Archive for the 'Geekology' Category

I recently started blocking ads in my browser. I don’t actually mind advertising, and I resisted blocking ads for a long time. I understand that some sites rely on ad revenue to earn a living, and I’m fine with that.

Why, then, have I started blocking ads?

Simple. Companies that insist on using tricks to try to force you to look at ads you don’t want to see. Pop-up and pop-under ads, for example.

Worse, to me, is those ads that pop up if you simply mouse over text in the middle of a news story. This is the epitome of skanky behavior on the part of advertisers. It’s offensive and disruptive. This is why I block ads now. If advertisers would simply realize, “Hey, if we only put some ads here and there in the main page and refrain from making them stunningly distracting, from interfering with the actual usability of the site,” then I would be perfectly happy to turn off the ad blockers and let the ads back into my life.

Until then, I’ll block the ads.

Do you love the Web? Or at least like it a lot?

Do you enjoy teaching people how to make awesome stuff happen?

Do you have great writing skills and a knack for figuring out how stuff works by looking at the code?

Want to make the Web a better place for everybody?

If so, you’re in luck! Mozilla is now looking for a great writer to help make the documentation on the Mozilla Developer Center even better. Keeping up with the rapid pace of growth of Web technology is exciting and hectic, but extremely rewarding.

If you’d like to take a shot at making the Web better, maybe you should apply for our new Technical Writer: Developer Documentation position!

Current Firefox nightlies have support for the bleeding-edge CSS transitions specification. I’ve spent the last few days playing with this feature, and have written some examples as well as reference and how-to documentation for using them.

CSS transitions make it easy to smoothly animate changes to CSS styles, instead of changes taking effect instantly. With a number of ways to control and customize the transition effect, and support for everything from font size and style to colors and even position, you can create some impressive effects with very little work. I suggest taking a look at the demos I put together to get a good idea what you can do.

Obviously since CSS transitions are still in the Working Draft stage, it’s entirely possible the syntax could change, but this is a great way to easily add a little pizazz to your web content.

Happy the gerbil was running around in his exercise ball tonight, when she hopped from the tile to the slightly lower wood floor in the living room, and the lid popped off his ball.

Before we knew it, Happy was on the move, exploring the living room. I got down on my knees and tried to catch him, but of course he was too quick for me. So I got some food and put it out, and he ignored it, and started checking out under the couch, over by my chair, and so on.

So then I tried putting some food in my hand and waited, and while he came and sniffed around my hand a bit, he didn’t climb onto it, so I wasn’t really able to snag him.

Finally, I had a brainstorm. We just got Happy a new, larger cage the other day, and the old one (also glass) hasn’t been put away yet, so I had Sarah go get that while I kept an eye on Happy.

She brought it to me, still empty, and I set it down on its side on the floor, then placed inside it Happy’s food dish with a little food in it. Then we waited.

It only took a minute or so for Happy to notice it, sniff around a bit, then crawl inside. A quick tipping up, and Happy was recaptured and transferred back into his new cage.

Watching Happy explore the world while dodging my attempts to grab him was actually sort of fun. But in reflection, it also makes me think about how tricky it can be to document moving targets like the open Web. Stuff changes, and it changes fast — sometimes so fast you can’t keep up. Seems like every time you reach out to start writing about something, it either changes or gets made obsolete by something newer, better, or faster.

But, just like trying to catch a runaway rodent, documenting the open web is a lot of fun, in a strange, giddy sort of way.

Firefox 3.5 was released about an hour and a half ago, and downloads are going strong. Seems like a good opportunity for me to thank everyone that contributed to the documentation for Firefox 3.5. While there are far too many people to thank them all by name (so I won’t be calling anyone out by name today, to avoid leaving anyone out), I’ll call out a few specific groups of people:

• Thanks to all the developers that made Firefox 3.5 all kinds of awesome. It’s because of you that we had so much writing work to do for this release!
• Thanks also to everyone that wrote content for the Firefox 3.5 documentation. This includes not just the folks that wrote articles on the wiki, but also people that blogged about new features and about fixed bugs, because your blog posts helped us get the documentation whipped into shape.
• I’d also like to thank people that helped tag bugs with the “dev-doc-needed” keyword so that we’d know what needed to be written about, as well as folks that filed bugs against the documentation.
• Last, but not least, I’d like to thank everyone that offered feedback on the documentation, as well as the folks that were so helpful when I had questions about the technical details.

The quality of our documentation rests largely in the hands of our engineers and contributors; there’s far too much for me to get it all right by myself, so thanks to everyone for your help!

For the next little while, while the plan for the next release is still coalescing, I’ll be working mostly on back-end stuff, such as our MindTouch wiki add-ons, as well as organization clean-up work. My goal for the next few months is to make the Mozilla Developer Center easier to use, as well as easier to contribute to.

I’d like to remind everyone to start tagging relevant bugs for Firefox.next as dev-doc-needed! It’s never too early; we’ve already got some docs for Gecko 1.9.2 on MDC!

If you haven’t been following the Mozilla hacks blog, where we’re featuring 35 days worth of Firefox 3.5 improvements for web developers — including tons of awesome demos and clever tricks — you’re missing a lot of great stuff.

The stuff being shared on the hacks blog is a preview of sorts of the direction in which the Web is going. Armed with the stuff going on there, you’ll be able to do stuff that previously simply couldn’t be done without resorting to tedious and/or proprietary techniques. Now you can do wicked cool stuff using open technologies.

