The MultiZilla Project Team Blog

Hola Apple...

Mon, 11 May 2009 14:37:06 -0700

HJ: Yummy: Apple's Software Update gave me a very intesting update; being OSX 10.5.7 The weird thing is that it isn't even released yet, or I must be blind again. I don't know what to say else — other than that being on the other side of the world might help. Let's go hunting for bug fixes and other fun changes.

Update: Hm. I never had any troubles with my NVIDIA 8800GT before, but I just noticed some weird red pixels on my monitor (after the required restart). I hope this get fixed before Friday, or I'll have to go back to 10.5.6 Nah. I rather buy a new video adapter. Yes, I just love it when Apple updates fail to work properly (later folks).

Update II: What is this? I mean my numeric keyboard has been functional for ages, up until today ('s upgrade). I don't get it. And no, I don't want one of these tiny little keyboards (without a numeric keypad). Seriously: I need my numeric keypad, and every single day so please Apple stay the F away from it!!!

Update III: I am apparently one of the few to get the latest Apple upgrade, but checking the files makes me believe that I somehow got the latest developer release of 10.5.7 installed via Apple's software update. I wonder if someone in Taiwan can fake channels and forward hacked versions via software update. I'm not pointing any fingers, and I'm not blaming Apple, but I can't trust anything that might have been compromised, comes from an undisclosed source (we're connected to a Cisco router which logs everything) and thus we are wiping disks and will have to re-install once again. What a nightmare.

Update IV: We were told not to wipe our disks and to wait a few more hours because Apple is really going to release OSX 10.5.7 later today — this was an apparent mishap of the mirrors in Taiwan. Might be a good idea to check these mirrors a bit more often. We're happy campers again (yeah, we solved that keyboard problem already).

A quick update...

Sun, 10 May 2009 02:34:25 -0700

HJ: I have been writing new widgets for the MultiZilla start page, but got distracted by the ugly look and feel of our current start page. I soon realized that I can't possibly do everything myself. At least not without getting loads of help from Raj and Michael. Who are busy with other things so I thought about hiring people. That however can get pretty expensive, and thus I looked into a few other options.

The good news is that we have a few options. And some of which already proved to be successful. XUL BootCamp being one of them, as you might have expected. We also need at least two interns for the summer holidays — I am a bit late with this, especially since these interns will need to work (almost) full time.

Well. Now you know why I am this quiet, and Michael is because his mom is (still) hospitalized (due to come home later this week) and thus he has to take care of his younger brother Bryan and sisters Melissa and Samantha. This next to his homework, his own project and a rather big renovation going on at home (thanks Bro).

Time for me to do some paperwork, and to setup everything for the interns. I tell you this; they won't have to miss anything (because I won't either). Yes it was either this or nothing… so here we go. Later folks.

My chronic sleep disorder AKA insomnia...

Fri, 01 May 2009 20:04:57 -0700

HJ: It is 05:00 here and I am already having my first cup of coffee. U2's “Moment of Surrender” is doing its best to wake me up after a short four hours of sleep. So lovely.

Hm. I'm either in for a new desk, or eye surgery one day soon — my new monitor is literally in my face now. Wait. I just need a new keyboard and open the door to the neiborns and work from there. Yeah. It's so great to have a fucked up bio clock.

Boy did that coffee go quick. I guess that it is time for my shower now, or look for news. Ah this is funny. Marc Stephens of Redruth, an English marine assisted his wife, Jo, with the birth of their fourth child, this after watching some movies on youtube.com about giving birth. Hm. Something tells me that Marc either wasn't too much home, and thus missed the birth of the other three, or was a bit stressed after all. I mean after three children… one might assume that you know the drill. Okay. I admit. Assisting your wife might after all still be a little weird. A lot? Anyway. My congratulations with Gabriel folks.

That's it for now. Back to work. Later folks.

What a sad day...

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:49:08 -0700

HJ: Today's "Queens Day" should have been a fantastic day for everyone, but in the end it wasn't. The weather was fine, but the tragic incident in Apeldoorn was not — five people have died today and another 13 are still hospitalized.

