It’s also essential to the way we manage our project at scale, though, and enough of our project’s history and daily activity lives there that understanding it is not really optional. Certain edge cases aside, you can’t really be effective in the Mozilla project without at least a passing ability to wade through Bugzilla.

I put together this video to help people who don’t really live in Bugzilla learn how to at least manage themselves. If you’re inclined to thank me for it, thank Deb and Dan instead – they’re the ones that actually made me sit down and finish the job.

Until wordpress stops eating my video tags, you can get the open-web, flash-free, unencumbered-codec goodness here.

If you’re using a browser that doesn’t understand ogg, I’ve put a copy on Vimeo as well:

(Yes, we would.)

Our deliverables had to be submitted by January 15. Others in our (amazing, amazing) community did all the real work, but since I was asked to pick up the coordination and delivery of those pieces, I wanted to talk about them a little.

In broad strokes, Microsoft asked us for 3 things:

1. An icon for the choice screen itself
2. Localized content for each supported locale
3. Administrative pieces that aren’t really interesting here.

First things first, then.

Icon

Firefox Logo Submission

Among the many things for which I take no credit, I take no credit for this. Patrick Finch and Jennifer Boriss worked the logo question up and down. There was market research in more than a dozen countries, there were mechanical turks, and a great deal of analysis from all quarters. Taking the research as a whole, this design led the others by a healthy margin. It beat other background colours*, it beat other styles, and it beat versions that omitted the word “mozilla” to focus harder on the product brand. Design decisions tend to be very personal, but Patrick and Boriss ran this thing like champs, and by the numbers.

[*Curiously, in Italy a version with an orange background did significantly better than the green. We asked if we could provide an icon per locale. No such luck.]

Localized Content

We were also asked to supply a 140-character* product description in each of 23 languages, specifically:

Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian (Bokmal), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish

In what is fast becoming a pattern, I can take no credit for making this happen, either. Patrick (always Patrick) worked with Staś, Seth, and our amazing localizers, and collectively they got it done.

Got it overdone, really. Our team noted that while the EU has 23 “working” languages (and two more that are official EEA languages), we were quite capable of providing several more as well. They also pointed out that there were some surprises in the list supplied – it was similar, but not identical, to the EU working languages list. Maltese and Gaelic had been dropped, Croatian and Norwegian had been added. We offered to supply the missing ones, along with some others, but we heard back that, no, the choice screen will be limited to those 23. You can see our complete submission, here.

[*No, I do not believe that this limit was introduced in order to make them more tweetable. Tip o' the hat to old Friedhelm though.]

Next Steps

Content! We have a little more than a month before the Browser Choice page goes live, and that means the localization and web dev teams (and Patrick…) are pushing to get everything ready for our new visitors. While we get that together, Microsoft will be running QA on the page itself in all 23 languages. We don’t get to QA the pages ourselves, but they have been responsive throughout this process; I trust that any issues they discover with our content will be brought to our attention quickly.

We did confirm that users in locales outside of the 23 requested will be shown the en-GB version of the Browser Choice page, which may give us the ability to wire up the Tell Me More and Download links with additional locale smarts if we want to provide extra information for those users.

So there you have it. We got the first pass done on a tight schedule, and we’ll get the rest in on time, too. At the end of the day, though, I think Mitchell put it best:

While the ballot mechanism represented by the choice screen has received the most attention, Mozilla is most pleased with the core principles Microsoft will be adopting that protect the choices a person has already made. These principles won’t be obvious to a person using Windows. That’s the point — once a person has chosen an alternative browser, IE should not keep reappearing. These principles are expressed in several components of the commitments and together should result in a greater respect for individual human decisions.

Bugzilla History Jetpack

I put together a jetpack to annotate show_bug output with the bug’s activity, so that you can track flag changes, state changes, reviews, &c. The idea was all beltzner’s originally, but I’ll take credit for the half-assed implementation, anyhow.

If you don’t yet have the jetpack engine installed, go get that first. Once you’ve got that, you can grab the bugzilla jetpack itself.

[N.B. Since that's just my generic bugzilla tweaks jetpack, you will get, for no extra charge, the one-liner that removes "Bug " from the start of bug titles, so that the bug number fits better in your tab strip. At some point I'll probably add it to the jetpack gallery without the ride along, but you want it NOW.]

