The Firefox ad has finally made it into the New York Times. Like 8000 other Firefox users I have donated 30$ to make this real. Unlike many who have the bad luck of having their name written wrongly or even not at all in the ad, my name made it into the ad without any bugs.

With 8000 names having to share the space of one page, there isn't much room for each individual name. So the names are printed in a fairly tiny font. I have printed the ad out on an A4 page and need a magnifying glass to read any of the names on it. If I remember correctly the New York Times uses a somewhat bigger format than A4. So in it's original printed form the names might be readable.

From an economical point of view 30$ for that little space is much money. But on the other hand it doesn't really matter to stand out and be clearly visible in this case. More important is to be part of a bigger movement. I wonder if this movement will be strong enough to overthrow MS Internet Explorer. I surmise those 8000 people are mainly geeks and nerds. Many internet users still don't know what Mozilla is and that there are alternatives to IE. This and other ads are a good starting point to make it known that there is something besides IE. One problem still stays: Many users just don't care which browser they use. They use IE since it is preinstalled on Windows.

Here's the ad in a reduced size with its upper left corner magnified to show off that I'm really in ;)

TaskSwitchXP Pro 1.1 alpha contains a funny easter egg in the about box of its configuration tool. If you wait long enough for all the credits to show up and disappear again, you'll see a c: prompt on which magically the most feared command of all time appears "format c:" The security question is answered with "YES" and then the formatting starts.

Of course nothing really happens, but somehow one takes a deep breath and at first thinks "Shit! That can't be real". Then the brain starts to work and recognizes this as a very rude but afterwards funny joke

Mazera is a fun game for PalmOS. It contains some really original ideas and the ingame arcade games such as "Bug Pong", "Bug Breakout" etc. are quite cool.

There is also a secret level that is worth searching for. It's called "Strange Place". It looks partly like a chest of small things that didn't fit anywhere else. There is also a big office that somehow looks out of place in the world of Mazera. It turns out to be the office of the developers of Mazera (like the office of the Architect in Matrix). You also meet the main programmer in front of his computer asking "What would Carmack do".

That's quite funny indeed if you remember that John Carmack was the main programmer of the famous Commander Keen, which was back then the first really fast jump'n'run game on the x86 platform that was as good in performance and graphics as the games on game machines by Nintendo and others.

After that joke I really expected to find a All your base are belong to us quote anywhere in the game, but I didn't find any.