iMac vs. Productivity

 Mozilla, Personal  No Responses »
May 152007
 

So my iMac has been acting funny for a couple of weeks. Nothing way serious, except that iCal has been crashing a lot lately. A couple of days ago, the preferences for a few of my apps disappeared. I ran file and folder scans and found no serious problems.

This morning, the preferences went away again, so I looked through some log files and found that a lot of my background processes (mdimport, SystemUIServer, etc) are crashing constantly, and the Mozy backup client is spewing I/O errors into the console log.

Those are bad, bad signs. So TechTool Pro is now running an intensive scan of the hard drive.

I’m not sure which I’m hoping for: to find serious hard errors on the drive (a major productivity hit but an actual solvable problem) or no serious problems (meaning I’ve got no clue what’s wrong). Ugh.

So work will be a little slow in getting done today. I’ll see what I can do.

This week I’ll be drafting the first pass of the Firefox 3 documentation plan, and am going to begin hitting up people to contribute documents starting this week or next. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

 Posted by at 12:47 PM

Mozilla Developer Center: Moving forward

 Mozilla  No Responses »
May 112007
 

I added a History link to the top tab-bar when using the new “mdc” skin. This makes doing copy edit work much easier, since you don’t have to scroll to the bottom anymore to check the history on an article. For now, we’re keeping “Devmo” as the default skin since we plan to do a new reskinning effort to blend in with the rest of the Mozilla web site once we have some design resources (in particular, the new logos we’ve got in queue).

The “mdc” skin is nice because there’s no sidebar, so you have more room to work when reading end editing the content. You can try it out by logging into MDC and clicking the “My Preferences” link at the top of the page, then choosing “mdc” in the Skin panel.

I’ll be attending the Paris developer day on June 23rd, and will be hosting a discussion about localizing the Mozilla Developer Center. One of the biggest items on my plate is working out ways for the localization teams to work better together, and I’m hoping to meet up with some of our contributors while I’m in Paris. Hopefully we can hash out some great ideas for improving our ability to collaborate!

 Posted by at 2:03 PM

Having a gas

 Personal  No Responses »
May 112007
 

Yay! The gas company is finally out in front of our house working on fixing that gas leak we’ve had out there for a couple of years now. Hooray!

 Posted by at 10:44 AM

MDC upgrade progress continues

 Mozilla  1 Response »
May 102007
 

Turns out that our upgrade did have a few minor quirks pop up, which we’re actively working on getting fixed. The first to be fixed is that the edit toolbar was missing in the Devmo and new MDC skins. Now they’re back.

There are bugs filed for redirect pages not automatically redirecting, and for HTML in templates being shown raw instead of rendering properly. I don’t have a guess yet on when those will be fixed.

In addition, the edit section links are now back on the right side of the page, and are sized more appropriately now.

I’m still finding out about cool stuff we got for “free” with the MediaWiki upgrade, including some improved controls for blocking users (handy for coping with spammers).

MediaWiki 1.10 was released today. We won’t be installing this upgrade immediately, but should be doing it soon. We’re in the final stages of setting things up so we can do a much better job of keeping up with MediaWiki updates.

 Posted by at 4:56 PM

MDC upgrade phase one rolled out!

 Mozilla  1 Response »
May 092007
 

The Mozilla Developer Center is now running MediaWiki 1.9.3 (the current version), and has a few other improvements as well. There’s a new theme, called “mdc”, available if you would like to select it in your preferences. That theme has no sidebar, so there’s a little more space to work. It’s not used by default, however, since it’s not going to be our official theme.

Starting tomorrow, I’ll be working on more improvements to the site, including some enhancements to make the new breadcrumb system we’re going to be using soon a little more friendly to work with.

So exciting!

 Posted by at 1:41 AM

Something I thought was funny…

 Personal  No Responses »
May 072007
 

It doesn’t really require any explanation, I think, so here it is:

 Posted by at 5:02 PM

Gas leak? So what!

 Personal, Rants  2 Responses »
May 072007
 

On October 6th of last year, I blogged about the gas leak coming from under the ground across the street from our house, that the local gas company had at that time ignored for well over a year.

On Friday, a couple of their trucks were across the street. They left after a while, having spray painted some stripes here and there.

My question is: are they actually planning to fix the leak, or were they just trying to get our hopes up.

It continues to astound me how long it’s taking to fix this. The stench of leaking gas is nearly overpowering at times. It’s been getting gradually but steadily worse for the past several months. There are days when I’m a little afraid to start my car for fear of blowing something up. It’s completely ludicrous.

 Posted by at 4:56 PM

MDC upgrade will roll out May 8th

 Mozilla  No Responses »
May 022007
 

I’ve just noticed that the MDC upgrade to MediaWiki 1.9.3 has been scheduled to take place during a maintenance window on May 8th. So that’s great news! Once that’s done, I can start working on all the other cool stuff I want to do to improve our site.

 Posted by at 6:38 PM
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