Help us test the new www.mozilla.org staging site

We are making progress with the relaunch of www.mozilla.org and we’d like to invite you to help us test things. All content has been copied over to the staging site and we can now start checking to make sure things are working correctly.

Things to check include making sure links among pages are working, verifying that all current content is there and identifying needed style tweaks. Feel free to let us know about any issues you see (by updating the tweak page or commenting on this post) to make sure we have everything covered.

Known issues include:

• Any pages with special behaviour aren’t set up yet. This includes the feeds on the home page, news, mirrors page, etc.
• Home page layout/styles are broken.
• Breadcrumb navigation is not yet implemented – as a result, menus do not yet reflect the current active page.
• There are lots of little changes that still need to be made that will improve the overall polish of many pages.

Mozilla Community Rubik’s Cube

A Rubik’s Cube with the logos of six Mozilla community projects is now available in the Mozilla Store (currently it is just in the International Store—if you’re in the US or Canada and would like one, please let us know).

Now that we have this available, it would be cool to get the very impressive one-handed Rubik’s cube solver from Fastest Firefox to do a new video with this one. Let’s get this guy a cube!

I Should Have Planted Another One

I recently cleared some space in our backyard and have been planting strawberries. We’ve done this in batches and after the last batch I noticed that we had thirteen little strawberry plants. For a minute, I half-seriously thought of going to get one more plant to avoid any possible bad luck, but didn’t think any more about it.

A couple of weeks later, I’m looking at our backyard through the kitchen window and things looked a little different. An enormous branch had fallen off of a tree and had fallen on the space with all the strawberries (plus the space with the carrots and melons I had also recently planted). You can see one little strawberry poking out near the bottom of the picture below.

It certainly feels like this was directed at me, since the pear tree and blackberries that were here when we moved in, and that are right next to the strawberries, were just outside of the reach of the branch. Next time I won’t question anything—I’ll just turn around, go back to the nursery, and buy another plant.

Gardens and Math

Although it’s been half a year since my last post about a book, I have managed to read a couple of things since then (I just haven’t had the time to write about them). To catch up on things, here’s some quick mini-posts:

Second Nature: Lots of interesting stuff in here, especially the Why Mow? chapter. One part stuck with me that talked about how it used to be a point of pride to organize homes for consumption as people were moving off of farms. Now emphasis is shifting back to organizing homes for at least some production. And there is a lot you can produce without turning a house into a farm — you can produce food, water, dirt, energy…

Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Gödel: Just like the book on infinity, this book is less about math than it is about our experience of the world. In short, the world is a weird place. While I was reading, I kept thinking of the second best line from Ghostbusters: I’ve seen shit that would turn you white (this clip is notable for also having the best line from the movie).

Up next: When is a Planet Not a Planet?: The Story of Pluto.

Featured Mozilla-Based Applications For July

People and organizations are doing a lot of interesting things with Mozilla technologies. Here are two of the many Mozilla-based applications available. If you would like to suggest other applications to feature, please leave a comment.

TuneUp was created for music lovers, by music lovers. TuneUp automatically cleans up your music collection, gives you information about upcoming concerts in your area and more.

Wesabe is part money management tool, part community. Wesabe gives you the tools and the insights to take control of your finances and see all your bank and credit card balances in one place.