Category Archives: Fun

Mozilla at CampusParty ’12 and Berlin

August 26, 2012 By in Conferences, FOSS, Fun, Mozilla, Technology 2 Comments

I had the wonderful opportunity to participate at CampusParty Europe in Berlin over the last few days. I had never been to a CampusParty before, but I had a great time! It is definitely one of the more unique tech conferences out there, if you can even call it that. The most amazing thing about this event was that it was hosted at an old airport, Berlin Tempelhof, and a lot of the interiors are still intact. For instance, you can still see conveyor belts, signs like “Passport Control” and all the gate numbers. The talks themselves were located in a large hangar-like structure, which made for some odd acoustics, but the talks went surprisingly well considering 8 of them ran in parallel under a (very large) roof. Another adjacent hangar was reserved for a bunch of tents where participants chose to camp out through the entire event.

My primary focus at the event was to support the Firefox OS Challenge held by Telefonica. I spoke to a few developers on how to go about writing an app for Firefox OS, and some of the common pitfalls encountered when a website is converted into an app. I think the reception was pretty positive and it was great to meet folks who were pretty excited about Firefox OS. I was also extremely pleased that my Samusng Galaxy SII with FirefoxOS worked flawlessly through all the demos (yes, even the WiFi)!

You can find slides from my presentation here.

 

 

Mark Surman, the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation had a talk scheduled at the “free software” track.  His talk was about the Mozilla Foundation’s vision for promoting openness, innovation and opportunity on the web, with some interesting ideas on how to achieve that in the long run, over the next century. What I found particularly interesting was the notion of building a generation of Webmakers, i.e. ordinary people who know how the web works and are “literate” enough to write or hack a web page. This knowledge is mostly limited to computer programmers or engineers  these days, but Mark’s argument is that because the Internet is so vital and fundamental to human society, it is important that we educate the next generation about the web, just like we do with reading, writing and mathematics. The Webmaker project, along with tools like Thimble, X-Ray Goggles, and Popcorn are all steps in this direction. Chad Vader’s remix of Rebecca’s Black “Friday” was played at full volume during the talk, and at one point there was a caped man on stage. ’nuff said.

Next up was the charismatic Christian Heilmann, who spoke about Mozilla, the web and you. The talk covered a wide range of topics, with a focus on Mozilla’s latest efforts in the Mobile space, specifically Firefox OS. There was also a shout out to WebRTC, one of the projects really close to my heart, woo! Christian’s talks are always very entertaining, he has a blog post with links to slides and the recorded talk, which you should check out!

I also got the chance to visit the venue of our future MozSpace in Berlin. Mozilla Spaces is a project whose aim is to set up places around the world where the Mozilla community can come together to hack, design, research and all the other things Mozillians do to keep the web open. The tech scene in Berlin is pretty hot right now, and given the strength of our existing community there, it seemed like a fairly natural place to open up a MozSpace. The space is right on the historic Bernauer Straße, overlooking the memorial. There’s a lot of history behind the area, and the locality is filled with offices and co-working spaces for many other interesting startups. The San Francisco MozSpace has some serious competition with both the Paris and Berlin projects underway!

While strolling around Alexanderplatz, the city’s U-Bahn (subway) center and generally a very busy plaza, I was delighted to see Firefox Advertisements all over the walls. We did a small advertising campaign in San Francisco at the Caltrain station and the US-101 a few months ago, and this appears to be a continuation of that effort. Germany is known for its emphasis on Privacy (both Google & Facebook have had tussles with the German Government on such issues), so I hope the various messages resonated with the public. I don’t speak German, but I’m told the phrases were rather eloquent!

 

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a MozCamp (my last one was at Prague), and so I’m really looking forward to attending MozCamp EU in Warsaw. Tim Terriberry and I will be talking about WebRTC, and I hope to see some of you there!

Mozilla at Mobile World Congress 2012

March 5, 2012 By in Conferences, Fun, Mozilla, Places, Technology 4 Comments

The Mobile World Congress at Barcelona this year was the first trade show that Mozilla has participated in. This is new territory for us, but given that 2012 marks the year where mobile devices will far outnumber desktops & laptops, it was clear that Mozilla has to play a central role in promoting an open ecosystem for mobile devices. However, we’re a small, community-driven software company, so putting on a professional face at a trade show like MWC to tell the world that we’re serious about our enacting our mission in the mobile space can be very intimidating. Especially when you’re sharing the floor with established industry giants; Huawei, for example, had a whole city block reserved for their “booth”. Other carriers, OEMs, and hardware manufacturers had an equally large presence at the show. At the beginning of the week, what we mostly hoped for was to sneak in, show our wares and gauge interest. What we actually got exceeded our wildest expectations.

