Standblog - en

Video+html5+Popcorn.js=hyper-video

Tristan — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 16:08:00 +0200

You may have seen that Brett Gaylor is joining Mozilla (see also Mark Surman's post). For those who don't know Brett, he's particularly famous for his "Open Source documentary" Rip! A remix Manifesto^[1].

One may ask why Mozilla has hired a film director^[2], but it actually makes a lot of sense thanks to Mozilla Drumbeat, as Brett is working on a Drumbeat project called Web made movies.

Now Brett has been a Mozilla community member for quite some time, contributing with the good folks at CDOT / Seneca College to create popcorn.js, "a JavaScript library for merging video with semantic data". I understand that this is a bit of a mouthful, but don't close your browser window just yet! Popcorn.js is what I would describe as "hyper-video" ("hyper" as in "hypertext"): the ability to leverage data from the video and link to it, Web style. Such data include:

location. Where on earth was this video sequence made? Then display it on an interactive map
subtitles. What is being said on the soundtrack. Display it as text, and offer to translate it into the foreign language of your choice using an online translation service
license. Under which license is this video sequence made available? (Copyright, Creative Commons, etc.)
person. Who's on the screen? If we know, then link to his/her Twitter and Flickr streams in real time
topic. What is being discussed? Then link to the corresponding article in Wikipedia and in the news.

Go and see for yourself the PopCorn.js demo (in case you're stuck with an older browser that is not capable of running the demo, here is a video of the demo).

I think this is a very significant step further for video on the Web, which was until now a very TV-like, passive and linear approach, now merged with the hypertext nature of the Web (its ability to link to things in other places), so that users can click on links in order to learn more. Of course, this is just a demo. Tons of things need to be done, but I see this as a very cool way to show what HTML5 and its video element, combined with the power of JavaScript and mash-ups.

Notes

[1] I can't say how strongly I recommend watching this movie, starting with its trailer.

[2] It's actually the second one, as Henrik Moltke, co-author of Good copy, bad copy, is already working at Mozilla... on Drumbeat!

The Web has never been as exciting!

Tristan — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 21:15:00 +0200

(This is a quick translation of a post I wrote in French earlier today)

Firefox 4 Beta has just been released. It brings seed, a better UI tons on new things for extension developers (hmm, JetPack!) and Web developers.

In this post, I'll focus on the Web development part.

In my opinion, combining CSS3, new APIs (including WebGL) and HTML5 is enabling the Web as a development platform to make a huge leap forward. I have worked with the amazing Paul Rouget in order to have a video of his demos in order to share my excitement.

For those who have installed Firefox 4 Beta 2, a good PC with a decent discrete graphic card and have enabled Direct2D hardware acceleration, here are 3 spectacular demos:

For those who are more in a hurry or want more details, please check the video and the article on Hacks.mozilla.org.

What you see on the screen is just a Web page, using standards that are being specified and implemented (HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL, new APIs…). What I find fascinating is that by combining these technologies, one can do things that were deemed impossible even recently:

Native video with an Open and unencumbered coded (WebM)
Good fonts ( @font-face, WOFF)
Declarative Animations (using CSS3, and soon SVG/SMIL)
SVG Filters and Masks applied to HTML elements (Gaussian blur effect, a B&W filter on videos, a round-shaped video
3D (the WebM video used at the end as a texture to a 3D rotating cube just floored me)
WebSockets, for a persistent bi-di communication between the server and the browser, used in this case to control remotely the presentation from an Android phone running a pre-Alpha version of Firefox for Android.
Drag & Drop, Indexed DB and local storage, the File API, Geolocation and device orientation and all the tech features I won't mention.

Of course, the Open Web still has to compete with proprietary approaches such as monopolistic AppStores or proprietary plug-ins. But it never has been has powerful and innovative as it is now, and that's what is making me excited!

Firefox, add-ons and innovation

Tristan — Tue, 25 May 2010 18:54:00 +0200

Today, I was invited to give a talk in Paris about Mozilla and innovation, and Mozilla has received an award for being innovative (but also being a platform for innovation).

It was a great honor to receive such an award, with other organization on stage with me such as Touch Bionics, Archos, Pan-African e-Network, Aldebaran Robotics, Groupe SEB, The City of Helsinki and Dassault Systemes.

I was particularly amazed by the Pan-African e-Network (India helping Africa for Education using technology) and Aldebaran (amazing little robot which is ridiculously cute).

As the person receiving the award in the name of Mozilla, I had to say a little speech about what we do at Mozilla, and how we do it.

