June 2006 Entries

Sherman Dickman writes:
Since the product management role is a relatively new one at Mozilla, I thought it would be useful to outline some of the most important functions that a PM should perform, particularly within the context of product planning. Many of these will be conducted in parallel with the Gecko 1.9 engineering planning efforts currently underway. The end PM deliverable for Firefox 3 will be a MRD that can be referenced by all, but the real value for the Mozilla community will be derived from the MRD development process itself.

Some of activities that are listed are:
- Identifying market and technology trends
- Product vision and strategy
- Key feature requirements
- Why should anyone use our product over another product? Do the benefits outweigh the tradeoffs that a user must endure when switching? If yes, why don't more people use our product?
- Which of our technology assets are clearly superior to the competition? How do we keep them from being easily copied or duplicated?

Read the posting in the mozilla.dev.apps.firefox (using news.mozilla.org).

Mit gamle Canon IXUS 300 har tjent mig godt og trofast i snart mange år nu. Da jeg fik det, var det et af de første små og lækre IXUS kameraer.

Nu da mit gode gamle IXUS 300, som er hele 2.1 megapixel, er blevet overhalet af selv de fleste mobil telefoner med kameraer, fx Sony Ericsson K800i som har et 3.2 megapixel med flash, tænkte jeg at det var på høje tid at få det udskiftet. Jeg havde først set på et Canon IXUS 750 som var det nyeste IXUS, da jeg begyndte at kigge markedet igennem. I en nyhedsgruppe læste jeg dog at et IXUS 800 skulle være på vej. Så jeg ventede lige lidt.

Og nu har jeg så fået mit nye kamera. Det blev et Canon IXUS 800 IS. Det er 6 megapixel med 4x optisk zoom og Image Stabilizer. Det er en billedstabilisator, der modvirker kamerarystelser. Dette skulle især være tydeligt ved langsomme lukkertider, fuld zoom og i svagt lys. Og prisen, ja med edbpriser.dk finder man altid den laveste pris.

Secure Digital flash kort
Da kameraet kun bliver leveret med et 16MB Secure Digital flash kort, er det jo kun et spørsmål om tid før man får købt et nyt. Igen skulle markedet jo lige undersøges. Det er faktisk forskel på flash kort. Det er primært læse og skrive hastigheden, man skal være opmærksom på. Jeg fik snævret valget ned til to SD kort, nemlig SanDisk Extreme III og Transcend 150X Secure Digital Card. De to kort ligger meget tæt på hinanden mht hastighed, nemlig omkring 22 MB/sec. Ser man på prisen er valget klart. Med Transcend kortet får man 2 GB for hvad 1 GB hos SanDisk koster. Så valget faldt på Transcend kortet.

Ekstra batteri
Da vi godt kan lide at rejse og mange gange ikke lige er i nærheden af en stikkontakt blive man nødt til at have et ekstra batteri. Det skulle dog vise sig at det ikke var så let at få fat i. Det fleste online butikker sagde at det kunne leveres indenfor 2 dage. Men de lyver altså. Når man så har afsendt bestillingen og får odrebekræftigelsen står der pludselig at de ikke kan levere. En enkelt af butikkerne udskød leveringen med 14 dage! Jeg annulerede blot orderen og prøvede at finde et andet sted. Fandt batteriet samt de andre småting hos Getmore. Leveringen af batteriet blev igen udskudt, men heldigvis kun 2 dage og her 3 dage efter bestillingen har jeg fået min pakke. Getmore fungerede fint og jeg fik også et Track & Trace nummer, således jeg kunne følge min pakke.

Min gamle kortlæser bliver også udskiftet, da den ikke kan læse SD kort. Faktisk kan den kun læse de goe gammeldaws Compact Flash kort. Og valget faldt på en Belkin Hi-Speed USB 2.0 3-port hub & 15-in-1 Media Reader/Writer. Den burde læse alle gængse og "ugængse" medier.

