the law of averages » projects

Readonly Attachments for Thunderbird 2

Nathan Y. — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 02:10:48 +0000

Last seen here two years ago, I’ve just updated Readonly Attachments for Thunderbird 2. It still does pretty much exactly what the last post describes, bugs and all.

Right now I’m just releasing a preview. At this point I’ve only tested it with Thunderbird 2.0.0.14 on Mac OS X 10.5.3; I’ll test with Linux tomorrow¹ and if all goes well I’ll update addons.mozilla.org at that point.

UPDATE: (2008-07-13) Things seem to work fine on Linux, so we’re just waiting for it to clear the review queue at AMO.

¹ Unfortunately I won’t be testing on Windows. My work laptop dual boots but frankly it’s so painful to load Windows these days that I can’t bring myself to do it. I’m trying to do more with my spare time these days that I enjoy and testing for Windows just doesn’t pass that test. Sorry.

MozCC Resources Moved

Nathan Y. — Tue, 16 May 2006 17:27:29 +0000

MozCC will be getting some much-needed attention this summer (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), so I took the opportunity to move the web content from my web server over to Creative Commons’ server. You can find the new MozCC page here, and downloads are over at updates.mozilla.org.

mozCC on addons.mozilla.org

Nathan Y. — Tue, 24 Jan 2006 14:16:57 +0000

mozCC is now hosted over at addons.mozilla.org. I’ll be distributing all future releases from there—it’s just easier to have them manage the update information, even if there is a slight delay to go through their approval process. So you may want to reinstall… or just keep reading this blog.

mozCC updated, adds support for Flock

Nathan Y. — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 01:00:03 +0000

Yeah, an upgrade for mozCC. Now it should work more consistently on Windows XP and (more interestingly) support Flock.

wpLicense Updated

Nathan Y. — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 21:58:05 +0000

So there’s a minor update available for wpLicense, and it’ll probably be most interesting to the Mac users in the audience. wpLicense 0.5.2 fixes a bug which broke the license selector under Safari. Oops. I’m not sure if the bug was Safari-specific or KHTML-specific, so if you’ve had problems with wpLicense under Konqueror, you may want to give this a try.

ccPublisher 2, Beta 1 is out the door

Nathan Y. — Fri, 30 Dec 2005 19:05:39 +0000

It’s late, it’s delayed, and it doesn’t do everything I wanted it to. But there comes a point when you just need to ship. As posted to the cc-devel this afternoon:

I’m pleased to announce the first beta of ccPublisher 2. This beta represents the first step towards final release. There’s still lots that needs to be finished and polished, but there comes a point when you need to start getting some feedback.

So what works in this release? We’ve successfully uploaded several items to the Internet Archive, and verified that the metadata travels successfully along with the item.

What doesn’t work or is missing? Most notably the installer is missing from this release: we’re 99% there on Windows and Mac OS X and 90% there on Linux thanks to some code cribbing from the Straw project. Beyond the installer, the crash phone home and UI niceties like icons are missing as well. Because the phone home code is currently disabled, please include a copy of err.log when reporting bugs or crashes. It includes all sorts of debugging output which can be helpful in tracking down the problem.

You can find the complete instructions for running this release in the Release Notes, and the Downloads are available at Berlios. Additional information is available at the ccPublisher 2 Releases page in the wiki. Note that Windows and Linux builds are available for download now, Mac OS X will be available later today.

Nathan R. Yergler
Software Engineer
Creative Commons

UPDATE Mac OS X builds now available for download at the link above.

mozCC Updates

Nathan Y. — Thu, 15 Dec 2005 15:12:09 +0000

So Hal pointed out that mozCC 1.1.4 (the latest release) doesn’t work right on Windows XP. Unfortunately he’s right. Well, sort of. When I installed it with Firefox 1.5 on Windows XP Professional, the (CC) icon shows up in the status bar, but none of the license attribute icons (by, share-alike, etc) show up. It appears that this is actually a line-endings problem: the icon graphic files are flagged as ASCII in CVS, and were apparently borked when I checked them out of CVS to do the build on Windows.

So this of course demands an updated build, but I’m choosing to hold off for just a little while. See, I’ve been promising a new and improved mozCC for months. And whlie I know I won’t have time to really do much in the near future, I would like to do a few updates. See the upcoming features page in the Yiki (what’s a yiki?) for details.

mozCC 1.1.3 for Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

Nathan Y. — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 18:53:52 +0000

Maybe it’s just the hacking environment here at the Summit, but I’ve been hella productive today. In regards to my last post, there’s an update for MozCC available. A couple of details:

The new release, 1.1.3, adds compatibility for Firefox 1.5 Beta 2 and adds support for metadata linked in the header with a tag.
Using the update manager you should be able automagically upgrade MozCC if you are using 1.5 Beta 2; the update specification won’t offer it to you if you’re not using Beta 2, because…
...this release hasn’t been tested with anything other than Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.

When Firefox 1.5 is finally released, MozCC will break until we release an update. This is intentional and I’ll try to get it updated shortly after the release (barring some late breaking bug this should be a trivial update).
If you want to download the new release directly, you can find it here.

MozCC with Firefox 1.5 Beta 2

Nathan Y. — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 15:47:04 +0000

Just a quick note to head off the stream of email I’ve been receiving (yes, both of them): mozCC doesn’t work with Firefox 1.5 Beta 2.

Actually if you tried to install it, you’d be told it’s not compatible, since mozCC 1.1.2 claims it’s only compatible with Firefox 1.4 (the internal version for Beta 1). At first I thought this was gratuitous version incrementing, and then I discovered that after incrementing the supported version in mozCC, it doesn’t work. At all. I’ve tracked down the problem and hope to have a release out later today or tomorrow that fixes both this compatibility issue as well as a rather embarassing issue pointed out by Jeff yesterday. Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Just to be clear, it’s not really gratuitious per say to increment the version from 1.4 to 1.4.1—I just assumed it had gone to 1.5; mea culpa. Also, the update is now available.

mozCC 1.1.2 Out

Nathan Y. — Thu, 08 Sep 2005 14:52:45 +0000

mozCC 1.1.2 is out; no feature improvements, just compatibility with Firefox 1.5 (and current nightly builds, alphas, etc.). I am working on some improvements to mozCC which should improve the overall user experience. In particular, I want to handle the following situations:

support for embedded, licensed content: Currently mozCC looks for a page license, and displays it’s information in the status bar. It’s perfectly valid, however, to license the text of a page with one license and the photographs with another. So we want to have an easy way for users to see that distinction.
support for discovery: mozCC lets you see that content you’ve found is licensed, but how do you find new licensed content? I want mozCC to help with that.

support for remix and re-use: I have two pages, can I mix them? Under what license? mozCC knows about the licenses in use, so I hope to help users re-use content.
To people who have inquired about localizing mozCC, I’m holding off until I get some of these fixes landed. They’re going to change lots of the internals, so it doesn’t make much sense to translate strings that may very well change or go away. If you’re interested in helping to localize mozCC, contact me, or subscribe to my blog’s feed—I’ll announce a call for translations there.

As always, let me know if you have any problems with the new release. Users who’ve installed an update to Firefox and found mozCC marked as “disabled” should be able to click “Find Updates” from the extension manager and download it auto-magically.