My thoughts and prayers are for all people involved, with the exception of the 38 year old frantic lunatic who drove his Suzuki Swift in a kamikaze style through a fence, and over a bunch of innocent people. Changing such a nice day into a nightmare. This will most likely change "Queens Day" forever. What a sad day.

Most of my day was used to clean up. I tell you a lot of good memories came back: I already trashed my first SCO Unix box some time ago, but today I found an old (defunct) SCSI hard drive (from the late 80's) and some AT terminal card (hello Dupaco). Now also trashed.

But not all of the day, because I also installed the 64 bit version of the Flash player on my Ubuntu box, just to watch the event on youtube.com And speaking about Ubuntu; I wonder why Canonical changed the URL of "Help/Release Notes" in Mozilla Firefox, which BTW still points to 8.10 instead of 9.04 but that aside, and why one menu item lacks ellipses and two others have a space in front of the ellipses. just weird.

I checked the official version of Mozilla Firefox, on Windows XP, and there it was ok. Disabling the "Ubuntu Firefox Modifications" add-on fixed most of the errors, with the exception of the URL to the release notes — this broken link is actually Mozilla's own error.

RIP Firefox...

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 19:47:27 -0700

HJ: I just changed the news blurb on our front page. Making things a bit more official. Yes. I am working on a completely new product, and for some time already.

My next product is currently build on top of Mozilla Firefox, but will use Mozilla 2.0 in its final incarnation. The first thing I had to do was to remove the complete Firefox UI… and I mean everything. Which I have completed already and thus: “RIP Firefox — diese kleine graue Maus ist tot…”.

The biggest plus for you will be that you won't see anything… but content. This means that it will be completely different, but the good news, for you, is that you won't have to miss anything. This maybe with the exception of today's add-ons, which will either be void or need a re-write to support the new look-and-feel.

This idea isn't completely new (I demo'ed it back in 2002) but people were not ready for such a big change. The people I work for these days however are about to use a new kind of hand held by Apple Inc. and don't care about these old-school browser UI's anymore.

Let's face it people: Mozilla Firefox is still the same old-school browser, and so is SeaMonkey and all the rest. Loads of replicated tam-tam but they fail, miserably, to raise above and shine. I'm so done with fat browsers — dead fish in the water.

Developers with the same kind of ideas and passion are hereby invited to join me and change the way we browse the Interwubble… and BIG TIME.

Buggy bugs and music...

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:58:05 -0700

HJ: I'm back, using my incredibly fast Ubuntu Linux system again. No more notebook. Not for some time. And the first thing I did today was to debug that file dialog problem I blogged about. This time however with a clear head. Right. I knew it… it was that stupid tracker deamon again — I had the same problem when I installed Ubuntu 8.10. Good news. Disabling the tracker deamond and applet is a matter of adding Hidden=true to the following two files:

/etc/xdg/autostart/trackerd.desktop
/etc/xdg/autostart/tracker-applet.desktop

Not much has changed it seems, and thus my notes came in handy once again. I'm glad that this Ubuntu hacking is over. Huh? I just noticed that my Feed Viewer barked about something:

Markup Errors Fixed by FeedViewer: \x,missing closing /

And the Feed Viewer barked because I used the HTML tag <br> instead of the XHTML variant, but we had to do this to prevent breakage of the HTML editions of our feeds, which for your info are generated from the same RSS data. I just wonder why we didn't fix our RSS to HTML converter… a few years ago. But whatever, it will soon be a moot point anyway.

Hm. This is interesting. My oldest daughter, Melissa, recently used my iTunes account to get a new album (says thanks to Password Manager). Nothing new here, but she went for one of LaFee. Which for your info is a German rock band. Seems like her German lessons are starting to pay off.

This album (the band?) is all about love, but there's one particular song on this album that I like most. It's called “Es tut weh” (it hurts). It's not about the lyrics, but the guitar and especially the piano. Reminding me about the time that I was hammering on our piano at home. Making everyone wonder what the BEEP is was doing.

