"On pardonne au Fardier de Cugnot de ne pas avoir de boîte de vitesse Tiptronic alors arrêtons une seconde d'emmerder Netscape 4".
posted by Daniel Glazman at 12:04 PM

That's awesome ! We have been believing for months that mangelo is the worst writer about Mozilla. DONG ! We found worse... A teen-ager writing so big bullshits that it becomes funny.
http://www.andkon.com/stuf/
Warning : this is really very very stupid.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 8:22 PM

In the Bush's Blunders series, the last one made us laugh a lot... Quote from the International Herald Tribune :
Of course, "entrepreneur" is a french word. The Bush trouble is that he has just no education.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 3:41 PM

A famous French author once said (approximative translation) "If you are more than 30 years old and wake up in the morning without any pain in your body, you are dead". Well, in fact, it's true ; except that 30 has to be replaced by 70. People in our family are falling like stones in clear water. What a summer :-(
posted by Daniel Glazman at 2:45 PM

Warf !!! Mozillazine now lists my blog in the "rarely updated blogs" section just because I went on vacation. Well, at least it gives me the opportunity to update my blog again and leave that section :-)

posted by Daniel Glazman at 2:08 PM

What means the 4th of July for you ? For me, it means the day my mother almost died and was saved only by a chain of luck and efficient people. Without the Gendarmerie (a police with military status) of Hossegor, the small village where we were having our vacation, she would not be alive today.
They not only called an ambulance for her, they stopped one on the main road and **ordered** it to rescue my mother. The two people in the ambulance immediately saw the situation was critical and decided they had no time to take her to the hospital. They "tubed" her and it saved her. She recovered after a week in Intensive Care Unit, including 4 days in artifical sleep with the tube.

Pfiuuuuu....
posted by Daniel Glazman at 3:37 PM

Back from summer vacation, discovering our new offices, unstacking thousands of emails, wondering what new catastrophe the newspapers are going to announce about my employer today.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 9:29 AM

Summer vacations...

I can't believe the last time I took more than 48 hours of break was exactly twelve months ago ! Far away from Paris, without telephone, without computer, without any internet cafe. The house we rent is beautiful, with a superb garden where the kids are going to play, we are at bike-riding distance from the beach and most of my childhood friends will be around for summer vacations too.

5 hours of high speed train on thursday morning and I'll be in a different world, a place where you don't need an approval to decide that yes you really want to do nothing at all today :-)

You know what ? I like Europe. We are perhaps moving a little bit slower than the USA, but we get something from the time we spend at work.

What do we get ? 5 weeks of payed vacation per year.

Want a map ? Here it is.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 1:31 PM

Banana Republic ?

We had an Election Day yesterday in France. We were electing the first Chamber of the Parliament, the one directly elected by normal people though a democratic process, not the high Chamber, a reminiscence from the 3rd Republic.

So this country wakes up today with a totally different political scene : Chirac was re-elected with 82% of voters (against Le Pen, that's an excuse for the 82%), the low Chamber of the Parliament has 2/3 of representatives of his party, the high Chamber has same majority, the Constitutional Court has same majority, the presidential mandate was reduced from 7 to 5 years (the low Chamber is also elected for 5 years) so the President can almost never face again an apposition at the Parliament...

Hey, only the city of Paris resists ! Look like Bush in empty US states and Gore in New York. At the difference it was not too close to call.

Chirac is quite impressive I must say. Totally incompetent as a President but a real "political beast". Able to transform 5 years of absolute inaction into the largest success of the Right in almost 40 years.

But he is also able to transform a success in a potential catastrophe since the former Prime, Alain Juppé, who stepped down from the political scene in 1997 after putting millions of people in the streets demonstrating, is back.

Well, after all, Chirac is perhaps a political beast ; but French also have for sure a very bad memory. To paraphrase de Gaulle, and please Anthony Davis, what can you expect from a country having more than 400 cheeses ?

BTW, it is now 5:15am, and Arte tv channel is broadcasting a documentary (could be NGM) specially adapted to #mozilla public : there's goat sex right now on the screen :-)
posted by Daniel Glazman at 5:14 AM

O tempora, O mores. It seems that "mens sana in corpore sano" is not so common. The sana part is sometimes missing.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 11:46 PM

Seems that one my posts here turned Anthony Davis so upset that he blogged an attack ad hominem against me.

