The roads I take...

I've just done the announcement dance for SeaMonkey 1.1.8 (yes, even to the SeaMonkey Blog), completing the release process for our current security update (yes, I know, we don't have partial, binary-diffed updates, those will only come for 2.x). It's always nice to ship fixes for a number of security updates and know that users of current SeaMonkey versions are safe from known vulnerabilities.

The thrill of launching that release was increased by the thrill of watching a successful Space Shuttle launch on the same day, which was even more thrilling because of the low probability of favorable weather that forecasts had given for today. Nice to see Atlantis finally up on orbit, making the Space Station really international with the European "Columbus" laboratory module.

And as that all wouldn't have been enough, I finally took up the challenge to go a bit more into code than usual, and at the same time do away with the striking emptiness of the main "Privacy & Security" pref panel in SeaMonkey. We were missing the "sanitize" feature (a.k.a. "Clear Private Data") in our suite, which seemed to fit perfectly into that empty space in my opinion - so I took a deep look into Firefox code and ported that feature to SeaMonkey. The patch ended up pretty large, but consisting mostly of code copied from Firefox, even from code that hasn't yet landed and probably won't even land for FF3! After a few hours of concentrated work, it looked all good to me - but knowing Neil, I'm pretty sure it will go through a number of iterations to fix his review comments.
In any case, this is is very likely another feature we will be able to add for SeaMonkey 2.

Having not done (much) of real Mozilla code, JS modules or XPCOM components before, I can tell anyone who doesn't dare to try that it's not that hard - especially when you can learn how things work by doing such code porting. Just Try It™!

I've just been watching a news conference of 7 astronauts that are currently on the International Space Station ISS, which just was expanded with a new building block these days by the current STS-120 Space Shuttle mission.

While this is a surely a great thing for science, I also think the political dimensions of what's happening here are also just cool: This station is operated by people from the ex-cold-war-opponents Russia and the USA, which are now working closely together there in closely joint missions, 50 years after Russia (or actually the USSR back then) flew the first experimental satellite "Sputnik", started the space age and made the US work hard to compete with them in this area. Cooperation between those nations in such a way makes them talk and do lots of work together and such communication ultimately boosts lasting peace and cooperation around the world.

This is even more so as those two big nations aren't the only two participating here, actually, the cooperative work unites people around the world and equally righted people of different origins - and the new "Harmony" module that was just added to this space station shows that perfectly: Planned by the US, this module was built in Italy, flown up by a woman-commanded NASA crew, handed over with a Canadian-built roboter arm steered by a black-skinned astronaut to a currently (incidentally) also woman-commanded space station, and will connect European and Japanese laboratories to the currently existing US and Russian modules as well as serve as a docking port for future manned missions to the station. The name of "Harmony" sounds really fitting for such a hub of international cooperation.

Even if the ISS projects span countries around the globe already, I hope even more will join in and make the peaceful international space cooperation network tighter. Some rumors tell that China is thinking about joining in in some way, NASA administrator Griffin had talks with officials there last year, though the topics of those talks stay undisclosed at the moment. Views from space made us see how small and fragile our planet actually is, work in space can hopefully make us see how we all can peacefully work together and do amazing things that wouldn't be possible without sharing and combining experience, knowledge and workforce.

This cause is surely worth attention and the help of anyone who has the abilities to support it. And those who can not directly participate should hold it up morally and try to maybe help other projects of open international cooperation, like open source software and the Mozilla project(s).

The spirit of open cooperation and communication is what really brings harmony - to space but even more to everybody down here on on this world.

Blogging life in many areas, especially in OSS developer communities like GNOME, KDE or Mozilla sometimes seems to actually orbit around planets, which are basically website feed aggregators that collect blogs from the whole community and show their entries at a single place. This way, you can read or watch one single site/feed and get a glimpse of information from the whole community.

Planet Mozilla is just such a site, and there has been some discussion recently about its administration, with the outcome that Asa is probably owning it now, a new set of peers for that administration has been decided, and we'll end up with this main planet site having the full range of all blog entries of "active Mozilla Community members" and a second feed that only has their Mozilla-related entries. Asa is doing a great job there, and despite of some differences of opinion I may with him from time to time, I'm glad he's taking care of that now.
Additionally, for all of us who are in the L10n community, there's another planet page up on the new L10n server, named as Planet Mozilla L10N.
I'll try to get this blog aggegrated on those planets, at least as soon as I have tag support here and can filter feeds for those where required (L10n, future Mozilla-related-only planet).

In other planetary news, I'm still a bit sad that the next Space Shuttle launch to our home planet's orbit has been pushed out due to damage caused by a hail storm and now can only take place after the ISS crew changeover from Expedition 14 to Expedition 15, which means I have to wait until at least late April to see another hopefully great Station construction mission. I hope they get the second half of P6 solar panels retracted more easily than the first half back on the STS-116 mission last December.

But until STS-117 goes out into orbit, I'll keep hoping their preparations go well and stick to those planets down here...