Author: zbraniecki

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World Firefox Day

Here it comes. FIrefox Day started 馃檪 (for polish users: www.dzienfirefoksa.pl).

I think it’s a great idea, and what’s important, fresh thing. Never heard of similar thing before. Thanks also goes to Paul Kim, who managed the whole thing, to amazing Tristan Nitot, who made this campaign possible in Poland, and to Marek St臋pie艅, who prepared it for us.
To cut major “concerns” raised by our friends who suddenly became so worried about Firefox download size – it won’t have any influence on the package size. Thank you.

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tech

The Witcher and FDL

The Witcher is a fantasy hero from Andrzej Sapkowski‘s books. I love them, because I find Andrzej’s writing style perfect (not sure about translations), and the characters he creates are incredibly interesting and expressive.

He’s style is to write about fantasy world with very modern thinking. It’s a bit strange at the beginning, but mostly because people tend to think of fantasy worlds as medieval+magic (you know, swords, knights, dragons, it must be medieval, right?) while there is no rule. It’s fantasy. It’s not anywhere in our history. The results are very interesting while he adds great piece of humour, a bit of philosophy and keep it so easy to read, you can do a book per evening.
Anyway, let’s get back to the subject. So, basing on the books there was a movie. Movie was Class D, horrible, pathetic production that costed ~4,5 mln dollars (it’s pretty much as for polish market) and should simply never ever happen.

Years later, polish publisher, CD Projekt, basing on their success decided to create a game development studio – Red Studio. Red Studio decided to start working on The Witcher as their first game. It’s good, they’re very talented, motivated, gathered a great group of fantasy writers, RPG authors and the best coders, designers in Poland, to work on the game, that’s bad, because they have no experience. They decided not to work on multi-player, not to work on Linux version, not to make it extendable (writing own modules to the game), just to focus on the story line. Lack of experience resulted in many changes late in the project. For example they first tried to develop their own gaming engine (in 2004?) then decided to buy Aurora from Bioware (Neverwinter Nights engine), but soon decided to activly co-develop Aurora 2 and it looks pretty good I think. There are many delays of course, the game was planned to be released around Q4 2005, now it’s Q1 2007 but you can watch videos from the E3 and it looks pretty much ready now.

I overall think that the game is worth waiting for, and I cross-fingers for those folks to create something really amazing. But what recently surprised me, was their Wiki. The Wiki is for gathering-around community to create knowledge base about The Witcher sage and story, to share their knowledge etc. It might be usefull later, to build in-game KB, but I don’t know if they’ll do this. What I know, is that they decided to use FDL as the license for the Wiki. And it wasn’t random decision as they describe it. They want to be able to share the data with Wikipedia. To be able to get the data from, and push it back to them.

I really think that we’re somewhere around the new age. Commercial, closed source as hell, game, made by poles who are usually very conservative in “I prefer to hide everything than to give anything” way of thinking, starts using a public MediaWiki with an intention to share the knowledge with Wikipedia, and uses open license.

I’m very happy to see this, and I hope that slow adoption of open ideas, licenses and freedom will happen, not even on the production level yet, but on the mental level. The Witcher made a small, but very important step in this direction 馃檪

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Microsoft’s marketing

Ian Hickson:

I love how Microsoft announce all their news long before they actually do whatever it is they announced. “Our next operating system will rock! In three years. Maybe four.” “Our browser is going to be amazing! It will ship next year.” “Our search engine will be better than the competition! In six months.” (That last one is especially funny to me since they keep saying it every six months, as far as I can tell.) But I’m especially amused by the latest one: “Our CEO will quit! In two years.”

Perfect 馃檪

Also, basing on their current release management process, they may not make the CEO release on time and they’ll slip by year or two.

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main

Gecko performance test

I spent some time during this weekend on examinating different versions of Firefox and other browsers against BenchJS.

Why BenchJS? First, it’s independent. It doesn’t use Gecko like Mozilla people would like it to be used. Second. It’s pretty generic. It tests animation, various JS functions, window open and window close, table drawing etc.
It also probably has some flaws. Like, for example some browsers may “cheat” by reporting that they finished after they finished calculations but before the result was presented on the screen and layed out.

So, on the one hand, please, remember that this is data from one benchmark test. It doesn’t say what “is faster” overall, it says what “is faster on this test”. So all “gecko is slow” people, don’t use it in your flamewars please. On the other hand, it says something. It may or may not represent the wider situation, but it’s a piece of data and we should think about it.
All results are the best ones of three tries.

Let’s get to tests.

Continue reading “Gecko performance test”
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po polsku

IE b臋dzie mia艂o karty!

Polska strona IE 7.0.

A wi臋c dobr膮 decyzj臋 podjeli艣my, kiedy d艂u偶szy czas temu, kiedy zastanawiali艣my si臋 jak to przet艂umacz膮. Szkoda, 偶e firma Microsoft nadal jest tak zamkni臋ta, 偶e mimo, i偶 znam co najmniej 3 osoby w polskim MS, nie uda艂o mi si臋 tego dowiedzie膰 wcze艣niej 馃檨

Strona jest bardzo prosta, funkcjonalna. Kolorystyka mi si臋 bardzo nie podoba, ale ja og贸lnie nie przepadam za kolorami jakie dobiera MS. Troche dra偶ni g艂贸wny slogan (A teraz ju偶 nie s艂ysz膮?), dra偶ni te偶, 偶e nadal s膮 jacy艣 klienci, gdzie艣 daleko (Chcieli, a nie “chcieli艣cie”, albo “Chcieli pa艅stwo”).

