February 2004

Flying somewhere near Albany, NY.

I've been in the Bay area for the last couple of days for the
Mozilla Developer Day, which was good. It was good to see a nice
turnout of folks, some faces familiar, some not so much. Some
needed to be put with irc nicks and some needed to be just covered
with a paper bag (sorry, mosedale.) The updates were good and I
think that it was just good to have people get together and see
each other again. Personally, I haven't seen a lot of these faces
in years, and I know that I was starting to feel the distance. I
had some good conversations with people about various issues of
concern and I think that we made a decent amount of progress as a
result. As a whole I call the trip a success.

In order to get a cheaper flight out here I stayed until Sunday
night. This leaves me with a couple of days in order to just
screw around in the Bay area. One of leaf's friends was nice
enough to to loan me his spare motorcycle, which gives me the
chance to participate in a sport that I have not been able to
really enjoy for nearly a decade. (Back between the ages of 16
and 18, that's how I got around. Cars are expensive to operate.
Motorcycles, not so much.) So today I went out and rode the
somewhat-cliche-but-still-fun Skyline Boulevard from Los Gatos up
to Belmont or so and had a burger at Alice's Diner on the way.
It's a gorgeous ride. Wait, here's a picture:

Skyline Boulevard

Of course, it's still February in San Francisco and it's not
that warm, so I froze my butt off a bit. Well. My hands,
anyway.

In continuing the orgy of transportation methods this same fellow
also just got his pilot's license, just like me (I rode on
caltrain two days ago so I think the circle is complete.) So
before I took off on his bike we also went for a little tour of
the Bay area. I got a number of pictures, some of which came out.

Look Ma! Alcatraz!

I've been looking through the pages at this site and here is what I have
learned:

• They like pictures of penises. A lot. In fact, I dare say
  that they like them more than pictures of naked women.

• People are just not that creative. Most of the channel
  pictures are the same.

• If I see another picture of skinny-hot-lady-showing-a-thong
  next to fat-lady-also-showing-a-thong I think I'm gonna throw
  something at someone.

• People think that a fat retarded kid dancing is funny.
  Really funny based on how often this same image keeps
  coming up.

• Yes, your car is cool. Does it really need to be the topic?
  (or, I've driven an acura integra. They really aren't all
  that cool.)

• Mugshots do not a channel topic make.
• Quake screenshots are the next currency.
• If you put a condom over your network port, you will not be
  protected from viruses. Don't believe everything you see on the
  Internet.

• Old dude smoking a cigarette giving you the finger with
  both hands means he wants you to go away. Take the hint!

• There are lots of images in spanish, none of which I
  understand
• The pope is funny.
• Midgets can play basketball.
• Hey look – more boobies. *yawn*
• Michael Jackson and Gollum do look a lot alike.
• Bad teeth + camera == pure laughs.
• Goats can spice up any party.

This is from Gerv's summary of Mozilla events at FOSDEM:

    Alex gets the FOSDEM 2004 "cool tech" award, for his "JSSh"
    tool - an add-on for Mozilla which makes it listen for telnet
    connections on a given port. You can then telnet into a JS
    evaluation shell, with full DOM and privileged access, allowing
    you to interactively debug Mozilla's internals. There's also an
    emacs mode which provides additional help. It's _extremely_
    cool:

    http://www.croczilla.com/jssh

Freaky. But unbelievably cool. Or as graydon puts it:

    <graydon> tell me you cannot telnet into mozilla
    <graydon> please

We're currently in the middle of renovating the second floor of
our condo in boston (which, just to muddle things is actually the
third floor of the house and is an attic.) We're currently in the
destruction phase of the project. This means removing the decades
old wallboard that is nailed to the rafters. I'm not sure what
it's made of. Something like shredded, compacted, cardboard,
covered with at least three layers of wallpaper and paint (Shona
claims there are more layers but I'm living in denial.) Whatever.
Anyway, there's a lot of dust. You can pull it down with your
hands, which is nice. There's also no insulation of any kind
which is both a blessing and a curse. i.e. I've been paying to
heat (sort of) the third floor which is only one inch away from
the elements, but at least I don't have to pull the current stuff
down. I don't think I could handle the itch.