The Mozilla development process has been explained many times in many places and languages by many people. This time, as the whole event is about innovation, I decided to focus on the way Mozilla does Open innovation (or Participative innovation).

Here is a quick recap of what I said to the audience (shamelessly stolen from the Labs team and Chris Beard). Slides are available in PDF format (2.6MB).

Mozilla, non-profit organization, builds products (including Firefox, 400 million users) and communities (that build/test/localize/promote the product and its add-ons, and also help users).
Our vision of the Internet is explained in our Manifesto. We "believe that openness, innovation, and opportunity are key to the continued health of the Internet".
Our development process is focused on building great products, with participation from thousands of people around the world.
With 75 languages and 3 platforms (leaving mobile on the side for now), each release is actually 225 versions of Firefox. Shipped simultaneously, aiming at 400 million users. This leaves very little room for crazy ideas that may damage the stability, security and ease of use of Firefox. Our development process is basically a funnel that makes sure that contributions are valuable for our users. But this limits innovation (don't worry, I'll explain next how we actually innovate, on a very large scale).

Add-ons are a key ingredient for innovation at Mozilla. They enable an "hourglass"-shaped process, where we're building tons of exciting, useful and creative things, like an upside-down funnel going in many directions from a single point which is the product. Add-ons, with the help of the community and the Labs team become basically a gigantic virtual R&D lab:
- We're making the barrier to entry is as low as possible so that it's easy to prototype ideas
- Very little interference with release cycle. You don't have to wait for the next release of Firefox to collect feedback on your work.
- It's very easy to share an add-on. Post it on your Web site, or even send it as an email.
- Ability to serve the long tail of innovation. Your idea can be useful to 2 people on this planet. That's OK.
- Best ideas that are useful to a majority of users while not degrading the user experience can be integrated into a future version of Firefox, sometimes after a rewrite.
Add-ons span a very broad space, from Firefox Sync to BetterPrivacy, including FlashBlock, OptimizeGoogle, and one of the least popular-yet-super-useful (for me at least) Thitan.
Mozilla Labs, key in fostering innovation, has 3 pieces:
- Exploration (exploring strategic focus areas with product teams)
- Incubation (of new products and services, regardless of whether or not they begun in Labs)
- Support services (Concept series, Test Pilot, etc.)
Results of this approach:
- Firefox is highly customizable and close to users' needs
- Highly "generative^[1]/hackable^[2]" environment where many people are empowered to innovate
- Building an Internet that benefits everyone.

In my speech, I dedicated the award (representing Hermes and Dyonisos, respectively Greek gods of invention and creativity, among many things) to contributors, supporters and users of Firefox and Mozilla technologies. Oh, and by the way, a quick poll from the audience — people working in the field of innovation — showed that roughly 80% of them were using Firefox.

Notes

[1] The notion of Generativity is taken from the highly-recommended The Future of the Internet book by Pr Jonathan Zittrain. It explains how PCs, combined with the Internet, are "generative" and enable people to invent the future.

[2] Hackable in the most noble sense, referring to ingenuity, not in the sense too often used by the press to refer to pirates and crackers.

Frogs, stability and performance

Tristan — Fri, 21 May 2010 10:46:00 +0200

Frog, by Lawrence Whittemore, used under CC-BY-ND license

Can you picture a bright sunny Sunday, with kids organizing a frog race? The frogs progress by leaps and bounds. Sometimes the one on the left seems to be winning, sometimes it's the one on the right. Then the one in the middle makes a nice leap and becomes the leader, even if it seemed a second ago that it was lagging.

This is pretty much what's happening right now on the Web browser market. On one side, there is the Microsoft frog, making small and rare bounds. it's making progress, but it's still the last of the race. Then there is the smaller Firefox frog, who jumps more frequently. And finally, there is a new frog — Chrome — who challenges the former challenger. The competition becomes more interesting suddenly.

Of course, there is a limit to this metaphor. Competition in the browser space is not happening in a single dimension. There are several aspects to the competition:

User experience
Page load performance
JavaScript performance
Start-up time
Stability
Security
Innovation in features
Extensibility
Standards support
… and many others.

Anyway, the general idea carried by the frog race metaphor is valid: each release of a given browser can change the race configuration, as the newest browser can out-perform the other in one or more categories of the race.

The next leaps for Firefox? Stability and performance

Mozilla is working hard on two "leaps".

