Weave 0.7 Released

mconnor

September 30, 2009

6:23 pm

We’ve been hard at work over the last month on the next milestone on our path to 1.0, and we’ve just released version 0.7.   In this release we have continued work on scalability and reliability, user-facing performance, and more exploration of the new interface model that first appeared in 0.6.

For more details about Weave 0.7, please check out the details over at the Weave blog!


Weave 0.7 Released

mconnor

6:23 pm

We’ve been hard at work over the last month on the next milestone on our path to 1.0, and we’ve just released version 0.7.   In this release we have continued work on scalability and reliability, user-facing performance, and more exploration of the new interface model that first appeared in 0.6.

For more details about Weave 0.7, please check out the details over at the Weave blog!


Test Pilot: Ready to dig into some data?

Jinghua Zhang

9:54 am

Exciting! The first test flight has completed and we’re now ready to release the results!

We’ve now completed our inaugural Test Pilot study, with more than 5,000 opt-in participants from around the world providing invaluable data into how they use tabs in their daily Web browsing, and today we’re making this data available under an open license for analysis by the wider research community.

With this first study our primary objective has been to provide a trial run of an end-to-end process while still maintaining user privacy. We believe that we’ve been able to gather enough information to answer the questions posed by the Tab Open/Close study while ensuring that we’re true to the privacy policy and guiding principles. All submitted test data is stored in anonymous form, none of it is directly associated with any potentially personally identifiable information, and no directly personally identifiable information was collected or stored.

tabs_max_xlim200

Data from this study is being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, with the additional requirement that you acknowledge that Mozilla cannot vouch for the quality or timeliness of any third-party analysis or work derived from the Mozilla Test Pilot Data.

We’re still working on the best way in which to license data from the Test Pilot program. Please do join us in the discussion group, especially if you are a researcher and help us better understand requirements for publication.

We encourage people to make creative use of this data, to conduct analysis and to perform research on these downloadable datasets. When you publish work derived from our test data, we ask that you cite Mozilla Test Pilot as the source. While it’s not required that you contribute back your analysis, we truly hope that you will join us in the spirit of shared exploration and research. Please do share your work back with us through the discussion group.

Tab Open/Close Study Test Data (9/3/2009-9/24/2009)

Get Involved

We invite you to participate in shaping the future of the Test Pilot program:

  1. Install and play with the Test Pilot add-on .
  2. Report a bug.
  3. Suggest ways to better structure the program or improve the user experience of participating in tests.
  4. Add your ideas for usability tests to the test proposals page on the Labs wiki.

Test Pilot: Ready to dig into some data?

Jinghua Zhang

9:54 am

Exciting! The first test flight has completed and we’re now ready to release the results!

We’ve now completed our inaugural Test Pilot study, with more than 5,000 opt-in participants from around the world providing invaluable data into how they use tabs in their daily Web browsing, and today we’re making this data available under an open license for analysis by the wider research community.

With this first study our primary objective has been to provide a trial run of an end-to-end process while still maintaining user privacy. We believe that we’ve been able to gather enough information to answer the questions posed by the Tab Open/Close study while ensuring that we’re true to the privacy policy and guiding principles. All submitted test data is stored in anonymous form, none of it is directly associated with any potentially personally identifiable information, and no directly personally identifiable information was collected or stored.

tabs_max_xlim200

Data from this study is being made available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License, with the additional requirement that you acknowledge that Mozilla cannot vouch for the quality or timeliness of any third-party analysis or work derived from the Mozilla Test Pilot Data.

We’re still working on the best way in which to license data from the Test Pilot program. Please do join us in the discussion group, especially if you are a researcher and help us better understand requirements for publication.

We encourage people to make creative use of this data, to conduct analysis and to perform research on these downloadable datasets. When you publish work derived from our test data, we ask that you cite Mozilla Test Pilot as the source. While it’s not required that you contribute back your analysis, we truly hope that you will join us in the spirit of shared exploration and research. Please do share your work back with us through the discussion group.

Tab Open/Close Study Test Data (9/3/2009-9/24/2009)

Get Involved

We invite you to participate in shaping the future of the Test Pilot program:

  1. Install and play with the Test Pilot add-on .
  2. Report a bug.
  3. Suggest ways to better structure the program or improve the user experience of participating in tests.
  4. Add your ideas for usability tests to the test proposals page on the Labs wiki.

