Truer Words - A Journal

Annoying Color Space Issue in Firefox

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:42:32 GMT

Jim Correia and I spent a little time talking about this a few months ago, but I just noticed the problem again. Look at the following image:

The image on the left is how Firefox 2 and 3 render it. The image on the right shows the same image in Safari. (You won't see any image if you're reading this in email, you'll have to go to the link above.)

If you don't see the difference immediately, look at Lauren's face. The color in the one on the right is really good, and is why I marked this image as one of my favorites in both iPhoto and Safari. The color in Firefox is terrible. She's darker, and the skin tone is way off.

This is really annoying. I think I understand the basics of this problem, but I'm told that the root of it is the cost of licensing the colorspace technology (from Adobe?). Mozilla has more money than they know what to do with right now, and they have a lot of really smart people. I hope they solve this soon.

(Note that the picture looks pretty good in Internet Explorer, also. Of the three major browsers, Firefox is the only one with this problem.)

Proto for FireFox Mac OS X

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 22:54:27 GMT

If you're running one of the FireFox 3 prerelase versions, you should install this theme. It's a pre-release version of the "mac look and feel" that Mozilla is preparing, bundled as a theme. I've read that they'll be shipping it with FireFox 3.0 when it's ready, but I now I can't find where I read it.

Huge improvement over what 3.0b1 ships with.

Note that "huge improvement," doesn't mean it's great. The toolbar area is now way too heavy and dark, which is exactly the oppsoite of Firefox 3's default theme. This theme is way better, but it's not nearly as good as Safari.

Firefox? Isn't That a Movie?

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 18:11:32 GMT

One of my clients has recently signed up for an online shopping cart system to work with his catalog (which is based on Conversant).

When a customer buys something through this shopping cart system, they're shown a confirmation page with a link back to a specific page on the vendor's site. That's totally standard.

The link appears to use JavaScript to submit a form which POSTs the sale's data (minus the truly private info like credit card number) back to a page on the vendor's site. Still pretty common (except their implementation doesn't actually work).

They claim that it only works in IE. Not in Firefox, not in Safari, not in Opera. Why worry about those, they're just a small percentage of the marketplace, right?

I'm sorry, but those people are morons.

Without even testing it, I can tell you that they're wrong: it doesn't work in ANY browser, not even IE. How do I know? The link just runs the script, and the script just causes the browser to navigate to the vendor's thankyou page: it never does anything with the form at all.

The form is all hidden fields, looking something like this:

<form action="url/of/thank-you/page" name="postData">
<input type="hidden" name="firstName" value="Seth" />
etc., etc., etc.

The form's action is pointing to the correct URL... but the form is never used. The script looks like this:

function submitForm()
{
	window.location.href="url/of/thank-you/page";
	return true;
}

If you understood the above, then you know how easy it would be to fix:

function submitForm()
{
	document.forms.postData.submit();
	return true;
}

Sigh. (Even easier: do away with the javascript entirely, and replace the link with an actual submit button.)

Inline-Block, Coming Soon to a Firefox Near You

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 16:21:47 GMT

I'm surprised and happy to see that dbaron (one of the most experienced and "lowest level" (as in plumbing, not importance) Mozilla contributors) is finally working on an implementation of CSS 'display: inline-block'. I've been subscribed to the Bugzilla bug for inline-block for years and years, so I was amazed to see it finally get some official attention a couple days ago.

Apparently he's also implementing inline-table.

How to Serve Compressed Data with mod_gzip and Apache 1.3 on Mac OS X

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 01:04:09 GMT

Some of us have recently been discussing the size of the Prototype library, my preferred library for DHTML/AJAX). Proponents of some of the other libraries play up their smaller file sizes, and it's true that this is a real issue for some people.

This little essay/how-to explains the basic ideas (the what, how, and why), and then walks you through setting up Apache on Mac OS X, to enable mod_gzip and serve compressed content. If you skip the editorial content and just follow the steps I've outlined, you should have everything up and running in fifteen minutes or less.

Misbehavin' Firefox

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 15:26:16 GMT

Firefox is being really obnoxious this morning (actually, this started at about 11:00 last night). It refuses to run!

I run both the Firefox 2 alpha called BonEcho (nightly builds) and Firefox 1.5.0.4 (release vesion). I run them with separate profiles, so they can run at the same time. The only extension in 1.5 is the Venkman, but BonEcho has a bunch of developer-related plugins installed.

