No More Typos

Memebot is dead!

2010-08-14T21:37:00.003+01:00

The free host that I used for a number of years, memebot.com suddenly went down a few weeks a go with no warning. All the sites it hosted are now offline and there is no FTP access to the files.
For the record, here is a list of the sites they hosted scraped from the Google cache

With hindsight it wasn't very smart to expect a company to host my domains at no cost, and so it has proved. This left me in a mess with all my sites going down in an instant!

I have been scrambling to restore the sites and now moved everything to the excellent dreamhost with the exception of the few bits and pieces I didn't have backed up which are now seemingly lost to the ether.

Why I haven't switched to Google Chrome...yet

2008-09-14T20:34:00.003+01:00

Since people have asked me over the last few days, thought I should write my first impressions of Google Chrome:

On the plus side,

super slick first-run experience and import of all my stuff from Firefox!
Noble attempt to de-clutter the browser space up

On the minus side, there are a whole bunch of bugs which mean I after playing with Chrome I went back to Firefox soon enough, namely:

My laptop scrollpad goes down but not up! Disaster (bug to track)
It makes a windows warning beep when you press Alt + D (bug to track)
No print selection yet, Chrome hates trees (bug to track)

And rather ironically, I can access google stuff better through Firefox than through chrome, like Google Bookmarks and Browse By Name.

At least I can sit back and and track these issues, so I'll know when Chrome 'works for me,' not yet though!

Million Pixels

2006-01-13T08:49:00.000Z

Nitin asks:

Are these million pixels for firefox actually going to the mozilla corporation?

Well, I can certainly say they won't be going to the Mozilla Corporation since it doesn't accept donations!

Bugzilla Spam!

2006-01-08T15:47:00.000Z

I think I've received some very targetted spam from my Bugzilla account:

Dear Gids,

Yoxel Systems is proud to present a demo account showcasing our exciting
on-demand software and IT project management services:

http://www.yoxel.com

The data used in our Firefox demo account is the actual data from Firefox's Bugzilla
that is represented in a way that allows you to have an alternative way of
viewing and analyzing the current state of the product. You can generate various reports,
graphs and charts which are not provided to anonymous users of the original database
otherwise.

While the purpose of the account is mainly to be a demo vehicle for
Yoxel Systems' services and capabilities we believe the actual content and its
representation could be of certain interest to you.

Happy New Year,
Yoxel Systems Info Team

------------------------------

-----------------------------------
Yoxel Systems is a privately held ASP company dedicated to developing
intelligent and flexible solutions to optimize and automate project
management and customer support.

If these people have been harvesting Mozilla Bugzilla perhaps someone should be cracking the whip, they could just as easily get legitimate publicity on Mozillazine or the like.

Jorge has it right

2005-12-21T09:50:00.000Z

Jorge Writes:
We're all in the same boat stuck with crappy hardware drivers, nearly non-existant ISV support, no common developer platform, and an increasing amount of momentum users willing to just give up on a Free Desktop and go buy Macs. And we're arguing about a print dialog! @!#$%@#$%!!!!

I can vouch for Jorge on that one having been in that exact situation. Trying to get people to use Linux and being stumped by broken printer drivers. The hoopla to get the thing on paper was akin to Danny Williams doing Ballet. To permit me a trashy metaphor, if the Linux Desktop is a steep hill, printer drivers are the sloshy mud right at the bottom, never mind if it's pretty nearer the top!

T-Shirt arrived

2005-12-17T12:08:00.000Z

My T-Shirt arrived in the post this morning. Very cool indeed.

Why I choose GMail over Thunderbird

2005-12-14T19:47:00.000Z

In Thunderbird

Select All--> Mark as Read ..... two minutes later ..... done

In Gmail

Select--> Actions --. Mark as Read ...... 10 seconds later ..... done

vive le difference

Firefox T-Shirt!

2005-12-12T20:39:00.000Z

Ordered a T-Shirt from the new Mozilla International Store today.

Hope all goes well with my order,

I'll blog again when it arrives (fingers-crossed)

Google Space - Firefox usability lab!

