Mission feeds morale

A long time ago I surprised Marco Zehe with a question and I took notes. These are my notes:

me: What do you like about your work at Mozilla? You can take your time, and if you like you can answer another day.

[0.01 seconds elapse]

Marco: Now is fine. A couple of things. The fact that sometimes you can work independently and thus are required to take some responsibility. You see gratification for your work in many different ways. I'm fully aligned with open source and making the web better - our mission - that's why I work here. We get to shape the way new stuff on the web becomes accessible. Whenever I get together with Mozillians, the amount of creativity and brilliance everyone brings to the table... creativity in a lot of ways. I'm always amazed by the talent at Mozilla.

me: Can I blog this.

Marco: Sure I don't care.

 I can tell you Marco is still excited today. Specifically about Firefox Mobile OS... more on that another day :)

Go ahead browser, make my day...

This command (I use OS X) takes the patches in my mercurial queue (which I tend to name bug-#) and opens a browser tab for each.

hg qseries | sed 's/bug-/https:\/\/bugzilla.mozilla.org\/show_bug.cgi?id=/' | xargs open

There's probably 94 better ways to do that but meh, and barely blog worthy perhaps... but this way I'll have a record of the command for when I forget. And smart people can add comments showing me better ways :)

I guess having FF restore my session is a good one.

7 things

I think Steve Lee was first to tag me with this fun 7 things meme.

My Seven

1. I lived most of my childhood on a family goat farm in rural Ontario, Canada. I loved fetching buckets of water for the goats and watching them drink deeply. One incredibly clever goat tried to murder me in various ways, but really it was sort of a Pink Panther - Cato relationship. Thankfully "Jody" was lousy at martial arts.
   
2. I now live in Toronto, a male in a house dominated by 3 strong women.
   
3. I'm a soccer player in the land of hockey.
   
4. The first computer I touched was one of the very first IBM PCs which my friends father had brought home from Geac. That night I lay awake thinking of that cool monochrome text glowing on the display. After a few years of selling farm-fresh free range chicken eggs my first computer was a Radio Shack CoCo2, and some 'older kid' I knew from the store gave me his old 6809 assembler programming cartridge. He had started dating. I saved my programs on cassette tape.
   
5. Yeah I was on the highschool programming team one year. Being the youngest, when we got our task list our leader gave me an easy one and I wrote out the algorithm on paper for when it came time to type it in (we shared one computer). We ran out of time working on the first task (the hardest). There is a lesson here somewhere.
6. My career plan was to build strategy based computer games until a guest lecturer introduced me to the world of accessibility technology.
7. I still have that country-boy trust in people.
   

The Rules

1. Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Passing it on, in no particular order:

1. Willie Walker
   
2. Pete Higgins
3. Greg Wilson
   
4. Simon Bates
5. Chris Hoffman
   
6. Jono DiCarlo
   
7. Flavio Percoco Premoli
   

Joining the Mozilla Accessibility Team

For my readers, all 5 of you, I want you to know the rumors are truthy. The Mozilla Corporation has come to an arrangement with the ATRC that will allow me to spend some time focusing on helping Marco and Surkov with Firefox accessibility!

We're scattered nicely. Marco works in Germany, and Surkov in Siberia. I'm working out of Mozilla's Toronto office where, in one week, I've managed to spill shawarma juice on Beltzner's chair, ramble irrelevantly and incoherently to Jeff Muizelaar about C++ object layout compiler differences[1], and order the sandwich melt instead of the dry rub ribs at CGL. What was I thinking?

Things I've learned: some spouses do in fact let their husbands brew beer in the kitchen, seriousness combined with fun is serious fun, having an espresso machine in the office is genius, the world stops for women's five pin bowling, if an Olympian uses chemical enhancements then they should compete in an evening gown, and finally, I'm going to learn a lot. I'm used to working with smart people... but these guys are sick!

[1] My current bed time reading is "Inside the C++ Object Model" by Lippman. I wish I'd read this 12 years ago. I recommend it to anyone interested in C++ object layout, compiler optimizations and so on... fantastic... but my next book choice will be fiction.

My Wordle

What should the alt text be? I think I give up...




Image made by http://www.wordle.net/

Moz@ATRC

Several days ago Tim Riley, and Jono DiCarlo, both from MoCo visited our lab here at the ATRC. As a sort of swearing-in I took them to our services pod where they got to try out some assistive technology. I took a few pics, and decided to try out my free download of Comic Life for OS X. It is a visual tool that is incredibly intuitive and simple to use (but not very accessible I'm afraid).

The first few frames show Jono, and Tim with shiny dots on their foreheads. These dots are picked up by a camera resting on the top of the screen, and allow the operation of the mouse pointer via head movement. We hooked them up with the open source Dasher input software. I think they both got a kick out of trying this and other Assistive Technology. The last frame shows them meeting with more of my group at the University of Toronto, where we discussed QA, automated testing, and UI design in open source communities.

Thanks for reading.

Where is David?

I've had enough requests to prompt this somewhat rare personal post. My second child, another healthy girl, Riley, was born January 6th of this month!

I feel so lucky, thrilled, and tired.

I've saved up some holiday time and will continue to focus on my family until the second half of February. High priority community work that I'm involved with will continue to get enough attention that I'm not a bottleneck, but pretty much everything else is on the backburner. Thanks for your patience.

And thanks for reading.

Be careful with "this"!

If you've ever struggled with registering JavaScript object methods as callbacks, you're bound to enjoy this recent post by ATRC colleague Simon Bates:

Registering JavaScript object methods as callbacks

I hope it brings you closure.

If Julie Andrews hacked on Mozilla...

Foxes on irc channels and newbies with questions
Bright helpful brattle and warm fuzzy kittens
XPCOM IDLs XUL PRUnichar strings
These are a few of my favorite things!
Chrome colored ponies and mozilla strudels
Bind doorbells and sleigh bells with XBL noodles
Thunderbirds fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things!
Hackers in dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eye lashes
Third party skinning gives firefox bling
These are a few of my favorite things!
When the bugs bite, and tinderbox stings
When I'm feeling sad,
I simply remember
my favorite things
and then I don't feeel so bad!
Foxes on irc channels and newbies with questions
Bright helpful brattle and warm fuzzy kittens
XPCOM IDLs XUL PRUnichar strings
These are a few of my favorite things!