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I’m offline!

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 🙂

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Woodstock 2005 – Let the game begin

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 🙂

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Minimo 0.0.7

In case anyone was wondering what could be Minimo’s key features…
MinSky 😉
And no, it not just that Skype will be on your phone. It’s that you’ll be able to use tons of extensions that are avaible for Firefox.

With SVG, XForms, XTF, Canvas and others features of Gecko engine, small device market is going to see something fresh…

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Mozilla Corporation

Now, when it’s announced, we can say it loudly – horay! 🙂
I think that this is a good idea. It allows us to split commercial goals from project management.
Now we have:

  • Mozilla.org – a project, source code, hackers, community, activists, projects, ideas, bugs, etc.
  • Mozilla Foundation – leading the project. Group of people working to manage the project. Non profit, has employers. All employees are working for Mozilla.org project in some way (hacking, admins, project managers, etc.)
  • Mozilla Corporation – A company controlled by Mozilla Foundation dealing with commercial tasks of Mozilla mainstream products like Firefox and Thunderbird. Promotion, commercial support, money-related deals etc. Some of Mozilla Corporation employers are hacking in Mozilla.org project, others deals with mainstream products promotion, security audits, etc.

Notice: This is my personal description. It is not official in any way. To read official information head to mozilla.org, Frank’s blog,Tristan’s blog or Mitchell’s blog

From what they write it’s not a big change. Just a way to solve the issue “we spend money and we’re non-profit”. The same people will do the same job, just in a bit better way. 😉
L10N issue won’t be touched this time. We’re still where we were yesterday.

I recived a few questions about this, so, to be clear.
I described mother project – Mozilla and it’s structures. In Europe we have Mozilla Europe – Mozilla Foundation’s affiliate being a mix of MoFo and MoCo and dealing with european projects, locale teams and marketing (like MoFo) and commercial support and brand (like MoCo).

In Poland, we have MozillaPL , MoFo-like group having three members (GmbH, Nikdo and me – everyone else is NOT a member of MozillaPL team no matter what he wrote). MozillaPL takes care of MozillaPL community (Mozilla.org-like).
And we have AviaryPL (a’ka still-without-website) team (more or less MoCo-like) dealing with products. But neither MozillaPL nor AviaryPL has any money related issues. We’re non-profit (this may change for AviaryPL but not for MozillaPL in time).

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IE7 beta1 improves on Acid2!

In it’s own, very abstractive, odd way through… 😉

Some blog comment from Jose Jeria and one “God, this is worse than Netscape 8” from Richard says it all…

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dramatic message – “There will be no 1.1″

I’m wondering why people keep naming any news about recent version bump like that.
It’s a shame. We’re just changing version to better reflect product status and every blog/journal/news site tries to scary user that we just resigned from releasing 1.1.
A user who see such title thinks that we have some (major) problems and we’re unable to workaround them so we gave up. Additionally, some news sites (after ZDNet?) keep article in that form – “There will be no long awaited 1.1 version! We will have to wait MUCH longer for 1.5″ and so on.

Once more Mozilla community/foundation/press showed that we are amateurs in term of media handling. We absolutely don’t know HOW to speak to keep journalists repeat what we want to tell them.
I read that “Major reason for users to update from 1.0.4 and 1.0.6 is that 1.0.6 was released in 30 languages at the same time!”. And it’s not that journalists are usually lazy and looking for dramaturgy. It’s also because we don’t know how to play with them to make them write what we want.

Examples? Every news site wrote about this change. There is no official news from Mozilla Foundation. So they’re using ZDNet, Slashdot, Weird or some blog post. It’s a mistake.
Localizations are, as always, underestimated by Mozilla Foundation, so there is no way for many journalists to get any information in their language. And they WONT ask in English mostly because they don’t speak it well. So they will translate (with many mistakes) ZDNet, read some blog, or invent something!
Journalists are looking for informations when they write any press news (those less lazy ones 😉 ).
What will be in Firefox 1.5? When it’ll be released? What with Thunderbird 1.5? What is this SVG? Why we have to wait for 1.5 so long? Will there be Firefox in my language? Who is localizing it? How Mozilla gathers money? Is it Firefox or FireFox? Who is using Firefox? How much market does it have? Why Firefox is cool? (version not for user but for journalist who want to write a sentence “Firefox browser was widely adopted because …”) Is Firefox a Netscape? Is Mozilla a Netscape? Why there’s no link to Netscape 8 on Mozilla.org? There were 6 big security updates in half a year, why someone says it’s secure? I heard that there is more than 300 000 “bugs” in Mozilla! and so on…

And now open www.mozilla.org or www.mozilla-europe.org and try to answer those questions. I can promise you that journalist will have problems to find it. So they’ll invent the answers.

