Involvement: Why I Love Open Source

A thoughtful perspective on participation

Every user of an application has run into small but irritating characteristics of that application. Most of the time, they can be easily ignored. But sometimes they are part of a repetitive task, and then they become problematic. They have a disproportionate effect on both productivity and the user's overall impression of the application.

Just about every enterprise makes nice noises about how they listen to their customers and how customer service is important to them, but the odds are very low that comments about small irritations will result in code changes. This is partially because most companies don't actually care as much about customer service as they pretend to, and partially because tracking these small things and then sorting through them, removing duplicates, and distilling them down to something that can be easily understood is a very complex and expensive task. Most of the time the effort involved simply doesn't justify the results.

This is something that always attracted me to open source. As a developer, the odds are pretty good that I can find a fix for that thing that irritates me. Then I can change the code to fix my version. If the irritation is idiosyncratic — basically if I'm the only one who doesn't like it the way it is — then that's where the process ends, and I'm happy.

The first credo of open source is that you try to give back to the community. So even as a non-developer there is an incentive to find the bug tracker or support forum for the project and to suggest a change. Sometimes that works[1], but a lot of the time good comments and patches simply fall through the cracks. After all, if tracking details like this is difficult for a for-profit corporation, it's not going to be any easier for a project run by volunteers!

What is really satisfying is getting sufficiently involved in a project to be able to have a direct influence on it, as I am with "Joomla!". It's great to be able to identify a minor irritation, to fix it, and to get it to a production release. This has been my experience twice in recent weeks. I've implemented small changes to the system that make it just a little easier to use[2, 3]. Not only will I enjoy the product more as a result, I'll have the satisfaction of knowing that thousands of systems administrators out there might think just for a moment, "oh, they fixed that – great!"

It is an interesting experience. These small tweaks and fixes that I get to make aren't the biggest contribution I make to the project in terms of lines of code or hours of work, but they're tangible and real. The direct impact on the user is visible and easy to understand. Implementing unit testing and contributing to the building of a "Culture of Quality" in the project are more complex and significant contributions, but they're also more abstract. The small tweaks are actually kind of fun, and it's nice to know that here and there, they is me.

Notes:

If you're an Eclipse user and noticed that v3.1 puts the entire file path in the window title... that was my suggestion. In the web development world where you can have many files called "index.php" open, this helps you quickly figure out where you are.
Add a new module to a "Joomla!" site from version 1.5.4 onward, and the list of available modules is now sorted alphabetically down the columns, rather than split across rows. We still have an issue to sort out with international characters, but it's an improvement.
Starting in version 1.5.5, all panes in the parameters block can be collapsed. Before this change, if you had a long list of parameters that ran off the screen, you would need to scroll down to the bottom in order to expand a panel below. Now you can collapse the long block, which lets you see the panels below, and then expand the one you want.

Republished with permission from Alan Langford from It's fixed in the next release.

19 Votes

13 Comments

Feed

Nick Kotarski makes this comment

2008-10-28 20:46:59

There is a pretty compelling reason to upgrade to Flash 10 related to Clickjacking.

Quote:
Issue #2a STATUS: To be fixed in Flash 10 release. All prior versions of Flash on Firefox on MacOS are particularly vulnerable to camera and microphone monitoring due to security issues allowing the object to be turned opaque or covered up. This fix relies on all users upgrading, and since Flash users are notoriously slow at upgrading, this exploit is expected to persist. Turning off microphone access in the BIOS and unplugging/removing controls to the camera are an alternative. Here is the information directly from Adobe.

Nick
Nick Kotarski makes this comment

2008-10-28 20:49:56

Part 2:

Quote:
Issue #2c STATUS: Fixed in Flash 10 release. All versions of Flash on IE7.0 and IE8.0 could be overlayed by opaque div tags. Using an onmousedown event handler the object click registers as long as the divs are removed by the onmousdown event handler function. Demo here of stealing access to the microphone.

Personally I would rather have the fix than the functionality that gets broken. But that's just me.

Nick
Michelle Bisson makes this comment

2008-10-29 02:05:19

Thanks Sam for the update!
Ryan makes this comment

2008-10-29 19:37:47

I am attempting to fix this for JCE too, using the swf from FancyUpload2 but rebuilding some of the accompanying javascript to work with Mootools 1.1

I'll post it to the forge if I can get it right.
Leo Lammerink makes this comment

2008-10-31 07:28:54

If you want to roll back to Flash 9 you need to uninstall Flashplayer and you need to do this with the Flash uninstaller as provided here [url=http://www.adobe.com/go/tn_14157here [/url] If you do not use that you have a lot of remainders left (source Michael Horowitz on Cnet

Than you can download the Flash 9 version (42MB)Here and you extract and find the 2 installer files (plugin for firefox and activeX for IE) in the extracted folder
Quote:
flash_player_update6_flash9\Players\Release
Run them and your flash loaders work again.

leo lammerink (aka leolam)
Anonymous makes this comment

2008-10-31 14:15:47

The old versions are still available: http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=tn_14266&sliceId=1

BTW, love the Captcha sound, is that a radio station?
Noel makes this comment

2008-11-03 18:10:57

http://digitarald.de/journal/54706744/fancyupload-for-flash-10/

Fix for the Fancy Uploader, works with J too.
Ryan makes this comment

2008-11-05 19:59:22

Quote:
http://digitarald.de/journal/54706744/fancyupload-for-flash-10/

Fix for the Fancy Uploader, works with J too.

I doubt that will work for Joomla! 1.5 as that new version uses Mootools 1.2, and even if you did upgrade to that and use a compatability layer, there are still quite a number of new and different initialization options for FancyUpload2, so you would have to rewrite parts of com_media to accomodate them.
Nick Kotarski makes this comment

2008-11-05 23:09:16

We are exhorted to update Joomla as soon as a security fix is released. We see many sites getting hacked because they are not updated in a timely manner.

Given that Flash 10 fixes a couple of important security issues why would you make yourself vulnerable by installing Flash 9?

I'm sorry I just don't get it?

Nick
Anonymous makes this comment

2008-12-29 07:19:01

Quote:
I am attempting to fix this for JCE too, using the swf from FancyUpload2 but rebuilding some of the accompanying javascript to work with Mootools 1.1

I'll post it to the forge if I can get it right.

Did you got it right?
Kimberly Koserowski makes this comment

2009-06-29 15:41:27

I turned the Enable Flash Uploader to No and I still receive the script error when trying to use Media Manager in any version of IE so obvioulsy this doesn't fix the problem in joomla and I am using 1.5.11.
Dimitris makes this comment

2009-09-11 03:42:08

Almost 1 year on flash 10 and still no fix on this problem.
And this is major if the sites content deal with a lot of images. If I was a php-js-as3 expert I could rewrite the com_media, but I'm not so I ask the experts out there to do it

Come on someone must have a solution to this!!!!
Lela VH Gamel makes this comment

2009-09-23 01:36:14

guess that the only way that we can still upload is using the old version of Flash, that's great if you are only doing programming, but what if you want to use something so simple as a playback from YouTube... problem is that you can't use Flash 9 in one browser and 10 in another that you don't progranm with.... Flash is a common plug-in to all of the browsers that you have loaded on the frame.

Anybody got any other ideas?.....

Involvement: Why I Love Open Source

A thoughtful perspective on participation

13 Comments

Add Comment