Hacking for Christ

Food For Thought

"The primary AIDS ministry in this country is not orphanages and hospices. The primary AIDS ministry is the preaching of the lordship of Christ, because AIDS is the first plague in the history of mankind that can be stopped by a change of behaviour."

-- Grant Retief, South African pastor

Gerv Status 2009-09-25

Status for week ending 2009-09-25. I'm deploying an alpha of the Bugzilla API next week :-)) Read my full status to find out what's implemented so far (short answer: most of it).

iTunes LP

I don't own any Apple hardware, and I don't run iTunes. But one part of this review of iTunes LP, Apple's new HTML/JS/CSS multimedia experience album format for iTunes, struck me:

As a music fan, and as a web developer, I couldn’t be more pleased with the new iTunes LP offering. If your audience is significantly Apple-oriented (e.g. a site about Mac rumors or a popular iPhone app) this proves that you can provide an incredible experience using only JavaScript and some proposed CSS3 properties.

The visualizer is a fun way to watch your music. And impressive; a friend of mine asked, “Is that Flash?” I may learn a thing or two about CSS animation by diving into the code and I encourage you to as well.

That's the web as an open platform, right there. The ability to "dive in and learn a thing or two" is what makes it great.

Gerv Loves The Web...

...and Firefox. And cheesy grins. And trees. (I thought that most of the other pictures would be someone sitting next to their computer, and so I decided to be a bit different.)

Gerv Status 2009-09-18

Status for week ending 2009-09-18. Highlights:

• Bugzilla HTTP API work going well - can get buglists, bugs and history, get and add comments, and there is initial support for modifying bugs. Can also get lists of and individual users. JSON or XML.
• Discussed adapting the proposed "ensure HTTPS" HTTP header to allow it to specify that there should be no change to the CA which issues the certificate; the aim is to partition the trusted CA space for added security.

Checkin Permissions For comm-central

Since we moved to Mercurial, those with checkin access have needed an extra permissions bit to check in to mozilla-central and its branch trees. This bit was the technical indication that people had been through the two-vouchers-and-SR process.

Committers to comm-central, with the exception of those working on calendar, also had to go through the same process. However, until last night, this was not technically enforced - anyone with Hg access could check in to comm-central. It now is enforced.

We think only one person who has committted to comm-central in the past six months does not have that bit, so this change should not affect most of you. But, if you are someone who has been working in comm-central and find yourself unable to check in this morning, let me know and we'll sort something out. :-)

.ics Files and Google Calendar

Dear Lazyweb,

I'd like to open .ics calendar files, like those provided by Facebook's "Export" button on an event, with Google Calendar. However, Google has not yet seen fit to provide a suitable URL for use with registerContentHandler(), as they have for Gmail with mailto: and registerProtocolHandler().

Please write a Jetpack or Greasemonkey script which does the following:

• Adds a "Register" button to the Google Calendar interface, which registers the "add event" web form URL as the handler, with a "icsfile=%s" parameter.
• Runs code on that form's URL which detects the parameter, XMLHttpRequests the .ics file, parses it, fills in the fields on the form, and presses "Submit".

For bonus points, reuse the JavaScript .ics file parser to do the same trick for Yahoo! and other web calendars.

Thanks,

Gerv

about:license updates

If you've added any third-party code to the mozilla-central or comm-central trees in the Firefox 3.6/Thunderbird 3.0 cycle, then please file a bug like this one so we can update about:license to comply with the licensing terms of that code. Thank you.

Gerv Status 2009-09-11

Status for week ending 2009-09-11. Highlights:

• I have starting work in earnest on an experimental RESTful Bugzilla HTTP API to allow people to more easily innovate with clients and new task-specific UIs. API design comments and use cases are most welcome - mail me.
• Now we have some consensus about the purpose of the Monday meetings, I have started a discussion on how we can change it to better meet those purposes.
• Google Summer of Code has now wrapped up, with six of our ten projects being completed successfully.

Blog Metrics

I'd like to have a rather better idea of how many people read my blog (directly and via RSS/Atom) than I get from Extreme Tracking, which I implemented quickly when I started the blog and is now well out of date.

What's free and good? :-) Recommendations?

Spotify Invites?

Anyone got invites for Spotify? I've found a free software client for it and want to try it out using their day pass option (£0.99 for 24 hours). But:

You need to be logged in to order a day pass. You get can get an account by becoming invited by a friend or buying Premium.

Premium is the £9.99 a month option. So it looks like you can't get a day pass without either first having bought at least one month pass or being invited...

Gerv Status 2009-09-04

This week's status. It covers the six weeks since OSCON, as I have been on holiday or not working for a large part of that time. Highlights:

• Sent out final reminder to everyone who hasn't yet signed the new Committer's Agreement; deadline is October 12th
• Posted deletion warning notices to each group on the list of dead discussion forums; deadline for objections is September 11th
• GSoC has wrapped up, with six of ten students being successful enough to receive the final payment (including one of my two).

Android/G1 Usability

Did they have any usability people working on the G1 software?

Here's a lovely one. There's a big red button on the phone with a power symbol. When the phone is "asleep" (the screen is off) this, or any of the other buttons, wakes it up (and you press Menu to complete the unlocking). But of course, you get used to pressing that one, because it's the Power button, right?

The button behaves that way at any time when the phone screen is dark. Any time, that is, apart from when you are on a call, when if the screen is dark and you press it, it wakes the phone up as you expect... - and ends the call without warning. Brilliant. I've cut several important calls off this way already.

Without much effort, I could come up with a list of 30 other G1 interaction design horrors. 15 of which would involve the Calendar.