As of last night, neither of them will finish launching. The profile manager opens first so I can choose a profile. After choosing a profile the main browser window opens with nothing in it: just a blank title bar and a big white window. Then comes the SPOD. After five minutes, my MBP's fan was running at full blast: clearly, Firefox had it's foot on the gas but was stuck in the mud and going nowhere fast.

Both versions of Firefox do exactly the same thing. Yet, they work fine if I start up with a new profile.

I don't WANT to use a new profile. All of my login info, bookmarks, history, etc., etc., etc. are in the old profiles! Yes, I know how to migrate them, but that's a pain in the butt!

(I had to resort to posting this through Safari... which has already crashed on me once. Good thing I actually did the writing in BBEdit!)

AJAX Toolkit Framework for Eclipse!

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 02 Mar 2006 20:08:33 GMT

Excellent!

IBM's AlphaWorks group has released the AJAX Toolkit Framework. It's an Eclipse plugin that provides DOM browsing, syntax checking during editing, javascript debugging... and an embedded Gecko (Mozilla/Firefox) browser. That's cool!

Requirements: Windows. (Cue audio: Wah wah waaaaaahhhhh.) That's a bummer. Guess I can't blame them. It's not like many of the creative types are on Mac or anything.

It's open source, though, so perhaps someone will put in the time to make it cross-platform.

I'm about to install it on my PC, and will report back later with my opinion and results.

David Baron: The danger of extensions (in Firefox)

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 23 Jan 2006 15:04:13 GMT

David Baron is a key developer behind Mozilla and Firefox. Yesterday he posted something about Firefox extensions that carries a message similar to something I was going to post today. He said,

I've been concerned for a while about the quality of Firefox extensions, and I'd like to explain why.

To start, I think one of the original motivations for having an extensions system in Firefox was to reduce demands for feature additions that are only used by a small number of people or are experimental. I have no problem with this. What I'm concerned about is that extensions are being promoted to large numbers of users as one of the advantages of Firefox. I think this may come back to haunt the Mozilla community.

I'm under the impression that extensions are used quite commonly, perhaps even beyond the more technical users of Firefox. This means that problems with extensions change user perception of quality of Mozilla products as a whole. But extensions are not of the same quality as the applications they extend.

There's more, but that's enough to give you the gist of it. Basically, he's saying that Firefox extensions are likely to become a huge problem, if they're not already. He emphasizes one reason: the lack of deep and wide testing that the actual Mozilla code base receives.

You see, the Mozilla organization(s) and the user community promote extensions as the solution to everybody's needs. Firefox itself is kept lean, and users can install extensions to meet their needs in areas that aren't served by the default features of the browser. Unfortunately, most of these extensions are not written by the most experienced core developers (like David himself), but rather can be written by anybody, and the only testing they really get is by the people who install them.

I ran into a big problem with this last week. My biggest client reported that some major, AJAX-based features on their internal web site (built in Conversant) stopped working sometime last week, in Firefox. They still worked in Safari, and IE on Windows, but he couldn't get them to work in Firefox on the mac. (Which is where I do all of my first-round testing...)

He had installed a bunch of extensions. Extensions are promoted by Mozilla, and they offer loads of useful features, so why not? Right? Well, at my urging he removed all of his extensions, and the problem went away.

That's right: browser extensions were breaking web pages.

I don't know that David's wish for more extensive testing of plugins will really work or is realistic. There are too many extensions and too many possible combinations.

What we need is for the user community to be told, repeatedly, that Firefox extensions cause problems. They're great, but if you find a bug in a web site or the browser you should disable them and try again. In that way, they're like Haxies on the Mac: they're fun and useful, but use them at your own risk, and always assume that they might be the culprit behind any problem. (Extensions can change almost any behavior or service of the browser, and Haxies can do the same on the Mac.)

Select-All When You Click in the Browser URL

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 21:42:30 GMT

Dave complained that the Mozilla developers removed the automatic "select all" when you click on the URL at the top of your browser window.

They didn't remove it, they just disabled it. It's controlled by a preference called "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll". Here's the email I sent him that explains how to change it back, in case anyone else wants to know how:

Dave,

In Firefox, go to the URL "about:config"

In the search box, type "urlbar".

