Today, and as I write this, friends and family of Aaron Swartz are gathering to pay their last respects to a son, friend, and colleague. Our Mozilla Foundation software team call, which normally happens at this time, was rescheduled in order to allow a number of the engineers to attend…
I was reading scrollback on irc this morning, where a number of my students were discussing the unit tests for the webvtt project we're doing this term. The main issue was that Visual Studio didn't seem to provide the equivalent of our autotools build system's ``make check`', that is,…
In 2013 I'm going to try something. I don't usually do New Year's resolutions, but I like the idea of the cold-startup (I don't know what the opposite of cold turkey and 'stopping' is, but that). For whatever reason, I need to do things all-or-none. I'm someone who thrives on…
"Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, “tradition” should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty…
Today our family gathered to celebrate Christmas on my wife's side. After the usual amazing food and gifts, we spent time making room for dessert, with some going for a walk on the newly snow-covered trails of the woods, and others sledding. My eldest nephew and I stayed back so…
One of the things I'm currently doing is helping the Mozilla Foundation figure out how to evolve and grow the Webmaker project. Mark has been writing about the plan for 2013. I'm mainly thinking about ideas for tools, products, and how to do work like this at the scale of…
With the majority of the webvtt parser now written (untested, unrevewied, but written), we've turned our attention back to testing. Previously the class wrote 300+ validation tests. These were simple VTT files that allowed us to check that a parser (or validator) correctly passed or failed a particlar VTT file,…
Last night as a few of us were working on the webvtt code, Dale popped into channel to ask if others were having trouble building. After a few minutes we concluded that the tree was indeed broken, and that the last commit had failed to add some header files, update…
We just launched Popcorn Maker 1.0 this weekend at Mozilla Festival 2012, and while the focus of the app is obviously web video remixing, one of our favourite features as a dev team was the JavaScript Crash Reporter. Bobby and I wrote a little bit about it in our…
We're about 3 weeks away from the Popcorn Maker 1.0 launch at this year's Mozilla Festival in London. Just to raise my blood pressure a bit, we've shipped a beta today. It coincides with the release of an amazing TED talk by Mozilla's Ryan Merkley about Popcorn.js and…