March 2009

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bringing accelerated 3D to the web

March 24, 2009 in Open Web, OpenGL, Web Standards | 50 comments

[ See Vlad's post on this topic, Arun's post in the Mozilla standards blog and the official Mozilla blog post. ]

Today Mozilla and the Khronos group announced that Mozilla will be leading an initiative to bring accelerated 3D to the web.  This is a pretty big deal for us and for the web, and is really a reflection of the continued acceleration of open web technology well beyond just the classic HTML and JavaScript that we’ve seen in the past.  It’s our intention to include this as base functionality in the release after Firefox 3.5, assuming all goes well on the standards front.

We’ve started to see more and more libraries being built to support use cases with Canvas in a 2D context but we really want to take things to the next level and start to allow people to use 3D capabilities as well.  Accelerated 3D graphics with the super-fast next-generation JavaScript engines from nearly every  web browser vendor means that we’re going to be able to start to see more and more advanced applications written using open web technologies.  3D is a huge part of that story and we’re happy to bring our proposal to the table.

The proposed spec (found in one of vlad’s post on 3D Canvas) is a pretty light wrapper on top of OpenGL ES 2.0, with some changes to support some JavaScript pleasantries.  OpenGL ES is a decent starting point, which is why we picked it.  OpenGL is supported as part of every major operating system and in it’s being picked up as a standard on mobile devices as well.  Compared to the full OpenGL spec, the ES variant is a smaller subset that reflects the reality of what’s being used on the ground and most hardware and software vendors have actually been re-tooling to support OpenGL ES with support for older versions of full OpenGL emulated on top of OpenGL ES.  Mixed with the fact that there’s a decent amount of knowledge out there in the industry of how to use OpenGL, we think that this smooths the integration between the current set of OpenGL users and larger web developer community.

Expect to see some releases of the code to start with in the form of the Canvas3D extension.  Vlad has made releases of it in the past and we’ll be able to have something that works as an extension as part of Firefox 3.5 for people to start experimenting with.

Hidden Egg

two good stories about the banks

March 21, 2009 in Economics, Storytelling | 1 comment

I’m going to point out two good stories about the banks today. I thought they were both very informative. But mostly I thought they were worth posting because they were incredibly different in their style and approach.

The first is The Big Takeover in Rolling Stone. What I love about this is the populist fire that it creates in everyone who reads it, including yours truly. Certainly in the US – and in other countries as well – people are angry. Quietly, independently, and often without outlet, but certainly angry. This is the best writing I’ve seen that brings that anger to the surface. Maybe because of the content – there’s a lot to be angry about – but also because it’s Rolling Stone so the otherwise boring financial descriptions can be lit on fire with actual curse words. Read it.

The second is Episode #375 of This American Life: Bad Bank. It’s about as far style-wise from the Rolling Stone article as you can find – pleasant, informative, but far more scary. Learn about the balance sheets of banks, mark to market accounting and what the Treasury and current and previous administration has been doing (or not doing) to help deal with the problem. As part of Act II they actually drill down and talk with some people who are buying bad mortgages from the banks and trying to build a business around giving foreclosed homeowners the chance to have smaller loans. So they cover things at both the macro level and personal level – very interesting and certainly worth the listen.

zomg a flying car

March 19, 2009 in Flying | 11 comments

Yes!  A flying car!

OK, it’s not exactly a car as much as it is a roadable aircraft, but it’s awesome to see people at least experimenting in this area.  Congratulations to the Terrafugia folks on a successful first test flight.

I’ve had the chance to interact with a few of the people at the company through the local EAA chapter (a few of the Terrafugia people come from MIT) and they were all really great.  Very happy for them.

Camera A:

Camera B:

Interview with the pilot after the first flight for the pilots among us:

There are a couple of other videos on their video page.

the open video conference – june 19-20 in NYC

March 19, 2009 in Communities, Events, Freedom, Mozilla, OGG, Open Web, Video | 3 comments

On June 19th and 20th, there will be a conference in New York City on open video.  If you’re interested in the problems around open video and want to talk with other people, many of whom are working on solutions, this will be the place to be.  Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman of Ryanishungry.com recently posted a video based on short interviews that were done at a recent open video roundtable.  It’s worth checking out.

