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title: Put the knife down and take a green herb, dude. |
descrip: One feller's views on the state of everyday computer science & its application (and now, OTHER STUFF) who isn't rich enough to shell out for www.myfreakinfirst-andlast-name.com Using 89% of the same design the blog had in 2001. |
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FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!!!
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| Saturday, October 05, 2013 | |
Q16: Is "minified" JavaScript Source Code? Compare to OOXML. Like interpreted code, you could (and, I believe) should argue that purposely obfuscated human-readable code and standards are operating as executable/proprietary code. Labels: javascript, licensing, mozilla, ooxml, open posted by ruffin at 10/05/2013 06:05:00 PM |
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| Thursday, August 02, 2012 | |
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Evil Brain Jono's Natural Log: Maybe software projects ought to design their architecture so they can do security/performance updates in separate development branches from UI-relevant updates? From the follow-up to the post I quoted from extensively in my last post. Really? You should design an app to abstract the UI from the engine? Crazy idea, that. Labels: development, gui, mozilla posted by ruffin at 8/02/2012 09:31:00 AM |
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Evil Brain Jono's Natural Log: It's not like we weren't warned. Lots of people in the community tried to tell us that this was a bad idea. But somehow, despite being an ostensibly community-driven organization, somewhere along the line we learned to tune out naysayers from the community. Bold emphasis mine. For Firefox extension developers (and I've done a little), the real take-home is here: "Worse yet, we didn't do enough to preserve add-on compatibility, making the updates extremely disruptive to people who depended on certain add-ons; and we kept going with our old version-numbering scheme even though the meaning of the numbers had changed completely, leading to mass confusion." Okay, also useful (this is becoming a "quotes to self" post): "Your users are temporarily tolerating your software because it's the least horrible option they have -- for now -- to meet some need." The post is more than worth reading for anyone working with software development. (discovered via link shared in the Real Software blog) Labels: dancing moons, development, gui, mozilla, noteToSelf posted by ruffin at 8/02/2012 09:17:00 AM |
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| Monday, July 09, 2012 | |
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From the "leaked memo" previewing today's announcement that Thunderbird's development is ceasing: In summary, we've been focusing efforts towards important web and mobile projects, such as B2G, while Thunderbird remains a pure desktop-only email client. One important bit of information: B2G is Mozilla's Boot to Gecko project, which quickly appears to be a Mozilla suite for mobile devices. And from this, I think we have our answer why Thunderbird's "dying" -- which, you should note, it's not; it's simply going from development to maintenance. And what's the last bit of innovation you saw from Thunderbird anyhow? How anything really changed in 10 years? Since the Netscape client, what's changed minus better rendering, encryption perhaps, and a passable junk mail filter? Our answer? There's not a lot of corporate adoption of Thunderbird. Show me one desk job where a desktop email client isn't a necessity. If there was, this announcement would have never happened, even if Mozilla still wasn't going to do more development on Thunderbird. That is, this "announcement" is very bad press for Thunderbird. If your company was considering using it before, well, after hearing the spin that it's toast, you're not now. Thunderbird failed at business, so they've not only stopped planning to make it better but have also announced to the world that it's essentially dead. This announcement is more important/telling taken as part of a media relations strategy than what it means for Thunderbird in the future. And let's face it: Thunderbird is a good client, but it's never been great. I think Mozilla finally figured out they didn't have the resources to change that with this codebase. Now if they'd just start porting libmime to more programming languages... ;^) EDIT: Here's a nice description of how much of Thunderbird is being reused in the B2G project. Hello, Chandler 2.0? (Which is to say, they're reinventing 90% of an already solid wheel.) Labels: email, mozilla, thunderbird posted by ruffin at 7/09/2012 09:25:00 AM |
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| Monday, June 18, 2012 | |
