Programming vs. Engineering vs. Mathematics.

An experiment was conducted in order to study the differences between programmers, engineers, and mathematicians. One programmer, one engineer, and one mathematician were all locked in separate classrooms for one week. Each classroom contained all of the normal things you’d find in a classroom: chalkboard, chalk, desks, etc. In addition to that each classroom contained water, one can of food (enough to feed a person for a week), but no can opener. At the end of the week, they opened the programmer’s door first. The programmer walked out. When they looked in the classroom they saw the can beat to hell, but opened. When they opened the engineer’s door, the engineer walked out. In the classroom were a bunch of equations and diagrams written on the board, one small dent in the can which was all that was required to open it. Lastly they opened the mathematician’s door. No one came out. They looked in and saw the mathematician laying dead on the floor, the can of food untouched, and a long series of equations on the chalkboard. But at the end of the equations was written the phrase: “A solution exists”.

Getting your extension to work with Firefox 3.0

When you develop a Firefox extension you’re required to specify the minimum and maximum versions of Firefox which your extension is known to work with. This is done by specifying a minVersion and maxVersion in the install.rdf file inside your plugin’s archive. Since my ClearSkyPlugin isn’t likely to break in any future version of Firefox, I attempted to bypass the version checking by setting the minVersion to 1.0, and the maxVersion to 9.0.
Of course, today Firefox 3.0 was released and my extension was detected as incompatible. After some twiddling I managed to figure out I had to set the minVersion to 1.0.* to get things to work.

If you’re having trouble getting your downloaded extensions to work, you might just disable extension version checking altogether.