I've made a few minor changes to the site style. If you see problems, please let me know. If you're using a Gecko-based browser there are a few additional tweaks that apply just for you and things _should_ look a little different than in other browsers.
May 2003 Archives
Brad Choate has some interesting commentary on Microsoft, AOL, Internet Explorer and Mozilla.
I guess it was a slow news day over at slashdot. I certainly didn't expect them to put up a Mozilla 1.4 RC1 post.
update: I'm not complaining :-) just surprised.
Garret, over at linuxart.com, has some very nice CSS stylin'. I've been pursuing something similar here with the mouseover effect for links within a post but his goes even further and styles up the whole post really nice.
There's an interesting poll over at OSNews.com which asks "which OSS application, in your opinion, has achieved high standards, performance, features and ease of use when compared to the best of breed of the closed source world." So far Apache is in the lead with Mozilla pulling into a respectable second place. I'm surprised that Open Office and Gaim aren't doing better. I use both and think they do a fine job when compared to their commercial equivalents.
Wow! I just downloaded the latest Thunderbird build and it sure does look nice. I think it's about time for me to say bye to ./mozilla -mail and make the big switch.
Thunderbird has all the great Mozilla mail and news features that I need, like junk-mail controls (aka spam filtering,) message views, sophisticated filters and support for multiple accounts. And now it has the slick Arvid artwork and customizable toolbars seems to work without problems. Oh, and there's an all new Firebird-style Options window. This is lookin' really slick. Great work guys!
You know you want it. Be the first on your block to download Mozilla 1.4 Release Candidate 1.
I got news this morning from Henrik Gemal that Linky 1.7 is out! The two things I really love about this new release are:
*Mozilla Firebird options support (clicking the Linky->Linky Options contextmenu item or visiting Firebird's Tools->Options->Extensions and then selecting Linky and clicking the Settings button gives you access to this wonderful configuration tool.
*Sorting options in Select Links dialog. Right-click on the links and a context menu appears. (This one rocks, you can sort on URL or domain.)
This is a great release. It's got everything I could want for customization and it works in both Firebird and SeaMonkey. My only complaint would be that the install has so many dialogs. Perhaps it can't be done any better given our XPInstall mechanisms but it feels like I have to click too many OKs in order to complete what should be a simple install. Overall, though, this is a great extension. Thanks Henrik!
(This is actually about two weeks old and I just realized that it didn't get posted. Oops.)
I've just discovered the photographic collection of Travis Rector. He's made some stunningly beautiful pictures from Kitt Peak and Cerro Tololo and regular readers of Astronomy Picture of the Day will probably recognize most of his images.
I've also just read that the scheduled launch date for Mars Explorer Rover 1 is my birthday :-) Also, somehow I missed the news of the galaxy evolution launch http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/releases/2003/62.cfm.
It's a holiday here in the US and I took full advantage, doing next to nothing all day long.
I did get around to reading an interesting paper called "Two Case Studies of Open Source Software Development: Apache and Mozilla" (PDF) by Audris Mockus, Roy T Fielding, and James D Herbsleb. It's a bit dated now and has a couple of process misunderstandings but overall it's a very interesting read.
Via BBC News:
"In this place, for a few hours each day, just after noon in the summer, there could be liquid water on the surface of Mars."
More on the research can be found at the PDF titled Spring Defrosting In The Russell Crater Dune Field - Recent Surface Runoff Within The Last Martian Year? (or try the google html version.)
The juicy bit from the PDF is this:
"The morphology of the rills indicates that overland flow probably causes the erosion.... We favor an erosion process by liquid water: the rills are located in absolute elevations of ~200 m, and the retreat of the south polar cap leads to an increase of the atmospheric pressure in the southern spring which could allow liquid water to be stable in this region. "
If you want to see the good images check out MOC narrow-angle image M19-01170 and this close-up.
This weekend, rather than dumping a pile of new Mars images on you, I'm going to point you to a couple of not-Mars image that have sparked my imagination in recent days.
