My Ambrose Bierce Blog Post

I just finished reading a collection of Ambrose Bierce’s Civil War writings. I’m not really a Civil War buff (I have watched Ken Burn’s documentary and I enjoy Shelby Foote’s drawl but that’s the extent of it) but I was interested in finding out more about Ambrose Bierce. The writing in the stories is amazing and they are full of great lines like:

I will cheerfully confess that if my story had been different from what it was it might have been worse than it is.

If only all 19th century authors could have written like this. I’ve tried several times to read books from that time that are supposedly so great but I always bog down (have I mentioned Herman Melville’s extended ambergris digression before?). A year or so ago I forced myself to get through all of Henry James’ The Princess Casamassima but I couldn’t connect with the story and it was tedious to get through. I’m not sure what it is, but I’m glad to know that I am able to enjoy some things from this period.

Up next, I’m going to reread a book about elevator inspectors.

Status Update 2008-03-21

Over the last few weeks I’ve worked on the following changes to www.mozilla.org:

• Posted a new History page
• Added a draft of a proposed new About page to bug 231131
• Started to look at what to update in the Roles and Responsibility section
• Prepared some updates to the Mozilla-Based Applications page
• Opened a bug about making some sort of anniversary announcement on www.mozilla.org for March 31 (bug 423925)
• Posted a Party page — in honor of ten years of Mozilla I reused some 10-year old table-based HTML code for the page that doesn’t even come close to validating

I’ve also worked on a few other projects, including putting together a concept for a new Mozilla t-shirt. There was a lot of useful feedback on my last post about the design and I should have more news about that, and some other projects, soon.

What Do You Mean By Green?

One of the first things that I’ve noticed when reading through the green home links I’ve collected is that many sustainable solutions involve trade-offs that need to be considered carefully. If something that increases the energy efficiency of your home also reduces your indoor air quality, is that something you want to use?

For instance, compact florescent bulbs are much more efficient than regular incandescent bulbs, but they contain mercury* that is released if the bulbs break (even if you never have an accident with a bulb at home the bulbs will certainly break in the landfill and there are very few recycling options for CFLs today).

There are many other examples of this type of tradeoff. Just to mention one more, bamboo flooring might be much more sustainable than traditional hardwood floors, but bamboo floors often contain formaldehyde glue that will outgas.

I came across one quote that I think summarizes things well: “green homes have three fundamental legs: energy efficiency, the conservation of resources and good indoor air quality.” There might not always be solutions that meet all three of these goals, but this does provide a good guide for helping make decisions. On the other hand, sometimes there are solutions (instead of CFLs, use LEDs instead).

* Some argue that CFLs are still better since they contain less than the amount of mercury emitted by coal-burning plants that are needed to power the less efficient incandescent bulbs, but if you’re building a house that runs on solar or wind power this argument doesn’t hold up anymore.

A Green Home

Over the last several years I’ve been bookmarking sites and articles that talk about building a green home or sustainable design. Now that it looks like we’ll buy a house in the not too distant future, I guess I need to go back through all this information and do something with it. I’ll post any interesting bits here, so stay tuned.

Forty Oh

I’m getting the hang of driving our new hybrid on the highway. After filling up recently, I drove mostly on the highway for the next couple of days and was able to bring the tank average to over 40 mpg. I took this picture in our driveway and was lucky enough to get this before the number dropped back into the 30s (we’re on a hill and the average mileage started dropping quickly as I was driving the last couple of blocks home).

I don’t have the hang of driving around the city yet and am getting numbers in the high 20s. I’m starting to do research, but I’m already running across some conflicting information. One person suggests that it’s best to accelerate quickly and then coast and then another set of tips tells you to accelerate slowly (look at page 7 in this PDF file). I’ll keep looking for other information, but feel free to let me know if there’s a good resource out there for this.

More Than 100 Applications Built Using Mozilla

A few months ago I posted that the Map of the Mozpad Universe page had over 50 Mozilla-based applications on it. More have been added since then and there are now 100 applications listed. I think there is good reason to believe that there are still more to add since this list almost exclusively contains publicly available applications and doesn’t include any intranet applications (with the exception of the listing of Le Monde’s internal CMS).

If you know of any active application development projects that are missing, please feel free to update the wiki or add a comment on this post. I’m excited to see this list continue to grow since there’s no other place that I know of to get an idea of the many different ways that Mozilla technology is being used. Getting a good sense of the scope of these applications also seems like a good step toward achieving some of the goals of the Mozpad community. Even though the Mozpad effort seems to have stalled, the plans this group put together still seem worthwhile.

How Does Mozdev Compare With Google Code?

There have been some discussions recently about how mozdev’s hosting service compares to Google Code. The feedback we’ve received so far has been very useful, so I wanted to talk about this topic with a wider group to get more comments and suggestions.

I think that one of the biggest advantages that mozdev has is that it is dedicated exclusively to people who are using Mozilla to build extensions and applications. This means that we can focus on providing features (such as creating a way to serve downloads that will work with Firefox 3’s secure installation requirements) that a general purpose hosting site, like Google Code, wouldn’t offer. I think there is a lot of potential in providing more of these features that apply only to Mozilla developers (for instance, one person mentioned that they had to use 4 different sites to manage their extension, so maybe we could sync information between AMO and mozdev to make developers’ lives a little easier).

Another thing that became clear from the discussion threads is that we haven’t done a good enough job talking about all of the new functionality we’ve added to the site recently or that we are planning to add soon. For example, someone mentioned that it was a negative that they couldn’t get admin access to their project’s Bugzilla account on mozdev. This had been true for a long time, but a few months ago we enabled this option when we upgraded to Bugzilla 3.0. There have also been many complaints about how limiting CVS can be, but the next item on our roadmap (after finishing the secure installation work) is to add at least one more version control option to the site.

Google Code certainly does have an advantage in some areas, but I think it misses the point a bit to compare mozdev with any general purpose hosting site just by looking at the different features available. Over the last eight years, a community of Mozilla extension and application developers has grown up on mozdev and it is these people and their collective experience that is the site’s most useful feature. No matter how great Google Code may be, it can’t offer that.

Internet By The People For The People

Right now there are no t-shirts in the Mozilla Store that have the Mozilla logo on them, so I’ve been working with a designer to create a new shirt design. I wanted to post the latest version here so people could take a look and comment.

(Click on the image for the full view of the black version of the shirt and for an alternate orange version.)

This design borrows some of the feel of the old Hack shirt. I think the circle of stars also borrows a bit from the European Union flag, but with Europe’s high Firefox usage I guess the connection makes sense

If you have any thoughts or suggestions about this design, feel free to post your comments here.

Status Update 2008-02-29

Last week I continued moving forward with updates to the www.mozilla.org site. Here’s a quick list of the changes:

• Started phasing out Press section (bug 324337)
• Ran into some redirect issues (bug 419764)
• Posted thoughts about need for News posting policy (bug 420130)
• Rotated the Featured Mozilla-Based Applications (eMusic Remote and Flickr Uploadr for March)
• Worked on draft of a new About page and will post to bug 231131 for review soon

I realize that these periodic updates don’t give a very good overall view of what has been happening on the site and what changes are being planned. To fix that, I’ll to post a thorough review of what’s going on with the site soon.