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The Network

Mozilla Network

I'm a native of Athens, West Virginia who can have a lot of things on his mind. Sometimes these things inspire me to type them down and publish them here. Enjoy.

I've never liked the word "blog," although I suppose that's what this is...

ARCHIVES:
December 2007-February 2008
September 2007-November 2007
June 2007-August 2007
March 2007-May 2007
December 2006-February 2007
September 2006-November 2006
June 2006-August 2006
March 2006-May 2006
December 2005-February 2006
September 2005-November 2005
June 2005-August 2005
March 2005-May 2005
December 2004-February 2005
Direct links to posts change when moved to an archive page.

Windows 95
Browser Wars
How to Access WVU MIX Mail in a Conventional POP3 Client






Recommended links:
Billy's Blog
Citizen Keith
Don_HH2K's Blog
The Gate: Lost Windows and Uneventful Events
Life in the Empire
Llais Ifanc Reloaded
Rudy's Corner
Sexy Red-Headed Nuns

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5-11-2008: Wow...

Three days ago, I actually had the privilege of shaking hands with William Clinton, 42nd President of the United States.

I can scarcely believe it myself...

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5-8-2008: The Most Unwanted Song

Ever hear a song that just grates on your nerves? Chances are you haven't heard the least of it.

In the mid '90s, composer Dave Soldier set out on a research project to discover what peoples' least favorite musical and lyrical subjects were. Once the data came in, he set out for a recording studio with Russian-American artists Vitaly Komar and Alex Melamid with the results in mind.

The result is "The Most Unwanted Music:" A 21-minute-long monstrosity littered with strange amalgamations of accordion, bagpipe, woodwinds, and tuba; female opera singing, female opera rapping, children singing off-key (about shopping at Wal-Mart!), occasional bursts of discordant noise, constant shifts in tempo, volume, and style, and asinine clippety-clop percussion sprinkled throughout. Eventually, this mess leads up to recitation of political slogans, and peters out in an anticlimax. Although I tried my best to be horrified by the song, I was laughing too hard throughout. (Tommy will get a kick out of the section around 4:26 vaguely reminiscent of Jethro Tull.)

They've applied the considerations of "most" and "least wanted" characteristics to the realm of visual art as well.

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5-6-2008: Leadership for Sale?

I have a feeling that I graduated from West Virginia University at the right time. The news affecting the institution in the year since then has had...well, a decidedly soap-opera quality to it. It would be downright hilarious if I weren't indirectly affected by the consequences myself.

Last spring, Michael Garrison was selected as the new president of WVU; seemingly in a triumph of political connections prevailing over all else. As one of his first-year actions on the job, he awarded a degree to the Governor's daughter for doing nothing. Lovely.

Needless to say, a fair number of people aren't too happy about that. In the words of one commentator, "You and your administration's disgraceful actions have caused the value of each and every degree issued by WVU to be devalued. You must do the honorable thing and resign." According to professor Larry Hornak, "whether political or not...all actions of the current administration will now be viewed through the prism of political calculation."

Reflecting the crisis, 79% of the faculty senate passed "a motion of no confidence," while over a hundred faculty and staff have petitioned for Mr. Garrison to resign. Of course, that doesn't mean that the president is in any danger of losing his job: The only group capable of inflicting that is the WVU Board of Governors, which is safely stuffed with Garrison's and Governor Manchin's political allies. And even if Garrison did resign, no doubt yet another seemingly-arduous "presidental search" would erupt with its own share of political graft and the interim university administration thrown into limbo for good measure.

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5-3-2008: On roommates, relationships, and related ruminations

It's been one year since I left college at WVU, and more than three since I last set foot in the academic hallstone of a double-unit dorm. As such, my memories of collegiate roommate life are quickly fading away.

Nonetheless, I still occasionally mull about the topic. In a little under two years, I had the fortune of living with five different people from seemingly all tracts of the student body. Some I got along with; others I didn't (to put it very mildly).

My naïvely idealistic attitude towards roommate life was essentially thus: Be quiet and courteous. Don't do anything that you suspect might bother your roommate. Get to know him gradually, and find constructive, unobtrusive ways to share your tastes and interests once you're comfortable doing so. Otherwise, leave him alone, and always treat him in the same way you wish to be treated.

