Air Mozilla: Kids' Vision - Mentorship Series |
Mozilla hosts Kids Vision Bay Area Mentor Series
https://air.mozilla.org/kids-vision-mentorship-series-20150506/
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Friend of AMO: Zitronella |
Today’s post comes from Andreas Wagner (TheOne); the correct attribution will appear pending a WordPress bug fix.
Congratulations to Astrid (Zitronella), our newest friend of AMO! Astrid dedicates her spare time to supporting German-speaking Firefox users in forums and chat rooms. She also helps to keep Firefox safe by finding and reporting potentially unsafe add-ons and bringing them to the attention of the AMO team.
“I have been contributing to Mozilla since 2010. Taking each and every one seriously, and providing support within computer literacy beyond the project is very important to me. Having the community at my back, exchanging experiences and working with them means a lot to me and is a huge enrichment.”
Thank you, Astrid! We’re glad to have you!
Thanks also to everyone who contributed to Marketplace and AMO last month–your contributions are reallly appreciated.
The new contribution wiki for May is now available. Please check it for projects that might interest you, and to report any of your contributions.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/06/friend-of-amo-zitronella/
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Matt Thompson: How we plan |
At MoFo, we plan in three key ways:
We’ve gotten pretty good at yearly planning and Heartbeat planning. Recently we’ve focused on improvements to our quarterly planning and reporting process, focused on:
Program Review is just one piece of how we can all do smarter quarterly planning together. More detail on that below.
Quarterly planning is key; it’s how we learn, course correct and align as we go. And it’s a crucial link between our high-level plan for the year, vs. the minutiae of each individual Heartbeat, where it’s easy to get lost in the weeds.
A quarter is short enough to feel real, but long enough to get something meaningful done.
At the end of each quarter, we need to:
There are two more fundamental challenges we need to address as well.
This is a crucial question for any project, community or organization. What’s the plan for ‘x?’ Where do I find it? It’s hard to get on the same page when we don’t know where that page is, or who owns it.
Until now, it’s been too hard to find the various Plans of Record at MoFo. They’re buried in a maze of etherpads, google docs and wikis.
e.g., “Where’s the go-to-market plan for Webmaker? When’s the beta release date for the app? Where’s the Clubs roadmap? How does it dovetail with the teach.moz.org roadmap? What are we doing this month to get ready for Maker Party?” etc. etc. etc.
To make that easier, we’ve linked all Plans of Record on mzl.la/plan. This will provide one-stop shopping for all key planning documents and roadmaps. It’s a single point of truth for the Plan of Record. There’s lost more to update and add, but we’re getting good feedback on it so far.
Q: “What’s the plan?” A: “You’ll find it on mzl.la/plan“
Don’t worry — you don’t need to update yet another wiki! Just keep using whatever tools or documents you’re already using; mzl.la/plan just links to or embeds your existing etherpads, google docs, wikis, spreadsheets, or whatever your team prefers to use. Just make sure they’re linked from mzl.la/plan, so that others can more easily find them.
Our quarterly reviews will regularly surface key questions or decisions that need to get made. In Q1, our Program Review and quarterly planning process did a great job at surfacing key issues like:
The crucial bit to optimize is: how do we ensure we’re able to discuss those issues with the right stakeholders, come to a decision, and then update the plan of record in a timely way? Going forward, program managers and program leads will need to streamline how we make use of these three groups to get that done:
The interface and hand-off between these three units needs to be clearer. And key issues or challenges need a clear project manager and decision-maker or they won’t get done. More on that soon.
Experience has taught us that simply drafting plans isn’t enough; we have to socialize those goals and plans with the people directly affected. And build shared ownership in the plan. “Working open” doesn’t work when we just chuck planning documents over a wall and hope they land in the right spot.
If there’s one thing this planning work underscores, its the fact that we probably have too many key initiatives. The holy grail for us is smarter execution and focus. We have a way to go yet — but hopefully this is a step in the right direction.
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Fr'ed'eric Wang: MathML Accessibility |
In a previous blog post about MathML in Wikipedia, I mentioned that, despite ongoing efforts there was still no accessibility support for MathML in Gecko. The situation changed two months ago: Design Science and NV Access released new versions of MathPlayer and NVDA, which in particular add MathML accessibility support on Windows, as shown in the demos below. This is exciting news and I am really willing to see this support extended to other platforms...