We setup our booth at App Planet to showcase many of our products that are relevant to the mobile space: Boot 2 Gecko, Firefox on Android, the Mozilla Marketplace, and Mozilla Persona. There was a continuous stream of people, on all four days, interested in checking out demos of our various products, which meant non-stop talking for booth staff! One of the things we’re really proud of is that our booth was manned by Mozilla staff who directly work on the very same products we were show-casing. This made for some very authentic demos, and we left no question unanswered.

Boot 2 Gecko

On the first day, we made an announcement that we would be partnering with Telefónica to release an open web device, a phone based fully on HTML5, powered by Boot 2 Gecko. This really resonated with almost everyone at the event, and set the tone for the following week. I had several people come up to me at our (rather modest, what I thought would be almost unfindable) booth and ask for a B2G demo, which kicked ass (and was only finished on Sunday night, most of us only saw the working phone on the first day of the show!). One gentleman from the press even commented that it was the only news worth writing about.

This is the kind of response that really energizes the entire team and validates a lot of our thinking in the mobile space. In a world that is dominated and controlled by vertical silos like those built around iOS and Android, our call for a more open eco-system is something that many at MWC were able to understand as being important, and potentially disruptive. Imagine being able to install apps from not just one marketplace, but several, or even just being able to navigate to a web page to install an app, without a gatekeeper or a middleman.

Everyone (including myself) was blown away with the performance of B2G on the demo phones, running apps like Cut the Rope (which was recently ported to HTML, CSS & JS, thanks to Microsoft) just as smoothly as the native counterpart. Our demo had a little view source button, which you could press when you were on the home screen, the dialer app, or anywhere else; and it always put a smile on the audience’s face. This is really a phone made of the web, for the web.

Mozilla Marketplace

The natural transition from the B2G demo happens when someone asks “how do users get apps on the phone?”. Mozilla is going to be running a marketplace for apps written using HTML5 technologies. Our marketplace is already open for developer submissions, and we hope to have a consumer beta ready sometime by the end of Q2 this year. We showcased some of our partner apps that have been submitted to the marketplace, running on a variety of different platforms: Android phones, tablets; Mac and Windows computers.

We’re going to have an awesome, community-driven app store (built on the same principles, and even the same code-base as our add-on marketplace), but it will by no means be the only HTML5 app store in town. We encourage, and even support, other companies wanting to setup their own stores; and developers are always free to self-publish apps on their own websites (adding an ‘install’ button to your website is really simple!). We’re going to be supporting paid apps on our marketplace, and also provide an in-app purchase API (credit cards supported via PayPal, and we’re also trying to support carrier billing in some countries); but because apps are built using the same web technologies used for building websites, developers are always free to setup their own payment systems.

It’s a really open eco-system, bringing the flexibility and distributed nature of the web to the app world. If you’re interested in the technical details of how this all works, I wrote a post sometime ago explaining it all. A very common question I received was “is there an SDK I can use?”, or “are there standard UI widgets we’re expected to use?”. The answer is that, this is not just another app store, developers will use the same technologies as they do today to build websites, with a few tweaks here and there (to support multiple screen sizes, and to support offline usage, etc.) to make an app. You can use any of your favorite JS frameworks, UI widgets and server side frameworks to build an app. Again, an app marketplace made of the web, for the web.

Firefox on Android

We also had lots of visitors to our booth who were either fans of Firefox and just wanted to say thanks (we love you all!) or were former Firefox users who now use a different browser (we love you too!).

The original version for Firefox on Android was built using the same front-end code (XUL) as on the desktop and had some performance problems. We’ve since re-written the entire UI to be much more smoother, and really focused on improving startup speed. We had some amazing demos of Firefox on Android phones and tablets that showcased all of these improvements, and more.

We also had a chance to demo some of the cool new WebAPIs that we’ve introduced (many of them driven by the needs of B2G!): such as camera access, accelerometer, vibration, etc. I think most of our visitors were very pleased with how far Firefox on mobile has come, with competitive performance and a smooth browsing experience. We look forward to pushing the latest nightly version into the Google Market on Android as soon as possible so everyone can get their hands on them! (If you’re an impatient daredevil, just head to the nightly page to download the latest & greatest).