The attitude some of my ex-roommates chose to express, however, was more than a bit different: Do whatever the heck you like. Be loud and boisterous, and never ask for permission from your roommate before doing anything; whether playing loud music or inviting people over to stay. Test his patience whenever possible, and ignore his complaints when his patience breaks. A few profanities and verbal insults never hurt, either.

Suffice to say, the reaction between these two philosophies was ice on fire.

One of the big regrets I have about college is the lack of social relationships I developed there. While that isn't to say I didn't meet any interesting people or make any new friends (I might as well plug Tessa's and Trent's sites at this point), the list honestly isn't very long. During my first two years, I often felt like an outsider in a place seemingly dominated by students whose attitudes resembled the lines of "Huh! Let's drink beer and burn shit! Let's vote for Bush!" During my second two years I had fewer distractions, but my enthusiasm was dampered. I started to get slightly sick of my studies, of my extracurricular groups, of the campus, and even of the city of Morgantown itself.

That said, I'm not one to give up hope: Surely the possibility of post-graduate study could open up opportunities of its own; socially as well as academically. Anything can happen in the future.

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4-29-2008: The Bible Line

Today I awoke to the ringing of a peculiar religious phone call, the dialogue of which proceeded as such:

"Hello? This is Andrew Turnbull."
(Quickly speaking) "Is this a business?"
"Which? Er...what?"
(Loud laugh) "OK, I'd like to share a positive, inspirational passage from the Bible with you this morning."
(Reads off some random verse)
"There, now wasn't that absolutely wonderful?"
"Mmm-hmm." (I hang up)

I feel a bit queasy about it: Although I wasn't pleased with the telephonic evangelism, I passed on the opportunity of making my displeasure known. Furthermore, this isn't the only time this has happened: I received a couple of near-identical calls from an "Appalachian Bible" something-or-other entity last fall. Surely they'll call again.

The saddest thing I can make of this is the fact that the Bible is a collection of anachronistic texts that can be made out to be virtually anything, depending on the verses one cherry-picks from it. Since the caller had the intention of presenting the Bible as an uncompromised book of love and inspiration, a passage like Hosea 13:16 was obviously outside the realm of quoting for the purpose: "Samaria shall bear her guilt, because she has rebelled against her God; they shall fall by the sword, their little ones shall be dashed in pieces, and their pregnant women ripped open." While there are quite a few good verses if you know where to find them, they make up but a part of the picture of the whole. And the overall picture, truth be told, is none too good.

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4-25-2008: Natural Ovens Redux Redux

You never know what you might learn. A few days after posting this, I happened to receive contact by none other than the marketing director of Natural Ovens Bakery, who helped to clarify a few points and address concerns:

Meanwhile, the infamous "Natural Ovens Bread Owner Paul Stitt Sells Out" thread on bestwellnessconsultant.com bears a reader comment from none other than Paul Stitt himself. It's a bit sobering, to say the least:

So there you go.

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4-21-2008: A Look at Opera

As far as web browsers go, Mozilla Firefox is by no means the only choice available outside of the big, bad, blue "e." The Norwegian developers at Opera Software have been dutifully filling in the title of "alternative browser" long before it ever became trendy to do so.

Although admittedly I'm a lifelong Netscape/Mozilla fan, I have dabbled with Opera from time to time over the years. It ran like a charm on my old 486, and nowadays I keep the latest version on hand for whenever I need a change of pace.

Some things I like about Opera:

• Unlike Mozilla, Opera Software make few qualms about supporting older operating systems: Even the newest version of Opera 9 will run on Windows 95. Any software firm still resisting the siren call of unnecessary Windows 98+/IE 4-only APIs is worthy of immense respect, in my book.
• They've always had a knack for innovative features. Not only was Opera the first browser to implement a multi-document interface (in 1996!), but it was also the only browser to employ Windows-native interface controls in the bargain as well.
• It runs faster than any other contemporary browser I've tried. (Except perhaps for Lynx...)
• You can show or hide images at will.
• It provides very helpful status indicators (showing the number of images loaded, and so on) while loading pages.
• Since September 2005, the browser has been available for free. No trials, no ads, no catches. (I'm not entirely sure how Opera expect to sustain their business model now, but there you go.)

