Bugzilla is NOT a discussion forum... but a playground

Jesse Ruderman bought us more joy from Bugzilla. Some of my favorite bugs:

• Bug 66984 - Need name for new image library (rename libpr0n)
• Bug 259207 - Mozilla firefox needs a title song
• Bug 261354 - RSS button looks like it says "ASS"
• Bug 262173 - Firefox Icon Problem - new firefox icon appears to be giant red panda that is humping south america
• Bug 122411 - Mozilla does not have a kitchen sink
• Bug 60455 - Mozilla doesn't add time to the day
• Bug 95849 - Lack of Sex is interfering with my ability to triage bugs
• Bug 125287 - thomas@pdb.no owes me some hot scandinavian blondes
• Bug 51015 - Microsoft should use Mozilla

The list goes on... :-P

Bugzilla is NOT a discussion forum

Apparently, not everyone know that Bugzilla is NOT a discussion forum. A Bugzilla newbies Clint Hamilton has recently spammed bug 243324 because he thinks someone is pissing him off (and marking his bug as duplicate). His comments are simply amazing, especially those HIGHLY EMPHASIZED comments:

I AM a member of Mozillazine and THEY tell me to come HERE!! F**k this $h!t. Trying to learn about FF bugs isn't worth this BS. I've been browsing bugs here for DAYS and I see PLAIN CONVERSATIONS ALL THE TIME WITH basic Q & A on these threads, so don't tell me this is "not the place to ask questions"!! What hell do you think most do here?? What the hell do you expect me to do, just "browse and read" and that's IT???? But Oh noooooo, it's perfectly OK for ANYONE ELSE to ask questions, just not ME!!!! I've tried to be kind to you, but you are REALLY ON MY LAST NERVE!!!! NOW LEAVE ME THE F**K ALONE JERK!!!!! YOU are the one making things worse with your condescending & holier than thou attitude!!! If *YOU* don't become a bit more diplomatic and understanding, and not so PROVOKING, it is YOU that will "eventually get revoked"!!! GET A LIFE AND STOP "TAGGING ALONG" behind me like a lost child!!!! What the HELL have I ever done to you!!??????

Know what he was talking about? I don't... :-/ And what's more annoying was that he even removed all the CC list because he didn't know how the CC list thing works! Oh my... Fortunately the list was restored quickly.

This issue is now over, so no more flaming. But I really want to see these useless comments removed. However, this cannot be done because it is not a bug but a feature.

I feel sick...

I feel cold. I feel dizzy. I feel sleepy. I sweat. In fact, I vomited in this morning. I had a cold last night... :-/

Localized Firefoxes

Wow, the localized Firefoxs are finally checked back into mozilla.org. This will undoubtedly help us to spread Firefox to non-English speaking regions!

FAYT Fixed

Two nasty bugs introduced by the new Find Toolbar were finally fixed:

• Find Toolbar: 'find again' does not work after changing tabs Find text should persist across tabs and windows (but not sessions.)
• View Source doesn't use Find Toolbar / Since Find Toolbar was implemented, Find as you type is broken in "Page Source" window

Maybe Firefox 1.0 RC1 will be out soon... :-)

Syllable on Windows

Syllable is an open-source hobby OS for x86 and compatible processors. The OS is tiny, compared with the gaint Linux distributions like Fedora and Mandrake. And now Michael Saunders has recently bundled QEMU CPU Emulator with Syllable, so that one can run Syllable on Windows! No need to burn CD, partition your HDD and install any boot loader! Just download, unpack and run!

It is so easy! The only drawback is that QEMU runs 10 times slower than a real PC, so your Syllable will be painfully slow. If you really like this distro, you should install the real one which is lightning-fast!

P.S. Alternatively you can try the Syllable LiveCD. Just burn the CD and put it into your CD drive when booting your machine. The OS will be loaded from the CD directly. If it doesn't, check your boot sequence (e.g. CD drive > Floppy drive > Hard drive), and check to see if your BIOS supports CD boot. Of course, since it is loaded from CD, you will lost your work after system shutdown and your CD drive will read like crazy when loading programs.

Posting and You

I've found a very nice video (via a post in Mugenchitai) "teaching" people how to post correctly. e.g.

• Provide information if you are asking for help.
• Avoid duplicate post by searching before posting.
• Post in the right forum.

Forum admins should make a post about this funny Flash animation and make it sticky, so that the newbies will know what to do and how to do better. :-)

What the customer really needed

Tonight, when I visit OpenWikiHelp 2004, a little image caught my attention:

Obviously, instead of giving your customers a broken or bloated product, try to give them what they really need... ;-)

Gmail said: "No ZIP file"

Tonight, I was trying to send an email with a ZIP attachment to my friend. But suddenly Gmail told me:

What?! Security reasons? I'm not a spammer nor a computer virus... :-( I didn't give up and tried some other popular formats like Tarball (.tar) and Windows executable (.exe). Well, as expected, they failed.

Luckily 7-ZIP is not blocked! :-D Gmail should seriously consider NOT to block any attachment. Otherwise, please block it in a smarter way. ;-)

One year old now

Oops, I've missed it. A year ago, I made my very first blog post. Quite unbelievable that this blog is still active... :-P

Happy birthday to me!

Gmail Virtual Filesystem for Windows

About a month ago, Richard Jones introduced the GmailFS to us. GmailFS provides a mountable Linux filesystem which uses your Gmail account as its storage medium.

And now, bjarke created a similar software: GMail Drive shell extension, which is more or less the same thing but for Windows.

IMO it is not that useful because you can expect it to perform worse than a network drive. But it is interesting to see someone who actually ported the idea to Windows. :-)

Gmail's New Features

Some people are more lucky more I! Cheah Chu Yeow found Atom feed and inline contact list and Jeff Mesnil found drafts and mail forwarding. These new features are not available to most users, so stay calm. :-)

It's nice to see these improvements. However, personally I think the Atom feed fearure is rather useless. Atom has been the site syndication format standard pushed for Blogger (owned by Google). But how useful can it be for email?

An email is different from a website: it is NOT public. Hence, authentication is needed. This mean one must either 1) sign in via Gmail's web interface or 2) sign in via a tool (usually Gmail notifier). The first method is not convenience unless one saved the login information in cookies. If one use the second method, he/she already can get notification for new Gmails, why he/she still need that Atom feed?

Maybe that's because Gmail want people to be able to use Thunderbird to read new emails (since Thunderbird can now feed RSS/Atom). Maybe Gmail want to roll out a browser (with related applications) based on Mozilla... Well... maybe... :-P