djst's nest

Team Mozilla is growing

The Mozilla team of World Community Grid now has 15 members! I also read that a Linux client is under development. Great stuff. :)

Join the WCG Mozilla Team!

After reading a lot about the differences between Folding@Home and World Community Grid, I've decided to try them both. WCG clearly is the more noble of the two, since it strives to "create the largest public computing grid benefiting humanity". They will also be hosting many different projects and not just protein folding, which is their first project. They simply appear to be more global community oriented, working on problems that affect the world in significant ways. Folding@Home, on the other hand, has the advantage of supporting lots of platforms, including Macintosh and Linux. Also, who wouldn't want to support Team MozillaZine? :)

Because of this, I've decided to run WCG on Windows XP and F@H on Fedora Core 3. Windows is my primary OS, which means I will be running WCG most of the time. That only seems fair, since I feel better about running WCG anyway. But I certainly don't want to throw away unused CPU cycles while running Linux, hence my support for F@H.

If you want to give WCG a try, I encourage you to join the Mozilla team I created! It would be cool if we could reach top ten with the team. I'm sure there are lots of Mozilla fans that want to benefit humanity by supporting the Grid. Or at least I hope so! I chose the team name Mozilla to cover people from both camps of the two F@H teams: MozillaZine and Firefox.

Distributed computing - or Grid Technology

I don't get it. There's already SETI@Home (with their generic Boinc system), Folding@Home and Distributed.net. Now there's World Community Grid too.

Why don't they all share their resources instead of reinventing the wheel? Especially World Community Grid, which seems to be a generic distributed computing system similar to Boinc. Which one should I spend my unused CPU power on, if anyone?

Update: Appearantly, World Community Grid and Grid.org are using the same system, developed by United Devices. I'm having trouble understanding the difference between WCG and Grid.org. Maybe someone could tell me which one of the clients (which share the same Human Proteome Folding project) I should use, and why there are two versions?

How To Create a New Profile

Many of the problems with Firefox are caused by dirty upgrades (upgrading from an older version and keeping the old profile data). It's very common that the replies in the tech support forum include the question: "Did you try it with a new profile?" This is not a bad question, since it helps to isolate the cause of problems if you try to reproduce them with a fresh profile. However, many users don't even know what a profile is, let alone how to create one.

Because of this, I just wrote a new tutorial on how to manage and create new profiles in Firefox. Hopefully, it will be easier for people to see how to create a profile after reading this text.

Google Links to texturizer.net

Appearantly, there's a new start page at google.com/firefox, which features tips and other info about Firefox. One of these tips, the one about keyboard shortcuts, is linking to the old Firefox Help site. Because of that, I had to make it so that it redirects to the new Mozilla.org hosted site.

A Date to Remember

It's November 9th, 2004.

Living in Sweden (GMT+1), I've already had a taste of this big day in Mozilla history. :) The new Firefox Help is ready. I spent the whole afternoon and evening working on the new site, updating content and improving style. I'm especially satisfied with the new Keyboard Shortcuts page. The old texturizer.net site has finally been put to sleep.

Soon it's time for celebration... :)

1.0... It's coming!

November 9th, 2004 is a date to remember. It's hard to believe that I've been heavily involved with Firefox for over two years now. I've got some work to do tomorrow over at the new Firefox Help, that's for sure.

Gecko taking a bite

As I mentioned earlier, I was on Crete a couple of weeks ago with my family, to celebrate my mom's 60th birthday. On the island, I had my first close contact with a real Gecko!

My mom and him instantly got that special connection:

America, it's wunderbar

USA, what's wrong with you guys? Almost every country in the whole world would vote for Kerry, yet you're voting for Bush... And what the hell is wrong with your voting system?

Books on Artificial Intelligence and Compilator Theory

I thought I should ask here since a lot of Mozilla users are computer scientists like myself. I'm taking a course on AI and another one on Compilator Theory this period and was wondering if anyone had anyone of these two books to sell:

Compilers: Principles, Techniques and Tools
by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi och Jeffery D. Ullman, (Addison-Wesley), ISBN: 0-201-10088-6

Artificiall intelligence, A modern approach (second edition)
by Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig, ISBN: 0-13-080302-2

Preferably, you're living in or near Sweden, as that will make it cheaper to send the book(s) to me. :)