In Memoriam: James Kim (1971-2006)

I had first learned of the news about the Kim family being missing in Oregon from a posting on Mozilla Links shortly after the family went missing on November 29th. I had also had heard about this on the local news, although I didn’t connect the two stories since the local media never mentioned he was a CNet Editor. On Tuesday, December 5th there was renewed hope as his wife and two daughters were found alive and well, however James was still missing. Sadly on Wednesday, December 6th, searchers found the body of James Kim in a rugged wilderness area in southern Oregon.

CNet’s Greg Sandoval, has put together a very touching tribute:
James Kim–family man, gadget fan.

Note: The CNet site is getting a lot of traffic right now which may cause the above link to load very slowly or to time out.

UPDATE: If you would like to help out the Kim family through a monetary donation or gift (CNet will accept gifts on behalf of the Kim family) please go here.

Firefox 3.0a1 – A Tiny Milestone

I have had a few folks ask, “So Guru, what’s new with Firefox 3?” To be honest not a lot, there are a couple minor changes such as Advanced Microsummaries, Acid 2 Compliant and is being built on Gecko 1.9. However, I really couldn’t think of anything else. There is good reason for this, according to Mozilla Links:

Firefox 3 Alpha 1 is also in Release Candidate status and expected in the next 2-3 weeks. It won’t feature any of the improvements expected for Firefox 3 like Places, the integrated bookmarks and history management interface, the Cairo graphics engine, not to mention anything from the long brainstorming list. It is mainly a renamed trunk (Firefox’s main development code) build.

So really it more about changing the name from Minefield to Grand Paradiso. I really don’t know much about the Cairo Graphics (rendering) engine and Places well that was suppose to be the big ’selling point’ of Firefox 2. Now I am beginning to wonder if it will even make it to Firefox 3. Perhaps it will be in the future Firefox 4.
:)