Citation needed:

Previously.

So, Peter Seibel interviewed me for his book. Then Joel Spolsky wrote this weird article about me based on that interview where he called me a "Duct Tape programmer". Peter asked me what I thought about it. I responded:

It's such a strange article, in that it's mostly favorable to my point of view but with such a breathless amazement to it, like he's just discovered an actual unicorn or something. "Look, everybody! Here's a hacker who actually accomplished things and yet he doesn't fetishize the latest fads that I and all of my friends make our living writing about!" There's this tone to the thing like he just can't imagine that someone like me can exist. He's impressed but he doesn't really believe in it, this mythological creature he's discovered. And of course the whole "duct tape" thing is vaguely insulting, and a perfect example of what we call "damning with faint praise".

So I guess to the extent that he puts me up on a pedestal for merely being practical, that's a pretty sad indictment of the state of the industry.

In a lot of the commentary surrounding his article elsewhere, I saw all the usual chestnuts being trotted out by people misunderstanding the context of our discussions: A) the incredible time pressure we were under and B) that it was 1994. People always want to get in fights over the specifics like "what's wrong with templates?" without realizing the historical context. Guess what, you young punks, templates didn't work in 1994. They also like to throw stones at Mozilla, and how much 4.0 sucked and how mozilla.org decided they needed to rewrite it all in 1999, so that jwz code must not have been any good, right? The peanut gallery always fails to understand that I was talking about an entirely different code base that pretty much ceased to exist by early 1996, thanks to the (at the time completely unwarranted) Collabra rewrite, and that has never been seen by the outside world.

Around 1998 I pushed for Netscape to open source both the 3.0 and 4.0 code bases, since the 3.0 code base was the one that included a mail reader that actually worked, but they wouldn't let me do it.

Peter wrote his own response to Joel's article that goes into more detail with some more excerpts from the book.

I really enjoyed reading Peter's book, by the way. (The parts that I'm not in, I mean.) You should buy it.

"Zawinski objects to the subpoena to the extent that the requests for production of documents included in the subpoena fail to adequately and specifically describe the matter sought, are vague, overly broad, or are calculated to or would operate to annoy, embarrass, oppress, unduly burden, or unduly cause expense to Zawinski."

I just spent six hours in a deposition, beginning at a truly uncivilized hour of the morning, wherein some schmuck grilled me about hallway conversations I may or may not have had fifteen years ago.

Apparently there is this shitbag company called "ValueClick" who are patent trolls. I gather that they have some patent related to cookies, and sued AOL for patent infringement. AOL responded with, "Surely you must be joking, please choke on our cookie patent", and counter-sued. So ValueClick dragged me in to a deposition looking for a way to invalidate the AOL/Netscape patent.

A software patent being used to attack a software patent troll.

There are no winners here.

...on the grounds that Asshole Godzilla is an awesome name for a band.

This month, Toho ordered Arizona rock band Asshole Godzilla to forfeit its internet domain and stop using Godzilla in its name. "We gotta change the name of our band, because we're so scary hard that Godzilla and the people surrounding Godzilla want nothing to do with us," lead vocalist Nick Danger writes on assholegodzilla.com, which is being shuttered.

Toho was only the second lawsuit against Netscape that was my fault! Oh, the good old days...

At domains.aol.com you can now register email addresses ending in... "mcom.com".

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.

So yeah, I re-claimed jwz@mcom.com. But I don't see a way to make that forward out of their webmail system, so don't bother sending me mail there.

I still can't get "jwz@aol.com" or the AIM handle "jwz" however.

Remember how they wouldn't give me the mcom.com domain for my "re-host the old web sites and browsers" project? Yeah. I guess this is the "several hundred thousands of dollars" value for which they really needed this domain.

Happy Run Some Old Web Browsers Day!

In honor of the ten year anniversary of the Mozilla project, home.mcom.com, the Internet Web Site of the Mosaic Communications Corporation, is now back online.

