Mozilla is planning on releasing Firefox 0.9 by this weekend. I’ve been looking at a few of the recent nightly builds, and it’s going to have a few new things, including a new theme. At first the new theme was a little jarring over the old one, Qute, but I’ll give it some time before I think about switching back.

But most exciting about 0.9 is that it means Firefox 1.0 is coming out next. The first few releases, back when it was still Phoenix, didn’t impress me much, but at some point in the last six months I stopped using regular Mozilla and didn’t look back. But I can’t tell if the 1.0 release will mark when their focus shifts from the Mozilla Suite over to Firefox/Thunderbird, like their roadmap says they will. If anything, the Mozilla organization has excelled at changing their mind, and often, so I never look more than a couple of weeks ahead with them.

Check out these photos of the transit of Venus that happened earlier this week. Looks like some kind of sci-fi painting, but it’s the real thing.

Only a few spacecraft have returned pictures from the surface of Venus, all of them Soviet. In 1975 the twin Venera 9 and 10 spacecraft landed and sent back pictures. A good rundown on that mission can be found on this page. Then in 1982, Venera 13 and 14 both landed and sent back color photos of the surface before being destroyed by the high heat and pressure. This page here has good-quality versions of all the pictures that were sent back, from all four landers. On the Wikipedia is an overview of the entire Venera mission, emcompassing 16 spacecraft over 22 years.

The Nevada State prison system is putting out a call for book donations for their Spanish-speaking inmates. In the request they had to specify, “Anything except pornography and textbooks”. Is that a problem they’ve had in the past, folks donating Spanish-language pornography?