A long time ago I reported that the Firefox team at Google was working on server side stored state. And now we have the proof:

Google Browser Sync for Firefox is an extension that continuously synchronizes your browser settings – including bookmarks, history, persistent cookies, and saved passwords – across your computers. It also allows you to restore open tabs and windows across different machines and browser sessions. Google Browser Sync is completely automated. The settings you select at startup are automatically synchronized across each of the computers on which you install Browser Sync. You won't even need to log in every time you start the browser. You can change which browser components are being synced – or even stop the syncing process entirely – using the settings panel in the upper-right corner of the page. The settings panel also gives you access to your PIN.
Read more and install

One of the chief selling points (if a free browser can have a selling point) of Mozilla Corporation's Firefox browser has been its reputation of being more secure than Internet Explorer. Preaching to a choir of open-sourcers at the Red Hat Summit, the company said it expects to maintain that advantage. Firefox has won the hearts of between 10-20 percent of the web browser market, stealing away a large chunk of Microsoft's IE monopoly. According to Secunia, those converts are well deserved. The security firm reports that while IE 6 still has 21 unpatched vulnerabilities, Firefox only has three.
Read more

Mozilla Confident of Security Lead over Microsoft
Mozilla Corporation is confident that its Firefox browser will maintain its security lead over Microsoft's forthcoming Internet Explorer 7. "In the long run, [Firefox] will always be more secure [than Internet Explorer] because we have transparency and we have external contributors," Christopher Blizzard, a board member for the Mozilla Corporation, said during a session at the Red Hat Summit in Nashville.
Read more and more

Here's a short summary of the software I use on my Windows PC. I try to use as most free software as I can. Leave me a comment if you think you have a better alternative than the ones listed below.

Internet
I don't think I have to say that I use Mozilla Firefox as my browser and Mozilla Thunderbird as my email client. Since I like living on the edge I use nightly builds of both.

Pictures
My picture viewer is currently FastStone Image Viewer which is quite fast and good at getting a quick overview of my pictures. I use FastStone rotating my pictures and giving them comments. I only comment my vacation photos. I've also started using Picasa as an experiment. Normally I never touches my pictures. Don't crop them and don't even remove those red eyes. Picasa provides and easy and fast way to do this modifications and at the same time has a nice way to preserve the original image and only saving the "diff" between the original and modified picture. But since FastStone saves the comments in the EXIF comment block of the picture and Picasa uses the IPTC standard I cant see my FastStone comments in Picasa and vica versa.

For editing pictures I use both GIMP and Paint.Net. I'm very close to giving up on GIMP since the program is a joke when it comes to GUI. Both GIMP and Paint.Net are freeware.

Office
As Office program I use OpenOffice.org. It reads all of the Microsoft Office documents I throw at it, but the GUI isn't perfect. Personal I think the Microsoft Office GUI is much better than OpenOffice.org. It's not perfect but much better. OpenOffice.org is open source and free.

Protection
For defending my system I use AVG Free as anti virus and Spybot - Search & Destroy for scanning for spyware. AVG Free is fast and works perfectly. Spybot is updated frequently and it updates automatically when I start it. Both programs are freeware.

Validaty is a Mozilla extension for Firefox, Flock and Netscape 8 that provides you with One Click Validation functionality. Validate a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service with a click of a button. The validation is done without opening a new page or tab. You click click the Validaty icon in your toolbar and the page is validated for you and the icons shows the status of the validation. The W3C Markup Validation Service is a free service that checks web documents in formats like HTML and XHTML for conformance to W3C Recommendations and other standards.

When you click the Validaty button

on your toolbar the Validaty button turns into either
or
depending on if the current page validates. No need to open a new tab or anything. If the page doesn't validate you're giving the option to see the validation report.

The default validator used is w3 but you can change this using the options.

You access the Validaty icon by adding the Validaty button to your toolbar. You do this by right-clicking on your toolbar and drag the Validaty icon to the toolbar.

So go ahead and install Validaty!