The first has been in rotation on my desktop for the last year or so. But on Friday, as I booted up and got ready for work, it struck me as fresh and new, filling me again with great wonder and enthusiasm about our magnificent universe, and I had to just sit and stare at it for about 10 minutes.
The Trifid Nebula, M20 photo was taken from the 3.58 m Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope atop Mauna Kea. This image has so much going on in it. It's really worth an extended look.
Much of the appeal (for me) of Triffid is that it's three nebulae all in one:
The surrounding blue light, especially intense on the right side of the image, is the reflection component of the nebula. Light from young bright stars is reflected off of surrounding dust and scattered toward us creating an amazing blue cotton-candy-like halo glow.
The central red area is the emission component of the nebula. There's enough energy in the stars of the central area to excite those (mostly hydrogen) gasses to glow. This energy is slowly chewing away the gasses surrounding the central stars, expanding the large cavity at the heart of M20. (Hubble took a nice close-up of what would be located at about 10 o'clock in the CFHT image).
The third component (maybe I'm stretching the definition a bit here) is a dark nebula - dense dust clouds and bands that absorb light so you see it as silhouette. It's these obscuring dust lanes, which divide the nebula into three lobes, that gave Trifid its name.
The second image I want to share is a bit closer to home. While geography conspired with the weather to make my view of the recent lunar eclipse less than magnificent, Jay Ouelette had considerably better luck and shares it with us all in this APOD image, titled Eclipsed Moon and Stars.
What an amazing and beautiful celestial companion we have in Luna. I really should spend more time with her (and will in a couple of weeks when we get into the new cycle and the moon is spending more time in the evening sky.) If you've got a small scope or even a pair of binoculars, I'd encourage you to do the same.
Check out this nice artwork.
Best wishes for a speedy recovery, Mike.
-- Asa and Deanna
I just saw this interesting post over at mozillazine.org's Firebird forums so I took a look at the webalizer data at mozdev. It looks to me like Mozilla Firebird 0.6 drove more mozdev traffic and download volume than Mozilla 1.3. My rough math says that there was about five times the hits on the peak days around the 0.6 release than around the 1.3 release and that the download volume was nearly double. Someone want to check my math? That's pretty wild.
I usually post Mars pictures on the weekend but this one was just too cool to wait.
Today's MSS picture of the day is just amazing. From the skies above Mars (and the same camera that's been feeding us all those great Martian surface photos) comes this beautiful picture of our favorite planet, Earth.
Thanks to alanjstr for the pointer to the National Geographic story covering this super-cool photograph.
And thanks to my lovely wife who sent me an email only minutes after the pictures went live (I suck for not reading it 'till I got home.)
"In one of the Internet�s quieter corners, mozilla.org, a revolution has been taking place. A new XML format, called XUL (eXtensible User Interface Language), pronounced "Zool", is on the way to re-shaping what we know about both the Internet, and desktop applications. A bold claim perhaps -- but once you've finished reading this, you may just find yourself agreeing."
Go read the rest of what Harry Fuecks has to say. (via mozillaZine)
Today (it would have been sooner except I was slow in getting the FTP directories created, sorry Andrea.) the Mozilla Localization Project posted windows and linux builds of Mozilla Firebird 0.6 for Simplified and Traditional Chinese, French, Italian and Korean. More on localized builds can be found at the front page of mozillaZine.org
I just ran across this LindowsOS 4.0 announcement which lists 10 reasons that Lindows is better than winXP. Three of those ten reasons (maybe four) appear to be the Mozilla application suite, more specifically Mozilla's tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking and junk-mail controls. They somehow managed to advertise three very cool Mozilla features without once mentioning Mozilla. From reading the press release, one would have to assume that those were all OS features. Well, good for them, I guess.
udate:I guess my comments weren't very explicit so this is a clarification. I don't think there's anything wrong with a company taking our (or any other) open source project and rebranding it for distribution. As a matter of fact, I think that's great.
