Toddlers Prefer Canadian Coinage

I was in Canada a few weeks ago and brought back some coins with me. The toddler in my life likes playing with coins (feeding them to her froggy bank, rolling them around…) and she likes these new Canadians ones much better than the American ones.

You can see why — Canadian coins have a Queen on one side and animals on the other (beavers, caribou, loons and polar bears). It’s hard for monuments and branches to compete with that.

The dollar bills were toddler friendly too. For example, the $5 bill is bright blue and has people playing hockey on it. Unless your son or daughter is in to iconography of the Freemasons, then the Canadian dollar bills win here too.

A Theme Park, A Chameleon And Some Bubble Gum

When John Slater posted about collecting photos for his T-Shirt History of Mozilla, I remembered that I had an old Netscape 6 shirt sitting in a box somewhere at home. Netscape was running a contest at the time called the Theme Park and this shirt was promoting the themes that were available then.

I have this shirt because I was working with Pete Collins on a point-and-click tool for Netscape that was supposed to make it easy for people to create and package themes. The tool was built as a Netscape extension and unfortunately never was completed (building an application on top of Mozilla in 2000 wasn’t quite as friendly as it is today).

The project was opened source though and is still available today at chameleon.mozdev.org. If anyone is interested in a graphical tool for Firefox themes, the code is still there and some of it may even be reusable (maybe).

Just one word of warning. If you do get this tool to work, please don’t make a pink and green bubble gum inspired theme. I can tell you that it doesn’t make the most pleasant browsing experience

Notes from Mozilla Identity discussion at the Summit

I’ve compiled notes from the Mozilla Identity discussion from the recent Summit and have posted those at:

• Comments on Sticky Notes
• Identity Session Transcript
• Identity Session Whiteboard

Unfortunately some of the content from the sticky notes was lost (these seem to have been thrown out before we could pack them so I recovered what I could from photos people took of the note boards).

If you wrote down notes at the Summit and they haven’t been recorded, please feel free to add your comments to that page on the wiki. If you took pictures of the sticky notes, please feel free to let me know and I’ll work with you to write down what we can read from the pictures.

Mozpad Post Mortem

Over the last few weeks at OSCON and the Summit, I’ve had a chance to talk with people about the platform side of the community. There’s a lot of interest and ethusiasm around this topic and hopefully we’ll see some increased activity around XULRunner soon.

In addition to talking about what we could do going forward, people had a lot of useful feedback about why the mozpad effort ran out of steam last year. Hopefully the following thoughts on mozpad will be viewed as constructive feedback and as a guide for any future efforts to build the community around the platform.

• The mozpad project had too many goals. Although many worthwhile projects were identified, the group never prioritized these efforts and instead tried to make progress on everything at the same time. For a new effort, it would probably work better to focus on just one thing first and then expand to other projects after making real progress on that initial project.
• There was not enough effort spent on bringing people into the process. The website was run on a wiki and the meetings were held in public on IRC, but many important XULRunner users never get involved. For a new effort, someone should go to each of the organizations building Mozilla-based applications and talk to them about their needs and explain why working with the community is worth their effort and how they can get involved.
• There was uncertainty about what the rest of the community felt about mozpad and XULRunner. Although there were encouraging words from Mitchell and others, people seemed reluctant to spend too much time without being given a green light to work on things. A green light wasn’t needed since anyone can contribute to an open source project, but I think there was a perception that nothing would end up being accomplished without some official approval. For a new effort, I think this perception can be fixed by clearly documenting how people outside of the core project can collaborate on Mozilla code and showing how Mozilla Corporation employees sometimes have a difficult time getting their changes accepted as well.
• The active mozpad members were too busy. The people coming to the meetings had their own products to ship (Firefox, Komodo, Songbird, AllPeers…) and they didn’t have much time to devote to fixing platform-related issues. For a new effort, we should look into ways to pool resources so that available volunteer time doesn’t become a bottleneck and so that fixing common platform issues doesn’t become the responsibility of any one organization.

Archiving Content on www.mozilla.org

Over the last few days we’ve started archiving content on www.mozilla.org. None of the content is being deleted—all archived content is available on the www-archive.mozilla.org site and can be brought back to the main site if needed. If someone goes to an archived page on the main site, they will get a 404 page that provides a link to that page on the archive site.

Due to the number of pages on the site and the lack of information about owners for much of that content, we are going to have to make some judgement calls about what to archive. We apologize for any inconvenience this causes and we are happy to work with people to fix anything that gets broken as part of this process. If you run into an issue with archived content, please open a bug.

Update: For a list of archived content, take a look at this Bonsai query of recent site activity (the archived pages have no value for the Rev column and 0/0 for the +/- column).

Apparently I’m Allergic to British Columbia

I got back from the Mozilla Summit last night and when I woke up this morning I could breathe through my nose again. I had started getting sniffly (sniffley?) soon after we arrived in Vancouver last Saturday and I couldn’t shake the cough or congestion all week.

It’s entirely possible that I had picked up a cold the week before when I was at OSCON in Portland (someone else that had been to OSCON said he had started getting cold symptoms that weekend too). It’s also possible that there was something up there that I was allergic to (maybe the bear fur, rock slides or out of control laundry trucks). I don’t think I’m allergic to Canada or Canadians in general though since I’ve had two nice congestion-free trips to Montreal before.