Categories
In The News

FundRace 2004

This is fun

Yea, it really is. It’s public info, completely legal, and great. Go ahead, search around, and enjoy your legally issued right to do so. As an American you should be informed about who is financing who. Says a lot. Look at maps too.

And pass that on. Sooner America stops being stupid the better. At least know what scum pays each scumbag.

It’s good to see a website processing all the data some Americans can have some real information.

Pass the link on.

Categories
Mozilla

Mozilla.org News

Some noteworthy mentions in Staff Meeting Summaries:

Thunderbird
– bienvenu might be free to do more feature work

Yea! Hmm… well I know David would be very upset if his todo list isn’t nice and long. Oh so many neat things. Let me make a list of my Thunderbird 1.0 wishes:

  • System Tray [Bug 208923]
  • MAPI support is on the top of my list of wants. That way we can sync Mail to Palm. [Bug 108275]
  • PalmSync for other platforms. [Bug 16767 28040]
  • Lots of Address Book enhancements have been discussed in the mozillazine forums. In particular, I would love to see support for multiple fields, for example, being able to add more/less IM fields, phone fields, etc. Some more flexibility would be great.
  • More Spam Enhancments πŸ™‚

Firefox logos
– debian provides a two-logo system (one for release, one for general public)
– solution of “checked in is modifiable” and privately held imagery protected seems to be workable.

Awesome, great to see that they are solving this conflict.

Firefox 0.9 update
– Ben’s put together a plan of the needed Gecko changes

Awesome πŸ˜€

Categories
Accettura Media

Project Aquarius

Heavy coding taking place in a new project. Well it isn’t new, it’s actually a little short of being a year old, but I never actually did it. I just brainstormed and drafted. The other day, I stumbled upon my notes, and liked the idea enough to give it a shot. Could end up being a giant waste of time (though I did learn a few neat tricks), but it could be worth while as well.

I’ve named this project Project Aquarius.

This is the dawning of the age of aquarius…

Historical note, Aquarius is best known as a boy whom is carried off by Zeus to Olympus to be a cupbearer (waiter) to the Gods.

And true to it’s namesake, Aquarius is designed to serve.

Yes, I know this is vague, but more later as the project evolves.

Categories
Personal

Term Paper Suckage

Yea, term papers definitely suck. Especially when your writing it over spring break, especially when you look outside and see snow on the ground.

Anyway, I decided for an environmental biology paper to write about Technology Recycling. Geeky, but still covers the class quite a bit. Perhaps I’ll publish to the blog at the end of the semester. Quite a bit of interesting stuff in here, a lot more than most ever think about when buying, or disposing of a computer.

So I’ve got a stack of papers on my desk, and 2 books to read. Lots of work.

Back to work with me.

Categories
Mozilla

Mozilla Licensing ”Crack down”

I think it’s important to take a moment and address the recent reports of a “crack down” on Merchandise sellers using Mozilla trademarks.

Once upon a time (earlier today), Gerv Markham posted an Open Letter copied below for you to read as well.

First off. As most who read this website know my only affiliations with Mozilla.org are some patches I’ve written, debugging, and being a part of the Mozilla community.

I firmly back the Mozilla Foundations decision to enforce it’s trademarks for the good of the community. It is essential to the growth, security, and reputation of the Mozilla community as well as the foundation. Allow me to explain, and I promise that I won’t rant for to long.

While many of the vendors selling Mozilla products are said to be of high quality (I’ve yet to own a non-software Mozilla product myself though), all it takes is one person abusing the trademark, and delivering inferior, or lack of goods to give the name “Mozilla” a bad reputation. Many people mistakenly assume that having a logo on a shirt means an endorsement. Which it’s not. The Mozilla Foundation would face a losing battle providing quality assurance to ensure that the Mozilla name is tarnished by a bad merchandiser, or scam. That name would very likely in the minds of the potential target market be associated with scam, rather than “superior browser”. THAT is not good for the browser as a viable alternative to IE. The Mozilla Foundation can not put itself in a position where the Mozilla name could be tarnished, removing it’s software’s reputation. Remember Mozilla is about quality software. That’s the goal.

Secondly, the Mozilla Foundation does a lot for the community. From all the servers (tinderboxes, lxr, bugzilla, www, ftp), to organizing, and paying some of the most talented programmers in the United States (seriously, interact with these guys on Bugzilla or IRC and you know your dealing with pro’s). All of this costs money. It’s a vital role to the community that the Foundation as a core entity provides. The AOL money won’t last forever. Not by a long shot. Yes, Mozilla has other interested partners helping. Lots of programmers from other companies are seen around the community. But it’s essential as a community we keep Mozilla Foundation afloat. Mozilla Foundation should be receiving licensing fees for use of trademarks. It’s only appropriate that the foundation, and in turn the community benefits from the use of the trademarks. For those about pure benefit, imaging funds from good merchandise being able to fund the hiring of another programmer full time? Just a thought.

It’s essential that Mozilla ensure that it’s name be used on it’s products, and only it’s products, or products it officially sanctioned. It’s for the good of the community. The Mozilla community owes it to the end users to ensure that it’s name is pure, and it protects end users from bad products in it’s name.

On another note, think about the idea of someone distributing a Mozilla browser compiled with Spyware, or adware bundled in. That wouldn’t be good. Do we want them to be easily doing so with the Mozilla trademark? I think not.

