With a little help from Asa over at mozilla.org I got the Flash plug-in working properly in Firebird. I'm quite happy with it. Thanks, Asa

Every Tuesday, including today, from 2:00-3:00 PM (PDT), OSAF staff assembles on the Chandler channel of OSAF's IRC web server irc.osafoundation.org. I try to participate whenever possible and will be there today.

The complete Chat Schedule, including logs of past Chats, is here

More info on how to join the Chat and how to get started with IRC is here

Why IRC? Of the various alternatives, it seemed to be the one most widely accepted in the developer community. It's far from ideal , but we do manage get by.

OSAF will out in force be at OSCON, the O'Reilly Open Source Conference, July 7-11. We'll have a session "Chandler: An Open Source Personal Information Manager" with Mitchell Baker, Katie Capps Parlante, Andy Hertzfeld, and Chao Lam on Thursday, July 10 at 2:30 (my keynote is Thursday morning).

We'll also be having a BOF Thursday evening "Chandler -- An Open Source Personal Information Manager" at 7:00pm. If you're at OSCON, come see us.

I will be giving a keynote address at the upcoming O'Reilly Open Source Conference (OSCON), July 7-11, in Portland, Oregon.

My talk is titled "Open Source on the Mainstream Desktop" and will take place, Thursday, July 10 at 9:30am.

Bart Decrem, the co-founder of Eazel, has been doing a lot of research, including interviews with two dozen key individuals in the Linux community, as part of a project about the current state of Linux as a client OS, its areas of growing momentum, and obstacles to its broader adoption. Thank you to everyone who has cooperated.

My talk will be based on the findings of the research. Based on what we've seen so far, it's been encouraging to see a lot of progress. Linux on the desktop is moving more quickly outside the U.S. than in it, more quickly in the enterprise space than with consumers, and more quickly in vertical applications in the enterprise like call centers, than as a replacement desktop for the general office workers.

Thanks to the many great comments I got after writing about switching to Mozilla as my browser, I'm now successfully up and running Mozilla Firebird .6, the slimmed-down, browser-only version of Mozilla. I was able to import or copy my bookmarks, cookies, and passwords, so I was able to avoid much of the drudgery of customizing the browser. I followed up on a couple posts which offered advice and cautions about Flash and Shockwave, but without success to date. I will give this a try next week when some of the experts are available via IRC to help. So far my overall experience with Firebird has been quite good, and I'm glad I made the switch.

I have replaced Internet Explorer with Mozilla as my default browser on my ThinkPad. (I will save for another time the story about my choice of PC's. I also have a Mac and use it regularly. Where is the Linux machine, you may well ask -- but as I said, that's another story)

The transition wasn't easy, but I was prompted to make the effort to increase the consistency between what I'm preaching (open source applications) and what I'm practicing, especially as the result of a pointed observation or two by Mitchell Baker, who is Mozilla's Chief Lizard Wrangler as well as OSAF's community liaison.

The difficulty is that, when it comes to using software products, I'm finicky about issues of fit and finish. It turns out Mozilla gets the job done for me, but some of the documentation is obscure or missing, the web site isn't all that well-organized for end-users (as in -- which version do I want to use) and there are a number of quirks to get used to.

After several tries, I managed to get all of my bookmarks imported. The trick actually has to do with knowing that you have to export the bookmarks from IE into a file, and then import them. It doesn't seem to be possible to read them in directly from the Favorites folder, but I assume this may be due to something in Windows.

I am having to rebuild all of the passwords for web sites which I had stored in IE. This is painful. It occurs to me here is an instance where I would actually be willing to expose all of the stored passwords for purposes of moving them over.

And of course all of my site cookies for sites where I maintain an identity without a password, like Mapquest, are worthless and have to be rebuilt.

In addition, I am having to reinstall of the usual plug-ins, or a lot of them anyway. If there is a way for Mozilla to automatically see it needs a certain plug-in, and then get the one it needs without manual intervention, it has escaped me.

Finally, I am discovering there are some sites which use IE plug-ins for which there is no Mozilla equivalent, e.g., Moveable Type. MT's IE version has a little button to insert a URL which takes care of generating the messy syntax. If I type it in by hand, I typically make errors and grow frustrated so I prefer the quick and dirty button. I concluded deprecated support of Mozilla is a good reason to consider using something else besides MT for a weblog editor.

Just today I was downloading a more recent driver for an HP printer and discovered that IE would auto-install the driver, but Mozilla would not. Boo!

Now that I've gotten over the conversion hump, I'm planning to stick with Mozilla, and I have the scars to show for it.

I'm experimenting with using quicktopic for follow-on discussion. It has the virtue of emailing notifications of new messages being posted. Try it if you like it.

Discuss Switching to Mozilla

Beginning in late July our official headquarters will be 543 Howard St., San Francisco, which is between 1st and 2nd streets. We'll be moving from our location in Belmont where we've been for the past year and fulfilling my original vision of OSAF being San Francisco-based. We want to thank to our gracious hosts at Reactivity in Belmont who have been sharing their network, kitchen, and conference rooms.

In addition to OSAF, the 543 Howard location will be home to three other non-profit organizations undertaken by me or my wife, Freada Kapor Klein, or both of us. These are The Level Playing Field Institute, The IDEAL Scholars Fund, and the Mitchell Kapor Foundation. All in all, there will be 20+ people, including shared aministrative staff, occupying the top floor of the building, which is a newly renovated warehouse. We think there will be good chemistry to have folks from multiple organizations interacting with each other on a regular basis.

543 Howard is the first "green" office building in San Francisco, which is part of its appeal. It's also a dog-friendly building, which will have a special dog run on the roof and dog-friendly lease terms.

See this Wall St. Journal brief (fee required) of May 13, 2003for more details.