Visit to the Mozilla Europe office in Paris

I’m in Paris for the LibreOffice conference, but today after a random talk with a guy that had a Mozilla badge/pin, I found myself in a tour to the Mozilla Europe office (which is also in Paris). Thank you random guy David for the tour (:

The office itself looks very nice, and reminds me of the work space of many software companies. But the unique part of the tour was David pointing to people and telling us what they are working on. It’s interesting to see the people behind the sciences, although we didn’t talk with them in order not to disturb the work.

I remember most when we David pointed to a guy and said he’s the one doing composer. Maybe because it’s very clear what he doesn’t, while some people work on more internal parts or more conceptual concepts like “performance”.

After seeing some cool posters on the wall, I got a chance for a short chat with Tristan Nitot and ask him some questions about Mozilla Europe and the office. I’m still trying to understand how Mozilla works (as an organization), and this was a good chance to get familiar with the European branch.

For me, the highlight of the tour was the chance to say to the people at the office “thanks for the software” just before leaving and saying goodbye. Not in everyday you get a chance to see the faces behind the software you use daily.

Happy 10th b-day bug #98160

Happy 10th birthday Mozilla bug #98160, I hope you won’t make it to your 11th, but who knows…I hope the same for your “younger” brothers bug #166240 which is only 9 years old. Many thanks for all the people who tried to help RTL users switch their textarea directionality and alignment easier.

Another bug in the “it sometime sucks to be an RTL user” department is bug #119857, soon to be age 10. I’m lucky to have BiDi Mail UI as a good workaround, otherwise I couldn’t read emails in Hebrew with the proper alignment/directionality.

In another department, I must say I love daylight saving time, as I have more hours of sun, but this comes on the expense of my schedule as due to bug #504299 all my events aren’t on the right local time, but an hour earlier.

Although the post is written cynically, I would like to call the Mozilla community to help with fixing these issues. I also want to thank the people who are already helping with these issues or helped in the past.

The Mozilla Inn

Hello planet Mozilla. For my first post appearing in the planet I’d like to write about a recent community aspect I experienced, the rest will probably be more technical.

While we have some great volunteers participating in Mozilla, there’s aren’t any Mozilla representatives in Israel. To be exact, there are a few Israeli that do work for Mozilla (and I think they work from within Israel), but we don’t feel them in the local free software community.

I was very surprised to see 5 people from Mozilla attending Wikimania 2011, but this is of course a good surprise. I would have excepted to see representatives in a free software conference, but we still haven’t had any international free software conference in Israel (maybe some day I could bring Debconf here).

A week later I had another representative arriving for a free software conference I organized called August Penguin. This is the first time having someone arriving from abroad just for the local conference.

For me, a free software user and contributor, Mozilla is mostly a software project. Meeting the various representatives gave me the chance to know some of the other sides of the organization and its activities. For me that was really interesting and I think that it would be positive to do many of the activities also in Israel.

Besides the interest in the organization, I had the chance to host some of the representatives by showing them around, providing a place to crash at and making sure they stay after the conferences would be as easy and enjoyable as possible.

Reflecting back, my place would probably could be the Moziila Inn as I had 3 people from Mozilla as guests in one week (on separate days). For me that was fulfilling the community side of the term “free software community”, as we’re not only a technical community. Others might even call this an outreach program (a term I heard from all 3 guess in various contexts), but I’m still not sure who is outreaching to whom (:

So if you happen to work on Mozilla stuff, and arriving Israel, drop me a note…

FireGPG

FireGPG is an extension that provides GPG encryption and decryption options for Firefox. It was discontinued a year ago, and didn’t support Firefox 4.0 due to changes it introduced.

I was happy to see that the source is still available ,and also maintained enough to have a easy option to build the extension manually. For Firefox 5.0 just download the code and use the build.sh script to build an xpi file, then install it as usual. The Firefox 5.0 support got version number 0.8.5. I’m thinking about repackaging it to Debian, as it was removed from Debian testing/unstable (version 0.8 is available for squeeze).

Thanks bit for the maintenance work and Aaron C. de Bruyn for making sure the single repository holds these changes.

Mozilla Israel stand @ August Penguin 2009

As part of August Penguin 2009, Mozilla Israel members Tomer Cohen and Tsahi Asher had a stand for promoting Firefox, web standards and other free software from Mozilla.

Mozilla Israel stand @ August Penguin 2009

The stand was crowded during most of the conference with people coming to talk or ask questions. The visitors enjoyed getting Firefox stickers/pins and web standards bracelets thanks to a shipment of the giveaways from abroad.

The party hats were used to make the August Penguin key signing party to look like a party (:

August Penguin 2009 Key Party

I’ll be happy to see more support for the local Israeli chapter of other projects, so we could have more stands like that in the next August Penguin.

vendor lock-in in Windows Live?

My university is forcing it’s students to have an account with Windows Live email service in order to get the university announcements/updates. Today I noticed a very strange behavior, in certain situations the website doesn’t let you configure email forward to another account outside of the Microsoft network. The following error message is shown:

You can forward your mail to one other e-mail address that ends in hotmail.com, msn.com, live.com, or is part of Windows Live Custom Domains.

I’m using Iceweasel 3.0.11 from Debian, and I complained about missing that feature, other people seemed to have the feature. After a few checks it’s seems to be the way the browser identify itself. When I changed my identification to IE7/Vista (using user agent switcher plugin), the problem was solved.

I’m trying to understand the logic – If i use IE or Firefox, I can do a forward to another account, but otherwise I’m locked in to the Microsoft network. It can’t be a technical issue, as in both cases the interface is the same (no special browser features needed).

Why ubuntu sucks in keeping the distribution in good shape?

Tomer writes about Why ubuntu sucks in keeping the distribution in good shape?, which is related to posts I wrote at the past about Why does Ubuntu puts Firefox translation in gnome’s language pack ? and The disadvantage of language packs in Ubuntu. I’m not happy seeing these problems happening again and again.

Will the Knesset install Firefox on its computers?

In a letter to the chairman of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), Ilan Gilon asks why the Knesset’s computing unit refuses to install free software (mainly Firefox). I’m quite interested to see the answer… (:

The question already started to be published in the media by Calcalist (in Hebrew). The letter was also published (in Hebrew) by a blogger at room404.

Always use protection

Thanks to Ido, I got a link to TECH SOURCE FROM BOHOL’s 25 Most Awesome Firefox Wallpapers. The one I loved the most is “Safe Browsing with Firefox”:

What’s yours ?

Working for Free? – Motivations of Participating in Open Source Projects

I’ve been asked to summarize an article by Alexander Hars & Shaosong Ou about motivations of participating in open source projects written in 2000 for a psychology course. It was very interested to see how many things can motivate one to invest in open source.

Although none of the motivators was new to me, I still found the article very interesting. In fact, during the presentation of the article to the class I added my point of view and the reasons I participate in open source. I realized that, although not intentionally, I enjoyed every motivator mentioned in the article, except “selling related products and services”.

It would be quite interesting to have this article done again, as the open source world became bigger and has more payed people working on free software. Any volunteers ?