Wow! There are more goodies on this album. Let's listen and do good. For now later folks.

More Ubuntu Hacking...

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 17:51:44 -0700

HJ: Canonical did not release Ubuntu 9.04 at midnight, for unknown reasons, but waited until about 10 hours ago with the new release. I don't know why, but it might have to do with additional bug fixes since the Update Manager found another 48 updates today.

There was one more update (libmjpegtools-1.9) which failed to download from the main server, this due to the sheer number of downloads — I don't even know why Software Sources picked the UK server for me but configuring it to a Dutch download mirror made it fly again. Great.

Not that everything worked out of the box; like the performance of the integrated Intel 945 video adapter, which was simply dog slow. I found the cure for this by reading some of the outstanding Ubuntu documentation. And all I had to do was to add the following line (the third line) to my copy of /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Configured Video Device"
Option "AccelMethod" "uxa"
EndSection

And that was it. But again, it's unlikely that average Joe Ubuntu user will do all this on his notebook, and that is why it should work out of the box.

Update: We longer need to patch /proc/mtrr so I removed it from this blog entry, but the change to /etc/X11/xorg.conf is still required!

Quick Update...

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 19:46:35 -0700

HJ: I can't remember when I had my last crash, but Komodo IDE just did. Not a serious problem, if I had saved my work. Which of course I didn't, and thus I had to rewrite this blog entry again.

Yes. This Ubuntu release candidate (9.04 RC1) should have been much better, or there should have been at least one more release candidate, because this one isn't going nowhere but the trash bin. My final verdict will however be made after the official release, due to later today, and not be based on a few annoying issues. That won't be fair.

Let's just hope that I won't have to go all sort of loops and hoops to get things going again — I want my file-dialogs working! Also, remember me writing about having issues with Ubuntu's New Wave theme? Well. Here's a screenshot depicting one (text color of menubar) of the problems:

ActiveState's Komodo IDE was the product I used when I ran into this, but so do Firefox and Thunderbird. The good news is that you can easily work around this glitch by adding the following lines to your copy of userChrome.css

/* Fix for Ubuntu New Wave theme */
menubar > menu { color: rgb(227, 227, 227) !important; }
menubar > menu:hover { color: rgb(255, 255, 255) !important; }
menubar > menu[open="true"] { color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important; }

You might as well replace userChrome.css that is when you didn't already changed something in it. There is one drawback, one I can think of right now … being that you need to remove the lines when you decide to use some other theme. And this is the result:

Note: I did not have a chrome directory under XRE so I simply created one and copied the file into it. Here is my complete path to Komodo IDE 5.1

/home/hj/.komodoide/5.1/host-hj-notebook/XRE/chrome/userChrome.css

Just have it changed to make it work for you (the above example should help). BTW: Yesterdays hospital appointment went surprisingly well. Quick even. There is however little to tell, other than that I have to wait, for four weeks, for the first results to come in. For now, later folks.

New Software...

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:32:07 -0700

HJ: I decided to upgrade the Ubuntu Linux boxes today. Three of four installation went smooth, but the last one will have to wait for now — my next hospital appointment is tomorrow morning, and rather early so I have other things to do.

Scott Gilbertson of The Register wrote that it took him 10 minutes to install Jaunty Jackalope (Ubuntu 9.04) but the download of the 700MB ISO alone takes longer for most people, let alone the installation process which took over two hours on an Intel Core2 Duo running at 2.8Ghz. Not exactly the worlds slowest computer, but that's not all to it because the installation process itself asks you to download the latest and greatest from the Web. Which I did, resulting in another download of 200 MB for 1390 files — your milage may vary. BTW Scott changed his article because the 10 minutes 'claim' is no more to be found.

And do I like it? Oh yes I do. In fact the new login screen alone is worth the ~~trouble~~ err download. There's a new theme and accompanying desktop background, but I do not use it — good for me because the color of the menu items is black… and that on a dark gray background. Which makes it rediculously difficult to read.

