Categories
Personal

Bacon

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.

Categories
General Personal

2007

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.

Categories
General Personal

A Festivus For The Rest Of Us!

Festivus PoleHappy 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.

Categories
Mozilla Personal

Moving Forward

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:

  • Get new reporter webtool in place. Sooner the better. It’s been delayed to many times. At least now it’s close.
  • Get charset and screenshot support up and running. Investigate if there’s something else that would be really beneficial.
  • Find new ways to get more end users to let us know when they encounter a problem, rather than just keep quiet.
  • Keep reading, playing around and getting new ideas. IMHO that should be a goal for anyone doing anything in life.

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.

Categories
General Personal

Vacation

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:

  • Security wasn’t to bad considering all that has been happening. The only thing encountered was no liquids or gels in hand luggage… Interestingly every hour, or less a flight attendant came around with cups of water. I guess they are afraid someone could become dehydrated and sue. An obvious change from procedures prior (on the way over that happened no more than 2x as I recall).
  • Constantly check that that your flight isn’t delayed, so you don’t spend 11hrs in Schiphol Shithole (after 11hrs that’s an appropriate name for any airport). Definitely not a great way to spend a day. Teletext, Phone, Internet, Smoke signals. Whatever it takes. Check and check again.
  • Just because a hotel advertises that it has air conditioning doesn’t mean that it works, works well, or works constantly. Hotels that only let it run when your in the room (usually activated by room key) only can work if it’s very powerful and can cool off a room quickly. Yet another thing to be aware of
  • When traveling trans-Atlantic, wide body aircraft, such as a Boeing 767, 777, 747 are preferable to a Boeing 757. Because it’s seated 3 and 3 with 1 isle, and bathrooms in front and back of coach, that’s a lot of traffic in 1 isle. Wide body aircraft such as the 767 seem much more capable of handling a long haul without feeling so tiny. Just a personal preference.
  • I had this notion that most old stone structures remained semi-cool in hot weather, but the Cathedral in Palma completely ruinied that.
  • There should be First Class, Business Class, Kid-Free Class, and Family Class. For those who want to sleep on the plane, you options.
  • I ate way to much… and enjoyed it all.
  • Beautiful beaches
  • Did I mention the food?
Categories
Personal Programming

Quieter Times While Coding

Since school is done (just waiting for grades, and a piece of paper to make me an official college grad), I’ve been poking on job sites. I’ve also been coding away for a few days now making good progress, on a yet to be announced project.

So things may be a little quiet.

Categories
Funny Personal Photos

Geek Star? Artist? Or Both

I’ve decided to expand and showcase some more of my talents. I can analyze information systems, code, and be artistic. That’s right! Inspired by the great Andy Warhol I decided to express myself artistically in the most fluid and graceful way I could think of.

Old and Busted

Andy Warhol

New Hotness

Great Wall Of Poland

Some more:

Methodology

Each label had to be pealed off “pretty cleanly”, not perfect, but can’t be in pieces. Each intersection of 4 corners were taped together. They were put up on the wall in chunks every few weeks taped to the wall and pre-existing segments.

Final Thoughts

Will I continue to grace the Art Scene? I’m not sure. It’s not about the fame, the money, or the glamor… but about the art. Making beautiful things.

259 bottles of art on the wall, 259 bottles of art.
Take one down and pass it around, 258 bottles of art on the wall.

And that’s what this college student did with some of his free time.

Note: The wall wasn’t able to tolerate being moved, and was torn down 5/10/2006. A temporary exhibition of stupid ideas executed.

There are no high resolution pics, as I only had a camera phone on me

Categories
Around The Web Personal

The Dance of Joy

When I saw AOL’s new Television service (free), I got excited. When I realized that Perfect Strangers was one of the show listed, I did the Dance of Joy.

Guess who is going to be watching a lot of TV reruns (even more than the normal 24hrs a day)?

Categories
Open Source Personal

Notepad Killer

I’m a pretty pathetic note taker. I’m not great at it, my note management skills aren’t that great, and I take a lot of notes during the day. My computer’s desktop is littered with notepad files all the time. Just ordered and unordered lists of things to do, snippets of code, URLs and other details. It’s a giant mess. I’ve tried various products to organize it, and nothing has worked. It doesn’t really hurt me, but it does drive me nuts. There’s got to be a cleaner way to do this.

Since I have a webserver on my computer at all times, I decided to just install media wiki (the software that powers wikipedia.org among other sites) as my new notepad. So far this idea is working rather well. Everything is in one place, off my desktop, and pretty organized. Thanks to being in a wiki, I can link things all over the place rather easy.

I’ve never been fond of the wiki syntax, personally I find it a bit awkward, but I guess I’ll get used to it in time.

I wouldn’t recommend this to anyone but a handful of people. For me at least, it seems to be working rather well. Much nicer than a bunch of notepad files littering my desktop… now if only I can manage to get rid of all that other junk.

I’ll try and post in a few weeks how I feel this serves as a solution to my problem. I have a feeling this will work very well. It’s organized, and in the web format I’m most comfortable with.

Categories
Personal Programming

Really Busy

I’ve been really busy lately, hence posting is a bit light. I plan to pickup soon. I’ve been working on many things.

On a side note, switching programming languages (Visual Basic .NET, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, PHP, Perl) all in one day can be very confusing at times. I’ve been finding myself mixing up syntax quite a bit in the past few days. Yuck. For those wondering, Visual Basic is by far my least favorite.