[ music | Goldfrapp - Ooh La La ]

If you're just here for the cheap goodies, you'll want to skip to this part.

So, sometimes people wonder why I like Dreamhost so much. It's pretty simple, aside from the great price and excellent features, I like them for their honesty and customer service. Some people look at Dreamhost Status as a list of failure. I look at it as extreme honesty. I've used many other hosts over the years, and experienced many with more issues than with Dreamhost, and are never explained, and half the time they lie and tell me there was no issue at all. But, here's an example of why I love their support.

Subject: bad_httpd_conf makes me a sad tree.
From: Grey Hodge
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 17:44:53 -0700 (PDT)
To: DreamHost Support

I went to access part of my site and got a 404. Afraid that the underpants gnomes had moved onto more profitable things like stealing pages, I hit the root of my site. For this I was rewarded with the dreaded "bad_httpd_conf" error of legend. I consulted the Holy Runes, which instructed me to sacrifice a chicken in the ways of my ancestors (that is, with lemon garnish and a side of rice pilaf). Sadly, this did not remedy my problem.

Knowing that dreamhoststatus.com is occasionally relevant, I went there and saw nothing relating to me. Upon seeing this, I immediately started to type out a comment there, since at the top of the page it clearly says "posting in the comments here IS NOT an official way to contact DreamHost" it seemed the most logical thing to do. After misspelling several words and complaining about how every host in the universe is better and that I'm going to move to a host my friend runs out of his mom's basement, I recalled you had this "support ticket" feature, and decided to give it a whirl.

So, my sites give me that error, and I'd like them not to. I would much prefer to see my carefully crafted yet half completed sites welcome me with open arms. As I took the time to type out all of this text, I'm obviously in a great hurry, and would appreciate if everyone stopped for neither food nor sleep in the coming days as you labor to deliver my sites to all the internets.

Yours Truly,
Grey Hodge
Gentleman of Great Influence and Stature

It wasn't as though the world was ending, so I thought a little humor would be appreciated. I then proceeded to stare at the clock in agony as the seconds ticked by. An inexorable 12 minutes later I got a reply. 12 minutes! I've had days go by with other hosts.

Subject: Re: bad_httpd_conf makes me a sad tree.
From: DreamHost Customer Support Team
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2008 17:56:51 -0700 (PDT)
To: Grey Hodge

Sir, I am dreadfully sorry that your beautiful sites have suffered this most humiliating indignation, and I have taken it upon my humble self to address the matter in the most expeditious manner possible. Not having a hammer close to hand, and with no negative reflection intended upon your previously attempted sacrifice, I employed my most powerful magic and mumbled assorted arcane incantations over the spilled entrails of a plethora of small beasts I found lurking in, and about, our offices.

The internet Gods must been pleased with my actions, as all of your sites are now back in operation and are displaying in glorious fashion.

Of course, it is also possible that running a quick re-configuration of your apache server did the trick. Sometimes, I must admit, it is hard to discern the truth of these things. I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience this has caused, and will make every effort to prevent it from happening again.

Your humble servant!
Robert The Junior

Now, in the past they've always been courteous and prompt, well humored, and even laughed at some of my past requests' jokes, but this gent decided he'd take it so far as to join in. I loved it and he did an excellent job. I love it when folks can take jokes well.

I promised cheap goodies. I will now deliver. The previous day I got the following email from Dreamhost.

From: The Happy DreamHost Forever Team
To: Grey Hodge
Date: Sun, Jun 8, 2008 at 9:25 AM
Subject: You just got five DreamHost Invitations!

Hey Grey!

This email is to let you know that you, yes you, have just been given five (5) oh so special DreamHost Invitations you can use to invite your friends and colleagues to DreamHost!

Of course, they don't NEED an official invitation to sign up, but if you email them and tell them to use one of these five invitation codes:

[email me if you want one]

... they will get all these super special advantages not available any other way:

• They will get four (4) times the normal disk and bandwidth! [that's 2TB of disk space and 20TB of transfer]
• If they choose our five-year plan, they'll get $150 off!
• If they choose our ten-year plan, they'll get $200 off!

(Each code is good for only ONE sweet DreamHostering referral!)

But.. these invitations are too awesome to exist forever! In fact, they expire in just two weeks, so you should probably get to telling ASAP!