Ma艂o pisz膮 o tym nowym bezpiecze艅stwie. Jak pisa艂em – ja nie wierz臋, aby IE 7.0 m贸g艂 byc bezpieczny, skoro jest oparty na dziurawym Tridencie, ale niech mnie zaskocz膮 馃檪

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Flock 0.7 pl – post臋p prac

Pracuj臋 nad wersj膮 pl. Oczywi艣cie napotka艂em mn贸stwo problem贸w. Flock proponuje sporo nowych rozwi膮za艅, kt贸re z trudem pasuj膮 do nazw w angielskim, a co dopiero w polskim. Pro艣ba o pomoc.

Jakby艣cie t艂umaczyli:

  • Web snippets
  • Add a snippet
  • Photo Uploader
  • Upload a photo
  • Clicking Star performs “Star and Tag This Page…”
  • Blog post

Na razie wybra艂em:

  • Favorite – Ulubiona
  • Add to Favorites – Dodaj do Ulubionych
  • Star this page – Oznacz gwiazdk膮
  • Blog post – wpis

Nie t艂umaczy艂em Web snippets ani Photo Uploadera.

B臋d臋 wdzi臋czny za pomys艂y 馃檪

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Flock 0.7 is ready!

Wooohoooo!

I couldn’t explain that feeling better than Anthony did! It was a long, crazy journey from Palo Alto’s garage, to Flock 0.7.

We grew, we matured, we redesigned everything for several times, we were happy, jealous, pissed off, proud, tired, nervous, motivated, unmotivated, focused, but what’s most important, we kept being excited about what we do, and we kept united together during this journey.
I’d like to thank the whole team for their incredible passion, and their patience to me when I was messing with all the code parts vertically across the components. I’d also like to especially thank Bart and Geoffrey, who made it all possible, and our QA team who did amazing job in making Flock a predictible piece of software 馃槈

Read more about Flock 0.7 by Bart!

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flockblog

Flock 0.7 l10n

Last month was awesome. We’re almost ready with Flock 0.7 release, and we want to make it the first release with semi-official localization builds.

If you want to help us, and you speak any language beside of US English, it’s a good time for you 馃檪

Please, take a look at my Flock-l10n maillist post聽 and contact me!

Flock l10n release should take place soon after en-US release. I’d like to mention, that unlike Mozilla we use a slightly different model, we release Cardinal (from 0.7 line) and then we release plenty small updates from the 0.7 branch while big changes will happen in 0.8. Between releases we have plenty small milestones like 0.7.0.10, 0.7.0.11, 0.7.0.11, and once we’re satisfied with the quality, we release one of them as official Flock 0.7 Cardinal, and then small updates are tagged with milestones like 0.7.1.10, 0.7.1.11 until we release one of those as Flock 0.7.1.

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Visiting Microsoft

Week ago, I was invited to Microsoft Poland.

Two Microsoft people, who were described as “people from the group which takes care of interoperatibility and are not technical” are comming to Poland on Monday, for one day. They want to “talk to someone from Open Source community” about, what they described as, “business implications of standards and interoperatibility“.

Sounds interesting, huh?

And yes, I did explain to them that I’m not a spoke person for any of the Open Source projects, neither Flock, nor Mozilla, nor KDE or anything else. The replied that they don’t want to talk to people from the “top”, but from the “field” which sounds even more interesting to me.

Of course I accepted the invitation, no reason to refuse the opportunity to discuss topics that are so important for me with people, who represent the world which makes my goals harder to accomplish.

So, according to them, it’ll be 4 people private discussion, with Adam Dawidziuk (7bulls), me, and those 2 Microsoft people.

Also, the funny thing is that it’ll happen in the exact same day when we have a meeting with Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu.
This has two background things I’d like to write about.

First one, is that it means something. It’s almost symbolic. Things are changing. When I was joining Flock, my experience with Microsoft as a partner in the business world was rather sad. I was unable to get response from them about how they’re going to translate “tab” in Internet Explorer 7.0 (so we can sync with them for polish Firefox and Opera), and they were trying to employ some Open Source people (like Eric S. Raymond or my Flocker friend Ian McKellar), it proved how little they knew about the world on the other side of the bridge.

On January 2006, another friend of mine, who at the time was working on Flock with me, Chris Messina, had a lunch with Microsoft. It was 100% informal, but happened. And now, after next few months the above will happen, and comparing to Chris’s experience, it’s something way more formal. It’s not a dinner, it’s a planned part of their workday. It’s a formal meeting.

I’m curious what were the reasons for them to organize such thing. Why now. Why in Poland. Is it a part of some bigger changes in Microsoft’s direction? I hope to know more tomorrow evening.

Second thing is, that I treat it as a great opportunity to answer questions about things that might help us know more about Microsoft’s inside. No, not that ones that are “secret data”. The ones that are not written down on microsoft.com because there was no reason for this.

So, what is your opinion? What would you like to know that Microsoft can answer?

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main

Widgets for Gecko

As many of you already know, Opera with it’s version 9.0 introduced technology called Widgets. What is also obvious, Gecko has everything needed to display such “Widgets”. Some time ago, in a comment on Quiris blog I predicted that it won’t take long to make it happen on Gecko.

Then, during XTech, Benjamin Smedberg presented talk about future of Web apps, and mentioned that the SVG, stylish clock in the top right corner of his screen is launched in XulRunner.
So, here we have next step of this story. Two days ago Benjamin posted on mozilla.dev.apps.firefox a proposition for standarizing Widgets around Opera’s API (with some modifications), and via WHATWG.