The new notifications are great, if I wasn't using such a dark background― making it hard to catch any of them. I guess (hope) that I can change the (background) color, but I haven't checked, yet (I have other things to do first). This upgrade finally got it right because the on-board network card works. This is really great because this solves a problem for many people, who before had to download and compile a network driver first. What a relieve.

Other than that, it finally works without hacking the installation process. Even on my 64 bit installation, which I tell you was a pain in the lower back before.

Now back to the website. I changed a few more pages and hope to change more a little later today. The latest updates about my ongoing work can be found, as usual in our news feed.

For now later folks.

Update: Oh dear. I am experiencing lockups while opening file dialogs. Not good. And I don't have the time to report this myself, since I am getting ready for the hospital so please notify (John?) the Ubuntu developers for me so that I can solve this issue (hopefully) when I return tomorrow. Thank you.

Bummer... whatever...

Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:42:52 -0700

HJ: What a bummer; I missed a cool Apple ad on our website. Apparently one with a link to Leopard 10.5.7. I asked the reporter for a link and this is it. I guess that a lot of people will keep checking Apple's software updates tonight, but I don't think that it will be released before next week. I'm also more interested in Snow Leopard (10.6.0) and iPhone 3.0 but who isn't.

Whatever. Time is flying isn't it. Three weeks on and we're still not done. Working faster however is simply impossible right now. The problem is that we have been neglecting the website, and for too long already. Time to to step in and change things around here. And big time.

Raj and Michael however are busy doing other things… so it's up to me again. No problem, and I'm not complaining, but it will take me longer to deliver the product — I am pleased to see someone like Doug (the mozdev.org webmaster) who fixed a number of little annoying things for us, and quick.

A few bugs in the new search engine has been fixed and the UK (google.co.uk) has been added, but there's still a lot more work to be done for the all new and improved MultiZilla. Which will be awesomely different and introduce new features, and search will be part of the changes.

Yeah. The new MultiZilla should be a lot more interesting. Especially for OS X users like me — I am not going to use Safari 4 just because of its self proclaimed speed, and since speed isn't everything… So what is you ask? Well. Screen real estate is. The width is usually not a problem. Nope. The height is, or better the lack thereof is.

Remember me giving it a shot back in 2002? Don't laugh; because one of the problems back then was that Mozilla's CSS implementation sucked. The other, probably the most important factor was that I sucked — I was forced to give up due to lack of time and support of the Mozilla Foundation. Things however have changed.

Now. We're back on schedule. This change will be big. Even bigger than tabs. More importantly; it looks much better. in fact, nothing will compare to my previous experiments. And this time everything will be much easier, this due to the awesome support and improved Mozilla technology.

For now, later folks.

Update: I found another, slightly better example depicting of what I was doing. Oh, and my next 6 1/2 year old screen shot puts Google Chrome's “innovative UI” into a whole new perspective (thank you Google). Man… I must have been flying back then.

Starting to wonder...

Wed, 15 Apr 2009 21:57:20 -0700

HJ: It is now 8:30 and thus my hospital appointment is rapidly approaching. I actually have two appointments today; the first at 9:40 and the second one at 15:00. And another one tomorrow. The weather forcast for today appears to be great, again. Not that I will see much of it — since I haven't slept a bit last night.

So what have you been doing? Well, not too much. Except for fixing the Firefox Start Page which for you info never validated properly (both HTML and CSS). Here's the original page I am referring to. Which is available in many different languages (good work Google) but mine only supports: French, German, Spanish and Dutch (so far).

A total of 35 errors and 3 warnings on one page. Why? I mean, you can't keep telling everyone that you support web standards, if your own pages suck. Right? That's why I fixed it, and to be able to use it myself. And so can you — you can set it as your home page, or just visit the page (bookmarks).

Yeah. I'm starting to wonder why I have spent all these (countless) hours, teaching webmasters and the like, to pay attention to web standards, to find out that the Mozilla Foundation / Corporation pages won't validation properly. I'm not the least surprised by Google. But the Mozilla folks?