I think that Mozilla is still very young in the “adult world” of market. Webpages, pressnews,policies are focused on creating great tools, creating a fresh brand, promoting it, but we fail to keep promoting it wisely.
We’re often loosing, for example with Opera, because of no plan. We had SVG for years but we will release it after Opera (and possibly after Konqueror/Safari!). We ignore secunia but journalists use it everytime they write about our security. So we still keep some bugs that we threat as not security not fixed in 1.0.x branch. And journalists still see “18% unfixed security bugs in Firefox” – great!
We had a problem with releasing locales (we still have with Thunderbird – can’t we learn from previous mistakes?) and everyone wrote about it. There was no official announcement, so they based on MozillaZine and mostly cited me or marcoos. If MoFo would write “we’re sorry for that, we’re trying to avoid a mess and we’ll give you all new builds in two days” everyone will be happy! And journalists will write that there is some minor issue and MoFo is doing their best to solve it in two days.
There are other examples. Our Visual Identity Team is not working (or I can’t see this) so our webpages around the world doesn’t have one, strong visual identity. We need a few templates and ask people to use it on any firefox.pl, mozillapl.org, getfirefox.de page. There is no Press Team to cover the longterm plan about media handling. Mozilla Localization Project has no real power to control Mozilla communities, ensure quality of local webpages, teach a few people in each country how to promote Mozilla and have our people “inside” the country… Instead MoFo tries to control everything by themselves.

We need to start working around this areas. We made extremely good work to create environment to work on great products. We made a work to release them. Now it’s time to improve those areas which often wastes brilliant work in others.

Beside of this. The situation when coders from the project, affiliates, advocates, localizers, and whole community involved in the project gets the news about version change from some blog whose author tracked some document history is another issue – complete lack of communication which leads to potential disasters and practical irritation of thousands of people who’re working around the project. Pity 🙁

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1.1 will be 1.5!

According to new roadmap Mozilla Foundation decided to bump release version from 1.1 to 1.5 for next Firefox and Thunderbird. Firefox 1.5 will be released in September 2005.

Good news. Version 1.1 released nearly year after 1.0 would give our users unclear information about changes and Mozilla roadmap. Releasing 1.5 is OK – we can release 2.0 “somewhere in 2006”. (and I doubt we’ll release 3.0 in 2006 ;)).
After all – our new release is a big change – like… +0.5, not like +0.1!

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Firefox ads in europe!

Mozilla Europe is advertising Firefox in a few european countries like Germany, France, UK, Italy and Poland!
Enter www.google.pl, type “browser” or “przeglądarka”, watch 🙂

It’s the first Mozilla ad campaign in Poland ever! Woo Hoo! 🙂

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Bugzilla 2.21 nightly

It seems that Bugzilla has some nice features now in it’s nightly build.
Improved look and shape, while FoodReplicator is not bad, I prefer the WorldControl app – I think it can be a next killer app on Gecko, I submitted by first nice bug – you can see that there’ll be some tool for estimate time summary for every bug/release/product, and you can set some comments as private (?).

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#l10n quotes about 1.0.6

Jul 16 23:56:16 <rebron> questions?
Jul 16 23:57:14 <gandalf> ETA for l10n builds?
Jul 16 23:57:50 <rebron> testing is happening now
Jul 16 23:58:18 <rebron> we’re shooting for Tuesday or earlier if possible for a release
Jul 16 23:58:57 <rebron> my understanding also is folks have signed off on their builds e.g. ready for staging, we’ll honor that for 1.0.6
Jul 17 00:00:31 <gandalf> simultaneous for all locales?
Jul 17 00:03:11 <rebron> as close as possible
Jul 17 00:03:26 <rebron> we’ve only done simultaneous release once with Firefox 1.0
Jul 17 00:03:44 <rebron> we’re going to make some changes though
Jul 17 00:04:15 <gandalf> what changes?
Jul 17 00:05:45 <rebron> we’ll embargo the security notes until 2 to 3 days after localizations have come in
Jul 17 00:05:50 <rebron> for a security release