inside aebrahim’s head

I just noticed that Google is munging search result URIs. For example, if you run a search on “mozilla”, the first result is http://www.mozilla.org/. However, the URI that they link to on the search results page is:

http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=1&q=http://www.mozilla.org/&usg=AFQjCNGjMwD4PF4GezESBBRN2It3HBj5Qg

I suspect that the usg parameter is probably one used to prevent bots from gaming whatever results they’re trying to garner, and possibly also to link clicked search results to a specific user or browser session. I understand why they do this, but the downside for the end user is that the copy link option in the context menu of any browser is no longer useful. One needs to actually follow the link to get the URL in a form that you can copy into another application.

From my perspective, this is a pretty major usability bug, and I hope they revert it.

The folks over at the Mozilla Digital Memory Bank kindly took the time to interview me last November. I just noticed that the interview transcript has been posted online last month.

I tried to log into my Hotmail account today with Firefox 3.0, and I got the following error:

Clearing the cookies and cache doesn’t help. When I log in via IE7, it works fine. This problem started to happen after the upgrade to Firefox 3.

After a lot of hard work by the Mozilla team and tons of volunteers, Firefox 3.0 has been released. Help set the Guinness World Records for downloads by downloading today.

Personally, my favourite new feature is the AwesomeBar. What’s yours?

I’ve been having a couple of issues recently with a Google Groups hosted list that I manage, for which no solutions seem to be available.

Issue #1 - Google Groups Atom Feed id and link attribute broken

I’ve detailed this issue more in my post to the Is Something Broken forum on the Google Groups website, but so far there’s no resolution. Basically the Atom feeds generated by Google Groups generate a id and link attribute that contains a relative link without an FQDN so that when viewed from an RSS reader, the links are broken because the RSS reader passes a URL without an FQDN to the web browser. I hope this gets fixed as it seems like a pretty major problem.

When viewed from Firefox’s Live Bookmarks it works fine, but not otherwise.

The RSS 2.0 feed generated by Google Groups does have an FQDN in the link attribute so it works properly. The “obvious” solution (other than fixing the issue, which is up to Google) is to use the RSS 2.0 feed instead of the Atom feed but that creates another problem.

UPDATE (18/06/2008): As of today, Google seems to have fixed the issue with the Atom feeds.

Issue #2 - FeedDemon 2.7 does not handle the pubDate in the RSS 2.0 feeds correctly

The pubDates in the RSS 2.0 feed seem to be generated correctly, like the following:

<pubDate>Fri, 06 Jun 2008 00:02:27 UT</pubDate>

When the RSS 2.0 feed is added to FeedDemon in synced mode (where it syncs with the Newsgator servers), it seems to ignore the pubDate and pick some arbitrary date for all the entries, and all the entries share this same date.

When the RSS 2.0 feed is added in non-synced mode (where FeedDemon pulls from the feed server directly), all the pubDates are respected and it works properly. In Firefox Live Bookmarks it works properly too.

With the Atom 1.0 feed from Google, the dates are correct in all cases but the links are broken. But at the moment users are in a quandry as there appear to be problems in both Google’s feed implementation and FeedDemon’s parsing of Google’s feeds.

UPDATE (08/06/2008): Nick Bradbury, the creator of FeedDemon has been able to reproduce the bug and has added it to the FeedDemon bug tracking database.

I was buying RAM today for a friend, and I noticed something quirky going on at Crucial.com. When I was at his house, I noticed that the stick of RAM he needed was $67.97. When I got home I went to order it, the price had ‘dropped’ to $65.93. I figured this was just due to volatile RAM prices. I placed the order at $65.93 and didn’t think much of it.

Later on, out of curiousity I checked the prices again, and I happened to use IE for this. Price was back to up $67.97. I thought this a little odd, so I checked again in Firefox, and the price there was still showing $65.93. I checked in Opera, and prices were $67.97.

The part in question, CT522745 is a 512MB upgrade for a Dell Dimension 4500. Screenshots from Firefox and IE are below:

Are Firefox users getting a hidden discount?

UPDATE: It looks like Firefox users are not being singled out for a discount, but rather that I had a cookie set in Firefox by them (it’s been years since I ordered anything from them) and when I cleared this cookie, pricing went back to ‘normal’. False alarm, but if only I had saved the cookie…

I was browsing through Yusuf’s blog today and read in his post about enabling cheaper SSL hosting for the first time about Server Name Indication (SNI), as specified in section 3.1 of RFC3546.

