Take A Look At Walltype!

My friend has been working on a site called Walltype! that allows people to post custom art work and then anyone can buy one of those designs to hang on their wall (think Threadless for art instead of shirts).

He showed me a prototype print that he made a few months ago and it turned out really well. From the FAQ: “Art is printed on fancy semi-gloss fine art paper using a very large and heavy printer. The print is then sealed on a mounting board and is ready to hang and easy to frame.”

Things are still in beta, so everything isn’t in place yet but you can view submissions, comment on designs or submit your own. It looks like the shop part of the site isn’t ready yet but will be open soon. This gives me a little time to figure out if I want to get Maples in Kyoto, flowers allover or Flower.

Random background information: I helped him think of names for this site back when he was planning things about a year ago. We really liked the name Walleye, but unfortunately it was already taken by a fishing site. He offered to buy the domain name, but the person who owns it said he had already turned down offers of [outrageous value] and thought the price was closer to [even more outrageous value]. That seemed a tad high to me, but who am I to say? Anyway, it’s a shame he couldn’t have the name since the mascot potential for an art site called walleye.com would have been great (cute little fish holding a palette and paintbrush and wearing a beret maybe?). It could have been the pets.com of the latter part of the first decade of the 21st century.

Status Update 2008-02-22

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve continued to work on updates and planning for the www.mozilla.org site. I’ve mostly been coordinating with people on various parts of the site, but I have had a chance to make a few small changes (adding Mozilla Messaging to the Timeline and reorganizing the navigation links in the About section). Next I’d like to continue helping with updating the About content and then phasing out the Press section (see bug 324337 for details).

Update on the Mozilla Foundation’s Directed Giving Program

In November the Mozilla Foundation announced that donors now had the option to direct their contributions to a set of Mozilla projects — Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey and Mozilla Accessibility. Since then more than $16,000 has been raised for these projects (about $5,000 is from donations and the rest is matching funds from the Foundation).

The Foundation will use this money to make grants to each of the projects based on proposals they submit. So far no grants have been made, but we have started talking with the projects about different ideas. We’re excited to be able to help each of these community efforts and will be posting more information soon about what is being done with these contributions.

To support one of these projects, please:

• Donate to Bugzilla
• Donate to Camino
• Donate to SeaMonkey
• Donate to Mozilla Accessibility

Thank you to everyone who has donated so far. Your generosity helps us continue to support the Mozilla community.

Interesting But Not Entertaining

I’m just now finishing Umberto Eco’s Serendipities (I skipped over some parts earlier in the book and am considering skipping the last few pages). It’s only 115 pages long, but it’s taken me 2 months to get through it. I do have a legitimate excuse for not reading more, but I think the real reason I haven’t read more is sentences like this:

The intent is first of all to question the materialistic claims of all epicurean, polygenetic hypotheses and then to reject every conventionalist theory as a way of separating language from the very source of Truth.

Right now I want to read books for fun and don’t really have the patience for parsing academic text even if the subject of the book (essays on the history of langauges) is appealing. I recently read a review on Amazon that sums up my limited experience with Eco’s non-fiction — “it is like listening to a professor who is interesting but not really entertaining”.

I have really enjoyed Eco’s fiction though and I’m happy to read more of that. The Name Of The Rose is great and I enjoyed Foucault’s Pendulum enough to read it twice (I thought I might understand more the second time around, but I’m not sure if I did). The Island of the Day Before and Baudalino weren’t quite as good, but still enjoyable enough. If I do read any more, I think I’ll try The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.

Up next, a collection of Civil War writings by Ambrose Bierce.

Thirty Point Four

I just filled up our new Camry hybrid for the first time yesterday and we managed to get an average of 30.4 mpg on the first tank. Hopefully we’ll be able to improve that average as we learn more about the car and about driving again in general (it has been about 10 years since I’ve owned a car). When I get some time I’ll do some research — I imagine Google’s got something with some tips and tricks that will be helpful to read.

Status Update 2008-02-08

Last week I took part in another www.mozilla.org planning meeting where we all agreed on what we want to do. That feels like good progess, but now we need to figure out how to make that happen. We felt that the most realistic approach is to take incremental steps to go from here to there, so I’ve started to break the plan into smaller steps that can then be bug-ified (bugged maybe?). Here’s the first batch:

• Make a comprehensive list of all projects (bug 393447)
• Update the About section content (bug 231131 and bug 414439)
• Update the footer (bug 416198)
• Update the Privacy Policy (bug 416174)
• Replace the Products section with Projects (bug 325485)
• Start determining new homepage content (No bug yet)

If you have any comments or suggestions about any of the specific tasks mentioned above or about the plans for www.mozilla.org in general, feel free to leave comments on this blog, on the various bugs or on the planning page on the wiki.