 When did this happen, exactly? Edit: Ah, it's about search engine weights for any javascript documentation you like, not that Moz allows you to edit docs (though apparently Moz does). Then as more people being to link their articles, note this part is key, AND put buttons in, we can change the search results. We are also working to improve the MDN and other such resources as well as pool them together in a more concise manner. This is not something that is a one off item, but a long term commitment for us, by us to improve things. Strange that the auto-generated links send you to different places in the moz js docs with each load (String, regex, array, global object, etc). Perhaps that's how you have to spoof search engines now? Another edit: Bizarre. Ace is a standalone code editor written in JavaScript. Our goal is to create a web based code editor that matches and extends the features, usability and performance of existing native editors such as TextMate, Vim or Eclipse. It can be easily embedded in any web page and JavaScript application. Ace is developed as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter (Bespin) Project. This Javascript app thing really has gotten out of control. ;^) $15 a month for an open source IDE (Cloud9 IDE) that was $49/month? I must be reading something wrong. Labels: javascript, mozilla posted by ruffin at 6/18/2012 08:39:00 AM |
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| Thursday, February 11, 2010 | |
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AppleInsider | Hulu to make videos available on iPad without Flash - rumor: 'The TV shows on Hulu would be perfect on the iPad. There is just one hitch: the iPad doesnโt support Flash, and all of Huluโs videos currently run inside a Flash player,' states TechCrunch If there's one thing Apple's figured out, it's how to leverage the 3-10% of folks that use Macs to push new standards over the tipping point. The iMac all but killed the PS/2-serial port mismash that came before it. USB was happening, but it wasn't until the iMac supported only USB (and at the same time merged the Apple peripheral market with WinPC) that USB became the dominant connection tech. Compare to Apple and Firewire, for which Apple collected license fees for a while. Firewire didn't go nearly so well as USB because firewire was an add-on, not a go-for-broke replacement for USB. USB 2.0 became so much more dominant that Jobs himself was eating his Firewire a few years after its introduction. Honestly, to make Firewire work, Jobs probably should have killed USB and gone 100% Bluetooth for peripherals, but Bluetooth wasn't ready for the weight then, and it's not now. Now, the iPad is killing Adobe. I'm not sure what Jobs has against Flash other than it's not something Apple controls. But he is killing it. HTML 5 video support in Firefox is a better solution, imo, than closed Flash plugins. It's, in a sense, a level less complicated. Once codec compression, speed, and resources are up, up, and down, respectively, to Flash levels, why not use HTML 5? The iPad helps make that "why not" an easier question to answer. If I'm worried about paying licensing for encoding and having end users have the proper Flash plugin installed, now I have a good excuse (aka, "business plan") to develop an alternative: a new platform that only supports the alternative that helps me hedge my bets against Flash. I can develop for HTML 5, pull an id and Quake 3 (where they released a test version of their latest game on Mac first) with the iPad to help bug test a relatively stable platform, and be ready to roll things out if Adobe doesn't give me a sweater deal. Reminds me a lot of AOL and Mozilla. At one point, AOL's licensing deal with Microsoft over using IE as the browser engine in AOL's client was coming due. AOL actually released a version of AOL based on Mozilla for the Mac, showing Microsoft that they didn't really need IE. MS no longer had AOL over a barrel, and a licensing deal was worked out. And b/c of this, in large part, we now have Firefox. AOL's bet played out perfectly for us, though perhaps not so well for them. HTML 5 video is the same move all over again. s/Microsoft/Adobe. s/AOL/[Hulu|YouTube] Labels: aol, apple, control, F/free, hats of money, id, iPad, licensing, microsoft, mozilla posted by ruffin at 2/11/2010 10:28:00 AM |
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| Thursday, September 11, 2008 | |
