Oxymoronical

As far as mouse types go you tend to find 2 different styles (lets ignore wired mice for now which are the spawn of the devil).

There are notebook mice. These tend to be small, making them uncomfortable for me to use. The big benefit with notebook mice though is that they can come with ultra-small USB dongles, or even better, bluetooth connectivity.

Then there are desktop mice. These are larger, ergonomically designed, with more buttons and all around nicer to use. However the USB dongles you get for them are generally a minimum of an inch long.

My problem is that I use a laptop all the time, I travel with it frequently and I like keeping the same mouse with me that is setup the way I like it. But the notebook mice are too small to use and the dongles with the desktop mice stick out too far which makes them very inconvenient.

What I really want is a desktop sized comfortable mouse that connects over bluetooth (I’d accept a sub-1cm USB dongle but really that just loses me a port). I’ve never found one, do they exist?

I’ll be honest, this post isn’t about Mozilla or even really anything Mozilla related (beyond the fact that it is about a poor web application). However I know that lots of people in the Mozilla community use Dreamhost as their webhost and I figure some of them might want to know to watch out for this and avoid getting into the same mess that I did so I’ll include it in planet feed anyway.

The problem is with Dreamhost’s Web Panel, the service that customers use to administer their web hosting packages. It turns out that certain parts of this panel can’t cope with the idea of you accessing it from multiple tabs or windows at the same time. If you try opening the web hosting settings for more than one domain in different tabs, only the last one you opened will actually work as you expect. Yep, they are remembering, server side, which domain you are editing the settings for.

This wouldn’t normally be the end of the world. I could accept it if there was some error message or it just failed to save the settings for one of the domains it wasn’t expecting. Sadly the panel is not that clever. Instead, no matter which domain’s settings you try to save it always overwrites the domain that was last opened. The panel does subsequently tell you the real domain that it saved the settings for (with a nice green tick to emphasise that everything is fine!) if you are careful enough to read the full message but of course by then the domain’s old settings are gone.

I discovered this when trying to make a change to one of my domains blew away the settings for my secure server, including the ssl keys. Thankfully they were recovered but this sort of thing really shouldn’t happen at all. It seems pretty absurd to me that a modern web application can exist that doesn’t seem to take tabs into account at all.

It’s a shame really because for the most part Dreamhost are the best webhosts I’ve ever used and their panel is very easy to use. Dreamhost’s support team have told me that this is a limitation of the web panel and it should only be used in one window, though there don’t seem to be any warnings about this anywhere. I hate to make sweeping statements like “Surely it would be easy to…” because it bugs me whenever anyone says the same about Firefox, but happily overwriting your settings (and calling it a success) seems like something that should be avoided at all costs.

For a long time now there have been web applications mirroring pretty much all the applications I use locally, email, calendar, spreadsheets, etc. I keep looking at these and feeling like I should jump on the bandwagon, after all lots of the people I work with use them and rave about them so they must be great right? The problem is I can’t figure out what I am actually missing, and most of the time I can spot immediately things I would miss by moving to them.

Obviously one clear benefit is that they are available anywhere in the world, you just need access to any computer with a modern web-browser. But you know what? Wherever I go in the world I take my laptop, or if I don’t it is because I really want to relax and be offline completely. About the only critical thing that I might need to get updates on is my mail, which I do have a webmail access to anyway.

The online services seem to fall down for me in a bunch of ways:

• I like to be able to run applications separately from my browser. I’ll grant you that tools like Prism make this sort of thing possible so that failure is going away slowly.
• No matter how good browsers become I don’t believe HTML will ever create as good a UI as a real application can. For the most part they are restricted to a single window interface, with pseudo windows hovering above looking nothing like platform native.
• They need you to be online (let’s ignore gears and stuff for the moment, I haven’t found the technology to be quite there enough yet). As I said I take my laptop everywhere. I can look at all my mail and calendar without needing to pay for an internet connection in some random hotspot.
• They simply don’t have the features that my local apps do. I expect this to change over the years but many of the online offerings are basic at best.
• How do I back up my data? Seriously, if I want to back up my gmail or google calendar what do I do? If I want to back up my local mail and calendar I just plug in a hard disk and let OSX deal with it. Obviously the opposite to this is that if my machine goes down then the online service will still be there and I’ll only have a potentially stale backup, but my backup is never more than a week old, and I can tell you I’ve lost more data over the years due to online systems going down than local machines breaking.

So here I am, wondering (again) what to do about task management. I keep feeling drawn to things like Remember The Milk because they are all online and Web2.0ish, but I’m not sure quite why. I’m sure I must be missing something critical about using the online apps, but I just can’t figure out what it is.

It wasn’t long ago that I was responsible for developing and maintaining a large number of websites. Like everyone in this role I needed a domain registrar I could trust to be cheap, efficient and most of all keep me updated about upcoming renewals. At the time I had a lot of love for Freeparking. They didn’t (and still don’t) look like much, but at the time I started using them they were all these things. No surprise I carried on using them after I left my last job when registering some personal domains.

