• Bert, The World’s Highest Ranking Law-enforcement Camel

    May 30th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 3 comments »

    After reading countless blog posts on planet about Download Day and a chance to get into the Guinness Book of World Records, I admit, I got a bit of nostalgic and curious.  So, I thought I’d write a bit of different post than the ones we’ve read so far…

    To start, how cool would it be to add this record to our list of cool things done by the community?  Since I’ve been working at Mozilla, I’ve gotten to participate or witness Firefox Flicks (the very tale end of it), the Firefox Crop Circle, and Operation Firefox.  All were such cool community-driven ideas.  This is just one more to add to the list.

    But here is why I felt nostalgic:

    The last time I paged through a GBWR was probably in the 4th grade (sometime in the late 1980s), waiting at the library for my mom to pick me and my brother up after school finished.  At the time, there really wasn’t a more sought after book to page through for a young guy like me.  The pictures alone were awesome!  I’d go straight to the page which showed Moses Malone palming a basketball and almost slam dunking without jumping…just standing.  There was the woman with the longest finger nails in the world.  Then, there was the Mongolian man who stood 7′9″ tall.  And, then the World’s Largest Pizza.  Does anyone else remember any others?  Please comment with some pictures!

    All the nostalgia, got me thinking…what’s today’s book look like?  And, who’s going to be our company in the present day GBWR?  Without trivializing how cool this record will be, I decided to pull out some of the more fun records I could find, very similar to the crazy records on the Download Day site.

    You gotta admit, this is some pretty good company:

    “The world’s highest ranking law-enforcement camel is Bert, who was accepted as Reserve Deputy Sheriff for the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, San Dimas, USA on April 5, 2003 and regularly goes on patrol with his handler Nance Fite (USA).”

    “David Huxley pulled a Boeing 747-400, weighing 187 tonnes (184 tons), a distance of 91 m (298.5 ft) in 1 minute and 27.7 seconds on October 15, 1997 at Sydney, Australia. David has now retired from the strongman circuit. He currently owns and runs an event management and public relations company called Tartan Warriors, based in Sydney, Australia.”

    “It’s death defying, it’s daunting and it’s downright dangerous. But, England’s John Evans balanced a 159.6 kg (352 lb) Mini on his head for 33 seconds at The London Studios, UK on May 24, 1999.  John’s a gigantic guy. He’s 2 meters tall and weighs in at 155.7 kg (343 lb). But it’s his 60.9cm (24-inch) neck that’s the only part of his body strong enough to take such immense weights.  This big fella has broken 25 records in 11 categories and is going for more.”

    “The longest journey on a lawnmower is 23,487.5 km (14,594.5 miles) in 260 consecutive days by America’s Gary Hatter. Hatter started his drive through Portland, Maine, on May 31, 2000 and passed through all 48 continuous US states as well as Canada and Mexico before arriving in Daytona Beach, Florida, on February 14, 2001.”

    “A Fender Stratocaster guitar signed by a host of music legends fetched US$2.7 million (then £1.57 million) at a charity auction for Reach Out To Asia at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Doha, Qatar, on November 17, 2005. Stars who signed the guitar included Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Paul McCartney, Jimmy Page and Brian May (all UK). The Reach Out To Asia campaign seeks to support worthy causes around the world, with particular emphasis on the Asian continent.”

    ****************
    We have to get in this book! This is great!

    Please add more records to the comments in this post.  Seriously, what else is out there?  It’d be great to have this post be a catalog of the great world records out there.

  • “Replaneting” some blog posts

    May 28th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    I hope you don’t mind for just verbing the word “planet”…

    but, I forgot to tag my last three blog posts so that they showed up on planet.  I think the new Word Press interface overwhelmed me, leaving me a bit clumsy.

    Here are the links with quick descriptions:

    I’ll spend the rest of the afternoon learning the ins-and-outs of the interface.  (It’s not that hard, Seth, comeon!!)

  • Some help from a Kiwi

    May 28th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 1 comment »

    Staś and I had a nice Mozilla Community moment last week.

    Turns out, some people have been reading our blog about the Community Survey program.  So, that’s not really a big deal since we syndicated it on Planet and have been writing a lot about the first three surveys.  (Here are links to surveys #1, #2, and #3.)

    But, the cool moment came when a statistician named John Williams from New Zealand approached me and Staś and offered his expertise for the survey program.  He’d been reading our write-ups and decided that he could probably add a bunch, noting that he really liked what he read so far and would like to help take the analysis even further.

    Here is a quick bio on John:

    “John Williams is a lecturer in the Department of Marketing at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. He specialises in teaching Marketing Research and has degrees in Marketing, Economics and Statistics.  He has been using Free Software since before the turn of the millenium, and is attracted to the consumer empowerment and related business issues that Free Software raises.”

