August 2003 Archives

MozillaZine.org - Your Source for Mozilla News and Advocacy, is five years old tomorrow. Congratulations Chris, Jason, Steve and Alex. Chris and Jason, I have both of you to thank for providing me an avenue into this project. Thank you. You all ROCK!

From the early days of mozBin and mozillaZine to the pioneering irc developer discussions to bugdays to Mozilla 1.0 press and beyond, you all have provided the Mozilla community a stable hub for gathering, discussing and making Mozilla news. Your contribution to this project is immeasurable. Thank you.

In thirty days, I'll no longer be employed by AOL.

I was just talking with Andrew Wooldridge, of CogWorks, a few days ago and near the end of our conversation about OPML, RSS, Feedster and blogs with good design and good things to say, Kristine, of Kadyellebee, came up. Today I noticed that she happened to post a comment that mentioned both Andrew and me the same day we having that conversation. We must all be telepathic :-)

I forgot that I already blogged about the work that Jake Savin (and others?) had done earlier in the month to get Radio and Manilla hooked up to Gecko's content editable features.
Bob Stepno's "Firebird Browser Speeds OS-X Weblog Editing" post gives some demonstrations and also notes a few Mac bugs (I think we've got most of those fixed for the next Firebird release.)
Is WYSIWYG editing in Mozilla or Firebird the only WYSIWYG available for bloggers on Mac? Does MacIE not have the winIE editing control? What about Safari? Does it offer this feature?

Mark Paschal has posted instructions for putting Mozilla Firebird on a Zip disk. I've been thinking about putting Firebird on one of those tiny USB 256MB flash RAM devices. Someone should put together a doc covering the various how-tos for making Firebird portable. Maybe I'll write something up if I'm successful.

Also, thanks Mark for the great tip: "I use about:config to change browser.throbber.url to �javascript:stop()�, so I can click the throbber instead of a separate Stop button."

Jake has a new browser. He chronicles his browsers on Mac history up to his recent switch to Mozilla Firebird. I'm thrilled that Radio Userland is taking advantage of this great Gecko feature and hope that more apps follow that lead.

I'm happily using the simple rich text editing controls in MT now that my gracious hosts have hooked that up.

(ed. note: somehow this didn't get posted when I hit submit. better late than never, i guess. I've also made some edits.)

Mozilla 1.5 Beta

Via MozillaZine:

Project Orb, a Mozilla documentation project has been launched. Project Orb intends to document to end users how to use and configure the Mozilla app suite, Mozilla Firebird, and Camino. The project is located at http://sourceforge.net/projects/projectorb/.

This is one area we can certainly improve and I'm pleased to see this effort starting up.

If all goes well then we'll have a Mozilla 1.5 Beta in the next day or two.

If all goes well then we'll have a Mozilla 1.5 Beta in the next day or two.

twoeyes.org explains why favicons are important and how you can add one to your site. I highly recommend this and agree with twoeyes.org that it's important to making your site usable in tabbed browsers.

From retroblog, via Brad DeLong, comes news that IIT Bombay is going Linux in two days time. Apparently the latest virus/worm mess pushed them over the edge and more than 4,000 seats are going to abandon Microsoft Windows and jump to Linux in a hurry.

Go. Buy. Now. :-) Mozilla Coffee makes you a better human being ;-)

AMR:blog asks for Linux distro recommendations for his HP Pavillion. My recommendation are Red Hat 8 or 9. I'm no "linux expert" but I've been running Red Hat for several years now and it's been my primary OS for almost a year. I've tried various other distros and none have been as easy to install or as friendly once installed.

Jesse Ruderman's amazing Squarefree.com Bookmarklets site got mention in the Old Gray Lady. Awesome!

Scott Johnson, the brains behind Feedster (the greatest rss/blog search tool on the planet) needs a test trackback. Hope that helps :-)

update: looks like the trackback didn't register. Maybe error on my end. I got the old "One or more errors occurred when sending update or TrackBack pings" message on posting. Well, I can try again.

Hey Scott, if you read this, you said that you 'd fixed my problem with Feedster search results in RSS not respecting limit= like the regular search does. I can't make that work. Am I doing something wrong?

Sun is starting to talk a bit more about Project Mad Hatter, a linux gnome desktop featuring Mozilla and StarOffice. Sounds like more information will be available next month.

We're wrapping up Mozilla 1.5 Beta and should have a release sometime soon. Lots (+108616/35718 lines) of great fixes since Alpha so if you haven't tried a recent Mozilla build, now's probably a good time.

