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July 31, 2003
Le Fish Cam
I visited the fishies at the fishcam today. As always, they all swam to see who is coming. The puffer (top right) is the most active one, and I believe the oldest. A far shot to show the setup (oldest webcam, and the camera is the original one used as well).
I remember my first day at Netscape, and the pit was filled up with people. Now it is empty.
My current cube, starting to get messy. Wide shot.
I would have taken more, but a lizard was hiding in the bushes.
Posted by doron at 9:03 PM | Comments (10)
July 29, 2003
Beware the Marquee Cube
Took some pictures of my old cube in the evangelism area. It was pretty big. In it is also the whiteboard of hell, where marquee was born. The little "<marquee> de Sade = hell" has been there for a long time since the great days of China embedding.
Other images: the kegerator and bridge and more bridge. As you can see, the final cantina was pretty messy.
Oh, and a bad image of Building 21.
Posted by doron at 8:02 PM | Comments (11)
Return of the Browser Wars?
eweek has an article about how Mozilla is now free and can take on IE. I disagree about Netscape holding back mozilla, it was never user end-user friendly. Go to IRC and ask a question, you get sent by someone to #mozillazine. And lets not forget the non-stellar QA for releases (1.2.1 anyone?). Also, Mozilla.org didn't seperate itself from Netscape, Netscape was finally killed, they had no choice. AOL gets 2 million dollars in writeoffs and doesn't get a bad name as the Mozilla killer. They only killed Netscape, and we never did anything for the project anyways, just held it back!
The article however does make a very good point about first concentrating on buisnesses:
"Netscape initially became big because everyone used it at work and then decided to use it at home."
And Gecko is in pretty good shape - strong DOM support for building advanced web applications, the best CSS support for creating an application that looks like a native application, XML/XSLT support to over modularity and Web Services support to get and send data without having to reload the page.
And look at the main backers - IBM, Sun, Redhat. Web applications are cross-platform, as Gecko is available on lots of platforms.
However, if Firebird is to be fast, should it still use XUL? Redhat could easily use Epiphany, which is a native gtk2 app embedding Gecko in a simple UI. Its faster than Firebird and fits with the rest of the Gnome desktop.
But, do enterprises want a small browser or an application suite that does all their communications needs? I would say some want a suite, some a standalone.
Posted by doron at 10:56 AM | Comments (6)
July 28, 2003
The Crazy French
The crazy french Netscapers (well, ex-netscapers). I had to deal with the one on the right for a whole year, nearly went crazy.
It is rumoured they were last seen mooning an AOL president...
Posted by doron at 2:41 PM | Comments (2)
July 26, 2003
Toolbar Overflow
Marcio's RSS News Ticker Toolbar has gone live at DevEdge. Its a nifty little tool based on my original toolbar article that displays headlines from RSS feeds in a ticker-like fashion. It doesn't actually scroll the headlines but rather uses a fading effect using -moz-opacity. Its a good example how an open XML standard (invented at Netscape, no less) can be easily accessed by Mozilla.
Posted by doron at 11:11 PM | Comments (10)
July 25, 2003
t-minus 1 week and counting...
... till my last day at AOL.
Posted by doron at 11:06 AM | Comments (10)
July 24, 2003
The Cantina to end all Cantinas
Today we had the cantina to end all cantinas (a cantina is when netscapers have a small party under the soda can bridge in the xml area) for Netscape. Food and alcohol flowed, t-shirts were given out and inner truths revealed. Hopefully people who had cameras will post pictures online soon. The group included current survivors as well as non-survivors, and was a blast.
Things change allright, but polar bear remains the most hyper dog I have ever seen.
Cheers to Netscape! No one can kill the netscape spirit.
Posted by doron at 10:11 PM | Comments (14)
July 23, 2003
$12.99 for opensource - priceless
mozillaoncd.com is selling mozilla 1.4 on cds for $12.99. They advertise on google for when you search "netscape" with:
Don't Download Netscape
Get Mozilla instead. No ads or spam
It includes popup blocking & chat
www.mozillaoncd.com
At cd.netscape.com, you can get Netscape 7.1 on cd for $4.95, or the CD and the Guidebook (which isn't too bad for newbies) for $11.95. Natrually Netscape 7.1 has all the same features mozilla has, plus AIM/ICQ, which users care about, rather than IRC. Though 7.1 has IRC now too in the dev pack :)
The moral of the story is, sleep more and buy less.
Posted by doron at 12:15 PM | Comments (17)
July 21, 2003
Translate This!