That’s not all

Mozilla Persona came up a lot in conversations, as identity is the binding glue for all our projects. Enabling a really simple sign-in process on not just websites but also devices like B2G phones; while respecting user privacy and choice, is a high priority for us. We were able to do demos of a Persona based login to the Apps marketplace but also explain to everyone interested about how this is not just another login system like Facebook Connect, but rather a federated and distributed system for identity. Keep up with the latest developments in this space on the Mozilla Identity blog!

During the same week as MWC, Gary announced Collusion at TED U, an add-on that lets you discover who’s tracking you online. With the recent debate around user privacy, especially in the mobile space, it wasn’t surprising that there were quite a few people who were interested in Collusion at MWC. I was able to give a few demos of the add-on in action on the desktop computers, but unfortunately we didn’t have a version working on our Mobile browsers (something we hope to fix in the near future). It was awesome to be able to demo this at MWC and show to the world that user privacy comes foremost at Mozilla (Firefox was also the first browser to implement Do Not Track).

All in all, this past week has been pretty exciting for all of us. Firefox brought openness to the web almost a decade ago and played a key role in shaping the web to where it is today. However, as the world is changing and becoming more mobile, we’d like to bring the same values and principles with us into this new realm. At MWC, we showed the world that Mozilla is a serious player in the mobile space. We made a lot of promises, and we loved the response; now is the time to execute. I hope that at the next mobile world congress, we will have lived up to all our promises and have a pretty compelling demonstration of what we accomplished in 2012.

The web is the platform. And Mozilla is leading the charge. Onward!

Project Assemble

February 2, 2011 By in Fun, Hacks, Technology 2 Comments

Ever since I participated in the first Summer of Code 4 years ago, I’ve been using Macs almost exclusively.  I really enjoy using them – they’re great machines for developers, and the amazing virtualization options make them practically the only development computer you’ll ever need.

However, I felt like I was drifting too far away from what the majority of computer users operate on, even today. Not to mention, my roots are back in the Linux world, and in the back of my mind I’ve always wanted to switch back to a “PC” (the term in quotes, because Macs are PCs too!). I had heard great things about how much better Windows 7 and Ubuntu are than their predecessors, so I decided to take the plunge.

For work, I settled on a trusty, hardy Lenovo Thinkpad. The new x201s have great battery life, portability and power. I’ve really been enjoying dual booting Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10 on it.

When it came to my home computer, I wanted to get one of those beautiful 27″ iMacs. However, Starcraft2 happened to release around the same time, and I found myself questioning the value of a computer that could not run it in ultra graphics mode. For the same price as the iMac, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that I could hand assemble a computer with most components near the cutting-edge. Awesome!

Ingredients

So I got to work. It is very convenient to order all the parts you need for a computer on Amazon. Let’s go through what you need:

  • CPU: Processor manufacturers have already hit the ceiling for how many transistors they can pack per square-inch, but now the race is towards how many separate ‘cores’ are available. Most software don’t even bother using more than one core, so the quad-core CPUs from either Intel or AMD should be more than sufficient for the next few years: I opted to go for the Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz. You’ll want to note the socket type of the CPU and make sure you get a compatible motherboard (the i7 CPUs fit into LGA-1366 sockets).

  • Motherboard: Pretty standard choices these days, the differentiating factors are usually overclocking support, USB 3.0 & SATA 6gb/s throughput, and the number of PCIe slots. You’ll want to make sure to get a motherboard that matches the socket type of your CPU. I opted to get the ASUS P6X58D Premium.

  • RAM: 32k may have been enough in the past, but you want to make sure you have atleast 4GB to stay competitive today ;) DDR3 is pretty much the faster consumer memory you can get in the market. I’ve heard that 1600Mhz is the sweet spot for i7 processors, going any faster won’t give you any significant performance boosts. I got a handy pack of 3 x 2gb sticks: Corsair Dominator 6 GB 1600MHz.

  • Graphics Card: It’s what puts pretty pixels on the screen; if you’re a gamer or design professional you’ll want to go all-out. I think having two cards in SLi (nVidia cards) or Crossfire (ATi cards) is much more efficient than getting a single very high-end card. Before you get two cards, make sure your motherboard supports the configuration and keep in mind that you can only link identical graphic cards. I chose to get two of the Gigabyte GeForce GTX460 1GB cards.

  • Power Supply: You get power supplies ranging typically from 400W to 1000W and you’ll want to choose one that keeps up with your hungry processor and graphics card, while still being economical. I got the Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850-Watt to fuel the two GTX460s and to give me a little room for expansion in the future.

