December 2009

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sugar

December 31, 2009 in Food, Long Attention Span, Video | 8 comments

I’ve been posting recently about food and nutrition and I feel like the information in this video was a huge piece that I was missing.

In this video, Dr. Robert Lustig goes through the science behind how sugar and its component parts, glucose and fructose, are processed in the body and what that means for everything we know about the US’s (and the world’s, for that matter) ever growing waistline. This talk shows why all calories are not created equal.

Like many good things in this world, it’s a long story, packed with information so you will have to put aside time to absorb it. But it’s worth your time if you ever wanted to understand why sugar makes you feel the way that it does and why it specifically results in weight gain vs. other types of carbohydrates, fats or protein.

Watch it on YouTube if you don’t see a video above. Licensed as CC-BY-NC-ND.

“skid mark”

December 18, 2009 in Firefox, Programming | 6 comments

A new phrase that I learned yesterday. Probably something that’s been around computers for a long time, but it was my first exposure to it.

Basically a “skid mark” is something you leave in code as a signature so that in a crash dump you can figure out how you got there.

We’ve been doing a huge amount of work in Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 to reduce the number of crashes. For some crashes we have stack traces, but not a lot of data on how we got to that stack. So we’re actually checking in code changes and and shipping them into the wild to see how they change crash signatures.

The interesting thing is that it’s working – we’ve been able to track down some pretty serious crashes with this technique.

focus

December 13, 2009 in Evangelism | 2 comments

Focus

When we focus on what we want the world to look like, and make products that reflect that, we excel.

two cool open video notes

December 9, 2009 in Firefox, OGG, Video | 10 comments

Today at the Mozilla all hands I saw two cool things:

1. A decent sized (600×400 or so) Theora video playing on a Nokia N900, decoding on the DSP with the main CPU kept at around 50%. (Pulseaudio is about 10-15% of that, and the rest of Vorbis decoding and some work to get the video onto a fullscreen texture.) This is based on David Schleef’s Theora-on-DSP work and it’s showing real promise.

2. With Bas’ Direct2D windows build, I’m able to play a 1080p Theora (test here) video on my Lenovo X200s and it’s smooth as butter. Fully scaled, full framerate, full screen, no drops. Pretty amazing. And he’s only doing scaling in that code, not yet doing the YUV->RGB conversions so there’s still a huge amount of room to improve here.

All good improvements for HTML5 and open video.

guidelines in MacNeil/Lehrer journalism

December 5, 2009 in Journalism, Video | 1 comment

Original Video with full context.

we are all connected

December 3, 2009 in Space, Video | 4 comments

More at the Symphony of Science.

mobile sunspider performance

December 2, 2009 in Mobile, Performance, TraceMonkey | 3 comments

A few weeks ago Vlad had the chance to do performance tests across a variety of different devices. He’s picked up a Droid as part of his Android work, also has access to an N900, and I also know he’s proud to admit that’s he’s a Zune HD owner.

Firefox for Mobile has been getting excellent reviews for features and functions. We also have good numbers for JS performance, an important component of building compelling web applications on mobile.


Mobile Sunspider Performance – Click for a Larger Version.