Last December, I also met Joanmarie Diggs at the Web Engines Hackfest and we have been able to start some preliminary work for Linux (WebKit/Gecko/Orca). I had the opportunity to refresh some of the patches written by Jonathan Wei during a Mozilla internship and to get part of his work landed into trunk. I have also made basic improvements to how we expose the accessible tree for ATK in order to prepare future support in Orca. It is certainly too early to announce anything. Just as a comparison, I also provide how Orca currently (badly) reads the MathML formulas below.
MathML accessibility support is also available in the latest versions of Safari+VoiceOver. So in theory, we "only" need to make Gecko expose the same accessible tree as WebKit in order to support the Mac platform. Jonathan Wei had a work-in-progress patch for that, see bug 1001641. Since it is far from being ready, I will cheat a bit and just show how VoiceOver reads the MathML examples in Safari.
Finally, the mobile platforms (Firefox OS and Android) are also very important. So far, I have only submitted some patches to make the GeckoView accessible and to fix some other small accessibility bugs. So I am interested in hearing more from Mozilla developers about the AccessFu stuff and how we could make MathML accessible on these platforms.
The table below contains some concrete examples taken from Wikipedia (in MathML mode), Mozilla Developer Network, KaTeX and MathJax. Note that at the moment, MathJax MathML formulas are not exposed to all assistive technologies. I recommend to force native MathML using an add-on for Gecko browsers or Safari ; or to use this GreaseMonkey script.
| MathML Example | NVDA | VoiceOver | Orca (no support) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pythagorean theorem (Wikipedia) | ||||
| Real roots of a quadratic equation (Wikipedia) | ||||
| Math.cosh from ECMAScript 6 (MDN) | ||||
| Polyfill for Math.atanh from ECMAScript 6 (MDN) | ||||
| Matrix of SVG's rotate transform (MDN) | ||||
| Two other formulas (KaTeX home page) | ||||
| Another Formula (MathJax home page) |
For the record, the detailed software versions used are:
Note: all these audio files are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.
All of these developments are still in progress and there are certainly many bugs to fix and improvements to do. Next month, I expect to have several opportunities to meet people and make progress on MathML. For people interested to help, here is my schedule:
http://www.maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic/?post/2015/05/06/MathML-Accessibility
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Eitan Isaacson: Using Pre-release Firefox on Linux |
Every committed Mozillian and many enthusiastic end-users will use a pre-release version of Firefox.
In Mac and Windows this is pretty straightforward, you simply download the Firefox Nightly/Aurora/Beta dmg or setup tool, and get going. When it is installed it is a proper desktop application, you could make it your default browser, and life goes on.
In Linux, we rely much more on packagers to prepare an application for the distribution before we could use it. This usually works really well, but sometimes you really just want to use an upstream app without any gatekeepers.
The pre-release versions of Firefox for Linux comes in tarballs. You unpack them, and could run them out of the unpacked directory. But it doesn’t run well. You can’t set them as your default browser, the icon is a generic square, and opening links from other apps is a headache. In short, it’s a less than polished experience.
So here is a small script I wrote, it does a few things:
~/.local/bin .~/.local/share/icons.~/.local/share/applications.It doesn’t require root privileges, and is contained to your home directory so it won’t conflict with the system Firefox installation or touch the system libxul. Typically, you only need to run the script once per channel. After a channel is installed, they will get automatic updates through the actual app.
See the nice icon?So, here are some commands you could copy to your terminal and have pre-release Firefox installed:
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eeejay/foxlocal/master/foxlocal.py | python - nightly
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eeejay/foxlocal/master/foxlocal.py | python - aurora
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eeejay/foxlocal/master/foxlocal.py | python - beta
curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/eeejay/foxlocal/master/foxlocal.py | python - release
http://blog.monotonous.org/2015/05/06/using-pre-release-firefox-on-linux/
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Air Mozilla: Product Coordination Meeting |
Duration: 10 minutes This is a weekly status meeting, every Wednesday, that helps coordinate the shipping of our products (across 4 release channels) in order...
https://air.mozilla.org/product-coordination-meeting-20150506/
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David Rajchenbach Teller: Detecting slow add-ons |
When it is at its best, Firefox is fast. Really, really fast. When things start slowing down, though, using Firefox is much less fun. So, one of main objectives of the developers of Firefox is making sure that Firefox is and remains as smooth and responsive as humanly possible. There is, however, one thing that can slow down Firefox, and that remains out of the control of the developers: add-ons. Good add-ons are extraordinary, but small coding errors – or sometimes necessary hacks – can quickly drive the performance of Firefox into the ground.
