With the switch from CVS to Mercurial the ongoing work for the next major release of Firefox 3.1 is happening in mozilla-central now. That’s why using Bonsai to query for fixes within a given time span will not work. So what’s the replacement? How can you search for checkins which caused a regression?

It’s as simple as that. Since yesterday the web frontend (pushlog) supports querying by date. You can use the same date format like it was used for Bonsai or just enter “yesterday”, or “today” which will also work. Sweet! Thanks goes to Ted Mielczarek who implemented this enhancement in bug 437445. Now it only has to replace the changelog/shortlog pages and should be shown by default. Hopefully this will happen soon. Until then just bookmark the above URL.

The next week or better days will be really exiting. As a contributor to the Mozilla project I was invited to join the Firefox Summit 2008 in Whistler, BC, Canada. Thanks for getting the chance! It’s deeply grateful. I’ll enjoy the days in listening to talks, having discussions with other community members and employees of Mozilla and just be able to see each one in real life (Steven, this time it will really happen!).

Together with Abdulkadir Topal, who co-ordinates the German translation of Firefox and helped me a lot with the website translation, we will reach Vancouver this Thursday evening. So we have 3 days to explore Vancouver and the area around. There is still a plan of things to do but its not final. So if anyone is interested to join us, you are welcome. Just ping me in IRC or add a comment here. Otherwise see you on Monday!

Some hours ago Mozilla has advertised the release date for Firefox 3! So this wonderful piece of software will be official available on June 17th, 2008. Amazing work was done during the last three years which result in a huge list (approx. 15.000 of them) of new features and improvements. Deb Richardson has written a field guide for Firefox 3 which describes the most impressive ones in detail.

Anyone who is interested in Firefox 3 should also pledge to download Firefox 3 by June 18th. It will help Mozilla in trying to set a world record for the most software downloads within 24 hours. Read more about the Download Day 2008.

Don’t forget: Spread the word around and inform your family, friends, and colleagues!

In February last year I bought my first MacBook with OS X 10.4 alias Tiger installed and I was happy to say “Hello” to the Apple folks. Ever since it was a bit of work and I had to learn a lot until everything worked like expected. But there is still one thing which bugs me when running Firefox or Thunderbird on a fresh OS X installation. Both applications don’t use a reasonable temporary folder. Instead files which are opened by helper applications are stored under ~/Desktop or ~/Download and will not be removed sometimes after Firefox or Thunderbird are closed. This results in a really cluttered desktop or download folder. All the following steps have to be done because there is no way to specify the temporary folder from within Firefox and Thunderbird. Both lack an UI or a hidden preference to change this folder. I cannot say when this will be changed, but there is a reported bug about this issue. But lets go on… (more…)

Some days ago I found this really interesting site. Until today it wasn’t possible to compose music by using wav files. Instead you have to use the midi format which emulates (todays nearly perfect) the real sound of the given instrument. But now that’s history! Grab a wav file, select the appropriate instrument, voice, or sound track and move its notes up or down. Damn, is that easy going. I’m fascinated about how that is working. Take a look at the video to also get banned.

The release of the Celemony plugin v2 is set to autumn 2008. So let’s have a great summer and wait for this wonderful piece of software.

What an amazing weekend! Reminisce about the last two years this one was definitely the greatest one at FOSDEM. The main reason why I joined again was Mozilla. And due to there aren’t so many choices to get the opportunity to meet Mozillians, I cannot cancel such an appointment. I met a lot of interesting and crazy people, listened to mostly all talks inside the Mozilla devroom (also known as sauna) and had pulsating and valuable conversations. Mostly I enjoyed to finally met Seth Bindernagel and David Tenser. Both guys working for the Mozilla Corporation and doing (like many others) a really great job. And that’s the reason why Mozilla gets so popular and can celebrate its 10th anniversary this year. Thanks to the organization team of Mozilla-Europe we had an incredible evening in the bowling centre. Sadly I didn’t made any pictures this year. But that’s not as bad because there are still hundreds of them available.

