bart's blog

Thumbnailing Google

The Google Preview extension for Firefox shows off a whole new dimension of what extensions can do. This one inserts thumbnail images in front of each search result for Google. For stock quote, it inserts a stock chart. Very interesting. Click here to go to the author's site.

groupblog envy

Blake reminded me of the Google company blog yesterday. Looks nicer than Feedhouse or planet.mozilla.org.

So we could set up a proper groupblog (using Scoop, for example), but it sure is convenient to have an aggregator instead. I'm wondering if we can make feedhouse or planet look more pleasant by redoing the style sheet and creating more of a culture of adding in pictures and syndicating entire posts instead of just small excerpts.

mt-rss rebuild trouble

I have this simple site that's built in movable type where the body includes Yahoo News RSS feeds. The content is included on the page using a MT plugin called mt-rss.

Of course I want the RSS feed content to be updated every hour. So I installed a little plugin called mt-rebuild and then set up a crontab like so:

2,32 * * * * /home/bartd/decrem.com/mt/mt-rebuild.pl -mode="all"
-blog_id=9

The weird thing is that the darned thing doesn't work: the RSS feed content on my page doesn't get updated automatically. It DOES however get updated every time someone posts a comment to the blog post on the page. Weird.

First I thought the problem was related to the location of the mt-rss cache but AFAIK that is not the problem.

Anyone have ideas on what's going on?

rolling rolling rolling

The first two weeks of Blake's community marketing projects have been terrific successes. In the first week, we asked Firefox users to start rating and commenting about our software on Download.com, and we are now one of the most highly ranked and highly commented apps on that site. Last week, we started a press monitoring team. Our volunteer team of 150 is already up and running, spotting stories that are noteworthy and providing positive, constructive comments where doing so makes sense. Reporters are responding very positively.

Now it's on to project 3: we are soliciting donations of print or web ad space. Read all about it in Blake's post and help us get 50 donations of ad space this week!

Mozilla needs a word artist

The preparations for Firefox and Thunderbird 1.0 are coming along nicely, both on the coding side and the marketing piece. The visual design team continues to do awesome work, the community marketing initiatives are off to a great start, and we now have both a marketing and a PR team hard at work.

What's missing now is a volunteer (or a team of volunteers) who can do with words what the visual design team does with images: a word artist who can take our key marketing messages and turn them into snazzy tag lines. Ideally, this person would also review our most important marketing copy (web site home page, product intro text etc).

If you're the right person (hint: most likely you're a professional copy-writer who works at an ad agency, for instance), or if your company would be interested in taking this project on on a pro bono basis, please contact me at bart at mozilla dot org.

For the record

On Thursday, Blake announced our second community marketing initiative: a press reponse team.

I've created a simple web page with some Mozilla-related news feeds and other basic project resources.

Join this project!

Livemarks

In the most recent nightly builds of Firefox, if you go to a web site that has an RSS feed, then in the lower right bottom of the screen there's a little box where you can click to create a special type of bookmark folder that is a "Live Bookmark" type that includes the RSS feed for that site. There are still some bugs in the feature and improvements to be made, but this is already one of my favorite features in Firefox.

Thanks for the anniversary present!

Happy birthday

The Mozilla Foundation is 1 year old today.

In putting together the story that's up on our homepage, I'd taken out a line about the total downloads this month because I didn't believe the number (5.5 million downloads in 30 days). Rafael tonight showed me the logs - he's right: we have been AVERAGING about 200,000 downloads a day for the past 30 days. Amazing.

mozilla.org - home of mozilla, firefox, thunderbird, and camino

13 days / 4 days

Still no fix for Download.Ject. Darnit, I'll have to keep using Firefox until that gets fixed.

Ah, and it turns out that the shell: vulnerability also affects Microsoft - they just didn't bother to acknowledge that, much less fix it. Microsoft doesn't think this is news. We sure took a lot of flack for announcing AND fixing it. I'm sure all the reporters who wrote about Mozilla "security nightmares" will now grill Microsoft on why they didn't disclose and fix.

InfoWorld: Microsoft products also vulnerable to Mozilla flaw: July 12, 2004: By : SECURITY

Mozilla, Microsoft

Here's the difference: Mozilla fixes security bugs when they happen; Microsoft fixes security bugs the second Tuesday of the month (except for official holidays, company retreats, or full moon days).

Techweb > News > Internet Explorer fixes > No Date Set For IE Patches > July 9, 2004

13 days without a fix.

12 days already... Time flies

... when you're chillin' in a mountain cabin in Montana.

