Hypocritical Greenery

October 27, 2003 by Steven Garrity

Two semi-random environmental notes from a complete evironmental hypocrite (me):

First, Tessa Blake, who shared her fantastic soon-to-be-release film, The Pink House at the Zap Your PRAM conference mentioned the weekly Chicago radio show This American Life. When I saw the link to This American Life on Matt Rainnie’s new weblog, I knew it was worth checking out.

The first thing I saw on the This American Life website was this amazing map of the movement of solid waste in the United States. It speaks for itself.

While I admit to only having copped the context-free statistic and not having read the article yet, I thought it was worth sharing anyhow: Slashdot links to an article that suggests that:

“A staggering 98 tons of prehistoric, buried plant material is required to produce each gallon of gasoline we burn in our cars, SUVs, trucks and other vehicles.”

Acts of Volition gets Slashdotted!

October 23, 2003 by Steven Garrity

I have reached uber-geek nirvana: our Branding Mozilla article has been Slashdotted.

Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0

October 23, 2003 by Steven Garrity

I’ve been using and enjoying the products of the Mozilla project more and more lately. I’ve been hooked on Mozilla Firebird for a while, and my recent Mozilla Thunderbird theme was my first real contribution (if you could call it that) to the movement.

I’m very interested in the success of the project, and so I have written a short article outline some recommendations and ideas for branding Mozilla.

For those too lazy/busy to read the article (or those who understandably might value their time more than my words and ideas), here’s the 10-second version:

The Mozilla Project should adopt a simple, strong, consistent visual identity for the Mozilla products including consistent icons across applications that mesh with the host operating system.

Read the article in full and please feel free to comment in reply to this post.

Branding Mozilla: Towards Mozilla 2.0

Recommendations for the branding and visual identity of the Mozilla Foundation’s product and project line.

Free/Open Rock & Roll

October 23, 2003 by Steven Garrity

The Creative Commons project has released a CD of music available under the Creative Commons lisences. I’m honoured to see that two tracks by Horton’s Choice, my now defunct rock band, have been included.

If someone ever did a Horton’s Choice remix, it would blow my mind.

God, Satan, on CNN

October 16, 2003 by Steven Garrity

The front page of CNN.com often seems to be as hilarious and absurd as the front page of The Onion. My friend Dan James point today’s particularly notable list of “top stories” (see the full screenshot):

Six Degrees of Zap

October 15, 2003 by Steven Garrity

Our Zap Your PRAM conference is coming up next weekend and it’s really starting to come together. We’ve got a great lineup of participants, a great venue, and good eats.

I got an email this morning from Peter Rukavina, one of our Zap organizers, who is on the road to New York today. Apparently weblogger extraordinaire, Dave Winer is going to be on PEI for another conference (flash site) that week.

As it turns out Dave, who’s living in Boston, knows two of our participants, Buzz Bruggeman from Florida and Sebastien Paquet from Moncton, New Brunswick. All three will be on PEI next weekend.

It’s a small world.

Does 1.0 Matter Anymore?

October 5, 2003 by Steven Garrity

More and more of the software I’ve been using lately has been open source. With this shift comes a different approach to releasing updates and to version numbering. Following the “release early, release often” mantra canonized by Eric Raymond in The Cathedral and the Bazaar, many major open source projects like Mozilla release “nightly builds” throughout the development process.

The practice isn’t unique to open source. While they don’t release them, Microsoft does nightly builds of developing versions of Windows. The developers of the closed-source RSS reader I use on Windows, NewzCrawler, have be releasing frequent “beta builds” publicly.

I remember an old article in Windows Magazine (I think it was by Fred Langa) that worried that delivery of software over the internet rather than on physical media would lead to “dribble-ware” – software that was let out the door before it was ready, only to be patched after the fact (sound familiar?).

With all of these changes, I’m beginning to wonder if major version numbers are loosing their significance. Three applications that I am relying heavily on these days are all significantly pre-1.0 (Mozilla Firebird – 0.6, Mozilla Thunderbird – 0.2, and Gaim – 0.7). Having been released frequently for months (years) already, I doubt that these applications are any less complete or stable than most “1.0” software.

Hurricane Juan Photos

September 29, 2003 by Steven Garrity

Photos of Hurricane Juan from last night here in Charlottetown:

I’ll update this post if I find more.

Update: The list at newrecruit.org is more up-to-date than mine.

Weblogging the P.E.I. Election

September 28, 2003 by Steven Garrity

Friends of Acts of Volition and speakers at the Zap Your PRAM Conference Robert Patterson and Will Pate have been running the Election Watch weblog to blog the Prince Edward Island provincial election.

They’ve done a fine job. I was hoping to participate myself, but it didn’t pan out (too much else going on). CBC PEI has an in-depth RealVideo piece on Robert and Will’s Election (6min 44sec – RealVideo).

They even have Premier Pat Binns on camera explaining why he doesn’t post to his weblog himself. CBC did a good job of covering the convergence the weblog and politics. It’s not an easy thing for the traditional media to cover. Well done to Nancy Russell and all of CBC PEI.

Luna Blue Theme for Mozilla Thunderbird – Development Version

September 20, 2003 by Steven Garrity

I’ve put together a version of Chris Cook’s Luna Blue Firebird theme for Mozilla Thunderbird, the new Mozilla email client application.

We’ve borrowed heavily from Chris’ Firebird themes, so he deserves much of the credit.

This is a rough first version of the theme. There are many elements that are either missing or broken. We have most of the icons completed, but we still haven’t done the newsgroup icons. Also, since I don’t have much experience working with Mozilla themes, there are some elements we haven’t been able to figure out yet.

Since I haven’t found a version of Thunderbird with the DOM Inspector (and I’m too incompetent to build it myself), there are some elements I could use some help on. See this diagram of what I haven’t figured out yet, and let me know if you are able to help.

Feedback, suggestions, constructive criticism, and help are all welcome.

UPDATE: A new version of this theme has been released. See
Luna Blue Theme (v0.2) for Mozilla Thunderbird Update for details.

Download/Install Luna Blue for Mozilla Thunderbird – Development Version

lunabluethunderbird.jar – 477Kb RAR File

Screenshots:

Long-time readers (if they exist) might remember me criticizing the concept of themes and skins (see these two old posts Thoughts on Winamp3 and A discussion of ‘skins’ strangly free of sexual innuendo). You can read about my partial change of heart here: XUL: How I learned to love non-native GUIs.