Archive for October, 2006

So I’m home from Toronto; FSOSS was a success, and I think my presentation went well. People seemed to respond well to it, at any rate, which is all I can ask for. Supposedly it will be available online at some point, so if you didn’t get to see it in person, you should be able to before long. I’ll try to post a link over to it once it’s online.

If you did see it, I’d appreciate your feedback on it, since I get the impression I’ll be doing other presentations in the future. My wife hopes that means getting to go to interesting places where she can get a ticket and go along too.

I do my presentation on documentation in open source this afternoon, at 3:00. My slides are done, and I’m forcing myself not to mess with them anymore. I’m gradually ramping up my stage fright, right on schedule. Awesome.

I just downloaded an unofficial Intel Mac optimized build of BonEcho. I’m going to go install it and see what I think of it.

Not sure how it compares, performance-wise, but the Aqua UI features aren’t working all that great for me, so I’m back to the official build for now.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, so I’ve not been posting here much. I’ll be doing a presentation on doing open documentation projects at the Free Software and Open Source Symposium in Toronto this week, so I’ve been busy preparing for that instead of doing much writing. If you’ll be there, drop on by. I can use all the support I can get!

My presentation will use MDC as an example of how a collaborative, open documentation project can be run successfully.

Among the many things on my plate for documentation is this: I want to produce a number of articles providing code snippets and how-tos for extension authors helping solve assorted problems often run into as they develop. The thing is, I don’t actually know what people commonly need help with. Any suggestions?

I’ll also be poking toward making real headway on migrating the Mozilla hacking guide into MDC finally. Not sure when content will actually start showing up on MDC, but I’m poking through it to figure things out.

We pretty badly need another writer on staff at Mozilla. There’s a huge amount of documentation to be written, and while we have lots of awesome contributors, we could really use more full-time help. Anybody in the Mozilla community interested?

I saw this on the MacDevCenter blog and thought I should share it: FireBug Makes the World Flatter. A nice little tale of Firefox advocacy in action.

So my decision to start a push on Thunderbird documentation seems to be extra well timed, judging from the news about Eudora and Thunderbird. This is pretty exciting; I know Thunderbird will benefit from having more people thumping on the code.

I’d like to start getting some documentation work done on Thunderbird before the end of this month, so suggestions are still more than welcome!

We’ve got a new keyword set up for Bugzilla — dev-doc-needed — that can be applied to bugs that require developer documentation changes.

For example, let’s say there’s a bug “add a method foobar() to the nsIFunkyTown interface”. Adding the dev-doc-needed keyword will let the documentation team know that when that bug gets fixed, a documentation change will be required.

We writer-type folks can then watch a list of bugs with that keyword and easily know when stuff happens that we need to pay attention to.

This could be a huge help in avoiding “what, you needed that documented?” problems that come up at the last minute. So I’d like to urge everyone that uses Bugzilla to make use of this keyword so we can continue to make progress toward getting our documentation whipped into shape.

So the North Koreans tested a nuke. What do we do now? I certainly don’t like the idea of a country run by a loon like Kim Jong-Il having nuclear weapons. In my ideal world, we’d test one of our own in their country. Maybe two or three. You know, until they learn that nuclear weapons aren’t very nice at all.

Of course, in an ideal world, nobody would have them — or, more to the point, feel the need to have them.

In reality, I don’t know what to do, although something has to be done. The problem is that once a country has them, the options of ways to take care of the problem get pretty slim.

What a mess.

For over a year, there’s been this occasional scent of natural gas outside our house. At first it was only very rarely, and not very strong, but it’s gradually gotten worse. When we first noticed it, the gas company (Atmos) sent someone out who said it was a trace of unburned gas in our furnace exhaust, so we replaced the furnace and the problem seemed to go away. For a while.

When it came back, it rapidly got worse. Everyone on our street can smell it, and it’s almost always there, unless there’s a brisk wind. People have been calling the gas company to complain, some of them repeatedly.

A couple of months ago, they finally came out and found a leak in an underground pipeline, and they marked the street to indicate where the leak is. Then they said, “This one isn’t too bad. We have lots of them worse than this. We should have it taken care of in a year or so.”

Are you freaking kidding me? It’s a gas leak, you morons!

The fellow across the street (in whose yard this leak apparently is) called the fire department, which came out earlier this week, and they said that a year is totally in violation of the law, and that Atmos has 30 days to fix it or face fines.

The problem is that it is in fact true that there are lots of leaks around town, over a dozen of which are apparently worse than ours, and odds are apparently against it getting fixed within that 30 day timeframe.

That makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, knowing that a company that pumps explosive gases through my neighborhood doesn’t have enough manpower to, you know, keep the stuff in the pipes where it belongs!

As time passes the problem seems to be growing worse; the smell gets stronger and stronger, and is detectable farther and farther away from the telltale yellow “X” painted on the curb across the street from my house.

I’m less than enthusiastic about raising my daughter in a place where natural gas leaks are apparently so commonplace that nobody bothers to do anything about them.

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter took pictures of Victoria Crater — the home of the Opportunity rover, probably for the rest of its life — and the resolution is quite spectacular. You can see the rover’s tracks, and even the rover itself. And its shadow.

That’s pretty freaking cool! This stuff amazes me.