Day 2

I have officially begun. Friday was my first day of paid work with the Mozilla Corporation, and it was tiring. As expected, it mostly revolved around logistical stuff, though I did find some time with beltzner in the afternoon to watch an hour-long introduction to how Mozilla builds a DOM tree (thanks Johnny!)

Basically, what Friday allowed me to do was get my feet sufficiently under myself to come up with this:

I haven’t, historically, done much with mindmapping and other “thinking aids” but right now there is too much bubbling around to keep track of, so it seemed like a useful exercise. Attentive readers will note that the current list of thoughts is both incomplete and horribly short-sighted, stretching out a month at most. This is deliberate – I think it relatively stupid to hop on board on day 1 and to start making long term plans on day 2. I suppose someone will tell me that this makes me an “analytic” personality type, or some such, obsessed with having all the information before making a decision. I would suggest that this is grossly overgeneralized (as personality-classification schemes always, perforce, are) though I will confess to a preference for having some information before making any momentous statements of direction. I have always been nutty that way.

On a personal note, the first day (and, indeed, those leading up to it) has been grand. People at Mozilla are welcoming and congratulatory, people at IBM are well-wishing and congratulatory and, on balance, my LinkedIn profile has never been happier (though it is notably wanting for some more 1-degree-of-separation Mozilla love).

I really do think this was the right move to make, I’m pretty excited to be getting going. I’ll be heading to New York in early March with beltzner to talk to some of the people in the CA/Browser forum, and then later in March I’ll be in Mountain View to meet with some more of my newfound comrades-in-arms. In the meantime I’ll be trying to knock down that web of questions while simultaneously, no doubt, adding whole new subtrees. If anyone reading this wants to point out answers to some of the leaf nodes in that web, or alert me to obvious swaths of unmapped work, I can now officially be reached at johnath@mozilla.com. Huzzah! (Yes, my home email still works just fine, too).

[Update: Yes, the map was made with bubbl.us, mea culpa for not providing tasty linkage. ]

[Update2: Yes, the Johnny Stenback video is available online here. ]

Transition

As intimated earlier, things have been afoot. Just one thing, really, but that thing sets into motion such a panoply of downstream consequence that I feel truly justified in my flagrant use of the plural form. To wit, then, and without terribly much further ado:

I am leaving IBM.
I am joining Mozilla.

This is momentous, so I will give you a minute to recover.

Continue reading “Transition” →

What’s orange and blue and downloaded all over?

I have been delinquent in my posting habits but this time, this time, it is not attributable to one of my regular outbursts of silence. This time there is something happening. Something that is keeping me a) occupied, and b) quiet about it. Some of you know what it is. For the rest, I will only say:

Watch this space.

(OMG w00t.)

Once You Go Black…

Amy has an uncle named Fred. Fred’s an interesting guy for lots of reasons, but of interest at the moment is that when he drinks wine, he cuts it 50/50 with ginger ale. I used to think he did this only with a particular batch of home-brew wine that was, to normal wine, what the bags of concentrated coca-cola syrup are to fountain drinks; dilution with that stuff is wholly appropriate.

But no. He does this with all wine. I think that’s fantastic. If that allows him to have a pleasant wine experience (champagne every day!) then more power to him, and what’s even better is that he can continue to enjoy even very cheap wine because the dilution softens some of the harsher effects of buying economy brands. Fine by me.

But I don’t do it myself, because I enjoy what’s involved in developing a palette for wine. I enjoy the vast spectrum of flavours you can come to appreciate, and I feel like cutting it with ginger ale would impair my ability to enjoy that: different strokes for different folks, that’s all.

I’m the same with chocolate: give me high-percentage, uncut, dark chocolate and I am a happy guy. I’m not stupid about it – I don’t turn up my nose at Hershey the way a good aficionado ought. But given my druthers, I trend towards quality and I trend towards unadulterated.

