How you you know you just walked straight through a worm hole and reached 1985?
When you try to unmount an unreachable network drive and instead of succeeding after a little while, you get a spinning beachball of death leaving you -- after waiting naively for 15 minutes (I went to get my mail etc.) -- with no other possibility than hard-resetting your computer.
While I like my Mac a lot, this is one of the days when I want to ask:
Apple, when do you finally reach the 21st century?
It's the second time in only a few days that I read this, so I guess I have to comment on it.
Today I had some minor problems loading my GMail account, so it showed me an error as follows:
Alright, so imagine I am a naive computer user who just got this message and I obviously believe what they are saying. Now I am going to go ahead and disable my firewall altogether and live happily ever after -- until I come across the first script kiddie that turns my workstation into a spam bot, virus nest, or both.
Similar issue: That blogger on MSDN.com who nicely suggested to switch off the Phising protection altogether when the CPU usage of your new instance of MSIE 7 spikes on some AJAX websites. -- While he meanwhile revised it to an acceptable "add these individual sites to a whitelist for which you switch off the phishing protection", his initial suggestion was just as bad as the one up there by Google.
Come on, people. Not everybody is a computer geek. People actually believe what you are writing there.
So please start thinking before you type. Having people switch all their security features off first (but burying the information that this might be a bad idea somewhere deep inside the help files) is harmful and -- sorry -- just plain stupid. People will switch it all off, they will see that "everything works" and they will stop reading about the issue right afterwards.
If you really, really, really have to have them switch off part of their software (which is not too surprising for some paranoid security products), at least spend half a minute explaining how the workaround can be done securely, and only for the page in question.
You owe this to your customers. Or, to put it differently: If you handle your customers' privacy as carelessly as you handle their web security, I sincerely hope nobody ever tells you their social security number.
alexa -- a search engine that provides traffic rankings about web pages too -- currently lists the first five websites on their "movers and shakers" list from Mozilla.
This blog is ranked #6 with an 80,000% growth and a weekly traffic rank of 4,277.
Chances are that's the one of the biggest growths Alexa has ever recorded for a single website :) -- I'm impressed!
Update: I am number 2 now! :) The growth percentage has fallen to a less impressive 460% this week but I guess being higher in the list is nice too ;)
Gosh, all these visitors were giving my server a hard time.
No wonder, after my cake story got dugg more than 3500 times, slashdotted, "valleywagged" and I don't know what else...
You guys were very supportive when it came to helping me picking up the tab, thanks! I got a lot of help from supporters who all gave me a dollar-or-so, so I decided to send a small check to the Mozilla Foundation and another one to the OSU Open Source Lab.
The OSU OSL is where some of Mozilla's servers are and they work hard for some of the finest projects in the Open Source world, and they also need our support. Through the collaboration of the OSL and Mozilla, that a whole lot of Firefox downloads can take place flawlessly at the same time, free of charge.
You are great. Thanks again!
(And I hope some people keep my blog in their feed reader :))
The Microsoft Internet Explorer Team sent us a cake for the upcoming release of Firefox 2!
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A big thanks to Redmond, Washington!
P.S.: No, it was not poisoned ;)
PPS: My Bandwidth bill was exploding. Thanks to everyone who helped my bandwidth bill by contributing a dollar or two. These are the friendly people who did.
How do I get the backspace and forward delete keys to work correctly?
- In the Keyboard section of the Terminal Inspector:
- Turn on the Delete key sends backspace option.
- Map the forward delete key to the following string:
\033[3~- Add the following line to your .profile:
Since ˆH is a non-printable control character, the easiest way to do this is to execute the following command:stty erase ˆHType the ˆH by pressing Control-V and Control-H.echo -e "stty erase ˆH" >> ~/.profile- Add the following line to your .inputrc:
"\e[3~": delete-char- Apply changes by doing a
source ~/.profileand abind -f ~/.inputrc.
Very helpful! I found this information on this website. Thanks, desp!
The release of Firefox 2 is coming up, and great things need to be celebrated. Thus yesterday, the firefoxparty website was released!
Partying is easy: If you host, add your party to the list and let the world know that you are going to celebrate the new, exciting release of your favorite webbrowser.
If you want to join a party, take a look at the map or the list and register as a Firefox party goer.
At the time of writing, you have the choice of more than 130 firefox 2 parties worldwide with at least 400 fellow party animals :)
Let's rock! Firefox: Take back the dancefloor!
A week of work, and the world already turns out to be entirely a village: Dan Mosedale, lead developer on the Lightning Project (= Mozilla Calendar as a Thunderbird extension) spent a year at the University of Karlsruhe studying Informatik (computer science) in the early 1990s.
About a decade later, I started studying there, and I still am.
Looks like -- to use the words of one of my favorite professors in Germany -- Karlsruhe rules :)
Just as a little warning beforehand:
I will probably be blogging on web application development with CakePHP a bit in the near future. As mentioned before, I started working at Mozilla recently, and the current project I am on happens to be written in PHP using the CakePHP web development framework.
I have to admit: Though the MVC design pattern is pretty well known (and well-taught everywhere), actually using it exclusively (pretty much no exceptions) takes a little bending my mind and makes me want to cry sometimes.
It's not that complicated, but, well, it's different.
So stay tuned for the little weird things I might come across on my journey through the bakery.