I have three computers on my desk (normally; my Mac mini is not hooked up right now for various reasons). One of these is an old Macintosh SE, which I use for copying double-density 3.5″ Apple II disks for some stuff I do on the side.

On that Mac SE, I have about 200 900K files that I needed to get copied over onto my iMac.

The Mac SE has no Ethernet jack, and even if it did, it cannot run a version of Mac OS that can do AppleShare over IP.  Similarly, none of the Macs I use can run versions of Mac OS X that support classic AppleShare.

So my mission was to figure out a way to get some 170 MB or so of files copied from the Mac SE to the iMac when they can’t be networked together.

Sneakernet, while technically an option, would be dreadfully tedious with so many files to move.

So after contemplating it for a while, I remembered that we have an old PowerBook 190 in the closet.

So I pulled that out, plugged it in, hit the power button… and heard the first half of the startup chime before it shut itself off.  That repeated a couple of times.

So I whipped out my Swiss Army Knife (which has a Torx T-8 bit on it, wonder of wonders!) and dismantled the PowerBook to look inside.

It was at this point that I remembered that the video/ethernet card we installed into it years ago never worked right, so I pulled it out, reassembled the computer (with a brief bit of panic as I accidentally yanked the keyboard cable loose from its connector, but managed to reconnect it), and fired it up.  It booted right into Finder, no problem.

It was at that moment that I realized that having removed the Ethernet card, I was back to “how do I get the files from the Mac SE to the iMac” again.

After thinking for a few minutes, I realized that the files on the Mac SE are on its external hard drive, and the PowerBook has a SCSI port. So I powered down the SE, put its drive onto the PowerBook, and started the PowerBook back up. Sure enough, I was able to copy the files onto the PowerBook’s hard disk.

Now I’m stuck again. How do I get the files from the PowerBook to the iMac? There’s still no Ethernet, and I have no external writable media that’s compatible with both SCSI and USB.

After contemplating the new puzzle for a bit, I had an inspiration, and with a quick check on Wikipedia, confirmed that the internal drive in the PowerBook 190 is indeed IDE (it was among the very first Macs to use IDE for built-in storage). So I opened the PowerBook back up and removed the hard drive.

Then I plugged the drive into the ATA->USB adapter unit I have for emergencies, plugged that into the iMac, and voila! The PowerBook’s drive popped up on the iMac’s desktop.  So I got my files copied over.

The PowerBook is now about half reassembled, with its drive back in place; I need to undo a couple of screws to get back in because I once again accidentally yanked the keyboard cable loose.

So, my files went from Mac SE to external SCSI to PowerBook to IDE adapter to iMac. Long, strange trip!

Panic Software is having a three-day 50% off sale on their Mac titles, including the fantastically awesome Coda web development software. If you’ve been stalling on buying a copy because of the $99 price tag, now’s the time to jump in!  I love this thing, so I figured I’d spread the word.

The Spirit rover amazes me.  As mentioned on the latest update to the Mars Exploration Rover web site, it’s been hit by yet another cleaning event, resulting in another 30% increase in power generation levels, to a whopping 652 watt-hours. That’s the highest it’s been in years!

On the down side, the rover is currently stuck in soft sand, and may also be hung up on some rocks. There’s a real possibility it may never move again because of this. That would be an unfortunate twist of irony, given the new longevity afforded by the power boost it’s received.

Still, Spirit and its twin, Opportunity, are a testament to human ingenuity, and it’s been a thrilling ride!

I got my start on computers way back in fourth grade, which would be, um, 27 years ago.  I was a hunt-and-peck typist at first, of course.

Fast forward to 1987. I’m still not a touch typist, despite having been using computers to write code, school reports, and the like for six years.  This is now my sophomore year of high school, and the year I took typing class in school.

It didn’t do me a bit of good. Several months of typing class, and I still couldn’t type without looking at the keyboard. Sure, I could type with my fingers resting on the home keys, but if I didn’t look at my fingers while I typed, I was beyond useless.  All those typing drills and speed drills only taught me how to pretend not to be looking at my fingers while in fact not taking my eyes off them except when the teacher was looking.

I continued to be largely a hunt-and-peck typist — a fast hunt-and-peck-typist, but hunt-and-peck nontheless — for the next few years.

Then, one day, I guess it was my second year of college or so, I was sitting at my keyboard in my room, pounding out some code, when suddenly it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was sitting there typing — fast — and not looking at my fingers.

I don’t know when the transition from hunt-and-pick to touch-typing happened.  It clearly happened sometime in late high school or early in college, but for the life of me, I couldn’t narrow it down more than that. All I know is that after something like 10 years of typing, I was finally touch typing.  Might have been 8 years, might have been 12.  I have no clue beyond that.

My style isn’t exactly what the teacher drilled into us.  For example, I never use the right shift key, even though we were supposed to use it when shifting keys on the left side of the keyboard.  On the other hand (no pun intended), I always use my right thumb to hit the space bar, even though we were taught to alternate.

Still, as someone that spends upwards of 12 hours a day at a keyboard, I’m glad this skill finally managed to wind its way into my nervous system and take hold.  Being able to see what you’re writing pour out onto the screen without having to look up from your fingers makes it a lot easier!