Back on 8th August. Comments disabled due to spam - sorry :-( See you all in two weeks.
I will be away from very early Saturday 23rd July until Monday 8th August, doing a couple of camps.
(In case you've been living in a cave and haven't noticed). I'm off to get my copy...
Warning: Spoilers in comments.
The company I work for when I'm not working for the Mozilla Foundation, Data Connection, is looking to hire four to six software developers (either new graduates, or people with existing experience) at their offices in Enfield, North London, where I work.
I can't promise you would get to work on or with Free software, but you would get to work with smart people for a company who are very good to their employees, and have a great culture of technical excellence. The fact that they are such a good company to work for is one of the reasons I'm currently attempting to do two jobs at once. ;-) You don't have to be a graduate in a numerate discipline - we already have classicists, linguists and others.
If you are interested, you can find out more and perhaps apply online. Please say that I sent you :-)
If you're not a UK citizen, that's not necessarily a showstopper, but this post is aimed mostly at UK residents.
RMS believes no-one should buy Harry Potter books because of the Canadian injunction the publisher got to protect the book's embargo before it's launch date. Fine - he's perfectly entitled to his opinion. But to post a massive spoiler at the bottom of his blog post, so even people who don't agree with him, or who want to follow his suggested course of action and borrow the book, have it spoiled for them - that's just nasty.
How can he argue for the right to private modifications in the GPL, and yet be opposed to the right of a release date for an artistic work? The publisher should be able to keep their work private if they wish, until they choose to release it - just as with the private modifications to GPLed code, or even completely private source code written from scratch.
In the past, terrorist attacks are often followed by a claim of responsibility, where the perpetrators send in a tape explaining who they are and why they did what they did. "Yes, we're the Real IRA, not the IRA, and we blew up these passers-by because we believe in a united Ireland".
But in the case of the London bombs, why would they bother? Everyone knows who did it, and what they are fighting for and why. Claiming would just give the authorities a load of forensic evidence - voice prints etc. The "fifth man" they are pursuing certainly won't want to stick his head above the parapet.
I wouldn't be surprised if no-one makes a (credible) claim for responsibility.
Recently, in a groundbreaking move, the BBC made available for download full, high-quality copies of all nine of Beethoven's symphonies. This was part of their Beethoven Experience. The files were available for seven days, with the following terms:
The BBC granted you a 7-day, non-exclusive licence to download this Beethoven Experience audio. You may not copy, reproduce, edit, adapt, alter, republish, post, broadcast, transmit, make available to the public, or otherwise use this audio in any way except for your own personal, non-commercial use.
Unfortunately, I got there too late to get copies of Symphonies 1 through 5 (and I particularly wanted 5 - ta da da daaaa!), but that's just bad luck. Still, it's great that the BBC is improving access to classical music in this way. I've been listening to them at home while working for the MoFo, and I know I wouldn't have been listening to classical otherwise.
So it's really depressing that people are taking the BBC's generosity and committing copyright infringement by making the files available after the download period has finished. These are not public domain - putting them up is just as illegal as putting up copies of the latest #1 single.
Is any company ever going to do DRM-free online music if every experiment in that direction ends with widespread theft?
As Daniel is on holiday (and, given that he's just released Nvu 1.0, he'll probably be away for a month or more ;-), I should point out this Nvu Tutorial which is running on thesitewizard.com. There's four chapters so far.
If you work, or someone you know works for the system administration team at the ISP schlund.de, who I believe are part of 1 & 1, please can you get in touch? I have a question about the SSL configuration on sites they host, and I can't read German.
Thanks. :-)
It's been driving me mad for months why sometimes when I click on a URL in Thunderbird it opens it in Firefox, and sometimes it opens it in Epiphany or Galeon or something like that (even though I use KDE). I couldn't see a pattern - was it to do with whether it was a body URL or in the header? Was it particular sites (Bugzilla seemed never to work)? I finally figured it out; it's down to this small but important sentence in the instructions:
Repeat [this configuration change] for each protocol you want Thunderbird to dispatch (https, ftp, etc.).
