Mozilla is already casting the enterprise market adrift with its stated wish to stop maintaining the Firefox 3.6.x series of the popular web browser in favor of charging through Firefox 4 right into version 5 and coming up on 6 and then who knows what.

Enterprises hate this. They need to build shoddy web-based applications against a browser, and if that browser changes, their apps will likely break.

Hence they need Firefox 3.6.x, if that's what they're building against, to stick around as long as possible.

No, no, NO, says Mozilla. We're in a development frenzy to catch Google Chrome, and we're upsetting the apple cart now for more goodness later.

The enterprise cares nothing for "goodness." It wants sameness, predictability and as little work as possible.

Can't say I blame them.

From a PR standpoint Mozilla is thumbing its nose at any enterprise users who decided to throw in with a browser that isn't Internet Explorer (and for large bases of users, switching browser allegiance isn't something that happens very often — and yes, they are where you, as an individual, were 10 years ago).

Despite all this, I still have updates coming to my remaining Firefox 3.6-running machines (of which there are more than a few, especially because there's not Firefox 4 or 5 for Macintosh PowerPC unless you count TenFourFox).

Yes, they all recently climbed to 3.6.19.

But if you can find the Mozilla Firefox 3.6 page, there is supposedly an end in sight for 3.6.x:

Firefox 3.6.x will be maintained with security and stability updates for a short amount of time. All users are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the latest version of Firefox.

If Mozilla wises up (and I hope they do), they'll continue patching Firefox 3.6.x for security issues for at least the next year if not two.

They don't seem ready or willing to do this, but I bet they're plenty able. Especially if they want to cement (and not rend) its relationship with enterprise users.

... in the news section. Thanks, Ladislav.

P.S. The link was to my Debian blog, which I'm going to be moving over here at some point in the middling future.

P.P.S. This post was initially created without a subject line in Ode's Editedit addin, but I later modified the title so the link out was in the body of the entry and not the title.

Just when I'm thinking, "Windows sucks less than it used to," here I am with my dual-boot system - Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit on one partition, Debian Squeeze 64-bit in LVM (with encrypted swap and home partitions) on another.

Everything has worked well until the arrival of Service Pack 1.

It just won't install. It won't install via the Windows Update mechanism. It won't install after downloading a 900 MB file.

A 900 MB file. For a service pack. Let's ponder that for a minute.

Read the rest of this post

I've been long intrigued by the prepaid cellular market. The traditional "contract" mobile carries that dominate in the U.S. generally fleece their customers and do so by offering "good" phones cheaply while making it all back with higher monthly costs for the duration of the contract.

I haven't yet written anything, but Virgin Mobile sent me a couple of devices over the past few months -- an LG Optimus V smartphone that runs Android and a MiFi mobile broadband device.

While I thought the LG phone a bit overpriced at , knowing full well that phones often available for down to free on a contract plan can cost much more from a prepaid carrier, my enthusiasm for the LG Optimus V was dampened when I learned that the phone had been introduced months earlier on Virgin Mobile at .

Upon Virgin's announcement that they would bring out a "real" Android phone, a Motorola with a bigger screen that compares more favorably with the better Android handsets for (ouch!), the drop of the LG Optimus V's price from back down to made me think all was not wrong with Virgin Mobile.

And they did have that killer Beyond Talk plan. No contract. per month for 300 minutes of talk, "unlimited" texting and web (really 2.5 GB before throttling, or so I understood, but not 200 MB like other carriers, so it was still a great deal).

Call me anachronistically cheap, but per month, even with a phone, sounded pretty good to me. Almost great, in fact.

But now I learn that on the day (July 20) Virgin Mobile releases its "grown-up" Motorola Android phone for , the Beyond Talk plan is suddenly a plan.

Wait. From to ? That's a 40 percent price increase.

Can I repeat that? A 40 percent price increase in the service overnight.

While nobody matches per month, there are plans out there for with unlimited everything, including talk minutes.

I don't claim to be a mobile-market expert. I'm just a guy who can't see spending to (or more) per month for mobile phone service.

I'd just as soon have no talk minutes and all texting and web. For . But nobody's offering that to me, either.

Virgin Mobile is "grandfathering" in current users, if they continue paying their bills monthly, and allowing them to keep the -per-month Beyond Talk plan. New people? It's 40 percent more.

Forty percent more. Overnight.