For now: “I'll be back” (like Arnold used to say, but I'm still waiting for him to return).

p.s. Thank you Doug for the quick fixes!

Hehe... Finally... Done...

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 10:43:04 -0700

HJ: The Google search box is back on top of our pages. It took me some time to figure out what I want, but it is done. This is it. Finally.

I'm pretty pleased to announce that the plain old 404 error page is no more. That page wasn't any helpful to anyone so I replaced it. Well, we actually redirect you to our new search page, but whatever. The new search page should show a list with links, ala Google. It might however need a little time to grow. To get smarter. Just give it a go.

Another time taker was our CSS. We had five or six different files, and that was part of us getting slow. The first thing I did was to group the files, but that wasn't enough. Nope. I also wrote my own CSS compressor (in PHP). And it does exactly what I expect it to do — reduce the time it takes to load CSS. What a brilliant move. Why didn't we do this earlier?

I don't know if there are PHP compressors, but I wrote the CSS compressor myself because the Java compressor failed on my Ubuntu 64 system, and I want to be able to put it on the server for general use hey, I am still eager to learn new stuff.

Not only is our CSS a lot smaller now, but it now also validates properly again. This is rule number two (one being properly validated HTML) so I really wonder what happened, but everything is cool again.

Michael was unable to finish blog comments, this partly due to server downtime, but also my birthday. We're hoping to complete everything soon, but school is more important — have fun in Amsterdam Michael!

For now later folks (wink)

Big improvements.

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:09:54 -0700

HJ: Good news. I have committed all HTML and CSS changes, which is very nice because we've gone from a crawling slow F(59) to a faster D(65) performance score in YSlow. This is not exactly rocket science, I know. And it doesn't make our pages the worlds fastest, but this is a nice improvement. Now I want my cookie, and a coffee to stay up even longer.

Ok. So what's next? I have prepared another test page, which produces an even better score of C(70). And that is close to becoming a fat B. Like Nicole said: “Don't blame it on the rounded corners”. And I won't, because it can be done. And clearly very easy (when you know what to do). I just needed a kick in the lower back (wink)

Well, this is all news for now. It's back to work for HJ now. Later folks.

Update: I managed to get the performance scores up. Again. The current version of our frontpage made it to C(78) and a test version of a next update is already at B(81). Oh. And in case you are wondering why I do all this work… that's because we need it — more about this is a next blog entry.

Website cleanups and other performance fun...

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 08:32:26 -0700

HJ: Two main principles for web authors are to: 1. Separate structure and skin and 2. Separate container and content. Something we here have been practicing for like… well forever already. Both in my add-ons and for our website. And that is also what we tell people during our XUL BootCamp sessions, all around the globe.

One other thing to keep in mind is to not use @includes in your style sheets, but to use <link> tags instead. Utilizing the latter makes your web pages just a tad snappier. But nothing new here. I know this since David Hyatt (and others) started to work on Firebird. That is when (2002) I started my hunt for speed — more about this in a next blog entry.

We however still use @includes on our website. But this is unnecessary, since we can easily replace these with <link> tags. Not that we did. Not until Nicole Sullivan reminded me about it with her presentation about Object Oriented CSS.

Reason for me to open Firefox and to install Joe Hewitt's Firebug and YSlow. A must have for webauthors. Ouch!!! Our frontpage (index.html) gets a mere F(59) as performance grade. That is not good. Actually that is quite bad.

The good news is that I already changed our style sheets (CSS and PHP) and now my local tree gets a performance grade of D(66). Putting us in between of mozilla.org with D(69) and mozilla.com with D(60). Which is quite good for a first attempt. Let's see if I can get us in C(N) somehow — that would be cool. Later folks (wink).

Good Friday...

Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:06:17 -0700

HJ: Good friday to me is something special. A day I never worked, and today wasn't different. It's all about faith and sticking to your principles. I am however also thankful that my doctor was working today, to help people like me in need of help. It isn't all black and white after all.

