After weeks of work cleaning, building, painting, and moving, we held our first vespers service tonight in the new space for our church. Although we barely had the icons up in the santuary and many still need to be hung in the nave, praying there was beautiful. “Now as we come to the setting sun and behold the evening lights, we praise God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit!” Vespers was timed perfectly: as we prayed, the sunset transformed the interior of the church in a wash of changing colors, a deep orange and then crimson. It feels so appropriate and good to be starting out in this wonderfully almost four-times larger space at the beginning of a new ecclesiastical year. As our new metropolitan, his beatitude, Herman, reminds us, the church year is about the mystery of our redemption. With every year, we learn a little better what it means to repent and be saved. Praise God for his goodness to us over this past year.

O designer and creator of all that is, in your power you arranged the seasons and the times. So now, bless this year we begin through your goodness, give all your people lasting peace, and by prayers of the Theotokos, save us.

Enthroned on high, O Christ, our God, you are the designer and creator of all things, whether visible or hidden from our sight, of day and night, of the seasons and the times. Bless this year we now begin, and preserve your people from all evil, O most merciful Lord.

- Troparion and Kondakion for the New Year by New Skete Monastery

Tony Davis complains (with much profanity) that All Mozilla does is steal Netscape’s thunder. Well, yeah. Read eWeek recently?

Tony says:

I am sick and tired of Mozilla…. Yes, Netscape makes bad decisions regarding problems that should be obvious, but their motivation is in the right place; to make money to pay for engineers…. Netscape engineers are paid to do things that no one else would do (if they weren’t paid for it). Period. Engineers who checkin patches composed of hundreds of files with thousands of lines of code. No kid working after school in his basement is going to do that…. Oh, and the majority of code contributed to Mozilla.org comes from Mozilla engineers PAID for by Netscape.

All Mozilla does is steal Netscape’s thunder. They release a product that is in reality Netscape 7.0…. If Mozilla.org had never released a browser with pop-up blocking in it (no matter how cool that is, and no matter that it doesn’t work correctly - it breaks Netscape Radio and several other features) no one would be using that same feature to slam Netscape.

But Mozilla’s not Netscape, right? Let’s be frank: Netscape 7 is getting slammed because it deserves it. Instead of focusing on the customer, Netscape 7 annoys the customer. I don’t want a dozen AOL advertisements sprinkled around my system. Adding them will not improve your chances of gaining my business. I do want popup ad blocking. The differences between Mozilla and Netscape are few. Mozilla, however, doesn’t annoy me (other than the UI problems that it shares with Netscape 7), and is ahead of Netscape in features I want (popup ad blocking, incremental find, chatzilla, javascript debugger). Mozilla just shames Netscape 7 by pointing out that it didn’t have to be frustrating.

The motivation for Netscape 7 seems to be desperation. Blake pointed out good ways to make money from the browser. Hint: they benefit the user in convenience not annoyance.

It looks like Blake pulled his rather venomous August 29, 2002 blog entry about the Netscape 7 release. It’s a shame the blog is gone, I thought it was one of his better ones.

Mike Pinkerton apparently saw it too:

Jinglepants writes:

Are you paying attention now, you ignorant, stupid, incompetent buffoons?

Yeah, i pretty much agree. The management chain at Netscape deserves this one 110%. It was only a matter of time before CNet (who are also incompetent and obvsiouly didn’t even run the product they were reviewing) called us on the carpet and made us pay for our greed.

We told you so. We told you so. We told you so.

David Hyatt also rants about how Netscape managers refused to listen. It sounds like the same story.

Blake ranted about the decision to pull popup ad-blocking technology from Netscape 7. He characterized it as making Netscape look money-hungry and stupid. Reading between the lines, it sounds like many Mozilla developers pointed out that because it was in Mozilla, it would be more noticable when it was pulled, and therefore shouldn’t be removed.

Blake also rightly critiqued the competence of the review at CNet, saying that it was obvious that they never used the browser. He asked why the review compared Netscape 7 to Mozilla instead of more appropriately to IE 6.

