December 2003 Entries

Just wanted to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays

Perhaps you could even make a donation to the Mozilla Foundation.

Jeg ønsker jer allesammen en glædelig jul og et godt nytår. Nu er det tid til afslapning, gaver og god mad.

Soon I'm gonna go to Mexico and Guatemala, so if there's any of you out there with great Mexico tips on what to see and what not to see let me know. Perhaps there's even some Mexican Mozilla people out there....:)

Launchy version 1.6.0 has been released.

What's new:
- Now Launchy also works on links in Mozilla Mail and Mozilla Thunderbird

Launchy is an Mozilla extension and will enable you to open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, Netscape, Outlook, BSPlayer, Windows Media Player and others. Launchy will auto detect all applications.

Launchy version 1.5.0 has been released.

Launchy is an Mozilla extension and will enable you to open links and mailto's with external applications like Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla, Mozilla Firebird, Netscape, Outlook, BSPlayer, Windows Media Player and others. Launchy will auto detect all applications.

Wanna open a link with Winamp? Just right click and say "Open link with Winamp". Wanna send en email to the selected mailto link using Outlook? Just right click and say "Send email using Outlook". I think you get the picture.

It's great for testing and also for using external mail and media applications. Launchy is a Windows only extension!

This table indicates which of the POSIX.1 functions in MacOS X, Linux, Microsoft Visual C++, and NSPR 4.3.
Read the article

MT::Plugins::Acronym 0.6 has been released. Acronym is a plugin for Movable Type that adds acronym tags to known acronyms.

Read more and Download at:
http://gemal.dk/mt/

Fixed in version 0.6:
- Fixed loading of database (acronym.db) under mod_perl by using MT::ConfigMgr
- Easier regexp management in acronym detection
- More acronyms added to acronym.db. Total is now 162

One of the problems that many Mozilla users experince it that content on the internet are served with the wrong content type. The results in fx WMV files not launched in Windows Media Player but instead shown as text in the browser window. This is due to the server sending the wrong content type to the browser so it thinks and treats, correctly, the content as plain text.

It's not a Mozilla problem but a server side problem.

But in Mozilla Firebird version 0.8 this will change. Mozilla Firebird will get a lot smarter about situations like this. Mozilla Firebird is gonna get autodection of binary content.

You can see all of the coding details in bug 220807. But basiclly what is being done is that Mozilla downloads a small part of the file and then tries to determine if the content is binary. If it is then Mozilla tries to find an helper application based on the extension of the file, to launch.

Read more about the 0.8 branch

On the right track
Mozilla was probably the best browser of the year.

Polish Campaign Encourages Giving Mozilla CDs for Christmas
From Browser to Platform: Mozilla Rises

- Macromedia Flash Player version 7.0.19.0
Check what version of Flash you have

- Total Commander version 6.01
- Winamp version 5
- SecureCRT version 4.1

IE Overhaul Part of Windows XP SP2
Microsoft's soon-to-be-released service pack for Windows XP will come with a major security-centric overhaul to the company's flagship Internet Explorer browser, including a new add-on management and crash detection tool and several modifications to the browser's default security settings.

Behlendorf: Open source at a "tipping point"
Open source developers are no longer generalized as individuals who "stay up late at night, drinking Coke and hacking. We're pretty much everywhere now, but we still can be pretty crazy, though," Behlendorf said. "Open source reinforces open standards and open systems," he said. "That's why it remains an unstoppable force, and why enterprise has embraced it for mainstream systems work. I think we're going to continue to see our software go out and make a difference in the real world."

University of California Backs Wisdom of Open Source
Open-source can be faster, better and cheaper than closed corporate software development, say researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) and the National Science Foundation.

SYS-CON Radio Interviews Sun's CTO John Fowler
Kevin Bedell recently had the opportunity to talk with Sun Microsystems' John Fowler about open standards, Linux and Java, and Sun's contributions to the open source community.

In January 2001, Microsoft reached a settlement agreement resolving a legal dispute with Sun Microsystems concerning the use of the Microsoft Virtual Machine in many of Microsoft's products. As a result, the following products are being phased out and will no longer be available through MSDN Subscriber Downloads or other channels at Microsoft.
Read the posting

- Transitioning from the MSJVM: Info for Developers
- MS JVM Transition FAQ

WinFS Overview - Significant New Storage Innovation for Longhorn
Quentin Clark provides an overview of WinFS, including what benefits it will produce, what it is, and how it's put together. This episode introduces you to WinFS as a basis for more detailed presentations.

Changes to Functionality in Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 2
This document focuses on the changes in Windows XP Service Pack 2 and its implications for developers. Examples and details are provided for several of the technologies that are experiencing the biggest changes. Future versions of this document will cover all new and changed technologies.

At work, TDC, we use a home grown CMS system to manage all the pages at tdc.dk and tdconline.dk. The system has grown to become quite complected. Most of the people using the CMS are using Internet Explorer since it's the browser thats being delivered and supported by the internal IT department.

So I decide to change that. Convincing people to use Mozilla Firebird instead of Internet Explorer isn't easy since people are so used to Internet Explorer and the way it works. Most of the developers are using Mozilla Firebird tough.

Benjamin Smedberg writes:
I have written up a proposal to separate the interfaces of the chrome registry into smaller pieces, some of which are defined/used by gecko and some of which are not. It also contains a system to pass uninstallation information back and forth between the chrome registry and xpinstall. Please take a look at http://bdsmedberg.no-ip.org/chrome/

- Interview with Mozilla Foundation employee Chris Hofmann
- Microsoft wins HTML application patent
- Mozilla ActiveX Control
- Mozilla 1.6 Beta Released
- Torment and Coding

Mozilla Firebird is a browser project built on some theories about UI design which its developers hold. This document is a catalog of some of those, presented in a way that talks about how our target audience interact with software.
Read the article

Jungshik writes:
This is to announce that escape()/unescape() was changed recently to make them compliant to ECMA 262 (ECMAscript edition 3). It's fixed in bug 44272. As a result, escape() and unescape() MUST NOT be used for URI manipulation any more. For URI tweaking, you have to use encodeURI(), encodeURIComponent(), decodeURIComponent(), and decodeURI(), instead. In bug 225695, I've been working on a tree-wide sweep to replace escape()/unescape() for the URI manipulation with en/decodeURI(Component). I'm making this announcement to make sure that no one checks in new patches that use escape()/unescape() the old-fashioned way (non-standard way). For details, refer to two bugs mentioned above and the following documents ECMA 262 and MSDN