Effective April 15 I will be removing all content from this blog.
I give permission for any Mozilla related content to be moved from this blog to developer.mozilla.org or wiki.mozilla.org.
No copyright or attribution is needed.
Update: Some people have asked why.
1. I’m tired of feeling the obligation to blog.
2. I don’t like having a platform where I can say things that I regret.
I’m also dumping Twitter and Facebook.
Update:I just want to clarify when this method can be used. Obviously a web page can’t update preferences in Firefox. We had a unique situation where a web page notified the browser of a change that allowed us to update a preference. It wasn’t a lot of preferences. There is a lot of debate over having web pages message add-ons in this manner.
A few of the add-ons I’ve developed use web pages for their options rather than having them in a dialog. Unfortunately, when you use a regular web page as an optionsURL in your install manifest, it’s opened up in a separate window that doesn’t have scroll bars and doesn’t work properly. Here’s a workaround.
It’s now been two years since I left IBM. During this time of self employment, I’ve learned a lot about myself. The biggest thing I learned is that while I enjoy the freedom of self employment, my personality style doesn’t fit well with being in an office all day by myself. I miss being around people.
In addition, this past year has been a pretty rough one for our family, so looking forward we decided that we needed to make a major change. So we’ve decided…
I recently had the need to send a CSV file from my add-on to a PHP server and was looking for an easier way than constructing a POST request. I discovered that XMLHttpRequest has an API for this called sendAsBinary(). Using the API on the client side was easy, but figuring out how to get the file from PHP was a little tougher, so I thought I would share the information on my blog.
A few years ago, I wrote a blog post detailing the differences between exemptions, allowances and deductions and telling you how to reduce your tax refund. Tax time is coming up, so I thought it was a good time to repost the information.
I’ve converted the post into a page – Exemptions, Allowances and Deductions: How to reduce your federal tax refund. There’s also a new version of the withholding calculator for 2011.
Do you ever find yourself going back through the decisions you’ve made and wondering how your life would be if you had made different choices? I know I do. But, as the movie “It’s a Wonderful Life” makes abundantly clear, we have no understanding of the impact that we’ve made in this life. Our decisions, good or bad, have brought us to exactly where we are and affected other people’s lives in ways we can’t imagine. Even the smallest choice could have had a major impact, just like The Butterfly Effect.
Update: Beta 2 available to fix a bug with adding prefs
Have you ever needed to customize Firefox for deployment with in your organization or even to your family? That’s what the CCK Wizard is all about. It allows you to create an add-on that customizes Firefox. You can learn more about what it does at addons.mozilla.org.
I’ve recently updated the CCK Wizard for Firefox 4 and have made a beta available. You can click here to install it. Once everything looks good with the beta, I’ll put it on AMO.
So what’s the future of the CCK Wizard?
You might not realize it, but Firefox has some mouse shortcuts for when you are opening a web page from the bookmarks toolbar. If you hold down Shift when you click, the link opens in a new window. If you hold down Command or Ctrl when you click, the link opens in a new background tab. If you hold down Command or Ctrl plus Shift when you click, the link opens in a new foreground tab. So how do you honor these different options when you are opening web pages in your add-on? You use the function openUILink.
I created an add-on last year for Firefox that displays your XBox Live friends in Firefox. I recently updated it for Firefox 4 and added a few features. So if you’re an XBox Live user, check out XFox Live on AMO.
In last week’s Firefox post, I mentioned Services.jsm. Services.jsm is a Javascript code module that was added to Firefox 4. It’s a great idea, but unfortunately it only works in Firefox 4.
Luckily it’s really easy to create your own Services module to work on earlier versions of Firefox (even Firefox 3.0).