Most interesting of all was his comment that it’s hard to feel good about the Netscape release when in 3 days of working on his Phoenix project (formerly mozilla/browser) he’d made a 50% improvement in speed and added a history sidebar as well. He was advocating that management get some people working on real improvements.

Hopefully he pulled his comments because he realized he was a bit heated and not because of management pressure. If anyone has a cache of the story, I’d love to look at it again.

Jon Udell: “What mainly fascinates me about this moment in history is the role of the blog. We’ve turned a corner, I think, in terms of pluralism. Authentic voices on all sides of all debates are heard directly. The world is profoundly more transparent. Given the irreducible and growing complexity of everything, this is a necessary and wonderful thing. I feel lucky to be a part of it!”

Idiotic bug comment of the day: “I for one will not use mozilla for browzing until the splash is changed, or more sensibly just deleted.” You’re not using a product because of the splash screen!? Just add -nosplash to the command line options and go on. First impressions matter, but there are thousands of problems more important than replacing the fire-breathing mozilla splash screen.

I recently discovered that Ray Ozzie is experimenting with blogging. In case you haven’t heard of him, he was the creator and developer of Lotus Notes. He founded Groove networks in 1997 to take groupware in a new, more secure, and decentralized direction. Because of his years of experience, he’s got terrific insights into how users behave in collaborative environments, particularly with regard to security.

He predicts: “If we continue on the current trajectory, e-mail will become the place where you receive stuff from people you don’t know, and Groove and other collaborative environments will be where you work with people you know.” This is already true for me. I already do a great deal of productive work interaction through instant messaging and IRC. E-mail has become a tool for archiving information, exchanging less-pressing thoughts, and spam.

The architecture of our collaborative environment matters a great deal in our productivity and the quality of the conversation, he says. Blogs improve the signal-to-noise ratio by creating distributed conversation threads that naturally omit the spammers and flamers because nobody links to them. If you have a blog, you can participate in the conversation. The conversation can be guided as blogs link between each other. Civilized public discourse can return: blogs allow everyone to have the power of their own press.

Speaking of blog architecture, a number of folks are working on the BlogMD Initiative. The name made me think of medical blogs, but in actuality they are talking about ways to improve the metadata (MD, you see) exposed about blogs. There are other similiar projects: BlogChalking wants bloggers to add geographic and demographic information to their blogs. They’re off to a good start with thousands of people adding blogchalk meta tags, but the data isn’t completely reliable due to formatting issues (Some people use a postal abbreviation, such as TX, instead of the full state name, Texas). BlogMD seems to be focused on data that is typically available on blog web pages, such as last update time and URL. Having a way to access this consistently and programmatically for all blogs would be helpful. And I’m sure there’s other metadata that would be useful.

I’ve got to run to vespers at church, but I also want to mention there is a privacy concern with some metadata, particularly the demographic data available when blogchalking. Many times we read stories in the newspaper and have no idea about the demographics of the author or editor. This hasn’t particularly harmed newspapers. How much metadata should be available?

Awesome. I read some groovy news about gecko feet and now this. Mozilla 1.1 is finally out. Go get it, use it, and spread the word. The Release Notes for 1.1 tell you what’s new. There are many improvements from 1.0.

Researchers at Lewis & Clark college have figured out how geckos can stick to anything. “Researchers found that the tips of the hairs on the bottom of gecko feet are tiny enough to take advantage of a weak attraction between individual molecules called van der Waals forces.” Because the adhesive technique is based on the structure of the hairs and not chemistry or capillary action, it has many possible applications in synthetic form. Imagine tape that works underwater or in a vacuum. Think of tape that doesn’t lose its stickiness and is self cleaning. I can’t wait for Band-Aids that don’t stick when you remove them. This is better than VELCRO.

Ian Hixie provided an insightful quiz to show that there’s more to writing proper markup than running it through a validator. The answers are educational and identify several common misconceptions about which tags are required and how tags should be used. Proper and accessible pages take work beyond what a validator can easily check.

