Check out the news at the QA blog: Tracy's reviving BugDays!
Wanna get your face on the cover of Wired magazine? Well, Blake Ross got his start at one of my BugDays :-)
BugDay is a great way to get familiar with the tools, process, and people that make Firefox happen. Check out Tracy's post to find out more.
This ad is great. Check it out, then Digg it.
Hubble is now 16 years old. Hard to believe it's been that long. What an amazing 16 years for astronomy, cosmology, and space education. Hubble, and the wonderful cameras that have called the space telescope home, have given me countless hours of joy. I'm personally greatful to every single person who invested in making this 16 years of Hubble a reality.
If you've got a decent connection, go watch some great videos.
Wow, a second Firefox bus. How cool is that. Firefox is hot!
Somebody please tell me that this is a joke. The order form failed to process so I'm guesing that's the sign that it's not serious. I can't stop laughing at this.
Here's an idea. In stead of "Ask Asa" where you all ask a lot of great questions and I try to come up with useful answers, what if you all ask questions, I select some subset and post them to the blog and request others in the community chime in with answers. Rather than me being the focus, I'll just act as a conduit. What do you all think? Worth trying? If so, go ahead and ask your questions (hold off, if you've got answers, until I round up the questions and post them to the front page.)
if it's a silly idea, no one will ask or answer questions and we can all try something different :-)
This is indeed hot! See this and more than 25 other ads at FirefoxFlicks.com and stay tuned, because we're posting more ads every day.
Does this mean that LiveJournal users are not allowed to provide (what does "provide" mean?) Firefox to their readers? Would this prevent LJ bloggers from posting links to Firefox? What about just recommending it or commenting on the feature set?
I got an email this morning pointing me to a blog post with these awesome photos of a Firefox bus. Pimp my bus, indeed!
Via IT-Director.com, I see that Firefox usage at BoingBoing.net has taken a big jump and is now above 45% -- and when you add up all Gecko browsers, the number is above 50% IE share at BoingBoing is down to about half of that of Gecko browsers. Nice!
We've uploaded five more videos to Firefox Flicks. Take a look and let us know what you think.
Another three videos are up at Firefox Flicks.
The ESA's Venus Express spacecraft has returned its first images - delivering the first views ever of the Venusian south pole. Venus has a massively dense carbon dioxide atmosphere and these new photos, very low resolution compared to what we'll soone get from Venus Express, show some beautiful spiraling clouds in that dense atmosphere. Venus' cloud structures are shortlived but we learned from the Pioneer Venus Oribter (orbited 1980-1992) that largescale patterns persist even as the structures at the smaller scale evolves and changes at a rapid pace. I can't wait for the high resolution imaging that we'll get from the ESA craft when it settles into a closer orbit.
This blog is four years old today. I've posted just over 2,000 times to the blog in that time. Those posts contain more than 400,000 words. That translates into just under 2,500,000 characters. No wonder my wrists hurt :-)
Maybe I should stop blogging and start cranking out a novel every year or so :-)
We've just pushed three more videos to Firefox Flicks. Check it out!
We've just launched the new Firefox Flicks video site. Here's a taste of what you can find over at Flicks. This Firefox ad, called "Daredevil" was created by Pete Macomber.
Voice Over:
The idea behind this spot was to capture a youthful energy and approach to life that is often lost in adulthood. In order to pull this off I studied the master of truth Errol Morris. I interviewed Ella Minot (a surfer, not an actress) using some of his techniques. I found that being passive, but engaging, allowed Ella to get lost in her world and when this happens you get the gems. As Errol once said, "you couldn't write this stuff." And he is so right. The word "daredevil" has been missing from my vocabulary for twenty years. I did the interview on the beach, which I think helped her relax and the fact that the sound quality is not perfect perhaps makes the spot more believable.
Camera:
"Daredevil" was shot with a DVX100 through a fisheye lens. I liked the using the fisheye for this project because the spherical quality of the image lends itself to the global nature of the product. (Please take all this with a grain of salt.) The skateboarding was shot from a bicycle. I like the silhouette of the rollercoaster on the pier in the background. I think it reflects the magical nature of a kid's imagination.
Post:
I made an effort to color the scenes to match the hot Firefox logo. The tag line changed several times, but I like the juxtaposition of this one. The music reminds me of something Ennio Morricone would write if he were an outlaw surfer. And one final note: Please remember it is much easier to make this stuff up after the fact.
About Pete:
Pete Macomber was born in Holland, raised in South Africa, received a degree in English literature from University of Colorado, competed on the US Snowboard Team and now creates music videos, commercials and screenplays from his Venice, California home when he's not off searching for undiscovered waves in Panama.
W're going to be putting up several new Flicks videos each day-- and there are two additional videos, "Drama Queen" and "Double-Click Relief" already up at the site, so head on over to Firefox Flicks and see some of what our community is working on.
Over at Planetary Photojournal, they've got some amazing photographic maps of Jupiter taken by the Cassini spacecraft. The cylindrical and polar maps were constructed from 36 Cassini photos and offer an amzing 175km resolution of our system's largest planet.
If you enjoy getting lost in Jupiter's bands, belts, spots, and vortices, don't miss these spectatuclar maps. Sexy!
NASA/JPL has posted the first color image of Mars from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment onboard MRO. The spacecraft is still in the early stages of it's orbit correction maneuvers that won't be completed until late this year, so the resolution of this near infrared image is only about 2.5 meters per pixel, but it's still astonishing detail and this is just a small taste of what's to come. Check it out.