It just seemed a little odd that in describing why it was such a great operating system he described Mozilla features without identifying them as browser features. They've made several edits on the page and now at least it's more explicite that they're talking about browser and email features. They also adjusted some of the images :-)
Chris Blizzard, in his weblog, said it pretty well, "frankly anything that gets our code into more hands is fine by me. It's just hard for my Ego not to feel just a tiny bit slighted."
Andyed has released a new version of Mouse Gestures that works with both Mozilla and Firebird 0.6. This new version sports some serious customization UI (also noted and screenshotted over at Simon Willison's Weblog). Good stuff!
update:Andyed says in comments here "Credit where credit is due... Jens Bannmann is almost entirely responsible for recent mozgest developments and the customization feature is his design." Great work Jens. This is nice stuff and very well done.
I've found a few more rss search tools that I'll be evaluating over the coming days. If you've already had some experience with any of these I'd love to hear about it.
NewsIsFree || dmoz.org weblogs || eatonweb portal || Waypath || BlogStreet || Blawg Search
I'm also looking into searching Google with filetype:rss and searching Daypop with &t=p as suggested by folks in comments.
update: Well, I've given all of the above listed tools a spin and with the one exception of NewsIsFree, none of them were quite right for my purposes (finding the latest blog posts on a particular subject.)
NewsIsFree was the only one to return the kind of results I was after. I've added it to my previous list of three great tools and will be giving it a more serious evaluation in the coming days.
I also put some more time into playing with Google filetype: queries but the lack of date sorting coupled with limited results proved to be more hassle than it was worth.
The daypop "hidden" t=p feed searching was a lot better than Google but cumbersome to use. I created a custom keyword bookmark for it but I'll probably wait for them to provide a real interface before I use it much more.
Expect to hear more from me on this kind of searching and if you've got any tips or tools that you use to find the latest blog posts on a particular topic, please let me know.
The Mozilla Firebird 0.6 web browser has been out for nearly two full days now and I've taken a minute out of my Sunday afternoon to check the reactions across the searchable blogosphere. It's still early but there are definitely some positive comments out there. Rather than quote a few of them I'm just dumping the links to all the posts I found which had any commentary (there were a few dozen more that basically said "Firebird 0.6 released. Go get it." and I'm not including those).
Jason Key at PNukeComm
Kristine at KADYELLEBEE
Hypermind
Julian Bond at Ecademy
Chris at TechnoBlog
mpary at Mikes Weblogs
kopa at Kaffeesud: Mozilla Firebird
allankintz.com
jbond at Voidstar
Jason Lefkowitz at Just Well Mixed
algorhythm
Kenneth Hunt at Tech Observer
kyte at Hamarana
vince at vincemease.com
Anil at Six Log
MXN at Punclox
blytt at Brian Lyttle Online
Marcus at Random Thoughts...
blogipity
V. Satheesh Babu at vsbabu.org
milbertus at Ramblings of a Code Monkey
lkieksi at Nickel And Chromium
Haiko Hebig at hebig.org
Neil at Neil's World
Binary Bonsai
Stefan Tilkov at Random Stuff
Sean 'Early' Campbell & Scott 'Adopter' Swigart's Radio Weblog
Tools . Komlenic . Com
One of the common threads running through a lot of those posts was "If you're still using IE, you need to switch." Let's hope that meme continues to grow.
update: more links:
steven at Acts of Volition
Bruno Raoult
This will be the last posting from the Feb 2002 - July 2002 (most recent) batch of MOC narrow angle images from the MSS Gallery. Once again, these are just a few more of the images that I thought were interesting out of a batch of thousands.
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)
If that doesn't fill you up then check out the "Picture of the day" at Malin Space Science Systems (MSS, the home of all this great MGS MOC imagery) and the archive of captioned images which contains all the previous pictures of the day.
And if that wasn't enough then revel in the mystery of the face on mars ;-) Thanks to Mike for the note on the new pics of this mysterious face.
