No title could be snappy enough

I’m headed home from Madhava and Kate’s ridiculously lovely wedding now, and I’ll freely confess that there’s some basking going on.

It was a tremendously lovely ceremony, followed by a reception that expressed their warmth and style perfectly. And through some colossal lapse in combined judgement, I was invited to be near the centre of it — blessed am I, truly.

I think I may have given the best extemporaneous speech of my life, after discarding most of my prepared thoughts on the way to the mic, and I can’t imagine when I’d have rather played that card. I hope the guests enjoyed listening to it even half as much as I enjoyed giving it, and especially Madhava and Kate themselves. They deserve nothing less than a wedding perfect in execution and sentiment, and as long as I didn’t detract from that I will take some small pride in my small role.

And now I think I’m going to sleep for a week. Hopefully the DJ will stop playing boppy 80s numbers early enough that my wife can join me at brunch tomorrow morning…

posted 05 November 2006 @ 00:11 • tagged friends, kate, madhava, speech, wedding

keynote video available

The video of my Seneca keynote is up now, in both regular and wide formats, it seems. They are somewhat large (394 and 270 megabytes respectively), so govern yourself accordingly.

You’ll need DivX (at least the codec) to view them, I believe.

posted 31 October 2006 @ 17:10 • tagged conference, keynote, mozilla, seneca • RSS

AMO and the quality bar

addons.mozilla.org has long occupied a special place in the Firefox software ecosystem. It’s the only site in the installation whitelist by default, the default server contacted for update information about add-ons, and where we send users who are looking for hot add-on leads.

That unique position means that there is a lot of value for some add-on developers in being hosted on AMO. Such hosting involves a review process, which I think both reviewers and developers alike would agree is one of the most frustrating parts of the whole system. The intent of the review process is entirely on the side of the angels: help make sure that add-ons are good for users.

The devil, of course, is in the details here. At times, the review bar has been placed entirely too high, in my opinion: otherwise-fine add-on updates rejected because they cause a strict warning to appear in the JS console, for example. In other cases, we’ve had add-ons approved which send some data to a central server, but don’t have a privacy policy listed. The most common and burdensome cases of this latter example tend to be associated with “toolbar-building” services: the ostensible authors of the resultant toolbars typically know very little about what’s being collected or how it’s being managed, which makes for a predictably unsatisfying conversation with reviewers.

(There are other elements of the review process that are inconsistent and difficult, mostly related to needing to reject items for errors in things that the add-on authors can change after the fact without review, but which can’t be helpfully fixed by the reviewers. These are the “easy” implementation artifacts, though, and not really the topic of this post.)

The trade-offs here are painful: adding a standard of “usefulness” or “implementation quality” to the checklist will not only dramatically slow the review process and require more specialized skills among our reviewers, but will also increase the variability between different reviewers’ decisions. Those are all things that I don’t think we can afford to make worse, and both the history and special position of AMO make me tend towards a much more laissez-faire position: if the description accurately describes what the user will get when they install it, especially as far as the collection and management of private information is concerned, then I think we should let the user make the decision about whether they consider the functionality useful. Some popular add-ons duplicate functionality that is already present in the browser, such as preference settings, adding only an alternate means of accessing it, for example, so requiring “significant new functionality” seems to work against the interests of a fair number of users.

At the same time, of course, I think it’s quite desirable to be able to point users at a more “filtered” view of the enormous add-ons space hosted on AMO. We currently have one such view, the recommended list, but that’s not really much of a solution to the broader problem. (It doesn’t try to be, really.)

A minimum rating threshold would be one way to narrow the default search results returned to a user, though it depends on the reliability and resilience of a rating system. Our current one isn’t sufficient to prevent the sort of gaming and distortion that would plague us in such a world, but that’s not to say that a sufficiently robust one couldn’t be developed. (Not “perfectly robust”, mind; just enough to keep the damage well below the gain.)

A simpler system would simply provide a single piece of metadata that could be set by reviewers or administrators using their judgment and likely via some multi-reviewer discussion. This wouldn’t scale as well as the universal rating by users, but would be more resistant to gaming and abuse (and easier to track and remedy if such nefariousness is detected).