To be a bit more concrete about the topics I had at FOSDEM and work that I’ve taken with me, I will give a short overview:

1. Some weeks ago during a QA session on IRC, Marcia Knous asked me if I would be pleased when Mozilla would support my work. I was happy to hear that because I don’t have the perfect equipment to build my own debug builds under each operating system. This is bad when triaging crasher bugs which only happen under a special OS. Now everything goes really fast. Three days later I got a message from Seth Bindernagel who leads the community-giving program. After some conversations there was made the decision that I will get a new Mac Mini and the appropriate OS licenses. Finally we met each other at FOSDEM and discussed if I would fit into the Community Loan Program. But due to I don’t have a real plan of things I want to do - QA work is really widespread - we dismissed that option. Meanwhile I got the Mac Mini from my local Apple salesman and I will start to set it up within the next days. Hopefully I’ll get some help.
2. Over the last month I heard about SUMO several times. But I hadn’t the change to gain insight into this project. So I was totally uninformed on Friday evening when I was introduced to David Tenser, the smart and blond Swedish guy behind this project. To make matters worse his first question was about the German translation. I had to acknowledge my ignorance. But during his talk on Saturday I get more and more informed about the background. In co-operation with Abdulkadir Topal we will try to find some reliable localizers who are engaged to help translating the Firefox 3 help into German. We plan to do some posts to our German newsgroups and forums. Lets see if we are successful.
3. On Friday I also had the chance to talk with Chris Hofmann about the translation of the Firefox privacy policy into German. Due to the legal text no-one wanted to do that in the past. Now we will give it a try and do our best to create a good first translation. But the final review will be done by a lawyer so we don’t have to know everything in detail. That’s really helpful! Thanks Chris.
4. Stanisław Małolepszy and Seth Bindernagel did a great job in analyzing the latest community surveys. Hopefully we can get some data to be able to have a detail view onto the community in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It looked like we are really a bit behind and not so enthusiastic like the Spanish folks…

Finally I have a lot of things to do right now and will give several status updates over the next weeks.

Who doesn’t know such a situation. It’s a wonderful day outside and you grab the camera to do some nice landscape shots. You are fascinated by the nature that you forget the time. It’s getting darker outside and now you realize that you have forgotten the tripod. So what are you doing now? It’s just simple. Watch the video and you will see how you can build your own stabilizer with easiness.

$1 Image Stabilizer For Any Camera - Lose The Tripod - The most popular videos are a click away

A more advanced version can be found on concept-club.de. But there are still some things which could be enhanced, e.g. a variable cord length so you also take a photo while crouching. I believe that I’ll have something to think about in the near future…

Seen today on kwerfeldein.de.

Nowadays I ask myself once again if we will get a strong winter with snow in Karlsruhe this year. Sadly I don’t really think so. If I take a look into the garden I can always see snowdrops flourish. We had too much sunny days in the last weeks. Same for today with about 10 degrees outside. It’s really hard to stay at home when sunbeams wake you up in the morning. Thats why I decided to enjoy this wonderful day and to have a first ride with my new racing bike, which I bought from my bike dealer last December.

For myself a long term wish comes true and I’m really happy to own a racing bike from Cannondale now even when it’s second hand. It’s a R800 Sport and was produced in 2003. The frame is made of Aluminum and it is damn lightweight against my other bike (F600 SL). You can really feel the ease while riding and reaching 40 km/h isn’t a problem. The only trouble I had is holding this speed.

I think it’s time to start this year’s training. Woohoo, it’s so cool…

Hey, what’s up with my Tiger? I didn’t realized it all the last weeks but why there is no keyboard shortcut anymore to cancel a dialog? It was a fine thing to only have to hit the space key. I mainly used it within Lightroom to delete an image from the database. But as I see now, the button hasn’t a small blue border anymore. It’s cumbersome to grab the mouse and navigate to the cancel button.

Does anyone of you also have this problem? I could imagine that this regression was caused by the latest Apple update 2007-009 which also half-killed my OS X installation.

Update: The button I talked about isn’t cancel itself, sorry. What I mean is the optional button e.g. “Delete from Disk” within the following image:

Update 2: See comment 4 for the solution.

After two weeks of inactivity and relaxing I’m back at home and will start working again tomorrow. So I wish all readers of my blog a happy new year. I hope everyone of you had a great time and was able to collect enough energy for 2008. Let it be a surprising year!

With the first post in 2008 I want to start a small survey because I don’t know anything about my readers and what they really expect in reading my blog. I would be glad if you could take some seconds and answer the following questions:

1. I switched the language of my blog to English a while ago. Are you happy with that change?
2. Did my posts reach your interest? What should I improve and should I blog more often?
3. Are you happy with the design/navigation?
4. A while ago I added a photoblog. Do you have some ideas for improvements?
5. Any other comments?

Thanks!