Month: July 2007

Thunderbird Spin-Off

Thunderbird has many fans. and yet what is a solid and mostly reliable program hasn’t grown at anywhere near to the rate Firefox has. Hopefully the change will see a renewed focus on brining new functionality to Thunderbird, changes that could well position Thunderbird as a fully featured future Outlook alternative.

well, for one thing they could invest in it. i am running thunderbird 3 nightlies, and the pace of change seems to be glacial.

Universal Web Runtimes

Mozilla strategy is to team (either directly or indirectly) with Microsoft, Mono, and Adobe enable every browser and every device that runs Flash to also be able to run applications written in Python, Ruby, and the latest version of JavaScript.

new directions for the mozilla runtime, including outfitting ie with a capable js implementation

OSM NL donation

Automotive Navigation Data (AND) is a leading provider of location, routing, mapping and address management are donating a street network of the entire Netherlands. Yes, an entire country. This is basically phenomenal.

major road networks in india and china, too. this is starting to feel like wikipedia in 2002. now if only they did not have such a huge mess on the backend side.

Bible checksums

The scribes who were in charge of the Old Testament text dedicated their lives to preserving the text’s accuracy when they made copies. The great lengths the scribes went to guarantee the reliability of the copies is illustrated by the fact that they would count every letter and every word, and record in the margins such things as the middle letter and word of the Torah. If a single error was found, the copy was immediately destroyed. As a software engineer, I can personally vouch that the scribe’s method of protecting the text is more rigorous than the common checksuming methods used today to protect software programs from corruption