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Stand In The Place Where You Work
Before they were called cubicles, the prefabricated office furniture we all now take despondently for granted was part of an idea called an “Action Office”. Though they’ve apparently lost their way at...
View ArticleSocial Engineering
I gave this talk at FSOSS last week, in which I try to reclaim the term “Social Engineering”, so that it stops meaning “get the receptionist to give you their password” and starts meaning “Measuring...
View ArticleHostage Situation
(This is an edited version of a rant that started life on Twitter. I may add some links later.) Can we talk for a few minutes about the weird academic-integrity hostage situation going on in CS...
View ArticleThe Thousand Year Roadmap
I made this presentation at Seneca’s FSOSS a few weeks ago; some of these ideas have been rattling around in my brain for a while, but it was the first time I’d even run through it. I was thoroughly...
View ArticleA Minor Hack
This is a cute trick you can do with Firefox that I happen to like. If you’ve got a bookmark saved in your bookmarks bar, right-click it and choose “properties”; there’s a checkbox there at the bottom,...
View ArticleDevelopers Are The New Mainframes
This is another one of those rambling braindump posts. I may come back for some fierce editing later, but in the meantime, here’s some light weekend lunacy. Good luck getting through it. I believe in...
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Reinitialize…
This post should find its way to the Planet Mozilla twitter feed; if it does, new posts to Planet will be reflected there again. (Pic cropped out of the “Halo: ODST” trailer from when it was still...
View ArticleThe Future Of The Planet
I’m not sure who said it first, but I’ve heard a number of people say that RSS solved too many problems to be allowed to live. I’ve recently become the module owner of Planet Mozilla, a venerable...
View ArticleCulture Shock
I’ve been meaning to get around to posting this for… maybe fifteen years now? Twenty? At least I can get it off my desk now. As usual, it’s safe to assume that I’m not talking about only one thing...
View ArticleFree As In Health Care
This is to some extent a thought experiment. The video below shows what’s called a “frontal offset crash test” – your garden variety driver-side head-on collision – between a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu and...
View ArticleThe Planet Is Safe For Now
This is a followup to this post – The Future Of The Planet – where I said we had four choices about what to do next: Do nothing; leave Planet as is. Improve Planet as a Planet. Replace Planet with...
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Switching Sides
I’ve been holding off on a laptop refresh at work for a while, but it’s time. The recent Apple events have been less than compelling; I’ve been saying for a long time that Mozilla needs more people...
View ArticleWilliam Gibson Overdrive
From William Gibson’s “Spook Country”: She stood beneath Archie’s tail, enjoying the flood of images rushing from the arrowhead fluke toward the tips of the two long hunting tentacles. Something about...
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The Scope Of The Possible
This is a rough draft; I haven’t given it much in the way of polish, and it kind of just trails off. But a friend of mine asked me what I think web browsers look like in 2025 and I promised I’d let...
View ArticlePlanet Migration Shakeout
This note is intended for Planet and its audience, to let you know that while we’re mostly up and running, we’ve found a few feeds that aren’t getting pulled in consistently or at all. I’m not sure...
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Planet: Secure For Now
This is a followup to a followup – hopefully the last one for a while – about Planet. First of all, I apologize to the community for taking this long to resolve it. It turned out to have a lot more...
View ArticleTrimming The Roster
This is a minor administrative note about Planet Mozilla. In the next few weeks I’ll be doing some long-overdue maintenance and cleaning out dead feeds from Planet and the various sub-Planet blogrolls...
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Cleaning House
Current status: Current Status When I was desk-camping in CDOT a few years ago, one thing I took no small joy in was the combination of collegial sysadminning and servers all named after cities or...
View ArticleThirty-Five Minutes Ago
Well, that’s done. mhoye@ANGLACHEL:~/src/planet-content/branches/planet$ git diff | grep "^-name" | wc -l 401 mhoye@ANGLACHEL:~/src/planet-content/branches/planet$ git commit -am "The Great Purge of...
View ArticlePlanetary Alignment
I’m going to be closing down a number of disused or underused sub-Planets off of Planet Mozilla later this week. If you have any objections to this, you should let me know directly. I’m probably going...
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