Flic.kr Jetpack

I also fixed flickr so that photo pages which have a flic.kr shortform URL have that URL added just below the photo, for easy copying. It’s also a jetpack. This one I actually added to the gallery, grab it here.

EXIF in Flickr

One more jetpack. I wanted to play with flickr’s awesome, awesome API, and I want EXIF data for flickr photos without a separate page load and I didn’t want it to look very nice. Presto.

Jury-rigged IRC

On the flight home, we had an adhoc wifi network running, which enables 1-on-1 iChat but is no good for multi-party. None of us had an ircd kicking around, so I knocked this together. It mostly works, but I bet you can offer improvements. (yes, nc would have worked here too, but ncat is neat, and does SSL).

Server:
tail -f log1 | ncat -lk 2000 >> log1

Client:
cat - | sed -l "s/^/[`date +%H:%M`] < @johnath> /" | ncat 2000

Extra Credit

1. Before making the history jetpack, I had it mostly working as a bookmarklet in 498 characters. Can you make it tweetable (140 chars)?
2. The history jetpack is scraping the show_activity content instead of using the new REST API. Patches accepted?
3. The EXIF jetpack should do a nicer job of highlighting what matters.
4. Local echo on the chatroom was kind of annoying, we ended up opening two “clients” each – one for typing into, and the other for seeing the unmunged chat stream. Got a better one liner?

For 11 months of every year, we all live our lives integrated– embedded, if you will– with our fellow citizens, hewing to their customs; blending in. For 11 months of the year we rarely even speak of the movement. But not this month.

It’s time for NSID operatives to go live.

First, remember our history. In 2007 I first spoke publicly of the cause, and in 2008 our numbers exploded. No Shaving In December has participants on at least 4 continents, participants of both sexes, and participants of all ages and stations in life. In fact, a recent survey I just made up confirms that every LinkedIn user is, at most, 3 hops away from an NSID participant.

Second, remember our cause. NSID’s not a political movement. It’s a silly, awesome getting-together of people who sort of like to see how they look when they stop shaving for a month. It’s permission to try something different and in that sense, our cause is freedom. Look at the flickr pool; it’s incredible. I love looking at these people I know to be cleanshaven getting all rustic and funky. How could you not want to be a part of this?

Third, remember your strength. Your job too important or high-visibility to stop shaving for a month? Bullshit – John Lilly did interviews with the LA Times mid-NSID like a champ. Your face doesn’t grow a proper beard? Hogwash – Claire’s been doing NSID 3 years running, and Gavin soldiers through “patchiness issues” because his follicles don’t tell him how to live his life, he tells them how to live theirs.

No shaving. 31 days. We tweet using the #nsid hashtag, we document our progress in the flickr pool, and we aggregate it on noshavingindecember.org. I’m proud of all of you – I love this time of year. Are you in?

Epilogue: The Charity Angle

[Everything below is optional. NSID is about freedom, and fun, and if you don't want to be bogged down by deeper sentiment there is no need to do any of this. For some people, this part may actually make it easier to enjoy NSID, though. If that's you, read on.]

NSID is a scruffy, scratchy time in the first few weeks, and that can be hard on pair-bonds. Over the years, the #1 NSID request I’ve gotten is to find a way to make NSID participation a charitable act, to make the suffering of our significant others more noble.

Choosing a charity to pair with NSID isn’t easy, but I think the Michael J Fox Foundation is a good fit. To me, Parkinson’s disease is insidious for the way it steals your independence by stealing your ability to perform simple tasks. Shaving, holding a razor to your face, is something I have the luxury of doing or not doing basically for fun; I like the idea that NSID could help a research foundation trying to cure people of a disease that takes that away. MJFF’s open approach, using ~90% of donations to directly fund Parkinson’s researchers, seems like a solid one to me and, I’ll be honest, it doesn’t hurt either that they will cut both US and Canadian tax receipts.

