I was looking at some of the source code for SQLite today, and ran across this. Nice break from the usual legalese.

** The author disclaims copyright to this source code. In place of
** a legal notice, here is a blessing:
**
** May you do good and not evil.
** May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
** May you share freely, never taking more than you give.

I got my new 17-inch Intel iMac today, and it is pretty cool. I’ll just cut to the chase and list things I like about it:

1) It compiles an optimized Firefox in 27 minutes, and that is without even setting up the build process to spawn multiple threads. Basically, it is really fast.
2) It has an iSight camera built in. I actually video chat somewhat frequently, and I appreciate not having to mount and center an external camera.
3) It has a remote control so I can control my DVDs and music from my comfy place (my bed).

Other than that, it is pretty much like every other Mac I’ve owned in the past few years. I wouldn’t have bought an iMac, but given that it is my only option for continuing to work on transitioning Mozilla’s products to Intel, I didn’t have much of a choice. Oh – and it was free from Apple because of their Developer Transition Kit exchange program. Free is good.

I have now filed 100 Mozilla bugs. That isn’t actually that many for someone who has worked on Mozilla for 4 years, but when I started I barely knew what gcc was (read: I was a very inexperienced software developer). You can tell this by looking at some of the early bug reports I filed. Bug 223583 was the first bug in which I wrote some significant code (rewrote the Camino download manager). 62% of the bugs I reported have been fixed, 4% were duplicates, 4% could not be reproduced, 8% were marked invalid.

It’s here, and everything works (including Flash and Java). Many thanks to Mark Mentovai for working all weekend with me to get this done. He came up with a great last-minute bit of coding to get Java and Flash working.

Click here to download an unofficial build of Firefox for Intel Macs.

Note 1) This is an Intel-only build. Official builds will probably be Universal Binaries.
Note 2) The UA String is not finalized.
Note 3) We cannot use official branding for unofficial builds, so the application is actually named “DeerPark.app”.

Here’s what I’ve been listening to lately that I really like. I highly recommend all of these albums.

Artist: Sage Francis
Album: A Healthy Distrust
Notes: Sage Francis used to be known primarily for his slam poetry, but he has moved on to a great career as a rapper. He is often pretty chill, but his lyrics are always loaded and sometimes they get him riled up. This album features one of the most beautiful hip-hop tracks I have ever heard, called “Lie Detector Test.” I don’t know who his DJ is, but the guy is a genius.

Artist: The Go! Team
Album: Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Notes: An energetic, inspirational (in a fun way) album with an old-school sampled rock feel to it. “Ladyflash,” “We Just Won’t Be Defeated,” and “Huddle Formation” are probably my favorite tracks.

Artist: The Mountain Goats
Album: Tallahassee
Notes: For those that haven’t heard The Mountain Goats, the band (which usually has only one member) is a California indie scene standard featuring a guy named John Darnielle. Most of his songs consist solely of himself singing and playing an acoustic guitar in a folksy indie-rock fashion. Tallahassee is a great album from The Mountain Goats, second only to “The Sunset Tree” as far as I’m concerned. I hated “All Hail West Texas” and it got a little discouraged about buying more Mountain Goats albums, but my faith has been restored.

Firefox 1.5 was a major milestone on all platforms, but it was not quite what it could have been on Mac OS X. We just didn’t have the resources to test for and fix bugs fast enough when release time rolled around. However, not delaying the release was a decision that I was happy with because it was the right thing to do, even if it meant less-than-great Mac OS X support. Firefox 1.5 was still a major upgrade in terms of Mac OS X support, and nothing to be ashamed of.

Once Firefox 1.5 was out the door, we got the time we needed to test for and fix some of the major bugs in Firefox 1.5 for Mac OS X. Mozilla’s release drivers were great about helping us get the results of that effort into the upcoming Firefox 1.5.0.1 release, and I’m writing this blog post to let you know that Firefox 1.5.0.1 is going to be everything Firefox 1.5 could have been on Mac OS X. You should definitely download it as soon as it comes out.

We’re really busy these days working on 3 major projects:
1) Porting all Mozilla products to Intel Mac OS X. The results of this work will appear as soon as Intel Macs ship.
2) Rewriting much of the Mac OS X infrastructure to use Apple’s Cocoa API (basically, Cocoa widgets). The results of this work will appear in Firefox 3.
3) Working on Firefox 1.5.0.1 and Firefox 2.0. These releases have almost identical codebases in terms of Mac OS X support, so they are sort of the same task as far as I’m concerned. Firefox 2 differs from Firefox 1.5.0.1 in that Firefox 2 will have more and better higher-level features.