There will be four preferences listed. One of them is "browser.urlbar.clickSelectsAll".

Double click that preference to change it to true.

Now when you click in the URL bar, everything is selected.

Seth

Update 11/22/2005: Peter Breul reports that it didn't work for him. My bad, I forgot to include the last step: restart the browser. Maybe that's why Dave didn't thank me for the tip. ;-)

CSS3 Seletor-Builder Tool for Firefox

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 13:51:40 GMT

Daniel Glazman, author of N|vu (the WYSIWYG html editor that sprang from Mozila's editor), has released a play-with-this first-pass version of a CSS3 Selector Builder.

If you know CSS, then you know what selectors are. They specify the items in your html (or xml) that you want to style with a given rule.

In CSS3, the selectors have been expanded. There are more options, but there's also more syntax and complexity. You can do negated selectors (as in, apply this rule to everything except _____). Unfortunately, more complexity means it's a little more difficult to learn.

Daniel's tool provides a GUI for building these selectors logically and easily. I think it's more of an educational tool -- especially since CSS3 selectors are only supported in the minority browsers right now -- but it's a nice demo and will be very useful when CSS3 is more widely supported. (Anybody know if IE7 will support CSS3?)

Mozilla Foundation Gives Birth

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 18:31:59 GMT

The Mozilla Foundation announced today that it's giving birth to a brand new baby... capitalist! The Mozilla Corporation will be a wholly owned subsidiary of the Foundation.

On August 3rd, 2005, the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit public benefit software development organization, launched a wholly owned subsidiary, the Mozilla Corporation. The Mozilla Corporation is a taxable subsidiary that serves the non-profit, public benefit goals of its parent, the Mozilla Foundation, and will be responsible for product development, marketing and distribution of Mozilla products.

Apparently they're making too much money -- somehow -- to honestly call themselves "non-profit." I don't really understand that, but I don't know all the rules of non-profithood.

Anyway, there's a major shakeup happening at Mozilla. The software will still be free and open source, so this doesn't really affect the users at all. In fact, I'm not sure it really affects much of anything, except that everybody's talking about it.

You can read a lot more about this at MozillaZine. Most of the stories on Planet Mozilla, for the moment, are related to this news, too.

New Features Coming in Firefox 1.1

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:35:58 GMT

Firefox 1.1 is going to have a load of new features.

The one I'm the happiest about is almost too silly to mention: you can reorder your tabs simply by dragging them around.

One of my contributions to Firefox Hacks was an explanation of ways you could customize Firefox's tabs. At the time, the only way to get draggable, re-orderable tabs was to install a truly mammoth extension called "Tabbrowser Extension." It completely replaced Firefox's tabs (it did a million other things besides draggable tabs, too).

There's a preview release of Firefox 1.1 called DeerPark, currently at Alpha 2. It's intended only for developers (thus the temporary name change).

Nigel McFarlane Died

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:52:13 GMT

Mozilla Author Nigel McFarlane Dies

Nigel McFarlane, the Australian author of two Mozilla books and dozens of Mozilla articles, has died. Nigel became well known in the Mozilla community when his book Rapid Application Development with Mozilla was published in 2003. His most recent book, Firefox Hacks came out earlier this year.

[SNIP]

News of Nigel's sudden death was posted to the Web Standards Group mailing list by Russ Weakley. Neerav Bhatt sent us a link to a copy of the message announcing that Nigel passed away. Melbourne newspaper The Age also has an article about Nigel's death. Nigel was a regular contributor to the technology sections of The Age and its sister publication the Sydney Morning Herald.

John Allsopp from westciv has written a short tribute to Nigel McFarlane.

I'm stunned and saddened by this.

My first contact with Nigel was after writing up long list of errata for his first Mozilla book. I made sure he had a chance to see it, in case he wanted to respond to anything. Rather than get angry at me for pointing out all the errors, he said I had "done a great service to the Mozilla community" (which is an exaggeration, but a nice one) and later invited me to contribute to Firefox Hacks.

Late last year I discovered that I had another of his books on my bookshelf, WROX's Professional Javascript.

Nigel and I communicated quite a bit by email, but we were both busy with separate projects lately and hadn't spoken in a couple of months. Last month I did receive a package from him by air mail, with a bunch of flyers for Firefox Hacks. That's the last I heard from him.