This post is already too long, but you can read and write more about various possibilities for rating and approval schemes in the Remora Idea Dump. We’re thinking about and working on ways to help users find good add-ons, in a way that scales across our community, and I suspect it’s something that we’ll be working to improve for some time!

posted 31 October 2006 @ 17:10 • tagged add ons, amo, firefox, mozilla • RSS

adrenaline withdrawal

Between the frantic reskinning of AMO, the general hubbub of the Firefox 2 release, and then preparing for and delivering my FSOSS keynote, last week was pretty much non-stop adrenaline. I was completely exhausted by Thursday night, to the extent that I actually stayed on campus rather than try to get up Friday morning in time to defeat Toronto traffic for a 9AM keynote slot back up at the Seneca@York campus, but the conference itself was enough of a source of energy that I managed to keep rolling until relatively late in the evening.

Saturday was spent sleeping and traipsing about the city as part of Madhava’s bachelor party, which was not exactly a meditative exercise itself. Ridiculous fun, of course.

So today I’m feeling pretty weird, I have to say. I’ve been quietly working through my backlog of “deal with this later” stuff — mostly context, but some of it perilously close to core — and letting the novel and welcome sensation of choosing my own next steps wash over and around me. I will readily admit, to the surprise of nobody, that I enjoy the rush of execution and the feeling of making decisions “live”, but I’m really looking forward to spending a few days taking a fresh look at the paths I was on before the explosion of the last 2 weeks. If nothing else, it’ll be nice to have “am I forgetting something important?” downgrade from “certainly” to “possibly” for a while.

And I should do some laundry, too.

I’ll probably — hopefully? — be less present/active in my usual interrupt-driven communication environments for a bit, but if you need me I’m sure you can reach me without too much trouble…

posted 30 October 2006 @ 14:10 • tagged madhava, mozilla, personal, seneca

Show time

I’m waiting in the audience in the gym at Seneca right now, for people to finish registering and the introductory ceremonies to start — then I get to give my keynote, and put everyone back to sleep.

I’ve written this talk 3 times now in the last few days, trying to find a balance between talking about the things I want to talk about, and not being too philosophical for a 9AM keynote. I don’t know that I’ve succeeded, really, but my laptop’s up on stage now so I’ve run out of time to tweak it. I hope people don’t all boo and leave halfway through — especially my friends.

Oop, intros are done. Here we go!

posted 27 October 2006 @ 08:10 • tagged mozilla, seneca, speaking

the kids are alright

[Because I am a big dork, this has been sitting in my drafts for a long time, since apparently I clicked “Save” instead of “Publish” or something. What fun!]

A little less than a year ago, beltzner and I met with a few people at Seneca College about a project that some students were about to undertake. The details of the project are themselves pretty interesting, but the really valuable takeaway for me turned out to be a connection with Prof. Dave Humphrey and others at Seneca who are interested in really baking open source work, technology, communities and principles into the educational experience.

Since that fateful day, we’ve embarked on a number of pretty exciting projects with Seneca, such as their hosting of hardware for development of MDC and AMO work, test environments, some pretty awesome buildbot hacking, multi-compiler support for distcc, and APNG support.

And, of course, the most excellently righteous “Topics in Open Source” course, which Dave is teaching for the first time this term, and in which I have been joined by several Mozilla compatriots in miseducating eager students about topics many and varied. As with most interesting things, it has not been all flowers and roses — entering our community can be daunting for even the most intrepid of newbies — but I think that some great stuff has and will come of it. The amount of energy and enthusiasm there is just ridiculous, and as a wiser man would have predicted I’m having a hard time keeping up with the students. Ah, to be young again.

A little more than a week from now, on October 26th and 27th, Mozilla is co-sponsoring Seneca’s Free Software and Open Source Symposium. A generous handful of Mozillians will be in attendance or speaking, and I predict ample opportunity to talk with Dave and his fellow crazy people about what they’re doing, what’s working so far, what we could try next, and how to get involved in whatever way strikes your fancy. The lineup of speakers looks pretty great, present company excepted of course, and it’s hard to imagine a better way to spend $20 of your open-source-self-education budget. Hope to see you there!

posted 16 October 2006 @ 14:10 • tagged conference, education, mozilla, seneca, speaking

Confession

I, Mike Shaver, love Philip Imperial Schwan with all my heart.