It took some doing. There is comedy.

First, the fun stuff:

• Until now, home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected to netscape.com, then redirected a dozen more times before taking you to some AOL portal page. The old URLs that were baked into the toolbar buttons of the original web browsers didn't work any more. But now, if you fire up a copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and click on the various toolbar buttons, they will work again! For example, in the old browsers, when you clicked on the "What's New" toolbar button, it went here.

• home.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.

• mosaic.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from July 1994. That's from just after the company was announced, but before the first browser beta was released. I think that by Oct 1994, both mosaic.mcom.com and www.mcom.com were redirects to home.mcom.com, but I can't remember any more.

• In order to make these web sites work in the old browsers, it was necessary to host them specially. In this modern world, a single server will typically host multiple web sites from a single IP address. This works because modern web browsers send a "Host" header saying which site they're actually looking for. Old web browsers didn't do that: if you wanted to host a dozen sites on a single server, that server had to have a dozen IP addresses, one for each site. So these sites have dedicated addresses!

  The web server also had to be configured to not send a "charset" parameter on the "Content-Type" header, because the old browsers didn't know what to make of that.

• Trivia Question #1: Do you remember why home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist?

• Trivia Question #2: Do you remember the behavioral difference the browsers exhibited when they were talking to a Netscape web server?

• Trivia Question #3: When was the <HYPE> tag implemented, and what was its origin?

• I had originally planned on re-hosting these web sites on an SGI Indy running Mosaic Netsite Commerce Server, just for maximal comedic value... and to see how long it took before someone Øwned it, since there must be someone out there who still remembers how to launch an assault on Irix 5.3. Unfortunately, that wasn't possible for political reasons explained below.

Trivia Answers:

1. home1.mcom.com through home32.mcom.com exist because the early browsers did client-side load-balancing: the browser itself had a special case where if it was loading "home.mcom.com" it would actually pick a random number from 1 to 32 and instead load "homeN.mcom.com"! Those were physically different servers in the Netscape data center.

2. When loading pages from a Netscape server, the caption next to the URL field in the browser would change from "Location" to "Netsite".

3. Not telling.

Enough about all that, I want to run some old browsers!

• My personal collection of old Netscape browsers is here: home.mcom.com/archives/. It's not complete, but it's all that I could find. (It is missing some key releases, such as Netscape 0.4 for Irix, which was the first release to ever leave the building; and the "non-exportable"-crypto versions of almost all of them.)

  If you can publicly mirror these, please do! I know of a few mirrors so far: edlang.org, nothings.org, fauxpaw.com, and moar.jp. Torrents, anyone?

• Linux users: You can run Mosaic Netscape binaries as old as 0.93 on modern Linux systems! You need to load the "a.out" module in the kernel, and install some really old libraries:
  • /etc/modules.conf: alias binfmt-0064 binfmt_aout
  • ld.so-1.9.5-13.i386.rpm (a.out loader)
  • aout-libs-1.4-9.i386.rpm (a.out libc 4)
  • libc-5.3.12-31.i386.rpm (elf libc 5, for NS3)
  • Reconstruct /usr/X386/lib/X11/nls/ (ancient X11 idiocy, don't ask)
  • For Java in Netscape 2 and newer:
    mv moz2_01.zip moz2_02.zip java_30 java_301 /usr/local/lib/netscape/

  Since pulling all those files out is kind of a pain, I've put together a tarball: netscape-linux-libs.tar.gz. Unpack it in your root directory. It shouldn't conflict with anything modern. I've tested that on Red Hat 9 and Ubuntu 7.10.

• Mac users: If you're using a modern Mac, you need to use an emulator.
  • Download BasiliskII from Gwenole's site. Note: there are apparently a number of projects that call themselves "BasiliskII 1.0", but the one linked here seems to be the only one that actually works.

  • Download Quad650.zip and MacStartup.img from Redundant Robot (a Mac ROM and disk image of MacOS 7.5.5).