  • Hard Drive: Solid state drives are catching on and becoming less expensive everyday. The performance boost is phenomenal, and I would highly recommend getting one for your boot drive. I got the Crucial Technology 128 GB RealSSD C300 because Crucial has been getting great reviews of late. You’ll still want a much larger regular spin disk, however, to store your movies, music and photos (the 128GB should be used only for your OS and frequently used applications). The Western Digital Caviar Black 1TB hard drive is a solid choice.

  • Tower: Finally, you need a case to put all of these parts in! While choosing a tower there are two sizes you need to consider: the ATX size which specifies the largest motherboard the case can accommodate, and the tower size itself which defined how much room for expansion drives, cards and ventilation there is. I got the Cooler Master HAF932 ATX Full Tower.

  • Keyboard, Mouse, Monitor, Optical Drive: These are all essential components of a computer but there really isn’t much to it. It’s mostly a matter of personal preferences. Just look around and pick one you are comfortable with. My choices were: Razer Lycosa Programmable Backlit Gaming Keyboard, Razer Mamba Wireless Gaming Laser Mouse, HP 2509m 25-Inch Diagonal Full HD LCD Monitor and Samsung Blu-Ray Internal SATA Drive with Lightscribe.

You do need a couple more things before you can being assembling your computer. A grounding wrist strap and a toolkit are highly recommended. Setup a nice hard, flat surface to work on.

Recipe

  1. The first thing you’ll want to do is to mount your CPU on your motherboard. For the LGA1366 this was as simple as gently placing the CPU over the socket to match the nudge and then pulling the lever to lock it in. I had to put some pressure to lock the lever, but I only did it after I was sure I placed the CPU in the right orientation.

  2. All the AMD/Intel CPUs will come with their own stock coolers. Mounting them on top of the CPU is very easy these days, as they come with pre-applied cooling paste. Just follow the instructions from the CPU box. I opted to get my own cooler and coolant, however, so mounting it was a little more involved.

  3. Now you’ll want to attach your power supply to your ATX tower. It usually goes in the extreme bottom or top of the tower.

  4. I prefer to attach RAM on the motherboard before mounting it on my tower so I have a better sense of where to place the PCIe cards. It’s also easier because your hands are constricted once the motherboard goes inside, and RAM sticks typically need to be absolutely vertical to their slots before they’ll go in.

  5. Once you have the RAM in place, it is time to secure the motherboard onto the ATX tower. The most important step here is to first attach the double-edged screws that came with your motherboard. They raise your motherboard and provide screw sockets for the ATX to attach to. Do not try and attach your motherboard directly to the tower without putting these in between. There should be a half-inch gap between the metal casing and the lower side of the motherboard.

  6. The hardest part is now behind you. Plug-in your video card, RAM and drives. Most of these are pretty much “push-click” based these days, really nothing much to it!

  7. Done? Now all that remains is to tie everything together. This might actually be intimidating to some, but cables these days are designed not to fit in something they weren’t meant to. The basic steps are to connect power to your motherboard, video card, fans, optical and disk drives. Then, connect SATA cables from your drives to the motherboard. Motherboard control pins go to the front of the ATX (for LEDs and power switch).

  8. Take a deep breath. Connect the monitor and a keyboard and flip the switch. If all goes well, the fans will start whirring; and you’ll get a beep from the motherboard indicating POST succeeded. wOOt!
    If that didn’t happen, maybe you got something other than a single beep. Different kinds of beeps can mean different problems, go the Wikipedia page on POST to troubleshoot. If you don’t get any kind of beep at all, and the fans aren’t spinning it means you missed a power supply cable somewhere. Double check to make sure the CPU cooler fan is running! If it isn’t your CPU will heat up very quickly — most processors will automatically shutdown when they overheat — but there’s a chance it may damage your computer, so double-check.

  9. Get your installation media and put your favorite OS on your brand new computer. Give it a name, and learn to love it ;)

That’s all there is to it. I certainly had a blast assembling my computer, it was a nice learning experience; not to mention very economical. Well, I’m off to play some HD-quality Starcraft2!

GSoC Mentor Summit ’09 Roundup

November 1, 2009 By in FOSS, Fun, Gentoo, Google, Mozilla, People, Photos, Plan9, SoC 1 Comment

The grand Summer of Code Mentor Summit of 2009 concluded last week and I had the fantastic opportunity of being able to attend on behalf of Gentoo, Plan 9 and Mozilla. What follows is some indication of how awesome the summit was:

(Photo courtesy of warthog from Etherboot)

I met so many folks I’d only interacted with online so far (the classic nickname-to-face matching), but even better was the opportunity to meet folks powering open source projects from so many diverse backgrounds. I met many of my personal rockstars, and learned about a bunch of open source projects I’d never heard of :)

Also, one of the things that is only possible at an event like the summit was the ability to get a whole bunch of non-linux operating system groups in one room. We had a great discussion, and it resulted in the creation of the “rosetta-os” special interest group. Look for more activity on the common device drivers for non-linux operating systems front soon!

