mozilla-macosX-11b.smi.bin

So Mozilla 1.1 Beta is out the door. Endico, Leaf and I put it to bed today at 18:00 PDT. Go to http://www.mozilla.org/releases/ for more info and binaries!

I'll continue stalling on the P2P review. My problem is that I've settled on the Shareaza application as the easiest to use (primarily because of it's search filtering capabilities and being ad-free) and so I haven't dug any deeper into Limewire or Bearshare.
I've received a few emails and spoken to a couple folks suggesting that I try out Kazaa and Morpheus clients. My new plan is to go find these clients and then compare the best of those with Shareaza. Maybe. Or maybe I'll just continue to download tunes and put off any reviews :-)

Update:Kazaa sucks. It has internal ads and throws IE pop-up ads. It litters the desktop with icons and doesn't have anything on Shareaza for features (at least from what I could tell in the 10 minutes I used it before uninstalling). I'm gonna try this KazaaLite app and see if it does any better.
Update:OK, KazaaLite is Kazaa without some of the ads. Nothing compelling thought. Shareaza has basically the same interface and none of the ads plus a nice filter-after-the-search feature. On to Morpheus I guess.

Let 1000 browsers bloom

Cool looking blog via massless. (see, you can do cool stuff that looks great in Mozilla _and_ that other browser.)

Incremental Find. How cool is that? How did I not know about this? Thanks Alex

The most inconvenient thing about blogger is the size of this little text entry box. It's tiny and it's been this way since I first used blogger.

It's a 1 line fix. Thanks to randomfoo.com for figuring it out. I wonder what it takes to get the fix into Blogger. If anyone reading this has any influence with the Blogger folks please pass this on. Please!

form { height:100%; padding:0; margin:0; }

This fellow makes a few points about Mozilla for Linux that seem worthy of some attention. I suspect the AA font issue will be a non-issue soon enough. The Moz file-picker probably won't be going away any time soon. I'm not sure what's unpleasant about printing, accessing file open and file save or cut and paste, though. Maybe this is more of his "it's not integrated like Konqueror" but I can't tell for sure. I suspect that bryner's nsITheme work will make a significan dent in the folks that want something more integrated looking/feeling. Mozilla really is at the top of the list for Linux browsers, though. On site compatability alone it knocks the others out.

"One of my priorities for the coming school year will be redress the balance and show my students that there is life beyond Microsoft."

Gerv's interview at New Architect

More people saying good things about Mozilla:


RasterWeb

Oh, as for me, I use Mozilla 98% of the time nowadays. I happen to like it very much. I like it better than IE without a doubt. One of the IS guys at work was amazed at the control Mozilla gave him when he first started using it. I'm sure most other IE users would feel the same.

If you are at all unhappy with your current web browser, I highly suggest taking a look at Mozilla. You won't be sorry.

If you've not seen Minority Report yet, you're missing some really cool tech stuff. The UIs on the computers in the film are really interesting: gesture based in the most part. I love gesture based UI - and so when I found the plugin for Mozilla I was a happy man. Try it out.

mozilla rocks! screw IE! screw Opera! and its multi-tab!

Mouse gestures in Mozilla. If you're running Mozilla -- my new bestest friend -- you should immediately install the Mozilla Gestures add-on. Gesture support works like this: hold the mouse down and zoom right to go forward, left to go back, up to open a link in a new tab and down to open it in a new window. Booyah!

With all the excitement this week (no, not the Milestone freeze) around Deanna's shoulder surgery I almost forgot that I committed to a review of the 3 Gnutella clients I've been using. Well, I haven't had any time to write anything up, nor have I had more than a few days of testing the apps. Deanna's doing a lot better and even spent a piece of the day unrestrained by her sling so I expect to get back to poking around on the computer more in the coming days and perhaps even banging out a brief review of those P2P apps.

I believe there is a critical mass of bright people coming up with great ideas on how to better connect the weblog world. The momentum continues to build as, almost weekly, new techniques progress from mindwalks to small proofs to widespread usage. The results of this work so far, great tools and techniques for making blogs more useful and more powerful, include RSS auto-discovery, the Daypop search and top40, Blogdex, BlogChalking, MEETUP, and many more.
But one problem that doesn't yet have an elegant solution is the difficulty of searching for a string within a blog posting within a certain date range. Daypop allows you to search for terms in blogs which have been updated within a certain time but that doesn't help me.
Here's my problem: Yesterday I searched daypop for blogs with comments that contain "mozilla". I read all of them. Today I search daypop for blogs with comments that contain "mozilla" where the blog was updated in the last day. The results are scores of the sites I read yesterday which have new comments that do not contain the word "mozilla" and a few sites which just added an entry containing "mozilla". What I really want are just the sites where someone posted comment since yesterday containing the string "mozilla" and none of the sites where the comment containing "mozilla" was posted before yesterday.
How could this be solved? My first thought was that Daypop could cache and archive all of the sites it indexes every day and let me search the diff between two archives of the same site. My second thought was to pose the question on my blog and ask other smarter people if there are solutions we could implement in the blogging tools or in our posts themselves that could make this easier. So if you've got any ideas post them and I'll do my best to query for them.

I wondered why there was so much recent spam in this bug. Folks do their cause no good when they drive away any developer that migh care with all of these "me too" posts to Bugzilla bugs.

...cover of the rolling stone via Andy Edmonds

Google! DayPop! This is my blogchalk: English, United States, Redwood City, Woodside Plaza, Asa, Male, 26-30!

We're frozen for 1.1beta with 1.1final just weeks away. Some really great features have landed since we branched for 1.0. We don't have any killer additions like we had with tabbed browsing but there are a lot of really good changes that people are gonna definitely like.

This holiday weekend I downloaded three Gnutella file swapping applications for MS Windows, LimeWire, BearShare and Shareaza. I've been playing with all three for several days and I'm almost ready to post something of a review.

Something about the big round numbers is very satisfying.

Cool! Chris takes this confused person to school.

And Piro didn't stop with Tabbrowser Extensions! He's got projects even cooler than that. Check out his ContextMenu Extensions. This is not your average end-user fare but for all of us that really use the Web it's great. It adds so many features that I can't begin to list them here. Go read about them in the ContextMenu Extensions help file (thanks again for the English translation, Piro. Your English is great) or install the XPI and see for yourself. I haven't been playing with it for long but so far I really like it, especially the stylesheet menu with it's user stylesheet editor.

Jesse pointed me to this awesome Mozilla additions/extensions site and I'm having a great time with the Tabbrowser Extensions which among other things allows you to reorder tabs, set an auto-reload on a tab and open bookmarks in tabs. Click this link to see screenshots or click to directly install the Tabbrowser Extension XPI. Piro even includes in-client help and an XPUninstaller for most of his extensions. This guy is awesome. (thanks, Piro, for adding English descriptions to all your very cool projects and thanks Gashu for the translations.)

Making my pitch again for mozBlog which makes blogging so much easier. If you're like me and surfing the web gives you most of your inspiration for blogging then this tool is a must. The best thing about mozBlog is that you can open it in the browser without leaving the page that inspired you to blog. You can select and drag text, links, etc. into the comment window. It's so easy. It also has a decent format toolbar and spell checking. And best of all, it's free

Dave should perhaps read this list of tips for fitting in at Apple so as to ease the transition.