Just Another Blog

Are you thinking what I'm thinking?

Thursday, September 30, 2004

My New Layout

I've update the layout (theme, style, whatever) of my blog and wiki. They are now more consistent and more professional. Also, I've incorporated the "Browse Happy" information bar that I made for the innocent IE users.

The names of the blog and wiki are changed too. Hopefully it will be easier for my visitors to remember.

The funniest thing is that IE now display an alert message of Stack overflow at line: 128. Wow! I don't even know which file it is referring to... Enjoy the worst browser on the Earth!

P.S. If you have clue what wrong it is, don't hesitate to tell me!

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Linebreak Removal

After a few days, I've finally managed to convert all linebreaks (<br>) into paragraphs (<p>). Why? More semantics! I'm sorry if this interferes your RSS readers... :-P

Monday, September 20, 2004

Firefox 1.0PR Now Available in CS Lab

Firefox is finally available in CS Lab! Suprisingly, the version is very up-to-date: 1.0PR:

Don't forget to spread the words of Firefox to your family, friends, colleagues, team members, office, department, organization, etc. Be sure not to spam them. ;-) Igniting the web is not enough: we have to make it explodes!

Get your little Firefox now!

Saturday, September 18, 2004

Google PageRank 0.9.2

I've upgrade my Google PageRank extension for Firefox. At first, I found it ugly as the word PageRank is now abbreviated as PR. But then, I found that if a page is found to be categorized in the Google Directory, a little icon will appear next to the text PR:. As before, mousing over the PageRank status bar item shows a tooltip of the Google Directory. But in this new version, what's more is that clicking on the item will give you to that Google Directory... Cool!

Try visiting mozilla.org with the extension installed. Clicking on it will open a new tab of Computers > Software > Internet > Clients > WWW > Browsers > Mozilla!

Spread Firefox is Down!

After 3 days of heavy workload, the spreadfirefox.com server is finally down. The following notice is put on the front page of the site:

72 hours later: The world is on fire

"There's a window of opportunity for Mozilla to gain significant market share," BusinessWeek reports ... The Wall Street Journal recommends that users switch to Firefox, because it's more secure, modern and advanced ... c|net reports that 18% of its users are now coming to the site using open source web browsers ...

There's a meme infecting the Internet: Firefox is taking back the web. And you are our vanguard in this new movement.

It's been an astonishing and sleepless 72 hours since we released Firefox Preview Release. Thanks to your impressive efforts, nearly 790,000 people have downloaded Firefox in 3 days, bringing us within arm's length of our 1 million goal with a week to go! Over 5,000 people like yourself have joined Spread Firefox already and are poised to take back the web by storm. Over at c|net, Firefox enjoys the highest site rating possible and a staggering 92% approval rating. In the past three months alone, Firefox has gained close to 2% of browser marketshare—the first increase for non-IE browsers in eight years.

With numbers like these, it's getting harder to ignore Firefox—and indeed, the browser is making its way into some very elite circles. Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal columnist that Newsweek called "the most powerful arbiter of consumer tastes in the computer world," told over one million WSJ readers yesterday to dump Internet Explorer and get Firefox. Robert Scoble, renowned Microsoft evangelist, now sports a shiny new Firefox button on his weblog. And Firefox enjoyed 24-hour coverage on the very front page of Google News.

Spread Firefox is enjoying some coverage of its own. It was featured on cable television as part of G4TechTv's Firefox Throwdown campaign. The site is now first in our roll call with over 16,000 referrals in 3 days! Other big name affiliates include Broadband Reports and WordPress, both of whom have been amazingly generous in spreading the word among their expansive clientele. A number of news sites, such as c|net, also wrote dedicated sfx stories. But before all this popularity could go to our head, it went to our servers—and they are struggling. Please bear with us through outages and slowdowns as we work to manage the load; we hope to have the download counter updating more frequently when we get our site functioning better under this massive load.

We would particularly like to recognize a fiction writer named Kevin Karpenske. Kevin recently gave us his previous domain name, Firefox.com, for our use in promoting Firefox. And you might notice something familiar on his new site: four prominent Firefox buttons, linked to an sfx affiliate account. Thanks, Kevin!

