I have fallen into the most dangerous trap of a computer programmer: doing nothing in the pursuit of perfection. When I left my job at Saint Patrick’s I promised that I would have my new weblog running very soon, and promised an exciting new development to boot… which was silly of me, because I had great plans but no working code to go with those plans. So I have not had a weblog for almost six months, because I kept telling myself that I would get up one day and my new weblog software would magically write itself.

I have given up those silly perfectionist dreams and returned to WordPress on my new website, and found a nice surprise: WordPress is a lot better than it was, and it has solved a lot of the complaints I originally had with it. I will be looking into WordPress extensions to make this blog even easier for you (my readers) to use: please let me know if you have suggestions.

It is good to be blogging again, because I have lots of ideas and decisions that I need to talk about. I have a backlog of ideas that I’ve wanted to blog about for the past six months, so expect some serious blog output in the next few days while I get caught up with myself.

Most importantly, the Mozilla Foundation has hired me (working remotely from Pennsylvania) to take XULRunner and libxul by the horns and wrestle them into a workable software solution. I am also spending a significant amount of time on the build system and such for localizations.

I’m aware that my website has broken links here and there, and that the import of the old blog database has left some dangling links. I’ll fixup what I can when I can, but it’s a low-priority task ;-) .

Suzanne and I are pleased to announce the birth of Claire Jane Smedberg, born 27 April, A.D. 2005
7 lbs., 10 oz.

Dear readers,

As some of you may already know, I am leaving Washington D.C. and my job at St. Patrick’s, effective this Sunday 30-January. I will be joining the expanding biosphere of hackers who are paid to work on the Mozilla products and platform. I will be working full-time for the mozdev group, inc., a consulting company that specializes in software solutions based on mozilla technologies.

I am saddened to be leaving St. Patrick’s; I have made many good friends here, and learned a tremendous amount about music, worship, and life in general. I could not have asked for a better job coming right out of college, or a more beautiful church or organ.

I am excited to be moving on to the new challenges of software development. As most of you are aware, I have been significantly involved with the development of Mozilla Firefox, serving as the volunteer coordinator of localizations for the 1.0 release, and writing a decent amount of the backend code that makes loading extensions possible. My work with mozdev group is full of exciting challenges. And I intend to continue development of the XULrunner, the next-generation runtime for XUL applications, or applications which wish to embed the gecko rendering engine.

Suzanne and I will be moving to Johnstown, PA on 3-Februrary, and so I will probably be out of touch for most of next week. Our new mailing adress will be

221 Hemlock St.
Windber, PA 15963

I also have a new email address, effective immediately: benjamin@smedbergs.us. Please update your address book accordingly.

Also, the location of my weblog will be moving soon to http://benjamin.smedbergs.us/. I will try to set up a decent number of redirects so that this current location continues to get you somewhere useful. However, old blog post links will not continue to work, because I do not intend to use WordPress for the new blog. Stay tuned for some exciting developments there.