Colin Charles Agenda

Chris Blizzard, now working at Mozilla and Linux integration, gave a most interesting talk, about Mozilla, and their new mobile initiatives. We managed to speak (but not nearly enough) about the mobile strategy afterwards (i.e. I think limiting it to the n810 or tablet like devices alone, seems myopic; phones are where its at), and I hope the conversation continues. Now for some quick notes.

- mozilla.org, is where products create motion. Been around for just over 10 years now
- Mozilla targets human beings (not developers)
- Focus on protecting open standards
- “Creating Joy!” for users
- Avoid feature creep (this is the secret of add-ons) - control the product, and just say, go build an extension. It isn’t just about customising your experience, but its about keeping the core experience joyous and uncluttered.
- Fix real problems on the web (i.e. pop-up blocking)
- 500 contributors to Firefox 3, 75 Localization teams, 200 people, 11,000 patches, 165+ Million users, added +45 million users in the last 6 months, and doubled in the last year - these are impressive statistics (I for one, am impressed by their developer community)
- Who are we targeting? Read Seth Godin’s blog entry “Why downloading Firefox is like getting into college“. Also, Stephen O’Grady’s Blog “Ode to the Common Man“
- Bring the full web to mobile. FF3 is where great technology for mobile exists.
- Apple has reset the idea of what the Internet on a mobile should be, thanks to the iPhone. They’ve definitely opened up the market for mobile based browsers. Note, no reason to redesign your website for mobiles in the future…
- Fennec - mobile browser experience
- Performance numbers on the n810 - faster than MicroB and WebKit. Not even optimised for ARM (i.e. no atomic locking), but already at a headstart
- Fennec will support add-ons. Touch and keypad versions are coming soon… Keep in mind all this is just getting started
- Android includes WebKit as part of the base platform. Mozilla on Android? Not quite yet, since Google wants only Java based applications. No mention of native applications yet from Google.
- Not really considered Series 60 (it would be nice), no talk of PalmOS, there is some form of Windows Mobile version, but its not released
- Gecko is hard to embed, in comparison to WebKit. The technology needs to improve, so that the gap that WebKit has, doesn’t widen further

Technorati Tags: gecko, webkit, mozilla, chris blizzard, lugradio, lugradio live usa, nokia, handhelds, tablets, mobile web, firefox, community, fennec, android

Aza Raskin from Mozilla, spoke largely about usability and user interface design. Judging from his Wikipedia entry, he’s been doing this for a long time and is very passionate about interfaces. It was very hard to see his slides (noted problem, too much sunlight), so I just attempted to make random bits of notes from his talk. His slides, may or may not be available, but he did mention that searching for a talk titled “Don’t Make Me Click”, was the basis for his LugRadio Live USA talk. Turns out, it was a Google Tech Talk, available on Youtube - Don’t Make Me Click (~65 minutes). Now for the sparse notes…

You already use a command line interface. Typed pine before? Or slrn? Now you just type gmail.com or nytimes.com. This is an interesting analogy… the command line and the location bar.

Intuitiveness vs. ease of use? There’s a difference. The iPhone interface isn’t exactly intuitive, but with all the advertising available around, when you got one, you knew what to do, and you got ease of use.

“Don’t copy, do something else”

1. Interface design is about how your software is used.
2. Usability is architectural (pretty interfaces/devices, you will use better)
3. Well designed command lines are good for usability. “Your users don’t know what features they want” - architect well, for your user. Learn a lot from Microsoft Word print dialog (which allows you to choose which pages to print)
4. Don’t blindly copy, find another box to think in
5. Don’t design separately for users and experts. Make things intuitive for all

Technorati Tags: lugradio, lugradio live usa, aza raskin, usability, interfaces, mozilla

With moving my workload to two laptops (one for work, on OS X and one for play, on Linux), you invariably have issues with being as productive as you should be in the software that you use. I dumped Apple Mail.app after about 2 weeks of solid usage (more on that, at another time), for Mozilla Thunderbird. It isn’t free of warts, but with the excellent plug-in architecture, it surely helps. Here are some plug-ins (add-ons in Mozilla speak) I can’t live without.

GMailUI
This tool is simply amazing. Ctrl+J for Junk, Y for moving to the archive, and so much more. Its keyboard shortcuts are similar to GMail, so if you also happen to use GMail, this is a worthy tool to have. Even if you don’t, the shortcuts make so much sense, its a wonder why its not on by default.

Lightning
I certainly like having a built-in calendar in Thunderbird, and more importantly, it works with my Google Calendar. It could improve with offline support, and a bit, but for a fairly recent full review, read Lightning, Google Calendar, and calendering in Thunderbird.