Nobody seems to know how he died. I believe he was in his forties, but that's another detail that seems to be missing from every story I've read. (This is where the ProJos come in handy...)

He'll be missed. This was really bad news.

Firefox 1.0.4 Is Out. Go Upgrade Now.

seth@macrobyte.net — Fri, 13 May 2005 12:44:48 GMT

Get the Firefox Update!

Firefox 1.0.4 was released yesterday, and it fixes the security holes mentioned a couple days ago. If you're on Windows or Linux, then you should already have been notified of the update. If you didn't install it, well... hop to it.

If you're on a Mac, then you probably weren't notified of the update because there are some mac-related bugs in Firefox's software update system. It never thinks any updates are available. So, just go download and install it manually. Click, click, pause, click, double click, pause, drag, click, pause... done.

Didn't follow that? It's click this link to the Firefox page, click the link to download 1.0.4, pause while it downloads, click to switch to the Finder desktop (or just use Exposé, much cooler), double click the new Firefox .dmg file, pause while the disk image is mounted, drag the Firefox icon to your Applications folder in the Finder window's sidebar, click to confirm that you want to replace the old version, and pause while it copies the file. :-)

I haven't booted my PC in weeks, but I seem to remember that with software update working properly, fewer clicks are required. Of course, that's probably good. I mean, if you're using Windows... aw, never mind.

Major Security Hole in Firefox

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 11 May 2005 15:19:41 GMT

This report of a major security flaw in Firefox has been out for awhile, but I've been too busy with other things to mention it.

All software has flaws, but this is the first Firefox flaw that Secunia has described as "extremely critical."

In fact, for most of the 50+ million Firefox users, this is a non-issue. Unfortunately, for those of us for whom it could be an issue, it really is very serious.

If you want the whole story, Mozillazine has two articles that are thorough and clear enough as long as you have some technical background.

Basically, it's a combination of two flaws. Both are serious on their own, but when combined they could actually allow someone to take complete control of your computer when you visit a malicious web page.

The first is related to iframes: a page with an iframe can execute a javascript loaded in that iframe, even if that iframe contains a document on a different web site. That's a huge no-no, and is called a "cross-site scripting attack."

The second is so obscure that the Mozilla devs must be banging their heads against their desks in frustration. If you (a developer) create an extension for firefox -- there are hundreds -- you generally offer it to people with an "install link." It's a link you see on a web page that, when clicked, runs some javascript code and offers to install your extension into the browser. One of the parameters you pass to the XP Install system can be the URL of an icon that should be associated with your extension. Here's the bug: that icon's url can be a javascript: url of the form javascript:do_something_here().

That javascript isn't run as part of the web page, it's run as part of the installation system. In Mozilla terminology, it's runing "as chrome." Really, that means the javascript isn't "sandboxed" into the browser like most javascript. It can do anything to your computer.

Now, put the two together and things get really ugly. A malicious site includes an iframe -- perhaps hidden from your view -- that opens a page in one of the Firefox extension sites like updates.mozilla.org. (That site is automatically "trusted" by all Firefox installations: you can go there and install extensions because the site is already in everybody's list of "trusted sites.") A script on the malicious site runs the install code on the trusted site (loaded up in the iframe... so it's exploiting the first bug, above), and passes a javascript: url for the icon URL, and immediately has the ability to do anything to your system that it wants to.

That was a little more thorough than I first intended, but maybe it'll help if you don't understand what's written in other places.

The good news is that there are only two web sites that are "trusted" by all copies of firefox (updates.mozilla.org and addons.mozilla.org), and they've both been modified in a way that prevents the attack from happening. (Probably by not loading the install scripts in the page when the page is loaded into a frame. If the script isn't there, it can't be exploited.) More good news: Firefox 1.0.4 is being readied now, and it fixes both of the bugs that made this possible in the first place.

99.9% of users (I'm guessing!) aren't vulnerable, because they haven't added other sites to their "extension installation white list" (ie, they still only have two sites that are allowed to install anything). However, some (including me) have added sites. If some dweeb can guess what sites I might have added to my whitelist, and I visit the dweeb's web page, he'll own me. My risk is easily avoided: I've just removed the eight non-Mozilla sites from my whitelist.

Make sure you update to 1.0.4 when it comes out, later this week!