Imagine my horror today then when someone else emails me to notify my that the registration for oxymoronical.com had expired the day before. Freeparking hadn’t so much as whispered on the subject and would you look at that, I now have to pay a late registration fee.

To say I feel let down is an understatement. Not only have they over the years failed to even update their website beyond its only-just-working state but now they seem to be actively trying to rip people off. It’s a shame but I guess it is the push I need to move all my registrations to Dreamhost who have been nothing short of excellent when it comes to my hosting. Sadly of course I still have to renew the domain first, then wait 60 days before I can move it.

I particularly like how their support form has “I was not informed of an imminent renewal” as one of the options to choose from. Clearly this comes up quite a lot for them.

That pesky JOEDREW! has tagged me so I guess I have to participate in this thing.

Here are the rules for this particular meme

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

My seven things:

1. Working for Mozilla is my first real honest-to-goodness stint as an employee. Previously all I’ve had is summer jobs, contracting and being a company director, well that and a period getting paid cash in hand that I’m pretty sure was totally not above board.
2. I earned my 15 minutes of fame by getting a small piece of code I wrote while in school published in a computer magazine. It was some assembly code to clear the Commodore 64 graphics memory in about the fastest time possible.
3. I used to enjoy scuba diving. That isn’t to stay I might not any more but I gave it up because, seriously, have you seen the temperature in Britain? It’s damned cold out there. As a university student at the time, jetting to warmer climates was pretty much out of the question. Unfortunately having a real training in how to manage equipment and dive safely has left me very wary of the risks involved in the quick dive options you frequently find abroad.
4. I currently live in South Wales and have done ever since I moved here to come to university. I originally chose here partly because they were about the only university doing the course I wanted, partly because the university was on the beach and partly because it was far enough away from my parents to not need to go home to visit all the time.
5. I am moving to America, hopefully as soon as May. This probably isn’t that much of a surprising fact but I am very happy that it is happening and looking forward to actually being able to work out of an office with colleagues for a change.
6. I once spent a number of months with a shaved head. It all started with a Halloween costume gone awry where it seemed like a good idea to shave “666″ in the back of my head (throw in some red face paint and a dog collar and it was kind of weird). The strange looks I got the next day convinced me I probably should just get rid of it all. For people considering it, don’t do it just before winter, hail hurts.
7. I don’t watch football (soccer for most of you). This sets me aside from the majority of the UK population. Sure I’ll watch the big internationals but don’t bother to ask what team I support. Sports that I do enjoy watching include rugby (like American football but more exciting and less padding) and F1 (fast cars, what more can I say?). Sports that I have enjoyed playing include hockey (field, not ice, not that I was ever all that good and nor have I played in years) and pool (8 ball, 9 ball, it’s all good so long as there is beer involved).

Now to tag people:

1. Mike Beltzner who is my manager and always has something interesting to say.
2. Madhava Enros who is the worlds repository of useful and useless information.
3. Benjamin Smedberg who knows more than is sensible about building and embedding Mozilla.
4. Ted Mielczarek who has the most awesome surname in the world, and is a great guy to boot.
5. Tiffney Mortensen who apparently makes awesome waffles.
6. Sam Sidler who throws awesome parties, I mostly deeply regret missing his last one
7. Majken Connor to attempt (and fail) to even up the boy-girl ratio.

Sorry all of these people are fellow Mozillans, but none of the rest of the world that I know really blog so there you have it.

One of the nice new features in the fast evolving HTML 5 spec is support for specific video and audio tags, replacing the more generic object and embed tags that have been used in the past. They have many benefits over the object tag such as a well defined JavaScript interface, controls provided by the browser and support for multiple formats for the browser to choose between for display. The current beta version of Firefox 3.1 supports this and includes support for playing the Ogg format with Theora and Vorbis codecs included. Opera has support underway as well and it looks like the latest Safari releases also have it (though it seems broken in some respects).

I’ve been trying to find a suitable video format for putting my fractal animations online for some time. Pretty much whatever format you choose you suffer because some platform or other doesn’t have a plugin for it by default. If all browsers are slowly getting ogg support though then that seems to be the ideal choice, so I have re-encoded all the animations as ogg files. Unfortunately it seems that my media gallery software (Gallery2) doesn’t support Ogg, and of course it doesn’t use the new video tag either. This is the world of open source though, so after a bit of tinkering I have it all working nicely. It can generate thumbnails for the animations using ffmpeg (which is already used for other video formats anyway) and will display the video using the video tag.

At some point I might try to push this upstream to the Gallery2 guys, but I after spending some time on their site and finding nothing helpful like a bug tracker or a way to pass patches to them I’m not sure when I’ll get round to it. Until then here are the rough instructions for applying the patch and some other changes I had to do. I’m sure there is some way to automate it all but for this one off case it wasn’t really worth my time.

• Apply the patch in your gallery install directory: “patch -p0 <patchfile“
• Run the following sql in the gallery database: “INSERT INTO g2_MimeTypeMap (g_extension, g_mimetype, g_viewable) VALUES ('ogg', 'video/ogg', 1);” (adjust for the table and column prefixes that you use).
• Deactivate the ffmpeg plugin (if it is enabled), and then activate it (assuming you want thumbnail generation to work).
• Delete the database cache in the maintenance section of the gallery admin.