First, Firefox 3.6.4 will improve stability in a very significative way, with some performance gains. This version will look exactly like 3.6.*, but it will handle plug-ins (such as Flash, Quicktime and Java) in a separate process (only for Windows and Linux for now, Mac version to come). No changes in the user interface, but significant progress in terms of stability. The issue with current versions of Firefox is that when a plug-in crashes, it crashes Firefox at the same time. Let's say you're playing Farmville^[1], which is a Flash app, then it crashes. The impression that you get is that Firefox crashed. It did, actually, but it was stable until Flash made it crash. The issue is that Mozilla has no way to make plug-ins more stable, as we don't have access to the source code. So starting with 3.6.4, plug-in crashes won't affect Firefox anymore^[2]. This version is planned for June 2010, which is very soon.

Second — and most importantly — is Firefox 4. I encourage you to read Mike Beltzner's post about Firefox 4: fast, powerful, and empowering. I have also a PDF version of his slide deck (2.6MB).

To make a long story short, Firefox 4 will be:

Fast ("super-duper fast", to quote Mike)
Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

Firefox 4 is scheduled for "whenever it's ready", and we plan to have it ready around the end of 2010 (that's somewhere between November 2010 and… early 2011)

Now I would like to focus on platform speed (I encourage the readers that are allergic to technical details to jump stright to the conclusion^[3].)

We're working on several fronts here:

New HTML 5 parser. This means a new generation parser really written to handle HTML 5. It will run in a separate thread so the the UI is more responsive. Its code will be cleaner and easier to maintain than our existing parser (which dates back to the early Mozilla days).
New JavaScript engine, JaegerMonkey, combining Method-based tracing used by Webkit and JIT-tracing from our TraceMonkey engine. To make things even better, our garbage collector is also being significantly improved.
Using the GPU to do a bunch of things such as video decoding and display, hardware compositing and scrolling, text rendering and drawing. This will take some serious load off the CPU so that the whole browser runs faster.
Startup time. It's already much better on the Mac, and it will be improved on Windows. (See Dietrich's numerous performance updates.)
''Limiting disk I/O. As CPUs get faster and faster, disks do not make as much progress, especially on laptops on mobiles. So we're working on limiting disk I/O in a very significant way (we're aiming at cutting it in half for the main thread!). This will improve Firefox' responsiveness in a very significant way.
Other optimizations, such as DOM performance (important for dynamic HTML), of which we'll talk more later.

So here is what Mozilla is already working on for the two important topics that are stability and performance. In future posts, I'll discuss the changes in terms of user interface, upcoming features, and new cool toys for Web and add-ons developers (new technologies and tools). In the meantime, if you want to get a taste of the future, please join us and test future versions of Firefox:

Firefox 3.6.4 beta
Firefox 4 pre-Alpha with WebM support (Open video, yay!)
Firefox pre-Alpha.

I can't predict which other "frog" is going to make another leap, and how large it will be. But be assured that the Firefox proverbial frog has a lot ready to deliver, and it will deliver very soon!

Notes

[1] Like 80 million people in the world.

[2] You'll have to reload the page that contains the crashing plug-in, of course. But Firefox and the other tabs won't be affected at all.

[3] In short, people were wondering if Firefox was a read panda or a fox, but now we're told it's actually a frog.

IE is being mean to developers, the song

Tristan — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0100

Scott Ward, Ruby developer over at With.us has posted a couple of months ago a pretty cool song on YouTube: IE is Being Mean to Me. I am sure that most Web developers will concur with Scott's song.

Here is an excerpt of the lyrics:

I wrote the last line of JavaScript at 4:45
I wanted to see if my widget was ready to go live
I tested in Firefox, Safari, and Chrome
I even tried Opera, but then I… should've gone home
Cause IE is being mean to me… again!
IE is being mean to me… again.
(…)

IE is being mean to me, again
I tried JQuery, Moo Tools and Prototype
But IE still won't display my widget right
And have you experienced the horror
Of debugging in Internet Explorer
If you're an IE user and have no idea of what I just said
Would you please consider using Firefox instead
I'd like to say that I simply do not care,
But how can I ignore so much market share?
I have a reoccurring dream about compliance
But it always ends in Microsoft's defiance
And that's why IE is being mean to me… again!
If you're an IE user and have no idea of what I just said
Would you please consider using Firefox instead
Do it for Open Source, it's free as in speech
Do it for developers everywhere, but most of all…
Just do it for me!

Privacy is a currency

Tristan — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 11:16:00 +0100

This post does not reflect the views of my employer or any organization I am affiliated with. Obviously. But I felt I had to say it again, just in case.

