The annoying error on Ha’aretz site has been fixed!
Tomer Cohen sent me an email about the encoding error on Ha’aretz site being fix and yes, it has been fixed.
It is great news for Ha’aretz that finally came to its senses, for the readers who are free to choose the browser they like and for me – a relief from the need to keep the Fix Ha’aretz encoding cacophony extension up to date with the latest version of Firefox.
It was easy. Mozilla never broke the basic API and the way Web pages are fetched by the browser, so my original code was working as is, since Firefox 1.5 to 3.5. While moving to FF 2.0, we had a serious problem of collisions with other extensions. Luckily for us, out of the blue came this email from Jillian directing me to a line of code, where i cast to interface instead of QueryInterface for it. That did it. He solved the collision problem in a snap. Thank you Jillian!
Other than that, I only had to update the extension’s RDF file, incrementing the version number to match the latest fox. Mozilla did a fine job, preserving the API over years and versions.
Why wasn’t it available on AMO (Official site for extensions and themes)?
For a while, it was. I registered both of my extensions at the AMO. Down the road, I had to close my developer account, trying to stop the AMO from pushing out to clients, an out of date version of the extension. It didn’t help. I finally contacted the QA guy and asked him to fix it. I got locked outside my account and the good guys at Mozilla were too busy to help me. Eventually, the AMO version got out dated and finally deleted.
I had a lot of fun publishing this extension. I got a lot of email from all over the globe univers. Mostly positive ones. I got to learn a bit about how the Mozilla organization works. It is a marvelous clocking machine that produce such a high quality product.
I had my 15 minutes of fame when blogs and news sites mentioned me. My 15 minutes lengthened to a night, when ynet published a blog post about me exactly on the day I got an iPod and wanted to download iTunes badly. Needless to say my DSL connection was down all night as a result of the link on ynet.
I thank you all for letting me play with your fox. It was fun. (Do not do it again. Install only AMO extensions or the ones you make). Hope to see you all again. (who says google wave?)
Yes, I think that Google Wave is the next interesting platform. Building wave robots, gadgets (shared-state applications), wave clients, wave commerce, push publishing, together with services like Google App Engine , Google Visualization API and Google Plugin for Eclipse, (all free, most of them open source), look like the most promising platform today./me rants: those guys got their Hebrew right from the very begining. I can’t use this old tune again for a comeback.