I know you all have been anxiously awaiting the unveiling of the adot's notblog search plugin. Well, thanks to the great tips at markpasc.org and the docs at the Mycroft project, (definitely one of the coolest mozdev.org projects,) you can now install into your Mozilla Firebird browser a plugin for searching my site. You can find the install link in this post and under the main page archive links.
Actually, I'm pretty sure no one really needs this but I install new builds every day and I needed to put the plugin somewhere that made it easy for me to re-install with each new build. What better place than here :) If you do install (or attempt to install) this plugin and it causes any problems or doesn't work, feel free to let me know in the comments.
So you really want Mozilla Firebird 0.6 but you need XFT fonts? Well, there's builds available. pryan.org is hosting several flavors, including Red Hat Linux 8, Red Hat Linux 9, Debian unstable, and Slackware 9.
I've been evaluating several new (to me) search tools, BlogDigger, Feedster, and rssSearch. The feature I was looking for was a comprehensive blog searching tool that would sort results by recency of the post that contained my search term, and so far I'm very pleased with each of them.
BlogDigger doesn't seem to be working at all for the last day or so (returning zero results for me) but over the last week it's been really useful. It's pretty fast, returns lots of good information and the sorting by date does an admirable job of getting the newest stuff to the top. I'm not terribly fond of the style/display of the search results page and I'd encourage the authors to not constrict the search results to such a narrow column by hardcoding a px value table width. For folks with high-resolution screens, this is a real PITA.
Feedster is emerging as my new favorite except for one shortcoming; it doesn't remember my preferences. This is a minor annoyance, but good dated sorting is the sole reason I'm seeking out these tools so it's somewhat important to me. I'd also like to see a couple of the "preferences" reflected as toggles in the advanced search tab. The site stile is fresh and comfortable and the search results are easy to read, very current, and well ordered. When the preferences work for me this will no doubt be my favorite. Bonus points for the bookmarklet and having an active blog. I'd also really love a working Mozilla search plugin (the one at mycroft doesn't seem to work).
rssSearch is also really nice. It does a very good job of ordering by date and it's fairly current. My big complaints there are also usability issues. It's really a pain to have to scroll back up to the top of the page to see the next page of results and the style for highlighting the search term in context can make distinguishing visited from unvisited links a bit difficult. Kudos, however, for the debug output displayed at the bottom.
All three of these are very capable search tools if you're looking for the latest in blog posts on a particular topic. Go do a quick search for "mozilla" in each, sort by date and you'll get a really good snapshot of the latest in what people are saying about the mozilla project and products. Thanks again to Neil and Michael for pointing me in the right direction.
If any of you know of other search tools that will put recent posts at the top of the results lists, I'd love to hear about them.
/. picked up my submission on the release of Mozilla Firebird 0.6 and the posts there were pretty positive. If any of you have moderator points, give an upward bump to Grayrest's post.
PNukeComm has a nice write-up and TechnoBlog calls it "rock solid" and "kick ass."
Mozilla Firebird 0.6 (formerly Phoenix) is available for download. This release features a fresh new look, a redesigned preferences window, preliminary support for Mac OS X and much more.
Read why you should be using Mozilla Firebird and get the latest release at http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firebird/releases/0.6/
We're hoping to make Mozilla Firebird 0.6 happen real soon now. New builds will be arriving at ftp shortly and if they smoketest OK then those builds are gonna be 0.6.
NASA Technical Report NAS-03-009 (via slashdot) proposes that NASA use the MPL:
"We present arguments in favor of developing an Open Source option for NASA software; in particular we discuss how Open Source is compatible with NASA's mission.
The paper goes into some detail about licensing and includes a brief analysis of several options. It concludes that the MPL is the most appropriate license for NASA software and notes these four points as determining factors (paraphrased): 1. It's OSI approved. 2. Derived works are open source. 3. Developed by experts (mitchell, you rock!). And 4. It's not viral like GPL.
See the full report at nas-03-009.pdf (Acrobat Reader required).
