There is not a lot to report for last week, but here is a quick update:
I just finished reading Green Centuries, a book set in the late 1700s about a family that settles in what will become Tennessee and gets caught up in the beginning of the Chickamauga Wars.
My mom gave me the book to read a few years ago when I asked her about some of the genealogy research she had done. She had said that members of our family had come to Texas through Tennessee and that I should read this book to get a sense for what it was like back then.
The sense I got was that a scrawny, educated, vegetarian like me would have no business being on the frontier. The main character, Orion Outlaw, is basically my opposite — he is burly, illiterate and kills lots of stuff to eat. Some examples of how much unlike Orion I am:
After killing a bear, he says that: “I always did like the toes. Brown ‘em right and you got a tasty tid-bit.”
The closest I’ll ever get to this is eating tofu buffalo wings.
When talking about clearing fields around his house, he says: “If a man kept his axe handy he could fall a lot of trees in a lifetime. And as he told them every one down was one out of the way.”
If I lived somewhere that had any land attached to it, I’d plant as many trees as I could.
One of the times he had to put up with his brother-in-law, the school master, he thinks: “what would become of Frank if you turned him out in the woods by himself. Most likely he would starve to death and somebody some day would find a few buttons or those books he carried in his pack scattered at the foot of a tree.”
I don’t think I’d last too long in the woods either…
Up next, Touch The Earth.
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Posted by davidwboswell
I heard the knife sharpening truck yesterday but I didn’t see it when I stuck my head out of the window. As far as I can tell, there’s no real schedule for the truck so when you hear the tinkling song coming down your street you need to grab your camera (if you want to get a picture) or your knives (if you want to get them sharpened) and drop what you are doing and hurry outside.
We’ve used the truck once or twice before and it seemed fine, although it seems that people have some very definite opinions about this. Even if this isn’t the best (or safest) way to sharpen your knives, I think it does bring up a question of what else (besides ice cream) could be handled as part of a truck based service that could be announced via some tinkling song. It’s a hard question…
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Posted by davidwboswell
Last week I continued working on my research projects and also got the process started for archiving obsolete content on www.mozilla.org by opening bug 395669. I’ve mentioned archiving in the last few updates, but I thought it would be helpful to talk a little bit more about the process and about what we’re trying to achieve.
The www.mozilla.org site is almost 10 years old (the first version of the home page was added to CVS on February 27, 1998) and there is some older content that is now out of date or that belongs on another site. For those pages, we would like to update the content, migrate it to a better location (this mostly applies to documentation going from www.mozilla.org to the Mozilla Developer Center) or archive it.
Our plan is to create a snapshot of all of the content on the site today and host that on an archive site. On www.mozilla.org we will then remove obsolete pages and set up a redirect to the copy of that page on the archive site (we’ll also add a note so people know that the page has been archived). This will preserve the original information and will allow us to clean up www.mozilla.org to make sure everything is up to date.
If you are interested in reading more about this or helping out with the archiving process, please take a look at the Mozilla.org:Planning page.
I like Macs (for full computer disclosure, I have had three Macs, two PCs from Dell before the Macs and then an Apple IIGS and an Apple II+ before the PCs) but I have always hated the way that Alt-Tab switches between open applications instead of between open windows the way Windows does it.
I finally got fed up with using the mouse to switch between windows earlier today and did some Googling and found someone else complaining about the same thing. I read through the comments and at the very bottom found the solution. Alt+` will switch between open windows in the application you are current using. Now I can easily check on Chatzilla while I’m using Firefox and that makes me happy.
Note: I also just came across Witch and this does a good job of allowing you to see and switch to any open window (even one that is minimized).
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Posted by davidwboswell
Last week I continued working on several ongoing projects. Here’s a quick update on things:
In September 2000, mozdev.org was launched as a site dedicated to supporting Mozilla application and extension developers. There are currently over 200 active projects being hosted and there are ambititious plans to improve the features that are offered to project owners and users. We would like to thank everyone who has contributed time, energy or money over the past 7 years and we look forward to another year of serving the open source community.
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Posted by davidwboswell
Unfortunately I lost a fair amount of time last week troubleshooting problems with my Internet connection and VoIP phone service (it only took 2 visits from Time Warner technicians, 5 calls to Vonage technical support, 1 new cable modem, 1 new router and a partridge in a pear tree to get things working again). I did manage to get some things done though:
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