Archive for May, 2008

The Deki Transition

We now have a very rough MDC up and running on DekiWiki.  The majority of the rough edges are my fault.  I made a PDF of the guide MindTouch wrote for how to set things up on our server and sent that to IT… and failed to check to see if it changed (which it did).  So our current setup isn’t quite right.

I’ve filed a ticket with IT to upgrade things and fix the stuff they didn’t know needed to be done, so hopefully they’ll find time for that today.

There’s also one relatively minor skin issue that’s causing some interesting problems, but that ought not to take long to fix, so hopefully we’ll get that today or tomorrow.

Then finally the testing can get underway.  There are probably going to be a few other things that will need twiddling, but until these other issues are resolved, they’ll be hard to spot.

Places

In more directly documentation related news, I’ve been finally actually moving stuff around for the Places documentation.  Among other things, this involves renaming a number of pages, and cleaning them up a bit.  We have reference document pages for each of the Places interfaces, so the Places API pages that Dietrich created are being phased into being how-to articles, since they include lots of great samples.

Things will continue to be a little dusty in the Places docs for at least a few more days.

Other Stuff

I’ll be out for a couple-three hours this afternoon.  My parents are coming to visit, arriving Friday night or Saturday morning, and my dad always appreciates it when we have a project for him.  So we’re going to go out and buy mattresses so that while Dad’s here, he can help us put together Sophie’s new big-girl bed.  She’s been sleeping in a toddler bed for about a year and a half now, and she’s ready to move into a full size bed.

I’m also going to take Friday off, so I can help my wife finish getting the house whipped into shape.

I’m tentatively planning not to take off any time while my parents are in town — they’re really here to see their granddaughter, and I’d just get in the way.  But I may work unusual hours for the first few days next week.

There are a lot of reasons to like Firefox 3, and if you watch Planet at all, you’ve seen a lot of folks extolling its virtues.  Deb, in particular, has done a great job sharing the joys of the awesomebar and the new security information user interface, among others.

And, yes, those are all very sweet features, and great reasons to like Firefox 3.

But my enthusiasm actually stems from a very different place:

I’m a Mac snob.  Seriously.

I’m one of those Mac elitists that Windows users get very annoyed by.  From mercilessly mocking their flawed and derivative user interface to taunting them every time they have computer problems to harrassing them over their never-ending battles with malware, I tend to get on their nerves pretty fast.

Now that I’ve stirred up that hornet’s nest and practically guaranteed some cranky comments, I’ll get to the point I was trying to make.

As a Mac snob, I get very frustrated when software doesn’t live up to my snobbish standards.  Firefox used to be a real problem for me in this regard.  It was like running Windows software on my Mac.  It looked wrong, felt wrong, and in some cases acted wrong.   When I interviewed for my job at Mozilla, the only uncomfortable moment I had was right after I ranted a bit on this point.

Tip: Complaining about how ugly your prospective employer’s product is is not necessarily a great conversation starter during a job interview.

Fortunately for me, it wasn’t a secret that Firefox was lacking a bit in the sex appeal department on the Mac.

With Firefox 3, that’s all changed.  Firefox 3 looks and feels, at long last, like a real, honest-to-goodness Macintosh application.  From the native controls in forms and windows to the sleek new skin that blends in seamlessly with the other applications on your Mac, Firefox 3 doesn’t stand out like a sore thumb the way Firefox 2 did.

Whether you like the specifics of how it looks or not (there are folks that don’t like the black-on-grey icons, or the grey background, for example), you can’t argue that it doesn’t look and feel like a real Mac application.

And for me, that’s yet another reason to love Firefox 3.

We got the bugfixed skin installed today, and we’ve received the converted database, so as soon as IT has a chance to install that onto the server, we’ll have MDC on Deki up and running so that we can begin testing it properly.  I’m quite excited about it!

We’re presently running almost exactly a week behind our originally hoped for schedule, so assuming we don’t unexpectedly make up for lost time, that puts the roll-out of the new MDC somewhere in the neighborhood of June 10th.

I’ll be headed to Toronto in a little under a month to have meetings (in person!) with my fellow evangelizers.  Should be good fun and hopefully more than a little productive!

Apparently, the amount by which MDC’s documentation has grown since we started heavy duty work on the Firefox 3 documentation is substantial enough that it is overwhelming the utility MindTouch wrote to convert a MediaWiki database into DekiWiki format.

So there’s some debugging and testing work going on at MindTouch to figure out exactly what’s going on there, and to fix that up.

This will probably result in a slip of our planned June 3 launch of the new Mozilla Developer Center wiki, unfortunately, but we do want to get it right the first time!

Once they figure out the problem and get the conversion done, we’ll have a test site up and running in Deki with our new skin in place, and all our MDC content as of about a week ago.  This will be used for load testing, performance tweaks, and other pre-launch work.  Once it’s up and running, we’ll likely be asking folks to pound on it to see if we have any problems!  I’ll blog again soon!