Debloper's Open Source Weblog

MozFest 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 06:20:07 PDT

Claimed to be the largest Mozilla hosted event, Mozilla Festival is the place for creative-developers to share & show-off. With that being said, I've had the pleasure to attain MozFest 2012 at London, last November - allow me to share the joy!

Looking back, the entire event has so many tales to tell - but, as most of them are best told over a coffee - I won't take you through all the trivial details here - rather, let's just get down with the facts:

Arrival

We were four Mozillians travelling from India to attend MozFest
Gauthamraj couldn't join us for Visa problems
Me and Sayak travelled & back together, and so did Vineel & Galaxy
Upon arrival, we headed straight the Mozilla Office, instead of going to the hotel & taking rest
There's a story about getting in the office-building - remind me later!

MozSpace

Mozilla London office is the first MozSpace I've visited. Sure it was a great experience - better than expected
It looked more like a cool startup's workplace - very casual, very welcoming
Liked the XboX 360 & the giant screen so very much - just sucked at Halo with the analogue controller (PC Gamer blues!)
Met Pierros, Kensie, FuzzyFox, Ioana, Emma & many other Mozillians for the first time - felt overwhelmed!

Inauguration

Reps reached at the venue (Ravensbourne College) early, for prep
Reflection of well-planning was everywhere - little things that make the experience incredible
Volunteers & overseers knew what they're doing - almost never seen them disoriented, never seen them stressed
Met Leo McArdle - a bright developer Rep of Mozilla UK, partner in MCS project
Met Michelle briefly in the morning - she was running around all the 7 floors
Got to know there's a guy called Gunner - his superpowers included perplexing you with a mic in his hand, and scheming to take over the world when his mouth is shut... mind. was. blown.
Reps, and booth hosts were briefed about the event, schedule, do-s & don't-s, evacuation strategy in case of alien invasion etc.
After the lunch, we wandered around the place, took pictures - as the big event for the day - the Science Fair, doesn't start until 6:00pm.
The air-drone by Mozilla IT was super-cool; the WiFi hotspots - not so much, though
The Science Fair itself was such a joy!

People showing off all sorts of crazy prototypes!
Mozilla Japan's JS-Cocktail got so much attention
I particularly liked The Knight Foundation's (particularly, Mark Boas) works on editing/indexing/remixing audio-video by their transcripts - some early prototypes, some with live demo.
There were so much going on, that 2-3hrs really weren't adequate

Engagements

On 10th Morning, the main Festival started - after Gunner, Mark Surman took the stage & set off the event's main course with a very earnest request: Fuck it, Ship it!
At our Contributor Garage booth, we Reps were busy being awesome & shizz.
I was enjoying speaking about Firefox OS, for people were quite tangentially interested about it; also, it was the first time I laid my hands on a real device running B2G
Seen #FlashFredy in action - he'd probably flash his pocket-watch with Firefox OS, if it had a USB port...
Had Mozilla QA's One & Done workshop - it certainly was productive, and sure was worth giving more time to. Here I met Zac and KaiRo
Firefox OS app-hacking was going on upstairs, BadgeBingo, Codery etc. other fun-booths were also drawing visitors, and Regnard was trying to have his session beside the Contributor Garage - crashed 'em a few times as well... :P
Accumulated enough adrenaline, walked upto Christian Heilmann's photobooth (where he was demo'ing his Makey Makey operated interaction cam) - and said "hi" (and some more stuffs)

A few mins later, when I was at the contributor garage - he walked up, said "don't know whether it fits you, I don't have any other size", and handed over to me what was a HTML5-pirate t-shirt!
I wasn't even decided about my list of technological visionaries, or
Let's just say you're 4 and your nursery sweetheart just kissed you - what do you do? You scream? You run? You kiss 'er back? Go cry to your momma? Oh, you wish!
So there was I, perplexed for a couple of second - wasn't ever cute & cuddly, but at least should've smiled & waved!

We missed a boat-ride on the Thames (cause we were in hurry(!)) to attend the party at London Film Museum... stone throwing distance apart from London Eye and Park Plaza Westminster Bridge, where we stayed
The next day was almost the same - except, I had a better plan to accumulate the user/developers' feedback on Firefox OS, with a shortlinked Google Form - which they could even fill from the device itself - got some pretty amazing responses!

Sightseeing

Me & Sayak had flight later the day on 12th Nov. So we planned to have a wandering-around the city, as much as we can cover.
Went first to 221/B, Baker Street. Walked passed Madame Tussaud's, till British Museum from there.
Took a mental note to have a full day and pre-performed researches for the Museum itself, the next time I visit - and left for the London Bridge.
Leaving the tube at London Bridge station, we discovered, the closest bridge wasn't the Tower Bridge we were looking for - had to walk a bit.
We got till the bridge, basically because of Sayak's continuous pestering - I'd have given up - took a lot of pictures on the way.
Couldn't hit Tate's Modern - were running out of time; so grabbed the luggages from Hotel & run for the Airport.
Oh did I mention? It was raining all day long (the reason I mentioned walking so many times). Awfully thanks for your best weather, London!

