April 2003 Archives

John Udell, in his latest piece at InfoWorld, discusses open source development with Brian Behlendorf and others. This paragraph, a comment by Behlendorf, caught my eye.

"What always frustrated me, in computer science, was how we learned all the low-level things -- which we have libraries for nowadays -- but we didn't learn large-scale integration. What's the skillset to be able to jump into the codebase of something like Mozilla, read the architecture docs, and figure out the makefiles? Computer science classes don't teach you how to dive into foreign codebases."

So, what is the skillset to be able to jump into the codebase of something like Mozilla?

Yes, we know. This morning's windows Mozilla Firebird browser build was huge. Brian's been working on getting talkback crash reporting hooked up and there was a glitch :-) Things should return to normal shortly.

No, it's not phone sex. It's crash reporting. Brian got talkback crash reporting hooked up to the Mozilla Firebird browser this evening. Grab the latest linux build and crash away!

Ben Goodger put together a great why switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser doc. That guy knows how to make a web page. My attempt some months ago to make a similar doc for the Mozilla application suite wasn't nearly as compelling (but it wasn't marked up using tables either ;-)

And for some interesting reasons why people might switch to not just the new browser, but the Mozilla development effort, check out this nice post from the folks over at Our Story

This week the Hubble Space Telescope turned 13 years old and to mark that anniversary a very nice photo of the Swan Nebula was released. If you missed last month's fascinating release be sure to check it out too.

I just ran across this YahooPOPs! project at sourceforge and it sounds pretty cool. It claims to work with Mozilla mail. Have any of you tried it?

--Asa

I just got word of this new Java project at mozdev which aims to make installing Java into Mozilla as easy as any other XPI. This sounds like a great first step to improving the plugin situation (I should remind my loyal readers that mpt doesn't believe that improving the plugin experience is as important to Mozilla usability as a page content validation indicator.)

Happy 25th, Liz.

Last night I looked through another 1500 or so photos at the April-released MGS MOC Image Gallery. Thanks to Kerz for recommending it and thanks to Henrik Gemal for creating the Linky Mozilla and Firebird extension. Here is another small batch of some of the pics I found interesting (mostly from the equatorial regions.)

I've batched them with three access links. The first link is to the context page which gives a low resolution narrow angle image and also the wide angle context image and some data about the site and the metrics of the photo. The second batch of links points directly to the medium bandwidth large-sized jpg images. These are big and pretty but are lossy and don't scale well (if, like me, you like to zoom in on the image and look at details). The third batch of links is to the high resolution lossless gif images. These are huge files and so if your bandwidth isn't great you might want to avoid these but they look great when you zoom in on them. If anyone is actually looking at these and would like me to post future batches differently, please let me know. It takes a few minutes to link all this stuff and I'd rather spend that time making something usable than not.

image 1 (index and context) || image 2 (index and context) || image 3 (index and context) || image 4 (index and context) || image 5 (index and context) || image 6 (index and context) || image 7 (index and context) || image 8 (index and context) || image 9 (index and context) || image 10 (index and context)

image 1 (lossy jpg - small) || image 2 (lossy jpg - small) || image 3 (lossy jpg - small) || image 4 (lossy jpg - small) || image 5 (lossy jpg - small) || image 6 (lossy jpg - small) || image 7 (lossy jpg - small) || image 8 (lossy jpg - small) || image 9 (lossy jpg - small) || image 10 (lossy jpg - small)

image 1 (full resolution gif - large) || image 2 (full resolution gif - large) || image 3 (full resolution gif - large) || image 4 (full resolution gif - large) || image 5 (full resolution gif - large) || image 6 (full resolution gif - large) || image 7 (full resolution gif - large) || image 8 (full resolution gif - large) || image 9 (full resolution gif - large) || image 10 (full resolution gif - large)
 

Phoenix (now Mozilla Firebird browser) and Minotaur (now Mozilla Thunderbird mail) are available on PlayStation 2. Now that kicks serious ass! Thanks to alecf and sspitzer for the link.

After a couple of weeks of occasional use of Safari's tabbed browsing, I'm just not happy. The Safari tabs are "anchored" to the toolbar above rather than the document below and that just seems wrong to me. For a while I thought it might be that I was just used to the moz-style tabs but after some though and a brief attempt to explain to pink my concern with Apple's implementation (and the reason I prefer Camino's tabs,) I've decided that it's not just being accustomed to one and not the other. Here's the problem as I see it.

