afongen

From the “For Web Developers” page linked to from the new Mozilla 1.0 start page, I found the Mozilla source generator sidebar, which generates formatted HTML source based on the current page’s DOM. Interesting idea.

One complaint: the output is HTML, not XHTML, even on XHTML pages: the tags are upper-case. This does most decidedly not mean that this is not a useful tool. I think it just needs a bit of tweaking.

Take note of the instructions to add this line to your prefs.js:

user_pref("signed.applets.codebase_principal_support", true);

The script that runs in the sidebar needs elevated permissions, which this preference setting allows.

Note, too, among the documents, a Guide to Mozilla 1.0, which brings together links to some very useful information.

You’ve probably seen it elsewhere, but I have to mention it: Mozilla 1.0 has been released.

Those simple words do not do justice to my excitement.

Apocalypse 5 is out, dealing with regular expressions in Perl 6. Whew!

And it’s looking like there’s a slim chance that I’ll be able to go to the O’Reilly Open Source Convention this summer and see Larry et al talk about Perl 6. Crossing my fingers.

“You don’t survive the cola wars without some kick-ass ninja moves.”

Damn straight.

For some reason, that just cracked me up. The best I’ve read there yet, though: Apple Executives Selling Stock, Buying Puppy. “I told them that a puppy is a huge responsibility that you can’t just throw $19.5 million at. Who’s going to feed it? Who’s going to walk it?”

New three-column design. I made the “mistake” of implementing it without testing in IE/Windows. 8 hours later, settled in at work, I give it a shot in IE6/Win and a couple sections overlap. Stupid friggin’ browser.

I should not be so quick to judge. As I keep pointing out to a colleague of mine who criticizes what Mozilla does to his designs, just because a browser does not act as you expect does not mean that it is wrong. It’s quite possible — probable, even — that in my tweaking here and there I broke something. It’s also possible, of course, that I need some weird workaround for a bug in IE6. I very much would like to avoid ugly hack workarounds, so I may end up having to go to a simpler design.

Just as well, because while thinking about how to fix it I realized that I’m not sure I want a three-column design. So after a quick workaround, back to the drawing board…

Update: for the record, it’s a problem with IE. So there.

Reading about <link>ed RSS feeds, I’m interested. Good idea. “Say, Sam,” I tell myself, “why don’t you check that out with Mozilla’s Site Navigation Toolbar?” A fine idea. But I can’t find it. In vain I methodically check through the preferences. Oh, great. It’s not in the Mac builds. I thought I remembered it there, but maybe not. Hm, maybe on OS X. Nope. Rats.

Wait! Release notes! Maybe I can dig through the release notes and find out whether it’s available for the Mac. Hey, there it is:

The Site Navigation Bar, also known as the Link Toolbar, is not available for this release. (Bug 138496)

Ah. No one has it in RC3. Bummer.

Fink, a project for bringing open source Unix software to Mac OS X, is making KDE available for OS X. Oh yeah. It’s still experimental, though (that is, “There are no guarantees that it won’t delete your hard drive, kill your dog, put water in your gas tank, or make parts of your body randomly explode.”). Doesn’t mean it isn’t good for a lark.

The State of Minnesota will soon stop printing and mailing paper copies of our paystubs (for those of us who do direct deposit) and is making paycheck information available on the Web. Great! I’m glad to see this, and especially glad that the site isn’t blocking browsers other than Internet Explorer on Windows. They’ve been known to do that. There are some minor issues with how it interacts with Mozilla, but nothing that prevents my access to the content.

Well, there is one thing: the site is receiving more traffic than they anticipated and it’s unresponsive. Connections are sometimes just outright refused. They say that they didn’t expect the traffic. Excuse me?! They didn’t anticipate heavy traffic? Why in the world would they not think that some 15,000 50,000 State employees would be hitting this thing on the day that it’s announced? Or on payday?

Sigh.

I’m trying to be polite because these people are my colleagues. But I’m sure you can imagine what I’m thinking.

Optimizing PHP, in which

we explain why optimizing PHP involves many factors which are not code related, and why tuning PHP requires an understanding of how PHP performs in relation to all the other subsystems on your server, and then identifying bottlenecks caused by these subsystems and fixing them. We also cover how to tune and optimize your PHP scripts so they run even faster.

This includes tips for PHP on IIS and Windows, as well as (of course) Apache and Unix.

Not to say that there’s nothing about writing code, either. I learned, for example, that references don’t provide performance benefits for non-object variables. In fact, they may hurt performance. Whaddya know.

Minnesota weblogs.

I was chatting with a coworker yesterday and mentioned my weblog. He wrote, “I hadn’t even heard of blogs before last months wired mag … now I’m bein’ referred to a colleague’s.” Well, here are a few more.

Weblogs have been so much in the news lately that I forget that not everyone knows what they are, much less follows several (or several dozen). It does make me question whether the Powers That Be will be interested in the idea of blogging the MnSCU IT conference, since they may not even know what weblogs are in the first place. I suspect that if there’s enough interest in it from a few people like our college webmasters, we’ll just have to do it to show 1) that it can be done, and 2) whether it’s worthwhile. There’s a strong chance that I’m the only one who’d be interested.