A few weeks ago, Oxford University professor Jonathan Zittrain recommended Firefox 3 on The Colbert Report. While getting the bump for the browser from this great show was certainly a win for Mozilla, more provocative was the new book Zittrain was discussing with Colbert, entitled The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Contrary to the Luddism I’d assumed the book’s title implied—e.g., that the Internet is a terrible thing and needs to be dismantled—Zittrain instead celebrates how open and positive the Internet and personal computing have been for us, but warns that this liberating period is in danger of coming to a close. ... Read more

Last week, Scott Petersen from Adobe gave a talk at Mozilla on a toolchain he’s been creating—soon to be open-sourced—that allows C code to be targeted to the Tamarin virtual machine. Aside from being a really interesting piece of technology, I thought its implications for the web were pretty impressive. Before reading this post, readers who aren’t familiar with Tamarin may want to read Frank Hecker’s excellent Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin post from 2006 for some background on its goals and why it’s relevant to Mozilla and the open-source community in general. ... Read more

Yesterday I tried learning Inform 7. I’m not sure how I feel about the documentation for this language; on the one hand, like its predecessor, the DM4 for Inform 6, it’s extremely thorough and well-written. On the other hand, one aspect of the DM4 that made it among my favorite programming books—perhaps one of my favorite books, period—was its exercises, which made experiencing the book fairly interactive. The act of reading a relatively short amount of text and then putting one’s newly-found knowledge to use in the solving of a difficult problem not only helped reinforce the knowledge for me, but it was also fun. ... Read more

A few weeks ago, I started a small project to create a user interface for something called a Z-Machine: a virtual machine created by Infocom in the late 1970’s to run their text adventure games—the most famous among them being Zork, which is apparently what the “Z” in Z-Machine stands for. These games, as their name suggests, are completely text-based; Infocom’s 1984 masterpiece The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, for instance, opens with this passage: ... Read more

Yesterday I found John J. Lee’s old Python-SpiderMonkey code from 2003, which creates a bridge between the Python language and Mozilla’s SpiderMonkey JavaScript engine—the same engine that powers Firefox. Lee mentioned on his website that it’s not currently maintained, and after downloading it and trying to compile it, I found that SpiderMonkey had changed a bit since the code had been written, so I made some fixes and, after discussing things with him, set up a new Google Code project for it at http://code. ... Read more

Salon.com recently published an interesting interview with Elizabeth Royte, the author of a new book called Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. It’s definitely worth a read, I think. One of the biggest takeaways from it is the fact that the whole “8 cups of water a day” maxim isn’t so much a myth as a misinterpretation that’s been promulgated by the water industry: yes, we need 8 cups of water a day, but we already get most of it from the water contained in the food we eat. ... Read more

I couldn’t find anything on the web that attempted to teach Python to readers who already knew JavaScript, so I thought I’d give it a shot, since a number of my friends at Mozilla don’t know much about Python but know JavaScript incredibly well. The languages actually aren’t that dissimilar—in fact, some of JavaScript’s latest features have been borrowed directly from Python. Aside from focusing on differences and similarities between the two languages, I also try to explain Python’s design philosophy a bit, to give readers a context for why things work the way they do. ... Read more

Since moving to Mozilla, I haven’t had a ton of time to work on Enso, the commercial product turned open-source project that I worked on at Humanized. One of the things I’ve been learning about at Mozilla, though, has been getting into the habit of writing about what I’m working on. We didn’t do this much at Humanized, at least not until the first few months of 2008 when we started designing openly. ... Read more

Given what I explained about Weave in yesterday’s blog post, it’s clear that one of the biggest challenges facing the project, aside from its far-from-trivial implementation, will be its usability. The good thing, as I mentioned in yesterday’s post, is that the project abstracts away any notion of asymmetric cryptography and all the complex concepts it brings to the table. But are there other ways it could be made easier to use? ... Read more

For the past week at Labs, many of us have been sprinting on getting Weave to release 0.2, which aims to be able to allow users to sync all their information between multiple browsers. This is something that Google Browser Sync has been doing for a while, but Weave’s adding an interesting twist to it all: because it aims to maximize user privacy, the data stored on the cloud is basically encrypted by a passphrase that only the user knows. ... Read more