A tab provides two basic functions. It provides a location for identification - the label, and it provides a "handle" for grabbing or selecting that particular object. Think of the realworld example that most of us are familiar with, the file folder. The tab on a file folder provides a place to label that folder and a handle that you can pinch to pull that folder into view. If that tab was floating above the folder, somehow connected to the filing cabinet above rather than the folder, its functionality would be diminished. Users would probably have a more difficult time associating the tab and it's label with the folder they wanted and they'd have a harder time physically grabbing the folder and pulling it out.

I think this is the case with the Safari tabs. Being an advanced user, I can make this adjustment but it's an adjustment to a less usable interface and I shouldn't have to. I have no idea why Apple designers made this decision and I'm sure it's already been discussed out there on the web (maybe I'll google for it later) but it seems to me that they've really created "buttoned browsing" rather than tabbed browsing and that it will be less obvious and learnable at first and less efficient even after well learned.

If this design decision is any indication of Apple's "innovation" in the browsing space, they'd be well served to do a little more immitation and a little less innovation.

Maybe jinglepants or one of his many fanboys will enlighten me :-)

There's lots going on with Mozilla right now. Tonight we freeze the trunk and ramp down to make a 1.4 beta release. Any day now we'll also be doing a 1.3.1 release to get XPInstall working for Mac Mozilla users (and a few other fixes). On top of that, we're very close to a Mozilla Firebird browser (formerly Phoenix) 0.6 milestone. After those three releases we'll be ready to branch for Mozilla 1.4 and open the trunk for 1.5alpha work which we expect to include the beginnings of the transition to the next generation of Mozilla applications outlined in the new roadmap. This is gonna be a busy few weeks :-)

Why can't cool announcements like this happen on Friday so I have a couple of free days to play. Maybe this evening or tomorrow evening I'll get a chance to acutally download and test Synapse's The Brain, a machine learning plugin for winamp that is supposed to learn from your listening habits and build from that a dynamic and intelligent playlist.

Remember half a decade ago when everyone was talking about "intelligent agents" and "smart bots" that would do everything for you from shopping to sealing business deals? That was obviously more hype than product but things are slowly changing. This mP3 tool is another example of just the kind of machine learning that I've been excited about since the Mozilla address autocomplete experiment and the Mozilla junk-mail controls. Lots of small and focused intelligent features within larger "dumb" apps seems to be the best way forward for the machine learning technologies and should help people actually adopt and get comfortable with this kind of computer smarts before they find themselves paying on a new mortgage negotiated by their toaster.

I'm looking for a low-cost (<$12/mo.) ISP with an 800 access number? Does such a thing still exist? Deanna's parents are full-time RV'ers, traveling all over the North American continent. They've recently purchased a laptop, planning to keep in touch with family and friends via e-mail. Since I've already got web access, I've offered to help them find a service but so far I'm coming up empty on the low-cost front. If any of you have suggestions, I'd really appreciate it.

Today I had two successes and one failure. I'm sure you all just can't wait to read about my personal life and time around the house so here it is ;-)

I wasted several hours trying to diagnose an electrical problem in the 325. There appears to be something shorted somewhere and I can't, for the life of me, find it. It's big enough to drop the battery to nothin' pretty fast so f I don't figure it out tomorrow I guess I'll have to pay someone to look into it. I really don't mind working on cars; I might even enjoy it. Engine, cooling, suspension, brakes, etc. I can deal pretty well with, but electrical is just kicking my ass.

The slow-draining bathroom sink was a quick and easy win. We've only been in this place for about 6 weeks so I know that slime filled trap wasn't our doing but at least it was a simple fix and even the easy ones feel good.

Today I am 25 pounds lighter than I was 90 days ago and half way to my goal.

From spaceref.com comes news that the Burt Rutan designed suborbital spacecraft has been unveiled. That's one slick lookin' vehicle.

update:Looks like the Scaled Composites site is down. Nice pictures can be found at space.com

Folks are commenting that the links to images in my post from April 14th aren't working. Is anyone else having problems with those links. They seem to load fine in Mozilla and Mozilla Firebird. I've also tested Konqueror 3.1-12 and while they seem to load there, the image display is really slow and "chunky". I don't have any other browsers in front of me to test with but if you see problems please let me know in comments here what the problems are and what browser you're using. Thanks.