I want this cell phone. I wonder if they'll make it available to non Jitterbug service providers. I've been looking for years for a cell phone with buttons I can actually hit with my clumsy thumbs and it seems that every year that goes by, the buttons get smaller and flatter and more difficult to hit without filing a point on my thumbnail or wearing some kind of thimble pointer aparatus.
Do any of you all have any recommendations for a cell phone that's short on features and long on actual telephone usability?
In a recent blog post, I asked those of you who are using more than 10 extensions to tell me about how you use the web. There were a number of great replies and a couple of (obvious, in hindsight) trends came out of that discussion. The kinds of users who have more than ten extensions seem to fall into three groups (with lots of overlap.) The first group is web developers. There are several great tools for web development and it's not difficult to break the 10 extension mark when you've got a handful of development tools installed. The second group includes people who want to modify or enhance traditional browser features, including extensions that alter content. Representative extensions types here included ad blocking, bookmark enhancements, and tabbed browsing features. The third vein included features that aren't traditionally thought of as browser features, add-ons like weather status displays and music player controls.
Many people who responded seemed to appreciate that their browsing habits might be very different from the habits of others and wouldn't suggest that everyone install the same set of extensions they used. Some of commenters were critical of me or of the project team for not including some or all of their favorite features by default in Firefox.
I'm interested in some more discussion around this topic. When you think about the hundreds of millions of people surfing the web today, what extensions do you think have broad enough appeal that say 90% of web users would benefit from that extension. What about extensions that would benefit 100% of users, or 50% of web users?
In that previous post, a lot of you wrote down long lists of extensions and why they suited your surfing habits. I'd be very interested to see your list of extensions again, but this time accompanied by your guess as to the percentage of web users that would benefit enough from each one of those to have it included in a Firefox distribution. (and I'm not excluding the possibility that we might end up with more than one distribution here.)
I'll start :-) Here are my guesses about the usefulness of my extensions to a general web audience.
Resizeable Textarea: about 10% of the web population would benefit.
SpellBound: maybe 50% of web users would find this useful (webmail being the most common use case. Forums and Blogs next.)
Link Visitor: Less than 1% of the web would have any use for this.
Your turn :-)
Want to know what kids think of Firefox? Check out Deitrich's blog post where he outlines some of the results of his "Firefox 4 Kids" presetnation to about 120 fourth graders. There's some great information here.
Things are really heating up at Firefox Flicks and you can read all about it at the Flicks Backstage blog.
Cheryl just got back from the Vail Film Festival where 4 Flicks ads were screened as part of the "Firefox Flicks and Oscar Shorts" program (which, in addition to the Flicks, featured 6 Oscar nominated and 2 Oscar winning short films.) You can read about the four Flicks that we screened at Vail by checking out the Backstage Blog.
We're only days away from a relaunch of the www.FirefoxFlicks.com site that will display Flicks ad submissions for everyone to watch, download, share, comment on, etc. and we're less than three weeks away from the big Flicks wrap party and celebration.
Stay tuned to the Backstage Blog for more updates.
Dual boot for Macs might finally be enough to get me to move from my trusty ThinkPad over to one of these shiny new Apple laptops. I think the only thing that might hold me back is that darned single mouse button on the laptop. I realize that Macs support the second button on extermal mice, but it's the built-in one that really annoys me.
Does anyone out there know of any cases of hardware hacking to cut that titanium mouse button in half and put a second sensor under it?
Mitchell Baker, our Chief Lizard Wrangler, has a blog post up that covers some good ground around what motivates so many of us to participate in this endeavor.
Just so everyone knows (though I think it should be pretty obvious) yesterday's post was a joke.
A couple of major events went almost completely unnoticed by the tech press in March, but I sure didn't miss them, and they've changed the way I view the Web and my place in the Internet ecosystem.
What were these two events that have got me using a different browser and entertaining an offer to move to Oslo?
The first, and most important to me, was the redesign of the Opera Widget interface available in the latest weekly builds. Until just about 10 days ago, it was simply too difficult to access my ROT13 encoder/decoder widget. Now, as long as Opera is running, with the convenient new "Widget Thumb" I can easily encode/decode ROT13 phrases by simply typing the phrase into the widget textarea. It's just this kind of time-saving UI improvements that demonstrate Opera's commitment to improving the lives of those "Regular People" I talk about so much.
The second earthshaking event that will have serious consequences well beyond the browser space was demonstrated in the #8265 weekly build. Starting with that build, which must have tens of millions of users already, Opera passes the Acid2 test. What does this mean for browser users, and what does it mean for the future of humankind? Well, up until Opera's #8264 weekly build, the world-renowned smiling face icon looked as if it had been shot in the head and lay drowning in a pool of blood. Finally, thanks to the hard work of the engineering team at Opera Software, ASA (I think they added that final "Asa" bit as as an enticement along with the job offer they recently extended to me) -- thanks to the hard work of the Opera engineers, hundreds of millions of web users will be able to stare at a bright yellow, and clearly not dead, smiling face icon again. But it won't stop there. That smile is so infectious that we'll no doubt see it spreading off-line and it could in fact be the first concrete steps toward world peace.
So how did the tech press miss all of this? I'm not sure. But I didn't, and I'm inspired. I can't tell you how good it feels to see that real innovation has returned to the web and to know that a browser company is finally willing to put its resources to work for the public good like this.
Opera Software, about that job, my answer to you is an emphatic "Yes!"
Just a reminder to everyone who reads here, today is the first day of April, also known as April Fools day or All Fools day. Beware of pranks or other silliness.
