Music: Sam and Dave

I was just listening to Hold on We’re Strummin’ by David Grisman and Sam Bush on the way to work and man, is it a great album. In case you don’t know, these guys are masters of the mandolin.

The album suprised me in two ways. First, even though I’m learning to play the mandolin and admire the sound, I think too much of any genre gets a bit long in the tooth after a while. I wondered if a whole album of mando music would get tedious after the first few tracks. Also, as mentioned in the liner notes, usually when well known musicians do an album together, they record the tunes that they all know so you don’t get a lot of new material.

But my misgivings were unfounded. The sound of the album is wonderfully diverse, from the fiddle and banjo on Old Time Medley to the groove of a National steel mandolin (gotta get me one of those!) on Swamp Thing. Also most of the tracks are brand new compositions by Bush and Grisman. And did I mention the perfectly crisp sound of the recording? This album will be on my play list for a long time to come.

B&N has some audio clips, but I’d recommend buying directly from Acoustic Disc because more of the proceeds probably go directly to the artists, and it’s a few dollars cheaper.

Mozilla Releases and an Apology

Mozilla has let loose Firebird 0.7, Thunderbird 0.3 and the version 1.5 of the Mozilla Suite. There is also a beta version of a new mozilla.org website. The website looks nice, but I hope they get a copy editor or technical writer to look at the text at some point. And what’s up with that brown search box in the upper right corner on a brown background?

Anyway, I’m sorry to say that I have no version of the Pinstripe Theme for Mozilla 1.5. I am working with an icon artist to give Pinstripe a more professional look and I think you’ll find the results worth the wait. I do however have a preview of the Pinstripe theme for Mozilla Firebird. A version for the Mozilla Suite and Thunderbird is in the works.

Pinstripe Tabs, part 2

This is in response to Bill McGonigle’s comment about Pinstripe’s tabs.

Bill says: “I think of Pinstripe as truely Aqua-consistent theme for Mozilla. I place consistency one tiny notch above optimal functionality on the Mac, so I would advocate emulating Jaguar’s tab look and feel.”

Pinstripe aims for Aqua-compliance, but it misses the mark somewhat. And where it misses, it’s due to the limitations of Mozilla’s cross-platform UI…
Continue reading “Pinstripe Tabs, part 2”

Various Updates

You can find up to date builds of Mozilla Firebird in this MozillaZine thread. I have never used one of these builds so I can’t comment on them. YMMV.

Work on the Pinstripe theme continues at a slow pace. My day job has been soaking up most of my free time. The bulk of the time I spend on Pinstripe is on creating icons. As I’ve said before, I’m not a “graphic designer” so it takes me a long time to come up with something good. If anyone out there would like to lend a hand at creating icons, drop me an email. I hope to have the next Pinstripe version available for the release of Mozilla 1.5 final.