Takeaways

Properly understanding the phrase well planned execution
Meeting a large set of European Mozillians for the first time
The Less Yak, More Hack mantra with massive reuse value
The Firefox OS user feedbacks (special thanks, Caitria O'Neill)
Popcorn release & close-up of Webmaker (digital-literacy) project
Knight Foundations' works on using technology in Data-Journalism
Realizing the lack, & the urge to host more developer events in India

Matt Thompson shared how to host mini-MozFests if you wanted to - Webmakers, you should be through it; and, if you're more interested about the event insights, then Michelle's take on that is a must.

MozTI @ BESU: Mobilizing Mozillians in Kolkata

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 06:44:23 PST

MozTI @ BESU: Organizers From left: Subhasish Kundu, Soumya Deb, Sayak Sarkar, Priyanka Nag, Shambo Bishnu, Amrita Roychowdhury, Gaurab Patra, Ramit Das, Avik Pal, Sankha Narayan Guria, Kaustav Das, Swarnava Sengupta & Arijita Das

Prelude

At the team dinner of the Mozilla Summer Code Party mega wrap-up event last September, a discussion bubbled up: "Mozilla Pune is a success, and so is the communities in Hyderabad & Chennai - what's next?"

A handful few of the active Mozillians in Pune (Me, Sayak, Priyanka) are originally from Bengal, and un-surprisingly we already knew the answer - as it has hurt us long enough to not have a Mozilla presence in our own City of Joy!

We knew very well that it'd be a challenging job, but were confident enough to tackle them; and queued it up for post-mozCamp todo list. So, when in December Sayak got to spend his semester-vacation in Kolkata, he seized the opportunity to start with the task by organizing an informal meetup (MozCafé) - which gained tremendous exposure, beyond expectation.

Preparation

Students of BESU, attending MozCafé Kolkata (Gaurab, Subhasish et. al.) were the first ones to come back with a follow-up - willing to host events in their institute. To our surprise, they had set a very tight schedule of less than 2 weeks.

You could tell they're quite of a curious bunch, by the way they named the event "MozTI" - a wordplay on "Masti" (मस्ती), i.e. Fun/Joy - backronym'd as "Mozilla Transposing Ideas"; and pro-actively started with the promotion by setting up websites etc. Some rough-edges of haste were there, but the enthusiasm & willingness to do good trumped the lack of experience. Also, the institute-management - especially, BESU Vice Chancelor, Dr. Ajoy Kumar Roy - helped organize the event in a great deal.

I planned to conduct some experiments on event-tracks to see how that turns out, compared to traditional flow we were following along previously:

Use an anchor to keep the event on track.
Split the day's activity in two distinct part.

Talks and overviews before lunch
Hand-ons & demos after lunch

Share large code-repos & pre-configured development-VMs

...details on why and how are revealed next up.

Presentation

The first day of the event was more of a general collective FOSS sessions to warm-up the audience. It included Google Summer of Code by Sayak Sarkar, hands on MediaWiki by Sucheta Ghosal, Outreach Program for Women (OPW) & WoMoz by Priyanka Nag, and a hackathon conducted by HackerRank. Being on transit, I couldn't attend first day first hand, but Priyanka has blogged about her experience which wraps it up quite good.

The second day of the event was completely focused on Mozilla, its products, platform, contribution model etc. Being a technical-university, the audience were more interested in development. Here's how we split up the job:

Sayak took up the Webmaker

Brief on Mozilla Manifesto
Overview of webmaker projects
Hands on Thimble, X-ray Goggles & Popcorn

Sankha got the audience into development

"Build Your Own Firefox"
#introduction to become a dev-contributor
A bug's life-cycle & how to submit patches

I covered the platform products & researches

Firefox, Thunderbird, Firefox OS
Persona, Marketplace, Devtools etc.
Hands on Firefox Devtools
Firefox OS Simulator Demo
Bananabread demonstration
Plus, I covered for the Emcee/Anchor role

Also, we had Q/A session with present Mozilla Contributors (Sayak, Swarnava, Priyanka, Sankha, Gaurab et. al.), to make it more interactive, live, and give the audience a first-hand idea of many kinds of Mozillians and their activities.

I've had planned to start a new ritual: live-blogging from the events - but anchoring & live-blogging don't quite go hand-in-hand - or, maybe I just suck at it; either way...

To elaborate the experiments we made for the second day:

Anchoring:

Till we used this format to keep the track, well, on track - we never knew how useful it actually is.
Going forward, we can sure plan & use it in a much better way.

Split the day:

On sundays, people tend to come late, or later the day
Instead of covering each topic in one go, this approach actually reaches more audience
When in second time, hands-on/demo session, the audience already have an idea what to expect & most of the terms are already heard about, so less confusing/disorienting.

Code/VM Sharing

In India, everyone can't afford to have a bandwidth to clone 10+GiB worth of source code repos (for B2G), even if they're quite curious & knowledgeable enough to play with it.
Until someone knows how awesome it is to compile their own Firefox & use, it's tough to convince that going through all the prerequisite setup is totally worth it. So we had it set up for them.
Removing these little roadblocks off the way & help them jump-start, we shared the codes & VMs which people copied like crazy!
Sure it served the purpose - and from now on, I'll have them all up for share, any events I go.

