Archive for October, 2007

We have an ongoing thread on the mozilla.dev.mdc newsgroup talking about how to make the Mozilla Developer Center web site better.  A general theme is about adding more and better documentation, but right now what I’m more interested in (in terms of this particular discussion) is actual infrastructure, design, and architecture improvements we can make.  We should be finally getting some resources to work on these sorts of improvements soon, and I need to have a list of ideas ready to present to them so they can actually work on them.

So aside from the planning phase we’re in right now, this shouldn’t impact the pace of writing and deploying new content (except that one of our goals is to increase contributions from others going forward by making contributing easier to do).

You can see a list of the ideas that have been brought up so far, or participate in the discussion in the newsgroup.

This week’s Friday 5, all about making up names for groups of things:

1. What would be a good collective name for your family, as in “A _____ of Joneses?”
   A set of Shepherds.
2. What would be a good collective name for your closest group of friends?
   Um.  Don’t know on this one.  Don’t have a group of friends that have enough in common with each other to group like that.
3. What would be a good collective name for the stuff in your desk?
   A “heap of trash.”
4. What would be a good collective name for your next-door neighbors?
   A naggle of neighbors.
5. What would be a good collective name for the people in your line of work, as in “A _____ of accountants?”
   A gaggle of geeks.

Tiny and pretty.  Works great!

We’re making great progress on the documentation for Firefox 3.  The new showModalDialog() DOM method has been documented,  as has the new nsIDOMFile API for preserving file selections for form inputs.

The “dev-doc-needed” bug list has gone from around 80 items to 34 items in the past two weeks.  That’s phenomenal!

We’re also doing very well on the items specifically on the doc plan.  We’re in great shape to have a very great doc set in time for beta, and they should be complete well in advance of release.

This week’s Friday 5 is about “lasts:”

1. What was the last thing you baked?
   A birthday cake for my wife a couple of years ago.
2. What was the last thing you tried on for size?
   A pair of shorts that are hanging in my room right now.
3. What was the last thing you purchased on credit?
   Tonight’s dinner.
4. What was the last thing you put a postage stamp on?
   A car insurance payment.
5. What was the last thing you took a photo of?
   My daughter!

This week’s Friday 5:

1. Of the people in your life, who is Most Likely to Succeed?
   My brother.
2. Of the people in your life, who has the Dreamiest Eyes?
   My wife.
3. Of the people in your life, who is the Cutest Couple?
   I don’t know any cute couples.
4. Of the people in your life, who is Most Changed?
   My daughter; she changes every day!
5. Of the people in your life, who is the Geekiest?
   Oh, yeah, that’s me.

She’s still alive and kicking.  Guess I was lucky there.  Seems to be no worse for the wear, too.  Whew!

After just putting up with some of the quirks of my previous theme on this blog for a while, I finally conceded defeat tonight and switched to a new one.  I don’t like it quite as much, but it’s more space-efficient and doesn’t have any weird problems that go along with not being updated for newer versions of WordPress.  So that’s a win on average, I guess.

Everyone’s had that time they looked for something on MDC and either totally failed to find it or found an article that was beyond unhelpful.  Let’s face it, there’s a lot of material there, and some of it isn’t as helpful as it should be.

So complain to me!  Tell me: what was the last article you looked at and wound up scratching your head and asking yourself any of these questions:

• Who wrote this crap?
• Why, oh why, did they subject me to this?
• What the hell was that trying to say?
• Was this written by an illiterate baboon?

Help me figure out which of our existing documents need attention so they can get it!  We have limited writing bandwidth still (volunteers are urgently requested!), so getting a list of the articles most in need of help would be a huge help in terms of targeting our work.

We had a bit of a scare with Happy (formerly Abby until Sophie couldn’t pronounce it) this afternoon.  I pulled her out of her cage to help introduce her to the concept of being handled regularly, and she leapt out of my hands and made a rather icky “splut” sound as she hit the floor.  She flopped over on her side and lay there, motionless.  My heart in my throat, I picked her up and she wound up on her back, legs pointed straight up in the air, her breath irregular.

I poked at her a bit, massaging her little chest, doing a sort of CPR, but there was no immediate reaction.  As I held her there in the palm of my hand, feeling terrible and certain she was going to die, she suddenly twisted around and tried to climb off my hand again.

So I set her back in her cage, and she sort of bumbled her way into her little house.  I watched her on and off over the course of the day, and she seems to have completely recovered — a few minutes ago she was running on her wheel, and now she’s eating.

Whew!