Virgin Mobile isn't offering 4g service. It's 3g. You can't use your to phone on "regular" Sprint (the network Virgin uses for its service).

Now the service from MetroPCS and the service from T-Mobile is starting to look a whole lot more competitive.

If my employer was paying the bill, I'd be fine with a "regular" plan. But that's not happening. This will come out of my own pocket. And I'm surprised how cavalier the average person is out there about paying or so per month just to carry an Android phone around in their pocket.

Disclaimer: I realize I'm in "get off my lawn" territory.

In the days of galvanized piping, you could sometimes count on rust to eventually stop a small leak. I've had small drips occasionally "go away" as the piping ages, sometimes after a matter of weeks.

This doesn't happen all the time. Or much of the time. Most leaks must be dealt with.

Electricity can "leak" too. To ground. But it's much easier, in my experience, to keep the "hot" and "neutral" wires apart than it is to keep water under pressure within a plumbing system. Ditto for natural gas, which runs to the home at something like 4 pounds per square inch of pressure instead of anywhere between 50 and 300 PSI (do I have my numbers right?) for municipal water.

Yep, water's a bitch.

If you see me, add_post worked.

And if you see this paragraph, I was able to add to an existing post.

If you see me, Indexette has done its job.

I like the fish, but that's the Ode-is-simple fish.

I need to get my own image(s) up top. Consider this a placeholder.

It's a portion of the front panel of a 1970s Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-11/20 minicomputer from Retrotechnology.com's PDP-11 page.

According to Wikipedia, the first officially named Unix ran on the 16-bit PDP-11/20 in 1970. The PDP-11 was succeeded by the 32-bit VAX, introduced in 1977:

I'm in awe at the moment.

I just added the Indexette and EditEdit addins to my Ode site. They both work. The documentation is detailed. The installation and configuration took about five minutes per addin.

I'll be back in that documentation very soon. Each addin's documentation includes a lot of detail and explanation.

I will go into greater detail later, but briefly, the addins do the following:

• Indexette: Allows posts in Ode blogs to retain their original (or arbitrary) post date even if the file and its timestamp has been modified.
• EditEdit: Provides a web interface to modify and create posts in Ode to supplement the usual writing and uploading of plain text files via FTP.

I'd like to thank Rob Reed, the creator of Ode for thinking so deeply about what he wants this project to be and then making it happen with code. And that code is always accompanied by detailed documentation, both inline and in separate PDF and text files.

It's not like I haven't used Blogger, WordPress, Movable Type, Flatpress and Blosxom. Because I have.

There's something about this particular blogging system that prompted me to move over to it. More than a few things, actually.

It's complicated, but I hope to explain it all as I go along.

At times I've use web interfaces to access most or all of the various e-mail accounts I happen to be using.

This is not one of those times.

My work account, my "personal" account, even my Gmail account (half personal, half "other") -- I tend to use e-mail client software for all of them. I do occasionally dip into the terrible web interface for my work account, the not-terrible web interface for Gmail and the also-not-terrible Roundcube web interface for my own domain's mail account.

But for the most part I use mail client software.

Right now I have the following set up on my Debian Squeeze laptop:

• Thunderbird (aka Icedove in Debian)
• Evolution (the default mail client for the GNOME desktop)
• Claws Mail (lighter-weight GTK mail client for Linux/Unix)

I use Thunderbird about 90 percent of the time. My main work account is on a horrible server that does IMAP poorly and slowly -- and I do not use POP, it's IMAP or nothing for me. For one thing, it's just about impossible to run more than one e-mail client on a single account if you are using POP, which brings all the mail down to your hard drive. IMAP leaves everything on the server where you can access it any number of ways.

I can't use a mail client that doesn't make the best of a bad IMAP situation. Evolution is horrible in this regard. It doesn't seem to multitask well at all, and often a long IMAP operation locks the whole thing up for minutes at a time.

Claws is better. When I first installed it, I added a couple dozen extensions. When I didn't end up using any of them, I removed them all. Still, I like Claws.

As I say above, I use Thunderbird most of the time. This is where I occasionally save messages to the hard drive. It's where my address book(s) live. It runs as fast as anything I've tried. I don't think even Claws can beat it.

I'm writing this because today I tried all three programs. As usual, I was quickly frustrated by Evolution. I wish it was better. It looks great.

Claws ran better than I remember it. There are a million things you can do to configure the program, but I can't seem to wrap my brain around the ultra-configurability of Claws.