So, how can an add-on developer (or add-on reviewer) find out whether her add-on is fast? Sadly, not much. Testing certainly helps, and the Profiler is invaluable to help pinpoint a slowdown once it has been noticed, but what about the performance of add-ons in everyday use? What about the experience of users?
To solve this issue, we decided to work on a set of tools to help add-on developers and reviewers find out the performance of their add-ons. Oh, and also to let users find out quickly if an add-on is slowing down their everyday experience.
On recent Nightly builds of Firefox, you may now open about:performance to get an overview of the performance cost of add-ons and webpages :
The main resources we monitor are :
Note that the design of this page is far from stable. I realise it’s not very user-friendly at the moment, so don’t hesitate to file bugs to help us improve it. Also note that, when running with e10s, the page doesn’t display all the useful information. We are working on it.
Add-on developers and reviewers can now find information on the performance of their add-ons on a dedicated dashboard.
These are real-world performance data, as extracted from user’s computers. The two histograms available for the time being are:
If you are an add-on developer, you should monitor regularly the performance of your add-on on this page. If you notice suspicious values, you should try and find out what causes these performance issues. Don’t hesitate and reach out to us, we will try and help you.
Add-on developers and reviewers, as well as end-users, are now informed when an add-on causes either jank or CPOW performance issues:
Note that this feature is not ready to ride the trains, and we do not have a specific idea of when it will be made available for users of Aurora/DeveloperEdition. This is partly because the UX is not good enough yet, partly because the thresholds will certainly change, and partly because we want to give add-on developers time to fix any issue before the users see a dialog that suggest that an add-on should be uninstalled.
By the way, we have an API for accessing performance stats. Very imaginatively, it’s called PerformanceStats.jsm [link]. While this API will still change during the coming weeks you can start playing with it if you are interested. Some add-ons may be able to throttle their performance use based on this data. Also, I hope that, in time, someone will be able to write a version of about:performance much nicer than mine :)
For the moment, we are in the process of stabilizing the API, its implementation and its performance. In parallel, we are working on making the UX of about:performance more useful. Once both are done, we are going to proceed with adding more measurements, making the code more e10s-friendly and measuring the performance of webpages.
If you are an add-on developer and if you feel that your add-on is tagged as slow by error, or if you have great ideas on how to make this data useful, feel free to ping me, preferably on IRC. You can find me on irc.mozilla.org, channel #developers, where I am Yoric.
https://dutherenverseauborddelatable.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/detecting-slow-add-ons/
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Jared Wein: Final In-content Preferences status update |
(I’M PROBABLY JINXING MYSELF HERE… KNOCK ON WOOD!)
We are now a week away from the release of Firefox 38, and with it will finally come the release of in-content preferences. You can download Firefox Beta today to see what it will look like when it hits Release next week.
I want to give a huge thanks to all of the people who worked on the project. You all helped it get to the point where hundreds of millions of people will get to see a refreshed and modern preference experience.
Major thanks goes out to Stephen Horlander, Michael Maslaney, Madhava Enros, Gijs Kruitbosch, Blair McBride, Richard Marti, Tim Nguyen, Justin Dolske, Zhenshuo Fang, D~ao Gottwald, Tim Taubert, Matthew Noorenberghe and a huge host of other people that have helped.
Known issues:
1) Dialogs opened in the Advanced pane don’t use the same tab-modal dialog implementation that can be found within the rest of the preferences. We hope to get this fixed in a future release very soon.
2) The design for focus rings within the preferences still has a refresh coming, but it won’t make Firefox 38. As with #1, we hope to get this in to a future release very soon.