True, that we didn't expect those many audience in Sunday afternoon - people literally fetched chairs to sit on the door-steps, with machines on their laps - tight on accommodation isn't something makes me proud as facilitator. Although, something that does makes us proud is how the audience was actually interested in knowing about how to contribute, life-of-a-bug, Devtools, Firefox OS demo etc.

While is Bananabread demonstration, one guys awed out loud: "That's Unreal!" Well, I know he meant the game engine & compared with it - but a large portion of the audience took it in its literal sense - can't blame them for it. :P

Here's to note, Sankha's "Build Your Own Firefox" was supposed to be a hand on session, but we had to turn it down to a demo, because:

There were almost 50% more attendees present than the available systems (even including the laptops some of them brought)
The system weren't powerful enough to complete the compiling in less than 30-40min - and of course not under the VM.

But, throughout his session Sankha Narayan Guria did a great job representing himself as a student-contributor with considerable amount of patches submitted to Mozilla-Central. His story of first patch-submission added a special personal touch - a short-story of inspiration, for the audience to listen to.

Proliferation

By the end of the event we were asked, what is the standard procedure to continue with one special interest group like this, and how they can stay involved.

According to our suggestion, there were plentiful of sign-ups at Mozilla Contribution Page. The event organizers went forward & promised us to organize a formal Mozilla group inside campus in 7 days - but eventually, only by 3 days they were done with forming the MozClub at BESU.

Students from other renowned institutes, who attended the event, were excited to organize MozClub in their own institutes & host events. They connected with us, and we had conversations, long after the event ended.

To be very truthful & frank, I really haven't seen so many enthusiastic students anywhere else - they're so full of positive energy, and willing to do something good!

Peroration

For the first time, I got to conduct an event, where the attendees, fellow speakers, organizers, me, as well as the driver who drove us, shared the same mother-tongue! Bong connection at its best - but I think there's more to it.

Bengalis are, by nature, a bit different kind of people. We have our own ups and downs - but one thing we've always been great at, is to step up with pride and stand for what we believe in. I think, that tradition still goes on.

May it be the city with latest Mozilla Presence, but from what I've seen to be planned for next couple of months, let me assure y'all - this Summer of 2013, I'll be looking forward for consecutive Mozilla awesomeness at Kolkata.

MozTour - South India: 6th-9th Oct, 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 08:02:06 PDT

Event Links:

Talk Slide: code.debs.io/talks/RestartlessAddons
GitHub Gist: gist.github.com/3844059
Live Example: addons.mozilla.org/addon/about-pages
Tour Summary: twitter.com/Debloper/status/257049363661086720
Code Walkthrough: thecodeplayer.com/walkthrough/making-of-restartless-firefox-add-ons

Event Venues:

Mozilla Mania, Chennai: 6th Oct, 2012 — Velammal Engineering College
Tech Carnival, Thanjavur: 7th Oct, 2012 — Sastra University Campus
Mozilla Mania, Warangal: 9th Oct, 2012 — Jayamukhi Institute of Technological Science

Event Tracks:

Mozilla Mania, Chennai: At VEC, the main focus was on the Addon Development workshop conducted by me & the WebMaker workshop by Gauthamraj. Dwaraka was our main contact for this event, and he arranged for the logistics along with the organizers from the institute.

Unfortunately, we had to face power-outage due to an accidental blast in the College power-grid that morning, leading to a late start & occasional backup outage.

The lab was pretty well equipped, but we needed to prepare the development environment to conduct the session. The organizers were trying their best to minimize the impact of the accident, and by the end of the day I took through the development procedure that most of the 57 attendees could follow.

Due to the situation, we had to coalesce both the workshops in one lab & Gautham did a great job making the best out of the session as well.
Tech Carnival, Thanjavur: In Sastra University campus Mozilla workshops were a part of the bigger yearly event of the Institute - Tech Carnival - a 3day event, 9th Oct. being the last day of it.

The audience was amazing — I must say — by both quality & quantity. The lab wasn't able to host 80+ students in one go, so we had to run the workshop twice with 40+ students in each time. It was exhausting, but not frustrating. Even though I had to go through the same 3½ hrs twice, it was totally worth it (in fact, second time it was even better - cause in the first session we had run into Firefox updation issue for firewall rules, which wasn't necessary in the second time anymore). Thankfully, I had a lunch break in-between... :P

There was a good volunteer support — plus Dwaraka, Naresh, Gautham — all lent their hands to run the workshop smoothly.
Mozilla Mania, Warangal: The last event of the epic tour was on JITS college, Narsampet (near Warangal, AP). Special thanks to Vineel for taking up all the logistics responsibilities (& the awesome long drive) - both me & my fellow rep Faisal Aziz enjoyed it very much!

This event was a bit more than a workshop — in fact, not only the entire institute premises was prepared for the event, but the neighboring institutes were invited as well. There were event inauguration, speeches, parallel workshops - full fledged tracks to cover as much of addon-development & localisation as possible in a day.

