Today, I want to honor and thank them for their service to our freedoms and the freedoms of others all around the world.

I begin with the three remaining World War II veterans I know:

• My Grandpa Porczak, my remaining US Army Air Forces grandparent
• My Great Uncle Gene, last of the four Ardissons of Export still with us, and a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge
• Professor Ruedy, one of my favorite grad school professors, who lied about his age in order to enlist

Moving on to more recent times:

• My Uncle Richard, who served from the Vietnam era to the Gulf War era
• Mr. Greene, one of my wonderful sixth-grade teachers, who brought his father, a Bataan Death March survivor, to class to help make World War II something more than distant words in a textbook to a bunch of twelve year-olds
• Magister Coleman, my esteemed Latin teacher, who was trained for mountain warfare and deployed to the jungles of Southeast Asia
• Reg S., an Air Force veteran who is the director of the assisted living facility where my grandmother lives

…And on to my own generation, beginning with high school friends and spouses of high school friends (all of whom have put in at least one tour in the Middle East/Southwest Asia):

• Alan B., who lived down the street, and two doors down from a World War II veteran, flew jets for the Marines
• Ryan N., my exchange-student-brother’s best friend and a sturdy defender on the soccer team, joined the Marines right after we graduated
• DJ R., husband of my dear friend Kassia, is in his second enlistment in the Air Force
• Matt G., husband of my dear friend Nicole (he’s the only one on this list I’ve never technically met, but I have gotten an email from him!), also Air Force

In college, I had the pleasure of knowing Hooman K., an Iranian from Toronto, Canada, who inexplicably had been one of the few, the proud, the United States Marines!

In grad school at Georgetown, I friends with many of our bright young officers:

• Michael B., US Army
• Cheryl W., US Air Force
• Dave A., US Army
• Gary B., US Air Force
• Abby T., US Army

And, finally, my younger brother’s buddy from years of soccer, Steven B., who is currently deployed to the Gulf.

From the bottom of my heart, thank you, my friends, and every other veteran and active duty service member, for your service and sacrifices. They do not go unnoticed, or unappreciated.

Farewell, Steve, and thanks for changing this world while you were in it. My thoughts are with your family and friends tonight.

Ave et vale…

…And thanks for all the Macs.

So Kodachrome has given us its last image and now is only a thing for the ages. I shot but one roll of Kodachrome, quite by accident; I normally used Ektachrome when shooting slides, and I can’t recall how I ended up with Kodachrome that day in late 1994 or early 1995. Perhaps the store was out of Ektachrome, or I grabbed the wrong package in my haste.

I’m sorry to admit, though, that the roll of Kodachrome was wasted making slides of line-art maps, David Roberts prints I’d brought back from Cairo, and, the horror!, photographs taken with a cheap disposable camera (carried, for whatever reason, to supplement my actual camera stuffed with Ektachrome during that trip to Egypt), including one shot taken through an airplane window! Worse (for me, at the time), because of my mix-up, I missed my presentation date due to the lengthier processing time required for Kodachrome. (It was, however, a mistake I never repeated.)

Still, I felt then the most I’d ever feel like a “serious” photographer and lecturer, using the school library’s rig to mount my camera and shoot the additional slides I needed to fill in gaps in my presentation’s slide lineup. And, as long as Kodachrome holds up, we’ll have those nice bright colors of random bits of Egypt, ready for projection on the nearest screen, and all of the memories they captured and preserve.

Kodachrome…

Since perennial contender Yahoo! finally cleaned up its act last year, the 2010 dodo prize went to FCKEditor, the first winner that affected entire swaths of the web rather than just a single website or a collection of an organization’s websites. (FCKEditor is a WYSIWYG text editor implementation for web pages used by many websites and by common web applications/web-based software packages for creating and maintaining websites.)

However, I’m hopeful that, after so many years, this entire contest will soon go the way of the dodo. Between renewed efforts to remove the build date from the Gecko user-agent string, evangelism associated with the many user-agent string changes in Gecko 2.0, and simple exhaustion of the number of possible contenders (after six years, and with the tens place in the year having been filled with a new number last year for the first time since many websites were created), I’m (overly) optimistic that people’s regexps have finally been audited.

Still, get your picks in now for both the site/company/piece of the “web software stack” that will break and the reporter of the Tech Evangelism bug who notices said site/company/piece of web software. No actual prizes will be awarded, but both winners will be recognized in a future entry in this journal.

And remember: only you can prevent bad browser-sniffing!