I have been thinking about privacy in the world of Web services for several months now. I've written quite a bit, mostly in French, and most of the material I have been producing is not yet public. Then I find this article of Dan Lyons in Newsweek that remarkably nails it down: privacy is a currency for which we don't know the change rate. It's something we're giving to online services without knowing what it's worth. I wish I was able to write English this clearly...

Excerpt from Daniel Lyons' On the Web, privacy has its price, to be read carefully:

What's happening is that our privacy has become a kind of currency. It's what we use to pay for online services. Google charges nothing for Gmail; instead, it reads your e-mail and sends you advertisements based on keywords in your private messages.

The real holy grail is your list of friends. With that information, marketers can start sending more targeted messages. If you like a certain movie, or album, or mountain bike, your friends will probably like those, too. So they'll be good targets for ads for those products. Of course, your friends are not going to buy everything you do. It's not pinpoint accuracy. But the data helps marketers "narrowcast" their advertising. And it sure beats buying commercials on TV or splattering ads all over the Internet.

The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.

These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of "monetizing" our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the "social norm," as Facebook puts it—so that what we're giving up doesn't seem so valuable. Then they must gain our trust. Thus each new erosion of privacy comes delivered, paradoxically, with rhetoric about how Company X really cares about privacy. I'm not sure whether Orwell would be appalled or impressed. And who knew Big Brother would be not a big government agency, but a bunch of kids in Silicon Valley?

The problem with buying things with your privacy is you really don't know how much you're paying. With money, five bucks is five bucks. But what is the value of your list of friends? If it's not worth much, your membership on Facebook may be the deal of a lifetime. If it's incredibly valuable, you're getting massively ripped off. Only the techies know how much your info is worth, and they're not telling. But the fact that they'd rather get your data than your dollars tells you all you need to know.

Two jobs openings at Mozilla!

Tristan — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 16:49:00 +0100

As Mozilla is focusing on technology and products with more frequent releases —Firefox 3.6 and 3.7, Firefox for Maemo and Thunderbird 3.x are coming soon! — but something different and not product-related is going to take place in 2010. It's called Mozilla Drumbeat. I'll shamelessly steal a piece of the drumbeat Wiki to explain what Drumbeat is about^[1] :

Long Term Vision: make sure the internet is still open, participatory, decentralized and public 100 years from now.
Mission: build community of people who create tools that help others understand, participate and take control of their internet lives.
Approach: website and local events gather people actively involved in creating a better internet. Annual Drumbeat Festival as major convening point.

The reason why I blog about Drumbeat today is that there are 2 positions open, one in Paris (France) and one in Mountain View (California).

Should you be interested in working full time on Drumbeat, head over to Mozilla Drumbeat - Open Web Project Producer in order to see if you could fit! (If not, there are other open positions listed on the Mozilla career site).

Notes

[1] Mark Surman has a great presentation about Mozilla Drumbeat.

Best Wishes for 2010!

Tristan — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 00:01:00 +0100

There are many differences between Europe and the US, and the habit of wishing a happy new year is one of them. In the US, one should send cards before the end of the year, while in France and some other countries, wishing a happy new year before it starts is frown upon (so we have all January to send season greetings).

But the good news is that time difference will help me here, since I'm able to publish this after midnight (Paris time) while showing up on my colleagues' screens in the US before the end of the year.

In any case, I wish all of you a wonderful year 2010. May it bring you joy, peace, health and satisfaction in what you try to achieve.

The beach of Saint Aubin sur mer — Calvados — facing West, at night

Je vous souhaite une excellente année 2010. Qu'elle vous apporte joie, paix, santé et satisfaction dans les objectifs que vous vous fixez.

Mozilla at FOSDEM 2010

Tristan — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 17:14:00 +0100

It's that time of the year again. No, I'm not referring to holidays, but the moment when the Mozilla Europe team starts working on the FOSDEM event. In 2010, FOSDEM will take place on the week-end of the 6th and 7th of February.

Mozilla community members jumping in joy at Fosdem, Brussels

Mozilla has had a devroom at FOSDEM for the past 9 or 10 years (I only started attending in 2002, by distributing cool Mozilla T-shirts) and we all know how much the Mozilla project has changed over these years. For years — when our resources were extremely limited — FOSDEM has been a great opportunity for the Mozilla community in Europe to get together. But as Mozilla grew bigger, we have started organizing events ourselves, focused only on Mozilla:

Firefox+ Summit in 2008 in Whistler ;
Mozilla Camp in Barcelona in 2008
Mozilla Camp in Prague in 2009
European Inter-Community Meetup
Local community meetups in Poland and Germany to name a few.

