Indistinguishable from Jesse

"Something in your eyes" = poetically romantic

"Something in your eye" = allegorically judgmental

"Something in my eye" = painfully annoying

I updated Tidybox today. The most requested change I made: fix it to work on static Tinderbox pages, such as http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/Firefox, in addition to the showbuilds.cgi URLs.

Install the new version

I joined yesterday's protest in San Francisco against the passage of proposition 8. I'd like to be able to say that I went only because I am outraged about counterproductive discrimination based on superstition. But the truth is I also had a selfish reason to be there: I wanted to see creative protest signs.

Attitudes toward political opponents

Many signs were angry: Fuck the H8 away, If you don't like.... One was so angry that it bordered on oxymoronical: Our diverse community does not tolerate haters.

Other signs tried to show opponents the light through compassion and empathy: All families matter, Careful whom you H8. It could be someone you love.

A few signs were simply patient and optimistic about the future: The winds of change are coming, Our love will outlive your vote.

Drawing historical parallels

Many signs drew parallels to civil rights movements of previous generations: separate is never equal, I can't believe we still have to protest this crap.

The most direct parallels involved laws against interracial marriage. One sign quoted Loving v Virginia, the supreme court case that overturned miscegenation laws: "Marriage is one of the basic civil rights of man". An especially touching sign read: I would not be here were it not for the courts legalizing interracial marriage.

One of the marching chants also evoked these parallels: "Gay, straight, black, white; marriage is a civil right!". (The parallel here isn't perfect: Loving allowed black people to marry white people, but we're not exactly fighting to allow gay people to marry straight people ;))

Attitudes toward religion

Quite a few signs were anti-religion, and anti-mormonism in particular.

But equally numerous were signs that drew on religion to argue for equality: All love is sacred, What God hath joined together, let not man put asunder, We are married by the power and in the presence of God.

Some protestors avoided bashing religion, and asked only for the separation of church and state: State/church shirt, Not your sacrament, just our civil right. If I had made a sign, I might have written: "Say what you will about 'holy matrimony', but 'marriage' belongs to all of us."

Humorous and strange signs

One man's sign read I really used to LIKE the number 8. Another sign reminded us to be careful how we use language: Discrimination is totally gay.

A few signs left me baffled: Marriage is totally gay, No queers, If the tooth fairy were gay....

Marching chants

After a few hours at civic center park, many of us marched three miles to fisherman's wharf, chanting various slogans. One frequent chant was "Separate! Church and state!" Chants were even used to direct the march: "Right on Lombard!"

Our most frequent chant revealed grammatical disagreement: "What do we want? Equal rights! When do we want ___? Now!". This was a call-and-response chant: only one person would yell the questions, while the crowd would yell the answers. Some callers yelled "it", but others yelled "them" or "'em".

The climax of the protest came as we marched through a tunnel. The sign above the tunnel entrance, "Quiet through tunnel", hinted as to what might happen once we entered. We did not obey this sign.

I created a page called Reducing testcases to replace the old Gecko BugAThon page. Now I have something modern to point bug reporters at when I'm too lazy to make a reduced testcase myself :)

The page is on the developer.mozilla.org wiki, so you're welcome to help improve it.

I made this using the On Notice Board Generator.

Despite all the problems, the summit in Whistler has been worth it:

• I finally got to meet Mozilla security contributor Paul Nickerson. He had interesting ideas about how to find and prevent JavaScript privilege escalation bugs, which we discussed with Blake Kaplan.
• Firebug developer John J. Barton and I figured out why Firebug showed user agent stylesheet rules on his machine but not mine. He fixed the bug on the spot. This should let me switch from the aging DOM Inspector to Firebug for reducing layout testcases, saving me time.
• Rob Arnold took one of my extra Apple remotes and said he'd try to get it working with Firefox on Windows.
• Dave Mandelin's session about Static Analysis was enlightening.

I avoid Keynote and PowerPoint to ensure that I will be able to refer to my presentations three years from now. Until last week, I thought that using the HTML-based S5 format meant compromising the style of my presentations.

While preparing a presentation for the Mozilla summit, I found a pretty S5 theme called Glossdeck. More importantly, I learned that Opera supports the Apple Remote for switching between slides.

I'd love to be able to do the same using Firefox rather than Opera. Using Opera is somewhat painful because switching slides using the keyboard is awkward (it uses space and shift+space rather than arrow keys) and Glossdeck has to be modified to work in Opera. But Firefox on Mac doesn't have a full-screen mode or support for the Apple Remote.

Boris Zbarsky's work in bug 113934 for reparenting Firefox tabs between windows should pave the way for Firefox to have full screen on Mac. It would be great if Firefox had Apple Remote support as well, perhaps as a DOM event sent to the focused web page.

If anyone at the Mozilla summit wants an Apple Remote, I brought three extras. I hear they work with Keynote and PowerPoint too.

In 2006, Mike Beltzner filed a bug saying that Firefox's about:config should have a warning. Chris Thomas wrote a patch adding a warning page, and it was checked in with a playful title suggested by the same Mike Beltzner: "Be careful, this gun is loaded!".

Some people thought the reference to guns made Firefox too violent. After much discussion, Beltzner changed the title to "This might void your warranty!", which was a suggestion from Phil Ringnalda.

Today, Christopher Aillon of Red Hat filed a bug about the "warranty" string. He says it has caused several users to contact legal departments or IT departments with questions that should have been unnecessary.

My suggestion is "Caution: Firefox internals may be hot". As a bonus, it fails to make sense in Iceweasel-branded versions.

Additional suggestions may be hidden in the Firefox source tree. When Beltzner made the change from "gun" to "warranty", he also added a note to localizers, suggesting that the title need not be a direct translation from English but "should be attention grabbing and playful". At least three localizers substituted their own phrases. I'm curious what the strings say when translated back into English.

Firefox 3 added support a new CSS color keyword, transparent. Surprisingly, this broke some sites, many of which had rules like table { color: transparent; } due to a Microsoft FrontPage bug.

The strangest part: Firefox wasn't the first major browser to support transparent. Safari was.

These sites were broken in Safari too — until the webmasters got emails from Firefox users. Is Safari's market share really so low that even when Safari is the first to make a change that affects compatibility, Firefox helps Safari more than Safari helps Firefox?