  • Launch "BasiliskIIGUI". Under "Volumes", add "MacStartup.img", and point "Unix Root" at your desktop or something (so that you can transfer the old Netscape installers into the emulator).

  • Under "Network", set Ethernet to "slirp".

  • Under "Memory", set model to "Quadra", CPU to 68040, and ROM file to the (unzipped) Quadra ROM. Turn on JIT. Set your screen size to something sane.

  • Start the emulator, launch "StuffIt Expander" and unpack the "netscape1_0.sea.hqx" file. (You can't just double-click it.)

  • Launch the "netscape1_0.sea" self-extracting archive. And you're in business!

  • But, if you want to run 0.9, you'll have to set your (real) system clock back to 1994 to get around the time-bomb. (0.93 and later don't have a time bomb.)

• Once you've got those old browsers running, you'll find that they're working fine with the mcom.com web sites, but they fail on just about every other web site in the world (for the "Host" header reason I described above).

  I have a fix for that!

  I wrote a small proxy server that bidirectionally translates the HTTP/1.0 protocol spoken by old web browsers to the HTTP/1.1 protocol spoken on the modern web. Download and run http10proxy.pl. (You may need to install the Net::Server::Fork Perl module first.) Then, go into the preferences on your ancient browser and set "HTTP Proxy" to localhost, port 8228. This will adjust outgoing Host headers as well as incoming Content-Type headers.

What Was That About Politics?

When I heard that AOL was shutting down their Netscape division for good, I mailed a contact there and asked if they'd transfer the mcom.com domain to me, so that I could resurrect these web sites to make the old browsers work right.

My contact asked around, and much to my surprise, the answer was yes! Wheels were put in motion, AOL's operations folks removed their dependencies on those domains (no idea what those were!) and the domains were about to be transfered... when...

AOL Chief IP Counsel and Time Warner blocked it.

Why?

Because their lawyers determined that, because mcom.com is ten years old and four letters long, they could make several hundred thousand dollars by simply putting it on the market and selling it to a spammer!

And so they began the process of doing exactly that.

Fortunately, my contact (who prefers to remain anonymous) talked them out of this, pointing out that it would be perhaps not the best PR move. But still, they wouldn't transfer it to me. AOL still owns the domains. However, they were willing to host the old Netscape content there, at least for now.

So, thank you to my anonymous contact for all the help! And thank you to AOL for hosting these historic web pages. And for not (yet?) selling the domain to a spammer.

A few people have asked me "WTF! Why isn't there a Mozilla party at DNA??" Well, there was going to be. In a nutshell, here's what happened:

I offered them the club rent-free, and offered to do the legwork of booking entertainment, once they told me what their entertainment budget was. I got them several price quotes. Weeks went by, and their budget turned out to be "some spare change we found in the couch." Also, they intentionally didn't publicize it at all, because they decided that they didn't actually want the public showing up. "There are a bunch of reasons for this", they told me. I don't know what those reasons are.

A huge nightclub like DNA Lounge is the wrong place for something like that. So, they're having their low-key insiders-only mixer somewhere else. My understanding is that if you don't already know about it, they don't really want you to know where it is.

Oh well.

Dear Lazyweb,

I want to actually run some of these old copies of Netscape that I have. I have an Intel iMac running MacOS 10.5.1. What is the easiest way to do that, without spending money? Presumably the answer involves running an emulator, of which there are many. I've tried a couple and not gotten far. (I don't have a preference on whether I run the Mac, Windows, or Linux binaries. Whichever is easiest.)

Facts please, not theories.

Bug 392686: Mozilla ten year anniversary party.

I haven't been even remotely involved in the project for nine years, so none of this really has anything to do with me (and hosting their party would have only cost me money) but I still think it's pretty sad that the anniversary is going to go completely un-celebrated.

