I am pleased to announce the release of Locale-Switcher version 2. This has been updated for Firefox 2 (and Thunderbird 2 betas).

Download Locale-Switcher Now

I have submitted the new version to addons.mozilla.org, and will hopefully appear shortly after reviews.

Announcing the release of the Atom 1.0 plugin for WordPress, version 0.5. This is a minor upgrade to version 0.4 that adds hooks so that other WordPress plugins can modify the default Atom 1.0 output. Current users need not upgrade unless they want/need to use these hooks.

Today I installed GnuPG and Enigmail and started signing my email correspondence. I’ve been meaning to do this for a long time, because I firmly believe that digital signing is the only long-term solution to spam. I don’t think that PGP signing will by itself solve the problem, without an additional web-of-trust UI for easily verifying public keys, but at least now if you want to, you can verify that an email that purports to be from me is actually from me.

My public key is available here.

Have you ever crashed Firefox? We’re trying to make that as rare as possible, and we have a new tool under development to make that possible. Google and Mozilla are working in cooperation to replace the closed-source Talkback crash reporter with an open-source crash and defect reporting mechanism, called Airbag. Check it out!

I am excited about this project for several reasons:

• Developers and bug reporters can get immediate crash stack information on the client.
• Firefox and other Mozilla-based applications can combine symbol information from multiple sources, including the XULRunner runtime, application binaries, extensions, plugins, and perhaps even some system libraries.
• It will hopefully allow us to collect stack information from some kinds of runtime assertions, not just crashes.

Airbag itself is just a set of libraries that read symbolic debugging information from binaries, collect crash information on the client, and process the crash information on a server. Mozilla will be working on related projects to integrate the client and server libraries into our applications. I am hoping to have airbag included in XULRunner trunk nightlies within 8 weeks, release and collection infrastructure allowing.

Announcing the release of Atom 1.0 for WordPress, version 0.4. This release fixes some bugs in version 0.3 where the main comments feed wasn’t working, and a warning from the feed validator about same-document references.

Note: I am told that this plugin is not compatible with the feedburner plugin. I have never used feedburner, so I don’t know how to fix this. I am happy to accept patches. You can use SVN to check out the development sources anonymously.

After having mucked yesterday with my WordPress to add threading to my Atom feed, I found there’s a better way. I’ve taken James Snell’s Atom 1.0 templates, fixed them up a little bit, and packaged them as a WordPress plugin (instead of uploading them directly into the WordPress install, which makes it hard to upgrade WordPress). Installation instructions. Source code.

Update: James says his templates are public domain, and I am putting my changes and plugin glue into the public domain as well.

Update: go visit the WordPress plugin for Atom 1.0 here; it’s better.

After my rant about web fora, where I mentioned threaded Atom several times, I decided to make this blog produce threaded Atom. I’ve written a little WordPress plugin that will produce a single Atom feed for a blog which contains the entries and their comments, using the proposed Atom threading extension. I’ve put up a page with installation instructions and release notes.

I hate web fora.

I do not think I can adequately express the loathing that I have for web fora as a communication medium. Whenever somebody proposes that I must take part in a discussion on a web forum, I want to pull out the foulest curse words in my vocabulary. Which, thank goodness, look something like this.

For years, I have managed for the most part to avoid using web fora for interactive communication. For example, I have tenuously avoided the MozillaZine forums. But recently, some (well-intentioned) mozillafolk have proposed to move the Mozilla corporation internal discussions from a mailing list to a web forum. I hate the very idea. Perhaps I have been tainted by years of badly-implemented fora, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. I would like to identify, as precisely as possible, what about web fora engenders such vengeful feeling in my soul and what tools would be necessary to change my mind. (more…)

I’ve been having problems playing CDs on Windows: if I have Windows Media Player running and I switch (audio) CDs, WMP never recognizes that the CD has changed. I couldn’t figure out what was going on; I even upgraded WMP to the latest beta (which, it turns out, I intensely dislike), but that didn’t solve the problem. (more…)

I’ve prepared, documented, and released a production release of the Firefox+extension repackager tool I blogged about a while back.