The audience turn over was overwhelming 400+ — the organizers had to stop the registration in 12hrs since it was opened, for accommodation issues — as they stated. Kudos to Meraj Imran & Hema BhanuPriya (main event organizers) and their team, for making the reach of the event so huge!

I've had suggested Meraj to filter the attendees based on their expertise, for the addon-workshop — and he did a pretty good job at it. Mostly there were 3rd & 4th year students, although two 1st year students were most technically sound bits of the workshop, without any doubt.

Now that I had an awesome audience... the infrastructure failed me. The entire lab was running Ubuntu 9.10 (with Firefox 3.6 — incompatible with latest addon-kit). The firewall wasn't co-operating, and the NTP was mis-configured as well (forking SSL cert. issues for all Mozilla sites). Connecting to internet required too much of proxy settings (so, new Firefox profile for development == setup proxies in all of them, one. by. one.).

By the time the SysAdmin up'd some of the systems, I gave a demo, participants were sharing systems — as a proper hand on for each of them seemed pretty long-shot at that situation. So, I brought in participants one by one & made them to take turns & go step by step on the machine which was connected to the projector, so that others can follow (& take notes).

Most amazingly, even in such unproductive situation — the students DID take notes, caught up the instructions most readily, raised pretty interesting questions — some of them also followed up after I wrapped up the session to discuss more (which generally seems quite usual, after a successful 4hr session — but here!).

Flickr Album, by Meraj: flickr.com/photos/82525714@N05/sets/72157631750999126
Facebook Album, by Faisal: facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.3985084139320

Event Takeaways:

Take a hint from the event names: Mozilla *is* in fact an epidemic now in India — in a good way, though! Students are interested in hosting events, faculties encouraging & helping them organize it, audience joining in hundreds & listening, a huge number of participants are slowly getting into the contribution part (i.e. giving back to the community & upgrading themselves in the process). If mentored right, this could as well be a revolution in the making; in fact, it is a revolution, which hasn't taken a colossal shape yet.

There are a few things getting in the way, though. Disruptive-orthodoxy, premature-evaluation, sacrificing good for easy, culture-shocks — these're holding us back in one form or the other.

Sometimes the willingness to host an event trumps the actual purpose of hosting an event. Sometimes the events are being organized in a format of cultural event & not that of a technical event. These can be fixed though... we need more flagship events, workshops, hackathons to be hosted & we should invite the prospective event organizers to the events to get them familiar with it. We have too much of honest good-wills, but not enough orientation to channel them properly.

It's not me being overly critical — it's me foreseeing if we only learn from the experiences, then how incredibly awesome the events can actually be, going forward.

Mozilla Summer Code Party 2012 - Pune

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sun, 01 Jul 2012 03:00:24 PDT

=================================== tl;dr ======================================

__________ Mozilla Summer Code Party - SICSR, Pune: 23rd June, 2012

__________



Event Page: wiki.mozilla.org/MozParty_Pune

Etherpad: etherpad.mozilla.org/20120623-Pune-Workshop

Sayak's post on Mozilla India: mozillaindia.org/node/644

Ankit's Slides: slideshare.net/ankitgadgil/the-mozilla-story

Faisal's Slides: slideshare.net/ankitgadgil/using-firefox-like-a-boss

Flickr Album: www.flickr.com/photos/kinshuksunil/sets/72157630325471864/

Facebook Album: facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151053643809188.493002.677614187

================================================================================

Pune is presently the city with the highest number of Mozilla Reps in India. We've previously tried a few small get togethers, like MozCafe etc. But our reps wanted to take the challenge of doing something more outreaching to the masses, and in this mood of summer vacations what's better than a Code Party for students?

So, our rep Sayak proposed a local event promoting Mozilla Summer Code Party to the community, and it was planned to be held on this Saturday, 23rd June, 2012 at the (unofficially default FOSS event space in Pune) SICSR Campus.

We have had a planning meet-up in the previous week to chalk-out the event, scheduling & sharing the topics for talks and workshops etc. So, the event started smoothly with Sayak introducing the audience to the Mozilla Summer Code Party, and then the Mozilla Story followed by Ankit Gadgil. Faisal gave the audience a pro-tip session, called "How to use Firefox like a Boss!". Then there was my session, a talk on "How Websites Work" — a very basic overview of DNS, protocols, domain/subdomains, anatomy of a URL, how data/mails get sent etc. Rajesh Ranjan & Aman Alam talked about how does Mozilla localization (l10n) work, how to start a new language project for translation & how to get involved in the l10n project. The last session of the first half was taken by Kinshuk Sunil on "FOSS & its Relevance to Students" — presented so charmingly, that the audience almost forgot they had to have the lunch!

After the lunch break, Sayak started with the webmaker workshop on Mozilla Thimble. Although there was 1-2 professionals, most of the were seemingly novice in webmaking — but, by the end of the session when they completed their hacking on the Thimble projects, it was prominent that the session was a success! Some of the works are featured in the Etherpad - please do follow. Next up, my sessions on "Basic Web-Technologies" & "Open Web Apps & B2G". Tried to cover from the mostly heard buzzwords to seemingly unheards important terms of teh interwebz, cross-platform mobile app development, tools: pros & cons, Mozilla B2G: customizability, open web-app support etc.

