Mozilla-based

Hi guys! (post intended to Mozilla Planet Education 😉 )

A lot time since last blogging, but now I’m exam-free, yay!

But let me explain: from 13 to 17 of July, I went to the Mozilla Madrid Technologies Course (MMTC from now), where Pascal, Vivien and Paul explain us how to use Mozilla technologies, how to create an extension, how Gecko works and all mozilla related stuff that they could show us. (see Paul’s blogpost)

So, then we need to have a project to work on. We can choose what to do (extensions, documentation, Firefox or Fennec…), and there is a lot of nice projects (see the list).

In my case I have decided to work on a XulRunner app to create and edit subtitles with openvideo (do we love OGG/Theora, don’t we?) and right now I’m prototyping the functions and what and how to do in my app and a basic UI.

So in the next weeks I’m going to blog more often, writing about the progress I have done, I’m also crossposting to the Planet that Pascal has open to centralize all our work.

Have a nice summer!

First of all, if you are reading me from education.mozilla.org planet, sorry for my bad english. I’m trying to improve it!

Second, thanks to David Humphrey for adding me to the planet. I will try to keep you informed about thing we are doing in Spain, more concise, in education world (as I’m currently a college student).

One of my first problems on University was to see only Windows computers on it (I’m studying computer engineering, and this is a bit depressing). You shouldn’t have only Windows-machines availables to the students if you are going to teach future computer engineers. So we (my colleagues and me) discovered that we have Linux machines in laboratories, where we can write our own code in a standard way easily and using open source software.

But the most depressing thing about having only Windows-based machines is that you have only one browser per default: Internet Explorer. Not only the bad Internet Explorer. We have Internet Explorer 6!!

Nobody doubts about Internet Explorer. It sucks, and v6 is old (not updated for 5 years) and it’s slowing the web (and developers’ brain). So I’ve thought about trying to install Firefox on all computers. Well, yeah, I can’t, users don’t have enough perms to install new things.

I’m not yet an expert about operating systems and LANs, but I think each student has her/his user, not an «student» standard account and I don’t know how are stored documents of each student, because we usually wait about a minute from the login window to the full desktop (it seems that all is retrieved from an intranet server).

So, what do you think I should do in order to try to make Firefox as the default browser on my University?

For me, the best option is to talk with IT guys and try to explain them what is Firefox (in case they don’t know it!). And then convince it about the Fox and his friends 😛

Have you driven a similar change? If so, please, contact me on this blog post’s comments.

PS: And if you have time, please, write down my grammatical errors to improve my English. Thanks!

A new project: XulTitles!

It's time to change to another browser…