This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 28, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: Security. I dealt with a mistaken report of security problems associated with the file NSSCKBI.DLL, which holds the pre-loaded root CA certificates for Firefox and other Mozilla-based products; for more information see my post to the mozilla.dev.security newsgroup. ...

The mainstream media is beginning to take note of eMusic. The latest sign: a favorable article in USA Today, “EMusic’s pitch: Download song-and own it.” I found the very last section of the article most interesting, describing David Pakman’s attempts to convince major labels to participate: He has a juicy pitch: Give him out-of-print material that consumers can’t get their hands on and let him promote the material heavily on eMusic, minus DRM. . . . The proposal has been accepted at all the major labels by lower-level digital executives, but gets stuck when it goes up to the executive suite, Pakman says. It’s a fun idea to consider, he says, but he assumes it will never happen. ...

My last post illustrated one way to figure out where a company like eMusic is going: look at its job listings. This post shows another way: look at press releases from its key suppliers, in this case a release from Day Software Holding AG (a Swiss vendor of content management applications), “CRX to Store, Manage and Exchange information about Artists and Records on Popular Music Site.” As it happens, this particular news doesn’t seem to have any particular implication for eMusic subscribers, except perhaps to demonstrate eMusic’s investment in creating a reliable high-volume web service. Day’s Content Repository Extreme (CRX) product is a true backend product: As explained in the CRX FAQ, its function is to present a standard interface between the underlying content repository (in eMusic’s case, where all the album and track information is stored) and the front-end content management system (which provides the actual end user interface to the eMusic content). At least in theory this will enable eMusic to change its web front-end (perhaps even migrating to a different CMS) with minimal change to the back-end. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 21, 2006. Note that I was out of the office on vacation for most of the week. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week: OSCON. Zak Greant coordinated with Brian Behlendorf re a brief “lightning” presentation on the Mozilla Foundation at OSCON 2006, but this apparently got dropped due to lack of time in the schedule. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. This post introduces the Blosxom plugin “extensionless.” Ever since reading the essay “Cool URIs don’t change” I’ve wanted to change my web site to conform to some of its recommendations, including the recommendation to omit file extensions (e.g., “.html") on URIs. Unfortunately standard Blosxom requires that a file extension be present in a URI for an individual entry (e.g., http://www.example.com/foo.html) to distinguish it from a URI for a category (e.g., http://www.example.com/foo). How to fix this? ...

This FAQ attempts to answer a variety of questions that might be asked about the usage guidelines that we’ve proposed for the “feed icon” (also known as the “RSS icon”) that the Mozilla Foundation is promoting for use in association with open web syndication formats such as RSS and Atom. Feed icon basics What is the feed icon? The feed icon was created originally for use with the Live Bookmarks feature of the Mozilla Firefox browser. In that context the presence of the icon in association with a displayed web page indicates that information contained in the page is also available in the form of a web feed using the RSS or Atom web syndication formats. ...

Earlier I posted about a proposed Mozilla Foundation approach to promoting use of the “feed icon” (also known as the “RSS icon”): As part of that approach I proposed having the Foundation (or some other organization) publish a set of usage guidelines for the feed icon as used in association with open web syndication formats such as RSS and Atom. This document contains a first draft of such proposed guidelines the (hopefully final) draft of the guidelines. ...

UPDATE 2023-03-27: This page is obsolete, as it refers to a prior version of this blog. However, it may be of historical interest. When I originally put up my blog one of the major things lacking was support for comments and TrackBacks. After looking at the various alternatives (the writeback plugin, the writebackplus plugin, and so on) I decided to embark on a complete rewrite of the writeback plugin in order to support my particular requirements for a comments system. After much struggle I created an initial version of my feedback plugin for publication and use on my site; since that time I’ve upgraded the plugin and incorporated bug fixes suggested by various people. ...

This is my report on activities of the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending July 14, 2006. Projects for the week Here’s a partial listing of what I and others at the Foundation did this past week; most of my time was taken up with travel and the board meeting, so not much else went on from my point of view: Certification Authorities. I approved the application from Wells Fargo for inclusion of its root CA certificate in Mozilla-based products. ...

As part of my day job I try to keep track of what’s happening in the various Mozilla discussion forums. Today I happened an interesting post in the mozilla.jobs forum: “XPCOM/XUL developer needed at eMusic.com (New York, Manhattan).” Based on the information in the post it appears that eMusic is looking to develop future eMusic client software based on Mozilla technologies used in the Firefox browser. My best guess is that eMusic is planning to develop a Firefox-compatible version of the eMusic toolbar for IE; such a toolbar would be developed as a Firefox extension using the technologies (XUL, XPCOM, etc.) mentioned in the job listing. (Note that an eMusic toolbar for Firefox already is available from a third party, but is not officially supported by eMusic.) A more remote possibility is that eMusic is planning to develop a standalone Mozilla-based application, e.g., a replacement for the current eMusic download manager or an eMusic equivalent to iTunes. A twist on the latter possibility is that eMusic could piggyback on the Mozilla-based Songbird media player currently in development, either adding eMusic-specific extensions to Songbird or doing an eMusic-specific version. ...