Note to self: It is OK to give talks, presentations without slide-decks, walking among the audience; but do have a list of topics planned out to avoid getting into too much unnecessary details and sometimes missing some points altogether.

We wrapped up the event talking about Mozilla Reps & Student Reps program, how to contribute, the different fields of contributions etc. We distributed some stickers, buttons etc. goodies and bade goodbyes to the participants, with a promise of more such events in future.

Thanks Sayak, Faisal, Ankit for organizing such a great event. Not only it was a complete event till the very end, but also the (unplanned, yet) awesome after-party with Momo & Juice — it'd be a crime not to mention about that. Looking ahead for more to come!

Firefox Add-on Talk and Workshop - OSScamp Hubli

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 13:49:09 PDT

=================================== tl;dr ======================================

______ Talk & Workshop at OSScamp, BVB College Hubli: 11-12th April, 2012 ______

Event Page: osscamp.in/event/osscamp-hubli

Talk Slides: debloper.github.com/talks/GearingUpAddons

Workshop Slides: debloper.github.com/talks/RestartlessAddons

Flickr Album: www.flickr.com/photos/kinshuksunil/sets/72157629471812562/show/

================================================================================

OSScamp Hubli was a community event, primarily organized by Mozilla India Rep Kuldeep Singh & Kinshuk Sunil to help spread Open Source across India in general. This two-day event was packed with talks and workshops on various open source technologies by some reputed open-source tech-evangelists in India.

First day was more like an appetizer, with talk sessions on Open Street Maps (by @geohacker & @ajantriks), Introduction to FOSS (by CommsReps & Student Reps Co-ordinator @kinshuksunil), Revision Control with Git (by Taha Asadullah) & my take on Getting Started with Firefox Addon Development.

The audience were interested & cheerful - the speakers were massively responsible for that, of course - it's not easy to take 4 talks consecutively, which explores completely different sets of domains.

On the second day, there were the workshops scheduled - on Open Street Maps (by @ajantriks), Firefox Addons (by Me) and Game Development with SFML (by @yadurajiv). Apart from the initial delay to setup the labs for the workshops to commence, everything went as per expectation. The volunteers (Roopak, Ruchika and others) did an awesome job managing the entire process.

The crowd was overwhelming; headcount nearing about a century. We had to make them sit in two different labs to accommodate them all and take 10-15min sessions alternatively in each room for first 2hours. Fortunately the next 2hours after lunch, we could merge them together in one lab - that made it easier for the attendees & less frustrating for me. But it was a hell of an experience to manage all the students almost single handedly, in the lack of volunteers, and still nobody left the place through the back doors! (Yay, me!)

The students required basic background about the Firefox Addons - as we didn't filter out the attendees, only a few had good understanding so that we can directly go hand on development. Thus the first two hours were basically talk & demo shown by me to help them understand most of the tit-bits, and in the next two hours they got deep into the actual development & made some toy-addons as much the time permitted. Although, it seems funny from my perspective how little I could help & how much I wanted to, but from their side it was more than even unexpected. To be frank, all they expected was to see demo presented by me only - but after making addons themselves & running it, they were precisely awestruck (DAT BLOODY THING WORX!).

There were some parallel events running along with the workshop (Online Treasure Hunt, Coding Competitions etc.) and some people who signed up for both, just couldn't make mind. After the session was over, many attendees came up & talked to me asking how to get in touch & digging deeper into the addons etc. - I was flattered!

We had to start the Game Development session also along this for the time limitations & that also had quite good response. Before wrapping it up, Kinshuk gave a very nice presentation: "Introduction to Mozilla Student Reps" and then we said goodbye to each other.

True, that there were so many things not right, or upto the mark - labs running Firefox 3.5 on WinXP, people using DOCX for sharing documents etc. to name a few - but it also shows how much scope is there to spread more Open Source to make everything better. It just takes a few people & a "challenge accepted" attitude to change the world - and it starts with showing the light to your own peers, friends, classmates, colleagues... then the circle grows bigger all by itself. Will look forward to more such events, really!

Restartless Firefox Add-on Workshop - Carte Blanche 2012

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 21 Apr 2012 10:11:10 PDT

=================================== tl;dr ======================================

__________ Workshop at Carte Blanche: MIT, Chennai - 25th March, 2012 __________

Slides: debloper.github.com/talks/RestartlessAddons

EtherPad: etherpad.mozilla.org/addon-workshop-cbmit (Revision 2)

Flickr Album: www.flickr.com/photos/77461019@N07/show/with/7017119283

Walkthrough: thecodeplayer.com/walkthrough/making-of-restartless-firefox-add-ons

================================================================================

It's not always that you get an opportunity to be a speaker in an event at one of the most respected academic/technical institution of your country - which is, coincidentally, the graduation-college of the most honorable aerospace scientist & former president of India, Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam!

