Licensing Edgecases
While I’m not a lawyer – and I’m definitely not your lawyer – licensing questions are on my plate these days. As I’ve been digging into one, I’ve come across what looks like a strange edge case in GPL...
View ArticleTime Dilation
[ https://www.youtube.com/embed/JEpsKnWZrJ8 ] I riffed on this a bit over at twitter some time ago; this has been sitting in the drafts folder for too long, and it’s incomplete, but I might as well...
View ArticleQuality Speakings
Unfortunately my suite of annoying verbal tics – um right um right um, which I continue to treat like Victor Borge’s phonetic punctuation – are on full display here, but I guess we’ll have to live with...
View ArticleA Summer Of Code Question
This is a lightly edited response to a question we got on IRC about how to best apply to participate in Google’s “Summer Of Code” program. this isn’t company policy, but I’ve been the one turning the...
View ArticleThe Evolution Of Open
This started its life as a pair of posts to the Mozilla governance forum, about the mismatch between private communication channels and our principles of open development. It’s a little long-winded,...
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Tunnels
Toronto’s oldest subway line, and the newest. This the view east from the Bloor Station platform: … and this is the view north from York University:
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Faint Signal
It’s been a little over a decade since I first saw Clay Shirky lay out his argument about what he called the “cognitive surplus”, but it’s been on my mind recently as I start to see more and more...
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Control Keys
I spend a lot of time thinking about keyboards, and I wish more people did. I’ve got more than my share of computational idiosyncrasies, but the first thing I do with any computer I’m going to be using...
View ArticleFeature Request
If I’m already in a Linux, ideally a Debian-esque Linux, is there a way for me to say “turn this new external hard drive into a bootable Linux that’s functionally identical to this current machine”?...
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Super Mario Telemachy
One thing I love about the Hyrule of Breath of the Wild is how totally unbothered it is by our hero’s presence in it. Cliffs you can’t climb, monsters you have no real shot at beating, characters...
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Defined By Prosodic And Morphological Properties
I am fully invested in these critical advances in memetic linguistics research: […] In this paper, we go beyond the aforementioned prosodic restrictions on novel morphology, and discuss gradient...
View ArticleOccasionally Useful
A bit of self-promotion: the UsesThis site asked me their four questions a little while ago; it went up today. A colleague once described me as “occasionally useful, in the same way that an occasional...
View ArticleReflections
Tevis Thompson, games critic and author of the excellent Second Quest has posted a new article on the best and worst games of 2018, and as always his work is worth your time. So the question is not:...
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Why Don’t You Just
This is a rough transcript of short talk I gave at a meeting I was in a few years ago. Enough time has passed that I don’t feel like I’m airing out any dirty laundry, and nothing’s brought this on but...
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Synchronous Text
Let’s lead with the punchline: the question of what comes after IRC, for Mozilla, is now on my desk. I wasn’t in the room when IRC.mozilla.org was stood up, but from what I’ve heard IRC wasn’t...
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Goals And Constraints
I keep coming back to this: “Open” in this context inextricably ties source control to individual agency. The checks and balances of openness in this context are about standards, data formats, and the...
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The Next Part Of The Process
I’ve announced this upcoming change and the requirements we’ve laid out for a replacement service for IRC, but I haven’t widely discussed the evaluation process in any detail, including what you can...
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