Hacking for Christ

Gerv Status 2009-10-30

Status 2009-10-30.

Ubuntu Crash Reporter Fail

This could get recursive...

Gerv Status 2009-10-23

Last week's status.

Sometimes Ranting Is Constructive

Three years after my 2006 rant about the fact that you can't reorder folders in Thunderbird, the excellent Jonathan Protzenko has written an extension to allow you to arrange them in whatever order you like.

Now all I need to do is figure out how to reduce that 3-year lead time...

"Where I Am" in Firefox

Firefox's Geolocation feature uses wireless access points. However, not all computers have wireless, and even for those which do, not all APs are in the database. It falls back to IP-based geolocation, but that is far less accurate. Also, it's worth noting that many computers - particularly those without wireless - are not laptops and therefore don't move around.

So what would be cool is if, if there's no fix from the wireless, Firefox gave you an information bar saying the following:

foo.bar.com wants to know your location, but Firefox doesn't know it very accurately. 
( Find Myself On A Map ) ( Share Approximate Location ) ( Don't Share ) [x] Remember for this site

If you clicked "Find Myself On A Map", Firefox would bring up a map from Google, OpenStreetMap or another provider, zoomed and scrolled to the approximate location it knows, and would invite the user to place a marker where they were. At the bottom, there would be the following UI:

[x] This computer is always at this location
( Share This Location ) ( Cancel )

If you left the checkbox checked, Firefox would remember the coordinates you chose and then in future you'd get a slightly modified version of the normal infobar:

foo.bar.com wants to know your <saved location>. ( Share Location ) ( Don't Share ) [x] Remember for this site

Clicking on "saved location" would give you the opportunity to update it, if for example you'd moved house.

A UI like this would bring the benefits of accurate geolocation to a much wider range of machines. Anyone feel like implementing this for Firefox 3.7? :-)

A Tour Of A "Pay to Download Firefox" Site

In the discussion about the best way to manage the Mozilla trademarks, the problem of sites charging people to download Firefox is often mentioned. However, not everyone has come across such a site. For your ediification, I present 'A Tour Of A "Pay to Download Firefox" Site', with detailed analysis and screenshots.

You'll be pleased to hear we have recently been having some success using trademark law with preliminary injunctions and domain name disputes against such sites.

Gerv Status 2009-10-16 and previous

My last three weeks of statuses are now linked from my User page on the wiki. Highlights of the current week:

• API 0.2 release imminent, blocked only on installation of a small patch on the two target Bugzillas
• New features: read and write support for flags and custom fields, and read support for groups
• I'm speaking at LUGRadio Live 2009 at the end of the week; if you are in the UK and free, come - it rocks!

Open Source Canteen Booking?

Does anyone know of any open source software for managing bookings in a canteen, say at a university? So each student can say e.g. "I'm in on Monday, Wednesday and Friday lunchtimes, and I'm a vegetarian", and a report comes out of the back end telling the kitchen how much food to cook? I've searched, but I can't find anything - and yet I'd expect it to be a fairly common problem.

Möbius Strip e-Scroll

I saw the Infinite Book on O'Reilly Radar, and that got me thinking: when we have flexible electronic paper, how about an eBook reader that either is, or can be clipped together as, a möbius strip, the width of a bit of A4? So you just keep moving it through your fingers as you read and the book goes on and on and on. Like an infinite scroll (the paper sort).

Someone else can come up with the concept art :-) I publish the idea here to make sure no-one can patent it.

The Most Under-Appreciated Skill

The most under-appreciated skill in the modern world is someone who can explain the complex in simple terms without trivializing it.

-- Scott Berkun

Anyone want to suggest other contenders for the title?

Bugzilla HTTP RESTful API 0.1 Released

I'm pleased to announce version 0.1 of a RESTful HTTP API for Bugzilla, specifically for bugzilla.mozilla.org. Here is the documentation.

So if you've always wanted to include b.m.o. data in your mashup, now's your chance :-) Do let me know how you get on.

Note that a few API features require Bugzilla 3.4, which I hope b.m.o. will be upgraded to Real Soon Now.