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I was killing time in a hallway until my next class started when I decided to visit the College of Business office to see an advisor about something. I ended up leaving checked out for graduation with 33 hours left. My graduation date is set for December 2008.

The courses I have left to take are:

• FIN 3715 - Business Finance
• MKT 3401 - Principles of Marketing
• MGT 3830 - Strategically Managing Organizations
• ISDS 3200 - Advanced Business Programming
• ISDS 4120 - Business Data Communications
• ISDS 4125 - Analysis and Design of Management Information Systems
• 3 hours Gen. Ed Humanities
• 6 hours ISDS electives
• 6 hours business electives

Last blog post for awhile, I promise!

The Mozilla community is very large and there are all sorts of events happening every day - whether it’s a project milestone, meeting, launch, freeze, anniversary, conference, or other item of interest. I think it would be both cool and helpful if we had calendar.mozilla.org with all of these events in one central place that were kept updated, so anyone could see what was coming up.

Obviously, everyone is interested in different things, so each of the categories of events could be toggled on and off.

Some initial ideas, because my blog posts can’t go without a table or list:

• Special Events - Such as Mozilla 24, OSCON, or other engagements Mozilla is sponsoring, like this
• Firefox - Milestones, freezes, and anything related to Firefox (Similar categories for other projects - Thunderbird, SeaMonkey, etc.)
• Meetings - meetings open to the public, like the Monday project status meetings
• Other recurring events like Air Mozilla, QA bug triages, etc.

The calendar could even talk to some other Mozilla sites to get data for those that might be interested in:

• Firefox downloads that day
• Bugs filed
• Bugs resolved
• New Add-ons

I wish I had time to work on this.

Friday, Mark Finkle and I participated in the Carolina Open Source Initiative’s Software Freedom Day celebration at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I was able to change flights late Wednesday night to avoid some potential problems getting there.

The event had a lot of traffic of people coming in and out throughout the day (especially when there was free pizza). The event leaders did a great job of promoting the event in the newspaper, signs, and word of mouth. Everyone we met seemed to already know about and love Firefox, but our main purpose in being there was getting more people involved in the community.

Mark and I were treated to a stormy surprise when leaving UNC and heading to the airport that resulted in me having wet pets for several hours and owning a UNC umbrella that I will never be able to use again (at least not in Baton Rouge… or Louisiana).

I’ve wanted to make this post for awhile and never got around to it, but a recent conversation reminded me about it. Below are the “top 10″ add-ons (extensions and themes) collected three different ways. (This table best viewed on my actual blog.)

Total Downloads and Weekly Downloads are the methods currently used for the “Most Popular” searches on AMO, and represents the number of downloads of that add-on from addons.mozilla.org.

Active Users is based on the number of daily update pings, and is a better metric of the popularity of an add-on because it shows which are actually being used after downloading. This information is not yet available on AMO, but we’re working on it.

Facebook Favorites is the number of users that have added that add-on to their favorites/recommended list in Rock Your Firefox. This shows add-ons that are both in use and loved. It would be a better metric of both popularity and quality than the others if the data wasn’t skewed a bit in that people that use Rock Your Firefox tend to be more technically inclined. Once we bring the favorites system to AMO, this data will be more reliable.

As I was about to go to bed, I refreshed my Facebook newsfeed/homepage and happened to catch that today’s gift is free. What?! They finally caved in and made gifts free? No. They’ve allowed their first commercial “gift” to penetrate the cheerful bunch of furry creatures, birthday wishes, and pop culture references, and even make it very clear why the gift is free: “The Skittles Gum gift is FREE to promote Skittles New Gum.”

While I’m sure it was quite expensive for this deal to take place, I guess we can expect similar items in the future. It will go nicely with the 2 sponsored polls in the last week I’ve had take up significant real estate in my newsfeed asking whether I would like to purchase a book on how to seduce women. (I’m guessing they are using polls to advertise because they can specify target audiences, unlike with flyers. Plus, people actually have to notice the polls.)

While advertisements creeping into Facebook’s core features is nothing new, as best I can tell at this late hour, this will be the first time they’ve allowed it to appear in users’ profile pages. (Obviously not including applications.) I hope next month they’ll introduce sponsored applications that are automatically added when you join Facebook, or better yet, interstitial ads.

Last semester I took a course in which there was a speaker from the corporate IT world every class (once a week) who talked about the various IT processes at his/her company. One night after (or possibly during?) a particularly uninteresting speaker, I jokingly asked shaver if he wanted to come speak. Fast forward 6 months to Thursday, when shaver arrived in New Orleans from London, drove here to Baton Rouge, and had a rental car tire blowout that almost caused him to miss his first talk. Maybe he’ll post pictures.

The first talk was to a technology club - the LSU chapter of Association of Information Technology Professionals. I was really surprised at some of the questions that were asked - I had no idea that people around here would care about Mozilla’s thoughts on mobile, Silverlight, or have heard of the “10 days” incident.

Immediately following that was the main talk to the Management of Information Resources class, a business elective of somewhere between 150-200 people. Shaver started off asking how many people use Firefox. I was very surprised when what looked to be about half the room raised their hands, and I’m sure after his talk, the rest of the people went home to try it out.

The next day I saw some of the Firefox buttons we gave out on a few backpacks. The talks were awesome, so big thanks to shaver for taking the time to venture down here before he’s grounded for a bit.

The latest version of Rock Your Firefox, Mozilla’s Facebook application, went live this morning. There are two exciting new features in it:

Automatic Add-on Detection

When adding the application, users will now have the option to detect the add-ons they already have installed in Firefox and add them as favorites. Existing users can do this from the sidebar of the homepage. Anytime new add-ons are installed, you can re-scan to detect the changes.

New Homepage with Newsfeed

Instead of going directly to the Browse area when using the application, there is now a homepage with a list of recent add-on activity such as new versions of your favorite add-ons, favorite additions by your friends, and recommendations based on your friends’ favorites. The sidebar has several sections, some of which will not always be visible.

Check out version 0.4 at rockyourfirefox.com! The next release is planned for the end of September.