Strange. A lot of people read my joke, including truly convinced christians like K., S., T. and F., in the US and in other countries, and they liked it. They laughed. Because they have more than one gram of sense of humor, because they also feel that there is no freedom without freedom of humor and criticism.

A famous humorist has once said that, yes, it is possible to joke about absolutely everything ; just not possible to do it with absolutely everyone.

Well, that's ok, it's not possible to joke about God with Anthony Davis. Does not change my life more than that.

Anthony is a citizen of country that strongly guarantees the religious freedom. But freedom of not being religious, and freedom of saying that I do consider and will consider until my very last breath that God is an obliteration of human's mind and Church is the largest multinational company of the world, do not seem to be granted by his system of thought.

A few details : not Noble but Nobel, from Alfred Nobel. You seem to like quotations. The following ones are for you :

• Aldous Huxley "God is incompatible with machines, scientific medicine and universal happyness".
• Woody Allen : "If God exists, I hope He has a good excuse..."

Have a nice evening.


posted by Daniel Glazman at 5:30 PM

Hey !!! So finally Denmark sends back home the French national football team, the former world champions. Shamely eliminated 2-0. COOL !!! We'll have a quiet summer and will be able to focus on rugby. Football is game of gentlemen played by bad guys while rugby is a game of bad guys played by gentlemen...
posted by Daniel Glazman at 10:44 AM

I have just downloaded mozblog and am editing the current post with it. Great tool, and a great example of what can be done with the editor !
posted by Daniel Glazman at 11:58 AM

• So explain me what happened...
• Well, Mister President, they just left.
• What do you mean "they just left" ? These...hmmm...people crossed half of the Universe to discuss with us and even before we have a chance to start really talking, they run away ?
• Uuuhhhh...Yes, sir... That's correct
• I don't understand. Tell me second per second what happened between first contact and the moment they went away.
• Yes sir. So we met them at the location indicated by the message. We did not really know if radio-astronomers decoded it correctly but there we were, in the desert night. When they arrived, we started playing again the message. Eh, it really looked like Encounters of the Third Kind. Ahaha... Sorry, Mr President.
• Hrmmm. What happened then ?
• The individual we call "the ambassador" left the spaceship and came to us. Our speech was ready, everything was right on tracks. But...
• But what ?!?
• The speaker had his speech in his pocket and when he took it, a one dollar bill fell on the ground. The "ambassador" picked it up, observed it during two or three seconds, said something like "aaaaaaaawwwwwwww" and went directly back to the spaceship. In less time that it takes to say it, the spaceship was gone... I don't understand what happened. There is nothing frightening on a dollar bill !!
• So we missed the first rendez-vous of the Human Kind with an extra-terrestrial intelligent form of life because of a one dollar bill... Ask our best experts, I need to know what's on these bills that is so scary.
• Mr President, just one more detail : the "ambassador" did not give back the one dollar bill, "he" kept it.
  

• So, Gaxymoz, tell us why your mission failed ?
• Your Excellency, we wanted to establish a contact with a mature civilization we could learn from. Humanity seemed to be a good candidate, they reached a correct level of technology, their last wars were during their 22nd century almost 11 human generations before present, they were mature enough to stand the shock it is to learn you're not alone in the Universe.
• So what went wrong ? You said before your mission Humanity was the best candidate we had...
• Yes your Excellency... Hum... I was wrong. When I approached the first men waiting for us outside of the spaceship, one of them let fall on the ground a small piece of printed material. I picked it up, and used my knowledge of their language to decode some text printed of this piece of what they called "paper".
• And what was written on it made you cancel the mission ?
• Yes. Look, I took it back with me. See here, this civilization is in fact in a so early stage we could not be able to share with them !
• Can you read that ?
• Oh, sorry your Excellency, yes. Here it is : "In God we trust".
  

posted by Daniel Glazman at 11:16 AM

People, it is highly time to move and find a place on Earth without television, radio or newspaper. The Soccer World Championship is about to start and I am already fed up with it.
Soccer, a sport where there are more players than neurons on the field.
I wish France could be eliminated from the championship the first day. What a quiet life during a month and a half we could have...
posted by Daniel Glazman at 4:01 PM

So we finally removed the "do not allow web pages to open unrequested windows" checkbox from the 7.0PR1...

7.0PR1 was out at 03:45pm, Paris time. I saw the first report of a workaround available in XPI form about ten minutes later, and someone posted that URL in the french newsgroups about web browsers a few hours later.

