Ever seen an interesting link on a large page, middle-clicked it to open it in a new tab and then realised that it was an internal anchor, and you are just loading another copy of the same large page?
To have every internal anchor marked with a small "#" symbol after it, add the following to your userContent.css:
a[href^="#"] {
padding-right: 6px;
background: url("data:image/png,%89PNG%0D%0A%1A%0A%00%00%00%0DIHDR%00%00%00%06\
%00%00%00%08%08%06%00%00%00%DA%C6%8E8%00%00%00%09pHYs%00%00\
%0B%13%00%00%0B%13%01%00%9A%9C%18%00%00%00%07tIME%07%D7%03\
%1D%10%0D*T%0FgN%00%00%00!IDAT%08%D7c%F8%0F%05%0C%0C%0C%A84\
%8C%83%81A%12%BF%FF%FE%23Q%07N%3B%B0%01%D2%25%00N4%8Fj%C7U\
%97%89%00%00%00%00IEND%AEB%60%82") center right no-repeat;
}
I was thinking the other day about data centres. Sad, perhaps. But I'm in good company.
Google recently started building a data centre near a hydro-electric power plant in Oregon, in order to get cheap power and access to plenty of coolant.
Thousands of blades whirring away indexing the web generate a heck of a lot of heat. Is this actually used for anything? My idea is, why not have a jacuzzi in your data centre, filled by the warm cooling water? The admins could use it to relax after a long day.
"Water's getting warmer, Jed.""That's right, Mike. Europe just woke up."
Then, why not go further and combine Project Blackbox and wave power generation in big red snakes (currently hollow, but could be filled with racks) to have your data centre afloat? Plenty of power, plenty of cooling. All you need is a radio or fibre data link to shore. Of course, that could lead to some interesting technical difficulties:
"Google's slow this morning.""Yeah. Their Amsterdam data centre sunk."
The student deadline for the Google Summer of Code is today, at 5pm Pacific time (midnight UTC, 1am BST, 2am European). Check out the list, and get those applications in! :-) If you know Perl, consider picking up one of the Bugzilla projects.
This needs a higher profile - a service to show you what any website looks like to someone with various sorts of colourblindness. (Example: compare WAI and colorblind WAI.) If you use the grayscale filter, not only will you know whether any bits of your page would be unreadable to one or more colourblind people, but it would also make it obvious where you haven't explicitly specified colours (because the default colour will remain).
This is obviously useful to web designers, but perhaps it would also be useful to colourblind people too. When they complain about a website, they could send a URL saying "this is what it looks like to me", to give the webmaster an idea of the problem.
Head over to ecirkit.com and click the Oh-So-2.0 single-word "Learn" header. You read:
No Refreshing
No Page Jumping
No Annoying Ads
No Nonsense
The Real Web 2.0
eCirkit is a constantly-evolving web-based application that employs the latest, most innovative technologies to make the user experience as dynamic and stimulating as the internet will allow. While its functionality is constantly pushing the envelope, eCirkit still retains older, practical methodologies (e-mail, videos, etc.) but delivers them in a means that is quicker and smarter than the most commonly-used "social networking" sites.
Yes, but...
Is it just me, or could the "IE Add-ons Contest" have been renamed the "IE Add-the-features-Firefox-has-that-we-don't Contest"? Of the four top addons, three implement Firefox features for IE. And the last is an extension we had first.
Even the description page for the grand prize winner admits as much:
Inline Search is an add-on for Internet Explorer that mimics Firefox's search behavior...
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery :-)
A new Microsoft selling-against-Linux website (warning - Flash required) divides Linux users and companies into five 'personas' or categories. An "Application Driven" person or company is "focussed on business requirements and place application needs ahead of platform decisions". Sounds like every good business to me.
Their footnote bullets say "30% of Application Driven firms prefer Windows for upcoming server purchases".
So "70% of companies who have the right attitude to platform decisions prefer products other than ours" is supposed to be encouraging to their sales force?
Is it just me, or do the default OpenOffice.org Writer styles suck?
Given that most people don't even use all six heading sizes in HTML, what made them think that it was vital to have ten styles, adjacent pairs of which are only distinguished by the presence of or lack of italics? Quick: is the italicised one more or less important? Heading 1 is not at all suitable for the top of a document, where I, at least, would expect something centred and perhaps underlined. And the spacing OOo leaves between the smaller headings and the previous paragraph is far too large, giving documents a "gappy" appearance.
In the default list, what's the difference between "Default" and "Text Body" anyway? And where are the styles for common things like like "Quotation", "List", "Emphasis" and so on?
There's a "Styles and Formatting" window which you can invoke when you want anything more than the default simple five which are in the toolbar dropdown (thereby making you pay a window management penalty). There are about five different ways of configuring the exact list of styles it displays, but it does not have a "New" button. The closest you have is "New Style From Selection", which is one option on a combination pseudo button/menu in one corner with a totally unintuitive "Paragraph" icon on it. (After five minutes of searching, it turns out that you can create a new style from the context menu.)
Lastly, whenever I try and read a Word document, it always sets the margins too far in so some of the content is squeezed onto the next page. Do Word files not contain margin information? Grr.
