Open Source Development

Mozilla Developer Days

Thursday, 18 September 2008 11:18 Jason

Unfortunately, I missed the first day of the two (which probably would have been the more useful day to attend), but was able to make it for the morning half of the second day, for the testing seminars. Since I currently have no experience with writing anything for Firefox, and didn't attend the first day, I wasn't able to connect what they were talking about with much, nor was I able to try anything out, since I didn't have a build of Firefox on my laptop at the time.

If it had been later in the semester, after I had started to look nto the Firefox code and had tried writing something for it, I would have been able to know exactly what theywere talking about, and would have learned something from it. As it is, I know I'm going to have to look all this up again at a leter date.

As for the actual presentations themselves, they were quite well done, and the speakers certainly knew what they were talking about. The only thing I woud have changed would have held it later in the semester, even if only by a couple of weeks.

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Green for Open Source

Monday, 15 September 2008 21:05 Jason

With the upcoming election, I think we should know at least a few of the issues each party is fighting for. In this case, I have been alerted to a campaign idea that I believe will have a positive effect on the Open Source community. The Green Party of Canada is promising to ensure that any new software the government uses follows open standards, and to try changing the bulk of the software the Government of Canada uses to Open Source.

While I have severe doubts as to their getting many seats in parliament (or any at all, for that matter), the simple fact that they're saying somehting about it may get others thinking about it to. Getting the idea out there can often be just as good as they themselves getting into power and performing the deed. Presuming, of course, that whatever party does get into power decides to contribute to the Open Source Movement, I would not be too surprised to see some of the big software companies--can anybody say "Microsoft"?--paying off our MPs to continue using their products.

Even if this does happen, if this becomes even a minor issue, it helps the cause, as it will cause a greater number of people to know about--and consider using--open source software.

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Ubiquity: xkcd Archives

Thursday, 11 September 2008 12:55 Jason

This may be fairly simplistic command, but for how often I turn to the comic, I figured it might be useful for others beyond just myself. If you're running Ubiquity, you should be getting a link to subscribe to a command. If you just want the code, it's in this JavaScript file.

This command allows you to search the xkcd comic archives for whatever you enter.

Last Updated on Thursday, 11 September 2008 12:57

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Project Potentials

Tuesday, 09 September 2008 11:04 Jason

Spellcheck Extension for Arbitrary Web Pages

This is the first I'd find interesting to do, and would likely use myself. Coding HTM, you're usually not doing it in an editor with a spellcheck, so it look unprofessional if there is a typo.

Modify Firefox to handle files downloaded to Temp more appropriately

This is an amazin idea, and again, something I'd find infinitely helpful. Quite often one needs to download a file, then decide if they want to keep it or not, whether they know much about the filesystem or not.

Add DTrace probes and scripts for Mozilla code base

Not much i can say about this one, but it just sounds like something that would be interesting to do. It being *nix-only is a bonus in my mind, and having to put little probes throughout the code would make it a lot easier to get a general understanding of the codebase, while actually addin something useful.

Last Updated on Tuesday, 09 September 2008 22:55

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A Paperless World

Saturday, 06 September 2008 02:02 Jason

Reading Steve's entry on "You Can't grep Dead Trees," it got me thinking about how little I use paper-based media anymore. This point was driven home when I went to my Shakespeare & Film class, which is the only class I have this semester where we actually need to purchase a book. My first thought was to look on Project Gutenberg and see if I could find a copy. While I could, I figured it was better to get the edition he told us to, just to make sure everything was the same.

However, the point here is that there is more out there that conforms to the idea of Freedom than just software. Project Gutenberg, for those who don't know, is a collection of books that have entered into the public domain. You simply search for a book, and if somebody has entered it onto the site, you can download it in whatever form suits you best. Personally, I usually get them in the open source Plucker format, so I can just throw it onto my Palm Pilot and read it anywhere. There are more limitations (namely that you cannot edit or alter the original book, unless simply fixing errors), btu you can still freely distribute it to whoever you want, however you want, as long as the copyright information is kept intact. Recently read "The Time Machine", "Frankenstein", several Sherlock Holmes stories, and have "Dracula" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"that I need to go through at some point, all for free.

Then you have any piece of art released under the Creative Commons licensing scheme: It's usually art (pictures and such) but with one of several types of licenses applied, which can be nearly identical in function to many OS licenses. While not always identical, the basic idea of freedom of use is supported and continued, and allows licenses to be applied to a much broader range of subjects than, say, the GPL could be.

What else can you think of that follows the same principles, but doesn't involve source code or binaries, per se?

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