Nostalgy
Need to move a message quickly? Need to copy one? Need to jump to a folder? Nostalgy provides some nifty keyboard shortcuts to change/move to/copy to folders, and it has auto-completion. Paired with GMailUI, Thunderbird becomes even more keyboard friendly.

Plaxo
Address books are a pain in the butt. On every platform (save for OS X), there are so many standards, none of which really work. Plaxo, takes the pain out of this, by synchronising with a server on the Internet. Now I can use many machines, and get Plaxo to sync my contacts. It has its limitations (3,000 contacts), but it does sync the “collected addresses” in Thunderbird (a killer feature, if I may say so).

Provider for Google Calendar
If you want to get Lightning to use Google Calendar, this add-on is required.

QuickQuote
Clicking Reply to Sender or Reply to All, now allows me to quote some text, and only reply to that quoted text. Saves me from deleting all the unnecessary parts of email. Its surprising that this isn’t the default behaviour in Thunderbird - after all, Evolution has had this for ages.

Quicktext
Templates, to improve efficiency. Need a canned email? Need to insert a file as text? This is a truly useful add-on, if you have a lot of repetitive email to write.

Remember Mismatched Domains
This is a most useful add-on, especially if you’re tired of seeing “Security Error: Domain Name Mismatch” everytime you start Thunderbird. Some mail servers have this issue (including some that I run - i.e. a machine with multiple hosts), so this helps remember the ones that I’ve “white-listed”.

Remove Duplicate Messages
Sometimes you get email in the form of a To: or a CC: and it also goes to a mailing list that you’ve filtered out. This helps remove duplicate messages, so that you only have one copy in your archives. It also helps, in the days of using POP mail (what days, I still have accounts where I POP my mail), and breaking connections - i.e. pulling down 2 copies of the same message.

Sync On Arrival
This doesn’t work with Thunderbird 2, but is a useful add-on to have (and I hope it starts working). Thunderbird has an annoying feature of not downloading/syncing IMAP mail, on folders that you haven’t clicked on. I’ve sort of worked around this by using Offline -> Download/Synchronise Now and ensuring all the folders I care about are subscribed to. I’m including this on the off-chance that the author wakes up and fixes it for Thunderbird 2 (and the upcoming 3).

While not a must-have add-on, I also have the British English Dictionary. Your mileage may vary here, as you might not be interested in said language.

These are the add-on’s that keep me productive. What add-on’s do you use?

Technorati Tags: mozilla, thunderbird, add-on, productivity, sync on arrival, remove duplicate messages, remember mismatched domains, quicktext, quickquote, provider for google calendar, google calendar, plaxo, nostalgy, lightning, gmailui

I like to spell with British English. Its probably because of my upbringing doing the O Level Examinations, at my high school.

For the last few days that Mac was annoying me, so I found out how to have British English available for all my applications. System Preferences -> International -> Input Menu. Select British. It will ask you to look for the Input Menu, I just selected the British flag and got rid of the input menu, to reduce clutter from the menu bar.

Firefox however, still decided to misbehave. It was then I realised that we had to download additional dictionaries for Firefox. That was easily done, thanks to the plugin architecture - visit Add-ons: Dictionaries. I wonder why it doesn’t use the system dictionary (I noticed that even in Linux, I had the dictionary add-on).

Now, I’m happily typing and not noticing typos of the spelling kind.

Technorati Tags: british english, language, spelling, firefox, macosx

I had this sudden urge to get my calendar maintained. Google Calendar is what I’ve been using, on-and-off, and its generally been a bit of a love/hate relationship I’ve had with it. Its good that its online, but that also makes it bad - i.e. what happens when I need to pen something down when I’m offline? It supports SMSing me reminders for events (good), it works via my mobile phone (good), there are Twitter interfaces to the calendar (good). It lacks integration from my main email client, Mozilla Thunderbird.

Why Thunderbird some might ask, and not Evolution? Its cross-platform. And if I were placing bets, I’d be betting on Thunderbird over Evolution, any day (in fact, I’m surprised Linux distributors haven’t figured this out as the easiest migration path - Firefox is shipped, but paired with Evolution). But I digress, lets focus on calendering.

There is the Mozilla Calendar Project, which creates SunBird (standalone) or Lightning (a plugin for Thunderbird). Naturally, I’ve chosen to align myself with the latter. My first snag was finding out that the add-on I downloaded, did not work on Linux x86_64. A little work on Google, showed me how to build it; a little further, and I found a contributor build of it, on the Mozilla site. So download Lightning 0.7 for Linux x86_64.

Thunderbird changes: Today Pane button on top-right, all right there is the option of the “today pane”, and bottom-left, there are two new buttons to toggle between email and calendering view

Once that was complete, Lightning offered to import my calendar entries from Evolution. I don’t know if on OS X, it will offer to import from iCal, but it seemed like a good enough feature to have - I however, did not use it, as I’d not been using Evolution before. When Thunderbird starts, you immediately notice options to change to the Calendar, or even bring out the Today Pane.