On June 28, following the Download.Ject vulnerability in Internet Explorer, Microsoft recommended that users increase their IE security level from the default setting of Medium to High. This of course was in response to exploits where hackers began sending banking site passwords and account information to hacker sites in Russia.

If you're still using IE and followed that recommendation, you've probably noticed that many web sites stopped working correctly. The security adjustments you made on your system disabled support for ActiveX and Javascript, which are used on a huge number of web sites. IIRC, Javascript, for instance, is used on 30% of web sites. While ActiveX is a proprietary Microsoft technology that only runs on Windows and was used in the exploit, Javascript is a web standard that has proven itself to be one of the more secure web technologies. Flaws in the design of Microsoft's security control system don't allow these two technologies to be controlled independently, so now IE users who are operating in a secure setting no longer have access to web pages with Javascript.

So you have a couple of choices:
- Experience the web, Microsoft-style. People complain about web sites not rendering properly in Mozilla browsers. We do OK on about 98% of the web pages out there, last I heard. IE users are now experiencing trouble with a vastly bigger set of web sites;
- Go hide out in a mountain cabin until Microsoft releases a fix for Download.Ject. It's been 12 days already. Let's count the days.
- Switch to Firefox today. Get yours at http://www.getfirefox.com/.

Saw a story today on Yahoo News saying Mozilla's "security nightmare has begun" and comparing our recent security vulnerability to the IE troubles. Let's see....
- Mozilla's shell: protocol security vulnerability. Harm done: no exploits to date. Time to fix: 24 hrs, before the vulnerability was broadly disseminated
- IE's Download.Ject problem. Harm done: some guys in Russia may be planning an extended vacation in the Caribean with your bank savings. Time to fix: 12 days and counting, unless you consider breaking any web site that has Javascript of ActiveX support a fix.

While our recent security vulnerability does confirm that all browsers are vulnerable to security breaches, painting the Download.Ject exploit and the shell: vulnerability with the same brush would be like writing a headline that screams "TERRORIST NIGHTMARE BEGINS FOR FRANCE" if, on September 12, 2001, a sleeping security guard was found sleeping on the job at the Eiffel Tower.

Setting up a new RSS feed

I decided to set up an RSS feed for just my Mozilla-related posts. That was easier than I thought - took about 5 minutes.

If you'd like to subscribe to just my Mozilla posts here's the URI: http://www.decrem.com/bart/index-mozilla.rdf

Synching two Macs, rediscovering Google Answers

A few months ago, when I first got my Powerbook, I was looking for a synchronization solution so I could easily keep my files synch'ed between my iMac and my Powerbook.

Jurgen suggested an open source rsync frontend called Unison that can run on OS X (command line). I ran Unison for a few months but got tired of the command line interface and the annoying warnings each time a file needs to be synchronized (I kind of expect a sync program to be smart about how to deal with new versions, but Unison at least as I configured it, insists on making me make all the decisions, which gets old really fast). Plus I often want to synchronize just a specific folder, so I was looking for something more flexible and more user friendly.

After poking around on Versiontracker for a while, I decided there are better ways to spend my time, so I put up a question on Google Answers and put up $8.

I came home tonight and checked Google Answers. Sure enough, a kind soul has put up an answer that's amazingly helpful, polite, and well written. $8 well earned/spent.

I'm once again amazed at how well Google Answers works. It's one of the more obscure Google services, but I highly recommend it for when you can't find an answer to a vexing question and are willing to spend a few dollars (you decided how much a question is worth; Google gets a flat 50c cut per question).

http://answers.google.com.

Oh, and to find out how to sync two Macs, go to http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=370899. The best part of Google Answers is that all answers because part of a public database.

When it rains...

When it rains it poors. This last set of nasty viruses to hit IE users seems to have been the final straw for a number of technology writers, so we're seeing a flood of stories encouraging people to dump IE and move over to Firefox or other alternative browsers. My favorite so far is today's piece in Salon.

These stories are piling on top of the continuing coverage of Firefox 0.9(.1) and Thunderbird 0.7(.1), and today's announcements of additions to the plugin APIs.

The result: yesterday alone we got 200,000 downloads on Mozilla.org, about double the already high normal. To put that number in perspective: I'm told that the highest ever number in the Netscape glory days was 300,000 in one day, for one of the 4.x releases. Quite remarkable.

In short, it looks like we're maintaining the growth pattern for the Firefox user base (it doubles every couple of months).

It's going to be a long hot summer, but it's starting to feel like the tide is finally turning!