The Mozilla Europe board and I have been thinking about the goals of Mozilla participating at FOSDEM, and we have decided to evolve things a bit. Now that we have our own events, it's time to approach FOSDEM differently and focus on making the Mozilla presence an opportunity to interface better with the other Free, Libre and Open Source communities. FOSDEM is wonderful in this regard, since it hosts dozens of other FLOSS projects, with people being able to work freely between devrooms.

In order to achieve this goal and become more approachable, we'll do two things:

The agenda will be significantly different from the previous years:
1. more 5 minutes lightning talks
2. joint talks with other projects
Because we have so many Mozilla specific events, we've decided to invite the most active people (and those who have not been invited yet) rather than all the European contributors. This will also leave more seats available in the Devroom, making Mozilla more approachable for other projects. This will also enable us to spend more on Mozilla-specific event that will take place later in the year. Of course, if you want to attend FOSDEM without being sponsored, you're more than welcome to participate!

Now, should you feel that you need sponsorship, go read the selection criteria! With regards to the content of the various talks, Axel Pike Hecht and Brian King should let us know soon how to deal with the program committee he leads, so that you know how to submit a proposal for a talk.

5 years of Firefox party in Paris

Tristan — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:57:00 +0100

Earlier this week, Firefox turned 5 years old. The press coverage here in Europe has been amazing. We were lucky enough to have John Lilly with us on this day, so we organized a party with 700 people in Paris.

5 years of Firefox cake. Other pictures from Richard Ying. Picture used under CC-BY-NC-SA license.

A couple of my colleagues have blogged about this, so I'll just link to them instead of repeating what they've wrote:

Mike Shaver : five by five, in the pipe ;
Mitchell Baker : Firefox Turns 5 ;
Ken Da Numerator Kovash : Firefox Hits 25% Market Share on its Birthday ;
Chris Blizzard : 5 years of Firefox ;
Marco Zehe : Happy birthday, Firefox! ;
Official blog : Celebrating Five Years of Firefox! ;
About:Mozilla : Five years of Firefox, 25% market share, and more… ;

A few people have taken pictures. Here they are:

Jean Jacques Peters (hosted on my Flickr account)
Richard Ying : 5 ans de Firefox : longue vie au panda roux ;
Ludovic Hirlimann

Back from Prague!

Tristan — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:15:00 +0200

Most of the Mozilla team in Prague (photo by Ludovic Hirlimann, used under CC-BY-NC license)

There are so many things to say about European Moz Camp 09 – which took place in Prague last week-end – I just can't get started…

I'll try to describe it anyway. It was:

Energizing. For example, I had a blast discussing about motivation with Milos, our Serbian localizer, among many other.
Super informative, with tons of sessions, keynotes and no less than 4 tracks (QA, Dev, L10n and Advocacy).
Full of interactions, the one you can't have on IRC, conference calls or Bugzilla
Exciting (having Mike Beltzner explain the Firefox roadmap was great, but having him understand better the community in Europe was even better)
Fun (involving laughter, friends, geeky humor and local beer).

Every single minute I have spent there was exciting, and I'd like to thank for this all the people involved in making this event happen (at the risk of forgetting a couple dozen names!).

First and foremost, the lead organizers, William and Irina, all those who helped on this topic. If there were glitches (and nothing can be perfect on an event of this size!), I did not hear of them! ^[1]
The track organizers who have built a wonderful program with the speakers
All the volunteers who were willing to showed up
Mark Surman, Mike Beltzner and Glyn Moody for taking time out of their busy schedule

There are tons of posts, pictures and tweets that have been published around #eumozcamp09. But if there were only 2 things to see if you haven't been able to attend, they would be the following:

Mozilla Drumbeat slides with audio, by Mark Surman (31mn), but full of interesting stuff on what Mozilla Foundation could do in the future besides Firefox and code
Sethb and Choffman in a 42 seconds clip I love this Community Yeaaaah!!!. Pure joy^[2]

I'm looking forward a similar event next year, with FOSDEM next February in the meantime. See you there!

A couple of blog posts and photo albums from around Europe

Mozillians of Europe, Unite (by Glen Moody, in English, from the UK)
Mozilla Camp Europe 2009, Prague : j’y étais (in French, from Belgium)
Mozilla Camp Europe 2009 by Jan Odvarko (Czech Republic);
EU MozCamp 2009, Prague, by Kazé (France)
MozCamp 2009 in Prague (from The Netherlands)
All in all, community rocks (by Milos, from Serbia)
Mozilla Camp Europe 2009 (in Slovene, from Slovenia)
Pragatik bueltan #eumozcamp09 itzel baten ostean (in Basque) ;

Pictures & videos

My pictures on Flickr.com
Ludovic's Gallery (I hope you have more coming, Ludo !)
Flickr photos tagged eumozcamp09
Nukeador's videos (from Spain).