Anyone who’s had to set up an TLS/SSL (let’s say secure) site knows that currently, a secure site must be hosted on a unique IP. If you need to host more than one SSL site, you need to have separate IPs for each secure site hosted. This requirement is present because pre-SNI, the server name is negotiated based on the DNS hostname only. SNI elegantly works around this requirement by adding another step to TLS negotiation. As part of the TLS handshake, the client tells the TLS server which hostname it is trying to connect to, and the hostname thus knows which certificate to present to the client. This is explained a lot more elegantly by Paul Querna.

SNI makes life better because secure hosting becomes more affordable. The cost of a secure certificate is often no longer the largest cost that secure sites must bear to be secure. One can get a certificate for $20/year. However, dedicated IPs are expensive. On a host such as Dreamhost, unique IPs cost $4.95/month. Add this up and it’s almost $60/year. If this extra cost can be eliminated a lot more businesses might be tempted to go secure, and this is a good thing for everybody.

So what’s the current state of browsers?

• Opera: Already has full support for SNI as of 8.0
• Internet Explorer: Windows Vista adds full support for SNI
• Gecko/NSS: Not yet, but bugs 116168 and 116169 have been filed.

It’s no secret that as far as end users are concerned, backend features are not as sexy as features which are exposed in the UI, but I wonder whether if SNI support is added to Gecko/NSS before IE, if Firefox will suddenly become a lot sexier to businesses who don’t have an arbitrarily large IP space but are looking to standardise on a browser, or recommend one to their clients. Hey, it’s a much better solution than forcing an upgrade to Vista.

A couple of months ago I blogged about the challenges faced by community projects. Something one of my friends who works on a mutual community project with myself and others wrote has driven me to write a little bit about what works well with community projects, because what he wrote resonates with a lot of my experiences:

[Our] volunteers come from varied backgrounds. Our earliest graphics work and page layout was done by someone going to medical school (cutting and slicing cadavers in the morning and slicing and dicing page-layouts/photographs at night). Our resident layout maestro who has a knack of determing browser bugs via impressive test-case reduction is an economics graduate. There are the usual suspects who have some paperwork by which they claim to know Computer Science but they are very much a minority.

When I read this, I couldn’t help but also think of the Mozilla community, which is comprised of a hugely diverse set of people with varied backgrounds and interests, but all of whom share a common goal. When you look at a project like Firefox (or really any community project), I think there are two major (and related) barometers of its health:

1. The ability of a project to draw contributors from outside its immediate field
2. The ability of a project to harness the capabilities of its contributors and channel it into useful activity

The first of these has to do with the pull that a project has on people who have no intrinsic connection to it. One of the reasons that Firefox has been so successful is that it has drawn people who would not ordinarily be interested in a web browser and made converts out of them. Not only has it made converts, but converts who believe strongly enough in the software that they are willing to donate their time in order to make it better. It’s pretty easy to convince a developer that tabbed browsing is a great idea, but a lot more difficult to convey the same message to others. Yet, to a large extent Firefox has succeeded in this; and it has certainly succeeded in drawing active contributors, many of whom have never taken part in an open source project before (or any software project for that matter).

The issue of contributors aside, why has growth slowed from how quickly it was growing before? Because for the majority of web users, a web browser is boring. Users don’t care what program you enter the URI into, as long as the page loads. Apathy is now the biggest the biggest barrier, because now we have to win over the segment of users for whom computers are not a passion, but simply a tool (or even worse a chore). How does one win over the masses of people for whom anything to do with computers is executed from rote memory, rather than any sense of intuitive understanding (don’t underestimate the size of this group). Do we even want to cater to this group? I don’t really have a good answer for either of these questions.

The second barometer, how a project harnesses the eagerness of its potential contributors is really the crux. My understanding of Firefox contributors is that you can categorise them into four broad groups:

1. Highly skilled, paid contributors
2. Highly skilled, unpaid contributors, who donate significant amounts of time
3. Less skilled, but enthusiastic and eager to learn unpaid contributors, who donate significant amounts of time
4. Less skilled (or unskilled) unpaid contributors, who want to help in a small way that doesn’t require a large commitment

As always, the first three groups combined do the lion’s share of the work, but are always outnumbered by far by the fourth group. The first three groups can work without hand-holding and still work productively. It is the fourth group who need channeling. Because they want to help out in the short-term or just as a one-time thing, they often do not have an understanding of the project, and thus their genuine efforts are misdirected. As a worst case scenario, their attempts to assist can actually hinder the first three groups from going about their work. I remember during early 2004 when Firefox was picking up steam, all of a sudden Bugzilla’s “Today’s Bugs” lists became a swamp of rubbish, and significant efforts were required to parse through and sort out the useful from the garbage. A perfect example of misdirected efforts—people trying to help but actually hampering progress.