Tell your invitees to use the 12-digit code you give them in the "PromoCode" field when they sign up at: https://signup.dreamhost.com/

So enter one of those codes and you'll get 4 times the bandwidth, and potentially save up to $200 on long term plans (which I expect no one will make use of that part). Each code is one time use only, so once they're gone they're gone. If you order and it says invalid code or whatnot, sorry.

* Update: Someone already used one, so that means there are only 4 left!

[ music | Simple Minds - Don't You Forget About Me ]

Well, it's been two and a half years, and maybe that's long enough. The Mozillaverse is livelier than it has ever been, with more and more happening every day. More exciting applications based on the technologies, new companies being founded, exciting opportunities all around. And in this age of blogs and podcasts and vlogs and feeds, apparently the world needs another voice. Well, MozillaNews is that voice. However, there's a problem! We need writers and content creators. I don't regret the 4 years I spent being MozillaNews' primary content creator, but boy, there's so much today I can't possibly do it all.

We're going to use a new CMS rather than our old custom-built CMS, and while we'll import our old articles, we're going to need new fresh content. So I'm putting out a call across all the Internets, through all the tubes, if you want to be a world famous blogger with the adoration of millions, email me at moznews@burntelectrons.org and we'll talk.

[ music | Foo Fighters - Disenchanted Lullaby ]

Recently someone ran over to WordPress and started a blog about Mozilla stuff. Now, I might have linked to that blog a while ago, but the latest post (as of this date) is nothing more than a personal screed against Mitchell. I never met her personally, but I've hung around long enough to feel comfortable enough to say that I doubt she has any significant personal ambitions of wealth here. If she did she'd have left long ago. Have you read this woman's bio?

But he (or she) did make a few good points, but never got down to the root problems. Mozilla is full of brilliant people. sure, there are some rotten apples, but find me a single organization without them. No one at the top got there by being stupid. However, I think one issue still plaguing Mozilla to this day is management. But there's another old saying that comes into play here, never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence.

Mozilla was founded by some people who had less than stellar social skills to start with, and they came from Netscape. Netscape was the golden child for a long time. Then MS came along and abused their position and ground Netscape down to nothing more than a sticker on the wall. A lot of the spirit of NS survived though, and that's mostly good. But one thing I think that came along that shouldn't have, and has survived like a virus, is an idea that once a decision has been made, it's the right one. Arrogance, that used to be called. It is a phenomenon I am somewhat acquainted with. Humility doesn't always seem to be in sufficient supply at Lizard Central.

Worse, this arrogance had a tendency to make Mozilla look aloof and smug to the community that supports it. The way Seamonkey was handled is a good example. Regardless of how the upper echelon actually felt, they came across as seeing Seamonkey as a bane, a ball and chain, an annoyance best shot and buried. I don't actually think this is what they intended, but that's how many people received the news. the Firebird name fiasco is an even clearer example. It wouldn't have broken anyone's back to say, "Hey, you know what, you're right, we made a mistake, and while we can't change it today, we assure you all that we're working on the issue and it WILL be resolved within a few months." The recent transition of Thunderbird was another example, although was handled a little better. But it was still handled poorly enough to give more fodder to trolls like Truthboy over at his Wordpress blog.

However, I think there's a glimmer of hope. They realized, were convinced, or planned all along and just really don't know how to manage public relations, that Thunderbird is a very valuable property for both Mozilla and the world at large. A property with a lot of promise and potential if handled right. And they're making some really good moves to help give that promise a chance to come true. I'm not sure this kind of thing would have happened 5 years ago. It shows that the success of Firefox, both in users, visibility, respect, and maybe even financially, has had a positive effect on the culture inside Mozilla.

So, what's the real truth about Mozilla? They need more education about managing people, not developers. Some good old fashioned person-to-person human interaction across the board. I think that's really the biggest issue anymore. Now, I know some will say, "Hey, anyone can speak their minds here." The ability to do so, and feeling like one can are two different things. And I think they need someone to help temper some of the language in communications with the community. A little diplomacy goes a long way, internally and externally.

Take it from me. I've never said anything that could be construed as offensive or arrogant.