The computer-society of Madras Institute of Technology (MIT) organizes an yearly tech-fest, called "Carte Blanche" (read: blank paper). Alongside with lots of talks & presentations, a handful of workshops are also hosted in this incredibly popular event. All of them are primarily focused to bring in more students into open-source and its derivatives. The workshops held, were on Arduino open hardware, wikipedia, BOSS project & last but not the least, the hand on Restartless Firefox Add-on workshop.

Mozilla India rep Dwaraka Nath was the primary contact to the organizers for conducting the add-on workshop. The session was on the 2nd day of the event, i.e. March 25. Expected audience size was 50 for the 4hr session. I planned to take the entire workshop in two parts, with a lunch break within, to not get the participants bored of the one single stretch of the session, otherwise.

The organizers (CS-MIT) planned for a minimal registration fee to arrange the certification for attending the workshop, refreshments & to keep the crowd to a limited number. Although, despite of this, the enthusiasm around this particular add-on workshop was overwhelming - the organizers had to stop online registration after 70 registrants, of which 63 attended it full-length.

CS-MIT had to move the workshop from presentation room to the largest computer-lab of the institute to accommodate everyone. This in fact lead to a situation of having no projectors, but two large-screen HD displays in both end of the room. Glad that I made my slides in HTML & had all my presentations available online, the distant view of the screens weren't an issue - everyone could access them on their own systems.

Primarily, I was expecting to have a test after the first-half, so that in the next half we will have more technically skilled students for the relatively challenging & detailed part of the add-on making. But, as the event progressed, it was evident that most of the crowd were technically sound enough to carry-through & seemed to be enjoying the session. Although I was a little trembled to think of managing the entire crowd, but I didn't wanna be the bad guy to deprive some of them from the hand-on experience - plus, the volunteer team of Harvish, Naresh etc. led by Dwaraka did an awesome job of troubleshooting the students having issues to follow through.

In the first half, the participants got the in-depth idea of general Firefox add-ons - structure of an addon, good-practice factors to consider, AMO submission/review process, how to set up development environment, find the required tools etc. That session ended with everyone being fully setup add-on development machine, with a traditional (restartful) "Hello World" skeleton add-on installed and ready to be worked upon. In the second half, we started digging deep with the online Add-on Builder web-app. I wanted them to make a completely working useful add-on, and having an easily accessible Firefox about: pages item in the context-menu seemed fun! To ease & speed up the development, I provided the base code - and many of them figured out how to hack onto it all by themselves. They seemed to be enjoying a lot & some of them asked some interesting questions.

The workshop ended with the participants receiving their certificates from CS-MIT for attending, and the Mozilla Reps arranged little goodies (buttons, stickers) for them (unfortunately, the Mozilla Swag Pack wasn't shipped till the event occurred). The overall enthusiasm was prominent, and I'm really glad this event exceeded the expectations of every level of success!

Thanks everyone who attended, thanks Mozilla Reps of Chennai - you guys are awesome, thanks the organizers for the kind hospitality - for me, this weekend just couldn't be better!

Privacy Icons : Phraud

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:38:49 PDT

See! I was supposed to use a word for fraud which starts with P (so, to go well with the other article titles). I did maintain all the constraints - but I cheated blatantly with the word that I used, exploiting the power of human cognition. Cannot similar things be done with privacy icons, to imply something that is not? Hell yeah, the possibility is endless. So what to do when we encounter such cases, or the browser does? We notify the user about the issue, right?

A classical preload-notice is cliché - USERS WON'T READ but press "OK, Proceed..." and even if they understand that there's a privacy-concern about this site, they will not have a clear idea (without reading the warning very carefully) exactly what it was about. Some other notification method may also come to your mind, came to mine one too - but none of them were 0% annoying, except for one.


Elements are painted-red if a fraud is detected with its corresponding parameter.

I said that I wanted the icons to be monochromatic 'as much' possible - but now I'd bow to this exceptional situation (Heh, ain't I histrionic? Psst. it's all pre-planned). Let's suppose, a site says it keeps the user data as long as 3 months but actually practices to keep them longer than that. Here, if we (the browser) make the persistence-arc chromatically different than the others, then voila! The icon remains intact, no annoying popup/notices/texts - but just at the very look at the icon, the user will know where exactly the trouble is (& what's better color than red in this case?). Same procedure can be applied for each and every parameter, and the browser has to do that by matching the HTML attribute-value and the site's privacy-practice list record.

Privacy Icons : Preach

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:44:53 PST

Making an HTML specification wouldn't work until it gets rendered on screen of browsers. All HTML can do is to help them by providing the logical details it needs to depict the icon - and then the browser actually has to draw it on the screen. As each browser has their own font color, size, styles preferences for various tags, here also we can expect some variation in privacy-icon-species - till it retains it's meaning for anyone above IQ-80. Simple enough so far, but that's not the reason I've opened a new section.

Nowadays, we are pretty used to with the browsers taking care of some of the underlying security risks (potentially harmful site, certificate mismatch, redirection loops etc.), this gives me an idea to ask them for another hand for help... yes, I hope they won't get offended.