We have some incredible things in store for you all over the coming weeks and months, and the sfx team is getting together today to discuss how and when we want to roll them out. Here's a sneak peek of some of the things you can expect in the near future:

  • A chance to put your filming and digital video editing skills to good use.
  • Enhanced promotion of the ten individuals and companies that are making our roll call—and some prizes.
  • The birth of nearly a dozen marketing teams that will collaborate using sfx-provided tools and infrastructure to accomplish some very specific and some very critical jobs.
  • An expansion of our affiliate points system, as well as the meaning of these points. You'll earn points for joining the aforementioned teams, points for donating, points for promoting Firefox in your signature file—points for just about anything you can think of that gets Firefox in the hands of another person.
  • A sneak peak at some of the things we've been creating behind the scenes for the past few months—being a member of this community has its rewards. You're gonna love our new posters aimed at college students.
  • A community rating system for sfx blogs. The top rated blog will be promoted to the front page of sfx at regular intervals, and runners-up will enjoy prime placement in our "Featured" section on the right-hand side.
  • ...and we're unveiling plans for the largest Firefox promotion we've ever undertaken, but we're going to need your help.

But first the Mozilla sysadmins and Daryl are pulling out their toolkit and performing surgery on our server so we can provide you with a more reliable experience here.

Blake, on behalf of the sfx team

Edited: The site is back and the full article can be found here.

A spiffy looking blog

Ha. I got a fan.

I like this guy! Guess why? YES! He is anti-IE too! ;)
Has an incredibly spiffy looking blog. Check it out!

A spiffy looking blog? Oops... I never found it spiffy. I always want to improve the style, but I'm no artist... :-(

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Get Fiberfox

Kevin really has a sense of humor:

Looking over the selection of Firefox buttons at the new SpreadFirefox site, I was inspired to make this:

Get Fiberfox!

To the obvious question, I say: Why not? This is an audience participation blog post. Warm up your Photoshops and your MacPaints and lets see your take on the little browser that could!

P.S. Try to search for Fiberfox. You'll be amazed...

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Take this challenge!

Glutnix got a really great idea: The 5 Day Firefox Challenge. The detail is as follow:

Read Why you should change to Firefox and step up and accept the 5 Day Firefox Challenge! Here's the challenge:

Download and Install Firefox as your default browser. If after 5 days you're not convinced Firefox is the best browser available, uninstall it and switch back.

Firefox will import your bookmarks from Internet Explorer.

A Google search box is built in. And if you miss the full toolbar, download a Firefox version of the Google Toolbar.

Use the Tabbed Browsing functionality. Watch your productivity improve.

Subscribe to some Live Bookmarks, like the one on Slashdot or Wired News. See the Live Bookmarks RSS button appear on the toolbar when visiting your own favorite sites.

Play with Firefox. Get to know it. Have fun with it. If after 5 days, you're not completely convinced, feel free to switch back. There's not really any risk.

Are you ready to take this challenge? ;-)

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

Mozilla Product Updates

Monday, September 13, 2004

The Mysterious Green Button

Occasionally there is a little green button next to the Firefox throbber:

Sometimes it appears, sometimes it doesn't. When I click on it, it shows a update window which should returns some Firefox updates to me. But it doesn't.

Is it a bug or a feature? ;-) And why is the button located next to the throbber, but not on the status bar?

Firefox Dot Com

The original owner of firefox.com, Kevin Karpenske, agreed to give the domain to Mozilla Foundation for her famous Firefox web browser. The content of his site will be moved to quailish.com.

Thanks for the domain name, Kevin! :-)

Sunday, September 12, 2004

Firefox 1.0 PR Preview 2

Asa announced another round of candidate builds. Go and grab it!

We had to take one more important change into the builds last night, moving from a blacklist to a whitelist for external protocol handlers, so today's builds are the new candidate 1.0PR builds.

If all goes well with these builds, they'll become the official Firefox 1.0 Preview Release builds on Tuesday morning. Please help us test these bits and if you find any major regressions, please file bugs and nominate those as PR blockers with the bug flag "blocking-aviary1.0PR" so that the Aviary team will see.

About the external protocol handler thing, it seems to be this one:

Whenever a protocol is not handled by Firefox (i.e. by external application, in this case, telnet), it will ask you for permission, until the protocol is in the whitelist. Good! Another security feature.

While the current Promote Firefox under the Help menu shows us nothing, someone managed to get a working link via bart's weblog. This is just a beta site which will be moved to the main page soon.