Notes

[1] Special shout out to Fuzzyfox, Irina and many others…

[2] I'm told that some doctors are already recommending it to people who suffer from depression

Love the web? Spread this poster!

Tristan — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 19:27:00 +0200

Tristan and Firefox love the Web

Tomorrow is the One Web Day, and Mozilla wants to celebrate the awesomeness of the internet. It’s also an chance to remind people that the web is a precious public resources. Your poster and photograph are a part of this. When you poster, you’re helping to keep the web open and free.

)

Svitlana loves the Web (in 4 different languages)

How can you help?

It's easy as one, two, three. And then four

Download the posters at www.mozilla.org/onewebday^[1]
Put your poster up at a prominent place, then take a picture of it
Upload and tag as #owdposter (on flickr.com, twitter or identi.ca)
Enter the context (Mozilla laptop bags to be won!)

)

Irina loves the Web (and code, too!)

Other people show their love for the Web too:

Notes

[1] You can "steal" this one too!

Quote of the day: Jay Sullivan on Fennec

Tristan — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 17:31:00 +0200

Jay Sullivan is the Mozilla VP of Mobile at Mozilla. He works on Fennec, the browser for mobile phones. Jay was recently interviewed by Lifehacker. Here is an interesting excerpt:

What we're seeing happen in mobile is just what we've been seeing on the desktop for the last five years. That's migrating from more client-heavy applications to more web-based applications. Fennec is built on the latest version of our browser engine, and has support for offline storage and things called web workers, which enables threaded applications that can run faster. All these technologies make it possible to build a first-class, HTML5-based application. Plus, we're looking at integrating with the devices' capability. A great example of that is geolocation. With a couple lines of JavaScript code, a webapp developer can take location into account. You see that in Firefox 3.5, with Google Maps supporting it. With Fennec, we're giving you that same ability, but I think it's more important in a mobile device. We're also integrating access to [the] device's camera, and we're working on other APIs to let developers access things like an accelerometer.

Back from vacations

Tristan — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 15:19:00 +0200

St Aubin sur Mer beach at dawn, aka Nan sector of Juno beach.

Poetry is important

Tristan — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 11:41:00 +0200

)

Sunset in Collioure

Some very good blog posts have been published recently, and I wanted to signal them to my readers. I'll start with a very general statement about the importance of Free, Libre and Open Source Software. It's Atul Varma's Business Card, who quotes an 9 years old and fundamental article by Larry Lessig, Code is law (with the book Code and other laws of Cyberspace).

Mitchell has published not one but two articles related to Mozilla's vision:

I Am Not A Number. "What’s the most interesting thing about the Internet today? To me, it’s not an application, it’s not a technology, it’s not a characteristic like “social.” The most interesting thing about the Internet is me. My experiences. And you. And your experiences."
Eyeballs with Wallets. Excerpt: "There are times, however, when being a wallet attached to eyeballs is not enough. The possibilities available to us online should be broader, just as they are in the physical world. Sometimes we choose to skip the mall and go to the library, or the town square or the park or the museum or the playground or the school. Sometimes we choose activities that are not about consumption, but are about learning and creation and improving the environment around us."

I like the fact that we're not ''just' "eyeballs with wallets". Of course, we're "Website visitors" (aka "Eyeballs"), and we're also customers of e-commerce sites (aka "Wallets"), but we're much more than this.

I'll conclude with a link to a pretty good New York Times article about Mozilla that quotes Mitchell (emphasis mine):

We succeeded because more people got engaged, helped us build a better product and helped us get the product into the hands of people. We succeeded because of the mission.

Exactly. Mitchell sums it up in less than 140 characters on Twitter :

we build Firefox to advance a mission. Now we need to show that Firefox is the first step, not everything.

The product (Firefox) and the mission are intertwined. The mission helps mobilizing forces and energies to build the product. And the product is here to advance the mission. Now our users do see the product (even if sometimes they confuse it with a search engine or an ISP), and sometimes "sense" the mission. We need to keep pushing on the mission part too (aka "poetry"): without it, Firefox is going to be challenged more than with it.

I'm back!

Tristan — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:23:00 +0200

After a 2 weeks trip on my motorcycle and my family (who took a train) in the South of France, I am now back at work since yesterday. Wonderful family and riding moments indeed...

