mozilla

In my not so humble opinion generating a graph like this from a database shouldn't require a 70 line ruby script!

An amazing weekend of Vancouver events awaits us. Unfortunately I can't go to all, all recommended:

• Design Thinking 2011 at Granville Island - Trevor Boddy on Vancouverism and more on Friday August 19 and Sat August 20, 2011 unconference. I'll be there!
• Grow 2011 - Startups, entrepreneurialism and more - Friday August 19th and the rest of the weekend. I won't be there but there will be lots of incredible startup folks from Toronto, Vancouver, the rest of Canada and Silicon Valley
• HackVan - Saturday August 20th at Mozilla Vancouver - hack on some cool APIs like Tin Eye cool image stuff and Context.IO email API and meet the incredible Joey deVilla. Say hi to Joey for me!
• Vancouver Design Nerds REFAB Jam - Saturday August 20th at The Hive across the street from Vancouver Hack Day and on the same day Saturday August 20th from 7-10p.m. I'll be there. C'mon down after Van Hack!

Not to mention Linux Conf 2011 Vancouver which started on August 17th and ends on August 19th

Presentation created for June 30, 2011 Vancouver Ruby / Rails meetup (flickr set, slideshare, pdf)

See my Better Support Living through Software for the full details

And just for fun here are the flickr pics of the slides:

I. Better Living

II. Just Say No

III.We Can Do This

IV. Support Comes to You!

V. Fork this!

Come join us for our big Firefox 4 party + Spaces party (how should we re-design our space to make it friendly for Open web compatible folks? We need your help figuring this out!). April 15, 5:30p.m. at 163 West Hastings 2nd Floor, RSVP on meetup, please! Free snacks, free drinks, free swag!

And I and the the rest of Mozilla Messaging have been integrated back into Mozilla corporation which means that after 2 Thunderbird releases  where we established our ability to deliver and assembled a fine team, we'll have better access to Firefox folks and resources (David's Future of Messaging Blog post explains it better).

Hard to believe that I didn't make any predictions in 2009 (my 2008 predictions)!

Herewith again some randomly ordered Mobile predictions which are worth what you paid for them!

Mobile

1. Google will introduce a "comes with data" mobile phone featuring an easy environment to write HTML5 & JS apps
2. A Canadian mobile phone carrier will actually sell mobiles other than the iPhone that have current software & aren't 6-12 months old :-) The current "sell old phones with old firmware with bogus customizations" model of Rogers, Bell and Telus will be over in 2011.
   
3. Apple's tablet will be introduced, it wil be big seller and a great creator and consumer of multi-media and it will be closed and have the iPhone App Store model rather than the Mac app model.
4. Nokia will deliver Maemo 6 and an N900 successor but it won't be good enough for the mainstream but will be awesome for me & other mobile devs because mobile Firefox will offer superior HTML5 and JS experience (yes working for Mozilla I am biased :-) !)
5. The next iPhone will boast a 5 mega pixel camera and other still and video imaging improvements which will be more than good enough for old cameraphone snobs like me and accelerate Nokia's decline among mobile multimedia creators.
6. Mozilla Messaging (my employer!) will introduce a version of Raindrop that doesn't require you to do geeky things like install things like CouchDB yourself and it will rock on Android, Maemo and any other modern open mobile web  environment (sorry Blackberry, iPhone and Symbian but you lose since you are all neither open or modern or both :-) !) Just kidding, it will rock on any modern mobile web browser open or closed methinks :-) !
   

A belated gig change post: Since July 21, 2009, I have been Technical Support Lead at Mozilla Messaging. It's been quite the wild ride. I have been immersed in Mozilla Messaging's product, the open source Thunderbird  Email client (in particular getting ready for Thunderbird 3 currently scheduled for November which has a plethora of improvements including the super spiffy global search) as well as tweaking the Mozilla Messaging Implementation of Get Satisfaction for Thunderbird support as well as starting the deployment of a Knowledge Base for Thunderbird. Busy times! Good times!

Sidenote: I'd completely forgotten the intensity of focus that's needed to ship a big product like Thunderbird; couple that with the knowledge that millions of people will be using it and with the history of Mozilla makes for a unique experience for me because the Unix network management software I worked on at Nortel was big but only used by 100s of users and even then by all reports most of the features were unused, contrast that with Thunderbird where seemingly every feature no matter how obscure is used by lots of folks!

[UPDATE: check out the official Open Komodo blog post from ActiveState] 

Got an advance briefing about Open Komodo (initially a portion of Komodo Edit combined with other open source goodies) which is an open source client side (JavaScript, HTML, CSS) web application development platform from our friends at ActiveState and Mozilla. Add debugging and PHP support (hopefully soon, LazyWeb ?!?) and you have a killer open source Drupal development environment as well as one for XUL based Rich Internet Apps and CSS/HTML/JavaScript Web Apps (e.g. iPhone apps). Can't wait to try it and see how it evolves!