Gecko ported to Qt/KDE

Several hackers had ported Gecko (the render engine of Mozilla) as a Qt/KDE component (KPart), which will enable Gecko to be embedded in KDE applications.

On the night before the start of the hacking marathon, a conversation including, among others, Ian Geiser, Lars Knoll, Dirk Mueller, and Zack Rusin happened onto the topic of integrating Gecko into KDE. Lars and Zack jumped into Mozilla's code, to see how feasible such a plan might be. Within four days (and before the end of the marathon) the two had a working port: Gecko running on Qt. They credited the speed of implementation to the maturity of the respective technologies and KDE's component architecture (though the caliber of the hackers certainly didn't hamper the effort).
We are delighted to work with the KDE community, both to extend the reach of Gecko, and to be part of an effort bringing even greater depth to the KDE desktop. Making Qt another platform for Mozilla, and Gecko another option for KDE is a win for both users and developers commented Mitchell Baker, President of the Mozilla Foundation.
This is the best of both worlds for KDE said Lars Knoll of the KHTML project. Integrating Gecko side by side with our existing renderer opens a lot of doors, without any compromise of the hard work and clean design that make KHTML what it is.

Wow... Cool! Does that mean we will have a Gecko-based Konqueror (or even Safari?!)?

More news articles here:

Saturday, September 11, 2004

New Firefox Quality Feedback Agent

The new Firefox comes with a new quality feedback agent (an agent for sending crash report to mozilla.org):

Finally Mozilla says "good bye" to the Qualify Feedback Agent with a Netscape logo...

P.S. It crashes when I was customizing the toolbar...

Firefox 1.0 PR Preview

As Asa said the 2004-09-10 build is most likely the candidate for Firefox 1.0 PR, I've given it a little try.

Before upgrading, I did a semi-clean uninstallation: uninstall the program, but kept the application directory. In this way, I can keep the plugins and extensions that reside in the application directory.

When I launched Firefox for the first time, it told me that some of my favorite extensions are not working:

The checking function is not working. It tolds me no update was found. Fortunately, the extension authors had already updated their code in their homepages. So there is no big deal: just go to their homepages (instead of u.m.o) for installation.

This is how it looks:

Some interesting findings in this Firefox build:

  1. Some changes in the Winstripe theme: the small icons are much smaller, and the close button is more 3D.
  2. The stylesheet switcher is gone, but one can still change stylesheet under View > Page Style (i.e. like Mozilla Suite). Updated: SSS is back in Firefox 1.0!
  3. The orange RSS icon for Live Bookmark.
  4. Promote Firefox under the Help menu. But the website is not available yet.
  5. XPI blocking (i.e. websites cannot install extensions on your Firefox unless you give it permission to do so). Surprisingly, u.m.o, mozilla.org and mozdev.org are NOT in the whitelist... XD
There are (at least) two security enhancements:
  1. For secure sites (i.e. https), the background color of the location bar will change to yellow:

  2. Also, the domain name of the secure site will appear as the botton of the window:

  3. For window opened with JavaScript, an non-removable and non-editable location/status bar will always reside on the top/botton of the window:

And if you care, this is the current user agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040910 Firefox/0.10 (For Windows XP, it will be Windows NT 5.1, instead of Windows NT 5.0). See what people say about this Firefox build:

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Coming Soon to a Computer Near You

Firefox 1.0 PR should be out by the end of this week. Stay tuned, or if you can't wait, download a nightly to help testing.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

The Guy's Guide to Geek Girls

My friend Kwan was touched by the guide that I found earlier.

He then did a little Google and found The Guy's Guide to Geek Girls. Well, the World is fair after all... :-P

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

A Girl's Guide to Geek Guys

A perfect guide for girls who want to meet geek guys. This guide is now widely spreaded in the geek blogosphere:

...however, remember that most of their days are spent sitting and staring at a monitor.
Geeks also like to go to sci-fi and Japanese animated movies, again, a basically harmless vent for your man.

Hey! That's me! :-P

MySQL Considered Harmful

If you are serious about database, keep your hand out of MySQL - the World's worst RDBMS.

Despite of its high popularity, it is a database software that doesn't even meet the basic requirement of RDBMS - Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, and Durability (ACID). It lacks of many things that you expected in a real (O)RDBMS package:
  • Referential constraints, unless using InnoDB.
  • Views.
  • Transactions, unless using InnoDB.
  • Unicode support.
  • Stored procedures and triggers.
See more about this in Why not to use MySQL. P.S. If you are looking for a real open-source RDBMS, try PostgreSQL or Firebird.

