Rob Sayre’s Mozilla Blog

The Pencil Project’s unique mission is to build a free and opensource tool for making diagrams and GUI prototyping that everyone can use.

Or so they tell me.

I want this t-shirt so bad. Make it now!

Update: in comments, Deb says “Please for the love of all that is holy let there be a women’s style.” I concur.

Thanks to Adobe’s Michael Daumling. From the the bug:

The new strings pass the acceptance tests on Win VC 2005 and Mac. On Win, all
SunSpider tests run three times faster. The very slow string-validate-input
tests run 15-17 times faster. Even with these tests excluded, SunSpider runs up
to 20% faster.

I remember severe thrashing about this release in the first half of 2007. Things were not looking good. It took some time, but the Mozilla community stepped up its game and turned things around. I’m really proud of everyone.

The next release is going to be here real quick.

Everything is going to be OK.

I’m pretty sure I’m late to this party, but here’s a link to a talk called Apache 3.0 (a tall tale) by Roy Fielding at ApacheCon Europe 2008.

Apache is one of the older open source Web projects out there, and Mozilla can learn a lot from its successes and failures. In particular, we can learn a lot from their past release schedule and the types of features that are interfering with their ability to have fun.

Later on, the talk moves into the design of Waka and Apache 3.0. I think Mozilla should consider collaborating on Waka and Moccasin (a proposed replacement for APR). For better or worse, we ship a networking library, so let’s hop along for the ride.

What say the Mozilla community?

My friend Dustin has some posters and tote bags for sale.

I think the tote bags are for a good cause and the posters are pure capitalism.

Clay Shirky’s latest post really hit me hard. I found it very uplifting.

When I was young, I wasted the same hours that Clay did in front of the television*, so I think it’s positive that kids are on their computers and phones, destroying the English language. A lot of my current lot in life comes down to Internet participation. I’ve gotten jobs, contributed to open source, made friends, made enemies, had wonderful intellectual conversations, written incredibly stupid and hurtful things, published my thoughts, had a recording of myself making an incredibly nerdy speech circulated on YouTube, found an apartment that came with roomates who became friends, answered random craigslist ads, helped someone out of a jam, damaged my permanent record, done things I’m proud of, done things I regret, traveled to far away places, lost my shit, acted holier-than-thou, reviewed restaurants, given noise-canceling headphone product advice, sent random email, had a black hat phase, and contributed to a community. I would do it again.

A lot of this happened in “spare time”. At least I wasn’t watching television.

* Mary Ann is way hotter. How could it even be a debate?

Mason has a great tour of Tamarin on his blog.

Check out this Ars.Technica post on Fennec. Our mobile efforts are going really well. I guess we should get around to adding ARM-specific optimizations, like we do for x86, PPC, and SPARC.