Weekly Status Report, W42/2008

Here's a summary of SeaMonkey/Mozilla-related work I've done in week 42/2008 (October 13 - 19, 2008):

• Build System:
  Another update for the updater Vista compat patch I started porting when working on locales Makefile sync - now I actually found the right places to patch!
• Misc Development:
  I did more work on the geolocation prompt to SeaMonkey but ran into cases where it didn't come up any more at all. This still needs more investigation, but the corresponding Firefox bug has some good ideas how to do it in an even better way.
• Themes:
  I spent quite some time to finally also bring LCARStrek forward to SeaMonkey 2.0 Alpha 1, so that both my themes have 2.0a1 versions now.
  Even though LCARStrek looks strange at first glance, it's always fun to work on it, as it's showing so nicely how flexible the Mozilla way of theming applications is. All those black background, striking colors, rounded borders, and intense mouseover effect things really show what can be done with basically just CSS and images.
• Various Discussions:
  Download manager, EU MozCamp, etc.

I attended a seminar about "Social Web" in the light of politics on Friday, and even though I of course am fully involved in social web activities, learning how others describe and view that is quite interesting. And collaboration, participation and direct feedback are components I see as fitting very well with how I think politics should work. Currently, most parties and politicians around here don't deal with things like blogs etc. very well, I think we only mentioned two or three exceptions of individuals. In the US, both presidential campaigns make much more use of that, but I think the real key is in long-term involvement a real authentic usage of those instruments and technologies. I'm looking forward to a time where everyone can discuss and collaborate with politicians through their blogs, YouTube-style videos and whatever else - but it probably will still take us a while to get there.