And so I confronted myself recently with the fact that I don’t drink my coffee black. Milk and Sugar, sometimes even a double-double. This, I realized, flies in the face of my whole aforementioned way of doing things. So as of about a week ago, it’s been straight black coffee.Â Yes, purely in the name of aesthetic synchrony.

It wasn’t easy at first. Turns out those adulterants do a pretty good job of making bad coffee more drinkable, and bad coffee abounds. But I’m here to tell you that it takes less than a week for your tongue to form the appropriate calluses, and now I’m starting to really feel it. I expect that, like wine, my brain will start to assign more neurons to coffee tasting in the coming months, and that the experience will grow on me. As it happens, I got a half pound of Kona for Christmas (thanks Barb!) and while it’s not Jamaican Blue or (I can only imagine) Kopi Luwak, I’m looking forward to tasting it without blinders.

Yes, I realise how ridiculous this all sounds.

Johnath’s Book Guide 2007

Although I can enter droughts that last for months at a time, I am, in general, a reader. At the end of 2006 I checked my PalmPilot’s list of books read in 2006 and it turned out there were 25. This is not a particularly impressive number, but it is clearly fodder for a blog post of some kind. I thought about writing a separate post for each, basically a book review a week or so — I could stretch the content until June that way.

Problem is, I don’t really care about stretching content, and that sounds like a lot of work. Besides, I suspect that some of those reviews would be pretty thin since the books either left no mark, or left a mark which has faded over the intervening months. So instead I’ve done the potentially more useful thing and just compiled them into a coarsely ranked list, because what would the internet be without lists?

Continue reading “Johnath’s Book Guide 2007” →

Tales of Comeuppance

One of my cognitive science profs used to have a bit of a soft spot for evolutionary psychology and it is from him that I developed my love of “cheater detection.” If you’re an evolutionary psychologist, see, a lot of the righteous indignation you see from your fellow simians out there in the world is traceable quite directly to a part of our psyche which is tweaked powerfully by the feeling that someone is cheating – acquiring benefit without paying expected costs. It really gets us riled up, on a very primitive level.

It makes sense, of course. Cheaters in a social species will act in ways (eating other people’s food, making sweet sweet love to other people’s lady friends, etc) that allow them to acquire huge positional benefits within the group unless there are powerful repercussions like ostracism or worse.

So lo and behold, here we are with all this evolution behind us and wouldn’t you know it, our brains are wired such that someone jumping the queue at Walmart or trying to pass a traffic jam on the shoulder is taking their life in their hands. It is rarely the case that I am pro-homicide but in the case of those inveterate jack-offs that pull into the lane which they know is ending right up ahead, and which will only gain them 3 car lengths, but will slow everyone down when they force themselves back in, I am more than a little inclined to make case-by-case exceptions.

Thus, as a public service, in this time of charity and co-opted pagan solstice rituals, I have put together a list of three of my favourite recent stories of cheater-busting. These stories are cheater-detection catharsis. You can go ahead and pump your fist at the end and say “Yes!” under your breath. I won’t tell.

1. What’s Noka Worth? Noka Chocolate is a hyper-elite brand of chocolate which gets packaged into gift baskets at the Emmys and so forth. Rarest of the rare cacao, hyper pure, no additives, blah blah blah. I will not be the one to impeach a company that focuses on quality for being elitist – quality is a legitimate thing after which to strive, and a legitimate thing for which to charge a premium. But at $2000/lb, you should be able to demonstrate some actual value add.

2. The Tale of Lyger, Jericho, and Republican Congressional Aide Todd Shriber. Todd decided to hire a “hacker” to change his GPA at Texas Christian University. Too bad he ended up emailing a couple of the guys running attrition.org which, like most sites which chronicle network security news, are used to being solicited by idiots, and tend to have some fun along the way. After you read the blog post, you can read the actual emails here (or, since attrition is under almost constant attack by one party or another, the cached version).