3) If you have gone to about:config and set browser.search.showOneOffButtons to `false`, the Search pane of the preferences is broken. The fix for this didn’t make the 38.0 cut-off, but it will be fixed within the next few weeks following release. Going forward this preference will be removed, so now may be a good time to revert that preference back to `true`.
Other lower-impact known issues can be found on Bugzilla.
You can download Firefox Beta today to see what it will look like when it hits Release next week.
https://msujaws.wordpress.com/2015/05/06/final-in-content-preferences-status-update/
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Air Mozilla: The Joy of Coding (mconley livehacks on Firefox) - Episode 13 |
Watch mconley livehack on Firefox Desktop bugs!
https://air.mozilla.org/the-joy-of-coding-mconley-livehacks-on-firefox-episode-13/
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Daniel Stenberg: curl user poll 2015 |
Now is the time. If you use curl or libcurl from time to time, please consider helping us out with providing your feedback and opinions on a few things:
It’ll take you a couple of minutes and it’ll help us a lot when making decisions going forward.
The poll is hosted by Google and that short link above will take you to:
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1uQNYfTmRwF9RX5-oq_HV4VyeT1j7cxXpuBIp8uy5nqQ/viewform
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Luis Villa: Come work with me – developer edition! |
It has been a long time since I was able to say to developer friends “come work with me” in anything but the most abstract “come work under the same roof” kind of sense. But today I can say to developers “come work with me” and really mean it. Which is fun :)
![By Supercarwaar (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons](http://www.liveinternet.ru/journal_proc.php?action=redirect&url=https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Uncle_Sam_Wikipedia.png)
[And I realize that I’ve been bad and not posted here, so here’s my new job announce: “my department” is the Foundation’s new Community Engagement department, where we work to support healthy contributor communities and help WMF-community collaboration. It is a detour from law, but I’ve always said law was just a way to help people do their thing — so in that sense is the same thing I’ve always been doing. It has been an intense roller coaster of a first two months, and I look forward to much more of the same.]
http://lu.is/blog/2015/05/05/come-work-with-me-developer-edition/
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Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: Mozilla View on Zero Rating |
Our support of net neutrality is grounded in our belief that we all must fight to maintain an open, global, and growing Internet. Because of the scale and potential of the Internet, it must be an international effort. We see a growing focus on net neutrality around the world and believe that this focus is positive and necessary for the continued health of this valuable global asset.
In India, for example, the focus on net neutrality and the impacts of zero-rating have reached an important inflection point. This week, we sent a letter to the Prime Minister of India supporting net neutrality, in response to an open consultation by the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Internet services. The Indian Internet community, including many Mozillians, has spoken out expressing concerns with zero-rating and its impacts on an open Internet. Not surprisingly, we too are concerned, and Mozilla’s Executive Chairwoman Mitchell Baker posted to her blog to identify what those concerns are. The bottom line is that zero-rating may actually NOT connect the world’s unconnected billions to the Internet, in India or elsewhere.
Zero-rating does not at first pass invoke the prototypical net neutrality harms of throttling, blocking, or paid prioritization, all of which involve technical differentiation in traffic management. Instead, zero-rating makes some Internet content and services “free” by excluding them from data caps that apply to other uses of traffic (which can result in “blocking” of sorts if a user has no available data left in a billing period).
The impact of zero-rating may result in the same harms as throttling, blocking, or paid prioritization. By giving one company (or a handful) the ability to reach users at no cost to them, zero-rating could limit rather than expand a user’s access to the Internet and ultimately chill competition and innovation. The promise of the Internet as a driver of innovation is that anyone can make anything and share it with anyone. Without a level playing field, the world won’t benefit from the next Facebook, Google or Twitter.
There are many things we still don’t know about zero-rating. It’s a relatively new business model and there is not a lot of data about its benefits or its harms, so we don’t know with certainty what the long-term effects will be. We don’t have data on substitutability – how many users will reduce or even stop their open Internet use because they have to pay, while walled garden offerings are free to them. But we do have data indicating that a significant percentage of people confuse “the Internet” and “Facebook,” – in part because of Facebook’s Internet.org initiative – notably including a global survey by Quartz where over half of respondents agreed with a statement equating Facebook with the entire Internet.