    John introduced himself and we immediately set a meeting to discuss his involvement. The meeting was easy to plan even though I am in California, Staś is in Poland, and John is in New Zealand. After our initial discussion, he did the following:

    • re-analyzed survey one to confirm results and give some new insight;
    • introduced new techniques to our plan, including “Principal Axis Factoring” to compliment our “common factor analysis”;
    • created this wiki:  http://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_Community_Surveys;
    • started a new IRC channel #surveys;
    • and challenged us to think about managerial questions we should ask after seeing the results of our “satisfaction-based” questions.  Why did someone answer with a lower rating of satisfaction on one question compared to another person?  And, what do we do to fix it?

    John also volunteered to finish the analysis of the second survey, which has been lingering for a while due to the two other surveys we have been conducting and other obligations like Staś localizing stuff for Firefox 3 and me working on the Screencast Contest.  (Did you submit your screencast yet?  You know you want to enter, just get it over with and do it!)

    So, why did John volunteer to do all this for us?  His quote was something like, “Hey, I do this kind of stuff for big companies all the time.  It’s nice to get to do it for an organization like Mozilla, which is really making a difference.”  That’s paraphrased, but you get the picture.  What a guy!

    Thanks, John.  We’re looking forward to your experitise and contribution.

  • A day at the N2Y3 Conference

    May 27th, 2008 by seth bindernagel with no comments »

    A few of us headed over to Cisco today to attend the annual Net Squared conference sponsored by Tech Soup.  I’ve blogged about Mozilla’s involvement with the Net Squared confernce a couple months back. Today, we got to see a number of very interesting projects that are using web technology to provide deeper insight into the social issues affecting communities around the globe.

    Some of the projects I met:

    • Maplight.org – brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics.
    • reframe it.com – a web browser plug in that creates a space for comments in the right hand margin beside any web page.
    • OpenCongress – brings together official government data with news coverage, blog posts, comments, and more to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.
    • HealthyCity.org – improves the ability of low-income, underserved children, adolescents, and their families to access services and advocate for critical resources in their communities.
    • The Genocide Intervention Network – empowers individuals and communities with the tools to prevent and stop genocide.

    All of the organizations participating can be found here.

    I also ran into Nick Reville and Holmes Wilson of the Miro Project.  Remember Miro and the Participatory Culture Foundaiton?  Mozilla helped them out with a grant last year.  These guys have brought Miro a long way, but could still use some help.  I offered to Nick to try to help with some fundraising and scaling challenges.  If you want to help out, please let me know.

    In my opinion, getting “off-campus” and going to conferences like these is worthwhile for a lot of reasons.  For one, it’s always great to meet people who are doing really high-impact work like the organizations listed above.  And, in almost every case, these organizations have or are hoping to use Mozilla to created addons for their constituents that relate directly to their work.

    Finally, going to a conference like this reinforces that hybrid organizations like Mozilla (and by “hybrid”, I mean that we have the a non-profit parent Mozilla Foundation and a for-profit subsidiary Corporation) are faced with a lot of non-traditional challenges.  Somewhere down the line, a few of us at Mozilla are hoping to do something meaningful in order to get to the bottom of a few of these core challenges.  We’d like to examine how Mozilla can take what it has learned about scaling and help other organizations do the same.  Perhaps a scaling/marketing challenge?  We’re just starting with the idea, but more to follow in the coming weeks.

  • Demos of Translate.org.za’s Localization Software

    May 21st, 2008 by seth bindernagel with 2 comments »

    I’d like to point everyone to a set of screencasts available for download on the l10n server.  These videos demonstrate the functionality of Translate.org.za’s set of localization tools, including Pootle.

    At my request, Dwayne Bailey and Friedel Wolff worked very hard to produce these videos so we could have screencasts showing just how to use their tool set.  Thank you so much, guys!

    Their software is available for everyone to use, but only if you choose.  If you’d like to learn more about the project, click here to reach their home page.  Or, you can click here to get a glimpse at the code and other aspects of the project.

    I asked Dwayne and Friedel to create the demos so that our Mozilla l10n team and the Mozilla community could get a much closer look at the tool set.  We have been working with Translate.org.za over the past several weeks on a grant proposal where Mozilla would provide them funding for their project to help them advance their overall mission.  Additionally, many of our existing localization teams are using the Toolkit to translate Firefox and Thunderbird.  Empowering them to make their toolset better seems to be a good thing for the Mozilla community.

    …more details to come soon about the decision of the grant proposal.  For now, please take a look at the screencasts, tell me what you think of the software as an option for a translation tool, and reach out to me/Dwayne/Friedel with your ideas or questions.

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