[ music | Black Eyed Peas - Let's Get Retarded ]

Ok, this is getting really stupid. One might classify it as retarded. In this Gobuntu non-free package list wiki page, Mozilla's trademark policy is called "draconian". I should point out to the Ubuntu crowd that Ubuntu's trademark policy is incredibly similar, with nearly identical restrictions. And in a major blow to Debian fans, Debian has a trademark policy too. Both boil down to the following ideas:

• The organization owns exclusive rights to the name in question with respect to computer software/operating systems (depending on how broadly they enforce the name, and how narrowly a court may restrict them).
• You can make minor changes to the product and still call it by the trademarked name.
• You may not in any way use that name for commercial purposes that could cause confusion. Forget about opening "Ubuntu In-Home PC Repair" or "Debian Computers Inc."
• If you're not sure if you're within these rules, ask.
• If you break these rules, or your use of their name could start to cause confusion in the market, they can and will tell you to alter your practices or even cease using the name.

Why do they need these rules? Because a trademark is IDENTITY. These organizations, just like you and me, need to protect their names and reputations. If I start hawking "Debian Web Browser" that contains spyware, I am damaging Debian's reputation. If I start giving away "Ubuntu OS" for free, and it's just FreeDOS with Ubuntu branding, that's trading on Ubuntu's good name and can make people think I'm REALLY giving out Ubuntu, when I'm not.

And what about their permission to use it with minor changes? If I change the default bookmarks to my website, and give that away in Ubuntu, that's nothing major. If I change the default wallpaper, and add my awesome new band's music to the desktop, and add my really cool "Catapult" game that I wrote. That's pretty minor. However, if I make the default wallpaper Tubgirl, change the bookmarks to porn sites, remove all networking, and make it turn on the PC speaker at top volume all the time, that's going too far because I could make people think this is what these distributions are really like. Don't you think Microsoft would love to be able to get away with trashing user expectations this way?

Well, Mozilla has the same rules. Debian went further than Mozilla was willing to allow, however. So, Mozilla said, "Let us look at your changes and we'll think about it." Debian handed the changes over in one giant monolithic patch, which is very difficult for one person to go over, because they have to reorganize it all themselves to really see what's going on. Debian didn't want to split it out into separate patches. Mozilla was willing to look at Debian's changes, Debian wasn't willing to meet Mozilla half way by making the changes easy to understand. An impasse arose. So Mozilla asked Debian to just stop using the Mozilla trademarks if they insisted on doing things their way. Mozilla can't and wouldn't try to stop Debian from redistributing their code changes, that's what open source software is all about. Debian was well within their rights to keep their changes.

Luckily, for a long time the Mozilla code has had a simple compile time switch that enables you to turn off the trademarked branding and either use the generic branding, or your very own custom branding. It's incredibly simple. The Debian devs had broken that option in all their changes. Let me repeat that. They broke that switch. The very thing that would make this dead simple THEY BROKE. This was the REAL CAUSE of the Debian outrage. They fucked up the branding switch, and it was hard to fix because they fucked it really well and it was going to be a fair bit of work to either fix it, or manually remove the branding.

Let me make my personal opinion of this clear. BOO-FUCKING-HOO. I guarantee you if I was distributing my own respin of Debian in which I broke Apache, Perl, bash, and set X to only run desktops rotated 180 degrees, Debian would pitch a royal fit, justifiably so. They tell me to stop calling it Debian. "Oh, well, that's hard because I went through and hardcoded the name 'Debian' into all the places you see it now." Debian wouldn't care.

Trademarks are not copyrights. Trademarks don't cover source code. You can build a 100% OSI-compliant build of Firefox from the public sources, and you can even pick to use the GPL, LGPL, or the MPL as your license of choice if you want to use and redistribute the code. But you can't break stuff and call it Firefox. That's someone else's identity, and they're not going to let you make it look bad.

And honestly, it's not even a choice. It's the law. Trademark law states that trademark holders must enforce their trademarks or they risk losing them forever. Ever ridden on an escalator, gone to a laundromat, or purchased anything made of nylon? Those were once trademarked terms, but they became so generic in use the holders lost their trademarks. Xerox very nearly lost their trademark, as have Kleenex, and Band-Aid. Adobe urges people not to say "photoshopped" and Google asks you to "search using Google" but not "to google". Having your trademark become a verb is even worse than becoming a generic noun.

So the next time you want to freak out because an organization is protecting their trademark, try to remember that the code is still open source, they're just protecting their identity. You wouldn't like it if someone passed themselves off with your name, would you?

