It's Asa on the tee vee. He's talkin' into the Internets.

Asa Dotzler has been trying to get live streaming working with our new native video support that’s coming with Firefox 3.1.  That is, video that is taken by a camera, encoded and pushed directly out to a web server instead of stored as a file so you can watch an event in real time.  The screenshot above is the first time – that I know of – where anyone has gotten this working in the browser without some kind of plug-in involved.  (And it’s free software, end-to-end, which is also nice.)

We managed to get the lag down to 2-3 seconds at one point.  We can probably get it even lower.  But it’s a fantastic start.

Asa isn’t the most technical guy, but he managed to get it working by mostly following the instructions on this page.  And it mostly works out of the box.  There are some bugs to fix on our end, and encoding theora without dedicated hardware is kind of painful, but it’s great to see the possibilities open up when we’ve got dedicated video support directly in the browser.

1.  First, Seth Godin on Be careful of who you work for.  This is a way to think of self-branding in the choices that you make in your work life and how it affects you.  Good thinking about how to approach the problem of job choice.

2.  Jason Fried’s talk at the 2008 Business of Software conference is worth watching.  He just talks about ideas that he has about software development and how they have learned to work at 37signals.  I don’t think that everything that he talks about is applicable at a place like Mozilla, where we have to work at a larger scale than they do at 37 signals, but there’s a core here that we share about action, simplicity and how we treat each other.  It’s worth the hour to watch this talk.

(As a side note, I have never ever worked at a place that is as special as Mozilla.  We have problems but it seems like humanity permiates the organization.  Part of working in a fish bowl, I suspect.)

Two from Bob Sutton:

3.  A quick quote from Harry Truman that rings true for me as well:

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”

I try and do this every day although I had not seen this quote before.  If I had to turn it into a quote I would say “delegate, celebrate, iterate.”  Push decisions as low in the organization as possible, throw things away that don’t work (and don’t blame in the process!) and celebrate the work of others as much as possible.

4.  The Importance of Killing Good Ideas.  This has to do with focus and the ability of an organization to be able to do a few amazing things instead of trying to do too many things poorly.  I’ve heard the story repeated that one of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was to kill off a vast number of projects that were going on at Apple at the time.  (There were probably a lot of really good ideas mixed in there along with some bad ones.)  I suspect, without a huge amount of evidence, that was one of the things that allowed Apple to get back on the road to growth + success.

I would also stretch this to hiring practices as well.  Sometimes it’s important to say no to good people than it is to say yes to someone that you’re sure isnt good.  It’s painful, but you end up with a better team when you do.

And two from Diego Rodriguez:

5.  What is design thinking? In the context of business schools, mostly.  A video interview with Roger Martin who gives a wonderful and succinct answer to the question.  I would borrow from some old Red Hat friends on this one myself (Chris and David – hope things are going well!) who describe it as learning to think creatively instead of critically.  A very important distinction.

6.  Yet another in a series of How to drive a 911.  I love the stuff that Diego posts in this weblog about racing and cars, but the thing that struck me about these videos was the choice that Porsche has made as a company.  They don’t have their own racing team anymore.  Instead they enable others to race using their equipment.  That’s a wonderful decision and a wonderful business model for the company.  Turning what is often a loss/R&D activity into something that enables others to celebrate the brand and give the company a chance to learn about their own products.  Good stuff.

And that’s it.  Happy that I can finally kill this window with these tabs in it.

Enjoy!

If parents told their kids the truth about sex and drugs, it would be: the reason you should avoid these things is that you have lousy judgement. People with twice your experience still get burned by them. But this may be one of those cases where the truth wouldn’t be convincing, because one of the symptoms of bad judgement is believing you have good judgement. When you’re too weak to lift something, you can tell, but when you’re making a decision impetuously, you’re all the more sure of it.

Another idea from the essay: that jadedness cuts off the opportunity for growth. I haven’t seen it expressed before, but it rings true for me. It’s one of the reasons you won’t find me jaded about very many things. As soon as you’re willing to blow off anything at the surface you cut yourself off from being able to learn from it – good or bad. Another good quote that’s related:

Innocence is also open-mindedness. We want kids to be innocent so they can continue to learn. Paradoxical as it sounds, there are some kinds of knowledge that get in the way of other kinds of knowledge. If you’re going to learn that the world is a brutal place full of people trying to take advantage of one another, you’re better off learning it last. Otherwise you won’t bother learning much more.

Very smart adults often seem unusually innocent, and I don’t think this is a coincidence. I think they’ve deliberately avoided learning about certain things. Certainly I do. I used to think I wanted to know everything. Now I know I don’t.

Indeed.

[blizzard@localhost ~]$ uname -a
Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.23.9-85.fc8 #1 SMP Fri Dec 7 15:49:59 EST 2007 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
[blizzard@localhost ~]$ history | awk '{a[$2]++}END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}' | sort -rn | head
164 ls
154 cd
110 pwd
104 svn
84 grep
80 ./start-whoisi.py
47 less
41 ssh
31 tg-admin
18 mysql

It's cold here.  And no one loves me anymore.  Where are you?

Love,
Your car.

<sluftie> you have short teeth
<blizzard> ???

A few weeks ago, without knowledge that such a campaign was in production, Jesse and I were discussing such an ad and who would play that part. My choice? Christopher Lloyd. Wearing this for a hat during the commercial.