3. Reverse 419 Artwork Scam. Okay, I confess this isn’t as recent as the other two, but I have a lot of love for 419eater.com. These guys respond to the 419 scam emails from Nigeria and elsewhere and, by acting as interested parties, get the scammers to perform in various silly ways. Usually it’s restricted to requests for religious conversion or even getting the scammer to send some money themselves but this is my absolute favourite. I won’t spoil it or anything, but if you only read one, read this one.

Green Threads

Yesterday I got a package from Dr. Dobb’s Journal with three copies of the January edition, confirming that not only was my latest article in print, but it was a front page feature, huzzah! The article itself can be found online here. My sister-in-law Barb said that it sounded “Drier than toast” so don’t say I didn’t warn you, but I do manage to mention my wife and marijuana grow ops in the first sentence, so really, you knew it had to go downhill from there.

The rest of this post will be dedicated to reprinting an email exchange I just had with a DDJ reader in the States, in anticipation of the fact that he might not be the only person to ask his particular question. Future respondents can thus be directed here, saving the tubes literal hojillions of electrons. [Editor’s note: Firefox 2’s sexy new spellcheck doesn’t like the word hojillions and recommends, instead, “gazillions.” I love you Firefox. Pat, pat.]

Continue reading “Green Threads” →

Hacking the Cisco 79xx Series

The phones where I work are fun. When we moved to the new digs back in 2001 (September 11th, actually) we were probably some of the first kids on the block to have a whole building running on Cisco 7960s – VoIP phones. Most of the time these look like normal phones, but the plug at the back is an RJ-45, not an RJ-11 which means there’s all kinds of fun available for people who like to play.

First of all, if you have one of these phones, make sure these problems have been fixed. I put that notice out in conjunction with Cisco back in 2002 and any reasonable admin should have pushed out the necessary firmware updates. But hey, if your phone system still allows one person to shut down arbitrary phones or potentially the entire phone system – neat.

After that notice went out I stopped playing with the phones quite as actively, but there are several other cell-phone-like things you can do if you’re lucky enough to have one of these on your desk.

Continue reading “Hacking the Cisco 79xx Series” →

Spiritus Frumenti

eBay and I have a relationship that is more flirtation than passion. Of course I know how sexy it can be. Of course I want to get to know it better. But eBay is an expensive mistress, so my feedback is a withered little 5, because I rarely actually buy the things there that I covet.

I am, however, so thoroughly chuffed with a recent purchase there that I must share. Thanks to the kind auspices of ginger.1 I am the proud owner of this:

It’s a prescription from December of 1924. A very special prescription, printed on a very special prescription pad issued by the U.S. Treasury department. It’s a prescription for Spiritus Frumenti, filled in Providence, RI. This is exciting for me, because 1924 is right in the middle of prohibition and Spiritus Frumenti, as the Latin geeks have no doubt already ascertained, is whiskey.

I have always loved old paper, but I am particularly fond of old paper which reflects old ways of thinking, and reminds me that people have always been crazy. This one is particularly great because it also reminds me that people have always been wily about wrangling their way around government prohibitions of things that are fun. And as you all know, I’m a real fan of people.

The Aeroplan Game: An ethnography

Steph’s sister Jody says my posts are boring. I choose to interpret this to mean that my posts are fascinating, but on topics which do not readily proclaim their relevance to her life. In any event, today’s will be no exception, because I’m going to be talking about frequent flyer miles; but also about voyeurism, so there’s some excitement for you.

Aeroplan, and programs like it, are a real challenge for geeks. On the one hand, as a demographic with higher-than-average concern for issues of digital surveillance and privacy, loyalty programs like Aeroplan which allow a company to profile your purchases and predict which brand of condom you will enjoy are viewed as being somewhat intrusive. On the other hand, Aeroplan miles bear a disturbing resemblance to points, and games with points, where intelligence can be applied to earn more points, well brother, that might well be called our oeuvre.
Continue reading “The Aeroplan Game: An ethnography” →