If using resources to do that remarkable idea was not counter-productive, I need to change my definition of "counter-productive".
posted by Daniel Glazman at 10:12 AM

Where can be the intrinsic values of a software company trying to build a market based on open-source code ? I thought that the answer was pretty obvious, it can only be in internal usage of the code or in value added to distributions based on the public code. Well, it seems that we focus only on the former while we totally underestimate, or neglect, the latter.

We should prolly reorg ourselves in a way offering more "space" to applications. When I say applications, I mean downloadable add-ons, in XPI form, showing that we do have an intrinsic value greater than only the integration of our proprietary tools into the open-source code. We should prolly "invest" into 3/4 engineers during 3/4 months, working on 3/4 highly visible XPIs. I have a few in mind:

• a slide maker, add-on to Composer
• a automatic and personal content syndicator, able to get document fragments anywhere on the web (anywhere = 100% user defined) and aggregate them with CSS positioning into a single document ; MyPersonalNewsReporter
• a digital photographs manager

Where could we be tomorrow with courage, determination, and just a little dash of risk...

What's the key there and how is that different from what we do know ? We don't offer or sell add-ons that run on the open-source distribution. All that we add is available only in the commercial distributions. We should make the proprietary parts of our software installable over the public version of the browser.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 10:48 AM

"Késkifésbi" is my older son's new credo. He can repeat that ten times a day. My wife and I did not understand it the first few times and Michel was quite upset to see his parents lost...

But we finally got it : "Qu'est-ce qui fait ce bruit ?", ie "What makes that noise ?"

Anyway, that's not too hard to understand in comparison with some of blurbs coming from the cube behind me and that I have to listen to... Developer's hell is a cube in a middle of a floor dedicated to Tech Evangelism and/or Marketing :-)
posted by Daniel Glazman at 2:49 PM

cool new demo : CSS Positioning !!!
posted by Daniel Glazman at 10:56 AM

So I have again updated my CSS add-on for Composer, CaScadeS, and it can now handle CSS positioning, floaters, overflows, display and visibility properties, margins and paddings, ...

It becomes so powerful that I just don't recognize the documents I am making with Composer. I keep forgetting about the light conformance or UI bugs when I see a frame-alike page made in 15 seconds with only paragraphs and a dash of CSS styles.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 10:22 AM

mozblog test.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 11:17 AM

I wonder if there is a journalist in France having really the guts to explain why and how Le Pen defeated the former Prime Minister during the Presidential elections and became Chirac's challenger...

Here is the story : Ch.Pasqua, a member of Chirac's party and a former Minister of Interior (police and stuff), was also candidate. Because his opinions and actions have always been quite close to the extreme-right, he could have gotten 2 to 3% of Le Pen's votes. But all the polls were showing that Le Pen was right behind Jospin, so Chirac probably asked Pasqua NOT to register formally his candidature to the Constitutional Court. Pasqua admitted recently that he had the 500 necessary signatures from city mayors to be a candidate.

So a large part of the 2 to 3% of Pasqua voters reported their vote on Le Pen, and then he ended up one point above Jospin. Chirac vs. Le Pen, the result was absolutely obvious, Chirac was sure to be re-elected.

Chirac played a dangerous game here, and was probably surprised by the deep success of this tactic. Then he had the nice role, playing the Savior of Our Democracy.

Well, yes, a very dangerous game. But not more dangerous than the game François Mitterrand played twenty years ago when he changed the poll rules to give Le Pen a representation at the Parliament. Helping Le Pen was a way of decreasing Chirac's representation.

Our politicians suck. Playing with the fire is no fun, even to get the power and rule the country.
posted by Daniel Glazman at 2:19 PM

In a small village of southern France, 1400 inhabitants, where ADSL and cable are of course not available, an association had deployed a Wifi network. Nicely done, with power supplied by sun cells.

The local regulation authority called ANF (Association Nationale des Fréquences, National Frequencies Association) sued them because they did that w/o prior authorization, and because it breaks a little bit the monopoly of giant France Telecom...

They had to pay 229 euros of fine, face a potential 30,000 euros fine and 6 months of jail ! And of course they had to stop everything.

Shame. France is really a too jacobin country...
posted by Daniel Glazman at 2:06 PM

first try of the weblog
posted by Daniel Glazman at 11:40 AM