In my talk, I am looking at two math problems from Project Euler. For each of them, I am contrasting an intuitive solution with one that is, arguably, faster/better/uses less memory. But is it actually a better solution and an optimization worth spending time and effort on?

Check it out and let me know what you think!

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It’s about 50 by 50 blocks. How did I make this, you ask? I took the actual Firefox logo, resized it to 50×50 pixels in Gimp, and reduced the colors pretty drastically. Then it just boils down to putting a grid over the image and turning the pixels into blocks. (Luckily, the Minecraft server is in Creative Mode, so I could freely pick blocks according to their colors, even though some of them are really rare when mined.)

A few weeks after preparing the lemon zest and Everclear concoction for the steeping, I got it back out of the basement:

Meanwhile, I had obtained and cleaned some small, reclosable lemonade bottles (after drinking their content, of course):

Straining the zest from the concentrated lemon extract reveals that it has transferred virtually all its color into the liquid and is now almost white. Fun!

Prepared some simple syrup (same amount as the lemon extract, i.e., about half a liter) in a pot and stirred it in. As you may have noticed, this changed the tint of the liquid a little: I used raw cane sugar, which unlike refined white sugar has a little bit of a color of its own. But hey! Trading color for flavor is fine by me.

Stirred it good, funneled into the bottles!

Finally, off into the freezer, and after a few hours… Prost!

This proposal isn’t new: A few months ago, it shortly came up surrounding a panel discussion at Mozilla’s internal All-Hands conference, where I asked for clarification on recent vague remarks from the CEO concerning anti-discrimination policies at Mozilla. Unsurprisingly (and rightly), the CEO reaffirmed that Mozilla would not tolerate illegal discrimination of any kind (paraphrase: mine).

At the time, I concluded that there was no need for a written Code of Conduct, believing that the basic concept of treating each other with mutual respect was so universal and simple that it can even (and should) be instilled into any preschooler, not to mention adult. It does not matter what you personally believe about anyone else’s gender, religion, sexual orientation, body shape, color of skin, handicap, or funny accent. The instant you walk through Mozilla’s virtual “doors”, you have to exhibit professionalism and respect towards whoever you interact with. I expected it to be an obvious prerequisite for acceptance into the Mozilla community.

Apparently, this is not shared by everyone. A small minority of community members seem to believe they don’t (always) have to adhere to such standards. Unfortunately, they are supported by another group of people who misunderstand this as a question of freedom of speech. It isn’t.

Still, let’s not get carried away: Inflating this occurrence into an outright crisis would utterly disregard the contributions of many individuals (me included) who take the mandate of mutual respect very seriously and have–regardless of their own background or even opinion on the topic at hand–been speaking up and demanding the person in question adhere to such standards while acting within the Mozilla community. Not to mention the many community members who may be less vocal but exhibit flawless behavior towards their peers on a daily basis as a matter of course.

In the light of all this, I concede now that writing down a Code of Conduct would be helpful to Mozilla. It would perform the important function of reminding people of these basic standards and urge superiors and peers to enforce them. It would also serve as a valuable reference in case of confusion, or when new members are unsure what’s expected from them.

Christie has listed some good examples of existing codes of conduct by other open source communities. I particularly like the Code of Conduct set forth by Ubuntu, because it does not make the need to act civilly dependent on any particular attribute of a person. Instead, it demands consideration, respect, and collaborative behavior from all community members and towards all community members equally.

I’d wish for a Mozilla Code of Conduct to do the same.

Twitter published yesterday that they are now capable of reactively blocking certain tweets for the users from certain countries only, should they be required to censor certain content in one country but not others. Previously, they were only able to remove tweets globally, whether or not certain content was illegal in all affected countries or not. As an example, they mention tweets promoting Nazism, which is illegal in Germany and France.

Mark Gibbs at forbes.com smells the opportunity for outrage and paints a grim vision of proactive, automated censorship at Twitter, and he even announces the beginning of the end of Twitter itself. Sadly, the article teems with outrageous yet wrong claims:

For example, Gibbs states that Twitter was considering, let alone be forced, to employ preventive, automated censorship using fuzzy statistical algorithms. This is in no way backed by the original source he’s commenting on nor the laws that spawned this in the first place. For instance, while denying the Holocaust is illegal in most of Europe and many other countries across the globe, pre-censorship is usually illegal, in Germany even unconstitutional. Only “post-censorship” (i.e., keeping an existing publication from being distributed after the fact) is, by way of court order, legal — much like in many other countries including the US.

This and only this way of reacting to illegal content after the fact is what Twitter claims to be able to do in their press release. To be more precise: Twitter was already required to follow the laws in the countries it operates in. I am not aware of a case when this might have previously happened, but if they were required to remove an incendiary tweet previously, they would have to delete it globally due to technical restrictions, not only in the area where a law was being violated — only now, Twitter will not have to settle for the lowest common denominator anymore. Arguably, that’s an improvement.

That said, I am as sensitive to the dangers to freedom of speech as the next guy, and I am a passionate opponent of certain legislation in my home country. Any sort of censorship, whether it may be deemed legitimate or not, is a restriction of free speech and bears the potential for abuse. Consequently, the biggest problem here is not the removal of tweets that directly violate laws protecting the democratic order of certain countries–our biggest worry, instead, should be the Chilling Effect this may cause (Chilling Effect, or “the scissors in the head” as it was termed over a century earlier in the 1840s in Germany, refers to the preemptive self-muting by a person fearing punishment when expressing their opinion). Therefore, I am quite happy that Twitter (along with Google and others) is publishing any block requests it receives on chillingeffects.org, thus exposing such requests to public scrutiny and political discussion.

I am planning on posting a new picture or two per week, depending on what photo opportunities I come across. I also installed a widget into the sidebar of this blog, showing you the latest and greatest additions to the photo blog.

We hope you’ll enjoy looking at the pictures as much as we liked taking them! Let us know what you think!

Champagne, ready to celebrate the arrival of 2012. In the background: This year’s Times Square New Year’s Eve “Ball”.

Woah, I can’t believe it! Project 365 is coming to a close! (Oh hey! This picture is intentionally similar to Day 1. Full circle!)

Happy New Year!

The penultimate photo (!) of Project 365 is an HDR panorama of Milpitas Civic Center. Milpitas City Hall is the big building to the right, and on the left you see the community center with the Christmas tree in front of it.

Make sure to check out the full-size picture. As an added bonus, you’ll see the same kid running through the photo twice — a neat “time lapse” effect of stitching multiple exposures together.

The flag of Santa Clara County at Mountain View City Hall was flown at half-staff today. Why, the Interwebs wouldn’t tell me. Anyone know? Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day is too far back, and besides it’d be the wrong one of the flags. Hmmm!

Look at the spiffy new reception area the contractors turned our prior mail room into! As far as I can tell, looks like it’s done! Of course, there’s all sorts of Mozilla decoration missing, but since Project 365 is nearing its end, I didn’t think I could wait that long