• Aug 8, 2003

    Marketing Mozilla Firebird

    I came across this page written by Blake Ross (Mozilla Firebird originator) on "marketing Mozilla Firebird (Marketing Firebird)":http://www.blakeross.com/firebird/marketing.html. It encourages Firebird users and advocates alike to promote Firebird via word of mouth (like the way Kazaa has grown), and through active promotion on your website.

    "Make it your goal to convert five friends, coworkers, family members or other acquaintances to Firebird"

    Linking to the official "Why You Should Switch to the Mozilla Firebird browser":http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/ page is one way. Saying things like "Stop popup ads with Firebird." is better. Web developers will appreciate it's better CSS model (IE 6 for windows is a klutz with CSS). Power users will appreciate tabbed-browsing (no more Right-click -> Open in a New window).

    Go on, promote Firebird if you love it. I do, and I've made 2 converts that I know of, and hopefully more from my entries here and at "Ensight":http://ensight.org/.

  • Aug 8, 2003

    Life as it has never sucked before

    I'm really on a downward spiral. There's not one thing I can't bitch about, but right now what really gets me down is being scammed by my FYP(Final Year Project) supervisor. I went through a whole lot of trouble just to get his project and now he gives me one that is totally unrelated to the project title or synposis.

    _Design of intelligent evolutionary software agents for e-commerce_ is the title and I'm doing nothing related to agents nor e-commerce. Instead, I'm continuing someone else's FYP(Final Year Project) which had disappointing results - something to do with Incremental Genetic Algorithms using the Michigan approach. Rest assured I don't understand what it is, nor does it excite me (I've read that someone else's technical paper) in the least. I did get assurance from the supervisor that there is a high chance of publishing a paper, so that is some consolation.

    Whatever. I'm tossing around the idea of getting _yet another_ change in FYP(Final Year Project). Or should I just stick with it and tough it out? Damn. Why am I so goddamn unlucky? It's like I'm furiously failing every saving throw as I come to each challenge. Or maybe I just have a Luck of 3 (only RPGers will appreciate that).

  • Jul 30, 2003

    The monthly report - July 2003

    redemption in a blog has seen a total of 18,000 16,000 odd hits in this month of July 2003. Not much - a petty amount in fact, but I'm glad to see that I am getting some readership at all.

    Now onto more interesting facts, first being the most visited entries:

    Top search strings:

    • thunderbird email - currently ranked no. 5 on Google
    • firebird google toolbar - 1st on Google
    • mambo 4.5 - 6th on Google

    Other interesting stuff:

    • ranked 3rd and 4th for rounded tables - who would have thought?
    • ranked 1st and 2nd for jade weblogic - now that would have my old colleagues at the company I was interning at visiting my blog and finding nothing of use
    • NetNewsWire, a news reader for Mac OS X, is one of the top user agents - I wonder who you people are, or maybe someone got here from an aggregator.
    • Java1.3.1 is another top user agent - I wonder what exactly this is

    Until next month, and thanks for popping by!

  • Jul 30, 2003

    CPE - the illegitimate, forgotten bastard child of ECE dept, NUS

    Those of us Computer Engineering (CPE) students in the Engineering faculty of NUS have really been hard done by this time. First of all, our selection of modules are a subset of those in Electrical Engineering (EE) - EE students have a much wider range of modules to choose from, while CPE have to compete with those from EE for places in modules in our concentrations. I've heard it said that an EE student can convert his degree into a CPE one, provided he or she takes sufficient modules related to CPE. I now understand why the split of Computer Engineering from the School of Computing (SoC) has been said to be for political reasons.

    Now, in the recent allocation of Final Year Projects (FYP), some CPE students (yours truly included) were wrongly allocated projects deemed 'Unsuitable for CPE' "because of a glitch" in the system. I can accept that - at least to the extent of accepting that a system that has been in place for several years can still fail. No matter. Provided something suitable was done as recompense for the lost opportunity to fairly ballot for the our FYP choices. I was lucky - after appealing for my 2nd choice project, which was unallocated, and with a 2nd mini-ballot, I got it. Others were not so lucky, as I've found. One of my friends was allocated neither his first 8 nor his appeal choices. OK, so he appealed to one of the heads to allow him to continue his Research Internship Project as an FYP - even his supervisor's all ready to accept him. But no they say, "even if there is a glitch, there are still many students didn't get any of their 8 choices... and you are not exceptional". What? This student has forfeited his chance at balloting for his 8 choices because of YOUR glitch. And you expect him to accept the outcome of somebody else's fumbling?

    And what's worse is most of the projects indicated as 'Suitable for CPE' were taken by EE students. This despite the fact that we have only a limited number of FYPs to choose from. I was worried initially and emailed the person in charge, who reassured me that yes CPE students will be given a priority. I now realise that was a lie: they refused to tell our year representative when he asked the same question.

  • Jul 29, 2003

    Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 released

    Mozilla Firebird 0.6.1 has been released. People who have been staying away because of the auto-complete crash bug, or have been annoyed like I was (but still stuck to Firebird for it's redeeming qualities) will be pleased to know that bug has been eliminated.

    "The Best Browser, Bar None"

    Other than that, the other bug-fix of note is a fix for the DOM security restriction bug which broke certain bookmarklets. And there's a snazzy new icon too. This is after all a maintenance, bug-fix release - the next major release, 0.7, will be out in the time of Mozilla 1.5 final's release date, and will feature upgrades to the download and password manager systems.

    Note: If you'd bookmarked the Firebird website as http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firebird/, it seems to be time to update it. The 'front' page is http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/, and that old page is now intended as a developer resource.

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