I read a book called Hint Fiction last year where the idea was to write a compelling story in 25 words or less. My favorite that I can remember was by J. Matthew Zoss: I’m sorry, but there’s not enough air in here for everyone. I’ll tell them you were a hero. I had an [...]
Discussing the security measures of a public facing and popular website is usually taboo. Often owners are unsure they are following best practices, prefer not to draw attention to their site, or hope that they can maintain security through the obscurity of their code. At Mozilla we are fortunate to offer nearly all of the [...]
I was playing around with gource this weekend while watching the TSL 3 Finals and pointed it at addons.mozilla.org’s source repository. I sped it up to display 1 day of commits per second and piped it all to ffmpeg to make a video. It turned out pretty well so here is addons.mozilla.org development so far [...]
Tagged AMO, code, Mozilla, webgetpersonas.com was started as a labs project in 2008. The plan was to get a website up and running to show off what lightweight themes were and see if they got any traction. If the site became popular, we’d merge it in to AMO in six or ten months and everyone would go back to [...]
Tagged add-ons, AMO, Mozilla, personasAnyone who has tried to set up AMO knows it’s no walk in the park even with the respectable amount of documentation. There are two big stumbling blocks: the database is large and complex, and a portion of the site functionality is still in PHP. Django’s syncdb can make a database, but the relationships in [...]
Tagged add-ons, AMO, L10n, Mozilla, open web, PHP, Python, webIt may be fatuous to write this post before we’ve actually finished the transition from PHP to Python, but I started writing a different post and this is what came out. Sometimes that happens. In January of 2010 we started migrating addons.mozilla.org from CakePHP to Django. It was a controversial decision. Developers were ambivalent to [...]
Tagged AMO, hindsight, Mozilla, PHP, PythonOften on complex pages with many assets it can be easy to overlook assets which don’t load. Usually they are minor JS, CSS, or tracking pixels which aren’t noticed until you’ve spent way too long trying to track down the problem (or a month later you log into your stats dashboard to discover you haven’t [...]
Tagged add-ons, builder, code, Mozilla, scripts, webWithin minutes of my arrival at the Emergency Department a call comes in that an ambulance will arrive shortly transporting a man in cardiac arrest. Orientation can wait. Over the next 20 minutes he is given a regiment of drugs. I follow him to a unit that will try to locate and destroy the clot [...]
Tagged blah blah, dramaI have a lot of files on my computer. Email archives, personal documents, stuff for work, photos I’ve taken…the list goes on – I’m sure most people reading this are in a similar boat. On occasion I’ve found some files to be missing or corrupt which is disturbing but is probably something to be expected. [...]
Tagged code, Python, scripts, securityI use split windows, both horizontally and vertically, in Vim all the time. I’ve always wanted to be able to split the window and then start a command line shell within that window but up until now that has just been a dream. My friend sent me a link to conque this morning which I’m [...]
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