To honor the fact that I have "web services" listed in my blog subtitle (goats run abundant here), my blog now has in its top right (your other right!) a quick translate tool using web services and Gecko's support for WSDL. You need Netscape 7.1, Mozilla 1.4 or FireBird 0.6 to use it.
Posted by doron at 11:42 PM | Comments (7)
July 18, 2003
Googlize your Mozilla
I am open sourcing my Google Toolbar, which was developed at Netscape. It works with Mozilla 1.0-1.4 (NS7.0-7.1), and NOT firebird.
Beta version at http://nexgenmedia.net/google.xpi. It has an uninstaller even :) Be sure to restart the browser after installing it.
Once nice feature is, type something in the search box and ctrl-enter, opens the search results in a new tab.
It behaves and looks like the IE google toolbar.
Posted by doron at 12:06 PM | Comments (5)
July 16, 2003
Stupidity
I've noticed several blogs mention how having Netscape die will help Mozilla. Mozillazine points to the fact that contributors outnumbered netscape people. So we have 20 people doing UI rather than 15 doing midas/editor/plugins/xpcom/etc work.
Also I see people saying Netscape was keeping mozilla.org from being a end-user product. So where is mozilla.org end-user support? The new mozilla.org site lists End User Documentation as the last item after scrolling 3 screens. Gemal says having 2 browsers (netscape and mozilla) is confusing. Great, now Mozilla has SeaMonkey, FireBird, TBird and Camino. Improvement! And none have the benefit of having a name recongnized by any internet-using individual.
I think people are forgetting how much Netscape (or AOL in truth) paid developers and QA were contributing. 1.0 was a strong milestone, but 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, where less and less people were working on it, were bad releases. 1.4 again had Netscape spending blood on it.
So now Mozilla is alone, with some enterprise backers. But is FireBird enterprise ready? Will removing 3 panels of security prefs deter companies? Extensions don't solve mass installing issues, as there is no CCK to create custom builds. FireBird has no Midas, which IBM wanted badley and Netscape implemented.
Do we have the resources to make the stand alones worthwhile to those backers ? Having worked with enterprises who deploy Netscape 7, I would have to say no.
But what do I know? I like marquee. And mozilla.org was hurt badley today and freed. Lets hope it can tend its wounds, or have some big blue help lick its wounds.
Oh, and what is that about bugzilla being enterprise ready? After having worked with that code, I honestly can say its a huge hack. But a hack that works. Maybe its time for Bugbird, and to get attachments you need to add an extension...
Posted by doron at 12:29 AM | Comments (29)
July 15, 2003
Goodbye and good luck to all...
... who got laid off today.
Posted by doron at 11:43 AM | Comments (13)
Mozilla Foundation
Congrats to everyone at mozilla.org for making this happen, its probably the right move at the right time, though my cynical self says "desperate move to save mozilla".
Though the website is fanboyish and bragging too much. Not very professional.
Posted by doron at 10:23 AM | Comments (11)
Tuesday...
... cue pycho music, garnished with some death march ...
Posted by doron at 9:16 AM | Comments (10)
July 14, 2003
Monday...
... cue Jaws theme ...
Posted by doron at 4:08 PM | Comments (10)
July 11, 2003
Parlay? Party?
Saw Pirates of the Caribbean yesterday, pretty good flick. Depp's character stole the show, as usual.
As for today's planned party at mgalli and I's place, we managed to buy all we thought we needed 30 mins before it started.
As for the party itself:
Everyone on the evite came.
Discussions did not involve politics.
Fruit juice was served.
None of the holders got madly drunk and fell asleep on the floor.
It wasn't fun at all.
This entry doesn't exist and was written by a 2-fingered monkey.
Posted by doron at 12:55 AM | Comments (2)
July 9, 2003
Qualified?
http://dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20030708.html
Posted by doron at 1:44 PM | Comments (10)
Dead Company Walking
Today, Building 21's "Netscape" logo was taken down (picture here).
We shall miss you Netscape!
Posted by doron at 1:39 PM | Comments (12)
July 7, 2003
Thou Shalst Move
Does anyone know of a cheap service in the USA to move say a bed/desk from one state to another? And UHaul won't work, no car/license here.
Posted by doron at 6:29 PM | Comments (11)
July 3, 2003
Ye olde cowboy boot
Time to learn about austin and cowboy boots me thinks.
Yeehawblahhh!
Posted by doron at 1:42 PM | Comments (12)