New DevEdge (Finally) Showing Signs of Life

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:00:00 GMT

The Mozilla Foundation's Deb Richardson reports that a temporary mirror of the old DevEdge is now available:

http://devedge-temp.mozilla.org

What were working on now is getting the DevEdge content migrated into the new Devmo Wiki, and we could really use some help. The Devmo Wiki (currently in Alpha state) and information about helping us out can be found here:

Devmo Wiki
Devmo: How to Help

Cool! I've been waiting for this for over six months! I'm very busy right now, but I'll be helping out as much as I can. This is important.

The Unpublished Hack: UDDI in Mozilla

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 06 Apr 2005 15:31:57 GMT

This is one of the five 'hacks' that I wrote for the book, Firefox Hacks. It wasn't included in the book because it's too geeky even for most advanced web developers, and Firefox's support for UDDI is incomplete. Still, if you need to work with UDDI, then Firefox could make an excellent test-bed because it's so easy to rapidly develop a user interface, and the missing pieces are easy to download and install.

This guide is just intended to help you start working with UDDI in Firefox. It's not comprehensive, by any means. If you know nothing about UDDI, the best you'll get here is a link for learning more somewhere else.

Note that everything mentioned in this 'hack' applies equally to Firefox and the Mozilla Application Suite (a.k.a. Seamonkey).

Read Hacking on UDDI in Mozilla or Firefox.

Slashdot Did and Did Not Like My Contributions

seth@macrobyte.net — Sat, 02 Apr 2005 20:39:42 GMT

There's a review of Firefox Hacks on Slashdot.

Overall, the reviewer liked the book. He even mentioned my contributions! You'd think that was a good thing. You'd be wrong.

I have to say I felt the chapter on Power XML (with 17 of the 100 hacks) was far too general on Web technologies and a little out of place; easily half the hacks in that chapter could have been dropped without any real loss to a reader's understanding of Firefox. I would have preferred more on the browser itself. No insult intended to Seth Dillingham, who wrote four of the hacks I'd throw out -- they are well written and do show how best to deal with Web technologies inside Firefox. I just felt that the space would have been better devoted to more "core" topics.

Nigel and Bryan had enough trouble coming up with 100 topics. With that, and the fact that Firefox has the "highest market share" among technophiles and web developers, can you really blame them for including some topics related to web development?

So, he liked my writing, but didn't think it belonged on this book. Could have been worse.

MacMerc.com Reviews Firefox Hacks

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 31 Mar 2005 13:23:29 GMT

MacMerc.com: Review >> Firefox Hacks by O'Reilly

For example, in just the first hundred pages you'll learn how to migrate profiles between platforms and versions, tear web pages apart with the DOM Inspector, detail security limitations and deploy Firefox on a network. In the next couple hundred pages you'll get into advanced topics like working with XML-RPC, SOAP and other XML technologies, developing applications in Mozilla's XUL and hacking into the core of Firefox itself modifying menus and behavior. [emphasis added]

Cool! Of all the topics they could have mentioned in this book, they picked some of mine.

On that note, I'd like to remind everybody that buying Firefox Hacks through one of my links (or anything else through one of my links to Amazon, as seen on most pages on the web site) will help me raise $6,000 towards the PMC, for cancer research and treatment. So far, I haven't sold anything.

My Contributions to O'Reilly's Firefox Hacks

seth@macrobyte.net — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 16:12:48 GMT

During the final quarter of 2004, I spent about eighty hours writing five hacks for O'Reilly's new book, Firefox Hacks. (Nigel McFarlane wrote the bulk of it.)

This story, which is both a journal of my work on the hacks and a review of what I wrote, is a little too long for the home page. You can read the whole thing at Articles -> Mozilla -> Firefox Hacks.

Long Live Firefox!

seth@macrobyte.net — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 17:29:36 GMT

People are afraid of change. The Mozilla Foundation is being hit by that fear, in a big way: there are a few very loud users demanding that the Mozilla Application Suite, also known as Seamonkey, not be abandoned in favor of Firefox and Thunderbird.

I think they're nuts, personally. The app suite was cool and powerful in its day, but I definitely prefer the lower overhead and cleaner UI of Firefox... and nothing was sacrificed.

Neil Deakin weighed in today. (He's the man behind XUL Planet, an indespensible resource for anyone developing anything for the Mozilla platform.)

