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Calendar Idea

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.

Software Freedom Day

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).

Top Ten Add-ons

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 Active Users Facebook Favorites
1 FlashGot Adblock Plus Adblock Plus
2 NoScript FlashGot Greasemonkey
3 Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) Download Statusbar Download Statusbar
4 VideoDownloader IE Tab Web Developer
5 Forecastfox Forecastfox IE Tab
6 Adblock Plus VideoDownloader Firebug
7 Adblock Noia 2.0 (eXtreme) Tab Mix Plus
8 Fasterfox Fasterfox del.icio.us Bookmarks
9 IE Tab Tab Mix Plus StumbleUpon
10 Download Statusbar PDF Download FoxyTunes

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Facebook’s First Sponsored Gift

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.

Building Software at the Scale of the Web

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.