I was fascinated when I read the new Mozilla development roadmap yesterday. When mozilla was in it’s late 0.9.x’s I got quite interested in how the project works, and so seeing their new plans is cool. I’m all for the move away from a monolithic application suite to having a gecko-runtime-environment, since I think it’ll for them to clean up a few areas that are currently a bit bodged – separate processes is one of them, profile shenanigans is another. Since they are moving to a plugin architecture for what have until now been fully integrated parts of the suite, it’ll hopefully force improvement of the way the rest of the plugins work. And then, perhaps, plugins on linux won’t suck quite as badly as they do at the moment (editing permissions on parts of the chrome since I run mozilla as a user, but have to install the plugin as root, is a nasty bodge, and I think they know it). I’ll also be interested in something that I haven’t seen mentioned yet – the use of gecko in little ‘toy’ programs (ie not mahoosive embeded things like the Oeone desktop). When the GRE is sorted out, it should be pretty easy to write little desktop tools for specific things, using a hugely powerful xml / html rendering engine as the backend – perhaps a bus-route planner or weather charts (or maybe, perchance, a calendar or irc client) – specific little programs with their own interface (XUL, natch) that get around some of the proplems of trying to present every web application as a website.

Heavily intertwinned with watching an open-source software product evolve is watching the way it interacts with certain part of the community. Perhaps the most important avenue of interaction is through bug reporting databases, but I’m concerned that there is a limit to their scalability. Not due to anything technical, but due to the signal noise ratios that seem pandemic in the Open Source community. When a project is particularly large, such as Mozilla or Mandrake, there are enough people who think it is their right to demand fixes to bugs that it makes it hard to use the bug-reporting systems properly. In my experience, there seems to be a fair crowd of people who’s sole participation in mozilla is bitching about their pet problems not being fixed. I read another one today, in which some-young-guy was claiming it ‘unacceptable’ that a bug he filed a few years back still hasn’t been fixed. Unfortunate, perhaps, but the mozilla developers don’t owe anyone anything. He also seemed confused about the role of paid developers in the mozilla organisation – they are being paid to work on the code, true enough, but they still don’t have any obligations to anyone other than their employer. So how this guy worked out that it is ‘unacceptable’ is a bit weird. But common – MandrakeClubs package voting system (where you get to vote for what programs should be compiled to be in each version of mandrake, or added later) is getting pretty full up with people trying to hijack the system for other purposes – demanding the distribution on 650mb (or 700mb) cds, recompiling the distribution for different architectures, that kind of thing.

The Mozilla developers have come up with elaborate ways of trying to deal with the noise – priorities, severities, dependences, the old ‘make this release not suck’ bug-tracking bugs, which have evolved into the mozilla1.4blocker? system, keywords and whiteboards, but they barely seem to cope. For the code, there was proliferate cvs access, so then code reviews were required, and then super-reviews to make sure that each bit fitted in with the rest of the project, and drivers, and branch drivers, to steer the project. And then bonzai, the web interface to watch the tinderboxes – computers that compile and recompile mozilla twenty four hours a day, to make sure that none of the checkins break the tree. And then there’s all the codewords (lxr, bonzai, tinderbox, trees and everything else I’ve just mentioned), designed to stop people poking their grubby fingers into the machinery. Perhaps not designed that way, but certainly evolved as such – and it makes the project harder to understand, and harder to get involved in. Perphaps the lack of understanding, and the barriers to entry, lead to bugzilla being so abused…

So if you want to get involved with Mozilla, how do you go about it? Basically, you can’t. You could file bug reports (but there’s millions of other people doing so, so face it – you’re unlikely to be the first to report that problem, it’ll just be another dupe), you could help mark dupes (but with tens of thousands (actually 200,000 in total) of bugs, rfes, wontfixes, wfms (it’s those mozilla-codewords again) finding dupes is not something you could do as a hobby), or more practically just stick to some advocacy. Unless that is, you’re a star programmer, in which case dive right in – but be prepared to deal with all the whiners that are tagging along for the ride.

Well, it looks like I still haven’t managed to implement the thing that stops me posting to my weblog when I’m pissed. Hey ho though, it’s not the first time.

A few days back, one of my mates asked me what was the advantage of using div tags and stuff over tables, since nested divs in order to get a particular layout was surely just as bad as nested table layout shenanigans. It got me thinking, and I spent Sunday coming up with an alternative stylesheet for my weblog, to show exactly what you can do with a little positioning and z-index stuff. I kinda liked it, and after I’ve checked it out with Internet Explorer (for the mighty IE has it’s own interpretation of the positioning rules, so it might look a bit wonky for the 45% of people that use it to read my ramblings) then I might incoporate some of the ideas into the live site.

The other thing that came about was my re-examing of the code I’ve used to make this weblog, and realising that some of it isn’t correct enough for my liking (the semantics of markup and stuff) – the date, for instance, is in a div by itself, whereas it should really be in a div that spans all the entries for that day. The titles for each posting aren’t in title tags either, which is a big blooper. I’ve been looking at reorganising the order in which things are printed, so it makes more sense without a stylesheet; I managed to show myself that I can display things in any order, regardless of what order each bit is in the markup. And finally, I might get round to putting link tags everywhere, so that Mozilla’s Site Navigation toolbar will work properly. Oh, and having urls for each day, month or year of the weblog working properly. And…

Just as well I don’t have any important exams coming up, or else I’d be in danger of fucking them up. As usual. Being in danger that is, not actually doing that badly.