Oh, and floppaganda has a sweet new look :-)

Well, the hard drive on my Dell Latitude is no longer making that horrible grinding noise, the sound that preceded the previous hd failures (two in the last year) on this machine. I'm beginning to wonder if I've got some bad heat condition or possibly a structural or shock-absorption problem. It doesn't seem like it would be the drives since each one has been a different model and they failures have all happened in this one machine (but none of my co-workeers with identical machines have had the problem.)

Things sound good today and I'm now well backed up. I've only got this machine as long as I'm with my current employer and that's scheduled to end in about five weeks so I'm still crossing my fingers and hoping for the best.

Laptops kick ass. Laptops suck.

AMR:blog has a nice post about carrying Mozilla around on a keychain. I think I might just get one of those USB drives and keep the latest Milestone with me in case I run into some malnourished machines :-) Sounds like there's plenty of room to keep a Firebird and a Seamonkey build for each of Mac, Windows and Linux with room left over. Maybe I'll add Thunderbird as well.

The old hard drive is grinding again. Last time (and the time before, and the time before) I remeber hearing this sound as I went to bed and waking up to a machine that was inoperative. Ugh. Crossing my fingers and going to sleep :\

Alex, at mozillaZine has a nice update on Firebird progress.

MozillaZine also points out the latest installment of Kay Frode's great Thunderbird articles. This latest piece tackles junk-mail controls. Get it while it's hot!

Neil gives us 18 reasons Thunderbird is better than OE. I'd add one more to that list: 19. Open source, standards-based internet applications just rock!

I guess I don't understand all the buzz about using google as a calculator. Maybe it's because I've have a boomark for javascript: in Firebird/Mozilla with the custom keyword "calc" and so typing "calc 3+3" and hitting enter already gives me an answer without the delay of hitting the google server. This has been available in Mozilla since about forever so the news that google will now do math isn't terribly exciting to me.

Right on the heels of the very popular From Outlook Express to Thunderbird comes the all new and equally valuable From Internet Explorer to Firebird:

In this guide I will go through what I consider the best way to configure Firebird so that if you are used to Internet Explorer you will find Firebird looking and feeling similar.

Great job, Jamie!

I downloaded a rawhide rpm containing updated artwork for the Red Hat bluecurve theme and I really like the changes they've made to the window decorations. Most of the changes are quite subtle but I think it's definitely a move in the right direction.

Over at squarefree.com, Jesse shares some good tips on locating bugs in Bugzilla. I don't use the quicksearch (though I probably should) but I do use many of the same technique as Jesse to be able to quickly locate bugs. Including duplicates is always a useful trick and one of the first things I explain to people new to Bugzilla. I also use the duplicates table for quick access to many high-profile bugs. Limiting searches to bugs with at least a couple of votes or limiting to bugs that have changed in the last few days also pushes higher-profile bugs to the surface. Jesse's collect buglinks bookmarklet is indispensible and I use it regularly to turn a query string into a comma-separated buglist for faster "sub-searches". Bugzilla is a monster but one that's not terribly difficult to tame.

The good news for those of you that have always felt Bugzilla was too difficult to search is that soon we'll have some new features and amazing performance improvements which will make a world of difference. As the new equipment gets set up over at the Mozilla Foundation's new digs, I'll give more updates.

Congratulations to Henrik Gemal who just got married. Henrik is a longtime and highly-valued Mozilla contributor. Maybe his honeymoon will give sspitzer a shot at taking the lead for most bugs filed in Bugzilla. Probably not :-)

(and if any of you think you'd like to give it a shot, you've probably got about 2,500 bugs to go.)

Today I read (actually I saw this yesterday but it hit slashdot today) that Microsoft has stopped development of Outlook Express. Thunderbird development has not stopped :-)

Just got back from the ophthalmologist who fitted me with a pair of tiny devices called punctal plugs. These small silicon plugs will hopefully prevent some of the dry eye symptoms I've been having.

I, apparently, make far too few tears and they evaporate too quickly causing dry eyes - an unpleasant condition.

Tears are quite a bit more interesting than I had realized. For example, it's tears, rather than blood, that deliver oxygen and electrolytes to the cells of the eye. And they're more than just saltwater. There are actually three layers to the tear system, a mucous layer on the surface of the eye that helps the tears flow across (and stick to) the eye, the watery layer containing the oxygen and electrolytes, and an outer lipid layer that acts as both a lubricant between the eye and eyelid and as an evaporative barrier for the watery layer.

My condition is that I'm both not making enough of the watery stuff and I'm not making enough of the oily stuff, so my too few tears are evaporating too quickly. Contact lenses have aggravated this condition that's why I've now got these punctal plugs.