I was happy to get 4 out of 4 in a minute. The errors seemed obvious to me, almost as bad as someone using the <a> tag just to create underlined headings. Based on the results, there’s a lot of educational work to be done to teach people how to create proper markup. The quiz also makes it obvious why automatic conversions from a non-markup format (such as Word .DOC or Adobe Acrobat .PDF) to a markup language generate such poor results.

After a week of silence, I’m wondering if Matthew Thomas has really given up. Perhaps he’s just having connectivity problems or taking a vacation. Come back soon, mpt!

In response to Asa and mpt’s conversation, Basil rants that user interaction != user interface. Basil makes a good point: broken pages cause usability problems, regardless of whether it is the web developer or browser that is at fault. Having some indicator in Mozilla that the page has problems seems reasonable, but I sort of agree with Asa that users will think it reflects their feelings and will do nothing to help them. I doubt most users even notice the little triangle warning on the status bar in IE that says there are script errors. Still, informing the user is better than not. Even Asa is arguing for more information for the user when he describes the problems with installing plugins.

Yay! The bugzilla search form has been updated to the new and much improved version. It’s about time! I wish they’d first fixed bug 155502 so that the search field was focused immediately as with every sane search engine in the world. Oh well, the old one didn’t give focus either.

The incremental find that I mentioned earlier has also been checked in. No UI yet, but you can add the accessibility.typeaheadfind pref to turn it on. Cool.

What if you found a portal to a parallel universe? What if you could slide into a thousand different worlds, where it’s the same year, and you’re the same person, but everything else is different? A world where Weird Al Yankovic is known as Apologetix and spoofs well known songs with Biblically-inspired lyrics? What if you’re already there?

Wow, I miss (whisper it) sliders.

I can’t believe you’re two already. God grant you many years, Quincy James.

Continuing the ongoing quest to find an economical method for moving cargo and eventually passengers to and from space, a private group is planning to construct the space elevator (mirror of the article from space.com). I first read about the space elevator almost twenty years ago in Arthur C. Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise, a story that is fascinating in its sound scientific and technical descriptions. The space elevator is a fairly simple concept: a wire anchored on earth at the equator connects to a platform in space. A lift climbs the wire. The main challenge has been to find a material that is strong enough for the wire. Clarke suggested a cable made from diamonds. It appears that the recently discovered carbon nanotubes have greater strength and will do nicely. So when will the space elevator be constructed? In the late 1970s Clarke was asked the same question. He replied, “The space elevator will be built about 50 years after everyone stops laughing.” It looks pretty serious to me.

Now we have suggestions for the BLINQUEE tag. Not only will it scroll, it will blink, too. Ha ha.

Microsoft will be no longer offering free downloads of their TrueType core fonts for the web. The folks at Typographica asked them why they were removed and got the Microsoft spin, I mean explanation. These font downloads have been offered for five years and were a great resource for older systems. I will particularly miss the very nice descriptions of the development of the fonts, although it appears some of the information is still available. Those descriptions were part of what sparked my interest in typography.

Since almost every recent Windows and Macintosh system has Internet Explorer and these fonts installed, this will not have great impact on the majority platforms. Could it be that Microsoft removed the fonts because many Linux users needed them in order to have readable screen fonts? Hmmm.

Update: Apparently slashdot ran this font story on Sunday. Reader comments indicate that the fonts are available on sourceforge.

Australian scientists have proposed that the speed of light may not be a constant. The proposal is based on the discovery that “light from a distant quasar had absorbed the wrong type of photons from interstellar clouds on its 12 billion year journey to earth. This meant that the structure of atoms emitting quasar light was slightly but ever so significantly different to the structure of atoms in humans. The discrepancy could only be explained if either the electron charge, or the speed of light, had changed. But two of the cherished laws of the universe are the law that electron charge shall not change and that the speed of light shall not change, so whichever way you look at it we’re in trouble.”

Asa added another screen shot of toolbar customization work that is going on. This new screen shot shows toolbar customization working while using the Orbit 3 theme. Nice.