Also, while you're waiting for me (or that website) to fix whatever's broken with those links, you might want to check out Sean Wilson's mars images and mars images ii posts and links. I especially like this image which I suspect is the result of dust devils carving through the thin layer of surface dust to reveal a darker background. Very cool.

update: It sounds like the problems weren't with Mozilla or the links. Thanks for the follow-up comments. I think that in the future (if it doesn't take too much longer) I'll link to the smaller version of the images and let folks who can handle the big ones make that choice. Sean Wilson did something similar and it seems like a good way to go.

Today in the U.S. is the deadline for filing income tax returns. We e-filed this year but something went wrong with the California portion of the return so I had to brave the lines in the post office to mail off my returns. I don't think I've ever seen a line like that in a post office in my life. It moved pretty quickly but I was still stuck there for about an hour. I really need to not procrastonate so much.

In other less boring news, Leonard David, Senior Space Writer at space.com is reporting that the first (of two) MER launch has slipped at least a week because of a cabling problem that NASA engineers discovered in pre-flight testing. Apparently there is some problem with the umbilical that connects the rover to the spacecraft and it's gonna take them a few days to sort it out. That pushes the first launch into early June but shouldn't impact the second launch which could happen as soon as two weeks after the first.

I've poured over another thousand or two photos from the Mars Orbital Camera and some of these are simply stunning. Because I want to get back to enjoying the photos, I'm not gonna spend a long time introducing the one's I've collected for this post. If you've got a fast pipe and a tabbed browser, just load 'em all up in tabs and enjoy. I call this batch "stippling". Man, this stuff really belongs on a gallery wall.

image 1 | image 2 | image 3 | image 4 | image 5 | image 6 | image 7 | image 8 | image 9 | image 10 | image 11 | image 12 | image 13 | image 14 | image 15 | image 16 | image 17 | image 18 | image 19 | image 20 | image 21 | image 22

I don't know if anyone is really interested in these but I think I'm going to continue with semi-regular selective image posts as NASA/MSSS/JPL makes them available. Maybe this is a good time to set up some post catagories. I could label my posts under "Mozilla," "Space and Science," and "Personal" or something like that. I don't use any specialized blog/feed readers but I'm assuming that if the catagory exists in the XML feed that folks could opt out of the catagories that weren't of interest to them. Anyone got suggestions of how I could make something like that useful (or is it not worth the effort?)

Well, after months of back and forth with the wonderful folks who contribute their time and legal skills to mozilla.org, we've finally got the OK to move forward with the new name. The Phoenix browser is now the Firebird browser. Complain away.

The Washington Times is reporting that Russia is preparing for a 2018 manned voyage to Mars. The paper pads the headline with the recent news of the Mars Exploration Rovers landing sites which were selected last week. The British Beagle 2 lander, scheduled to reach Mars aboard the Mars Express spacecraft in early December also gets a somewhat confused mention. (The Beagle 2 is the lander, the Express is the spacecraft. I guess the Times isn't very concerned about accuracy.)

After 20 paragraphs of this "old" news, we get to the good stuff. "Russia, meanwhile, said last week it will confine six cosmonauts in an imitation spacecraft for nearly a year and a half to prepare for a possible manned flight to Mars in 2018, and foreign cosmonauts could be invited to join in the isolation project."

While this may initially sound like great news for proponents of manned flight to Mars, I read it as something of a setback. Earlier studies from the Russian Space Agency and from NASA had all pointed to 2014 as the best possible launch date.

I suppose that "any news is good news". At least the money hasn't stopped flowing alltogether.

Yesterday adot's notblog turned 1 year old. I didn't even notice until I was reading Chris Nelson's birthday blog. I remembered that I started mine about the same time and sure enough it was April 12, 2002.

I can't say that it's come a long ways because there isn't much more of interest here now than there was then. I'm posting a wee-bit more regularly (I think) but covering just about the same beat - Mozilla, my health, my science and astronomy interests, other Mozilla bloggers, the occasional cat picture, etc.

A few people are still reading this thing and while it's mostly for my own pleasure, I'm happy to hear any suggestions for making it more interesting/entertaining. I've carefully avoided talk of politics and war and I don't think that's gonna change any time soon, but if there's some aspect of any of the topics that I've been covering for the last year that you'd like to see more about then fire off an email or post a comment here.

Over at Ace's Hardware message boards, (also picked up by The Inquirer) folks are commenting about UA string sniffing that blocks other-than-IE browsers from WMP9. Nothing that's really news to long-time Mozilla (or Opera) users, but there are some positive and some cute comments in that tread.

update: links fixed. thanks alan and david. It was late at night and I got the names and links all wrong but it's fixed up now.