The mechanics of the plug is pretty simple. It works like this: you have four tear ducts, these are drainage pipes, not the thing that actually makes the tears (that's a tear gland and is located in the eyelid,) one at each of the top and bottom of the inner corner of each eye. When you produce tears, they flow out across the eye and either drain through the punctum (tear duct) or evaporate. Plugging some of those drainage ducts with a small silicon plug will hopefully keep more of the tear around for longer and relieve some of the symptoms of dry eyes.

The next step I'll take is investigating the various nutritional changes I can make to encourage better production of the lipid layer to reduce evaporation. Recent studies suggest that the essential fatty acids EPA, DHA and GLA can play a significant role in producing that film layer. My diet is already fairly rich in fatty fish like salmon so I get those omega-3 fatty acids but I might seek out an additional supplements.

(What? You expect only Mozilla news here?)

Check out Jesse's Burning Edge which chronicles the status of the daily builds of Mozilla Firebird.

One day closer to death, Jason. Enjoy :-)

A couple of nice reviews hit the web today. Check out Jamie's Thunderbird review, with lots of nice screenshots and check out Keith Robinson's Gorilla Web Tip Numer Six - Switching to Mozilla.

Radio and Manilla are finally taking advantage of Gecko's rich text editing thanks to some nifty work by Jake. (link via Scripting News and Adam Curry who had this to say: "Jake's got wizzy-mozilla working in Radio under OS X. Watch how quick I change from Safari. ")

PC-WELT magazine has some covereage of the first stand-alone Mozilla Calendar builds and The Lone Programmer says, "in terms of features to help you develop JavaScript, Mozilla is without competition."

Mozilla applications are making a lot of news these days. If you've got a blog and Mozilla's been good to you, let the world know.

Eric might want to try out RSS Reader Panel, NewsMonster, Aggreg8, or XULChannels.

Neil tells us about some of the recent Firebird changes.

Jesse Ruderman demystifies chrome URLs.

And vfwlkr, of Musings points us to a mozillazine post describing the process of using one of Jesse's bookmarklets to make Firebird remember yahoo webmail passwords.

andyed, over at Surf*Mind*Musings, talks a bit about Mozilla's junk-mail filtering and bug 11036. I think that bug 168905 would make Mozilla Mail (and Thunderbird) the undisputed world's best email client. Doing for the rest of my mail what junk-mail classification has done for spam, would just about bring tears to my eyes.

You know you want it; mmmmm, pretty fonts. Get your XFT and GTK2 Linux Firebird build. A big thanks to Brian for getting these builds goin'.

I'm sure I mentioned this before but it warrants another post I think. Eric Meyer has built a great tool, called Color Blender, which makes finding that perfect color for your style sheet sooo easy. Thanks Eric!

It seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity but I was just a bit too late to the table. I just don't think I'll have the time to figure out answers to what should be simple questions, like am I allowed to solicit contributions for the filing fee and if so then do those contributions fall under the regulations that cover contributions used to campaign.

I could probably get this and other questions all sorted out in a day or two but there just isn't a day or two left and since I can't foot the bill myself and I'm not comfortable soliciting for the funds, I'm gonna have to drop my plans to try to get on the California recall ballot :-(

Maybe next time ;-) And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

In Mozilla news, Firebird finally gets that "advanced" preferences panel that so many of the geekier have been demanding for nearly as long as the project's been going. Nice work Blake. SeaMonkey is frozen for Mozilla 1.5beta which I hope to get out soon and we're wrapping up the final changes to Mozilla 1.4.1.

Go Tom!
Nice combination, John!
Firebird on X-box!
Get Active!
MT Sidebar!

It appears that I'm not allowed to solicit any funds until I've filed this form 501. The paypal button is on hold while I research this further.

I can't find much on the $3,500. It's not at all clear whether the filing fee is covered by the same rules as other campaign expenditures. I'm not even clear on whether or not I'm allowed to solicit money for that fee.

Well, here's my thinking: I need to raise the $3,500 dollars in the next two days, get the 65 signatures and get it all in by Saturday afternoon. This is doable and the financial contributions have already started to stream in.

If I am unable to gather the $3,500 before the filing deadline then any money that I have gathered will go to a Mozilla project of my choosing (mozdev, mozillazine, bug bounty, Mozilla Foundation, etc.).

If you're cool with that and you want to help get my name on the ballot for this special election then please visit www.asaforgovernor.com and make a contribution. Just 175 people giving $20 each would seal the deal.

As is obvious from my previous posts, I don't know much about the legal obligations for someone collecting money like this. I appreciate the comments and links you all have posted and am happy to hear any more advice in this area.