)

Puy Mary (Pas de Peyrol, 1588m)

More pictures to come!

What's wrong with the Web?

Tristan — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 19:28:00 +0200

I was invited to hold a workshop at Lift France '09 which title was What's wrong with the Web. It looked like the topic was interesting, because it was the first workshop to reach the fully-booked status (with 25 seats) and we ended up with twice as many people in the workshop that we wanted! No doubt, LIFT participants – just like me – do think there are things to improve on the Web. I started the session with a brainstorm on sticky notes with the whole audience. We tried to put on the notes keywords describing what one considers as an issue with the Web (and more generally the Internet). We quickly ended up with hundreds of thee notes, posted on the wall. I asked Charles Nepote (FING member and LIFT co-organizer) to help with by categorizing the notes in order to list the top issues. Here they are, in no particular order:

Identity management
Universal access
Too much centralization of services
Off-line
Security
Privacy & big brother
Business
Content

Workshop "what's wrong with the Web?"

Then we discussed most of them, trying to identify the sub-issues and potential solutions. Here are the notes I took on the whiteboards^[1]:

Identity management
- Right to be forgotten
- Ability to have multiple identities
- Right to anonymous access (for political dissidents, whistleblowers...)
- Ability to take back my identity if abused by a third party

Universal access
- The digital divide
- Seniors
- Accessibility
- The lack of broadband in remote places
- One single Web, for mobile and desktop users
- Users need simplicity!
- Authors need to share best practices
- I need to be able to give feedback if a site does not work for me
- Politicians should work on this

Too much centralization of services
- Makes censorship easier
- Gives too much power to a couple of search engines
- What happens when a service shuts down?
- Lack of control over my data
- We should operate our own servers
- Devices such as Fonera2, NAS Home servers and ISP "boxes" could host me on the Internet.

Off-line
- How do I work while disconnected?
- How do I sync my off-line work with the Cloud?

Security
- Spam is making email irrelevant
- ~~Hackers~~ crackers are dangerous
- Security is painful to deal with
- Security is a necessary evil
- It's complex. We need education
- Security UI is key to education (but if only people read the dialog boxes!)
- It's everyone's responsibility (users, software vendors)
- People tend to externalize these issues to large service providers (see too much centralization of services)

Privacy & big brother
- Security is too often an excuse for monitoring people
- Security is too often an excuse for censorship
- The notion of privacy is evolving over time

Business
- How can I make money on the Web? Is advertising the only way?
- Is free content sustainable?
- What does "free" mean? (Am I bartering my privacy in exchange of free services without knowing it? Or is is really free, no strings attached?)
- There is way to much advertising
- Flash advertising (animated with sound) sucks.
- I hate pop-ups (and pop-under too), along with ads that float over the content

Content
- There are sites I cannot comment on. Can browsers fix this?
- Comments are too shallow/too aggressive
- Signal to noise ratio is too low
- It's all too serious
- Can I trust what I read on the screen?
- Where is the poetry on the Web?

During my workshop "what's wrong with the Web?"

Conclusion

Actually, as I'm using text to describe the issues, one can see they're all pretty much correlated. Security links to privacy, which links to data ownership, which links to identity, for example. So actually a graph would make a lot more sense to describe the relationships between all these issues.

After The discussion, I gave a quick wrap-up talk of these issues. I'm not to write it down here this post is already too long, but will certainly do in my next post. The idea of having my talk at the end of the workshop was two-fold:

Let people come up with issues I did not have on my radar. 50 brains are more efficient than one!
Try not to impose my view of the world to people in the room, but instead let them discover the issues (which is more powerful than hearing about them). In short: let people think by themselves instead of throwing a message at them.

Overall, leading this workshop was certainly a blast. It was intense, fun, challenging. I'm looking forward doing more of these in the future. In the mean time, thanks a lot to LIFT organizers, Laurent Haug (LIFT Founder), Charles Nepote (FING, for helping during the workshop), Jane Finette and Chris Hofmann (both from Mozilla) for preparing this with LIFT.

Notes

[1] The session was held in French and I took pictures of the sticky notes put on the paper boards: panel 1, panel 2, panel 3, panel 4, panel 5, panel 6.

Geneva with Mozilla contributors

Tristan — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:27:00 +0200

I'm back from the EU Inter-Community Meetup wonderfully organized by William, with representatives of a few Mozilla local communities, including Germany, Denmark, France, Spain and Italy.

