Month: August 2005

Another nice marketing idea from Opera.
After the last rumours about Opera going freeware there were two possibilites. The rumours were right or wrong (Oh! So wise!). If the rumours were right, preparing such campaign is a very clever move. You get free news/press, you get blog news etc. People keeps talking about Opera. They might do some more “promotions” like this before really switching to freeware. Bravo!
If the rumours were wrong, then they must do actions like this not to gather bad press (imagine article “Everyone was sure that Opera will be freeware, but they only gave their users new forums… Such a disappointment”).
I think that the former one is truth, and Opera is just playing with the last days of occasional promotions for product that will be free in a short time.
For example, imagine the amount of people who promoted Opera with buttons for weeks, months, to get those 250 clicks… And I got Opera with one small email. But the amount of noise in press about both actions is the same, so Opera wins.

I’m still saying that Mozilla should learn from Opera that sometimes you can do small step to gather big marketing advantage (as my favourite example – we really could’ve SVG first).

If you love python, hate javascript, and want to work in Gecko… head to bug 255942 in b.m.o.
Gecko 1.9 will be scripting language neutral and will support Python.
What next? Perl? Tcl? VBScript? (sic!)

Guys from KDE are writing status updates from aKademy. TSDGeos TSDgeos and Ervin wrote about day second.

The most important part for Mozilla world is that Gecko can be embedded into Konqueror(hopefully this will work in KDE 3.5) and that Dirk Mueller was payed to port Firefox to QT.

Devmo is extremly vibrant project. It’s not in beta version yet, but thanks to awesome work made by Dria and her followers, we were able to create in very short time very big knowledge database. It’s easy to use, easy to extend and now we’re a few steps from being ready for 1.0 release.
Early next week we will move from MediaWiki 1.4 to MediaWiki 1.5. MW 1.5 is much faster, has better database schema, improved user management and many others. For localizers it’s most important new feature is ability to get email when any change to the selected document happens.
Also, Devmo will use two of my patches – first one for Multiwiki user storage. That’s the one allowing you to switch language without need to log in once more. Second one allows us to create external redirects. If the value of #redirect [[value]] starts with http:// or https:// it will redirect to external domain.

The last but not least change is that we’ll have a new skin. It’s really awesome! Take a look:
English Devmo
Polish Devmo
Test Devmo with MW1.5 version

If you find any bugs or if you have any suggestion, write it here.

Open your favorite browser. Type

javascript:for(var i in null) {}


and check if this will throw an error.
In fact, it should, but I tested Konqueror, Opera, Firefox, Shimono tested IE6 and Shaver tested Safari – all of them passed this.

To prove that this behavior is not proper, head to ECMA standard 262, and take a look at:
Point 12.6.3, step 3:

12.6.4 The for-in Statement
The production IterationStatement : for ( LeftHandSideExpression in Expression ) Statement is
evaluated as follows:
1. Evaluate the Expression.
2. Call GetValue(Result(1)).
3. Call ToObject(Result(2)).
4. Let V = empty.

Point 9.9:

9.9 ToObject

The operator ToObject converts its argument to a value of type Object according to the following table:

Input Type	Result
Undefined	Throw a TypeError exception.
Null	Throw a TypeError exception.
Boolean	Create a new Boolean object whose [[value]] property is set to the value of the boolean. See 15.6 for a description of Boolean objects.
Number	Create a new Number object whose [[value]] property is set to the value of the number. See 15.7 for a description of Number objects.
String	Create a new String object whose [[value]] property is set to the value of the string. See 15.5 for a description of String objects.
Object	The result is the input argument (no conversion).

So we should throw an error. The question is. What sites will we break? Shaver asked me to find some sites that will be broken, but it’s not that easy. So if you know about any site that might do for in loop on undefined element, please, let me know.

That’s a great news! Opera Watch claims that Opera S.A. will announce alternative buisness model for Opera browser soon. And, as for me, there is only one alternative – freeware.

There are two ways for Opera. It can either became “exclusive” browser as I mentioned in some previous post, or go freeware and compete Firefox, IE and (soon) Konqueror. It seems that Opera will be free. No, not free as in Opera’s current marketing rubbish “free, but…” – a really, 100% free browser.

Is this good? It’s a motivator for Mozilla team for sure. It’s also a fall of a next myth. Once Opera is free and identifies as Opera, there wont be any more excuses for much lower market share. If they will not be able to gather more market share (remember their “awesome” 8.0 long awaited marketing campaign?) – they will have to start looking for issues inside their software, not outside.

Also, what about moving to open source? Humm? Temptating? 😉

Yes. That’s it. I’m 100% offline since August 9th. I’m on Kyokushin traning camp. 5 tranings per day. We start at 07:30 am to 09:00 with warming training (boxing, stretching, running on a beach), breakfest at 09:15, from 12:00 to 14:00 – strength, gymnastic, 14:15 – lunch, 16:00-18:00 fighting – boxing, kyokushin, muai-thai, brasilian jujitsu, 18:00-19:00 swimming pool, 19:15 supper, 20:30-22:00 theory of fighting, light stretching.
No place for computer, no place for coding. Ok, I can feel pain in my hand, I strained my thigh, all my muscles hurts me… Hey! I’m resting 🙂

I’ll be back on 21st so be patient please 🙂

I’m going to biggest Polish music festival – Woodstock 2005. More than 300 000 great people will be there! 🙂

Side note. Linux will be there with us (pl). We’re going to promote open source and open technologies, and I’m… (suprise!) going to promote Firefox 🙂