So here’s how it works. If you want in on this aspect, start your NSID participation with a donation (US/CDN). When conversations come up about the scruff, tell them you’re doing it for charity, get those people to donate, too. And if, at some point, your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/cat can’t take it any more and insists that you shave, the price of that shave is a matching donation. The more your friends donate to defend your cause, the bigger the matching donation will have to be. And in the worst case, you make it through the month, and MJFF still gets a donation or two they might not otherwise have had. Make sense?

The only catch in all this is that I don’t have a centralized way to track MJFF donations. Let’s use the comments area on this post for that, shall we?

If I told you you could have one-click mac screenshots with automatic scp to a host of your choice and it could have a reasonably bad user experience and no keyboard bindings, well you’d just be all over that, wouldn’t you?

Yes, I know about grabup (and their recent departure), and tinygrab, and all the rest. I’ve used several of them, in fact. What can I say, I wrote this way back when, and still find it gets the job done. If you don’t want to hitch your cart to someone else’s image hosting horse (and associated ad spam/image expiry blah), you’re welcome to it.

It’s a shell script. It takes the screencap, does the scp, and then puts the URL on your clipboard. You’ll need to edit some bits. I find it irksome to run from the command line, so I wrapped it in a 1-liner applescript (do shell script "~/bin/sattap") that I can just click from the dock.

Rob wrote one of these, too. [UPDATE: And now catlee has "ported" sattap to linux.]

Migrate.app

My macbook has the irksome habit, when I disconnect it from the external display and then reconnect it, of leaving all my windows on the tiny little 13″ display and not the hulking 24″ display I just connected, presumably for displaying things.

I borrowed a script from Dudehey on macosxhints to do the heavy lifting and then tweaked it to my particular preferences about which windows stay where. You will disagree with me, and hate this script; in fact, it won’t even work for you. But maybe you can make it work for you, if you care to?

Here it is. Open this in Script Editor – change it however you like, and then Save it somewhere as an Application, throw it on the dock, and hooray.

Rotate Page Bookmarklet

Okay, I don’t actually find this one useful, but it amuses. And you need some amusement.

javascript:document.body.style.MozTransform="rotate(90deg)";void(0);

Go on, try it. (Yes, in Firefox.)

I don’t know if there are people out there who like the way they sound in audio recordings, or look on video. I certainly don’t. I don’t think it’s a self-image issue, either; and I know I’m not alone. My recorded voice lacks the resonance I experience internally, and my recorded image just looks… mouthier (?!) than I imagine myself to be. I don’t even know what that means.

Proposed:

Nightingale’s Corollary to the Uncanny Valley Hypothesis: The depth of one’s psychological attachment to, and familiarity with, one’s own image, amplifies feelings of canny/uncanniness. This can result in greater than average affinity for moderately dissimilar representations (c.f. the popularity of “realistic cartoon avatar” generators, or caricature artists), but also particularly heightened sensitivity to minor dissimilarities.

[Discuss. Cite examples.]

The Point (i.e. Where You Should Have Started Reading)

I bring this up because the inimitable duo of Alix and Rainer recently took some of my scattered ramblings and knit them together into an educational piece on some of the security features in Firefox. I think they did a lovely job:

YouTube

In very much related news, Drew worked with Alix and Rainer to put together a video that talks about some of Firefox’s privacy features. I find it much easier to listen to Drew’s calm, matter of fact, “we did awesome stuff, and want you to know about it” delivery. I suspect you will, as well.

YouTube

In what history will likely judge as a vain attempt to impress him, then, I recently landed bug 513147, deletion of the now antiquated “Properties” dialog that used to be available on right-clicking things like images and links. Not because it was useless (every feature is someone’s baby, and is added for a reason) but because it wasn’t useful enough, to enough people, to justify the cost.

50kb of code in our product that is poorly understood, not often used, and not covered by unit tests is not free. When bugs show up, it takes longer than it should to fix them. If a security bug were to show up (which is always a risk when content mixes with chrome, however remote it may seem) it would be particularly expensive for us to reload that context into our brains to fix it.

Deleting it isn’t free either, of course – there are 4 extensions that build off that dialog that will need to be updated, and there may be some who use it regularly who will be disappointed. But the forces of software (inertia, squeaky wheels, cynicism and inertia) bias so heavily towards keeping code in the tree that we should all try to take clear deletion opportunities when they come up. Not capriciously, not without sensitivity to the impact it can have, but with recognition that the hidden cost to keeping them is also large and… hidden.