Some things I dislike about Opera:

• In Opera 8 and 9 for Windows, the OS-native MDI and windowing controls were removed in favor of an awkward cross between an MDI and a Mozilla-like tab interface, with the inherent advantages of neither.
• It defaults to a weird, non-OS native "skin" upon initial installation. I need to switch over to the "Windows Native" skin, disable special effects, then go into options and disable smooth scrolling before I even find it sane enough to use.
• Its user interface is extremely idiosyncratic. Many keyboard shortcuts, menu options, and feature terminology are different from those of other browsers (which admittedly would be less of an issue if I hadn't cut my teeth on Netscape/Mozilla browsers for thirteen years straight).
• The "Home" button isn't placed on the toolbar by default.
• Likewise, the status bar isn't visible by default, and status messages don't appear on it.
• The scrollbar isn't flush with the right edge of the screen.
• Menu items highlight themselves as I hover the mouse cursor over them. At least they don't take on that annoying Office 97/Windows 98-like button appearance, but I would have preferred an OS-native menu bar in any case. (On a related train of thought, I hacked the XUL of Firefox and Thunderbird to give them normal-looking menus in Windows 95.)
• The header on my site breaks on Opera 9 (and 8, and 7, etc.). Yes, this may be my fault, but if there was an easy way to fix this gaffe (short of completely redesigning the header) I would have done it by now. The horizontal rule crosses behind the graphics on very old versions of Mozilla as well.

Am I being harsh? I suppose not: Every piece of software has its points of open debate, good and bad. If I had really wanted to let out the venom, I'd be critiquing Internet Explorer. Maybe some other day...

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4-18-2008: Natural Ovens Redux

A little while ago, I wrote a short bit about Natural Ovens; the wonderful Manitowoc, Wisconsin-based whole grain bakery founded by biochemist Paul Stitt thirty-two years ago.

Well, it seems as if all good things must come to an end. Just barely over one year ago, the Stitt family sold their business to Alpha Baking Co., a Chicago-based firm with a presence in the foodservice industry.

Although most accounts of the deal implied that there were "no plans to change the number of employees or product lineup," every actual indication since then has implied otherwise. My grandmother in Manitowoc sent this newspaper article along my way. While the clipping in question claims that items have been reformulated "to provide higher levels of whole grains, fiber and taste," her own personal assessment is that "the bread isn't as substantial as it used to be" and that "you will notice the difference in the quality when you taste it."

Karen Hanrahan of "The Best of Mother Earth" notes her own reservations:

A disappointment indeed. Time to fire up the old breadmaker again...

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4-15-2008: Java for Windows 95. No, not Windows 95.

Here's something ridiculous on the pages of Sun's Java.com:

First of all, this specific help page is titled "Java Runtime Environment for Windows 95." In big letters. So far, so good. Then guess what isn't listed amongst the platforms the article "applies to" an inch below? You guessed it: Windows 95.

Second of all, why does Sun insist that Windows 95 users "must use the 1.3.1_xx version" of the Java runtime environment? Version 1.4.2 works: I should know, because I've tested it myself. And as late as 1.4.0, Sun was still plugging Windows 95 and NT 4.0 into its official system requirements right next to everything else. Why the suddenly-absolutist push back to 1.3.1? Elsewhere on the page, they claim that "the best and most stable version of the JRE we can recommend is 1.3.1_xx." By that token, are they stating that their own newer Java releases are worse and less stable than those that came before?

I personally find that nothing on this page makes a lick of sense. (Fortunately, there are always Sick Windows Tricks to look at for a respite...)

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4-11-2008: A Ski Season in Review

Two weeks ago, I wrapped up an eventful season as a cashier at Winterplace Ski Resort.

The job was an enjoyable experience, and I highly valued the opportunity to gain valuable experience and familiarity with a working environment and the schematics of financial transactions. I had a lot of fun as well: It was often exciting to see and interact with a wide variety of people in the midst of dealing in financial transactions.

