Entries from March 2005

After years of sitting on the sidelines (due to busyness, laziness, or lack of financial wherewithal), I’m finally getting off of my duffel bag and headed down to South by Southwest. Judging by the list of panels and speakers, it looks like half the web is going, too.

It’s really exciting to finally get a chance to go to the festival, and will be equally cool and overwhelming to be around so many web nerds. The possibility of finally putting faces, and more importantly voices to names and URLs is going to be a blast.

If you see me wandering around with a glazed donut look on my face, feel free to grab me and say hello. At the very least, please be kind enough to point me in the direction of the nearest caffeinated beverage.

I just stopped in at the hotel to grab a jacket and figured it was time to break the blog silence. The days have been absolutely spectacular, but it gets chilly in the evenings in Austin, didn’t you know. I’ve also learned that the native bird of Austin is the long-tailed Grackle, and that, when in Rome, it’s best to say, “y’all” whenever possible.

I am on my way to catch what I can of the Fray Café 5. I just had the extreme (extreme!) pleasure of hanging out for a spell with “The British Design Invasion”, which included someone I’d been looking forward to meeting, Jon Hicks. What a blast. I’ve had the great luck to meet lots of damn friendly folk here, and learn a thing or time while I’ve been at it.

Much more hot, sweaty post action on the festivities and the conference soon, as time permits. Ya’ll come back now, ya hear?

I’m back from SXSW, feeling exhausted but still vibrating from the exhilaration of the past six days. This was my first year at the conference and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect, but I was pretty much pleased with the whole experience. My brain still feels like oatmeal in a Baggie, so instead of writing a rambling 2000-word that might verge on the incoherent, I’ll summarize in bullet points.

» Around the bend and back home again continues...

Okay, everyone is probably used to this by now, but to reiterate, the G5-optimized version of Firefox 1.0.2 is now available.

According to the Mozilla foundation this is purely a security fix release, which remedies the following arcane nerd issues:

• Drag and drop loading of privileged XUL
• Arbitrary code execution from Firefox sidebar panel
• GIF heap overflow parsing Netscape extension 2

Apparently that last one is a doozy, and as such this is a highly recommended update for anyone running these optimized builds. This build is identical to the release version, with the following exceptions:

• There is a different application icon (unofficial builds like this cannot use the official Firefox icon)
• Includes the “pretty” form widgets by Kevin Gerich
• Chock full of speed and swagger - well, in theory, at least. I haven’t done any benchmarks because I’m a lazy ass.
• Creates world peace, enhances sexual prowess, improves overall muscle tone, and imbues user with the brilliant wit of Dorothy Parker. Or not.

Download Firefox 1.0.2

Download the G5-optimized Firefox 1.0.2 release (disabled) A newer version than this is now available.

As usual, this is an unofficial build which is not supported by anyone, though I might try to help out with an issue if you email me or post a friendly comment below.

Feedback, complaints, compliments, and non-gender or race-based jokes welcome in the comments. Ranting or bitching about Firefox, Mac-integration conspiracies, or anything else will be treated with derision and swiftly mocked.

(Neil, pondering whether or not he should just change the name of this site to “Firefox’s manservant” and be done with it.)

Update (July 20): I have created a special BeatnikPad Mozilla / Firefox feed for those of you who are interested in just Firefox and other Mozilla-related updates. See how much I care?

For those of you who want the full BeatnikPad feed (which includes Firefox updates) you can use this feed instead. Enjoy!

Subscribe to the Firefox / Mozilla feed