Je vous remercie pour votre attention.

posted 06 October 2006 @ 15:10 • tagged personal, phik • RSS

when I see your face

Getting my first eye exam in 2 years today, since I really need to replace my bent and scratched glasses. My prescription is pretty stable, but I got some eye drops that are apparently going to screw me up pretty good for the better part of 8 hours.

I am looking forward to fumbling through customs and security at Pearson this afternoon, liberty bag in tow. With my luck, I’ll end up having some allergic reaction that will leave me unable to drive from SFO — or maybe that’d be vlad’s luck…

posted 02 October 2006 @ 11:10 • tagged personal, travel • RSS

Je me surfeit

As any of our posse can tell you, a trip to Montreal means running a significant risk of developing gout. The food is amazing, as always, and other than a brief sputtering on Friday afternoon the weather has been perfect. None of this hotter-than-the-loins-of-hell crap that we left behind in Toronto, for example.

Lunches have been pretty low-key affairs, since breakfast was often taken around 11, though the paninis (one ch�vre, one “� la Cubain”) and salad at “olive + gourmand” were definitely a score. We of course did lots of wandering touristy stuff, including an excellent little exhibit on prehistoric Japan at the archaeological museum, and the impressive set of gardens-cum-exhibits at the International Flora event, and I managed to buy some new and much-needed clothes as well. But enough about non-eating pursuits.

On Friday evening, Steph scored us a table at her friend Chuck’s new restaurant, “Garde Manger”. It’s new enough that it really doesn’t have a sign outside, but it’s well worth risking mild confusion. When my Caesar arrived in a stein with two meaty crab legs sticking out, I knew we were going to have a good time. The three of us picked out a half-dozen items from the tapas-y daily menu, ranging from a fresh tomato salad to a ridiculous bavette with frites. Then, of course, the waitress upsold us — I mean called our attention to the availability of their assorted fresh seafood plates. We took the “small”, which only featured a dozen oysters in addition to crab and shrimp, which was undoubtedly the wisest course. A nearby table — which I suppose all of them were, really, given the scale of the joint — had a large “plate” hoisted onto their table with what looked like considerable effort; I believe there have been credible productions of The Little Mermaid with less underwater fauna. For dessert, we shared a generous slice of pecan pie which I would be reluctant to carry across the border without a doctor’s note. (We later learned, through Steph’s network of restaurant-industry informants, that the pie was made by Chuck’s mother.)

The next night (after the museum and garden stuff above, but I’m too lazy to edit for mere chronology) Austin arranged a table for Steph, Tyla and me at “Joe Beef”, the latest of David Macmillan’s endeavours. I’ve been a fan of David’s since first enjoying his work at Globe, and though David wasn’t on site last evening we had a pretty good time nonetheless. His partners Allison and Fred took care of us, and we gorged ourselves appropriately.

Before leaving today Tyla and I wandered over to Atwater market, a staple of our Montreal days. It’s been nicely restored since the fire a few years ago, and a little complex has sprung up across the street, boasting a large SAQ, some condos, and assorted grocery/drug/houseware stores. We’ll have to take a closer look when next we’re in town together. I hope I won’t be another 4 years!

posted 06 August 2006 @ 14:08 • tagged food, montreal, mozilla, personal, travel • RSS

Je me souviens

Tyla and I are ensconced in the “did we say there was wifi? tee hee!” comforts of Via1, chugging our way towards Montreal. She’s asleep, and adorable; I’m pecking away at my infernal Blackberry, and unexplainably impatient — must be a day that ends in “y”.

Tyla hasn’t been back to Montreal since we moved back to Toronto in 2002, and I’ve only been there a handful of times for business. It’s a downright travesty, given how much fun the city is, and it’s one that we’re going to do our best to put right over the next few days.

There is an amazing amount of great stuff happening in my part of the Mozilla world these days, and I have been desperately derelict in my duties as regard publicizing them. I must atone for this, but not now. Now I settle back, enjoy the last 200 pages of a righteous, 6-volume sci-fi epic that vlad started me on back in Serbia, and plot my path of culinary marauding through the unsuspecting establishments of Montreal.

posted 03 August 2006 @ 21:08 • tagged montreal, mozilla, travel, tyla • RSS
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