To address the Debian situation very briefly, I do believe a solution will be reached. Mozilla is a key product to the Linux community, and the Linux community is a key audience of the Mozilla browser. It is my personal belief that the browser should be branded as “Firefox, Debian Edition” or something to that effect, to let it be known that it’s acknowledged by Mozilla, but it’s got some changes to it. The source is said to be available in “a separate file”, so it would be possible to know what is Mozilla’s source, and what isn’t. This is, all IMHO.

So once again to reiterate, I back the Mozilla Foundations decision to enforce it’s copyright, and product the community from the hazards abuse can bring, and ensure it’s viability as the core foundation of this community. And no, I wasn’t threatened by a family of rabid monkey’s to say this. I am writing this at my own will, and have no obligation to even touch the topic, much less have some open dialog about it.

Dear Mozilla supporter,

We note that you are selling Mozilla-branded merchandise in your web shop/fashion house/bazaar stall (delete as appropriate.) While we are pleased that you want to support Mozilla in this way, the Mozilla Foundation enforces its trademarks and requires permission to sell merchandise that includes our artwork or name.

The Mozilla project uses Mozilla, Firefox, the fox-on-the-globe and other names and logos to brand its products and goods. We like to think that it’s a mark of quality. (That’s not to say that what you’re selling is necessarily poor quality; we make no claims either way.) We’d like to be certain that what’s being sold with our logos on is the good stuff. And (let’s be honest here) it’s only fair that we get a cut, to contribute towards keeping the Foundation going.

So we’d ask you, please, to stop selling Mozilla-branded merchandise and get in touch with icensing@mozilla.org to discuss how to proceed. We’ll talk business plans, quality guarantees, percentages and so on. We’re really open to coming to a fair arrangement.

The Mozilla store (http://store.mozilla.org) is our chosen vendor for the US, Canada and Mexico. OK, there’s not much stuff there now, but we hope to have more soon. So we’re unlikely to allow general Mozilla merchandise aimed at the general public to be offered by anyone else in those territories.

However, people in other countries, get in touch as outlined above and we’ll see if we can work something out. You want to support us, and we want to be supported – so it shouldn’t be too hard πŸ™‚

Gerv

P.S. Our lawyers asked us to specify that the Mozilla Foundation reserves the right to take legal action to stop infringements of our trademarks.

Categories
Mozilla

Bug 117532 RIP

Bug 117532. It’s been one long journey, but it’s finally over. And just in time, as 1.7b is extremely close. That was a lot for a UI pref, but at least the wording is good. It’s worth it for good wordage.

Bug 235086 is also wrapping up tonight.

So I wasn’t totally useless tonight. I also got Bender (file server) somewhat up and running at this point. Should have it close to 100% tomorrow sometime. Still todo:

SpamAssassin
MRTG (and all associated with it)
GD
Some Perl Modules
FTP configuration
some Apache configuration
virus scan
AIM Bot for monitoring status
… [list goes on]….

But hey… it’s working now. File services have resumed.

Categories
MacVillage.net

News Headline System Approaching Beta Tests

I wrote a brand new news headline for MacVillage.net. It’s also RSS based, like the current incarnation, but much more efficient. It will also support more feeds. Thanks to using PHP’s XML capabilities, it processes a feed in half the time of the last version. And because it now cashe’s, and uses a better timing mechanism, it doesn’t reload news sources more than necessary. That means less CPU consumption!

So expect to see more content on the slowly rebuilding MacVillage.net soon. Perhaps by the end of the week I’ll plug the new system into production.

Categories
Hardware

2 computer problems in 1 day

2 out of 4 computers had problems today. Yea! Home computing is fun!!! πŸ™

One was a relatively quick fix. Simple disk scan ended up fixing the permissions error, or whatever was wrong with it. The other (Bender, the file server), wasn’t so easy. Something ravished permissions on the System drive, causing tons of errors. Ended up formatting the System drive and doing a clean install. Easier than trying to fix it all, since that validate permissions option is a load of BS. As I type, I’m recompiling Perl 5.8.3(since Jaguar has 5.6.1). Overall, not to hard, since OS X comes so nicely packaged. Also a good excuse to update everything to more recent versions.

Previous uptime record is 28 days for that box. I think we can do better this time around πŸ™‚

I did get a change to go workout though, so It’s not an ubergeek day.

Categories
Software

I’m running Fedora Core 2

Well, I finally did it. I burnt Fedora Core 2 Install CD’s, and put it on my 2nd HD of my Thinkpad. Had trouble booting at first, but found a hidden option in my BIOS to select the drive as my boot drive. It’s zippy! Very, very, very fast. My big problem so far is I’ve been unable to get my wireless card going, and downloading anything, means booting into windows, and copying to a floppy disk…. a real drag.

But it is fast. Looks like I got a new toy to play with!

Also on th agenda is a boot loader. I tried just using the Windows one, but that wasn’t working for me, so perhaps I’ll just use grub on the alternate drive, to boot windows. If anyone has some good directions, or reading material on this topic, please shoot me an email, or leave a comment, I’d really appreciate it.

Other than that, all is good. It’s been a very busy week, so some geeky fun was in order.

Categories
In The News

Porn Illegal

Can you believe this? Porn illegal behind the wheel? How could they? Why can’t an adult enjoy a steamy adult video while driving cross country?

Canadian Pork may not be kosher to all faiths Yikes!.

And that sums up todays creepy headlines.