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Advancing the Mozilla Manifesto

Most regular readers of this blog are familiar with the Mozilla Manifesto and with the work that the Mozilla Corporation undertakes to advance the manifesto. It is good work. Actually, it is great work from a great community of people. However, the corporation focuses most on Firefox and the related software and communities. The manifesto [...]

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New Pitches for the Lab with Leo

My work at the Mozilla Foundation is, not surprisingly, focused on advancing the Mozilla Manifesto.
After my last Firefox 3 segment on the Lab with Leo Laporte TV show, I started thinking about pitches for new segments that tie in with the manifesto.
The rough ideas I've so far had are:

Deep Customization of Firefox: Make your browser [...]

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20000 km, $7000, 7 days and 4 tons of CO2

… or, "Making Event Attendance Count"
Late last year, I gave a keynote at paired Finnish conferences MindTrek and OpenMind. While the events were well worth attending, afterwards I spent a few bleak hours thinking about the actual costs of my attendance. If I had left Canada just for these events (which, thankfully, I [...]

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Lab with Leo Laporte: Demoing Firefox 3 and an (Emulated) Trip Down Memory Lane

Some ways back in the haze that was 2007, I was a guest on a few episodes of the Lab with Leo Laporte show. When I was visiting, I did two brief segments – one on Hiveminder and another on Free Software/Open Source.
I'll be going back next week to record another few segments. This time, [...]

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Life on the Lagging Edge: Greasemonkey Rocks!

I've been doing some interesting work (though, perhaps only to me) on the OSI mailing lists over the last week (which I'll be writing about later). A lot of it has involved far too much manual processing of data from mailing list archives. In particular, I've found that I'm doing the following over and over [...]

Keynoting linuxdan.si: Great Food, Mild Discomfit & a Castle

LinuX dan Slovenia was held in Ljubljana castle (which, as one might guess, overlooks Ljubljana from a hill called Castle Hill.)
Conference organizers: Want to improve the next conference that you host? Hold it in a castle - everything is more interesting in a large stone building that has arrow slits. Also, when if the wireless [...]

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Recipe: Cornbread Crème Brûlée

My wife loves cornbread and crème brûlée. This dish combines both (much, I am sure, to the horror of many.) I made it as a part of our 11th anniversary meal.
Serves: 4
Preparation time: 20 minutes of work, 5 hours of waiting.
Ingredients
1/4 cup coarse corn meal
1/2 cup water
1 cup heavy cream
1/4 cup brown sugar
4 egg [...]

A French (Culinary) Invasion of the Deep South

Last night, Mandy and I celebrated eleven awesome years of being together.
I cooked us a dinner that combined two cuisines that are very important to me, but that I almost never cook any more - French (or, at least, the codified version that I was taught in cooking school) and home-style cooking from Texas, Oklahoma, [...]

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Conference Report: OpenMind & MindTrek 2007

OpenMind 2007 and MindTrek 2007 were excellent mid-sized (400+ participants) tech events that brought together a great mix of people - academics, working developers, activists, senior IT management, public servants, industry veterans, innovators and even pirates [0].
Some presentations were lackluster, but the informal discussions were awesome. There [...]

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Supporting Development of Norway's Electronic Frontier

Some months ago, around the time of the 2007 eZ Conference, I started working with Tor-Arne Bellika (from Innovation Performance AS) and Aleksander Farstad (from eZ Systems AS) on a series of projects centered around helping to develop Norway's electronic frontier.
The projects are diverse and broad in scope. They range from developing a Free Software [...]

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