Want to help support a worldwide effort to build the future of the Web? Join the Mozilla Labs team!

Pascal Finette

September 28, 2009

10:51 am

Join Mozilla!

Your favorite web browser is Firefox, you played with projects hosted by Mozilla Labs, probably you even hacked on them already? Now is the time to join the Mozilla Labs team to catalyze and support the work of a worldwide community working on innovations for the future of the Web.

We are currently looking for all-stars in the following roles:

Product Marketing Manager – Labs

You will be a key contributor to Mozilla’s outbound product marketing efforts for its innovation programs in general, and projects like the Concept Series, Ubiquity, Weave and Jetpack specifically. If you’re passionate about the Web, and are willing to roll-up your sleeves, then this position is for you.

Learn more and apply here.

For our Jetpack project:

Product Manager – Jetpack

Are you a talented Product Manager who wants to guide future development of Mozilla Labs’ Jetpack project? Read more about the position and apply here.

Labs Engineer – Jetpack

Are you an exceptional Software Engineer who wants to help design and develop the underlying technology framework for Mozilla Labs’ experiments, with an initial focus on the Jetpack project? Learn more about this role and apply here.

And for our Developer Tools/Bespin:

Labs Engineer – Developer Tools (Bespin)

We are looking for a forward thinking Software Engineer with a focus on User Interface creation to join the Developer Tools Lab and initially focus on the Bespin project. The Developer Tools Lab is a group within Mozilla’s Labs organization that is focused on making it fun and easy to create amazing applications on the Open Web platform. Bespin is a newly formed experiment in delivering a revolutionary code editing experience entirely in the browser using Open Web technologies, like HTML 5’s canvas element, local storage, web workers, and so forth.

Read the full job spec and apply here.


Want to help support a worldwide effort to build the future of the Web? Join the Mozilla Labs team!

Pascal Finette

10:51 am

Join Mozilla!

Your favorite web browser is Firefox, you played with projects hosted by Mozilla Labs, probably you even hacked on them already? Now is the time to join the Mozilla Labs team to catalyze and support the work of a worldwide community working on innovations for the future of the Web.

We are currently looking for all-stars in the following roles:

Product Marketing Manager – Labs

You will be a key contributor to Mozilla’s outbound product marketing efforts for its innovation programs in general, and projects like the Concept Series, Ubiquity, Weave and Jetpack specifically. If you’re passionate about the Web, and are willing to roll-up your sleeves, then this position is for you.

Learn more and apply here.

For our Jetpack project:

Product Manager – Jetpack

Are you a talented Product Manager who wants to guide future development of Mozilla Labs’ Jetpack project? Read more about the position and apply here.

Labs Engineer – Jetpack

Are you an exceptional Software Engineer who wants to help design and develop the underlying technology framework for Mozilla Labs’ experiments, with an initial focus on the Jetpack project? Learn more about this role and apply here.

And for our Developer Tools/Bespin:

Labs Engineer – Developer Tools (Bespin)

We are looking for a forward thinking Software Engineer with a focus on User Interface creation to join the Developer Tools Lab and initially focus on the Bespin project. The Developer Tools Lab is a group within Mozilla’s Labs organization that is focused on making it fun and easy to create amazing applications on the Open Web platform. Bespin is a newly formed experiment in delivering a revolutionary code editing experience entirely in the browser using Open Web technologies, like HTML 5’s canvas element, local storage, web workers, and so forth.

Read the full job spec and apply here.


Mozilla Labs Meetup – Oct 8, 2009

Ragavan Srinivasan

9:02 am

Updated: Oct 6, 2009

1. The event will start at 6:30 PM.

2. The venue is Twitter HQ 539 Bryant St., San Francisco, CA 94107. Many thanks to the fine folks at Twitter for helping host the event.

3. Alexander Limi and Alex Faaborg from the Firefox team will be giving an informal chat on what to expect in the future versions of Firefox.

Please RSVP on the Meetup page if you will be coming. Thanks to those who’ve already done so.

Hope to see you all there.

Original post below

It’s time for another edition of Labs Night, our monthly meetup to discuss Mozilla Labs projects, your projects and the Open Web. Our October session will be Thursday, 10/08 6-9 pm. We haven’t yet settled on a venue yet as we are looking at a few different venues in San Francisco. We will post an update as soon as we’ve picked one. The event is open to everyone, so if you are in the San Francisco area feel free to stop by.

We have two awesome speakers this time around, so it will be double the excitement. Brett Slatkin and Brad Fitzpatrick from Google will talk about all the cool work that’s happening on the real time web. In particular, they’ll talk about Pubsubhubbub and Webfinger.

We will also hear what a lot of the Mozilla Labs projects have been working on, in 5 minute lightning talk style presentations. We’ll have a few slots open for other lightning talks as well, so if you are working on a cool project, this is a great opportunity to show and tell.

As with previous Labs nights, there will be some good food.  Please RSVP on the meetup page if you plan to attend as that will help us determine how much food to order.

PS: We are also working on getting someone from the Firefox team come give a talk. Stay tuned for more info.


Once Upon A Time In Stanford: Theatrical Trailer

Abi Raja

September 27, 2009

8:31 pm

The following PREVIEW has been approved for, Inappropriate audiences, By the blog association of America, UnInc.

The film advertised has been rated R, Humans strongly cautioned, All material will be inappropriate for humans under acceptable intelligence level, Adult themes, adult activity, hard language, intense and persistent violence, sexually-oriented nudity, drug abuse.

A Surreal Production

Fade into a group of three people standing around a small unknown object on the ground. There’s no background music, but the sound of crickets chirping far away can be faintly heard. They speak in whispers.

BOY #1: What we tried was … I suppose, what I’m saying is that we are always doomed.

GIRL #1: No, it’s alive. Every breath could be heard. Even now.

BOY #2: And time will pass and we will forever be trapped in this moment.

BOY #1: There’s going to be at least another million dollars.

BOY #2: What about the oranges and fireflies?

GIRL #1: The President wouldn’t. He has more than enough issues on his mind. And the love. And everything else.

BOY #1: I .. am .. really .. sorry. I really am. I’m sorry about all the things I did and all the things I didn’t.

BOY #1: I’m truly sorry for how everything turned out.

The other two don’t say anything. Tears appear on the eyes of the three but they don’t look at each other. Instead, they stare beyond their human circle into the wilderness that looks stunningly beautiful at this time of day, as the sun sets.

BOY #1 starts walking. The camera pans from his eyes to his shoes as they trudge across the fallen dead leaves. As the sun disappears beneath the horizon, the camera zooms out. We see the silhouette of BOY #1 falling to the ground on his knees. Soft, beaty and at its core, optimistic (juxtaposed with the emotions of everything that happened earlier) music starts to play, getting louder as the camera zooms out even further leaving the viewer with a view of nature and a hard-to-distinguish human at the center of it all.

Fade to black.

An old lady walks to a desk in a hospital and asks something that is inaudible, the receptionist replies “We don’t do that kind of thing here”.

An African teenager talks to a police officer wearing a blue uniform in an exaggerated manner, “Look! This is just chocolate!”. The scene is set in Terminal 2 of Changi Airport.

Three young men walk across a crowded open space in Raffles City in the heart of Singapore flanked by skyscrapers in every direction, one of them says “They’ll throw you in jail for that shit”.

Fade to black.

NARRATOR: This fall, one man,

A boy waves goodbye to his family.

A plane leaves the runaway and heads into the thicket of clouds.

Fade to black.

NARRATOR: On the journey of his life,

The camera flies over the Great Wall of China.

A huge portrait of Mao is seen hanging at the entrance to the Forbidden City in Tienanmen Square.

A Boeing 747 soars across a blue sky above an envelope of blue clouds.

An aerial shot of the Statue of Liberty and New York.

The Main Quad of Stanford basking in the plentiful sunlight with a cloudless blue sky in the background.

Fade to black.

NARRATOR: In an attempt to change the world

A dark, awkward Indian 18-year-old walking solitarily across Escondido Mall as the sun sets with the red-domed Hoover Tower in the background.

Shots of the White House followed by pictures of the Capitol – the West Face and the Capitol Rotunda.

A starving old man in Africa lies on a simple white bed. He removes the intrevenous drips that are pierced into his hand, stands, walks to the edge of his room and steps out onto the grass. His bare, thin black feet are seen against the greenness of the grass.

As the music grows louder and the beat faster, a quick succession of shots of the Golden Gate Bridge and various parts of Stanford and San Francisco.

Hundreds of men in suits walking across Wall Street.

NARRATOR: To find love

A blonde-haired boy kisses another blonde-haired boy in a sea of lip-locked couples.

