new york times firefox ad goes live

The NYT Firefox ad has gone live. I’m not going to cover it in great detail, since that’s been done already by plenty of others. Instead, I offer you a sample from my Inbox: Woo! My name is in the New York Times ad as one of the Mozilla Firefox donators. Ali’s name is listed … Continue reading “new york times firefox ad goes live”

The NYT Firefox ad has gone live. I’m not going to cover it in great detail, since that’s been done already by plenty of others. Instead, I offer you a sample from my Inbox:

Woo!

My name is in the New York Times ad as one of the Mozilla Firefox donators. Ali’s name is listed also.
Here’s the sample ad URL:
http://www.mozilla.org/press/nytimes-firefox-final.pdf

Thanks Ali for spreading the word. I’m going to buy the poster for this thing!

When the NYT ad was still accepting signups, I posted a note about it to an email list consisting of quite a few of my friends from high school, and the above email was seen today on the same list.

As it turns out, Firefox is back in the NYT again and getting more attention, this time in an article by Randall Stross. Some choice quotes from there are reproduced below:

Mr. Schare has said that Mozilla’s Firefox must prove it can smoothly move from version 1.0 to 2.0, and has thus far enjoyed “a bit of a free ride.” If I were the spokesman for the software company that included the company’s browser free on every Windows PC, I’d be more careful about using the phrase “free ride.”

[snip]

Mr. Schare of Microsoft does have one suggestion for those who cannot use the latest patches in Service Pack 2: buy a new personal computer. By the same reasoning, the security problems created by a car’s broken door lock could be solved by buying an entirely new automobile. The analogy comes straight from Mr. Schare. “It’s like buying a car,” he said. “If you want to get the latest safety features, you have to buy the latest model.”

In this case, the very latest model is not an ’01 Internet Explorer, but an ’04 Firefox.

Looks like Mr. Schare has a penchant for putting his foot in his mouth. 🙂

fun facts about electronic voting

While electronic voting is not bad in principle, the recent implementation during the US presidential election was appaling. Here’s why. I’m by no means a luddite, but if we’re going to use technology to solve problems, lets at least use best practices and leave an audit trail.

While electronic voting is not bad in principle, the recent implementation during the US presidential election was appaling. Here’s why. I’m by no means a luddite, but if we’re going to use technology to solve problems, lets at least use best practices and leave an audit trail.

illegal searches conducted by the TSA

The terrorists have already won. That’s right, they instigated a sense of national fear, duped politicians into passing the unnecessary PATRIOT Act, and have managed to keep Americans scared enough that their leaders (Bush, Rumsfeld, ex-AG Ashcroft, et al.) were able to break down existing protections of personal privacy under the more vague than ever … Continue reading “illegal searches conducted by the TSA”

The terrorists have already won.

That’s right, they instigated a sense of national fear, duped politicians into passing the unnecessary PATRIOT Act, and have managed to keep Americans scared enough that their leaders (Bush, Rumsfeld, ex-AG Ashcroft, et al.) were able to break down existing protections of personal privacy under the more vague than ever notion of national security. That, and the already opaque US Government has found itself in a position where it can deny accountability for its actions, claim that divulging information would be a threat to national security, and call anyone who challenges them unpatriotic. Really, 9/11 was a gift to the intelligence agencies of the US.

John Barlow has himself experienced (alternate link for those who live in places where TypePad is banned) the extent to which intelligence and security agencies feel they can take liberties. During one of his travels, he was subject to an illegal search of his possessions (the TSA is legally authorised only to search for threats to national security, nothing else), was thrown in jail, and was subject to a body cavity search. I recommend you read his story, which is quite disheartening (to say the least).

When federal agencies feel empowered to take these kind of actions, I wonder what kind of privacy Americans expect to have going into the 21st century? Right now, it’s looking like most Americans are willing to settle for little or no privacy, as long as ‘national security’ (whatever this means) is not breached. By the time people realise what they’re giving up it will be too late.

If the terrorists have succeeded in creating an environment in which its become acceptable to erode personal privacy and relax legal safeguards against government interference in personal life, then I contend that they’ve already won.

blog housekeeping

I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my blog over the last few days, and have made a few changes and additions: In addition to the faux blog post about Firefox that IE users see, I’ve added browser sniffing code to my Firefox sidebar box, which serves different content according to what browser you use to … Continue reading “blog housekeeping”

I’ve been doing some housekeeping on my blog over the last few days, and have made a few changes and additions:

  1. In addition to the faux blog post about Firefox that IE users see, I’ve added browser sniffing code to my Firefox sidebar box, which serves different content according to what browser you use to view it. Currently, it’s capable of differentiating between (and serves different content to) the following:
    • Firefox
    • Gecko-based, non Firefox
    • Internet Explorer
    • Opera / Safari / Konqueror
    • Others

    There’s no real reason for this, other than one of the PHP tutorials for beginners happened to cover user agent sniffing at an early stage, so I thought I’d tinker with it.