2005-11-26T12:40:00.000Z

Am I the only one to notice Google's new Heathrow Web Cafée computers are running Firefox? They make an ideal location for real-world usability studies!

Hat tip to ZDet for the image from their gallery

UK Users can flock to BBC 'Flock' Video

2005-10-31T10:40:00.000Z

If you're a UK Web user you can watch the Newsnight report about Flock and Web 2.0 at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4382626.stm - might be avaliable to everyone else as well. Was fun to see some the people who's blogs I read on a very cool news report.

IE: tearing down the web

2005-10-04T17:13:00.000+01:00

Who ever said IE was bug-free, well no-one I've ever heard. Anyhow, thought you might enjoy this picture I grabbed of Gerv's blog being torn up by IE Autoscroll.

Close, but still no 'Browse By Name'

2005-09-23T18:45:00.001+01:00

Asa writes that the Google Toolbar for Firefox is out of Beta, good work, but they are still insisting Firefox has Browse By Name built in.

Well, if anyone's listening...

'I'm Feeling Lucky is not Browse by Name'

Asa speaks

2005-09-14T09:07:00.000+01:00

Enjoyed listening to Asa Dotzler's keynote from ETech 2005. Added Asa's pronounciation of his name to his Wikipedia article as well.

Winamp search makes iTunes 5 look old hat

2005-09-11T15:20:00.000+01:00

When I saw the new iTunes search feature it reminded of the search feature that Winamp had introduced way back in Winamp 3. After all it seems pretty straightforward, you type a word and it finds everything that matches.

Hacking the Firefox Autoscroll icon

2005-09-02T14:23:00.000+01:00

Doing my usual Firefox related trawl across the web I saw a Firefox hack unlike any I had seen before. Hacking the autoscroll cursor! This reminds me of the IE5.5 Custom Scrollbars notorious 'feature.' Whilst the site in question uses the feature tastefully I wonder if this feature takes off, whether it will make Firefox users ask 'Who's browser is it anyway?'

sticky content

2005-09-02T11:45:00.000+01:00

Just visited the website emblazoned on my very cool japanese t-shirt (www.goo.ne.jp) comprising robots and the word 'goo.' Seems to be some kind of Japanese Portal.

From San Francisco to Bala Lake!

2005-08-20T12:43:00.000+01:00

I've been away the past few weeks so my blog has been neglected. I was staying near Bala Lake in Wales, though I did have my blog in mind when I got some stuff sent over there from the fine folks at Creative Commons which I can share with the world here, as well as people at Uni when I get back. May I take this opportunity to say the WIRED mash up CD rocks!
On the site I was staying on they had some systems running Xandros Desktop with which I battled but that's a rant I'll save for another time...

Ubuntu Documentation

2005-07-08T17:08:00.000+01:00

I'm not going to launch into a big tirade about how far Linux has to go, but I saw this intro to a help document:

"Music Player is an ID3 organised, music library and player for your MP3, FLAC or Ogg/Vorbis Music Files"

For a start, my copy of the Ubuntu Live CD can't even play MP3 Files. I guess an equivalent would be the introduction to Firefox Help being:

"Firefox is a Web Browser which can access your HTML files and remote URLs using the Hypertext Transfer Protocol"

You get the idea...

Firefox Google Toolbar sans 'Browse By Name'

2005-07-07T22:17:00.000+01:00

I was having a look at the Firefox Google Toolbar via Asa and notice it lacks the excellent Browse by Name feature of the Internet Explorer version. Someone needs to point them at Jesse's blog post and that someone may as well be me!

'Google to buy Firefox?' Impossible!

2005-07-07T17:27:00.000+01:00

Just reading some unfounded speculation over on Spread Firefox, 'Google to buy Firefox?'
Perhaps I'm wrong but I was under the impression that buying an open source project is impossible, what would a company buy exactly? Mozilla Foundation doesn't 'own' the Firefox source code. Even a project under corporate stewardship such as Helix Player can't really claimed to be 'owned' by RealNetworks even if it decides what gets in to the product.

Opera Keyboard Shortcuts

2005-06-28T15:43:00.000+01:00

Just finished up writing updated Keyboard Shortcuts for Opera for Bug 291877.
One oddity I found was that Opera has two shorcuts for the Address Field (Location Bar in Firefox-speak.) F8 is fine, unless you're in Full Screen Mode in which case it's useless and you have to use F2.

