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In one of my classes, we were assigned a group project of doing a company profile paper on a tech company. I happened to be wearing a Firefox fleece, and when it came time to select a company, one of my group members said “Why don’t do we do them?” and pointed at my chest.

While I would love to do a company profile of Mozilla if this was an individual project, I was hesitant about how the group (only two people knew about Mozilla) would do with such a unique company. We split the paper into sections and I was emailed the draft of our paper today, combined with everyone’s sections.

Imagine my surprise when I read the following paragraph:

“Mozilla is also finding a competitive edge in other markets by offering very portable products such as microscopic pill cameras, bio sensors that localize landmines, implantable medical devices for the treatment of brain tumors, mobile television service, video headsets, thin –film diamond coatings, and paper batteries for music playing greeting cards. Also, Mozilla is now offering solar air-conditioner equipment and solar energy powered automatic and compacting trash bins.”

The first response I thought of was “That’s not true - we’ve never made paper batteries” but I decided to go with explaining where she misread her source. Her source is cited as this Mozilla press release (7th paragraph down), which referred to many companies at the Economic Forum, not just Mozilla.

As shaver put it, “indeed, it is hard to imagine any company that was involved in all of those things of which you were not already aware, as they would constitute one of the most amazing industrial organizations in the history of opposable thumbs.”

FACT: It is impossible to handwrite a “c” immediately following an opening “(”, like so: (c

You will always skip the c and go to the next letter. Don’t tell me you can do it, because you can’t.

The following addons.mozilla.org bugs for version 3.0 (Remora) were RESOLVED FIXED between Monday, Feb. 19 and Sunday, Feb. 25.

• Bug 370599 - many timeouts on remora links
• Bug 370595 - Display of localized add-on descriptions broken
• Bug 370998 - Short URLs not used consistently
• Bug 370612 - Old versions page doesn’t indicate that the add-on is sandboxed
• Bug 370597 - Disabled add-ons shouldn’t show up in the search
• Bug 370610 - Offered search plugin in remora not working
• Bug 371181 - Ordering of application versions appears random
• Bug 366620 - Remora URLs are inconsistent and contain featureless parts
• Bug 370607 - Different search fields produce two different search URLs
• Bug 366652 - addon’s title is rendered at a wrong place in a narrow window
• Bug 370783 - Broken image on extension discussion index page
• Bug 370778 - Expanded item details only shows one author even when there’s more
• Bug 371193 - “Other languages” list should not require clicking the “Go” button
• Bug 370781 - Make localized date format more verbose
• Bug 371346 - Old versions should be sorted “newest first”

This was an experimental post. If you are interested in weekly summaries like this of AMO/Remora bugs that are fixed (like the Burning Edge), please let me know and I’ll continue them.

FavLoc 1.1 was released on Friday, with a number of improvements:

• Added locales: hu-HU, ko-KR, sk-SK
• Added support for Thunderbird 1.5-2.0b2, Firefox 3.0a2
• FavLoc now supports Thunderbird for saving attachments!
• File overwrite protection: Choose whether to always overwrite, always make unique, always manually rename, or always ask
• Added option to automatically select last saved location in download prompts
• Added option to automatically select FavLoc in download prompts
• Re-designed executable download prompt to be more compatible with other extensions
• FavLoc now uses an XPCOM component
• Fixed bugs in 1.1

You can download the new version from Mozilla Add-ons or visit the website here.

Sony Online Entertainment Tech Support Chat:

My Problem: I have an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core Processor running Windows Vista Ultimate. When this computer ran Windows XP, I was able to play EQ by setting the affinity to 1 processor. After upgrading to Vista, that doesn’t seem to work. I get to character select and when I try to enter the world, the bar gets all the way to the end and then crashes. I have tried updating my processor and video card drivers and I’m running EQ in XP compatibility mode as an administrator.

——————————————–

TSR Someone: Hi, my name is TSR Someone. One moment please, while I read your question.
TSR Someone: We apologize for any difficulty running our games in Vista - Microsoft changed a few settings to Vista that can cause a few issues running some of our games. These instructions will help you load any Windows XP game in Vista:

1. Right click on the program launch icon
2. Left click on “Properties”.
3. In the new window that pops up click on the “Compatibility” tab.
4. In the “Compatibility Mode” area check the box next to “Run this program in compatibility mode for:”
5. In the drop down list make certain that “Windows XP (Service Pack 2)” is selected.
6. Under “Privilege Level” make certain that the box next to “Run this program as administrator” is checked.
7. Click on “Apply” then click on “Ok”.
8. Double click on the program launch icon.

This should allow you to run your program under Windows Vista.
Justin: I’ve already done both of those things.
TSR Someone: I am sorry we don’t support vista for EverQuest. This was just a troubleshooting process.
TSR Someone: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Justin: Ok, how can I get a refund for the month since I just reactivated my account but can’t play now?
TSR Someone: May I have your station name?
Justin: ************
TSR Someone: One moment please, while I look into this for you.
TSR Someone: I am sorry there is no refund policy. If you want we can either freeze your account or transfer your time to some other game.
Justin: does EQII support vista?
TSR Someone: No.
Justin: I guess transfer it to EQII then please.. I’ll try it anyway.
TSR Someone: For security reasons, we are unable to address your account issues without first verifying your identification. Please respond with the following information:

- First four and last four digits of a credit card on the account and the name on the credit card:
- Real Name:
- E-mail Address:
- Station Name(s):
- Birthdate:
- Account/Registration key (usually found on the back of your CD case or on the instruction manual):
Justin: ***********
TSR Someone: I am canceling your EverQuest game and forwarded your request for transferring the time to EverQuest II to my supervisor. You will be contacted soon via email.
Justin: Ok, thanks.
TSR Someone: Is there anything else I can assist you with today?
Justin: Nope
TSR Someone: Thank you for visiting our Sony Online Entertainment customer support chat. Take care and have a nice day!

I decided to upgrade my desktop to Windows Vista Ultimate last week. I had previously said I wasn’t upgrading to Vista, but I couldn’t resist since it was free from TigerWare. After a little trouble with the installation (it didn’t finish installing and would BSOD on every boot) I got it working. I like it, but I’m mainly making this blog post to share some tips I had to figure out.

• iTunes - Apparently Apple hasn’t updated most of their software to be compatible with Vista. If you actually purchase music legally, you may not be able to play it on Vista until you run the iTunes Repair Tool for Vista.
• Administrative Shares - After I upgraded to Vista, I wasn’t able to connect to \\justin2\c$ like usual. It turns out local administrators can’t access stuff over the network unless you create a registry key as described here.
• User Account Control - In Vista, anytime you do something that requires administrative permission (which is apparently a lot of stuff), Vista comes up with a box that just asks you to continue (if you are logged in as an administrator). This was really annoying, so I decided to turn it off (Control Panel » User Accounts and Family Safety » User Accounts » Turn User Account Control on or off). It turns out this is a big mistake, because now some software can’t get permission to things, which I found out when trying to install Adobe Reader and it couldn’t write to my temp directory.