There’s also missing data on the other side of the equation. There may be markets where affordability hurdles to access remain so significant that mobile networks can’t reach economies of scale to keep prices down. It may be possible that access to zero- rated services will help to give previously unconnected users a “taste” of the Internet leading them to demand access to the open Internet itself. The truth is we don’t know.
Still, prohibition through legislation or regulation, a path some governments have taken or are considering, may not be the right answer. Taken to an extreme regulation could chill some innovation and could result in industry not taking collective action. Even worse, regulation could allow governments to determine which content could/should be zero-rated – and the benefit of net neutrality is that no entity should get to decide which content a user has access to. Different markets and political environments require individual analysis. In some contexts, such as Netflix’s abandoned zero-rating plans in Australia, resolution may occur as a result of public pressure, without formal action.
We understand the temptation to say “some content is better than no content,” choosing a lesser degree of inclusion over openness and equality of opportunity. But it shouldn’t be a binary choice; technology and innovation can create a better way, even though these new models may take some time to develop. Furthermore, choosing limited inclusion today, even though it offers short-term benefits, poses significant risk to the emergence of an open, competitive platform that will ultimately stifle inclusion and economic development.
There are alternative approaches that could serve as solutions to the challenges that zero-rating seeks to address. For example, Mozilla has sought to create such an alternative within the Firefox OS ecosystem. Our partnership with Grameenphone (owned by Telenor Group) in Bangladesh allows users to receive 20 MB of data usage for free each day, in exchange for viewing an advertisement. Our partnership with Orange will allow residents of multiple African countries to purchase $40 Firefox OS smartphones that come packaged with 6 free months of voice, text, and up to 500 MB per month of data. Scaling up arrangements like these could represent a long-term solution to the key underlying problems of digital inclusion and equality.
Likely, the solution will be found in some combination of: new approaches and business models; potential increases in philanthropic engagement as Mitchell’s post suggests; and technology and business innovations to reduce the costs of connectivity. But whatever the mix is, preserving the level playing field that drives innovation and competition on the Internet must be the baseline.
We’ve tried to outline here some of the positive and negative issues associated with zero-rating. More education about these issues, and affordability and accessibility challenges, will be part of working out the right solutions. Multi-stakeholder roundtables and incubation challenges around alternative solutions to affordability problems are also likely fruitful pathways. Or maybe solutions will come from academia and think tanks, through research driven white papers. Mozilla will be exploring these options further in the months to come.
We look forward to working with the Mozilla community, others in industry, civil society, governments and other actors to think through how best to provide everyone with access to the full diversity of the open Web. We hope you’ll join us in these conversations.
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2015/05/05/mozilla-view-on-zero-rating/
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Mitchell Baker: Zero Rating and the Open Internet |
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2015/05/06/zero-rating-and-the-open-internet/
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Jan de Mooij: Using Rust to generate Mercurial short-hash collisions |
At Mozilla, we use Mercurial for the main Firefox repository. Mercurial, like Git, uses SHA1 hashes to identify a commit.
SHA1 hashes are fairly long, a string of 40 hex characters (160 bits), so Mercurial and Git allow using a prefix of that, as long as the prefix is unambiguous. Mercurial also typically only shows the first 12 characters (let’s call them short hashes), for instance:
$ hg id 34828fed1639 $ hg log -r tip changeset: 242221:312707328997 tag: tip ...
And those are the hashes most Mercurial users use, for instance they are posted in Bugzilla whenever we land a patch etc.
Collisions with short hashes are much more likely than full SHA1 collisions, because the short hashes are only 48 bits long. As the Mercurial FAQ states, such collisions don’t really matter, because Mercurial will check if the hash is unambiguous and if it’s not it will require more than 12 characters.
So, short hash collisions are not the end of the world, but they are inconvenient because the standard 12-chars hg commit ids will become ambiguous and unusable. Fortunately, the mozilla-central repository at this point does not contain any short hash collisions (it has about 242,000 commits).
I’ve wondered for a while, can we create a commit that has the same short hash as another commit in the repository?