The first public working draft for XHTML 2.0 has been published. Amazingly, Sjoerd Visscher has created an XHTML 2.0 page that works today in Mozilla, Opera, and IE6. I’m not sure whether I should be more impressed by his implementation or by the extensibility of the browsers.

XHTML 2.0 makes a number of changes from XHTML 1.1. Among the more interesting are new tags for <section>, a generic heading tag <h> to work with section, navigation list tags <nl> and <menu>, <line> replaces <br>, and the <quote> tag to replace the short-lived and buggy in IE <q>. “Dive Into Mark” has more about the changes from XHTML 1.1.

One change that concerns me and digiboy | marcus is that <acronym> is treated exactly like <abbr>. Perhaps this is just an admission that IE has supported acronym for quite a while but not abbr. I thought the point of having both of these tags was to help screen readers better pronounce the abbreviation. Otherwise, I see no need to have both.

Update: Evolt.org has an interesting article about the difference between abbreviations and acronyms.

Just the other day I got around to joining the MozDev Mozilla/Browser mailing list and got excited about helping to improve the user experience of Mozilla. Today I read that the original “em be” project has come back to life as Phoenix. It is great to see more projects working on Mozilla UI, but it’s getting a little confusing. Amusingly, the MozDev M/B project is also debating a name change.

Hyatt and Asa are teasing us with screen shots of customizable toolbars. This will be great. I can hardly wait. I hope we hear more about Phoenix soon.

Yes! Somebody made a T-shirt showing the Pac-Man arcade game crashing after someone has played a perfect game of Pac-Man eating every dot and ghost and completing all 256 boards. I want one. It would be an almost perfect (hey, my game play isn’t quite that good) way to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the World’s Fair in Knoxville. Why do I mention the World’s Fair? Well, the biggest thing I remember from it is that Pac-Man was everywhere. There was a special arcade set up and of course people were selling Pac-Man paraphernalia.

Technical writers can make a tremendous difference in the quality of a product if they are allowed to provide feedback early enough in the process. Apparently Microsoft is making this more official with their new UI guidelines for their inductive design. Fascinating. I have noticed that web interfaces are influencing traditional software interfaces. It seems to be a good idea when this involves embedding help text (tips, hints, short instructions) right in the interface, especially since no one reads the documentation. Writers are quite sensitive to complications in the UI even when they cannot suggest a good way to solve the problem. At the least, they tend to write things that make more sense than the typical programmer-speak.

Apparently some catholics also appreciate the smells and bells.

The same blog led me to a page expressing hopes for unity between the Catholics and Orthodox. I am saddened to hear that some Orthodox have behaved so poorly in online forums. I know it is extremely difficult to judge the tone and intent of people in written communication especially email, so I hope much of this is simply misunderstanding.

A mathematician reviews “A Beautiful Mind” and notes its similarities with the film “Pi”. I enjoyed his review and his comments about math inaccuracies in Hollywood films. We shouldn’t be surprised, as Helen points out, Hollywood seems to be inaccurate about every field.

A New York Times article (free registration required) describes the complexities of creating a computer program that can play Go. Unlike the logical play of chess, where computers are able to beat grandmasters, Go is a game of pattern matching and intuition where casual human players can generally beat the best computer programs. Strong human Go players seem to be able to evaluate the board and intuitively make the best moves. The challenge in creating a computer Go player is that processing speeds are currently too slow and that evaluating the board is notoriously difficult:

In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would take about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue [the chess-playing computer that five years ago not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at the time] can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London.

For a computer program to be able to play Go, we will need to greatly improve computer pattern matching techniques and probably create programs that learn from their mistakes. Perhaps someday this will be possible. In the meantime, let’s enjoy playing this ancient game.

The article also reminded me of a scene in the movie A Beautiful Mind (Recommended!). Early in the movie, the mathematician John Nash plays Go and gets frustrated at losing. In a deleted scene available on the DVD we’re shown that the experience motivated the real Nash to create his own game called Hex. He also is responsible for a mathematical proof that the first player should win the game. I need to figure out how to play this, too.