I kind of expected their response to be, "But we have a perfectly good cafeteria", or "Oh, we're just going to get a booth at the Tied House instead", but this is even lamer. Saying "We're not having an anniversary party because we're celebrating all year" is like saying "You don't get a birthday party because every day is equally special!"

Remember that time when you entered the science fair, and then they decided to give everybody first prize, even the kid who ate paste? It's like that.

I really shouldn't care about this. But, geez.

Update: Hey, they changed their minds! There will in fact be a Mozilla Ten Year Anniversary Party at DNA Lounge on Mon, Mar 31. Details TBA.

Update 2: Scratch that, they changed their minds again. No party for you.

torgo_x takes us on a tour of what it's like to run a 13.5 year old copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.93b on the modern interweb.

There used to be an archive of the old mcom.com pages at dotnetat.net but that's no longer resolving.

BTW, if anyone has a copy of 0.4 for Irix, please give. That was the very first release to ever leave the building, and it's the only one missing from my archives...

Great news everybody! The new Mozilla Calendar stores its calendar files in a local SQL database instead of ICS files, ensuring that the only way to actually get your data back out will be to use some Mozilla tool that understands their private database schema, instead of just copying the file! Why? Because, much like mbox files, ICS files have...

wait for it...
wait for it...

poor performance characteristics! Bwaaahahaha!

It's like watching an infant totter toward a porcupine. Again.

You may recall that my inability to get any of the three disjoint, out-of-sync, perma-alpha Mozilla Calendar codebases ("Calendar Mozilla plugin", "Calendar Firefox plugin", and "Sunbird") to function at all was one of the primary reasons I finally gave up and bought a Mac. I must say, even with all the hardware trouble I've been having, this news made me so very glad I made that decision, because it means that their fourth attempt to reconstruct the calendar and finally get it out of alpha is something I'll never have to even think about the possibility of ever trying to run.

Shame about the Google Hegemon eating their lunch, too.

"Netscape.com will be revived again by AOL, and will relaunch soon as a Digg-like user-driven news/aggregation site."

What's a xer?

From: morfordc@yahoo.com
Subject: your web rant
Date: July 18, 2005 6:48:30 AM PDT
To: jwz@jwz.org

Wow. Just fell upon your rant because your pages were taken down.

Waaaaaaa.

Wow. Think you're the only person in the world whose bosses had them stop doing something that would look bad to the public? Waaaaaaa.

Spoiled little Xer. Can't have my widdle webpage that I authored on company time and is posted for free. Waaa.

Back in May, I wrote in a friends-only post:

I got mail from some guy from Fortune writing yet another article about Netscape, this one "pegged to the upcoming 10th anniversary of the IPO." So I said,

See, if you had said just about any other anniversary, I might have been interested, but by picking that one, I think you've just told me that your article is about "gosh, look at the rich people" instead of being about what we accomplished.

To which he said,

Think what you will, but you're dead wrong about my focus. The IPO was a cultural event for Silicon Valley and Wall Street, and as such its a milestone and marker for all that followed. By re-visiting the Netscape story 10 years after it exploded onto the consciousness of the general public, I'm very much focused on all Netscape accomplished, as well as what other people accomplished because of Netscape.

I read that as: another article glorifying the fiscal feeding frenzy of people who have never actually created something in their lives. More nostalgia for "the bubble". Awesome.

I guess when you're writing a paean to greed, you probably don't realize you're doing it, because you're so entrenched in that culture that you can't tell that you're a part of the problem.

I don't usually blow people off when they ask for interviews and stuff, because somehow I keep thinking that maybe this time my input will make their output be less nonsensical. Or maybe just because I like hearing myself talk. Whichever, this one really rubs me the wrong way.

So I blew him off. Well, the article is out now, and I see my instinct was exactly correct: it's not accomplishments or culture or technology, it's just about price tags.

And to this day, every time I read Mike Homer's name my stomach clenches up.

