That sprained wrist… turns out it’s broken. So now (again) 100% one handed typing for the moment.
Speaking of broken… Bug 389131 could use a hand (pun intended). Same for 389128. Anyone want to assist? Both have patches, may need tweaks/cleanup still. I just can’t manage extra coding until I get patched myself.
It’s a bit quiet around here for the past week because I sprained my wrist pretty bad. As a result I have been avoiding typing more than I already do at work. I am slowly resuming and getting back to normal as it allows. Been down this road before. Not as much fun as it sounds.
A week ago I came back from St. Maarten, an island known for it’s weather and beaches. There are a few ways to tell a good beach from a great one:
A beach with an active runway for an international airport makes for a good time. So much so I got to this beach a several times. Equipped with a camera phone I took some video’s of the fun. The video’s are slightly grainy since it was taken on a phone, and a bit shaky since the jet blast could be pretty strong at times.
For the record, sand does go through clothing at that speed. It was strong enough that I wasn’t able to watch a takeoff live as I had to turn my head and close my eyes. Only afterward could I watch the video replay.
Boeing 747 takeoff (can’t even keep the camera up).
I was away last week… 3700+ emails (thankfully mostly spam) to process.
Have some video and photo goodness to get up here at some point, but that won’t happen until this weekend at the earliest since I’ve got some catching up to do. I suspect I won’t be blogging much this week as I do some catch up.
Damn you wet weather. Closing roads and making things a mess. 8 inches of rain in Central Park. The irony will be drought restrictions being posted later this summer.
Is bacon considered red meat? I saw this on TV this morning wile flipping through the morning news. During some stock video of various red meats it was mixed in with mainly shots of beef. It comes from a pig, so I guess under the definition “anything from a mammal is red meat” it is. Though pork is traditionally white meat.
Bacon… meet tomato a vegetable fruit.
It’s now 2007 for an hour already. So here’s to a great 2007!
On the plus side, it’s nice to see at least this blog updated the copyright on it’s own (though an hour off since the server is GMT -6 rather than GMT -5 like I am. I’ve got to make the rounds and do the rest now, and make it automatic for the future. Every year I forget until the last minute.
Happy Festivus!
Just in case anyone was wondering, I made the Festivus Pole in this post using Inkscape, which did a pretty good job at making it easy enough for even me to do silly little work, and I’m far from an artist. It even lets me output svg, though I uploaded a png since not all browsers support svg at this point. Thankfully I didn’t have to draw any tinsel, but as we all know, that’s not allowed, since it’s distracting.
For those who are interested in the real thing, there is a video about a company who makes Festivus Poles.
As usual the web has quite a few things out there about this amazing holiday. Just search Google News this time of year, or check Wikipedia’s Festivus article.
There is even a new book on the holiday: Festivus: The Holiday for the Rest of Us.
Frank Costanza: Many Christmases ago, I went to buy a doll for my son. I reached for the last one they had, but so did another man. As I rained blows upon him, I realized there had to be another way.
Cosmo Kramer: What happened to the doll?
Frank Costanza: It was destroyed. But out of that a new holiday was born: a Festivus for the rest of us!
Cosmo Kramer: That must’ve been some kind of doll.
Frank Costanza: She was.
It seems that since Firefox 2.0 has shipped, everyone is really taking some time to think about the future. Not that it wasn’t on peoples minds before 2.0. For me 2.0 was really a maintenance release. End users got some great new features and fixes, but all I really contributed was a small fix or two, most of the time I could allocate was spent on planning and server side development (more on that some other time). Mike Connor and I seem to have overlapped on feelings towards future improvements:
- Site compatibility We’re doing pretty good, marketshare helps, but we need to be better. We need to push Reporter, and put real time into analysis of the top sites showing up there. Sometimes its our fault and we need to prioritize bugfixing, sometimes its Tech Evangelism (and we need to get back to doing that too).
I mentioned a few weeks ago it’s important for end users to report problems, and got some traction. But I’m still looking for ways to get more casual users reporting problems they encounter. Anyone with ideas on how this could best be accomplished, without annoying the user or adding intrusive UI should let us know. Either leave a comment here or contact me. We can’t help what we don’t know.
To help improve the quality of analysis of reports, I have gotten pretty close to a new reporter webtool. This version has much more flexibility and allows for easier viewing and manipulation of data. I hope to give it more time in the next few weeks and make a drive to go live with it. It’s been delayed several times (my fault), but it’s now in the final stretch. Future revisions will be much more incremental to prevent such delays again.
To further help improve the quality of reports, Gavin Sharp wrote a patch to capture the character encoding of web pages reported. I wrote one to allow users to send a screen shot of what they see. Both I believe should make 3.0. I think these changes will help improve things in the long term. Knowing the charset can help improve character related problems users experience (since charset detection is somewhat of a messy game), and having actual screenshots of what users see is of course beneficial for rendering issues.
Hopefully some of the bigger Gecko changes taking place on the trunk will further improve site compatibility. Of course growing marketshare has and will continue to help websites adopt a policy of cross browser compatibility. That has in the past, and will continue to be a driving force. So remember: don’t spoof your useragent more than absolutely necessary. Make sure webmasters know who you are. “Stand up and be counted”.
My personal goals for Firefox 3.0 are these:
I think that’s a rather obtainable set of goals with a definite positive impact.
I’m also working on an update to MozPod to allow for synchronizing your iPod calendar with Lighting (in Thunderbird) or Sunbird. It’s somewhat working but still rather buggy. There are also several fixes for other issues since the last release of MozPod. I hope to have that out by the end of the year (which would be 1 year after the last release).
On a more personal note, last month I accepted a position with CBS Digital Media as a developer at CBSNews.com. For those wondering, yes I am working on improving the experience for Firefox (and Mac users) among other development work. It’s not too bad right now (personal opinion), but being better is of course welcome. The usual disclaimer that the views on this blog are mine alone and do not represent those of my employer of course apply (but I’m sure you knew that already).
So there you have it. I plan to write a few more posts in the next few weeks more specific to individual things discussed here, but for now that should give everyone an idea about what I’ve got cooking. It’s a rather interesting mix of things I get to work on.
I’m back from vacation. Like two years ago, I spent some time in Holland visiting family, and then some vacation time in Spain (Mallorca to be exact), then back to Holland for a day and a half. Just starting to catch up on things, so be patient if your expecting a reply from me. I’m tired after an a long day with a flight at 9:30 (GMT +1) that landed 12:00 (GMT -5). So here are some random thoughts in bullet form: