Hacking for Christ » Syndicate

Mobile Market Reports

2012-05-16T12:04:19Z

“thinkinsights” and Google have released some fascinating data about smartphone usage, gathered from detailed consumer surveys.

All the presentation reports (right hand column) have roughly the same format. Why not download the report for your country, and the one for Brazil (the launch country for B2G) and see how different things are there compared to where you live?

Compared to the UK, in Brazil:

Far fewer people have smartphones (14% vs 51%)
Smartphones are used less often (40% vs 59% daily)
They are used on-the-go less often (64% vs 86%) – poorer network coverage?
Social networking is proportionately more popular than email
Smartphone gaming is significantly less popular (39% vs 62%)
They use fewer apps, even free ones (14 vs 23 installed)
Almost all smartphone users are urban
Cohabitation is significantly less common (20% vs 11%)

Thoughts: reading between the lines, network coverage is poorer and data-on-the-go is harder to find. We need to make sure B2G phones and apps are solid in absence of a good network connection. Also, the phone will be the only computing device for many users.

Welcome To Life

2012-05-16T08:05:13Z

An under-3-minute video short story by Tom Scott. “A science fiction story about what you see when you die. Or: the Singularity, ruined by lawyers.”

The ‘other-licenses’ Directory: Don’t Use It

2012-05-14T18:36:29Z

This is a public service announcement. There is a top-level directory in mozilla-central (and similar repos) called “other-licenses”. Don’t put any more code in it. Really. There’s now even a README saying so.

Longer version: this directory is not for non-MPLed code, it’s for non-MPL-compatible code, of which we have very little. There is some stuff in there which shouldn’t be, but let’s not make it worse, OK? :-) Keep your code where it logically lives; don’t make your life harder than it needs to be. If you really think you are importing code which needs to be in there, you should be talking to licensing@mozilla.org first (as with any code import) and explicitly saying you think that this is where it should go, so they can tell you that you’re wrong ;-)

WikiProject Mozilla: Help Wanted

2012-05-08T14:56:23Z

A week ago I lamented the sad state of the Mozilla-related articles on Wikipedia, and suggested it would be good to form a “WikiProject Mozilla” to clean them up. Robert McKay was kind enough to write a proposal on Wikipedia for such a project. If you are an existing regular or semi-regular Wikipedia editor and would like to help Mozilla by working on this, please add your “~~~~” to the Support section of that page, and keep an eye on its progress.

Mozilla Grows Too Big For Summit

2012-05-08T10:16:17Z

A quick Public Service Announcement, just in case anyone still has their summer plans on hold: Mozilla is now too large (yay!) to get us all in one physical location. So there won’t be a Mozilla Summit this year. Instead, the hard-working Contributor Engagement team is stepping up the pace on regional MozCamps – we’ve already had one in Latin America, and they are planning one for Europe, one for Asia and one for Africa/The Middle East before the end of the year. I won’t steal their thunder; look for more details very soon :-)

Lindholm’s Law

2012-05-07T19:22:48Z

If you are a software engineer, or in fact any sort of engineer, I strongly suggest you take careful note of what I will call “Lindholm’s Law”:

Never send a recorded communication containing a statement of opinion or decision on an IP-related legal question to someone who is not a lawyer.

Tim Lindholm’s unfortunate statement, contained in an email which was the subject of heavy legal argument in Oracle vs. Google, was:

We conclude that we need to negotiate a license for Java under the terms we need.

Even though one of the addressees of the email was a lawyer, and even though the email said “Attorney Work Product” and “Google Confidential” at the top, the court ruled that it was not attorney-client privileged, and could be used by Oracle in court. Read why.

GSoC 2012 Project List

2012-05-04T18:07:11Z

The Google Summer of Code kicked off two weeks ago, and I am pleased to list the 18 projects being done under the Mozilla banner. This is a 50% increase on last year; we are very grateful to Google for being so generous with slots. The name of each student is linked to the location where they will be posting weekly updates on their progress, if you want to follow along with a project you are interested in. (Apart from those students who have not yet sent me this information; consider this a public reminder.) I’m sure they would appreciate any help or advice you have :-) Please make them feel welcome!

Project	Student	Mentor
Thunderbird: ‘No Reply’ Reminder	Han Lin	Jonathan Protzenko
Thunderbird: App Tabs	Nguyen Ngoc Trung	Mike Conley
Calendar: Improve Invitation Support	Christian Kulpa	Ludovic Marcotte
Dynamic MathML – Support <maction>	Andrii Zui	Fred Wang
HTML5 and CSS3 Examples on MDN	Vikash Agrawal	Jean-Yves Perrier
Get ISPDB Into Production	Sergio Charpinel	Blake Winton
Graphical Timeline of Browser Events	Girish Sharma	Panos Astithas
Improve Gmail Interoperability	Atul Jangra	David Bienvenu
Instantbird: Account Import Wizard	Will Nayes	Florian Quèze
L10n Tool for Standardization of Terms	Gautam Akiwate	Philippe Dessante
Meemoo Improvements	Vilson Vieira	Forrest Oliphant
Native Webapps Support on Linux	Marco Castelluccio	Felipe Gomes
Networking Dashboard	Jiten Thakkar	Patrick McManus
OpenBadges Back End Improvements	Matthew Ramir	Chris McAvoy
Port SuperTux to the Web	Xingxing Pan	Alon Zakai
Slide Drive Improvements	Jeremy Banks	Greg Wilson
User-Specified Content Security Policy	Kailas Ravsaheb Patil	Tanvi Vyas
WebSocket Testing Tool	Robert Koch	Yvan Boily

“Witness” Web App: Hackers Wanted

2012-05-04T16:09:23Z

We need a “witness” web app which provides proof that person A has agreed to legal document X.

There are loads of applications for this:

Proof that a Mozilla contributor has agreed to our Committer’s Agreement
Proof that someone has agreed to the IPR policy necessary for contributing to a standards body mailing list
Proof that someone has agreed to a trademark licence

These things can be done without an app, but it’s dull and tedious for the person doing the paperwork. Much better to get a computer to do it.

In its simplest form, the app would just require a Persona login, show you the document, have you click “I Agree” and then store that information, with metadata such as time, IP address, document hash etc., perhaps sending a data bundle off to a timestamping service to prove it couldn’t be falsified later. There would also be a confirmation email sent out to the email account which would allow people to repudiate the agreement within a certain length of time. in case something had gone wrong.

There are loads of potential additional features – extra logging, a mechanism to email everyone to come back if the document is updated, notification of the document uploader when someone signs it, etc. But the basic idea is very simple, and could be really useful.

I asked for help on this at the start of last year, and got one response, but then the person turned out not to have time. Are there any web app hackers out there who would like to build a generally-useful piece of open source software?

Moar Crashes Please

2012-05-04T11:30:06Z

I’ve heard it would be helpful to the Fennec Native team if they had more crash data. So I’ve written the world’s simplest random website loader. Load it up on your phone or tablet and just let it go. It loads a new random page every 10 seconds. Glance at it every 10 minutes and submit any crashes that appear, or hit “Back” if a frame-busting script broke it. You can test Fennec while doing something else! :-)

I’ve been running it on my phone and tablet for an hour and a half, and submitted 2 tablet crashes (one Flash, one in libdvm).

Of course, it may not produce a high crash volume because it doesn’t interact with the page. Ideally, it would be an add-on, so frame-busting wouldn’t affect it, it could dismiss pop-ups, follow links, crash reports would have the correct URL, and perhaps it could even auto-submit crash reports and restart itself. Suggestions for better tools to use would be most welcome.

Orchestrated Agreement Is Often OK

2012-05-02T11:53:38Z

There’s a difference between [all the developers from a single company] actually being decentralized and simply striving to appear that way. Under certain circumstances, having your developers behave in concert can be quite useful, and they should be prepared to coordinate behind the scenes when necessary. For example, when making a proposal, having several people chime in with agreement early on can help it along, by giving the impression of a growing consensus. Others will feel that the proposal has momentum, and that if they were to object, they’d be stopping that momentum. Thus, people will object only if they have a good reason to do so. There’s nothing wrong with orchestrating agreement like this, as long as objections are still taken seriously. The public manifestations of a private agreement are no less sincere for having been coordinated beforehand, and are not harmful as long as they are not used to prejudicially snuff out opposing arguments.

– Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Wikipedia On Mozilla

2012-04-24T14:49:36Z

I recently read an article on Science Daily entitled: “Most Wikipedia Entries About Companies Contain Factual Errors”, which noted that companies often found it very hard to correct articles about themselves.

I noticed a while ago that there are several articles on Mozilla-related topics on Wikipedia which are out of date, poorly authored, uneven in coverage or all three. Some examples:

Mozilla: I cleaned up this article a bit in December, but it still needs further work – the order of items is chronological rather than in order of importance, and there are significant parts out of date (e.g. references to Minimo).
Mozilla Foundation: this page is quite accurate, but very incomplete. It says nothing about the Foundation’s most recent projects, the Webmakers initiative or the Mozilla Festival.
Mozilla Application Suite: this article is in the present rather than the past tense, suggesting that the Suite is still viable software.
SeaMonkey: this article contains far less detail than the Mozilla Application Suite article, despite being a current project.
Firefox: this is better than many, but has many “may be out of date” annotations, and needs someone familiar with Mozilla’s current doings to improve it.
Thunderbird: some good stuff but also a useless list of historical system requirements.

We’re a significant feature of the Internet and contemporary life, and we should have better quality coverage than this. Are there any Mozillians who are also Wikipedians who would like to form a “WikiProject Mozilla” or similar effort to clean these up? This is not a case of doing a few drive-by edits; that’s probably how the articles got the way they are now. It would need some commitment and proper sourcing and research. But it is important.

On The Internet, No-one Need Know You’re Unstructured

2012-04-24T08:39:45Z

Consider this: the only thing anyone knows about you on the Internet comes from what you write, or what others write about you. You may be brilliant, perceptive, and charismatic in person—but if your emails are rambling and unstructured, people will assume that’s the real you. Or perhaps you really are rambling and unstructured in person, but no one need ever know it, if your posts are lucid and informative.

– Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software

Blinded By Greed

2012-04-20T12:17:54Z

A recent email exchange I was involved in:

To whom it may concern,
I have recently had email with Mozilla firefox logos stating I have won £750,000 and I have to travel to Spain to collect the payment. Also I have to pay a fee to collect such winnings. They claim I have won a competion and won’t transfer the winnings into my bank account til I travel to Spain and collect. All I want to know is this true or false because I feel I have been scammed and I not in a position to leave my location.
Please can you confirm and respond in any emails.

It’s a hoax. Do not respond and don’t send them any money.

Gerv

I have just had a phone call askin for my bank account details and they will transfer via bank and it was from Mozilla uk to fax my details to them. You may say hoax I’m not sure as they did not ask for money up front.

Look, it’s a hoax. You were foolish to give them your phone number, and are foolish to continue contacting them. Stop. We are not giving away money!

Why did you ask Mozilla about the truth of this claim if you are not going to believe our answer?

Gerv

Mozilla and Patents

2012-04-17T23:08:53Z

Harvey Anderson, Mozilla’s General Counsel (that is, chief lawyer), has written a couple of blogposts recently on Mozilla and software patents.

The first was about the Microsoft purchase of the AOL/Netscape patents;
The second contains some more general thoughts on Mozilla’s patent strategy.

Also noteworthy is Twitter’s announcement today of the “Innovator’s Patent Agreement” (IPA), a model agreement for companies to come to with their employees, such that the company can still file for patents on the employee’s inventions but those patents can only be used defensively. You can read the draft IPA on GitHub, and even fork it and submit pull requests :-)

Empathy

2012-04-17T09:51:16Z

There does not seem to be much correlation, in either direction, between the ability to write good code and the ability to communicate with one’s fellow human beings. There is some correlation between programming well and describing technical issues well, but describing technical issues is only a tiny part of the communications in a project. Much more important is the ability to empathize with one’s audience, to see one’s own posts and comments as others see them, and to cause others to see their own posts with similar objectivity. Equally important is noticing when a given medium or communications method is no longer working well, perhaps because it doesn’t scale as the number of users increases, and taking the time to do something about it.

– Karl Fogel, Producing Open Source Software