Don't miss this. It's really easy and it's super-cool. If you only give it 10 minutes, punch your location into this tool, and then step outside 10 minutes before the "Moon enters totality" time listed. If you've got more time, you'll want get out there an hour or two earlier. Things are still pretty cloudy here but my fingers are crossed and the weather reports are promising "mostly clear" tonight.
update: Well, it was really hazy and the moon was quite low in the sky but still beautiful. I hope that the weather turned out a bit better for others.
The mozillaZine.org front page has been pretty active today.
Glazman's posted new composer++ bits, a mac build plus newer builds for windows and linux. I haven't had a free minute to give it a spin (but I'm still really looking forward to it).
And Tiernan Ray at E-Commerce News has an interesting commentary on web browser features and quality/reliability.
I just read over at Keith Devens .com that the W3C's Amaya web browser is officially dead. Keith says, "Now that we have Mozilla, we don't need another reference implementation... they probably felt that they weren't needed anymore."
Frank Merenda over at uptime has posted a nice tipsheet on tabbed browsing plus some bonus tips for other handy Mozilla features. Check it out.
with pop-up blocking. Mike Pinkerton's landed a Mozilla Firebird-like pop-up indicator and management mechanism for Camino.
There's no doubt in my mind that pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing are the two most important web browser features to come along in the last few years and there's also no doubt in my mind that these relatively new innovations can improve in their usability and efficacy. Mike's taken Camino's pop-up blocking to the next level and this can be nothing but good.
Thanks to Michael Lefevre for the help killing that horizontal scrollbar in IE. I've looked at the page on various browsers on a few different platforms and everything looks pretty good to me. People with pre-Gecko versions of Netscape are out of luck though and I don't intend to spend any time trying to make it better for that browser. I recommend an upgrade. If you see problems on your browser/platform of choice (and espeically if you can offer fixes) please let me know in the comments.
Maybe I'll have some time to do more structural change after I get finished up other more important stuff.
Well, the new $20 bill was unveiled today. I'm really disappointed. The subtle blue, peach and green fade is just lame. It looks worn and washed out even before it's been through the laundry. The lack of any bold or hard-edged splashes of color is a real disappointment to me and I think a missed opportunity to catch up with most of the rest of the world in having money beautiful enough that one enjoys holding onto it :-)
One thing that Mozilla (and Mozilla Firebird) could really use is a short and clean "How to do 20 really cool things in Mozilla (Firebird)" document. Ben Goodger wrote the great "Why you should switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser" doc and I wrote something similar in my "Mozilla Application Suite" doc but both of these tell users what compelling features we have to offer and not how to use them.
I'm seeing time and time again folks (on blogs) saying things like "I know Mozilla can do this cool bookmark keyword thing, how does that work? How do i make it do [various things]?" or "Mozilla's got good searching but how do I get more search engines on the list?". The "101 things you can do in Mozilla" doc did a lot to get people thinking, talking and sometimes even using a few more of Mozilla's great features and it's a bit closer to what I think we need for a "tipsheet" but I think it suffers for being so long and it doesn't have quite enough detail for how to get the most out of each feature on the list.
Ideally, someone would write something along the lines of "20 amazing Mozilla features that will dramatically improve your time on the web" doc with only the most valuable features mentioned and going into some detail on how to really take advantage of that feature. One could take 20 or so items from the 101 things doc and expanded them. Most of the great features have been documented more thoroughly somewhere else and so it shouldn't be hard to make a really comprehensive tipsheet without too much effort.
For example, starting with one tip from the 101 things... doc, pick a really cool feature:
Bookmark keywords
Keywords to look up bookmarks quickly. Keywords have the advantage that the part entered after the keyword is filled in where '%s' appears in the bookmarks's URL.
Then use google to find a more comprehensive explanation somewhere like the mozillaNews Hints and Tips which says:
Keywords & Bookmarks
The first tip involves bookmarks & keywords.