From here it's just a question of getting the rubbish hauled away,
of where there is a lot. Then get the windows replaced
(maybe), electical, new plumbing for the new bathroom, get new
walls in, probably flooring and we're done.

Check back with me in June on this particular project.

Also did a short instrument lesson this weekend. I kind of
stumbled around a little bit with the one approach that we managed
to do. We went out and did some power off and power on stalls
under the hood, which weren't too bad. Did a couple of unusual
attitudes including one which I swear to god, the plane was
right over on its side. But at least I recovered well. Then
we went out and did the NDB 20 approach into Fitchburg. I
completely mis-read the approach plate, missing the location of
the Initial Approach Fix (it was at an NDB/VOR intersection
instead of at the NDB as I was expecting.) I did a little bit
better on the second pass. It was fun, though, if a bit bumpy.

I've spent some of the last couple of days reading plugin
documentation and puttering with the infastructure surrounding a
decent plugin widget for Totem. I feel like I have a better
understanding of how things need to come together, so I can get
some real hacking done now.

I also did my required IFR cross-country last night. This must be
a cross-country of at least 250 nautical miles that includes three
different kinds of approaches. So I did a route from Bedford to Pittsfield, down to
Hartford-Brainard
and back up to Bedford. Did one NDB approach at Pittsfield, which
I kind of fumbled, one decent VOR approach into Hartford-Brainard
which went quite well and the final ILS approach into Bedford.
The last approach went sort of OK. I did it without an attitude
indicator and my instructor kept asking me to change the speed
during the approach. It went OK, but not great. I kept the
localizer centered, but failed to keep the glide slope centered.
We'll have to work on changing speeds during an approach as well
as partial panel approaches.

From here on out, I can use a safety pilot and practice local
approaches. I still need to build a good 20 hours of hood time
before I even meet the minimum standards in that regard so I've
got some work to do.

For those of you who have been unable to stand the wait I
finally got a copy of the security gaim errata out for Fedora.

It was a weekend of pretty intense flight training. I've picked
up the pace of my instrument training because I did some math and
realized that I wouldn't have enough time to have my rating until
some time next fall, and I don't want it to take that long. I
think it took about 11 months for me to get my private, and I
don't really want a repeat performance.

Friday I went for a (relatively) long cross country up to maine
and back in a warrior because I needed to build up a little time
so I could get my rating to fly the arrow (more on that later.)
Not much to report here except that the maine coast is quite
beautiful. Also, airports with a little [R] next to the name of
the field on the sectional need to be examined closely in the
A/FD. For example, the airfield that I was looking at turned out
to be an airbase, and they don't let just anyone land
there. Namely me. I ended up landing at a cute little airport up
in Maine called Wiscasset. I'll
have to go back up there during the spring/summer. It looked like
it was a short walk from some nice ocean front parks. And the FBO
has the coolest name ever.

Saturday I had a couple of hours scheduled with my instructor and
the weather was quite nice, although a bit bumpy up there. I got
away with wearing only a sweatshirt on top of my usual compliment.
It almost felt like spring. We went up and did the LOC RWY 16
approach at Beverly. It went OK
except that I failed to time the approach so in reality I would
have had no idea where the missed approach point was. That
approach also has a missed that has an intersection hold which was
challenging. My entry was OK on the hold, although I missed a
twist once I was in the hold because approaching the hold you're
actually flying in the opposite direction on the same radial as
where the hold is located. In all honesty the thought of flipping
the OBS did cross my mind, but I failed to execute.

From there we flew back and did the ILS RWY 29
approach back into bedford. Full stop.

