XULRunner and Python could be a pretty interesting platform for developing GUI desktop applications. ActiveState's dragon wrangler Shane Caraveo shows you how!

I have recently discovered a couple of awesome developments which are worth mentioning:

• The Awesome X Window Manager (awesome wm) is a light-weight, tiling window manager based on dwm. Similar to wmii or ion but seemingly more advanced and very easy to use. Version 2 is available from Debian and Ubuntu repositories so you can simply apt-get install awesome ... now isn't that awesome?
• More...

I am saddened to see that AllPeers has shut down their service. Very very sad. The announcement: AllPeers Service Shutting Down Today.

As a few people have pointed out recently, MozPad has been much less active in recent months. I too have been guilty of dropping the ball on MozPad activities. I think that the interest in MozPad was driven by a desire to make sure that the Mozilla platform is not forgotten, overshadowed by the Mozilla corporation's focus on Firefox. Mozilla has shown that they intend to invest in the platform, however, that doesn't mean that MozPad is no longer needed. More...

I'm working on a simple extension for Firefox that would notify the user when an SSL/TLS site's certificate changes. This way an informed user could decide if the certificate change was valid / expected and opt out of an ssl session in questionable circumstances. Is there any interest in such an extension? My friend ask me whether there was a way to do it so I'm working on proof of concept code, I will release it as open source if anyone cares.

Update:

Working proof of concept code released. See XPI attachment below. Note: this is tested in Firefox 3.0 beta 2 and it uses mozStorage (sqlite) to keep track of the url/certificate mappings. This isn't really usable, it's simply a proof of concept with no useful user interface. It will pop up an alert when you visit a site that has changed it's certificate since your last visit.

Update #2:

An updated version of this extension is now available on addons.mozilla.org (it's in the sandbox until it's been reviewed.) You have to log in before you can view the sandbox: Addon #6415

Tonight I threw together a little XUL file that demonstrates most of the major user interface [controls|widgets|whatever] so that I could get a quick idea of how any given GTK theme would look on a variety of different interface elements. I'm sure there is a GTK application that does this but I thought that it would be an interesting use for XULExplorer.

So without further ado I present you with my mostly useless example-widgets.xul

An interesting read: A List Apart has a recent article by Håkon Wium Lie (CTO of Opera Software) which demonstrates the use of True Type Font support in CSS. I'm really surprised that this isn't already supported by major browsers Gecko. With the major text rendering changes in Firefox 3.0 (plus cool new features such as APNG) I'm confused as to why such a seemingly important CSS feature is not implemented in Gecko. It turns out that there is a bug (#70132) which was filed in 2001 and is aparently not getting much attention. Is anyone interested in working on this?

Update:

More...

I would like to share a technique that I am using to customize WebRunner's behavior without directly changing the source code. In my AppRunner extension I have created an overlay for webrunner.xul and within the overlay I include my custom apprunner.js script. Today I decided that I want to modify the behavior of a function in the core WebRunner application object.

In webrunner.js there is a global WebRunner object which is defined like this:

More...

Here is a quick transcript of today's meeting for those who missed it and don't want to wait for thebot.