  2. I’ve added TypeKey support to comments. Later on I might enable comment moderation for non-Typekey enabled commenters.
  3. I’ve added a class to my blog called aebrahim-mozillaAdvertising. Any form of static Firefox or Thunderbird advertising is enclosed within this class. Feel free to do whatever you want with it using userContent.css (or whatever alternate method your browser supports).
  4. I’ve made my blog’s HTTP headers a little more sensible. I’ve added Last-Modified headers to all pages, and added charset=utf-8 to the Content-Type header. I’ve also added Vary: User-Agent to the blog homepage.

UPDATE: I’ve removed most of the advertising because I think it’s annoying.

when to stop thinking about mozilla

You know you spend too much time thinking about Mozilla when you see the name ‘DoGZiLLa’ on IRC (not on moznet) and it takes you five minutes to figure out that it’s a play on the word ‘Godzilla’.

You know you spend too much time thinking about Mozilla when you see the name ‘DoGZiLLa’ on IRC (not on moznet) and it takes you five minutes to figure out that it’s a play on the word ‘Godzilla’.

thunderbird promotional resources

Why should Firefox steal all the thunder? Now that Thunderbird 1.0 has been released, let’s get cracking and make use of the excellent promotional materials and start letting the world know about Thunderbird. Is it just me, or does the ‘Reclaim your inbox’ button look really sweet? I’ve got a button up on my blog. … Continue reading “thunderbird promotional resources”

Why should Firefox steal all the thunder? Now that Thunderbird 1.0 has been released, let’s get cracking and make use of the excellent promotional materials and start letting the world know about Thunderbird. Is it just me, or does the ‘Reclaim your inbox’ button look really sweet? I’ve got a button up on my blog. Have you?

If you haven’t already given Thunderbird a spin, try it today. You won’t regret it.

Congrats to Scott MacGregor and David Bienvenu for this excellent release.

stylesheets for different media

I only recently learned about how you can use different style sheets based on the display media. Since I thought the idea was really cool, I thought I’d have a play around with it. The end result is an update to an article on Bohras. It has different style sheets for screen, print and handheld … Continue reading “stylesheets for different media”

I only recently learned about how you can use different style sheets based on the display media. Since I thought the idea was really cool, I thought I’d have a play around with it. The end result is an update to an article on Bohras. It has different style sheets for screen, print and handheld media, and not only applies different styles based on the media type, but even displays different elements depending on whether its being displayed on screen, on a handheld or in print.

While the implementation is pretty simple, I think it’s functional. I thought I’d post a link to it in case anyone out there is wondering how to do this themselves (it’s not that hard).

The major differences to note between the three versions are the following:

  1. Only the screen version displays the sidebar where article source thumbnail images can be found.
  2. The print version omits some text from the footer which links to the site disclaimer and a link to email the webmaster.
  3. The handheld version does not have justified text (otherwise it looks bad on handheld devices with huge gaps between words).
  4. The handheld version contains no hints on how to display text (wrt fonts and sizes). The handheld UA will make the best decision about this.
  5. Because the sidebar has display: none; placed on it in the handheld version, UAs that respect display: none; will not ordinarily download content linked to from that section. So handheld users won’t download the thumbnails, saving them time (and money, if bandwidth is metered).

In other words, I’ve made some assumptions about what content and formatting is appropriate for each media, and used CSS to put that into effect using separate style sheets (see the <head> of the document). The HTML document itself contains only structural markup, and no presentational markup (except for <em> and <strong>). Because of this, the document has a useful parseable structure (see <h[123]> tags), and degrades nicely on browsers that don’t support CSS at all.

firefox is the anti-opera

So says Scot Finnie, at least. He’s written an excellent review of Firefox that’s not only fair, but very detailed as well. In fact, out of all the reviews I’ve read of Firefox so far, this is probably the best one (not just because its positive, but also because of its comprehensiveness).

So says Scot Finnie, at least. He’s written an excellent review of Firefox that’s not only fair, but very detailed as well. In fact, out of all the reviews I’ve read of Firefox so far, this is probably the best one (not just because its positive, but also because of its comprehensiveness).

google rankings

I have a question for webmasters out there who have some experience with SEO. How does Google treat the following? a) Text that has class=”foo” where class foo is undefined. b) HTML comments (including IE’s conditional comments). My expectation is that it that for (a), class foo will be ignored entirely (no loss or gain … Continue reading “google rankings”

I have a question for webmasters out there who have some experience with SEO. How does Google treat the following?

a) Text that has class=”foo” where class foo is undefined.
b) HTML comments (including IE’s conditional comments).

My expectation is that it that for (a), class foo will be ignored entirely (no loss or gain in terms of SEO), and that HTML comments (including conditional comments) are also ignored entirely.

Does anyone have evidence to the contrary? Maybe some Mozilla folks out there know about this. I’m not worried about this for my blog, but another site that is considering advertising Firefox in place of some normal header text. For them, even marginal loss in terms of SEO may place it below another competing site (which would be unacceptable). Thanks in advance for your input.