In case you're unaware of the keyword feature, each bookmark can have keywords associated with it. This allows you to type the keyword into the URL bar and go to the bookmarked page as if you had typed in the whole address.
This by itself is fairly cool, but keywords get even better when you use variable subsitution. For example, let's say I look at a lot of Mozilla bugs but don't want to have to go to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/ and type in the bug number to look it up. With Mozilla you can create a keyword that, when followed by a number, will automatically look up the bug number.
How is this done? Do the following.
1. Create a Bookmark with the following address: http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=%s Note: that the "%s" is a variable which stands for the string to be subsituted.
2. Next add the keyword "bug" (without the quotation marks) to the bookmark. To do this, right click on bookmark and choose "Properties"
3. Type in "bug 123" (again without the quotation marks)into
the URL bar and watch as you are redirected to the Bugzilla page on Bug123.
4. Bow down and praise the great Mozilla.
I think a document like this would answer a lot of the repeat questions asked across blogdom as well as provide something more for "the press" who can't seem to talk about any of our other cool features besides pop-up blocking and tabbed browsing. "101 things" was really good but I think it was a bit too long to really sink in with the masses. What do you all think? Any volunteers?
I've made a few minor tweaks to the stylesheet for this blog. I'm not sitting near a windows or mac machine right now so I have no idea if things went to hell for the less capable browsers on those platforms.
I tested with the latest Geckos on linux (which should be good coverage for any platforms running Gecko-based browsers like Mozilla's Firebird browser) and I'm crossing my fingers that nothing broke horribly for those unfortunate enough to be stuck using that microsoft browser.
Also, I don't know the first thing about web design. I've just tweaked the css through trial and error until it looked the way I wanted it. If you don't like it or if you do then let me know in the comments.
via mozillaZine.org:
Glazman has made win32 builds available with improved functionality including absolute positioning support, better resizing, snap to grid, and inline table editing. I haven't given it a try because I don't have a windows machine here but I'll try to check it out in the next few days and let you all know how it goes. Feel free to beat me to it and let me know what you think in the comments here.
Update:Glazman's made available a Linux build!
Timothy over at slashdot was kind enough to post news of our latest beta release, Mozilla 1.4b and the bulk of the early comments are on-topic and favorable. Go read and if you got moderator points, spend them :-)
I just discovered (actually this post is a couple of days old and I somehow saved as draft rather than publish) the mozdev project Extension - Room which appears to be in beta. It's a listing of many popular XUL extensions covering the Mozilla application suite, the Mozilla Firebird browser, Netscape and (soon?) the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.
This looks a lot like what David Tenser has been providing over at the greatest Mozilla Firebird (and now Thunderbird) site on the planet, Mozilla Firebird Help. When is someone going to build it into the app?
For you're viewing pleasure: more beautiful Mars pictures taken from Mars Globbar Surveyor's Mars Orbital Camera. The MOC has been in operation for more than half a decade and streams down large hunks of image (and other) data to the folks at NASA and JPL who publish these great photos in big batches every few months. I've finished looking over the last batch of thousands of images and here are 10 of the final 20 or so pictures that I marked from this latest batch. I've culled the pictures that I thought were interesting from a mostly visual perspective. Some caught my eye as being interesting in terms of geology but most were just plain beautiful.
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)
And if ogling all that b&w photography has completely tweaked your rods, then this gorgeous color HST photo of the Helix Nebula should light those cones up and bring a smile to your face. Hubble snapped this beauty (or, rather, series of beauties) while it was head over heels with it's rear pointed out to shield against the Leonid barrage. What a wonderful picture to celebrate Astronomy Day!
And if that wasn't enough, I just saw that HubbleSite has released an "even deeper field". This photograph peers further into space than any taken before, bringing to your screen the light of stars a full magnitude fainter than the dimmest of the famed 1996 Hubble Deep Field. (If you were wondering just how much sky these images actually cover you could approximate it by holding a dime at arm's length and imagining all 1,500 galaxies shown the HDF sitting inside the space of Roosevelt's eye, and yes, most of those big spots are galaxies, each filled with hundreds of billions of stars.)
