February 2008 Entries

A truly amazing weekend. I attended Fosdem 2008. I basically spend all the time at the Mozilla room meeting with a lot of interesting people.

Some of the most interesting talks were the talks about:

Mozilla Prism
Mozilla Prism is an application that lets users split web applications out of their browser and run them directly on their desktop. Prism will either be built directly into Firefox 3 or available as an extension. This is a really exiting product from Mozilla Labs.

Mozilla Mobile
Firefox will be available on the mobile phone. This time it's for real. A dedicated team is now focused on developing a version of Firefox that will run on a mobile phone. Some features from the normal desktop version of Firefox might be stripped, but the mobile version will have both XUL, extensions and all the other important stuff. MathML might be stripped, but this has to be decided later on.

The mobile adventure is a very important. Just think about the last 10 times that you checked your mobile phone. I bet that only 1 or 2 times out of 10 it was actually to call someone and to answer a call. The other times it was properly to check email, browse, GPS or some other thing that didn't involve the traditional phone usage. Firefox Mobile might be able to do all of these tasks.

A lot of people might start talking about how to distribute Firefox Mobile and if/and how Mozilla should strike deals with handset manufactures. This is important, but I think it's more important to focus on actually making the product. So let's get a product first!

Read more about the mobile Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla Support
The support channel for Firefox consist of a knowledge base, a forum and live chat. It's an important part of the community since it both helps the users with their Firefox problems but also helps the developers to focus on specific areas where the users are experiencing problems. Eventually the support site (in some way/layout) is going to replace the built in help. That's the one you get when pressing F1.

Firefox 3 will also include (from what I was told) a utility that pops up when you cant get access to the internet. Some kind of connection wizard. This was one of the biggest problems when upgrading from Firefox 1.x to Firefox 2.

Other cool stuff
Another cool presentation was the Songbird presentation. Songbird is a desktop media player build on top of Mozilla. It has a web page API and some of the coolest icons and graphics on the web.

Both the Songbird player and the TomTom Home are both built on top of the Mozilla trunk. A year ago this would be highly risky. This has all changed and now the trunk is really stable.

All in all being at Fosdem has been a great experience and I hope that I can get even more involved in the Mozilla project.

DOM Inspector is not going to ship as a optional component in Firefox 3. Currently it's available in the installer as a optional component. This will not be the case in Firefox 3.

The reasons for this are very good:
- it forced users to select custom install just to get the DOM Inspector
- it forced users to install Firefox again just to get the DOM Inspector if they didn't choose it on the first install

Instead it will be made available as an extension on addons.mozilla.org. See bug 271812 for more information.

Personally I think it's the right decision. I just hope that it will be available very soon on addons.mozilla.org

Firefox 3 is going to include support for the new Java SE 6 runtime environment.

This is a new implementation of the Java Plug-In that features increased reliability, ability to specify large heap sizes, ability to select a specific JRE version to execute a particular applet, and support for signed applets on Windows Vista.

The New Plug-in is designed to work with:
- Internet Explorer 6 and 7 on Windows XP and Windows Vista
- Firefox 3 on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Solaris and Linux

Note: The new Plug-in does not work with Firefox 2, and no support is planned for this browser with the New Plug-in.

The new Java plugin is still in beta. You can download it at Java SE 6 Update N Early Access Program

Read more about the new Java Plug-in
Get even more information by reading the release notes

From bug 406040:
For several months a new implementation of the Java Plug-In has been under development which uses the NPAPI and NPRuntime plugin and scripting mechanisms rather than the archaic OJI. This work has been done in close cooperation with Mozilla.org and several browser-side changes were needed in order to enable a non-OJI Java Plug-In. This work was done in the Firefox 3 train, so the new plug-in currently works only on Firefox 3.

Så er der kommet en firmware opdatering til Nikon D80.

Der er foretaget følgende forbedringer i version 1.10:
- D80 er "Certified for Windows Vista", dvs. det kan bruges sammen med Windows Vista.
- Den nye USB Media Transfer Protocol (MTP) understøttesnu. Indstillingen PTP i opsætningsmenuens USB-punkt ændres til MTP/PTP. Ikonet ændres også.
- Effekten af støjreduktion ved lukkerhastighederpå 1-8 sek. med lukkertiden indstillet til "bulb", når On (Til) er valgt for Long exp. NR] (Støjreduktion ved langtidseksponering), er blevet forbedret.

Du kan downloade opdateringen her

For the first time I will be attending Fosdem. Fosdem 2008 will take place in Brussels, Belgium on 23/24 February, 2008.

FOSDEM '08 is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet.

Mostly I think I'll hang around the Mozilla Developer Room.

Perhaps I'll join the Firefox 3 Extension Developer's Workshop and get my extensions updated. I hope I can find the time. A lot of people are requesting this.

Well. See you all there!

Last week I updated my Nokia N95 to the latest firmware. I'm now running version 20.0.0.015. You can check the firmware version on your Nokia phone by entering *#0000# when you're in the main window.

You can always check what firmware version is available by going to the Nokia Device Software Update page, where you enter your product code. The code is printed on the white label beneath the battery.

Remember to check the official changelog for the 20.0.0.015 version.

This update also gave me a chance to cleanup my installed programs. I had loads of installed programs which I never used. Now I only installed the programs that I actually use.

These are:
- Mail for Exchange. I can't live without this one. It's a push mail client for Microsoft Exchange. This way I don't have to sync to get my mails and calendar entries. It's done automatically and it's always 100% up to date.
- Windows Live. I use the Messenger client for IM. I dont use the Hotmail functionality
- Nokia Maps. I installed Denmark and Sweden as maps so that I don't have to download them over GPRS. The maps are used by the built-in GPS.
- Nokia PC suite. This one is mainly installed on the PC to be available to connect the phone to the PC.
- Nokia PC Phone. It's a beta software that gives you a possibility to use your mobile phone with your web browser. Both Internet Explorer and Firefox is supported. I use it for sending SMS from within my browser.
- Sports Tracker. A GPS based activity tracker that records information such as your speed, distance and time. Perfect when you want to know exactly how many km/miles you have run.
- Location Tracker. This one is new, so I'm not sure how much I'm gonna use it. It automatically tag your location data to your pictures. Perhaps I'll use it on a boys night out. The day after I can see where I've been.

I've tried a lot of other programs but these are the ones that I ended up with. Yes perhaps it's nice to have a weather application installed, but seriously how much do you use it. For me, never.