Let's just hope the Opera fanboys don't find their way to this post...

Channel 9 Guy in Microsoft propaganda

2005-06-22T22:13:00.000+01:00

I'm sure this is some kind of viral, contagious, (insert daft buzzword here) video from Microsoft but, who cares, it made me laugh, especially looking up at the Channel 9 Guy on my desk whilst I was watching a giant one.

I wonder how Blake's videos will compare, mind you I'm sure he has a smaller budget!

Draggin' it out

2005-06-17T19:35:00.000+01:00

With tab rearranging one of the new features of Firefox Deer Park Alpha. I thought it'd be a good time to compare the UI of Firefox and Opera for this feature.

The Opera UI certainly has a greater swish factor though that doesn't always translate into a usable feature. Opera also offers more widgets with close buttons on each tab and a New Page (tab) button as well.
In the end I think they are both good implementations and this is a really useful feature.

my first patch!

2005-06-15T21:13:00.000+01:00

After my previous experiences noted in my blog, I managed to scrape together my first patch thanks to the fine folks on the TortoiseCVS mailing list and on irc.mozilla.org/#documentation
...and here it is

I'll update my blog with it's progress (or lacktherof) through Bugzilla.

Just trying to help!

2005-06-14T11:13:00.000+01:00

The last few days I've been wrestling with CVS trying to fetch some files, make some changes to documentation and generate a diff, how hard can that be you ask? Well very if my experience is anything to go by. Anyhow I wanted to do something productive so I wrote up a Real Player Plugin issues page for Mozillazine KB.

The browser goalposts have shifted

2005-06-11T13:58:00.000+01:00

Reading through the rants, raves and occasional informed debate over at Slashdot about IE7 it occurred to me that the browser goalposts have shifted. Many of the highly moderated comments said 'what does this have over Firefox/Safari/Opera.' My answer is it doesn't matter! In the new browser war it's about execution not about features. The trick is to integrate and make the features you offer accessible.

Cleaning up the internet!

2005-06-10T21:01:00.000+01:00

After a great day at Sennen. I just had fun amending the Wikipedia entry for Mumbo Jumbo to include Nonsense!

No OSX on Windows boxes?

2005-06-07T17:15:00.000+01:00

Steve Jobs says "We will not allow running Mac OSX on anything other than an Apple Mac," (via Gerv's blog.) What's to stop this? I would think business users will stick to whatever rules Apple lays out but enthusiasts will try to get OSX running on beige x86 boxen as soon as they get their hands on it.

Note to self: try to stay on topic in future, on second thoughts this is my blog so maybe I'll just keep writing when I see something cool!

New contender in 'Hideous IT site theme' contest

2005-06-06T21:03:00.000+01:00

Read an article in El Reg this evening, but was set aback by the hideous theme, no doubt encouraged to emblazen the site with corporate colours this page reminded me of a coulourful web I'd rather forget! In fact it reminded me of the venerable Slashdot IT beige monstronsity, judge for yourself:

Live Documentation for Mozilla?

2005-06-02T20:14:00.000+01:00

Just saw this Live Documentation Gnome Bounty sponsored by Google. It would be great to have something like this for Mozilla, would certainly make me contribute, that is unless I can get to grips with Patch Maker.

Cool stuff at Guadec

2005-05-30T22:39:00.000+01:00

Watched some of the talks from Guardec this afternoon.
Some points that stood out as spot on to me:

It's important to ship stuff, even if it's not perfect (Paraphrasing Miguel de Icasa) Mozilla I think has learnt this lesson
Features for girls (Paraphrasing Jeff Waugh) Not sure how well Firefox is doing in this department, not really in a position to judge!

Looking forward to the usability lab results talk tomorrow...

Minimo Rumour Mill

2005-05-30T13:53:00.000+01:00

I wonder if there's any link between Minimo and the just announced Linux-based Nokia 770
What browser's this thing running? Could it run Minimo in the future?

Just putting that one out there...

There is no Dana, only XUL!