Yours truly, Asa Dotzler.

[ music | Pixies - Here Comes Your Man ]

This is a headline I'd love to see in eWeek or InfoWorld next week. I also predict a certain someone will be working remotely from an undisclosed location for a few weeks.

[ music | 12 - Duran Duran - To Whom It May Concern ]

Today I sent out an email to the WWW-Style Mailing List. I'm sure most Mozillians don't read it, however, so I'm reposting it here for comments, opinions, etc. Please leave your thoughts in the comments as I'm interested in everyone's opinion on this.

[ music | Depeche Mode - Policy of truth ]

I'm a little tired of ignoring a rather large elephant in my room here, so this is me acknowledging an elephant you in all likelihood didn't see. However, I do, and I want rid of it. So I'm going to partake in the typical self-indulgent blog post. I don't want pity, I just don't want to pretend there's nothing wrong anymore.

At the age of 28, I officially became the caretaker of a parent with dementia. If that seems a little young, it is, because the parent is definitely on the young side of the bell curve of dementia patients. And as often the case, I'd been a caretaker for several years before the disease was actually diagnosed. It's amazing how effective we can be at lying to ourselves and avoiding conclusions we want to avoid. I was so good at it I made a complete ass of myself to several people for about six months at the end of 2005 and the start of 2006.

At the start of May 2006, things devolved to an untenable state, and an ultimatum was issued. Either my mother checked herself into the hospital to determine what's going on, or I would. In a wonderful turn of real life melodrama, my statement was, "I'd rather have you hate me and be well than love me and be sick. One way or another, this is going to happen, today." She checked herself in, and within a week, we had the diagnosis.

Dementia is a spectrum of diseases rather than a single specific one, with the most commonly known type being Alzheimer's disease. Dementia tends to describe the condition of the patient and symptoms rather than the cause. She doesn't have Alzheimer's, nor does there seem to be any easily recognizable gross organic defect like what you see in Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, or Dementia with Lewy Bodies.

She was started on several medications immediately, two of which I cannot speak highly enough. Aricept and Namenda. Her reaction to these was rapid and incredibly positive, far more than one would expect reading the literature. Within a few weeks she was significantly more lucid and coherent, and far more capable than she had been in quite a while. She wasn't perfect, but in these situations, you'll take 80% of normal when you can get it. For roughly a year things went so much better. For that year I an unable to express my gratitude.

However, about two months ago, things started to decline again, with alarming rapidity. Last week we went back to the doctor after only having a check-up three months ago. We tried some adjustments to the meds, and things looked to improve a little. Until Thursday. Without unnecessarily delving into detail, I was forced to hospitalize her again to see if we could see what was going wrong now. It's somewhat of a crisis, and things have never been this bad before. Things were actually quite fine Wednesday, we enjoyed the local fireworks display. I don't know what changed, and I don't know where things will go from here. We'll see shortly I assume. There's a meeting tentatively scheduled Monday with the doctors at the hospital.

I'm saying this because I need to unload, and to stop acting like this stressor doesn't exist. I'm also saying this to remind people of the old saying, "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans." It's rather prophetic that John Lennon said that the year he died. Three dear friends lost parents of their own recently. One's father died of heart disease, another's mother to ovarian cancer, and one just a month ago lost both to a car crash. My situation is by no means unique or unusual.

I never had a good relationship with my father, but I love my mother dearly. If you got along with one or both parents, pick up the phone, talk to them, tell them you love them, whatever. But cherish whatever time you have with them, your siblings, your kids, your friends. Life is far too short, and goes by far too fast. It's like falling from a cliff at night: it's exhilarating, it's scary, and you never see the end coming. Enjoy it while you can. Every day can be the most wonderful gift in the universe.

Just don't get caught making plans.

[ music | Breeders - Do You Love Me Now ]

[ music | DJ Format - We Know Something You Don't Know ]

Now on windows? But Firefox has always been on Windows. Oh, you mean your browser. How cute!