If a general list of sites which abuse/misuse/cheat the privacy policies, can be maintained, the system can become even more transparent. If a general list is not possible, then each browser can have their own list of sites, from which it can check and warn the user - whether they really comply to the policy they say they do, or they differ. It's not a rigorously tough act to perform if you argue; maintaining a malware site-list is lot more tough in my opinion, for which nearly all modern browsers have implemented notification facility already.

So now that we have come this far, we actually need to consider about the mode of notification - i.e. how to let the user know if there's something fishy about the site they are visiting or putting details into.

Privacy Icons : Plead

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:43:07 PST

Here we are, to cry to ~~momma~~ W3C. Yeah, I know it's kinda too late to make another HTML5 proposition like this - but I'd hate to see a <privacy /> tag in HTML v5.6.21.3.9 i.e. as a minor update to it. The world(-wide-web) is changing; it's significantly different from the perception of someone's online presence even what it used to be just 3-years before. I will pretend not to be cynic about it, not from any side; rather, it's a big leap forward and an integrated effect of web2.0. And online-privacy is a very large issue and a huge part of it to consider about. True that we can always skip it for later, but isn't it too late already?

All I mean to say is that, if a privacy-tag is implemented to be used by the sites, the entire process of enforcing better privacy practice becomes hell lot easier. I don't say it'll reduce people mal-practicing with user data, but in case they would, it'll be easier to detect those spots (how? Well, when there's a will, there's a way!).

The <privacy leaktype="hexval" persistence="timespan" exposure="scope" /> can also very well be a sub-tag of <footer> tag - or, I'd better leave that decision for the experts to handle. I kept mentioning that there was a plan behind the hex-values of the parameters; they are actually designed to be used as the values/properties of privacy-tag's attributes (if it gets included into the next HTML specification - and the 'next' is version 5).

Privacy Icons : Preparation

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:41:28 PST

Only two of the four shell-leaks we have put, are widely discussed and are supposed to cause pain in our - erm... forehead, namingly the #2(partner/barter) and #4(feds/govt.). But the other two, albeit not too many of us cared about it, but are also equally concerning. It's not necessary to have only one leak though; sites are most likely to (and will) have multiple leaks or all at once (may very well have none, too). The design that we have made up can very well handle (any of) these kind of situations - visually at least. But, is that all? No.

Let again take a look at the numbering-scheme of the leaks - they are all in powers of 2 (2^[0-3]). Thus, no matter how you make combinations taking any of them - the sum of the combination-indexes can be represented as a single hexadecimal digit (ranging from 2^0-1=0x0 i.e. no-leak to 2^4-1=0xF i.e all-leaks). Hence, it's effectively similar to the octal notation of file-system-permissions to determine the type of leak-combinations from that one digit, but in our case the parameters being four, we have to go for hex. It may seem trivial, but it's actually planned to be like this (and the conspiracy behind it is to make it easy to implement digitally - so that the software read/write them efficiently).

Not only the shell, you can now see all other parameters can also be put onto the logic table - only difference being, they are mutually exclusive. So, it's easy enough to code-the-icons the way you want it - if you have the svg/png piclets(wow!) of the icon. Ask me why this was necessary... cause I've got to tell you that next.

Privacy Icons : Provision

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:39:59 PST

The privacy as it may sound, might not have same context for every purpose or scenario, not even for the same person. Your social networking self and collaborative self wouldn't have similar concerns about the privacy. Even on social networking platforms, you do treat your Facebook and Twitter differently, don't you? (Don't just say 'no' to prove me wrong - we are under a situation here!)

Moderated P: This represents that you will be asked to put your information, some of which are mandatory but all of which is scope-adjustable. You can set your 'circle-of-trust' to whom you want to expose which of your data (just me, friends, friends-of-friends, everyone or some other representation). Your choice to hide the details you don't want to reveal, will be respected.
The Open P: In this case, you don't have any permission to change the scope of the information that you upload. Your data 'may be' accessible throughout the web publicly; 'may not be' as well, depending upon the companies' policy and structure - but the security of your information is completely on their hand. Even if the company wouldn't sell-out your data, it has a fair chance to passively help the spammers/stalkers. So, the icon tells you here, if you want something to be secret, don't tell it in these situations.

Some web-services/applications may need some of your details, some require very handful things and for some you have to literally digitize from entire of your music choice to appetite preference. Let's think of a discussion forum which 'need' only your email ID to identify/contact you, but 'offers' to fill in a profile "if you'd like to", which will be visible by all other members/visitors/web alike, then it's significantly different from some other web-service, where it asks your details to fill in and gives you the choice to maneuver it's exposure.

So, this is about most of it for the privacy-icon designing. Now we have to consider the abuses & exceptions.

Privacy Icons : Persistence

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:38:44 PST

Persistence in the sense, how long your data stays in the website's server. The implementation of it should be simple enough to understand from the visual-feedbacks (and having a chance to not have to babble a lot, I'd just present you with the icons).


Momentary	7 days to 1 month	1 to 3 months


3 months to 1 year	Infinite Persistence

Although I'm not happy with the Momentary Persistence logo, I know somebody will come up with a better way to represent it. Next step is to visualize how can we handle the private-data.