Some other thoughts and observations:

• It seemed as if the most frequently-uttered customer sentiments in my presence were comments on my voice. "You sound like you should go into radio broadcasting" was a complement I heard two or three times, while at other times the interaction proceeded more like the following: "Where're ya from?" "Athens, West Virginia." "Well, ya don't sound like yer'from around here."
  I have to admit that my voice isn't exactly one that pigeonholes me into the linguistics of the area: Any Appalachian regional inflections I might produce are extinguished under the brunt of my upper-midwest family influence.
• The "cash registers" employed were in fact glorified Windows computers, running something that declared itself as "MicroSale POS for use with Window (sic) 2000, XP." That tagline isn't exactly one that inspires confidence, and in fact I did find the system to be solidly on the buggy side: Once a customer payed for a $4.49 transaction with a five-dollar bill, and the system then prompted me to dispense $1.01 in change. (Oddly enough, such discrepancies largely vanished at the moment I stopped using the "shortcut buttons" for specific monetary units along the bottom of the touchscreen and elected to manually punch everything in instead.)
• To transport employees between the "Mountainhouse" and the main resort building, the resort had three vehicles in its disposition; all of them physically or mechanically decrepit in some way. One of these was a thirteen-year-old Jeep Grand Cherokee with a blown head gasket, a missing fuel cap, over 200,000 miles on the odometer, and a rear passenger's side door with a tendency to pop open unless you physically held it shut. Admittedly, these vehicles were the source of many jokes among the employee cognoscenti.
• A surprisingly large proportion of visitors to the resort were from church groups, coming by bus invariably from points farther south. I never quite understood how these entities existed: Where I come from, church bodies have neither the resources nor the membership necessary to charter buses and organize lavish youth-group trips to resorts several states away. Pessimistically, I might think that religion occupies a larger role in these peoples' lives than it deserves to...
• One other thing I never understood was why some visitors would buy an expensive soft drink at the food court, drink only half of it, then leave the rest on their table for someone else to pick up later. On the same note, I didn't understand why people threw aluminum cans in the trash can when there was an "Aluminum Cans and Plastic Bottles" bin for recycling just a foot away.
• I could tell the story of the child who tried to pay for a bottle of Gatorade with his lift ticket. But, alas, I'm running out of space...

Oh well. I still had a great time!

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4-6-2008: A Tale of Four Films

Photography is a matter that I enjoy, but have had a rather tenuous relationship with over the years.

As a consequence of improvised schedule changes, I ended up borrowing a Pentax K1000 from a family friend and taking a photography class in my sophomore year of high school. After five months of learning a wealth of information about equipment and techniques, roaming around the county on many a weekend camera in hand, and attempting to work in a dark room with disastrous results, I put the camera down. I finally got around to purchasing a second-hand SLR of my own three years later, and have been occasionally shooting in the analog realm ever since. It's hardly a prolific activity, however.

Perhaps because of that lack of prolificity (if that's even a word), I seem to have more film than I know what to do with. A quick search of my junk drawer (that yielded reading fodder before) caused me to discover the following specimens laying about, which probably became too far gone to shoot and process long ago:

The first roll, in its own emblazoned "PhotoWorks" canister, is this bit of ISO 200 stock. As far as I can remember, this came with a solicitation in the mail. (Yes, from the infamous Seattle FilmWorks of years ago.)

I recall once reading somewhere that store-brand and off-brand films can be properly identified by the country in which they're made. "Made in Germany" is a good sign that the substance inside is Agfacolor film; "Made in USA" foretells exposures on 3M Scotch. This roll notes itself as being "made in Italy, finished in USA," so it's anyone's guess what entity actually made the stuff. (A directive on the label to "use by 01/2003" doesn't improve matters, either.)

Unless I'm mistaken, these two rolls were a "present" of sorts by a sympathetic relative. That's the only explanation I can muster; I never use film as sensitive as ISO 800 or as insensitive as ISO 25 stock in normal use.

I might as well provide an explanation for yet another breach of photographic normalcy: The strange white protrusion to the ISO 25 roll at right is nothing more than a piece of masking tape I foolishly used to keep the roll in place on the scanner bed.

With two questions out of the way, the third quickly becomes "how old is the film?" The "Max" roll I'm not as concerned about, but Kodak hasn't used this logo for "Royal Gold" film since the late '90s (or possibly even mid '90s) at least. What would happen if I had it developed? A grain-fest, I suppose, although perhaps the extra resolution afforded by a low "speed" number might compensate a bit...