The secret sauce is however, in installing yet another Thunderbird add-on, the Provider for Google Calendar. Once that is installed, and you’ve read the notes on the GDATA Provider, and understand its limitations, you’re on your way to using Google Calendar, right in Thunderbird!

Lightning, in calendering view in Thunderbird

Its got limitations though. Google Calendar doesn’t support categories, so they don’t show. If you decide to edit/delete a recurring event, it doesn’t work (known bug), and you still need to login to the web interface. If you create a Task in Lightning, and so happen to tack it onto your calendar on Google Calendar, it just disappears (so make sure tasks are tracked in the local calendar); this is because GCal doesn’t do tasks. By default, all alarms are set to be popup’s, and not SMS messaging like I prefer. If you’re offline, it doesn’t show entries (c’mon, cache entries at the very least). This is something that I’d love, and there is work going on to make this happen.

Verdict? These add-on’s are going to stay in my Thunderbird install. There are quirks, I still have to hop on the web interface from time to time, but it looks like as long as I’m online and in Thunderbird, I’m going to be a happy camper when it comes to calendering.

Technorati Tags: mozilla, lightning, thunderbird, calendar, calendering, google calendar, thunderbird add-on

I had the opportunity to visit a school today. Not quite a school you’ll expect to roll-out a deployment of OLPCs (its a top-notch boarding school, with yearly fees that cost as much as completing a 4-year university degree), but a school in Victoria, nonetheless.

Microsoft products are entrenched in the Victorian school system. It so happens that Microsoft ISA Server 2006 is used to power mail for the students. Trying to access mail via the browser, proved to be impossible with the OLPC.

Secure Connection Failed: The certificate is not trusted because the issuer certificate is unknown

The error code received: sec_error_unknown_issuer. So I thought I’d try out giving an exception.

Getting an exception? You need to find advanced encryption settings

Exceptions are impossible to get, seeing that there’s no way to get to the advanced encryption settings location. After coming home, I decided to check up on this (which involves hopping on to the developers IRC channel). Turns out the ticket is #5534: Browser cannot connect to sites with non-standard Certificate Authorities.

I added to the ticket, mainly because the MS ISA Server 2006 actually had a valid certificate, signed by VeriSign. It works fine in Firefox, but just not on the OLPC. Apparently, there’s an FAQ about this too: How to ignore SSL warning about invalid security certificate? However, the idea of installing Opera, just doesn’t bode well with me - the browser itself, must work.

Time to get hacking…

Technorati Tags: olpc, olpc xo, microsoft isa server, ssl, sec_error_unknown_issuer, certificate, encryption, gecko

No, its not alphabet soup. Just some notes from the session at the Sun Tech Days. I’ve not looked at DTrace much (my only look into instrumentation, has been from SystemTap, which doesn’t deal with applications), but plan on doing so soon… I’ve managed to get OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2 installed in VirtualBox, so it can only start being more fun from here…

Want to learn more about DTrace and MySQL? Then come to the MySQL Conference & Expo 2008, in Santa Clara, California, because on Thursday, Ben Rockwood, from Joyent, will be presenting a session on DTrace and MySQL (read the abstract, its good). The talk covers the fact that you can get useful information currently, even without the embedded probes in current versions of MySQL. For more DTrace and MySQL tips, don’t hesitate to read Joyeur, Joyent’s weblog.

DtTace, Web 2.0, Java, AJAX, PHP and the rest (notes from the talk)
by Peter Karlsson, Solaris Technology Evangelist

DTrace now has providers for a large number of languages: JavaScript, Java, PHP, Python, Ruby. Perl is on the way.

MySQL 6.0 will have DTrace support; PostgreSQL already has this in Solaris currently. If building from source, there’s a flag that needs to be enabled. A lot of work was done thanks to a community member.

You need a Solaris kernel. Ported to OS X and FreeBSD. Supports “dynamic instrumentation”. D is the dynamic language, used to script instrumentation

Very common request? Find how much time is spent in a given function. The thread local variable (self->variable = expression;) - nowadays, you can be running two threads coming down in the same function call. DTrace - so this is great for multi-threaded debugging.

PHP doesn’t have DTrace integrated, so, get the Coolstack PHP.

DTrace probes have been added to Mozilla to help debug JavaScript applications. This is available in Firefox 3 (in beta now). There is also a generic DTrace framework, that isn’t just JavaScript only - the networking parts of Firefox, to look at how DNS lookups work, etc. all can be instrumented via DTrace.

Further reading? DTrace and PHP, demonstrated.

Technorati Tags: dtrace, php, javascript, mysql