Privacy Icons : Perversion

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:37:21 PST

Call it the first step into our privacy icon design - we will essentially draw a circle (and something more). Let's make the outer shell is the wall of our privacy - makes sense, eh? So, where there are walls, there are leaks. And these leaks on the walls can technically be of 4 types; let's tag 'em-

Frontal Leak: Nearly each and every company tracks and uses their user data for business strategy, customer services and logistic purposes. A company with many daughter projects may have super-sets of users in many of those projects, and so may use the same data for all the daughter projects, which that member has joined (or availed services). Say for example you, having a Google ID, have joined Gmail, Buzz, YouTube, Calendar, etc. and whenever you join new Google services with that ID, at the moment of first-use/basic-setup you can see your that product-related data (Name, DoB, events etc.) has been fetched from your account already. You didn't give those details to this service (explicitly), but having you as existing member, the system has done that for you. There's not much of choice which you can opt here; and this being the same organization, doesn't hurt much anyway - but none the less, the user has the right to know the information inter-sharing and thus the front (& right) side of the Icon is leaked.


Privacy is Protected	Frontal (Internal) Leak	Backyard (External) Leak

Backyard Leak: This is the fishy one, and also the most discussed one too. You want to know whether this service will give out (sell, mainly) your data to other companies (partner sites, ad-agencies) behind your knowledge or not - simple. I'm not going into examples, it's not easy to name one. If the company acts in under-the-table business, then the privacy icon has to reflect that. This leak is on the hind (left) side.
Federal Leak: i.e. in simple words, whenever there's a federal/govt. pressure to hand over your user data, and you comply without going into any trouble (without verifying whether formal procedures have been performed to have the data or not,) handing over the data, then the icon will have a top-leak. For the cases where procedural approaches made by Govt. or any other upper-hand, there's nothing too much to do about it for the website, and mostly any site will have to give in. Hence we won't consider it as a leak.
Security Leak: This is the controversial one (even I'm not sure, whether it's 'to-be-or-not-to-be' implemented or used ever) but, if there's a chance or history of security issues, those sites has to wear this monkey-cap. As being the spookiest and the leakiest-leak, it's at the bottom! Hope it makes sense.


Federal Leak	Security Leak	All Leaks

Now now, as I've described those leaks, and how to visualize 'em, there's one single prick may poke in your mind if you've spotted - why the numbering is 01-02-04-08 and not 1-2-3-4? Well, I have an alibi for that; I'm smart, ain't?

Privacy Icons : Preamble

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Sat, 05 Feb 2011 22:35:44 PST

Let's take a look at Aza's privacy icons' alpha release first. Aza sure made it clear about the curves & corners to consider about; but for the icons, I don't really think he gave his best effort. (Although, I sense conspiracy that he intentionally underperformed so that people can catch up to it, find bugs & get involved;)

I find the following problems:

Not usable under 64x64 resolution.
Too many graphical sprites to get used to.
Using color-outline with black-content... meh!
For being more cognition friendly, it uses redundant representation of similar notions (graphic bar && red-color, to negate).
Not quite simple.
Too many icons to understand one site's privacy policy.
You can't just look at 'em an understand - you have to be through (But I have ~~ADHD~~ AADD!).
On the websites, how exactly are we going to put all these icons, eh!?!

So, let's simplify things a bit. I'd prefer a single-icon to start up with - in case I fail, we already have plan B. There's a reason behind the single-icon approach: multi-icon representation produces significantly more cognitive load for the user to parse the icons' information one by one & then decide - but all they actually want, is- just to look at it and feel safe/unsafe.

While making the icon, I've particularly kept some factors in mind. Although I don't propose them to be guidelines; it's just, we will have them as specifications for this discussion. Those are-

It has to be monochrome (or monochrome-possible).
It has to be simple, yet informative enough - although we are aiming for very subtle-period working memory, still will try not to make an information-overload to the viewer.
It has to be page design-neutral, to be used by all types of organizations alike, and also to restrict modification (which can also be misused to cheat the system).
It has to be low-resolution feasible with as less modification as possible (none, the better).
The Icon is better to resemble with the existing copyright (& creative-commons) icon, to be seamlessly integrated in the web, without seeming to be an alien logo- accidentally dropped out of nowhere.
Unlike the creative-commons icons having many modes, the privacy icon has many parameters - they are different.
Each of the elements in the icon can be used to indicate the different parameters, but it has to synchronize well with the iconic implementation to mean it.
By now, I'll stop sounding like any of those ultra-formal privacy policy texts & will try my best so that none of you require a dictionary.

The 7th point is important, because that's how I'm going top-down to create the icon, please join me.

Trying Out SUSE Studio - The Online Linux-Distro Customization Portal

noreply@blogger.com (Soumya Deb) — Mon, 27 Dec 2010 11:18:30 PST

I already had this in mind to try out the SUSE Studio from the very 1st day I came to know about it's release news, but As I'm getting older, I'm getting lazy and "bloated" as well... so, after that much delay - finally today is a good day to start.

The setup is simple to start up with. Just head over to SUSE Studio Homepage, you will be greeted with a friendly robo-waiter with brief feature list & example/demo links in it.

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