Indistinguishable from Jesse

Firefox has a bug that causes floats to overlap with other content in certain cases. This leads to an amusing rendering of part of the Wikipedia article about Web 2.0.

In the past, I've complained about banks not using https for login pages and software providers not using https for downloads. Both of these practices put large numbers of users at risk of financial harm through man-in-the-middle attacks, including attacks against unsecured wireless networks.

Starting today, I'm practicing what I preach: sections of my site that offer software, such as Firefox extensions and bookmarklets, are now served using https. I'm using the following .htaccess magic in each of those directories to redirect http requests to the correct https URL:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTPS} !=on
RewriteRule (.*) https://%{HTTP_HOST}%{REQUEST_URI}

Supporting https will cost me about $65 per year: $17.99/year for a domain validation certificate from GoDaddy and $47.40/year for a unique IP from my web host.

I didn't like the existing Wikipedia userboxes that say "This user contributes using Mozilla Firefox" because they use a non-standard Firefox icon. (There are strict license restrictions on userbox images, for reasons I haven't tried to understand.) So I created a more specific userbox, using the "Minefield" icon, which happens to be more free than the Firefox icon.

For fun, I created a few more userboxes for my user page:

• This user goes to eleven.
• [In Soviet Russia] Wikipedia uses HIM!

Feel free to include them on your Wikipedia user page :)

<vlad> check out gecko's awesome new gfx capabilities
<vlad> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382613
<vlad> I think we should call it a feature
<vlad> "background: funky;"
<gavin> sweet
<luser> -moz-spirograph: awesome

There's a screenshot on the bug, but for the full effect, you should load the animated testcase in a current trunk build of Firefox. If you're not using a current trunk build of Firefox, now is a great time to try it.

Costco membership: $25.

24 large chocolate chip cookies that are almost as good as my mom's: $6.

4 bottles of Martinelli's sparkling apple juice: also $6.

Getting back at jX for weeks of referring to the apartment I'm sharing with Colin as a "gay lovenest": priceless.

One side-effect of including a spell checker in Firefox is that some users file bug reports when they disagree with the default dictionary:

• Spell check approves "donut", flags "doughnut"
• Racial epithets should not be included in spelling suggestions
  • Originally "Racial Epithets should not be included in the default dictionary"
• Obama not in spellchecker dictionary
  • Originally "Spellchecker has political bias"

It seems that some people are angry that a Kurdish-language version of Firefox exists. The mozilla.feedback newsgroup has been full of posts about Kurdish, many of them similar to this message.

Who knew that making it possible for volunteers to translate a web browser into multiple languages could be controversial?

Jay is running a contest for improving Talkback reports.

Improving the presentation of crash report data will could make stability efforts more productive. For example, making it easier to notice crash regressions would reduce the effort it takes to keep Firefox stable, because it's easier to fix regressions when the regression range is known and recent. I added some ideas to the talk page.