There's a big opportunity for the free software world to make a word processor which is actually usable - because it's one area Word has failed miserably in recent years, hence their multi-million dollar new UI. The retraining this UI requires is an opportunity to persuade people to switch; but it's going to be a hard sell if the alternative is even more complex than the original.
Technology is now being developed to catch speeding motorists without emitting tell-tale radar signals by listening to the doppler shift of the engine sound as it passes.
I don't know how it copes if the car is accelerating or decelerating at the time but if it works, that'll put a stop to people avoiding being caught speeding by using radar detectors.
I have absolutely no sympathy for those who complain about speeding fines and cameras. If you don't want to pay the fines, don't break the law. It's not as if the speed limit is a secret.
Following on from guess the scary extension...
An object recently went missing from our flat. None of the three of us (I have two flatmates) took it anywhere or have any knowledge of its whereabouts. It normally never leaves the room in which it is used. We agree it is about the most unlikely object in the entire flat for anyone to steal. Can you guess what it is?
The Mozilla project is again taking part in the Google Summer of Code.
New this year, in addition to the normal sorts of thing, we will be inviting proposals for Bugzilla-related projects, and also projects relating to improving or creating a new extension (for any Mozilla XUL-based application). We are glad to have the help of mozdev in reaching out to extension developers and finding mentors.
Learning from our experience last year, we now have a brainstorming page which is separate from the official list of projects which are approved and have mentors allocated and for which we will be inviting applications. Please place all ideas on the former page.
Roll on the summer!
Update: Students have only until 24th March to apply. And so we need things for them to apply to do! Get those ideas down ASAP.
I was asking a while back if anyone had a bookmarklet or service to turn MediaWiki markup into HTML. No-one did, so I've built one. I'll be using it to turn my internal wikified Mozilla Foundation status reports into text suitable for posting here.
It's all very web 1.0 - note the "cgi-bin" in the URL. You won't find any XMLHttpRequests here. It's written in Perl. All the hard work is done by the excellent Text::MediawikiFormat Perl module.
One slightly funky thing is that the scripts know how to serve themselves up for download. This means I don't need to keep two copies on the webserver. It's very simple (five lines of code) but I've not seen it done before.
I just installed an extension recommended by a website. I then restarted Firefox, and looked at the extension Preferences. They were so numerous and extensive and detailed that I felt I couldn't be sure what this extension was actually going to do to my browsing experience. I foresaw my browser changing in tiny, quirky ways and not being able to track down why - or, worse, not knowing which exact checkbox to click to restore normality.
So, without even trying out any of its purported features, I immediately uninstalled it.
Can anyone guess which extension can inspire such fear even in a fairly geeky person like me?
Someone pointed out to me recently that the real conference junkie could, should they choose, spend almost the entirety of July away at technical conferences around the globe. A possible itinerary would be as follows:
Of course, I don't know how much all the flights would cost, either in dollars or in carbon...
Update: it was Dave Neary who said it, and he's pointed to a more relevant conference for the middle section and noted that OLS fits on the beginning. The blog post I link to has his hectic schedule.
The currently-used Mozilla project CVS Contributor Form (PDF) is a piece of project history. The website shows it being checked in back in 2001, and I'm sure it was pretty much the same even before that.
However, the ravages of time have not left it unaffected. It barely squeaked by the change to the tri-license, due to some far-sighted provisions about "other licenses acceptable to mozilla.org". But as the day when we move away from CVS gets ever-closer, its very name spells its doom.
The editable version of that document is lost in the mists of time. So, one short bit of retyping later, I've done a draft update for the form, now titled the Mozilla Foundation Committers' Agreement. This fixes the issues I know about - it removes explicit references to CVS, and generalises the idea of Code to cover contributions to e.g. our website repositories. The agreement is also now with the Mozilla Foundation, a legal entity. Comments are welcome.
Note that this has not yet been through any sort of legal review, and so will almost certainly change, possibly substantially, before it comes to replace the existing agreement.
This Wordpress release download compromise is exactly the sort of thing I had in mind when I thought up Link Fingerprints for Firefox and other WWW clients. If the download URLs on the Wordpress website and in the release announcement emails had had a fingerprint attached, then any supporting clients would have complained, and the admins would probably have found out far sooner than 3-4 days after the compromise.
Note that not everyone's client would have needed to support it for it to be useful. Of course, the more clients that support it, the better it is for those individual people, but some level of support in a few clients protects everyone by flagging the problem.
Dear Lazyweb,
Have you ever pressed "Reply" to an email, spent ages editing it and then realised you had meant to hit "Reply All"? It means you have to do a new Reply All, and either copy and paste the edited text from the old to the new (which messes up Thunderbird's special handling of the quoting) or copy and paste all the extra email addresses, one by one, from the new to the old.
Wouldn't it be great if there was a Thunderbird extension which put a button on the Reply Compose window which basically did an "Oops, I forgot the other people - please add them now"?
In March of last year, I did an interview for the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank while at an onsite in Mountain View. They just sent me an email telling me it's finally up on the site - and it looks like they liked it enough to do a 10-minute excerpt of the interesting bits as a podcast. (As Jeff comments, they mention transcripts but I can't see them.) There are also podcasts from Ben Goodger and Chris Hofmann - it looks like it'll be a series.