The Thousand Year Roadmap
I made this presentation at Seneca’s FSOSS a few weeks ago; some of these ideas have been rattling around in my brain for a while, but it was the first time I’d even run through it. I was thoroughly...
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Barbiephonic (redux)
I have a funny story about the recent Hello Barbie networked-device security failure. This is doubly a repost – it started its current incarnation as a twitter rant, and longtime readers may remember...
View ArticleA Minor Hack
This is a cute trick you can do with Firefox that I happen to like. If you’ve got a bookmark saved in your bookmarks bar, right-click it and choose “properties”; there’s a checkbox there at the bottom,...
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Developers Are The New Mainframes
This is another one of those rambling braindump posts. I may come back for some fierce editing later, but in the meantime, here’s some light weekend lunacy. Good luck getting through it. I believe in...
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Witness Me
Having recently forced myself to play through the ending-plus-the-real-ending of The Witness, I’m finding myself wondering if it was worth playing. I’m surprised to find myself thinking that it...
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Reinitialize…
This post should find its way to the Planet Mozilla twitter feed; if it does, new posts to Planet will be reflected there again. (Pic cropped out of the “Halo: ODST” trailer from when it was still...
View ArticleThe Future Of The Planet
I’m not sure who said it first, but I’ve heard a number of people say that RSS solved too many problems to be allowed to live. I’ve recently become the module owner of Planet Mozilla, a venerable...
View ArticleCulture Shock
I’ve been meaning to get around to posting this for… maybe fifteen years now? Twenty? At least I can get it off my desk now. As usual, it’s safe to assume that I’m not talking about only one thing...
View ArticleFree As In Health Care
This is to some extent a thought experiment. The video below shows what’s called a “frontal offset crash test” – your garden variety driver-side head-on collision – between a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu and...
View ArticleBrought To You By The Letter U
Being a global organization, Mozilla employees periodically send out all-hands emails notifying people of upcoming regional holidays. With Labour Day coming up in Canada, this was my contribution to...
View ArticleThe Planet Is Safe For Now
This is a followup to this post – The Future Of The Planet – where I said we had four choices about what to do next: Do nothing; leave Planet as is. Improve Planet as a Planet. Replace Planet with...
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Historical Precedent
A while back in Architecture For Loners I wrote a bit about a how in-game architecture can fail a video game’s narrative if you’ve got the right eyes, the right incentives and maybe the right jetpack:...
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Economics
Two similar jokes rolled past me late last week, the first when I mentioned that running a Java program in JVM in a Linux VM in a container on AWS is a very inefficient way of generating waste heat,...
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Pageant Knight
On September 17th, DC “celebrated” what they called “Batman Day”. I do not deploy scare quotes lightly, so let me get this out of the way: Batman is boring. Batman qua Batman as a hero, as a story and...
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Minimum Viable Basic Human Decency
I’ve been batting this around for a few weeks now, ever since I started drafting Free As In Health Care. I’m not sure where to take it at this point, so I’m going to publish it and see what happens....
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Switching Sides
I’ve been holding off on a laptop refresh at work for a while, but it’s time. The recent Apple events have been less than compelling; I’ve been saying for a long time that Mozilla needs more people...
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Modernity
For no particular reason, here’s a picture of a computer with a 1.3Ghz processor, 2 gigabytes of RAM, 32 gigabytes of solid-state internal storage and another 32 gigabytes on a MicroSD card, wifi,...
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Memories And Palaces
This is an old memory, dredged out of the cellar by this Metafilter thread about a Sierra game: The Colonel’s Bequest. Bequest was a charmingly understated member of the “[Subject] Quest” games...
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