Finally, the crème de la crème: A roll of black-and-white film hand-rolled by myself for high school photography class, back in 2000 or so. Rolling the film was a simple-enough business; developing it was another matter entirely: I remember one occasion where the silver on my underdeveloped negatives simply wiped off. Perhaps because of the trauma surrounding that experience, I never got around to shooting my final roll. (Of course, the fact that I neglected to fill in any of the information on the label means that the prospect for improper exposure and development is no more abated today than it was seven years ago...)

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4-3-2008: OOpsyXML!

Have you heard? A little while back, Microsoft Corporation unveiled something called OOXML: A piss-poor, proprietary file format with skeletal documentation that hasn't even been implemented by Microsoft. Next thing you know, they're vainly trying to nominate it as an ISO standard for the world to adhere by. Then, guess what? It becomes one!

This is not what is supposed to happen. Ordinarily, ISO functions as a consensus-making body, not a paper-certification mill. The standards they create are intended to be practical, interoperable, and the product of international experts in a field...not a tool allowed to give a single vendor free reign.

Even worse, the whole voting process was fraught with corruption. A number of countries (paid off by Microsoft?) joined the technical committee at the last minute simply to unconditionally endorse the format. In Norway, 80 percent of the committee was opposed to OOXML. The result? Their vote went through as "yes." What the heck?

Regardless of the exact consequences these shenanigans have, one thing is certain: The credibility of the ISO as an infallible, world-renowned standards organization is no more.

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3-31-2008: Happy Tenth Anniversary, Mozilla

Guess what? Precisely ten years ago on March 31, 1998, Netscape did something remarkable and new: It publicly released the source code to what was destined (at the time) to become Netscape Communicator 5. By consequence, they started the Mozilla Organization: An entity overseeing development of the project and harnessing involvement from the community as a whole.

The Mozilla project got off to a rather rocky start. It seemed to be practically a product of desperation on Netscape's part, with Microsoft having pulled their commercial business model up from under them and Netscape 5 not coming along nearly as well as planned.

After a few years, a few false starts, a massive re-write, changes in strategy, stamping out bugs, and quite a few testing releases for good measure, the fruits of the project were borne: Netscape 6.1/6.2, Mozilla 1.0, Netscape 7, Phoenix, and finally Mozilla Firefox. Considering that in March 1998 the source code produced an output like this, it's remarkable how far we've come in...uh, ten years.

Some further links of interest:

• To celebrate the occasion, Mozilla staffer Jamie Zawinski took the liberty of re-creating the Mosaic Communications website of 1994 at home.mcom.com: A homage to the salad days when Microsoft had no online presence and Netscape Communications wasn't even yet known as such.
• Netscape's original announcement of the source-code release from early 1998 is remarkably still online. (The "Choose Netscape Sweepstakes" undoubtedly ended long ago, though.)
• Mozilla Foundation chair Mitchell Baker has a rather interesting write-up on her weblog titled "Mozilla Turns 10 Today."
• A PDF timeline chart tracing Mozilla Firefox and other browsers back to their roots is available on Foxkeh, a Japanese site.
• Finally, I might as well mention a handful of links on my own server: Yours truly's Mozilla Network (that I finally gave a layout update to at long-last), and the Visual Browser History detailing the evolution of the Mozilla project from the days of Netscape 4 to Firefox.

(Here's bit of trivia: In around 1999, my alma mater used the Mozilla project as the basis of study for a software engineering class. Both the class and the professor who taught it are long-gone, though...)

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3-26-2008: The Quest for the Perfect Saving Place

The other day, I found myself in the midst of a one-sided conversation about retail stores and trends. I mentioned that I missed shopping at Kmart back in the days when all the stores had red-and-turquoise exterior signs and orange interior walls, and wondered if there were any stores still like that in operation today. After enduring the receiving end of my long-winded talk for minutes on end, one of my parents gave forth a handful of "suggestions:"

1. Get a dog; or otherwise either something or someone to give me companionship.
2. Prepare to live out of my car for weeks on end.
3. Start off on a road trip nationwide with the intention of tracking down the perfect Kmart.
4. Take notes on all the observations, feebles, and complications I encounter along the way.
5. Post everything online as I go along, and attract a huge cult following.
6. PROFIT!

Somehow, I don't think I'll take up the opportunity...