So http:// URLs were being correctly dispatched, but https:// ones (including, of course, Bugzilla) were not. If anyone else is similarly incapable of following instructions, perhaps this blog post might help them.
bugzilla.mozilla.org bug 300,000 was filed on 2005-07-07 at 13:54 ZST by long-time Mozilla contributor 'timeless'. Of all the entrants in the 300,000 bug sweepstake, the person who guessed closest was Takeshi Nishimura, who guessed 2005-07-07 07:06 - over a period of nearly 4 months, he was only 6 hours, 48 minutes out!
Update 2005-07-08: Takeshi told me how he got involved in the project. "I was enjoying Firefox and one day I recommended it to my wife. Unfortunately she complained about some bugs. I found these were filed as bug 175787 and bug 271359 but no patches. I fought with the source code and presented patches. I'm continuously working on Firefox's other odd things, especially on favicons."
The runners-up were David Naylor (5 days, 31 minutes out) and Peter Lairo (5 days, 17 hours, 58 minutes out).
There were 60 entries. Of those, one person entered a date which was about a year in the past, two entered dates only a few days in the future, and several people submitted entries with my email address as the entry name! Takeshi's entry was chronologically number 54; so most people under-estimated how long it would take for us to reach this milestone. That is to say, bug filing seems to have slowed in the past quarter. Perhaps Hendrix is having some effect.
And, because someone always gets this wrong: there is no correlation between the number of bugs in your bug system and the bugginess of your current product. If that were true, then every product we've ever made would have been getting steadily buggier since its inception, which is clearly nonsense. The number of bugs in a bug system is a function of the amount of time it's been running (7 years), the number of products tracked (currently 5 major ones, with many other smaller ones and components), and the size, vibrancy and tenacity of the bug-filing community. So, everyone who's ever filed a useful bug should give themselves a pat on the back.
As you might expect, I've been paying fairly close attention to the news today. One thing that struck me was Tony Blair's speech at midday, given from the G8 Summit in Gleneagles.
He started by saying that his "thoughts and prayers" were with the victims and their families, and went on to finish by condemning the terrorists. "My thoughts and prayers are with the victims" seems a fairly common formula - I've heard politicians use it after tragedies in the past, and several times over the course of today. And I've certainly heard no expressions of concern for the terrorists.
At the time, I thought this was very statesmanlike. However, prompted by an email from a complete stranger, I looked again at the Bible. And I found that during the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said:
You have heard that it was said, 'Love your neighbour and hate your enemy.' But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (Matthew 5:43-48)
I think that's massively challenging - it certainly challenged me. I hope any Christians reading will feel able to take time to pray for the people who perpetrated these acts - because even they are not beyond the concern or reach of God, and what they have done cannot be too serious for Christ's death to pay for it, if they ask him.
Of course, the clearest ever demonstration of the principle of "love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you" was on a hill outside Jerusalem 2000 years ago, when "while we were still sinners, Christ died for us".
When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him, along with the criminals - one on his right, the other on his left. Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." And they divided up his clothes by casting lots. (Luke 23:33-34)
I am looking for online copies of the EULAs which came with Microsoft Visual Studio 6, and Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, specifically the parts which deal with redistributing bits of it such as the C runtimes (MSVC6.dll, MSVC70.dll etc.). I can find several things on the web which might be it, but I can't be certain. Therefore, someone who owns a copy of Visual Studio needs to do the search and to confirm that the paper or electronic copy they got with it matches the URL they are giving to me :-)
If anyone has a copy of either of these two bits of software, I'd be very grateful if they'd do some Googling and try and find a match.
Update: if someone could also give me or point me to a definitive list of all recent and known future MS Visual Studio/C++ versions, with all their possible names and version numbers, that would also be very helpful.
