One of the major challenges we face with the design of our new linguistic command-line project is that of trust. As Zittrain mentions in The Future of the Internet, this is really the fundamental problem of generative systems, and also their most valuable asset: the ability for a user to run arbitrary code is simultaneously what gives the personal computer its revolutionary power, but it’s also its greatest vulnerability. At present, because our project is still in the prototyping stage, we’re opting for freedom of expressiveness and experimentation over security. ... Read more

Yesterday I participated in the San Francisco AIDS Walk with two Mozilla interns. I’ve always been a bit puzzled by the concept of walks/runs-for-a-cause because at a surface level, the energy an individual spends running or walking doesn’t directly contribute to the actual cause they’re ambulating for. Ultimately, it seems like it’s a transaction for one’s time and energy in exchange for a cause’s publicity: rather than simply donating a few dollars to a cause, ambulating for the cause is indicative of the sacrifice of one’s time in the name of a cause (which can be more valuable than money, depending on the individual). ... Read more

Lately some of us at Mozilla Labs have been experimenting with graphical keyboard user interfaces in Firefox. Our current work-in-progress is something that we’re calling Ubiquity for the time being, though the name is by no means set in stone. This project is heavily informed by Enso, a software product developed by me and my colleagues at Humanized from 2005-07. Aside from the benefits outlined in Alex Faaborg’s blog post entitled The Graphical Keyboard User Interface, this experiment is intended to solve few other problems, one of which I’ll address in this post. ... Read more

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

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

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

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