2005-05-29T17:36:00.000+01:00

I watched Ghostbusters last night, having not seen it for years, my only memory was a giant marshmallow! I wanted to see it again because I read about the Mozilla references to the film, 'twas great seeing it with this in mind.

Firefox on Channel 4 News

2005-05-24T22:22:00.000+01:00

I saw Firefox on tonight's Channel 4 News during a piece about al-Zarqawi by Alex Thompson (whom I saw speak at my university last week.)
They showed Firefox displaying a forum post about al-Zaqawi's injury.

Anyhow, it's always cool to see Firefox on the small screen!

B is always for Bookmark

2005-05-21T14:17:00.000+01:00

One bug that's bitten me recently (albeit very lightly) was the access key confilct in Bookmarks, if I press B to get to my Broadcasting bookmarks I always get the Bookmark This Page... dialogue box instead. This is Bug 250987

Vlogging?!?

2005-05-20T11:00:00.000+01:00

After I read yesterday about Vlogging, it got me thinking about what future mutations of blogging may occur, how about:

Flogging - revealing your daily thoughts by pushing your feet on the keyboard
Slogging - Sensor captures your dreams and uploades them each morning
or how about the 3lite...
ROT-13-ogging your daily thoughts encoded for only the most dedicated readers

No use for dead space

2005-05-18T19:40:00.000+01:00

Insipred by the sight of an empty Firefox Bookmarks Toolbar I decided to file an RFE (Bug 294684) to give the option of hiding the toolbar when all bookmarks are deleted from it. I guess it's a good idea...

...unless someone has a good use for dead space!

Search Bar Blues

2005-05-14T20:11:00.000+01:00

I spent some time today looking at bugs with Firefox's search bar. I found that you can't open the 'Add Engines' link in a new tab. Thanks to Bugzilla Helper I was eventually able to find and mark as new Bug 287437. In the process I found out about Bug 283273 which reports you can't get to the Add Engines option using the keyboard. Finally, I found Bug 233308 which wants to rename 'Add Engines' to something better!

I've illustrated the above bugs using this scientific diagram.

Pragmatism over idealism

2005-05-12T22:51:00.000+01:00

Ben was spot on in his blog post, Firefox has succeeded because it chose pragmatism over idealism in its development process, Safari will do so as well.
Firefox has had its fair share of critics over any number of tough decisions that were made, but in the end these decisions have reaped dividends with a great product.

Websidestory Authoritative?

2005-05-10T17:20:00.000+01:00

Enjoyed reading the latest figures from Websidestory So let's get this straight:

...the upstart browser has more than 22 percent market share in Germany

So let's review the stats:

Browser

Germany

Internet Explorer

92.2%

Firefox

5.47%

Hmm...

To where? Nobody Knows!

2005-05-09T11:49:00.000+01:00

I thought I'd write about one of the little bugs I found in Firefox.
Add enough Bookmarks to fill the screen and the up and down arrows are always present, even at the end of the list. This is Bug 222274

Make your mind up Firefox!

2005-05-08T22:38:00.000+01:00

In recent versions of Firefox when you drag some text to the Location Bar or Search Bar you are automatically taken to that location.
However, the cursor contains both the icon suggesting it will overwrite the text and a regular cursor suggesting it will be appended, I filled this as Bug 250622 but no one seemed to notice! Maybe it's a duplicate...
Anyhow, because a picture speaks a thousand words here are some moving pictures to illustrate the problem.

...Press next to start the video

EPSON copy utility

2005-05-08T17:24:00.000+01:00

In what I hope will be the first in a series of UI rants...
I'd like to bring your attention to the interesting 'realistic' UI of EPSON copy utility. In fact it's so realistic you can't use your keyboard to set the number of copies, you have to use the up and down buttons. Nor can you toggle the black and white/colour switch with your mouse, instead you have to go to the 'Device Settings' menu.
The function buttons are realistically unclear, and they come without any Tooltips just like the real thing!

See also: Gerv's X-Lite Softphone UI Rant

Channel 9 Guy!

2005-05-06T22:23:00.000+01:00

Thanks Scoble at Microsoft for sending me a channel9 guy

That is all.