It didn't take long, but the Google search keys I e-mailed my children were: Gamma Ray, Radiology and Radiation Therapy. Just to let you know what I am going through right now. No drama, and I rather like to concentrate on having my birthday tomorrow. Yah!

Melissa, my oldest daughter, helped me by checking all links for me in Internet Explorer. Great work Melissa. This will help me to fix the missing link images. And a lot faster because I won't have to do all this work myself.

Some people keep surprising me — I got 25 euro as a birthday present today, and this from someone I don't even know. I'm speechless. Thank you Anne. I have two words for you: iTunes store.

I tell you, the things I missed most after I moved to the United Stated of America in 1999 were my children, my music and my guitar. I love music and I keep telling other parents that music is good and important for children. I'm so blessed with children playing guitar, drums and before that keyboard. They seem to enjoy music just as much as I do.

I don't remember exactly which album I bought first, but then again it was over thirty years ago already. It might have been Van Halen or more likely The Police. Or was it Slade before that? I just don't know. The strange thing is that I know the lyrics of most songs, and the first one that comes to mind right now is… let's take this blurb:

Oh I, oh, I'm still alive
Hey, I, I, oh, I'm still alive
Hey I, oh, I'm still alive
Hey…oh…

This particular song was written almost twenty years ago, by Pearl Jam. All history now. Still. I started to appreciate it more and more recently. Too bad that I lost a part of my hearing with this freak shooting incident — someone emptied a shotgun next to my face when I took a stand for a girl that was close to being shot by some drunk nutcase. The girl walked away without saying thank you… because she was drunk too. Hideous isn't it.

p.s. This article was published a little late because of Good Friday.

Five more page fixed. Plus the anchor bug...

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:52:13 -0700

HJ: I had the feeling that something wasn't right. And apparently I was right, because today the lab results of Mondays blood test came in… and thus there we go again — a new appointment is scheduled for tomorrow already. Which is great since I am not feeling very well.

Might that explain why I can't seem to concentrate properly at the moment? I mean finishing anything in time seems like an impossible task right now. It is however also an incredible amount of work for one person to complete. Wait, wasn't it Friedrich Nietzsche who said: “In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play”. And I like to play, but stay far away of (on-line) gambling. No thanks.

The good news for today is that the MySQL database setup is ready, thanks to Doug (mozdev.org webmaster). A perfect opportunity for my son Michael, to show off his new PHP and MySQL skills (I told you so son). Let the game, err, comments begin (soonish that is).

There's a new driver for Ubuntu Linux for my NVIDIA GT8600 video card, I am however reluctant to install it. Especially today. The reason for this is twofold. The first one being that there is no apparent reason for me to update — I am still pretty happy with my driver. And the last time I updated my video driver, ended in long hours of correcting a faulty installation process. I simply don't have time to play with Linux drivers, so that has to wait for now.

Back to hacking the website again — on my way to fix yesterdays bug, the anchor bug, which I did not fix until now. For now, later folks.

So how are you doing?

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 15:26:10 -0700

HJ: This blog has been a one-way event for too long, and thus we filed a bug report today; asking for MySQL support. This should change things for the both of us. So that asking something simple like: “So how are you doing?” won't be left unanswered. And it shouldn't because it matters, at least to me. So yeah. I can hardly wait for comments. What about you? You see (wink)

I keep switching from Ubuntu Linux to OS X (10.5.6) in order to see how things are looking on OS X — I recently changed the font for the HTML editions of the feeds, which I had to verify. And it did not look good (fixed earlier today).

We will soon add a few third party scripts, to make things nicer. One of the things I want to change is our front page. And what I have in mind for our features list is an image menu. That in my book is very nice.

We also like to change the screen shot section of our website, and the way you open/view screen shots from the features section on our website. The way I want to do this is like macpaw.com did (scroll down to the screen shots). And yes, they are using the same libraries (be it older and uncompressed ones).

We also replaced the feed icon with a nicer one. Ah darn. I just noticed that the links from the feed viewer don't open the requested article. Seem like someone here forgot something. And since that person is me… back to work. Later folks.