Archiv für den Monat: März 2005

Waking up

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It’s been another long night. On the Autobahn. In the snow. It’s winter. I need a break.

After visiting FOSDEM, I was heading to Amsterdam talking to people of the What The Hack organization about this and that. The CCC is going to be pretty much involved in that event and I am going to talk about it much more about this here in the coming months.

On the way back from Amsterdam to Berlin we made a stop in Hamburg, visiting the CCC in Hamburg. We arrived pretty late due to the snow but we had a chance to meet a couple of old and new people and to have a chat. Everybody is suprisingly relaxed about the organisation of Easterhegg 2005 but I guess this will change soon as the event starts in three weeks.

Now I am back in Berlin, in hacker jet-lag. Must… adopt… to… real… world…

FOSDEM III: Mozilla

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One of the developer teams at FOSDEM was the Mozilla project. I stayed with them for a while and listened to what they have to say and to announce. First of all, it was apparent that the crowd was really proud of what has been achieved so far. This is no surprise: Firefox is taking the market by storm and is about to make life for Microsoft significantly harder. Thunderbird is about to do the same for the e-mail market but here is an even longer path ahead before we will see results.

The deal with Google (putting the default start page of Firefox on their servers) is a win-win situation. Google gets the hits, Mozilla gets the money. The Mozilla project significantly earns from this relationship and has engaged a long list of new employees recently because of this new income. Click a link, sponsor a programmer. Supporting open source was never easier. Apparently, around 80% of the users stay with the preconfigured start page. So this might work out fine in the end.

On the technical side, more consolidation seems to lay ahead. The „Mozilla 2.0“ effort is about to change the foundation of most Mozilla apps to provide an even more solid and flexible „kernel“ for the applications. This might translate in more consistent behavior, smaller apps and more OS integration but I am not holding my breath for the Mac. Mozilla’s Macintosh support has been a nightmare from day one and while Firefox has improved on this, it’s still far away from where it could be. This is a result of focus (Linux, BSD and of course Windows are primary targets) and man-power (not enough Mac hackers available) which seems obvious. So there is nothing to complain about in general. It’s getting better all the time…

Talking about the Mac: the presentation of the Camino team was quite interesting and I decided to go for a current nightly build to check out the new features. I have been using the tool two years ago but quit due to technical problems and the emergence of Safari. So what shall I say? I was blown away! Not in terms of features – Firefox, Safari and OmniWeb all have much more to offer – but in terms of speed! The perceived velocity is around 200% to 300% compared to the other options. No delays, straight and compliant rendering and very good Mac OS X integration. Stunning. I have switched to Camino as my default browser for a week to see how this works out under heavy usage. But this small app is a beauty and it’s by far the best integration of Gecko on the Mac.

Working on it

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This weblog is still in the resurrection phase. During that phase anything may happen. Foremost, I am working on reestablishing the content of my previous blog which is halfway through right now. I have been struggling with XSLT and SQL a lot and it’s sort of fun – although probably not to you, dear reader, waiting for philosophical and insightful ramblings about the world and the state it’s in. We’ll get to that in between ;)

I am playing around with the design here as well, starting with the currently available themes for WordPress which turn out to be quite impressive in general. Weblog design has gone a long way in the last years and it’s ever more apparent that it’s been the driving force behind web design and web standards recently. This is good.

Talking about tools: I am writing this using the excellent MarsEdit weblog editor that I have been using for a while now and that I can nothing but recommend. Kudos to Brent Simmons at this place whose development process I have been following very closely in the last months and I am nothing but deeply impressed how he combines friendliness and excellence in programming. This is outstanding.