Sunday I also had another three hours set up to do my final chunk
of training in the Arrow. (At
the place that I've been flying you need at least 125 hours total
time before you can fly the Arrow solo.) We took off and went up
to high altitude just to see what it was like. Doing stalls at
ten thousand feed is a bit different than doing them at three
thousand. The plane handles a bit differently. The controls
aren't quite as responsive because there's less air. We did some
power off, power on and turning stalls as well as steep turns.
From there he showed me how you can convert altitude into speed in
the arrow and just for fun we did the ILS RWY 2
approach into Keene. Keene is a
neat little airport right near Mount Monadnock.
It's right in a valley and it gives you good perspective into why
departure procedures and staying on the glide slope and localizer
are so important. My instructor says that in the summer it's fun
to fly right around the top of the mountain because you can
usually see and wave to the hikers at the top. That sounds like
fun.

From there it was back to bedford and we did the ILS RWY 29
approach into there and stayed in the pattern and did cross-wind
landings. I have to say that I was not pleased with my
performance. I felt pretty clumsy at first – landing the Arrow is
a bit harder since it sinks much faster than the little warriors
that I'm used to. You have to carry power almost all the way
through the approach and make sure that the nose stays down or you
will bleed off speed pretty quickly. I was having a lot of
problems keeping the center line in the relatively strong cross
winds but I was doing better after a low approach and a few more
turns around the pattern. I'm still not completely confident,
though. I'll have to go out and do some practicing on one of
these days that we have some stronger winds.

However, I have my complex rating now. This means I can fly a
wider array of planes that are a bit faster than the trainers I've
been in during most of my training.

Next up on tuesday is the required long IFR cross-country. Has to
be at least 250 Nautical Miles. I'm not sure where I'm going to
go yet.

Ken.

I triaged a lot of bugs today. I even got a little bit of hacking
done on a Totem
plugin for Mozilla. I've got shell code that compiles, but
nothing of substance yet.

The 2004
Mozilla Developer Day is going to take place at the Mozilla
Foundation offices on February 27th. I'll be there. There will
be donuts. Asa
will also be there. And from what I hear, he won't be wearing any
pants. So don't miss it.

Having Mozilla / Thunderbird / Phoenix / Firebird / Firefox /
Epiphany / Galeon / MYFIRSTBROWSER crashes with Fedora Core 1 when you happen
to stumble across a page that contains Chinese or Japanese text?
Yeah, so have most other people. Shaver got to experience the
love that is fontconfig and true type and has a cute
little script that will remedy what is probably the most
common crash. Of course, I did do a Mozilla errata for FC1 that
included a local fix for the symptom but people continue to
download their own builds and are surprised when they see the
problem again. I guess I can't keep all the people happy all the
time. (I also appreciate shaver toning down my language. You
know, for the kids.)

My old friend Dave
Mason, whom I miss quite a bit, has some great pictures from his
time with the Clark campaign. I've always enjoyed his pictures
and his particular skill for getting good candid shots. (Dave, I
think I'll be passing through North Carolina in the beginning of
March assuming all goes well. I think we should hit Pepper's or
something.)

I've finally written up some
documentation on using XEmbed to build Mozilla plugins. In
the past we've basically been limited to using Xt widgets to build
plugins. Now, we can use a boring old GtkPlug to do so. In
theory this should also make it possible to build out of process
plugins, since XEmbed makes that a lot easier.

Anyway, this is just a start, but a good one. Maybe I'll stop
getting all that email that includes the phrase “I've been
reparenting my window into Mozilla and it's not working very
well…”

Few things in the world can screw up a unix system like
accidentally executing and then responding positively to this
prompt:

rm: remove `/dev/null'? y

Here's my list if features that should be included for Firefox 1.0:

• A mind-controlled UI: but it only works if you think in
  russian!
• Flashback mode: whenever you hear a helicopter overhead the
  browser will redirect all page loads to web.archive.org, circa 5
  years ago.
• Stealth mode: using specially malformed headers, Firefox will
  load your web pages and web servers will be unable to log your
  vists.
• Mach 6 Technology: advanced compression algorithms will make
  the web faster than it's ever been before!
• Arctic compliant: you can land firefox on an ice flow in the
  middle of the north atlantic. Not sure why you would need this,
  but hey, we had some extra bandwith.