Dorothy Anna Ardisson, 1917-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Nurse Corps, World War II (March 1942-October 1945); service at Camp Patrick Henry, Virginia, and Oran, Algeria

Gerald John Ardisson, 1921-2009
Second Lieutenant, US Army Air Forces, World War II (March 1943-October 1945); service in the skies over France and Germany from Nottingham, England

As I said, though, we’ve been working on all sorts of things so far this year. Dan Weber has been hard at work on patches for some of the most visible issues with the new autocomplete experience, and I landed the fix for the magically-reappearing autocomplete window tonight. Dan is also still working on improving the speed of autocomplete for large histories, though that patch is not yet ready. Chris Lawson has also been working on various and sundry other bugs, including changes to the Flashblock exceptions list so that pasting URLs into the field will work as users expect. Philippe Wittenbergh is hard at work polishing some of our toolbar icons.

Christopher Henderson has been working on a patch that moves our history off of Mork, which is both the sane thing to do and critical for moving forward to the new Mork-less world. As usual, I have been chasing down bugs here and there and wrangling patches to get ready for the upcoming 2.0.2 and 1.6.11 releases. We’ve also seen Alex Jones, who has been working off-and-on on supporting Mobile Me sync, again recently, though it sounds like Sync Services wants to do things in a manner that is not easily compatible with Camino’s bookmarks implementation. All in all, we’ve been fairly productive since the new year began.

Which brings us back to the title of this post and to this weekend’s developments. Late Saturday afternoon, I got a debug version of Camino to build, launch, and run using Gecko 1.9.1, and early Sunday evening I was able to make a static (i.e., distributable) build do the same thing. (Even better, Christopher Henderson was able to replicate my success.) This feat would not have been possible without all the hard work that Christopher put in for the aforementioned history migration, as well as a good bit of debugging and patching he did this weekend as we hit some unexpected code-change-related build failures. After applying those patches, I mostly deleted and added things to the project and waited for the next build failure. At the end of the day, though, Camino launches and runs, plays <audio> and <video> (with Ogg), and displays pages with @font-face (with raw TrueType fonts).

This doesn’t mean that we can turn around and release a version of Camino based on Gecko 1.9.1 (and there’s a very strong possibility we may not); for starters, there are a number of known regressions (including the loss of Find-As-You-Type), as well as possibly hundreds of other serious problems we haven’t discovered in our limited test browsing. Beyond that, the “build system” is not yet a system at all; it involves pulling mozilla-1.9.1 from hg, checking out Camino from cvs into mozilla/camino, and applying a large patch. But if you’re brave or crazy, you can try this at home now (and for those less brave or more sane, there’s an Intel-only build here that you can use to help us find other broken things. N.B. You should treat this build as highly experimental. It might eat all of the cheese in your house. It will eat your profile, so make a backup copy first).

(Update 9 Feb: The patch above now has all of the required parts of the history migration, which had been missing from the earlier patch.)

We also know (thanks to earlier attempts by Philippe Wittenbergh and Kai Rune Mathisen to build mozilla-central) that there are more serious code breakages in newer versions of Gecko, so this is only the beginning. In between other things the last few weeks, I’ve also been working on a new repository and fleshing out issues and solutions for the build system. There’s a long road ahead, and Camino 2.1 might be ready before we’ve gotten to the end of the road; we’ll have to see. However, as Christopher said on Saturday night, “it’s been a great day in Camino Land.”

This news is a bit old now (since it appeared briefly on Planet Mozilla the other day half-buried in a PR round-up, and since reader James reported it in a comment on January 21), but FCKEditor is the winner of the 2010 edition of the annual “we break our site for your browser when the new year rolls around” broken browser-sniffing contest.

If you use FCKEditor on a site and it doesn’t work with Firefox 3.6 or nightly builds of any Gecko browser built since January 1, you’re probably seeing the bug that won FCKEditor this year’s prize with a stunning upset of two-time defending champion Yahoo!

My gut feeling is that this new type of contest winner is much worse than the old “major site is broken” type, since there is no single point of contact for the fix (everyone who uses the affected versions of FCKEditor will have to patch or upgrade their install), since unpatched instances of FCKEditor could break functionality on websites far and wide for years to come, and since in some ways the distributed nature of the problem means there is less visibility than when a major website suddenly ceases to work correctly.

I think this also highlights the importance of web “library” or “component” authors doing things correctly from the beginning—not browser sniffing at all, but instead testing for features—because their code will be used widely and, as I understand it, they have little control over getting consumers to update when there are fixes for broken things like this.

If you’re going to write something for wider consumption, or that you think may one day be useful to large audiences, please take the time to get things right from the beginning, especially if your code doesn’t have a dead-simple upgrade experience. Your users, and their users, and even other unrelated software vendors, will thank you for it later.

(And remember: only you can prevent broken browser sniffing! )

As I noted in January, the “three-peat” is Yahoo!’s to lose, although there was some talk last January of Yahoo! actually doing away with their date checking.

Get your picks in now for both the site/company that will break and the reporter of the Tech Evangelism bug who notices said site/company. (For the record, my picks are Yahoo! and Philippe Wittenbergh.) No actual prizes will be awarded, but both winners will be recognized in a future entry in this journal.

And remember: only you can prevent bad browser-sniffing!