Other sessions worthy of special mention were Open Source Security, Recruiting and Retaining Awesome People, Advanced Trolling (yes, you read that right), and of course the always welcoming Casablanca where I spent most of my time. We discussed everything from our SoC experiences to the Afro Celt Sound System in that room, always full of creative energy and warmth.

After 4 years of participating in the Summer of Code, I am super happy to have finally met the faces behind the program. Every single person I met over the course of last weekend was friendly, intelligent and just generally awesome; that sort of thing doesn’t happen by chance. I feel warm and fuzzy inside to think that I’m actually a part of the revolution that is free and open source software, three cheers to everyone that made it possible!

Google Search and Culture

October 15, 2009 By in Fun, Google, Humor, India, Life 5 Comments

I usually never pay attention to the auto complete suggestions offered by Google, until now, when I found they can be quite amusing. What’s even more fun though, is repeating a search across different country specific sites, to get a idea of what the people of that nation are most worried about. Here’s a sampling, let’s start with India:

"How To" in India

#1 certainly explains India’s growing population. We’re also quite obsessive about learning proper English (Outsour Singh is desperately looking to land that call center job) and hacking Orkut accounts. Now, for the Netherlands:

"How To" in the Netherlands

I guess the one take-away from this is that the English speaking Dutch population (which is quite large, mind you) are mostly looking for more info on some romantic comedy from Hollywood. I was also curious about the results for the USA:

"How To" in the US

Hmm, why are there so many Americans wanting to learn to “tie a tie”? “How to solve a Rubix cube” is about the only intellectual entry to appear on the suggestion list among all three countries, until you realize that it’s actually spelled “Rubik’s”. I wouldn’t be surprised if “Rubix” makes the dictionary soon.

The common theme for all countries seems to be: learning to kiss. Indians are confused between “losing weight” and “reducing weight”, which also explains why everyone wants to get better at English. Some Indians also want to gain weight, a term which is most definitely absent from American searches. Our Dutch friends have no interest in either, I completely understand why; they maintain a very healthy lifestyle by cycling all over the place. The Americans have apparently mastered the art of downloading videos from Youtube, while the Indians and Dutch are still learning the ropes. American women first want to learn to get pregnant and then quickly want to get rid of the resulting stretch marks, while Indian ladies don’t bother with the latter.

The geeks out there will notice the UI improvements on the US version of Google over the other two. I think I’ll stop drawing inferences now :-)

Try your own fun searches to see what auto-suggest has in store! Suggested starting point: “How to use”…

Another summer at Mozilla passes by

September 1, 2009 By in Fun, Hacks, Mozilla, SoC Leave a comment

My last day at Mozilla this summer was last Thursday. I didn’t take a lot of pictures this summer, because, you know, I took a lot last time around. Also, this strategy turned out pretty well because now there are more pictures of me floating around on the tubes! After a longish trans-atlantic flight, I’m back in Amsterdam now resuming work on my Master’s (because hacking on Minix is awesome).

No other internship has been ever so satisfying: over the summer, I worked on a wide range of mini-projects which allowed me to exercise skills ranging from systems to application level programming. I even did a bit of work in the mobile space (turns out programming in limited memory and processing speed is a *lot* different).

One such project that I’m especially excited about is support for video recording in the browser. Yes, there is even a canvas-based live preview of your webcam feed, in addition to Ogg/Theora encoding support! Combined with the audio recording support I wrote sometime ago, some really cool applications are now possible. Skype-like dialer in the browser? Why not?! (*hint* anyone is free to send in a patch for multiplexing the audio and video, they’re currently two separate Vorbis and Theora streams *hint*).

We also had 3 major releases for Weave during the summer: 0.4, 0.5 and 0.6. The last one was especially big, given the completely new, HTML based UI (big kudos to thunder for pulling it off!) and a bunch of other performance fixes. Also, the web UI I wrote last year underwent so many great changes by the wonderful folks at Glaxstar. Now we’re putting up a community design challenge to revamp the UI so we can ship the thing! (*hint* if you’re good at UI design you should participate in the challenge *hint*).

There’s so many more cool things I worked on that I’d like to talk about, but perhaps they deserve a separate blog post. Soon… (I keep promising myself that I should blog more often, it never works).

To add the already good times, my two students in the Summer of Code this year passed with flying colors. Yay!

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