A brute force attack that works by committing and then reverting changes to the repository should work, but it’d be super slow. I haven’t tried it, but it’d probably take years to find a collision. Fortunately, there’s a much faster way to brute force this. Mercurial computes the commit id/hash like this:
hash = sha1(min(p1, p2) + max(p1, p2) + contents)
Here p1 and p2 are the hashes of the parent commits, or a null hash (all zeroes) if there’s only one parent. To see what contents is, we can use the hg debugdata command:
$ hg debugdata -c 34828fed1639 40c6a58ef0be7591e6b0d48b36a8e1f88486b0ee Carsten "Tomcat" Book <cbook@mozilla.com> 1430739274 -7200 extensions/spellcheck/locales/en-US/hunspell/dictionary-sources/chromium_en_US.dic_delta ...list of changed files... merge mozilla-inbound to mozilla-central a=merge
Perfect! This contains the commit message, so all we have to do is append some random data to the commit message, compute the (short) hash, check if there’s a collision and repeat until we find a match.
I wrote a small Rust program to brute-force this. You can use it like this (I used the popular mq extension, there are other ways to do it):
$ cd mozilla-central $ echo "Foo" >> CLOBBER # make a random change $ hg qnew patch -m "Some message" $ hgcollision ...snip... Got 242223 prefixes Generated random prefix: 1631965792_ Tried 242483200 hashes Found collision! Prefix: b991f0726738, hash: b991f072673876a64c7a36f920b2ad2885a84fac Add this to the end of your commit message: 1631965792_24262171
After about 2 minutes it’s done and tells us we have to append “1631965792_24262171'' to our commit message to get a collision! Let’s try it (we have to be careful to preserve the original date/time, or we’ll get a different hash):
$ hg log -r tip --template "{date|isodatesec}"
2015-05-05 20:21:59 +0200
$ hg qref -m "Some message1631965792_24262171" -d "2015-05-05 20:21:59 +0200"
$ hg id
b991f0726738 patch/qbase/qtip/tip
$ hg log -r b991f0726738
abort: 00changelog.i@b991f0726738: ambiguous identifier!
Voil`a! We successfully created a Mercurial short hash collision!
And no, I didn’t use this on any patches I pushed to mozilla-central.. 
The Rust source code is available here. It was my first, quick-and-dirty Rust program but writing it was a nice way to get more familiar with the language. I used the rust-crypto crate to calculate SHA1 hashes, installing and using it was much easier than I expected. Pretty nice experience.
The program can check about 100 million hashes in one minute on my laptop. It usually takes about 1-5 minutes to find a collision, this also depends on the size of the repository (mozilla-central has about 242,000 commits). It’d be easy to use multiple threads (you can also just use X processes though) and there are probably a lot of other ways to improve it. For this experiment it was good and fast enough to get the job done 
http://www.jandemooij.nl/blog/2015/05/05/using-rust-to-generate-mercurial-short-hash-collisions/
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Michael Kaply: Firefox ESR 38 Overview |
This post will provide a high level overview of changes coming up in the next Firefox ESR. This list is primarily focused on changes that will impact enterprise users. It is not intended to be an exhaustive list. For a list of all the changes, see the release notes links.
Note: Firefox Hello and Encrypted Media Extensions will NOT be part of the ESR.
My plan is to have a new CCK2 beta that coincides with the Firefox 38 release that will allow for disabling some of these new features. It's a beta because it also has the new code for no longer using the distribution directory.
If I missed something, please post it in the comments.
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Air Mozilla: Webdev Extravaganza: May 2015 |
Once a month web developers across the Mozilla community get together (in person and virtually) to share what cool stuff we've been working on.
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Mihai Sucan: Touched |
Articol disponibil si ^in limba rom^ana aici.
Hello everyone!
This is most likely my last article here, and I apologize for the length and not so much of a fun reading, it is not going to be about my usual technical subjects. I am also going to tag Planet Mozilla for reasons that will become obvious here.
This is hard to write, but here we go: I have recessive dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa (RDEB) which means I have had a fragile skin since birth. This had an important impact that I will not detail here, you can read everything about it on dedicated websites.
As I mentioned in my previous article the cancer metastasis is going to most likely end my journey here - unless I am going to live through yet another miracle in my life.
I have never written publicly about my situation, which is also shared by Marius, because we are both proud of what we do, we do not want people to feel pity or anything like that. We want you and others to know us by our work, our achievements, and such. People easily get emotional and too supportive once they know the situation. Their actions never made us feel comfortable.