Every day is so wonderful
And suddenly, it’s hard to breathe

The first mile was the hardest. Except, that is, for the second mile, the third, and what comes after.

You see, my lungs are fucked. I ended up in hospital a few years ago, and they were thus diagnosed. I can’t run for more than twenty metres or so without being reduced to agony.

I ran home tonight.

You are beautiful in every single way
Yes, words won’t bring me down
Don’t you bring me down today…

I stumbled, I staggered, and I collapsed in my room when I got home. But I still can’t take it. Chin up, they say. But I can’t mask the pain. I can’t overcome it. I can’t cope anymore.

Help.

And still there is this emptyness. Lonely, and alone. I had learned to cope, but really I haven’t.

To all your friends, you’re delirious
So consumed in all your doom
Trying hard to fill the emptiness
The piece is gone and the puzzle undone
That’s the way it is

I love being a target demographic, especially when I have the feeling of watching the cruise missile heading up the wrong street…

Last night I was watching ‘BBC Three on BBC One’ – where they put one channel out on another one’s frequency – and I’m sure it’s nothing to do with lack of audience (or even potential audience, what with the new channels being digital only). Anyway, BBC Three is aimed at the twenty-something audience, and so is full of comedy, entertainment, documentries about cult figures, that sort of thing. Now I’ve a feeling that Dom Joly has missed his mark somewhat with the rather bland show I watched him host. His loud, over the top style such as the phone thing made him famous in Trigger Happy TV, but it worked there because in general, people don’t act that way. Watching the reactions in museums when he starts screaming on a phone is funny, but when you’re a chatshow host it just falls flat. And I always thought of him as much more clever than he came across last night.

That was followed by ‘liquid news’ – a live program apparently. But when they cut to a live reporter in east London, where it was dawn, yet in west london it was only just after midnight (and London isn’t that big), the bubble was burst. The reporting style left me cold as well – it was as if they’d been told to be cool, be groovy, and appeal to the target demographic. Maybe it would work better if there was no such thing as Newsround – the news show for kids that treats them like adults, and deservedly wins awards for it’s work year after year. Maybe there’s a lot of young adults who like being treated like teenagers, so perhaps that’s who they’re aiming at. But it didn’t impress me much.

Ooh, I just noticed that it’s the first of April now. So Happy Birthday Jenny, don’t worry, I didn’t forget to buy you a present once again. And I’m going to do my usual trick to avoid being made an April Fool – stay in bed till the afternoon. It’s a cunning trick, but it works every year. Ho hum.

I was going to have a list of unanswered, or unanswerable, questions to start off with, as a clever lead up to the point I am about to make, but it’s more tricky than I first thought. I was one of those irritating kids who would always ask questions, and I know a fair amount about an awful lot of things. I know why the sky is blue, I know why the grass is green, I know why Mars is red … but I don’t know why we have two types of bulb fittings in Britain. There, I did manage to do the list thing. Ha.

The dodgy electrics in our house (ask Mr T, he likes them) are causing lightbulbs to blow at a fair old rate, and my spare bulb supply is running out (hey, if she’s not around to switch her bedroom lights on, she’ll won’t know the difference), so I decided to sally forth to IKEA, a good source of cheap stuff. It also gave me an excuse to go and buy all the bits of kitchen equipment that have gone walkabouts over the years (/me waves at everyone who’s nicked stuff in halls and flats – cheers guys) and generally look around. I really like IKEA stuff – it’s cheap, good quality, and my landlord wouldn’t dream of having any of it in his own house. That’s my new yardstick of seeing whether I like something or not. But IKEA is cool, I like the products, I like the business strategy, I like the ethos, I’m not all that keen on the advertising, but hey. And it’s only two bus journeys away from my house – the same number as my daily commute.

Rule number 1784 in life – don’t ever, ever mix the following things – Bus Route 112, Hanger Lane, the North Circular, 5.30pm on a Monday. I wasn’t thinking straight, or to be more exact, I wasn’t thinking at all. I can’t believe that people sit in that traffic every single day – well, I can, since I’ve seen them doing it. So it look a little while longer than I expected to arrive, having barefacedly lied about the amount of change in my pocket on the way in (’scuse me mate, but my car’s broken down over there, and I need another £1.80 or so for some petrol – hmmm, last time I looked the minimum delivery was only two litres at less than a pound per litre, and he already had about a fiver of change in his hand).

Those of you who are on the ball know how this story is going to end, and so you can fill it in for me – I’m just too lazy. Those of you who don’t know what I was going to say, shame on you. There’s a clue in the first paragraph; the title is a mis-appropriated Microsoft-bashing joke being put to good use. It’s not that hard, but you might want to lay off the beer, vodka, glue, crack cocaine or whatever it is that’s causing your short-term memory problems…