You can view a small version (70kB), a large version (740kB), and a rediculously large version (4.9MB) of this new HST Andromeda Halo image at HubbleSite's NewsCenter
We're due for a total lunar eclipse next week. You can find out when to step outside and watch at this handy Lunar Eclipse Computer. Also, be sure to check out the space.com Minute-by-Minute Guide for some good tips on what to be watching for.
The moon is going to still be pretty darned low in the sky out here on the west coast as the eclipse hits totality but you can bet I'll be out with my binoculars and camera. Lunar eclipses are one of my favorite naked-eye celestial events. So even if you're not a regular stargazer, do yourself a favor and mark your calendar. Just punch your location into that web form linked above, block out a few minutes to a few hours of your time, and point yourself at the moon on the evening of the 15th (or early morning of the 16th for some). If you've got a pair of binoculars, even better but it's by no means required.
Henrik Gemal has blogged the release of Linky 1.6.0. You should definitely check out this extension. I've been using the heck out of Linky for viewing mars images ever since kerz recommended it to me.
First, Neil T. and Michael Fagan rock. They pointed me to several really good blog search tools. So far, BlogDigger seems to work the best for me but I haven't given enough time to rssSearch and Feedster to make a fair comparison.
Thanks to improved blog searching, I found lots of cool moz-relates info that I'd been missing with just Google, Daypop and a few big blogrolls. Below are a few pointers to some of the (I think) recent stuff that I'd missed:
Joe's additions to userContent.css which kicks serious ass. Maybe we should just ship that thing in Mozilla Firebird commented out and let people uncomment to enable some good ad-blocking. (Amusingly, and on an ad-related note, this guy reckons that Mozilla Firebird will have to start charging money or putting up ads like Opera.)
I'm not sure when this showed up but for anyone wanting to convert a Mozilla SeaMonkey extension into a Mozilla Firebird extension, this Transition from a Mozilla Package to a Firebird Extension doc at the mozdevxfly project should be a big help.
Henrik Gemal is using a nice little "off-site link" indicator icon with links over at his weblog. I really do like that and as soon as I have time I think I'll add something like that to this blog.
Mozilla Bonobo with screenshots sounds very cool (thanks to blizzard for the initial pointer.)
These bookmarklets for playing with images are pretty cool. Not sure why you'd want to drag an image around but it certainly works. The album bookmarklet seems like it could really be useful though.
Myk and Brian published Remote Application Development with Mozilla, Part 2 a few days ago and I forgot to blog about it. Remote XUL apps are definitely keeping me excited about Mozilla.
Code for enabling rich text editing for MT in Mozilla missed my radar as well. Maybe mywonderful hosts can add this to their MT installation.
Ken, over at Ken & Sarah: Our Story was looking for one of these custom keyword docs (mine, Blogzilla's, mozillanews' and Grayrest's) and maybe you were too.
Another improvement for the plug-in experience can be found at the team murder site.
And apparently someone's reading my blog :-)
update - more things that rock:
This bookmarklet.
Google allows people to search Web pages, as well as search specific types of content such as news sources, shopping sites through its "Froogle" service, Usenet groups. Soon the company will also offer a service for searching Web logs, known as "blogs," Schmidt said.(from Reuters)
What I want, and can't get from DayPop or blogdex is a date of post sorted results so I can, for example, search for weblog posts on "mozilla" and just see the recent ones. Daypop will sort results by date of indexing but it indexes full pages and pretty regularly so you don't really get new stuff at the top. Maybe Google will get this right.
A lot happened today including three rounds of respins, the final of which is now available as Mozilla 1.4 Beta. Today we also pushed 1.3.1 bits for all those Mac OS X Mozilla users that needed working XPInstall (although, you really should just get 1.4b, it's so much better). Hopefully we'll have a Mozilla Firebird 0.6 release shortly.