Update: Ok, I'm using Safari right now. Actually, it's nice. The biggest thing I can say is we have to find out what they're doing for font smoothing and steal it. It's magnificent.
Firefox text demo 1
Firefox text demo 2
Safari text demo 1
Safari text demo 2

[ music | OMC - How Bizarre ]

Well I guess I can talk about it now. The papers are signed and the plane tickets are bought. I've been hired by Mozilla Corp! Since everyone knows that MoCo has been in freefall since the release of FF2, with a precipitous drop in revenue, I've been brought in to revitalize the company. The first step is to bring direction back to development. To further that goal, we're dropping Gecko and moving to WebKit. WebKit is obviously more stable and well developed, and has much more room for growth than Gecko. Gecko is stagnant and has reached the limit of its expandability. This has been a well kept secret, and everyone's been denying it for several years. WebKit is lighter and faster, and Gecko is just getting too bogged down with too much code only bz understands.

Second on the agenda will be to move WebKit development onto Vista. Vista is obviously the future, with people upgrading by the dozens every week. This will also allow us to leverage Vista's enhanced Digital Rights Management features for the third prong of my new Mozilla Corp plan, SecureWeb.

SecureWeb is an entirely new way of browsing the web, and delivering content in a completely secure manner. SecureWeb puts content owners and developers where they should be, in control of the user. With total control over the browser experience, things like browser incompatibilities are a thing of the past because you can't browse SecureWeb without Firefox 3 Secure Edition, and that only runs on Vista. And since content developers are in total control, there's no worry about security breaches because only Licensed Content Providers are allowed to develop for SecureWeb. Content Providers will be approved by the LCP Board, which is comprised of Mozilla, Microsoft (our Fully Qualified Partner), Google (another Fully Qualified Partner, and SecureWeb cofounder), the MPAA, the RIAA, and SCO.

I'd like to take a moment to thank everyone who made this possible, and it'll be an interesting ride!

[ music | Badly Drawn Boy - Pissing In The Wind ]

MozillaZine's forums are nearly worthless these days. I know of moderators that have been complaining about other mods for ages, but now they've taken to new lows. Today, Daifne has seen fit to mouth off and scurrilously accuse the wife of a lead developer of trying to scam people out of personal data. Basically, the egos on some of these people would be laughable if it weren't so sad.

For the sake of this discussion, we're going to ignore how Lucy was the prime mover on the "Bookmarks missing after installing Firefox 2" problem when FF2 was first released. Why? Well, because Daifne did. Either out of ignorance, or because she was too lazy to check up on a person before accusing them of nefarious activities, she put her foot squarely in her mouth, with her sidekick "malliz" there to keep the foot embedded. When learning identities later, Daifne didn't bother to do anything like apologize or even acknowledge a mistake, she instead decided to defame and insult Mike Connor.

And yes, after watching the forums at MozillaZine go downhill for years, I had enough. I made a statement. I stand by it. There are too many trollish moderators at MozillaZine. And it's sad.

At least Lucy was able to still help the user. Not that it mattered to the mods.

P.S. Wow, ok, well, they're still at it. Daifne? Can you hear me honey? You're a troll. And I'm not the only one who is saying so. (Please don't post, just read unless you're going to be constructive)

P.P.S. Ok, Dartman? You can go to hell too.

P.P.P.S. Wow. Mega kudos to Alex Bishop for this post. He said everything I was thinking in a far more cogent manner than I did off the cuff. Bravo.

[ music | Dave Brubeck - Unsquare Dance ]

Now, first off, I think The Rumbling Edge is a nice blog that does a great job of covering Thunderbird related updates, much like The Burning Edge does for Firefox related changes. However, considering it is being hosted by MozillaZine, I think it's a little top-heavy about ads. Here's an illustrated screencap of the first screen, or "above the fold", what you see before you scroll down. My screen is 800 pixels high, and I've cut out most of the chrome in the screenshot. The numbers below deal just with the content pane, also. Red is ads, green is content, blue is "chrome" like the title and RSS feed link, and the grey is whitespace.

Now, roughly 43% of that is whitespace. 46% is ad space or revenue-generating links such as the ones to download Firefox, etc. 6% is actual content, namely links to recent builds, and the download counter. I'm being generous with the term "content" here by defining it as useful updated information. Lastly, 5% is the title and tagline, and the RSS feed link. Even adding that into content, 46% of the above-the-fold area is ads, 11% is content. There is more ad-spade than whitespace. Further down there are two separate Paypal donation buttons. I'm all for making money off your work, but this is a little offensive. I have ads here, but none of it blocks content, and you don't have to scroll to get to the content. I only hope some of that ad revenue is going back to MozillaZine.