The situation has improved significantly. Efforts have been made to channel contributions to where they are most helpful, and as a result Reporter and Hendrix now exist. Systems such as these not only channel efforts to where they are required, but also provide useful information in aggregated form to the skilled contributors who are in a position to act on the feedback. When channeled in this manner, the fourth group of contributors become enablers. They provide supplementary data that helps the skilled contributors to triage problems and improve the product.

How well the capabilities of these passerby contributors is harnessed can make the difference between creating a group of enablers and creating pandemonium.

Going back to where I began, I think it is clear that variety amongst contributors is a hallmark of success. However, with variety comes a necessity to actively manage contributions so that they are complementary to each other.

The original post that sparked this one is part of a relatively new blog that talks mainly about the technical considerations that have gone into creating a community website and server infrastructure.

My last blog entry was on July 8, a good two and a half months ago, I think my longest hiatus yet from blogging. Since then, things have been sort of a whirlwind on all fronts (in a good way, of course).

Most important on the list is that I got married on 15 August 2005, to Zainab Currim (now Ebrahim), who I have known for the last five years and been engaged to since December 2002! We had both been waiting for this for a long, long time, and it is amazing to finally be married.

When I say that I got married on 15 August, I should qualify this statement, because marriages for Muslims and Indians don’t work in the same way as they do for many of you who have grown up in a Western environment. For many of you, after the marriage ceremony in a church, there is a reception, and then that’s it. For us, it’s a bit more complicated. First we have what is called the nikah, which is the marriage contract itself, and is executed between the groom and the bride’s appointed representative, which is usually her paternal grandfather or father. Once the nikah is complete, the couple are legally married. However, that’s not the end of the deal. Prior to and after the consummation of the marriage, there are other traditional ceremonies that also take place, and it is these ceremonies that constitute the wedding celebrations.

So my nikah was performed on 15 August, but the wedding celebrations are yet to take place. They’ll happen this December in Mumbai (most of my extended family lives there) and Kolkata (Zainab’s family lives there), both in India.

The venue of our nikah was Najam Baug, a Dawoodi Bohra community hall that my great, great grandfather originally built along with his brother-in-law in 1886, and was recently rebuilt by our family and inaugurated on 15 August 2005 (my nikah took place during the inauguration).

I took on the task of designing the website for Najam Baug, and just completed it a couple of days ago. It’s the first website that I’ve designed from scratch (though I did use a CSS trick or two from ALA), and I’m pretty happy with the result. Designing the website just reminded me what a pleasure it is to design for standards-compliant browsers such as Firefox and Opera.

When it comes to rendering standards-compliant pages, these browsers Just Work™. Internet Explorer drove me crazy with its Screw Standards™ rendering mode. I spent hours making IE not totally screw up floats, and also a long, long time trying to figure out why content was just plain vanishing in IE. As it turned out, the vanishing content bug was IE’s notorious Peek-a-boo bug, which I was able to fix using Matthew Somerville’s line-height hack. After making all these efforts, the website now displays only acceptably in IE, but still not perfectly. For those of you who have IE, you’ll notice that there is a lot more whitespace than you see in other browsers. I still haven’t figured out how to fix this.

There’s still a lot more that’s happened in the past couple of weeks to talk about, but for now this is all I have time for. I hope that over the few days I can write a couple more entries. One of the things I want to write about is about using Firefox at work, and a few observations and challenges I’ve faced in being able to use it 100% of the time.

Every year the University of Chicago’s Networking Services and Information Technology department (NSIT) distributes a connectivity package (CP) to all incoming students. This CP is also used by departments throughout the university. The CP, amongst other things, contains a web browser and an email client.

Starting this fall, all incoming students will receive a CP that is built around Firefox and Thunderbird. This means that any student who pops NSIT’s CP into their computer to set up university email services will have Firefox and Thunderbird installed on their computer! The same CP is also likely to be targeted at university departments for new deployments.

I graduated from UChicago last year, and it’s great to see my alma mater supporting and taking advantage of open source projects in this manner. UChicago is fortunate to have a group of people working at NSIT who understand the value that open source projects can offer them.