The Mozilla European Inter-Community Meetup is the first of a series of community gatherings aiming to bring together active communities from across Europe in the same city for a day of presentations, discussions and workshops. The aim of the event is to enable communities to share experiences, learn from each other and improve collaboration.

It was quite a blast, with the usual mix of energy, enthusiasm, big brains, diversity of cultures and general willingness to do the right thing for the World, the Web and Mozilla. I've been involved with Mozilla for more than a decade, but I'm still excited by this . The agenda was not too different from other Mozilla meetings: lot of hard work in a meeting room, sandwiches for lunch and partying during the evening – beer, good food – along with a walk in the center of Geneva, the unmissable Jet d'eau and the ritual silly group photo !

Photo by William Quiviger, used under CC-BY-SA license.

A couple of interesting numbers:

Of the 22 people in the room, 17 were volunteers.
7 different nationalities. (FR, ES, IT, USA, DE, DK, AR)
The 5 locales represented here (Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Denmark) covered roughly 70 million active users in Europe.

A couple of links:

My Flickr set for the event
All pictures on Flickr tagged 'mozgeneva09'
Goofy's presentation. I particularly liked "Funny things should be done seriously" and "Give them the tools and they'll build cathedrals".

Upgrading the Web in 35 days

Tristan — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:16:00 +0200

There are tons of new developer-oriented features in Firefox 3.5 that are waiting to be used to create new Web applications. Geolocation. New canvas features. Native video and audio elements. The amazing Tracemonkey JavaScript engine. The ability to use Web fonts. A flurry of new CSS 3 properties and improvements. These are things that really get me excited because I understand their potential as I've been in the browser business for so long, but can be really hard to grasp for ordinary people in some cases.

But the truth is that Firefox 3.5 is a modern browser, part of a movement who wants the Open Web to thrive, with the help of other browser vendors such as Opera, Chrome and Safari. An Open and Generative Web where one can invent new stuff without having to ask permission.

hacks.mozilla.org banner

So we have to explain how these new features work, and what they enable developers to do. Enter Hacks.mozilla.org, a new blog put together by the Evangelism team, with material provided by the worldwide Mozilla Community. Over the 35 days to come^[1], starting today, we'll try to post 2 articles per day. One to demo something really cool, one to explain something new. Get ready to get excited. Get ready to learn new stuff about Web development.

The first articles are:

Introducing the Hacks.mozilla.org blog by Chris Blizzard. "While Firefox 3 was a signifigant upgrade for the web’s users, Firefox 3.5 does the same for developers."
Pushing pixels with canvas article, by Paul Rouget ;
Content-aware image resizing demo, by Stéphane Roucheray, a French Web developer.

Notes

[1] 35 days. Firefox 3.5. hint, hint!

Happy anniversary, Mozilla 1.0!

Tristan — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 09:16:00 +0200

Seven years ago today, Mozilla released its first browser, Mozilla 1.0. Wired has an article to celebrate^[1]. Two years and a half later, Firefox 1.0 was released.

T-shirt for a European Evangelism contest I organized early 2002, in preparation of the Mozilla 1.0 launch

Coincidentally, John Lilly (Mozilla CEO) has just published a blog post titled Onward. John talks about Mozilla getting new office space and reflects about all the things that have changed over the 4 past years, when he came on board. The whole post deserve a read, but here is an excerpt for my busy readers (emphasis mine):

In just the four years that we’ve been here — out of the 11 since the Mozilla project started — the web has been transformed, and has itself transformed so much of the way we live our lives. It’s easy to gloss over, since we see the changes every day — and it’s easy to see the road that we’ve traveled on as being inevitable — but it really wasn’t. The reason we have a vibrant, open web today is because of millions of little decisions and contributions made by thousands of people in that timeframe — people who work on browsers, people who build web sites & applications, people who evangelize for standards, people who use the web and ask/demand that it be better.

If you happen to read my blog, there are good chances that you are one of these people who have contributed to this changes with your "little decisions and contributions", such as using Firefox, installing it on your friends' computers and making sure your Website is compatible with modern browsers. I would like to thank you for this. But I'd like to reiterate the fact that this is just the beginning of the Web. Most of it remains to be invented. Let's make sure that we keep making these little decisions and contributions coming, so that the Web we're going to use tomorrow is the one we want!

Edit:

Mitchell Baker: 7 years of Mozilla product releases
Glyn Moody: Happy Birthday, Mozilla - and Thanks for Being Here. Pretty good read, with mentions of JWZ's Nomo zilla article.

Notes

[1] Hat tip goes to Frank Hecker for mentioning this.