Monday, September 06, 2004

Netvigator says no to HKBN's VoIP

In response to HKBN's VoIP plan, Netvigator has sent the following message to us (Netvigator subscriber) via email:

What You Need to Know about Residential VoIP Broadband Phone Services

Dear Valued Customer,

You may be aware of certain new voice services marketed as VoIP Broadband Phone Services that ride on the broadband networks of other Internet Service Providers (ISP) such as NETVIGATOR. As your broadband service provider, we feel it is important that you understand all the facts about this type of VoIP Broadband Phone Service and the potential implications and impact they may have on your broadband service.

What You Need to Know:

  1. The installation of these VoIP Broadband Phone Services involve complex network settings, errors made during this process may lead to disconnection of your broadband service.
  2. These VoIP Broadband Phone Services have not undergone compatibility testing and certification with NETVIGATOR, therefore it will not be possible for us to provide any related technical support.
  3. The division of broadband bandwidth by such services may directly result in a reduction of broadband Internet upload and download speeds.
  4. Unlike traditional fixed-line services, these VoIP Broadband Phone Services do not have independent power supply, during a power outage you will not be able to make emergency calls.
  5. The Hong Kong Police and other emergency services providers will not be able to trace and locate the caller if the installation address is changed without notifying the VoIP Broadband Phone Services providers.
In August this year, one of the largest VoIP Broadband Phone Services providers in the U.S. suffered 2 major outages within 2 weeks, each lasting nearly 2 hours, and affecting its 200,000 customers. This is a clear example of the significant difference in service reliability between traditional fixed-line services and VoIP Broadband Phone Services that ride on other ISP's network.

We also wish to remind you that you should not be connecting your NETVIGATOR Broadband service to any unauthorized device other than your personal computer, as this may affect the quality of your broadband service.

The Hong Kong Government currently intends to review regulations in relation to this type of VoIP Broadband Phone Services to ensure that consumers' interests are protected.

At NETVIGATOR, we feel it is important to keep you abreast of new developments in the market so that you can make an informed decision. If you have any further questions, please feel free to call our customer service hotline at 1833 833.

NETVIGATOR

GetThunderbird.com

We used to have GetFirefox.com. Now we also have GetThunderbird.com!

I wonder when we will have GetSunbird.com...

Small Glitch in Mozilla.org's Website

All human being make mistaken. In addition to the well-known Firefox UI gliches, I've found a small typing mistake in mozilla.org's Marketing Project page.

See? A space is missing before the hyperlink... :-P

Sunday, September 05, 2004

BONIC!

I've upgraded my SETI@home Classic client to BONIC. Unfortunately the BONIC server for SETI@home doesn't give any jobs to me:

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-09-05 17:16:33 - Sending request to scheduler: http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-09-05 17:16:37 - Scheduler RPC to http://setiboinc.ssl.berkeley.edu/sah_cgi/cgi failed
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-09-05 17:16:37 - No schedulers responded
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/ - 2004-09-05 17:16:37 - Deferring communication with project for 1 hours, 23 minutes, and 42 seconds

For another project (ClimatePrediction.Net), there is no problem. But apparently my machine is way too slooooooow:

ProjectApplicationNameCPU timeProgressTo CompletionReport DeadlineStatus
climateprediction.nethadsm3 4.03lrck_200102940_000:14:240.01%2383:11:302005-08-18 21:41:15Runing

Saturday, September 04, 2004

Mozilla Bits and Bytes

Sorry for not posting for a few days. I've been busying at making another weblog which is made for academic stuffs.

Here are some interesting Mozilla stuffs that happened this week:

By the way, I've also successfully convinced my Department to install Firefox on every Windows workstations for students. :-P They haven't installed yet. Let's see when they will...

Wednesday, September 01, 2004

New Mozillla website launches

The new Mozilla website launches! I love the new design. It is clean and clear, showing the 3 big products (Firefox, Thunderbird and Mozilla). Also, the new design requires no scrolling (provided your screen is large enough) which is a big plus. The 3 RSS channels at the bottom of the page are also very sweet: now newbies will know about mozillaZine and Mozilla Weblogs when they visit the main page.

More news about the launch of the new site:

  1. adot's notblog*: we have a website
  2. Inside Firefox: New Mozilla Website