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3-22-2008: Five Years

I'll take a pause from the usual fluff today to reflect upon a few numbers:

• 600,000,000,000: U.S. taxpayer dollars allocated and spent on President Bush's war in Iraq, to date.
• 200,000,000,000: Dollars requested for the like purpose in 2008.
• 3,989: U.S. troop casualties in the said conflict.
• 29,395: U.S. troops wounded.
• 50,000: Minimum number of civilian casualties reported. (Some informed estimates place the total at over 600,000.)

"What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne. What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income - to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. [...]

The consequences of war are dire, the sacrifices immeasurable. We may have occasion in our lifetime to once again rise up in defense of our freedom, and pay the wages of war. But we ought not—we will not—travel down that hellish path blindly. Nor should we allow those who would march off and pay the ultimate sacrifice, who would prove the full measure of devotion with their blood, to make such an awful sacrifice in vain."

- Barack Obama, 2002

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3-19-2008: Forgotten Music: Welcome to the Full and Dirty

Justifiably or not, I tend to relegate the early '90s as being one of the strangest periods for music. The vinyl format largely disappeared from mainstream record shops (largely taking the single along with it), and CDs began to overtake cassettes in sales. The matter recorded onto them began to splinter into various fragmented niches; each with their own specific audience and sales chart. My own music collection tapers off suspiciously after 1992, with a spike around 1998-2000 from when I followed new releases providing the only respite. Part of the "strangeness" in personal assessment comes from my lack of firsthand emotional attachment to the era: My main memories are listening to either scratchy classical LPs or silence, and consciously banning "Achy Breaky Heart" from the car stereo. I didn't start to actually dig into and become acquainted with the musical product of the time until several years after the fact...at which point I pursued popular and forgotten releases with equal opportunity.

As a point of example, take INXS: The Australian group that spent the mid-to-late '80s enjoying a wave of success with energetic, genre-breaking albums like Kick and Listen Like Thieves, and which more recently have been disposed to an unfortunate combination of reality-TV fodder and relegation to nostalgia. The 1990s were not especially kind to the band; although it clearly wasn't for lack of effort.

1992's Welcome to Wherever You Are was an envelope-pushing album, with influences from world music, funk, and rock converging into a seamless whole. Recorded over three months on the Isle of Capri, 1993's Full Moon, Dirty Hearts featured fewer stylistic embellishments, but made up for it by being even more cohesive in form. Seldom before had they recorded a song as heavy as "The Gift," as energetic as "Time," as emotional as "Kill the Pain," or as unusual as "Viking Juice." "Please (You Got That...)" featured a stellar vocal by Ray Charles, and the collaboration with Chrissy Hynde of the Pretenders on the title song was equally impressive.

Welcome to Wherever You Are and Full Moon, Dirty Hearts were released in a timely manner and arguably ranked among the best music the group ever did, but were relegated to the ranks of remainder racks almost immediately. Why? Perhaps INXS lost some commercial momentum after a slightly-dull release in 1990 with X. Perhaps they were simply in the right place at the wrong time: Stylistically, they had more in common with the "alternative" rock of the late '90s than that which came five years before. Perhaps they simply fell victim to the general strangeness that became the early '90s music-buying public. After a three-and-a-half year hiatus, the band made an aspiration for success once again in 1997 with Elegantly Wasted, but it wasn't to be. Lead singer Michael Hutchence died later that year, more or less sealing the fate of the band for the next eight years.

So, what moral is there to be learned? Welcome to Wherever You Are and Full Moon, Dirty Hearts are damn fine albums. And, perhaps, the early '90s were just as strange a time for music (insofar as determining what would and would not be a smashing success) as they seemed...

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3-17-2008: Delays!

This is a fine thing to overhear in the midst of taking a shower on what you thought was your day off from work:

(Phone rings)
(Someone else in the house picks up the phone)
"Hello? Oh, yes. No, Andrew can't come to the phone right now. Oh, can he come and work this evening? Yes, he can! What's that? And Tuesday too? Yes!"
(Click)

As such, my tentative plans of using today to write something longer and more meaningful in this space have been shattered...

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3-10-2008: Notes on Mozilla Firefox 3

(Before I begin, a note to readers still wondering "what Firefox is:" Mozilla Firefox is a piece of web-browser computer software, descended from Netscape, that you would in all certainty be using right now had Microsoft not come to dominate the "market" with illegal marketing tactics for Internet Explorer a decade ago. I'll step off the soapbox now...)