A girl cries as she walks alone over a large field of long grass.

Two hands together in front of a fountain.

A boy and girl lay in a field of sunflowers oblivious and yet conscious, as a strong breeze brushes over them.

NARRATOR: And to discover the meaning of life

Serene shots of dew on blades of grass.

Someone’s lips as they blow onto a dandelion which flows apart melding into the gentle air.

Two lips locked in a intense kiss, the faces are not visible.

A sun rises over green hills.

NARRATOR: As the world explodes around him

In rapid succession, shots change. The music reaches its intense apex.

A black volcano spews massive amounts of orange lava.

A girl leaves crying from a classroom.

A boy walks calmly to the edge and falls over the mountain. He drops silently as if he were already dead.

A tycoon strikes the shores, houses are ripped apart and blown into the wind.

A nuclear bomb explodes, an intense fiery mushroom that renders the world strangely silent for a moment.

The music fades out as the screen turns slowly to black.

Silence follows.

Another shot of what appears to be the same boy in the first scene but this time we can only see his silhouette. The clouds pass by over him to reflect the passing of time, the sun sets, the lake is still, the boy sits there, on his knees.

Utter blackness.

And without a thud,

ONCE UPON A TIME IN STANFORD

Fade to black.

Coming soon to a blog near you.

Fade to black.

11 lines of text with names of actors, producers, co-producers, cinematographers, composers, music supervisors and rich-old-Jewish-men-who-controlled-the-media-and-the-rest-of-the-Universe-even-during-the-Holocaust, that no one can possibly read in 0.8 seconds, with a copyleft notice at the bottom.


Don’t worry about “skewing” the data

Jono DiCarlo

September 25, 2009

2:59 pm

I get a lot of people contacting me by email, IRC, forums, or blog comments to say that they’re “worried that if I join Test Pilot I’ll skew the data” because “I’m sure that my tab usage is atypical”.

People! Don’t worry about being an atypical user!

First of all, we have already had almost 5,000 Test Pilot data submissions. One outlier isn’t going to do much to “skew” a data set of that size.

But more importantly, you shouldn’t assume that you’re abnormal. We don’t know what “normal” tab usage is! That’s why we’re doing this experiment, to find that out. If we started out with an idea of what normal tab usage looked like, and threw out things that didn’t match our preconceived notions, that would be a clear case of experimenter bias. Then we’d really be skewing the data.

For instance, I was surprised to find out that there are users who have over 500 tabs open at a time. Over 500! They’re surely outliers, but they’re not abnormal users &emdash; they’re just users. That number isn’t skewing the data &emdash; it is the data. Thanks to those users’ participation, we now know that having 500 tabs open is something that people do with Firefox, something we might not have known otherwise.

As I said in a previous post, I do believe we have a major oversampling of the power-user / early-adopter demographic in our current Test Pilot user base, and that we need to work on fixing this by reaching out to a wider sample of users. But note that word: wider. Excluding yourself because you think you’re atypical isn’t helpful. If you really want to help our sample — and I’m touched that so many of you do want to help " the best thing you can do is to let your less-techie friends know about Test Pilot.


Bespin in Ubiquity and Jetpack

Christian Sonne

September 21, 2009

6:44 am

Lately I’ve been spending some time working on Bespin integration in Jetpack and Ubiquity. “But Jetpack already had Bespin support!” some of you might think, an yes it did – but only for people running OSX. The rest of us was stuck with a textarea, styled to look slightly like Bespin (and indeed, most people didn’t even notice it wasn’t the real one). Ubiquity had CodeMirror for certain version of Firefox, but for most users it would be disabled due to an incompatibility between later versions of Firefox (3.1b1+ I think) and the CodeMirror project.

The problem — and the reason Ubiquity didn’t change over sooner — was that the official version of Bespin embedded was running a quite old Bespin (0.2.2), while the current version is 0.4.3, and the former didn’t support clipboard copy/paste in anything but OSX.

Long story short: a few bugs later and a lot of help from some very friendly Bespin devels (thanks Alex and Kevin!), inquisitive readers can now try out Bespin 0.4.3 in Jetpack and Ubiquity. It will require you to apply patches by hand against the latest development versions of the relevant project, or wait until the changes land.

EDIT: here is an updated version of the Ubiquity Bespin patch, that includes autoindent, closepairs, and other useful settings.

Feedback (and bug reports) would be greatly appreciated.


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