Attention: Please only fill out this poll if you are actually a Mac user. I don't give a flying fuck what you use on Windows! I honestly didn't think I had to spell this out, but apparently I do.

Poll #511923 Fight!
This poll is closed.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 598

Browser:

Mail:

AIM:

IRC:

Please explain your answers. Especially if you said "Other!"

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Remember last week, when I tried to buy exactly the same audio card that 99.99% of the world owns and convince Linux to be able to play two sounds at once? Yeah, turns out, that was the last straw. I bought an iMac, and now I play my music with iTunes.

This took... let me see... just about zero effort. Well, I still have to go buy some longer audio cables, but that's it.

I plugged a mouse with three buttons and a wheel into the Mac, and it just worked without me having to read the man page on xorg.conf or anything. Oh frabjous day.

Go ahead and say "I told you so" if it makes you feel better.

Anyway, this means several things:

• You shouldn't be holding your breath waiting for a new release of Gronk.

• I also got to stop using the crapware known as Mozilla Sunbird; now I can use iCal, which Just Works (for example, the alarms actually go off, and it doesn't periodically shit a WAV file into my .ics file.)

• The future direction of xscreensaver has become... highly ambiguous.

I'm still using my other Linux machine to read mail and run XEmacs, but I'm hoping to wean myself of that eventually, one way or another. If all goes well, then in six months or so, the only Linux machines I'll ever have to touch will have no video or sound cards in them at all.

The only thing I couldn't figure out how to do: compile xscreensaver. It stopped working some time between OSX 10.3 and 10.4 due to some GTK/Fink stupidity where pkgconfig/gobject-2.0.pc never gets installed. I'm trying not to care. That's going quite well.

Dear Slashdot: please don't post about this. Screw you guys.

Some useful Firefox extensions I've found:

• Link Toolbar:
  This puts a little navigation bar down in the bottom right of the window, with buttons that correspond to the LINK REL tags in the web page, letting you do forward, back, up, & top. This is handy, because it means that (when people use these tags) the "next" link is always in the same place, regardless of who wrote the page or how it is scrolled. Mozilla had this built in (the "Site Navigation Bar") but it was removed from Firefox.

• EXIF Viewer:
  When you pop up a menu over an image and select "Properties", this extension shows you any EXIF data in that image: shutter speed, etc.

• Named Anchors:
  This adds a new tab to the "Tools / Page Info" dialog that lists all of the named anchors in the current document.

• Moving the Search field:
  Not really an "extension", but it took me a while to notice that it's possible to move the "Web search" field up into the menubar area, instead of having it to the right of the URL field. This is nice because it gives you more space to read long URLs. You do this by clicking right on the menubar and selecting "Customize". The UI is pretty clunky, but it lets you get rid of much useless junk and move just about everything around.
  

• Other search engines:
  You can change the set of search engines on the menu to the right of the field by selecting "Customize", but that doesn't work very well (you have to be the owner of the /usr/lib/firefox-*/searchplugins/ directory, I think.) I deleted everything in that directory but Google, and added Webster, IMDB, and the Wayback Machine. Annoyingly, you have to re-do this every time you upgrade Firefox.

bradthemad reports:

"The Dukes Of Hazzard are brought to you by Netscape."

Never ones to miss an opportunity for brand necrophilia, AOL/Time-Warner sponsored a weekend full of Dukes Of Hazzard reruns on the redneck channel this past weekend, and the above quote is taken verbatim from the into-spots bumpers.

Results 1 - 10 of about 139 for "Brand Necrophilia".

Today Nat announced this new calendar server project called Hula, and I've got a funny story about that.

Nat was in town, and he stopped by to say hi and chat, and he said, "So we've got this big pile of code we're going to release, and we're going to build an open source groupware system! It's going to be awesome!"

And I said, "Jesus Mother of Fuck, what are you thinking! Do not strap the 'Groupware' albatross around your neck! That's what killed Netscape, are you insane?" He looked at me like I'd just kicked his puppy.

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