Lately, it seems that the one certainty in life has been a new Firefox release every year or so. Version 1.0 debuted in late 2004; 1.5 in 2005, and 2.0 around the tail end of 2006. By that measure, it would seem that we're almost overdue for a new release. Sure enough, one is just around the corner, and Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3 made its way out today. (Download link.) So, what to make of it? In a nutshell...

• Memory management has been improved: "Cycles are broken and collected by an automated cycle collector, a new memory allocator reduces fragmentation, hundreds of leaks have been fixed, and caching strategies have been tuned." With a little luck, this should mean that your hard drive is left churning less often at the end of the day than it used to.
• A lot of effort has been devoted to tailoring interfaces to the specific platforms they run on. While this isn't as obvious in the Windows and Linux versions (which were fairly platform-tailored to begin with), the Mac port features a bunch of visible changes; among them OS X-native web form elements and blah gray toolbar buttons.
• The location bar has seen a host of enhancements: More on-screen information is provided for URL suggestions, and the site icon on the far end now forms a handy button for site info. Likewise, the bookmarks now feature tag support and a "smart folder," and the "Places" feature that almost made it into Firefox 2 has surfaced at last.
• Rendering-wise, there are developments in color management, CSS and SVG capabilities, "as well as improved display of fonts with ligatures and complex scripts."

By this point in development, it seems likely that nearly all the features, changes, and other developments slated for the final release have been cast in stone. Unfortunately, the improvements in speed and usability have been offset by reduced OS compatibility: Windows 95 was broken earlier with Firefox 2 a year ago, and with version 3, Windows NT 4.0 (as well as 98/ME, little as I like to think of them) has been shown the door. The often-hurried pace of the Mac development front, meanwhile, provides even less relief on this note: With version 3, Mozilla Firefox won't even run on OS X 10.3 any more.

As a final comment, it's worth noting that the Book of Mozilla (which itself has seen the addition of a few more entries since the last time I bothered checking) has been revised in this release. Without further ado, this new bit of allegory-laden literature:

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3-6-2008: A Record Store Receipt

When digging around in a drawer of self-saved junk today, I uncovered the piece of paper at right: A receipt from a purchase at the Sam Goody record store at the Laurel Park Place in Livonia, Michigan on August 1, 2002.

I remember that day well: It was a fit of shopping in the midst of the semi-annual family trip to Michigan. (In the time since, I had almost convinced myself that the mall was in Wayne instead of Livonia. Many of the municipalities there tend to blend together.) The onetime-proud Michigan retail edifice of Jacobson's, the most prominent store there, was in the midst of its going-out-of-business sale at the time.

I bought two things that day. The cryptic item labeled as "SBUY GREEN" happened to be a Canadian-issue Huey Lewis greatest-hits CD from the discount rack. As soon as I placed it on the counter, the young female cashier on the other side made an inquiry of "Oh, you listen to music like that?" before quickly leaping into a three-second air-guitar excerpt of "Hip to Be Square." I tried my best to grin and bear it even as my eyes were rolling the other way.

The other item happened to be a new release: The Lonely Position of Neutral by Trust Company. To date, this is the only time I was ever encouraged to purchase an article of music from an MTV video and low price tag alone. "Downfall" was a fairly catchy tune (if nothing else), but the other ten tracks proved to be downright abysmal, with the most stifling melodies, cringe-inducing lyrics, and repetitive electric guitar chords imaginable. Sensibly, I managed to sell it off (along with a pair of Limp Bizkit CDs I was once duped into buying) a year and a half later, before the resale value thereof touched rock-bottom. Thank you, Cheap Thrills.

A message on the bottom of the receipt declares: "WE NOW CARRY VIRGIN MOBILE CELL PHONES...PAY AS YOU GO WITH NO HIDDEN COSTS." What that exactly meant...and whether or not this represented an ill-conceived diversification of commerce on Sam Goody's part...is unclear to me. It didn't help: After a bunch of corporate shenanigans, Musicland was "forced" into the melting pot of Trans World Entertainment, who's converting any straggling Sam Goodies into FYE stores as we speak.

I have doubts that the specific store in question still exists today, in any case: On the Laurel Park Place website, the only things still listed under the "Music/Entertainment/Travel/Camera" category are "AT&T / Cingular" and a Ritz Camera shop. And how musical those stores are, too...

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