December 2008

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3 short mozilla videos worth watching

December 22, 2008 in Fennec, Firefox, Mobile, Mozilla, Video, Weave | No comments

First, Aza Raskin does a quick interview with Dan Mills to talk about what’s going on with Weave. There’s been a huge amount of development going on in the weave project including a completely new server and client. I’ve heard that some of the labs guys have Weave syncing between desktop and mobile devices, too. So lots of progress going on there. I’m sure these guys will have another release up pretty soon.


Dan Mills on Mozilla Weave from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

In this video Madhava Enros gives a demo of our Mozilla mobile browser called Fennec. Since the first Alpha release there’s been a lot of work on responsiveness and performance. Madhava gives a quick walk through of the browser as it stands today.


Fennec Alpha 2 Overview from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

And in this last video mctones gives a demo of a concept that he’s working on that might be used when you open a new tab, using z-order to indicate age with a jQuery-driven visual layout. This video is pretty neat if for no other reason to see the sea of floating web pages. Not sure if it’s useful, but it’s a fun video.


Auto Dial 3D from mctones on Vimeo.

looking for a contact at NASA

December 18, 2008 in Mozilla | 6 comments

This is a “help me” post.  I’m looking for a contact at NASA.  In particular, someone in the shuttle program who might have access to previous launch high-level telemetry data.  If someone knows someone who knows someone, drop me a line or contact me on twitter.  It’s Mozilla-related.  Thanks!

just declared email bankruptcy

December 16, 2008 in Kicking My Ass | 8 comments

I just deleted my entire email Inbox.  800 unread wasn’t something I was going to fight my way back from.  So if you sent me something that you think I should really look at and respond to, send it again.  Otherwise it’s gone forever.

open-government.us

December 2, 2008 in Freedom, Lessig, Obama, Open Web, Politics, Regulations, Video | 1 comment

The matter of copyright and access to content seems like a small thing in the mix of problems that the new President will face when he gets into office.  Indeed, when compared to problems like climate change, a faltering world economy, a couple of wars and everything else that’s on all of our collective plates, this might seem like a trivial thing.  But it’s not.  As a signal of how this administration will act vs. what it will be doing, these things are important.

A number of individuals and organizations have put together a set of principles on open-government.us that reflect what they believe should be the way to approach the question of access to documents, video and other artifacts that are created as the government transition takes place, and hopefully after.  Some of this has already happened.  So progress is being made.

On the site there’s a short video from Lawrence Lessig that introduces the ideas as well as a place to add your name to the list of signatories.  It’s worth the five minutes.  Go have a look.

privacy is hard

December 1, 2008 in Clay Shirky, Design, Privacy | 10 comments

I got this dialog on Facebook today and I was completely stumped.  Totally.  I read the paragraph over and over, trying to figure out what I meant.  I read it to friends, didn’t help.  Thought about it some more.  It turns out that what I really wanted to do was both of these things.  I want it out of my profile and I want it not to be able to read my data, either.  But you can’t.  It’s a false dichotomy.  You can pick one or the other, but not both.  In the end I picked “Remove” – removing access to the data.  (Maybe.)  In hopes that it would at least posting new stuff to my timeline on facebook.

This stuff is hard.  No one has really figured out how to describe these interactions.  More evidence that privacy decisions in our world are a completely unnatural act.  We’re just missing the language and cultural context, not to mention the tools.