Personas, for those not familiar with it, is a Firefox add-on from Mozilla Labs that allows you to easily reskin the browser. Sort of like a theme, but different.
This weekend I decided to make a bacon persona. It was really easy to do; I just made a couple of JPEGs and submitted them to the getpersonas.com site. Result:
The internets are serious business. When you’ve got questions, they’ve got answers… Is Lost on TV? Is it a rerun? What year is it? 2009? 2010? Has the LHC destroyed the world yet? Is Abe Vigoda still alive? Is it MFBT?
Which brings us to the question frequently asked by Mozilla developers. Is the tree green? Ta-da:
It’s using a cross-site XMLHttpRequest to fetch the tree status from Tinderbox. This is a neat way to generate the answer in the browser (instead of scraping the status from a cron script on my webserver), but it means you’ll need a recent browser (like Firefox 3.1!) which supports this.
It’s surprisingly snappy. The HTML is about 7K, and the XHR status is about 2K. Compare that to the normal Tinderbox page, which weighs in around 220K.
The page polls the Tinderbox status every 2 minutes and updates the displayed status. The first time the state transitions from not-green to green, it will trigger an alert(). I think this will be rather useful if you’re waiting for the tree to turn green before checking in a patch.
It doesn’t check if the tree is open or closed. (Yet?)
Thanks to Jesse for the original idea, and to Reed for helping to get the Tinderbox server configured to allow XS-XHR.
If a rule prevents you from improving or maintaining Wikipedia, ignore it.
Seems like a rather interesting way to encapsulate exceptions and common sense as part of an official policy, and well as introducing a touch of rambunctious energy and freedom into what could otherwise become a stodgy bureaucracy.
Gerv just posted about the number of random Wikipedia pages in his browser history. Hmm, sounds like a meme in the making!
Back in November, Mardak posted some code to pull data out of Places… I’ve modified it to create a list of 10 random Wikipedia links from your history (along with the total). Looks like you’ll need a Firefox 3.1 beta (or newer) for this to work. The count will be a bit different than what you see with Gerv’s method, as I try to be more accurate with filtering meaningful Wiki pages.
1. Open this link, select-all and copy it.
2. Open up the Error Console.
3. Paste into the Code field at the top, and click Evaluate.
(Note that this runs code without any security restrictions, so don’t get in the habit of doing this for people you don’t trust!)
Fred and Borris both recently blogged about intelligent image resizing. This previously came up about a year ago, probably when this research video started making the rounds:
It’s cool stuff, although I’m a little doubtful about it working well for general web content. It would be a fun experiment, though!
Also in the news today is this New York Times article (via Neatorama) about an automatic “beautification engine” that modifies images to make the people in them look better.
Would that be interesting in browsers? I suppose some people would find in interesting in some cases (*cough*porn*cough*), but it’s a little scary and creepy to think about the kinds of social and psychological effects that would arise from subtly applying such an algorithm everywhere. (Consider a similar vein: automatically rewriting web pages more cheerful. A news article about panic selling on Wall Street suddenly becomes a doubleplus good story about the great weather, buying opportunities, and fluffy kittens!)
A month or two ago this stupid little icon showed up on my menu bar. I found it kind of amusing (in a sad kind of way) because it appeared out of the blue, without my having approved anything, and the dropdown menu had a bunch of redundant items that were all variations of “you are not using MobileMe”.
I noticed today that now it’s complaining about sync conflicts. Which is also kind of sad, because I *still* have never used it, and have no idea what those conflicts could be for (turns out they’re for iCal conflicts… but I don’t use iCal any more). It even *says* that I’ve never used it, and that syncing is disabled!
The “small world theory,” embodied in the old saw that there are just “six degrees of separation” between any two strangers on Earth, has been largely corroborated by a massive study of electronic communication.
With records of 30 billion electronic conversations among 180 million people from around the world, researchers have concluded that any two people on average are distanced by just 6.6 degrees of separation, meaning that they could be linked by a string of seven or fewer acquaintances.
The database covered all of the Microsoft Messenger instant-messaging network in June 2006 [...]
Gosh, that’s kinda neat. We’re all just… Hey, wait. 30 billion records from 180 million people? Retained for over 2 years? I wonder how many users of Messenger (and other IM services?) are aware of how much data is being logged.
I set up a Maemo build environment not too long ago, so that I could follow along with the Fennec work. I was curious to see what other Mozilla stuff I could get working for my N810…
That’s the current trunk version of Thunderbird (aka Shredder). I had to jump through a few hoops to build it, but it wasn’t too bad. Setting up Scratchbox and upgrading the compiler is a chore, but once that generic work has been done it builds about the same way as any other platform. Checking out the source was the hardest part — Thunderbird and Seamonkey are in mercurial now, but the client.py checkout script requires the “subprocess” python module, which doesn’t seem to be included in the Maemo packages. Grr! So “python client.py checkout” failed, and I had to stumble my way through checking out the new repo by hand. Thanks to the folks on #maildev for helping out!
How’s it run? Fairly well, from my brief testing. The UI isn’t optimized for small-screen mobile usage, but it seemed responsive enough that I’ll try using it in coming days. The other mail client I’ve tried on the N810 are sucky, quirky, or some combination thereof — so even something barely usable will be nice!
Presumably a SeaMonkey build should work too, since they share a lot of common code, but I didn’t try it.