Lots of people have been asking about Mozilla's Composer app and what will happen to it in the new world. The roadmap says:
The other integrated components of the Mozilla application suite, Calendar, Chatzilla, and Composer (the HTML editor application), are not going away, either. We're not sure yet how they'll evolve -- whether they'll become standalone toolkit applications (and if so, based on which XUL toolkit), or popular add-ons to Phoenix (if so, they will need to use its new XUL toolkit). But we're committed to supporting them to the fullest extent required by their owners, including providing daily and milestone builds of them for community testing and feedback.
Well, Daniel Glazman posts at his blog today a future for composer where he explains what his goals would be as the Composer maintainer. I'm excited to see that people who are in a position to keep this great application moving forward are interested and passionate about doing so. I use Composer and look forward to the many improvements that it will gain in the new world.
I'm considering making some changes to this blog. I was inspired by this little gem and it got me thinking that I could do a lot to make this page work better. This post is a call for suggestions. What styles, features, etc., do you all think would make this page better. You're the ones that read it so don't hesitate to offer suggestions or comments and I'll see what I can do to make improvements for you all.
clarification: I wasn't planning on picking up the design from the MyDimension blog I linked to, just looking at the mini icons that identify off-site links. I'm not sure the icons are the right thing to do but marking the internal and external links differntly seems very useful.
further explanation Neither was I agreeing, when I clarified that I wasn't planning on using that design, with any of the people that criticized it. Truthfully, I didn't even pay any attention to the design. I was so tickled by the very cool use of CSS for solving a very interesting usability issue that the colors or layout of the page went mostly unnoticed. Perhaps that's a good place for me to start - making my content interesting enough that my layout goes unnoticed :-)
(william, sorry if my linking caused you any bother. i really do like your mini icon feature and was completely sincere when I called it a gem.)
I mentioned the other day just how much I have been anticipating a good XUL feed reader. Well, today I found something very interesting. It's not a standalone app. It's XUL right in browser content but it's pretty nice and I think it's good enough to be my default tool for a while. Take a look at XUL Channels in your favorite XUL-capable browser and let me know what you think.
From the Mozilla Thunderbird project page, via mozillaZine front page:
"We have our first official linux nightly build for the first time since Thunderbird moved to the trunk. Not to be out done, we also have a new windows nightly which includes the latest code reduction work mentioned on May 2nd."
Brian got Mozilla Firebird nightlies building on OS X and the first bits have been pushed to FTP. Woo-Hoo! If you want a Gecko-based browser for OS X that's smaller and faster than the Mozilla SeaMonkey suite of apps and that still supports more than 40 XUL extesions and more than 50 themes, then give Mozilla Firebird a try. We still have work to do to get some basic Mac UI issues worked out but these first builds are a good preview of for Mac users that haven't before been able to test Firebird.
More pretty pictures:
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)
While we still haven't gotten "official" builds of the Mozilla Firebird browser going, a May 02 build has been posted over at KMGerich.com. I've logged a couple of hours on it this evening and so far so good. We've got to make a few Mac-specific changes to get the preferences moved to the app menu and some other bits like that but overall it works pretty well.
Ever since the first XPIs of forumzilla I've been convinced that a clean and simple Mozilla-based feed reader was just around the corner. I tried NewsMonster when it first went beta but it was just too heavyweight for me. rsszilla and satimoz never materialized. I was beginning to get discouraged.
Today, Andy Edmonds over at Surf*Mind*Musings points out a new Mozilla-based aggregator called aggreg8. There's actually code here! And it works. I grabbed the 0.1 XPI (which works in SeaMonkey and Firebird) and gave it a try. It's off to a nice start but only worked with one of the first three feeds I configured. It complains Aggreg8 did not recognise your feed as valid XML. Probable cause of this is incorrect content/mime type. The "Content-Type" of this feed is : text/plain when loading my feed. It attempts to download Hixie's and it displays Andrew's just fine. I suppose I should file a bug :-)