Can you feel the tension is the air? I sure can. It's the point when Mozilla starts collapsing.

Neil's pointing out that although the SeaMoneky supporters are doing what they were (mistakenly) told to do -- that is, organizing themselves and considering a fork -- there aren't enough active key Mozilla developers for the project to afford a split.

His message applies generally to all projects. Without strong leadership (which the Moz Foundation isn't yet providing on this issue), even an established project risks fracture and disintegration.

DevEdge is Coming Back, as DevMo

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 28 Feb 2005 13:53:15 GMT

According to Mitchell Baker, the top dog at the Mozilla Foundation, they've finally reached an agreement with AOL on the old Netscape DevEdge content.

We've reached an agreement with AOL that allows us to post, modify, and create new documents based on the former Netscape DevEdge materials.

I first mentioned the disappearance of DevEdge on October 10th. Since I still use(d) the devedge sidebars all-the-stinking-time (especially the CSS2.1 and HTML sidebars), I was forced to recreate them from the Internet Archive and serve them locally.

Now Mozilla has hired Deb Richardson full time to manage "DevMo," which is going to be the new Mozilla.org site for developer documentation. I was hoping that person was going to be Nigel McFarlane (but that was based on nothing more than rumors). Hopefully he will be involved in the project: as with all open source projects, the Mozilla project has precious few talented technical writers in its mix of active supporters.

Free Books from O'Reilly! (Sort of.)

seth@macrobyte.net — Mon, 21 Feb 2005 22:33:03 GMT

Last year I contributed five articles to a book that O'Reilly is publishing in March. For the insane amount of time I put into my articles, the pay was very bad. That's not a complaint: I knew what I was agreeing to from the beginning. I took it on because I'd like to do more writing, and I'd like to start developing a reputation in the area covered by this book. (How odd, then, that I'm not yet ready to say what that is!)

There was a bit of confusion when I first signed the author agreement, so I wasn't terribly surprised when the check didn't show up at the appointed time. I contacted the editor, who apologized profusely... and then more than made up for the delay by allowing me to pick out a few books.

I've had three books on my Amazon wishlist for months, so I just sent him that list: Perl & XML, Programming Web Services with Perl, and the fourth edition of the venerable JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. All three arrived today. Ehhhxxxcellent!

Over the years, my most-ever-used technical book has proven to be the second edition of JavaScript: The Definitive Guide. O'Reilly sent it (and seven or eight other titles) for helping to edit Matt Neuburg's Frontier: The Definitive Guide.

It seems a little odd that the JavaScript book is my most used, considering how rarely I talk about js here or anywhere else. I mention UserTalk-related stuff all the time, but never refer to any UserTalk documentation (I think the whole language is stuffed into my head already). JS is probably my second most used "language". Perl is next on the list, though that's just in the last couple years. (I'm not counting HTML or CSS as languages, and C comes in bursts).

Back to the original point: do they count as free books, when they're thrown in as a bonus after eighty hours of labor? ;-)

Scott Andrew: "Where I've Been"

seth@macrobyte.net — Sun, 28 Nov 2004 15:53:13 GMT

While doing some research for a paper (which, in fact, is due this afternoon!), I happened upon the home page of Scott Andrew. Scott is the author of the XML-RPC JavaScript Message Builder, one of only a few browser-based XML-RPC javascript libraries.

Anyway, his music is the only reason I'm mentioning this right now. He's really good! Good enough that I've finally used up the last few dollars of an iTunes gift certificate (thanks Clark!) to buy his album, Where I've Been.

He actually offers all of his music for free on his site. So why purchase it? Well, for starters, it was only $6. Also, go read Different Currencies, where he describes his support for P2P and filesharing. After reading that, of course I paid for it!

Funniest Bug: $50 from Hyatt

seth@macrobyte.net — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 09:10:04 GMT

Ben Goodger, Firefox developer, filed a bug in Bugzilla years ago. The bug was pretty simple: it just said David Hyatt should give him $50 for no reason at all. It's a funny one. Lots of knuckleheads commented on it, some tried to change it, people who didn't really get it.

The funniest part of all is that now the bug is closed, Verified Fixed. Ben claims that after all these years, Hyatt handed it over, and there were witnesses. Mike Connor calls it "the end of an era."