Archive for the 'Tech Talk' Category

Userfriendly on the Second Microsoft Cake

Userfriendly.org published a funny little picture about the second Microsoft cake:

They should have covered the Firefox 2 cake instead: After all, it still rendered in black and white ;)

(Thanks for the link, Jean Pierre!)

Firefox Credits

The Firefox world record attempt has just weighed in with a whopping 8 million downloads (plus change) in a 24-hour period.

And, as I recently noticed, each Firefox instance carries my name among the men and women mentioned in the credits list (for my work on the Mozilla Add-ons project):

My name in the Firefox 3 credits.
Awesome :) (did I mention I dig my name being spelled correctly?)

If you want to see who else is on the list, click on “About Firefox” in the help (or Firefox, on Mac) menu, then “Credits”.

Thanks to Mike Connor (who I believe put me on the list) and to everybody who made Firefox 3 such a great product.

Firefox PDF Extension for Mac OS X

Jean Pierre pointed out a fabulous little extension for Firefox 3 on OSX:

The firefox-mac-pdf extension embeds PDF files right in the browser, so you don’t have to download them, open them with Preview.app and remove the file off your desktop afterwards. It works much like Acrobat, except it uses OSX’s built-in PDFkit.

That’s definitely an extension I’d like to see on AMO.

Make Firefox a Guinness World Record!

As many of you may already know, tomorrow, June 17, Firefox 3 will be released to the general public.

But that’s not all: In an event called “Download Day” Mozilla is trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in 24 hours. You can help set the record!

All you need to do is download Firefox 3 tomorrow within the first 24 hours of its release.

Need more info? Hop over to the Mozilla Blog or read the official Download Day FAQ.

Noise Assassin

Wow, that’s a pretty impressive bluetooth headset. (I’d embed the video here but that function seems to be broken).

Reverting All Local Changes in SVN

Whenever I apply somebody else’s big patch to review it, I obviously go ahead and revert the changes to my local Subversion working copy afterwards. Here’s the line I use to do it, maybe somebody will find it useful (though I mainly blog it not to forget it myself):

svn st -q | awk '{print $2;}' | xargs svn revert

(To be honest, I also expect about 17 comments now that tell me how I can do this more efficiently, or what I didn’t consider when writing this in about 5 seconds — so, don’t disappoint me, fire away! :) )

Long Distance Remote Control

The buddy I am currently staying with called me a nerd today because I was putting on a Firefox T-Shirt. Oh, little does he know, poor fellow.

I wonder what he had said if he knew that we just set up an OpenVPN server on our wireless router at home to be able to log in from a distance and program our dad’s satellite receiver? We call it the 6.500 kilometer remote control.