May 2006 Entries

Mozilla Foundation has said it is committed to rewarding the community that helps develop its software. Mozilla's suite, which includes the Firefox Web browser, is partly developed by unpaid programmers, often working in their spare time. Mozilla on Wednesday said it could not afford to pay all of its voluntary contributors, but instead may contribute by providing hardware to some developers. "Sometimes [volunteers] struggle on bad machines, or stay up all hours looking for someone with a Linux machine to test a program. Maybe we can provide machines," said Mitchell Baker, Mozilla Corporation chief executive and a member of the Mozilla Foundation board of directors, in an interview with ZDNet UK.
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Despite its success, however, Mozilla's fans are becoming increasingly -concerned that the organisation is moving away from its altruistic roots and becoming a fully fledged money-making operation. The company makes no secret of the fact that it turns a profit. Firefox uses Google as its preferred search engine partner. When a user carries out a search via the browser's built-in search facility, about 80 per cent of the advertising revenue from any associated hits goes back to Mozilla.
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With the release of Windows Vista Beta 2, I want to announce that we will be naming the version of IE7 in Windows Vista “Internet Explorer 7+”. While all versions of IE7 are built from the same code base, there are some important differences in IE7+, most significantly the addition of Windows Vista-only features like Protected Mode, Parental Controls, and improved Network Diagnostics. These features take advantage of big changes in Windows Vista and weren’t practical to bring downlevel. The IE7+ naming gives us an easy way to refer to this version.

- IE7+ running on Windows Vista: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0)
- IE7 running on Windows XP: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1)

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Some of you might have noticed that on some of the checkins that are made recently the word coverity has been mentioned.

Coverity is a bug finding system that is capable of detecting defects and security vulnerabilities in the source code. Coverity detects at compile time bugs that will crash the system at runtime. Examples include memory leaks, use after frees, and illegal pointer accesses. Coverity also pinpoints security vulnerabilities in your source code that hackers can exploit. This eliminates serious problems such as denial of service, data/memory corruption and escalation of privileges in the earliest stage of development. Example vulnerabilities detected include buffer overruns, integer overflows, format string errors and SQL injections attacks and many more.

In collaboration with Stanford University, Coverity is scanning the Mozilla source code. This is great news for the Mozilla project. We're getting a free audit of the source code. This will improve the quality of the code and hopefully fix some of the bugs that still exists in the Mozilla source code.

The status of the Coverity scan as of today is:
- 232 total bugs
- 116 open bugs
- 99 fixed bugs

Så blev det igen tid til Banff Mountain Film Festival 2006. Igen i år blev det afholdt på Base Camp på holmen. Det er nu anden gang vi, Jacob og Thomas og undertegnede, er med til Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Festivalen starter altid med et par foredrag, hvorefter de udvalgte film vises. I år syntes jeg klart at det var foredragene der var det bedste. Især Søren Gudman's var fascinerende. Du kan læse meget mere om Søren Gudman's expedition på 7zummits.dk.

Da Søren Gudmann den 14. december 2005 stod på toppen af Mount Vinson på Antarktis og skuede ud over sneklædte bjerglandskaber i knap 5000 meters højde, havde han bedrevet, hvad ingen hidtil havde troet var muligt. Ikke blot havde han besteget den højeste bjergtinde på hvert af de syv kontinenter - en bedrift, der i sig selv er ganske usædvanlig - han havde endda gjort det på rekordtid og således forbedret en af bjergbestigningens allerstørste legender Rob Halls 15 år gamle rekord med hele 21 dage. Gudmann gennemførte projektet på blot 193 dage og blev den første dansker, der havde besteget alle syv tinder.

I filmkategorien var det den første film, Parallelojams, jeg syntes der var den bedste.
En underholdende og inspirerende film om en flok klippe-narkomaner, der tager alt i brug - fingre, hænder, albuer, fødder og knæer - for at bestige en række frygtindgydende klipper, der rager durk op i himlen i det legendariske naturområde Indian Creek i Utah. En hyldest til den fri klatring i sin rene form med en god blanding af humor og nyttige tips.