•Direct video link: [OGG] [MP4]

Also consider following the openvideo twitter user, identi.ca user and facebook group.

open web video screencast #3 – creating your own player

March 16, 2009 in Firefox, JavaScript, Mozilla, OGG, Open Web, Video, Web Standards | 17 comments

Chris Double posted about this but I thought it might be worth it to put together a simple video screencast of what this actually looked like in practice. It’s a damn neat idea and opens up all kinds of possibilities. Once again, with video as a first class citizen on the web, what can people dream up?

watching the firefox 3.1 beta 3 release on social media networks

March 13, 2009 in Communities, Firefox, Mozilla, Twitter, identi.ca | 3 comments

At Mozilla we do a lot of releases. Every few weeks, we’ll do a minor release to fix security issues and improve the reliability of the browser. On the 3.0 branch, for example, we’re up to Firefox 3.0.7.  7 releases in 9 months is a pretty blistering pace.  For a long time we were also doing releases of Firefox 2 in parallel with Firefox 3.  Oh, and we were pushing out an occasional alpha or beta release of Firefox 3.1 (soon to be 3.5) too.  If there’s one thing we do at Mozilla it’s get software out the door.

One of the things that we do when we do a release is try to have a “canonical url” for each release.  For major releases, it’s like the url above – a mozilla.com release page.  But for the betas we usually have a post ready in our Mozilla Developer News Weblog.  For the new Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 release, we had a post ready ahead of time and knew what the URL would be.

But ahead of this release one of the things I did was to set up a short url on bit.ly for the release.  One of the nice things about bit.ly is that it lets you track information as people click through the url.  You can see people clicking through the short link for our release at the associated info url for that particular short url.  This is what it looked like a little while after the release:

The data flow is a little flaky and I hate that it goes from live to past week (2 hours to daily is a pretty rough transition) but it’s great to be able to see the effect that particular posts can have on the traffic.  It’s also interesting to see the traffic sources in the graph as well.  It gives you a good sense of where people are reading information and generating click through traffic.

What’s really interesting is that you can take the bit.ly url and use it to track posts on twitter by using twitter search.  Here’s what I found after coming back from dinner last evening:

This was after a post from the @mozillafirefox account which has about 14,000 followers or so.

Search also lets you follow what people’s reactions are as well.  In our case we’re using the #firefoxbeta tag to follow what people are saying.  I’ve been able to interact with some people about their experiences with add-ons compatibility and problems they have had with the release.  (Surprisingly few problems, actually.)  But mostly it’s just fun to watch people talk about how fast this release is when they actually use it.

Tools like twitter search have also let Mozilla set up the Release Rapid Response Team (RRRT).  This small team of people collects information from twitter, identi.ca, facebook, weblogs and other places and raises common issues for our development and support teams to look at.  As an example, here’s the RRRT list for Firefox 3.0.7.  (Yep, it’s a short list but that’s a pretty good sign.)

It’s great being able to passively listen or interact directly with people on the product and I think it’s part of a sea change in search, social networks and product support.  It’s going to close the gap between comsumers/users and the people who produce those products.  And I also personally believe that it’s going to require that companies be more authentic in the way that they operate.  Not only can companies see what users are doing in real time, consumers can also see what companies are doing as well.  The transparency is two-way.

At Mozilla we’ve found ways to adapt and turn it into something that’s really useful.  I wonder what other projects + companies are doing with these new tools?

quick tip: open web video and mime types

March 9, 2009 in OGG, Open Web, Video, howto | 10 comments

A quick note if you’re going to be using OGG open web video hosted on web servers.  There’s an important configuration change that you should make so that Firefox recognizes it as video.  In my Apache configuration I’ve added this directive:

AddType application/ogg .ogg
AddType application/ogg .ogx
AddType video/ogg .ogv
AddType audio/ogg .oga

Most web servers are likely to return the mime type as “text/plain” which Mozilla will not show as video.  If you don’t set it, and it’s served up as text/plain then Firefox is likely to show either an error or endless buffering.  (Although I suspect that the endless buffering is actually a bug in our internal player and will likely be fixed.)

Update 1: This should have been video/ogg for .ogv, application/ogg for .ogg, and audio/ogg for .oga files.

Update 2: You should look at this post from Silvia for the correct information. Thanks, Frank.

yeah, this is worth a post

March 1, 2009 in Humor | 7 comments

Thanks to Sarah and iPhoto ‘09 for this one.  I’m told that you can still buy these shirts at Xiph’s t-shirt store. Pretty awesome.