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I'm just about done with my daily use experiment of Chrome, and am back to using Firefox right now. Firefox seems quicker, crashes less [for me], and, well, I'm probably just more used to the browser. Strangely, FF can activate Blogger markup shortcuts (like ctrl-i for italics) and Chrome, in my use, can't. (That said, on my G4 running OS X, FF 3 is too slow for me to use daily. There, I use Safari.) So why would I use Chrome again? Seems obvious: Gears, although now that I look at it, Google has Gears for IE and FF! Gears is the interface that lets browsers go offline, for example, as in my post on Google Reader offering to make itself accessible offline. That's nice, and I'll bet that Chrome does Gears better than any other browser. It's designed to be a Gears host from the start. Anybody, iirc, can code up a Gears application, yet I still have to think it's going to be Google first and Google best. This means Google went for Embrace and Extend, embracing the browser, and making an extension that ensures that your browser does a superset of everyone else's. That there's Gears for FF and IE and that anyone who learns can code for Gears makes it appear like Google's being altruistic, but the fact is that Google's not just dealing the cards, they're deciding which ones to print as well. Google's continually more evil, imo, and it seems to be an evil born of success coupled with a desire to expand. Many of the things they do are Good Things (unobtrusive, almost useful ads, POP and IMAP Gmail access, making Gears accessible, if not Open and Free), but the bloom is off the rose for me. By the way, the KHTML project now seems to be the most interesting Open-Corporate encounter in the software world. There's Safari, Chrome, OmniWeb, the vaporware that is Sun's JWebPane, and, of course, Konq all sharing the same parental codebase. What exactly is the sweetspot that makes KHTML so attractive, and so attractive versus Mozilla code or internally written code? (And let's remember that IE comes from Mosaic, even if MS is idiot enough to say that IE 7 has no Mosaic code (look, if you started with a codebase that large, unless you start over from scratch, the traces of the original are always going to be with you... Always.) I know some of it is obvious: Smaller codebase, good license, etc. But is the code particularly well written? Commented? What specifically makes it so much better than the alternatives that the last two major corporations (three if we count Sun, which we won't, yet) that released popular browsers have all used it? Labels: chrome, firefox, gmail, Google, khtml, microsoft, mozilla posted by ruffin at 9/11/2008 07:49:00 AM |
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| Thursday, August 21, 2008 | |
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From <Glazblog/>: Firefox is the root of the buzz, the root of the income, the root of the success, the root of the massive hiring process Mozilla started. Seamonkey is not a part of it any more, xulrunner is not a part of it any more, I hardly see how webrunner fits into that strategy, Mozilla just does not care about the editing companion to Firefox whatever its name Nvu or Composer, and Thunderbird is itself taken out from under the wings of Mozilla Corporation. The whole thing is about Firefox. Don't misunderstand me, I'm not saying it's bad or good. It's factual, period. So the modernity factor, the quality factor, the freedom factor and the coolness factor are NOT attached to the name 'Mozilla' for the public, sorry to say. I mean, I kinda got that feeling already. What I suppose I didn't quite understand is that not only has any sort of brand recognition with Mozilla been ditched, it's been ditched because it gives inferior performance in public considerations. Mozilla is not a neutral, relatively obscure brand, it is, instead, negative, dated, and unuseful. There's a reason it's called the browser war, I suppose. But what does this say about the place of html authorship and email in the public? And we're back to the question of what is [that hated moniker] Web 2.0 supposed to mean? iMovie to YouTube takes the place of Mozilla Composer to your geocities site? Labels: business, firefox, mozilla, web 2.0 shiite posted by ruffin at 8/21/2008 09:39:00 AM |
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| Wednesday, April 16, 2008 | |
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My favorite feature of NVu was the ability to highlight part or all of a page in Firefox, cut, and paste something that looked pretty much the same in NVu. Then I could either steal the html or WYSIWYG it right there in NVu. Yes, I know NVu has been dated for quite some time (which also means Kompozer's no good), but until now still played nicely with FF. With Firefox 3, however, the cutting and pasting no longer works; the html comes out as plain text. I don't believe the current Moz Editor has a standalone release, though there are some docs on doing it yourself, beyond me. Perhaps I'll download Moz with Composer by itself, eh? EDIT: Talk about intuitive. If you put document.designMode='on'; in a script tag somewhere in your page, you can use Firefox to edit your page. I'm betting there are other calls for getting the editor toolbar to show up too. Strange. Labels: mozilla posted by ruffin at 4/16/2008 12:37:00 AM |
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