Any of you know campaign finance laws or how to handle raising money to get on a ballot? Do the same regulations apply to gathering funds to register a candidate as apply to gathering funds for campaigning? I can't find anything at the county registrar's office on who can legally contribute to the $3,500 so I'm assuming that's open to anyone.

Also, several people have suggested that if I can raise money, but not enough to get on the ballot, that the money could be donated to the Mozilla Foundation or some other Mozilla-cause. I like that idea a lot. Any legal experts know if there'd be a problem with that?

It's on metafilter already! Thanks to Pete for the heads up.

update: It's been brought to my attention that Pete has also posted on the potential run, "What platform will he be running on? Many platforms! And most importantly the Mozilla platform!" and so has xsamplex "Pornstars, publishers, pundits and termintators, move aside..."

more: There's a mozillaZine discussion as well!

I've been reading up a bit more on the special election. The good news is that the ballot will have candidates listed in random order and it sounds like the list will be quite long. That could be a real boost for those lucky enough to end up at the top of the list.

My enthusiasm is growing. The only significant bump in the road is raising the money. How do I do it? www.asaforgovernor.com will be available soon (with paypal) but I think it's going to take some real creative thinking to raise $3,500 in two days, and how to handle it if I raise some but not all of the necessary money?

If there's any chance at all of making this happen, it would have to come from you all. Any bright ideas for raising money fast? Ideas and offers of money are quite welcome in the comments section to this post.

I'm sure that many of you all have heard the news about the California special election where some, probably small, number of people will turn out to vote on whether to remove the Governor or not and if removed, with whom to replace him. Today I learned that it only costs $3,500 to get a name on the ballot. If there are a large number of names on the ballot, we could see a new Governor elected with a record few number of votes. In that climate, it's not unrealistic to think that a dark-horse candidate could steal the show.

So what do you all think? Should I run for Governor?

update: In addition to raising $3,500, I'd have to gather 65 signatures of registered California voters. The signature bit doesn't seem too difficult. I'll be contacting the county registrar's office tomorrow morning to see what paperwork is required.

more: The calendar of events seems to suggest that I have only two days to raise the money, gather signatures and file a declaration of candidacy. Am I reading this right? That seems like a painfully small window of time to raise $3,500.

I had a nice time at Linux World today. Ben Goodger was kind enough to do the driving.

I got to see a great friend from my Auburn days and did a lot of Mozilla talkin' with folks at various software companies and linux distros.

People seemed really pleased to hear that the Mozilla Foundation was moving forward and that Mozilla was alive and well.

Mozilla stickers == smiles.

I'm going to try to make it to Linux World in San Francisco tomorrow or Wednesday. If you're gonna be there and are interested in connecting up, drop me a note in the comments to this post. I'll try to bring some stickers and a few t-shirts.

Phil Ringnalda has a nice write-up on Web Panels called Firebird's Next Killer Feature.

The Firebird "Web Panels" feature is getting really nice, really fast. Take a look.

Web Panels is much more useful/versitile/practical than the old SeaMonkey sidebar. If you're visiting a page that you want to hold onto for a few minutes you can just pres the "Grab Page" button and it pulls that page from the content area into the Web Panels sidebar. If it's something really useful, like Gemal's BlogUpdates or the "Post to Movable Type" pop-up, then you just "Grab" it and click "Add Web Panel". That creates a bookmark for the page with a special flag that causes it to always open in the Web Panels sidebar. (You can set this flag on any bookmark by opening the bookmark's properties and checking the box labeled "Load this bookmark in the Web Panels sidebar.")

There's still more work to be done for things like context menus, supporting the SeaMonkey sidebar API, persisting content when the panel is closed or another sidebar is loaded, etc. but it's already very useful. Grab a build in the morning and take a look.

Dave, Ben and Brian have been doing some really cool work on Firebird recently. Dave's "Web Panels" work is coming along nicely. I think it's going to be light-years ahead of the Mozilla SeaMonkey implementation in terms of usefulness and usability. Ben's been heavily involved in the Web Panels design and has also done some great work to improve our handling of downloads and helper applications. Brian has nearly finished up a much improved password manager. 0.7 is going to kick ass!

update: Anyone out there got some cycles for the next killer feature? (killer for those of us that blog with MT, anyway.)

There's a nice review of Firebird and Thunderbird, chock-full-o-screenshots, and worth the garbled by babelfish read, over at PC-WELT online.

Firebird 0.6.1 for Macintosh OS X is now available.

If you don't already know about Firebird, check out Mozilla Firebird 101.