It is in the spirit of this sensitivity that we, on the Firefox team, have tagged this bug and others like it: [killthem].  What else do you think should go? (And please, be gentle. Remember, every feature is someone’s baby.)

[Update: Geoff Lankow has taken the code that used to be built in, and made it into an add-on, which is think is fantastic. As I said to him, and as I said above, my assertion has never been that the code was useless, just that it wasn't useful enough to justify its cost in the core product. An add-on is a great place for functionality like that, and I thank Geoff for his work.]

I think, initially, some people viewed our private browsing mode as a checklist feature. Even though we’d been working on it since before Firefox 3, it wasn’t strong enough for us to ship until 3.5 and in the interim other browsers have implemented versions of the same functionality. I really like the way we’ve done it, and there seem to be significant differences between the various browsers’ implementations, but regardless of all that I also don’t think that any private browsing mode is a complete solution.

Private browsing mode assumes that you will always know ahead of time that you’re about to do privacy-sensitive things. In Firefox 3.5, we tried to match more closely the way people actually use the browser, and sometimes that means they need to clean up after the fact – forgetting a slice of time, or a particular site. It also means that sometimes they want their browser to remember things, sensitive bookmarks for example, but not publicize those in the location bar. People’s use of a web browser in 2009 is more nuanced than:

Alex Faaborg has done a fantastic job detailing many of the privacy features in the latest release of Firefox. I’d encourage you all to check it out.

One feature I’ve been talking a lot about is our support for Geolocation. I think that once Firefox 3.5 gets out there and sites realize they have a (privacy- and user-control-respecting) way to ask their users for their location in the world, all kinds of great services will show up. Flickr already has a photos-near-you feature, for instance, and I imagine mapping sites, restaurant reviews, and others are hot on their tails.

So I’m sure, in short order, that this won’t be necessary. In the meantime, if you’re running one of the Firefox 3.5 Release Candidates, you can use this bookmarklet to inject your current location into the google maps search box, so that you can base searches off your current location:

javascript:function sv(s){document.querySelector("#q_d").value=s};sv("Checking...");navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function(a){c=a.coords;sv(c.latitude+"%20"+c.longitude);document.forms.q_form.submit();},function(){sv("Rejected!")});

If you haven’t used a bookmarklet before, it’s easy. Open up your bookmark manager, decide where you want to put this (I like to have them on my bookmarks toolbar, since I use them a lot), and create a new bookmark. When it asks for a location, put in the code pasted above. Now, when you’re on the google maps site, click the bookmark to jump to your current location (after, of course, giving your consent).

This bookmarklet is specific to google maps (but I bet you can hack it!), and it certainly requires you to be using a modern browser with support for these features.  If you don’t have the latest Firefox yet, you can become part of our early testing community by downloading a copy now.

[Update: Changed the bookmarklet code a little to give some feedback immediately by letting you know it's checking. I bet someone out there has already made a version of this that's half as long, and twice as powerful. Comment!]

She was making a point about how Google gives users control over the kind of ads they see, and she mentioned this:

I think I always knew that the “Ads by Google” text at the bottom of ads was clickable – I’ve probably even clicked it. Historically though, it’s just been a sales pitch for would-be advertisers and content authors.  Now, when you click on it (go on, there’s one at the bottom of this post), there’s a link to your very own “Ad Preferences Manager.”

This page tells you what Google thinks you’re interested in based on the browsing habits it’s observed, and hence what kinds of ads it wants to show you (seriously, go check it out).  It also gives you the option to add/remove interests, or opt out entirely.

Betsy, from Google, was talking about how they had been trying to really get the word out to people about this interface, so that people could control their ad experience. I wasn’t sure whether that message was reaching people – even people who might care about the information advertisers collect.

A couple of questions, then:

1. Did you know about this page?
2. Do the contents there surprise you?  How accurate are they?
3. How does it all make you feel? Are you more comfortable, knowing that you have some control? Or are you less comfortable, seeing the profile laid out like that?
4. Did you make any changes while you were there?