I need a keyboard. Anyone got any recommendations? I've been typing a lot on my laptop for the last year or so and my wrists and forearms feel like someone ran over them with a truck. Advil was keeping it tollerable for a couple of months but doesn't seem to be doing a bit of good any more.

It's actually quite painful and I have little doubt that a big piece of it is typing on the laptop keyboard so I'm interested if any of you have had good experiences with particular keyboards helping bad wrists.

And, yes, I know that the best thing I can do is to type less :-)

April brings a new batch of hi-res images taken from the Mars Orbital Camera aboard the Mars Global Surveyor in its 6th year of orbiting the red planet. The captioned few are nice (especially those Wirtz Crater dunes) but if you're into Mars imaging, you'll be wearing out your tabbed browser at the full list. I've sifted through a few hundred (only a couple thousand to go) and below you'll find a few of my favorites so far.

Today I decided to conduct an experiment. I wanted to investigate whether or not I'm happy with Phoenix's default preferences and if I wasn't, what I would change. For this experiment I would create a brand new profile and attempt to work for the fist half of the day without making a single preferences change. Then, after using the unconfigured app for about 4 hours, I'd see how many changes I had to make to the preferences to get them "just right". My expectation was that I would absolutely hate the fist half of the day and that I'd be changing a lot of stuff around in the afternoon. I am, afterall, a power-user :-)

Well, it's the end of the day and I've been faithfully recording every instance where I cursed the Phoenix default setting and then all of the changes I made to the browser preferences to get it "just right". The results were interesting.

The only thing that really bothered me and the only setting I changed was to make the start page blank rather than that mozilla.org web page. I didn't change a single other preference.

I did make a couple of changes to the toolbars and I changed the size of the browser window to be larger. I bookmarked a couple dozen of my regularly visited sites, adding a handful to the bookmarks toolbar. I also installed a couple of mycroft search plugins and the tinderstatus extension and now the browser feels "just right" to me. But I only had to change one item in the preferences manager.

Had the option not been there to change the start page, I think I would have been pretty peeved and if I wasn't able to find some way to change it, strange as it might sound, that might have been enough to make me consider moving to another brower.

I think this is what a lot of the Mozilla and Phoenix preferences and features debate boils down to. No one person needs the 1,000 or so preferences that Mozilla or Phoenix could expose in the UI. But if the one setting he do need isn't there, it matters a lot.

I've got a few paragraphs of additional thoughs on "the preferences problem" but I want to think about it some more before I post. I'll leave you with this question. If you could only have one preference in your browser, what would it be?

The first build of minotaur based on the Mozilla trunk is available. See the news at the minotaur front page. The previous minotaur binaries were built from the Mozilla 1.3 branch. In case you haven't been following this project, minotaur is a standalone version of Mozilla's fantastic email and newsgroup client and makes a great companion to Phoenix. It sounds like Arvid will be making a Qute/Phoenix-like theme for Minotaur as well. Things are starting to come together.

I'm not gonna be blogging for a few days.

Yesterday mozilla.org released a new product and today it releases another. This new roadmap lays out, in broad strokes, a new direction for Mozilla, one that I believe will result in both a better group of applications and a better set of technologies. The better product will include Phoenix and Minotaur (new names coming soon) and the better technologies will include large improvements to Gecko and a cleaner XUL toolkit.

I've read a lot of the early feedback at mozillaZine.org and at slashdot.org (and some in email sent dirctly to me or to drivers@mozilla.org) and so far it is overwhelmingly positive. The negatve comments seemed to mostly revolve around the "I love Mozilla and Phoenix doesn't have my favorite Mozilla feature" sort of comments. That's understandable. Not having the DOM Inspector or the JavaScript Debugger and other apps/features for those that need them will be a definite barrier to entry.

I asked folks a while ago what they liked about Phoenix that they found lacking in Mozilla. In light of the new roadmap, I think it's worth asking that question the other way around. What do you like about Mozilla that you find lacking in Phoenix?

update:Brendan's posted a couple responses at slashdot that are worth a read. "what is happening to XUL?" and some history.

Well, the Mozilla 1.4a release is for real - just in case anyone was wondering.
Did any of you read that Larry Ellison quote? "There is also a new browser, Mozilla, which is Netscape 7 plus bug fixes. It's not bad." While I appreciate his making the pitch to ISVs that we've got a product that's "not bad," it seems a little odd that someone would consider Mozilla to be "a new browser." and only somewhat less odd that they would suggest that it's based on Netscape 7.