There were at least four terrorist explosions this morning in London, mostly at Underground stations but at least one on a bus. Casualty numbers are unknown at this time. The London transportation system has been shut down. It is likely that these attacks were timed to coincide with the start of the G8 Summit at Gleneagles.
Mozilla Foundation products now only display IDNs in a whitelist of TLDs, which have policies stating what characters are permitted, and procedures for making sure that no homographic domains are registered to two different entities. This work was done in bug 286534 by Jungshik Shin - thanks to him. I've made a list of the whitelisted TLDs with links to their registries and the relevant published policy documents. Our whitelist is currently (almost; see below) identical to that of Opera; I'd also like to thank Yngve Pettersen of Opera for saving me a lot of work in gathering this data.
(Note: .museum and .hu have been approved but we have not yet checked in the change to enable them. This is bug 299927.)
We won round one. The problem is, of course, that we have to win every round; the patent lobby only needs to win one.
Still, the profile-raising that has gone on means that it's very unlikely that any legislature will pass patent legislation "on the nod" any more. And that has to be good.
I'm pleased to say that today is my first day working for the Mozilla Foundation. :-)
Henceforth, I will be working 2.5 days a week for Data Connection, 2 days a week for the Mozilla Foundation, and will be unemployed for 0.5 days a week; I will be aggregating that time to allow me to do other important things. I'd like to thank Data Connection for agreeing to share me in this way.
The current plan is to work for the Foundation on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My first task was to clear some of the backlog in my inbox; I started the day with 400 messages, and I'm now down to 237. So those of you who just heard from me after a long period of silence - you know why!
Going forward, I will have a number of responsibilities, which will become more clear over the next few weeks. One I'm particularly excited about is "[perform] analysis and [make] recommendations regarding anti-phishing issues, and other topics that impact the user experience on the web." As many of you know, I am very interested in usability and look forward to making a contribution there.
The future of the Mozilla project is extremely exciting. In the past, we've broken new ground in many areas - the first major corporate opening of code, the first project to have a complete set of integrated web-based tools, often being the first project to hit particular scaling issues, the first Foundation with a significant number of paid employees, the first project to seriously adopt community marketing, and being the most widely-used piece of consumer free software on the planet. I expect to see that sort of innovation continue, and I'm thrilled to be a part of it.
The list of companies, organisations and projects using Bugzilla has recently passed 400. (The numbers are always a little vague, as public Bugzillas come and go.) The list includes such major projects as Mozilla , the Linux kernel, GNOME, KDE, and Apache.
Credit goes, of course, to the great team which keeps the whole show on the road. And as that page goes to show, people don't choose a bug tracking system based on the attractiveness of the developers. ;-)
Today, we are here to declare our interdependence. Today, we hold this truth to be self-evident: we are all in this together.
I go to the G8 with an agenda that I think is best for our country.
And that, O globally-minded American, is what you need to change. As long as the Bush believes that he should be getting the best deal for you and your country, the planet will continue to heat up and the world's poor will be unable to trade their way out of poverty. It is clearly in your best interests, within George Bush's political lifetime, to continue to pollute the atmosphere and to keep protectionist trade barriers.
And don't fool yourself, O American - there are no long-term win-wins here. A better deal for the global poor does mean a worse deal for you. Yes, some of your countrymen may not have a big-screen TV and air conditioning. Fellow human beings in Africa are dying of hunger and preventable disease at the rate of one every three seconds. Get some perspective.
No politician will ever adopt such an unselfish position unless he's absolutely stone-cold certain that it's the will of the people. And so, for the good of the world, you need to make your voice heard loudly and persistently. Today, the 4th of July, declare your interdependence and demand from your political leaders carbon controls, trade justice, and the best deal for humanity.
The list of Mozilla-related projects which were chosen to be part of Google's "Summer Of Code" is now available.
Thanks to everyone who applied; it's a shame not everyone could be funded. Still, I look forward very much to the product of those ten projects. It's particularly exciting that localisations are being sponsored for three of the remaining six most-used languages.