More Than 50 Applications Built Using Mozilla

Whenever I see an announcement about a new application that uses Mozilla in some way, I try to remember to update the Map of the Mozpad Universe page. I added a few more links today and realized that there are now over 50 applications on the list. That seemed like an impressive number, so I wanted to post about that.

For many of those applications I had to rely just on blog posts since I couldn’t find any information on the projects’ sites that said anything about Mozilla or XULRunner. A community run evangelism effort aimed at getting these sites to include the Powered by Mozilla logo might be just the thing here (just in case a certain Mozilla application focused community effort happens to be looking for direction).

Update on Knife Sharpening Truck

A couple of weeks ago I heard the knife sharpening truck coming down the street, so I grabbed my camera and took a picture out my window. It’s not a great picture (lots of glare, odd angle and a little bit of fuzziness because there’s a screen on the window) but it does give you some idea of what a knife sharpening truck looks like.

Yeah for Transparency

I finished reading A Demon of Our Own Design a few days ago and I enjoyed it. A lot of the details about financial instruments and trading strategies were way over my head, but I did learn some things. For instance, I was aware that there was this thing called Long Term Capital Management that caused a huge ruckus several years ago, but now I have a better grasp of what it was doing and how it caused that ruckus.

The parts of the book that I found most interesting dealt with possible policy responses to the burst of financial innovations that have been driven by increased computing power and globalization. The main point that I took away was that the author believes that adding more regulation will just make future crises more likely since the problems in the financial market are related to how complex it already is.

This is not some sort of laissez faire-ish argument for keeping the government out of the market, rather it is simply saying that by reducing complexity the transparency of the system will be increased. This would be a good thing since more people will be able to understand what’s going on. As things are, only a few people understand how certain parts of the market work, so it is easy for them to game the system if no one else can figure out what they are doing (his phrase for this is “complexity helps the malfeasant”).

I think the concept of transparency clearly applies to more than just the financial markets. Governments certainly work better when they are transparent and understandable (to reference a different phrase here “sunshine is the best disinfectant“). This also applies to software and the Internet (although I’m clearly a little biased here in favor of open source). If you want a phrase here to describe why developing software in a transparent way is better than doing it in a closed way, take your pick from The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

Up next: Umberto Eco’s Serendipities.

Status Update 2007-12-14

I spent most of last week working on a couple of internal projects, so I don’t have much to report. I did make some updates to the bug for updating the www.mozilla.org/projects page and that will hopefully be ready to go live soon.

Is Kafkaish A Word?

I’d like to thank Bart Decrem for helping me with a seemingly simple thing. He set up an account on a site for the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and I recently asked him to help transfer that account over to me. Bart had both the account number and password, but that wasn’t enough.

When he tried to log in, he was told that he couldn’t because he was accessing the site with a different IP address. When he tried calling customer support, he was told that they would only talk to him if they could call him back using the phone number in his account. Unfortunately, phone numbers and IP addresses have this habit of changing over time.

In the end, he had to dig up bills from four years ago and write a letter and go to a notary to prove that who he is today is who he was in 2003. This Kafkaish (or Kafkaesque, I suppose) encounter took up many hours of Bart’s time and I appreciate his help.

Status Update 2007-12-07

Last week I made some tweaks to the Mozilla Foundation home page mockup based on feedback. I just finished checking this in along with the other Foundation page changes I mentioned in last week’s update.

I also spent some time working on a proposed new Featured Projects page (bug 393447). This is part of the effort to update the list of Projects on www.mozilla.org to make it easier to showcase what people are working on in the community. Feel free to post to that bug if you have any comments.

Status Update 2007-11-30

I spent some time last week looking at the Mozilla Foundation pages on www.mozilla.org. I think there are a number of things that can be done to polish this content, including:

* Updating the Foundation home page (see mockup)
* Changing the navigation links to point to some newer pages and removing links to out-of-date pages (suggested links are on the home page mockup)
* Editing some pages that have become a little stale (such as removing the notice about the offices moving in 2005 on the Contact page)
* Setting up redirects for common variations of the Donate page URL (such as www.mozilla.org/donate.html)

If anyone has any comments or suggestions about any of these proposed changes, let me know. I’ll try to get these checked-in later in the week.

Eating Acorns

On our recent trip to Texas we stayed in a house with a big pecan tree in the backyard and there were hundreds of pecans on the ground. We cracked a few open to eat them and even half-seriously thought about making pecan pie.

After we left Austin we went to San Antonio and stayed at my dad’s where there were hundreds of acorns all over his yard. I was curious why people ate pecans but not acorns, so I opened one up and gave it a try. It tasted like a nut, but it had a bitter aftertaste.

I did some research later (maybe I should have done the research first…) and acorns are edible and they were often used in American Indian cooking. There are also all sorts of instructions online for how to remove the bitter taste and then what to do with the nuts after that. I didn’t have time to try making acorn pancakes, but maybe next time.