I work on the Canvas3D project, a Firefox extension. Actually I work on JavaScript that uses it, not the extension itself. So every now and then I need to download the thing, from addons.mozilla.org And it’s bloody annoying. The addon is classified as ‘experimental’, which I assumed means that it’s not really ready for general …
Continue reading Open source projects can be full of it tooSafe For Seneca
Ever since I read the subversion manual I’ve been really impressed with version control, and with subversion especially. Like any other student in CS I’ve had my fair share of “Where is the latest version of my assignment? Crap, it’s on my desktop at home and it’s due in two hours”. And subversion got rid …
Continue reading Why don’t people use version control?This is a letter I mailed to Suzan Kadis. She’s the MP for Thornhill, Ontario – where I live. It’s an issue I feel strongly about. You should write to your MP about bill C61 also – if your MP thinks their constituents don’t care, they won’t care either. Verbatim copy follows. 26th June 2008 …
Continue reading An open letter to Susan KadisYou know what is the worst thing that a web browser can do? I just learned what – lose bookmarks. Not just the favicons, not just the order, not even the URLs – lose all the bookmarks completely. This is what Firefox 3 did. As part of the upgrade I made sure to recreate the …
Continue reading The worst thing a browser can doI’ve recently learned that Adobe has opened the Flash spec. Which, from an open source user’s point of view is really cool. But then I put on my competitor hat and started thinking of making a Flash editor. I won’t bore you with the technical details, of which there are lots (and no it’s not …
Continue reading How to open your spec but not lose to competitorsI’ll pick on Java but this should apply to other languages too. I’m just afraid that due to circumstances beyond my controll I’ll end up writing Java code this year – that’s what got me thinking of this. All Java applications I ever used (web or local) were dreadfully slow and used way too much …
Continue reading Why managed code is slowAll proper programming languages I can think of have a real simple function – sleep(). It suspends the execution of your program for a time. This is what I wanted to do. Having no choice but to use javascript in this case, I went around looking for what the sleep() function is called in this …
Continue reading To sleep with javascriptFor many years I have been asking free software fanatics – how will you make money if your software will be taken (legaly) for free by your competitors? Sadly the best answer I ever got was “you’ll make money from support and other services”. Which is good when you can get it; but you can …
Continue reading Whether to make money with softwareAre you one of those people who think all software should be free? I don’t like you. But that’s besides the point, I’m going to look at how your views might apply to other very similar products and maybe that will be interesting. In the paragraphs below – when I say positively ethical I mean …
Continue reading How is it different?It’s that time of the year when people who have a life go live it fully, and people like me are left bored to death, cause their work is not as interesting :) So I looked over my to do when you’re bored to death list and found this idea – research, or at least …
Continue reading Open source projects competing for manpower