Firefox 3 Release Party in Christchurch

13 June 2008 - 9:23pm — Bevan

Mozilla has finally announced Firefox 3's launch date; this Tuesday 17 June. (Note that's probably US time, so it will be Wednesday in NZ).

Mozilla wants to break a guiness world record for number of downloads in one day and I'm sure they'll achieve it. You can go pledge on spreadfirefox.com (A drupal site): http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

I created a "FF3 launch party" event in Christchurch for kicks on mozillaparty.com: http://mozillaparty.com/en-US/events/view/101

I think we get some free gear if enough people come or something.

OT: Humourous Signs on the West Coast (New Zealand)

9 June 2008 - 6:45pm — Bevan

On a road Trip to the West Coast (New Zealand), we found the merchandise, prices and marketing rather peculiar. This store had a particular broad but limited range of products and services:

Painted Blackboard sign in mud reading 'Psychic Reading, Vege's & Soap'

While the petrol in Ikamatua seemed just a little over-priced:

Mac Favicon Deprecated -- And RELEASED!

3 June 2008 - 1:34pm — Bevan

Iuru pointed me to a plugin on userstyles.org that fixes the issue Mac Favicon was designed to resolve in a far more maintainable and cleaner way than Mac Favicon ever could. Therefore I've decided to deprecate Mac Favicon and Mac Favicon XL themes for Firefox and instead encourage users to install the Stylish addon, then install the Mac bookmark toolbar favicons style from userstyles.org.

If you prefer Mac Favicon XL, see the instructions that follow.

Mac Favicon 3

2 June 2008 - 9:41pm — Bevan

UPDATE: Mac Favicon and Mac Favicon XL have been deprecated and rereleased. See http://drupal.geek.nz/blog/mac-favicon-deprecated-and-released

With Firefox 3's release now imminent, a number of people have contacted me about whether there will be a version of my Mac Favicon theme for FF3.

While the short answer is "yes", the long answer is more complicated; I won't be able to take this on anytime soon -- probably not till August. A couple of folk have contacted me about doing it themselves. I would be really happy if someone were to do it. I would happily test it, release it on addons.mozilla.org under Mac Favicon, give you access to do that or link to your release elsewhere.

Learning & Teaching Code Style & Appreciation

29 May 2008 - 11:16am — Bevan

Yesterday in an informal COSC208 (C and C++ programming) lecture at the University of Canterbury, discussion broke out on how to teach and learn coding Style. Here are my 2 cents;

I believe it's not possible to effectively teach & learn Style with single-developer programs that have a clearly limited life span -- such as all code written for COSC208 and most undergraduate university papers. Once the paper has finished and the grade has been determined, who is going to maintain the student's code? Who is going to read your code? No one. So why would the author/programmer/student bother to make it easy to read or maintain, or care for Style? They would not -- except if the prof mandates it. But as pointed out yesterday, that is very resource-consuming and fails to teach an appreciation for Style.

Do General Public GET Open Source?

15 May 2008 - 12:21pm — Bevan

This article about SilverStripe "giving away their product" completely misses the point of open source. I think that like most of the general public here in NZ (perhaps worldwide?), the author understands that "open source is free" (like free beer), but misses the point that SilverStripe's software, and open source in general, is not free because it costs nothing, but because the code that is written to create the software, is open for anyone to use, look at, modify, enhance, learn from, redistribute, sell, print out and use as toilet paper, or glorify in a nice picture frame above their mantlepiece. Because the code has been freed from the restrictions typical of commercial software licensing.

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