Of course this means that now even fewer people can see the animations I guess. So if you want to see them then you’ll just have to try out the latest Firefox betas!

Oh, watch out for old versions of ffmpeg. The default version on my webhost (dreamhost) crashes when attempting to make a thumbnail of an ogg file. A build of the latest version of ffmpeg works though.

Apparently I’ve been talking a little too much about interfaces lately

Word cloud

Dear web (I’m not going to insult you and call you lazy like some people I’d mention),

Why is it that even if I’m just adding a tag to a wordpress post it deems it necessary to update the date of the post causing places like planet to republish the post? Surely there must be some way around this that I’m missing?

It’s been a hectic couple of weeks for me and I wanted to touch on a few of the highs and lows before I forget them all.

It started with flights to get me to Toronto (for those of you that don’t know I live and work out of the UK). I was speaking at the Toronto Developer Day as well as attending a Firefox team work week (two things that conflicted more than I would have liked unfortunately). I normally manage to find direct flights but this time I had to connect through Amsterdam which wasn’t too bad, even if they seem even more mad for security than Heathrow. Incidentally terminal 4 at Heathrow is miles nicer than 3 where I normally come from, even if the 6 police officers armed with automatic weapons was a little disconcerting.

The Developer Day seemed to be a success and I hope all the attendees got something out of it. I’d encourage those that didn’t to let us know where we went wrong of course, not point in us running these things if they don’t give you anything. I think the people at my session found it useful, though I suspect I really need to work on my presentation style for such things. I feel kinda bad though that I’m not more confident about speaking and so could have taken some of the massive workload that Mark Finkle took on off his shoulders.

The rest of the week was spent with the rest of the Firefox team either figuring out concrete plans for the immediate future or working on those plans, interspersed with pizza, barbecue and poutine (Who’d have thought that Canadians would mash together some of the quick takeaway foods I used to get here and serve it in a restaurant!).

Next stop was Mountain View, via Detroit this time. I have to say that Detroit is a really nice airport to change at, even if it does mean that you’re probably flying Northwest if you do so.

I had a weekend to kill so on the Saturday a friend took me to a Renaissance Faire. I thought it might be a bit too geeky even for my tastes at first but it turned out to be a lot of fun, not sure you’d ever get me dressing up to attend like many do though. Fairly fun to watch Americans celebrating a history they never had.

Sunday I headed to the Winchester mystery house. I probably wasn’t in a good mood for it to be honest, jet lag had hit me and then the tour guide was a stereotypical over the top American tour guide trying to make every little oddity out to be spooky. Still it was an interesting place to walk around and the gardens were quite spectacular.

Tuesday I headed into San Francisco proper and went to meet up with the guys at Songbird. One of the things I really want to do is avoid writing the add-ons manager for just Firefox so it was good to chat with them about what they would like to see and how important they find the future plans that we’ve already toyed with.

That evening I had a great meal with some new friends at a German restaurant (yes I had to go to California in order to eat at a German place for the first time). I also got to experience the fun of driving out of the city back to MV at eight in the morning. I think I’ll be avoiding that in the future.

Thursday it was fun to attend one of the monthly labs meetups. Pretty cool to see plans for what is coming both in experimental stuff and in Firefox itself. I think it’d be really useful to stream these events so more people can get an insight in what is coming and why. Too often we can land things in the nightlies seemingly without any discussion when in actual fact a lot of thought does go into pretty much everything.

Finally Friday morning was painful. I maybe took people too seriously when they advised me on how long it would take to get to the airport and to check in, and then I added some for safety leaving me getting up at 5am and then ending up waiting at the gate for an hour and a half.

Seriously, why are so many people carrying on multple bags rather than checking them. I suppose I understand the risk of lost luggage but it is getting really annoying when I have to stick my single carry-on bag under my feet, decreasing the already sparse space there, because the overhead lockers are filled with trolley cases.

Northwest has to be one of the worst airlines I have flown. Poor food, very little movie selection, no tv episodes available at all. Thank god I have taken to putting movies onto my iPod so I always have something decent to watch.

Now I’m sat in a hotel room trying to stay awake for a bit longer. After I get back to Heathrow, after some 20 odd hours travelling (and I can never sleep on planes) it seems to be a good idea for me to sleep before taking the final 3 hour drive back home. But I also need to start the shift back to UK time. I shall probably be waking myself at around 3am for a leisurely drive back to Wales and then slowly shifting myself a couple of hours a day for the rest of this week.

I’ve finally taken the plunge and switched my website to a more modern blogging software (Wordpress) and a dedicated media gallery (Gallery 2). Hopefully through the magic of redirects most shouldn’t notice much difference. I just hope planet hasn’t decided to dump all my posts onto the front page, if it has then I apologise.

I’ve also taken this opportunity to move all my extensions to addons.mozilla.org. Most are currently still in the sandbox, hopefully they will come public soon. I’m also using the nice new AMO API service to populate details on the add-on homepages, means there is only one place I need to make most changes to.