What changed? Having reached a life prognosis of several weeks or months I feel that trying to keep this proudness is not going to help me achieve one of the goals I still have.
One of my current goals is to raise awareness of EB and in particular the ongoing EB research, which is very promising. I am fully convinced that children born with EB will no longer have to go through the same hardships as Marius and I did.
The running theme of this article is how I was touched by the people I met. How you have all made my life much better, and ultimately how you can also make a positive difference for others.
I will dedicate the rest of this article to making a case for donations, why they are important for you and others. I am going to put things in my context, otherwise I feel like leaving matters unexplained will not make a strong enough case for my goal, my wish for others.
This is where you, the Mozilla community, and anyone who listens come in. You can help others get treatments sooner than later by supporting EB research.
In the 27 years of my life, I have met a few people who made a huge impact on my life, in different ways. I will start with the charities that have donated a lot of dressings to us. With EB patients wound care is an integral part of daily life, and the special dressings we received were essential to making wound care much easier and safer. From these charities I have to name Debra UK and an amazing person, Agnes Beveridge. Thank you Agnes. Since its beginnings Mini Debra from Romania has also been very helpful.
The people I made friends with and their impact on me are very important. A chemist, engineer, who has the spark of a geek. As an older man figure, he was influential. We played lots of chess games and we had fun. Thank you Dan for supporting our geeky nature in the early days and staying a friend forever.
Around 1999 when Marius and I first went online, one of the goals we had was e-learning. In the tech age of those days e-learning was a lofty concept. Little did we care or know, so we contacted a professor from a Romanian University, as easy as writing an email to a friend, even more mundane. :-) We started from that silly email to what it became today: we made a friend and found a mentor of online conduct and education. Thank you Prof. Mihai Jalobeanu.
The third person who I want to mention here is a cousin who grew up to become a Catholic priest. As a student, he spent many summer vacations with us, returning from Rome, Italy every year. We learned so many things from him, about culture, philosophy, history, religions, faith and many more. We played a lot of chess as well. His influence cannot be quantified. Thank you Simon.
Much respect and appreciation to Professor loan Dzitac who coordinated my bachelor's degree and master's thesis. He is one of the professors who make the Romanian academia better every day, together with a few others like Prof. Jalobeanu.
Before I became a Mozillian I was an Opera browser user, and as an aspiring Web developer I became involved with beta testing pre-releases of their browser. This was during the highschool years and slightly after, starting with 2006. Those years and the influence of the Opera team I met online and the other enthusiasts have shaped my skills and interests. I became more interested in the open Web and standards. Thanks to everyone at Opera who were really great people. Your support for the open Web was important for me.
Proud to be a Mozillian
No, not because of the company, but the people who make Mozilla. It is an honor to have such colleagues.
My latest experiences are those with the Mozilla team. I was lucky to join the Firefox developer tools team in 2010 when the team just formed. I was quite proud, hehe. :-)
In 2012, after working with the team remotely, I finally got the courage to be part of the regular team meetings in various Mozilla offices around the world. The first meeting for me was in London.
When I arrived in London, March 2012, I felt like dreams can and do come true. It was seemingly impossible for me to do that. To work for a great company like Mozilla, to meet some of the makers of the Web, to travel to fancy places, not hospitals, not tourism, but a work meeting, and no pity. I felt proud, but I also felt the burden of the amount of work and help others have put into making this happen. Mozilla on one side and my family with their tireless support. I did things to get to this "achievement", but they could not have happened without the endless help from others, their love. With all that greatness, there was also the disappointment with the amount of work I was giving others, just to "get my way".
It feels weird and uncomfortable that my fight for life, for living through the experiences I wanted, to work and travel, really means that others get more work to do for me. My push forward gives others work and I need a lot of help. The concept of burden quickly comes to mind, but then should I give up? I almost always chose to not give up. For me saying no to things I wanted meant giving up on life bit by bit. Whenever I had to decide whether I go to a developer tools team meeting I had this dilemma. Go and get what I want or let it all be?
I remember how nice it was to meet everyone, the first dinner, with my colleagues and Johnathan Nightingale. People who you remember forever. I was impressed with how accepting people were. I recall meeting Chris Lord (gecko graphics layer work for Android at that time, iirc) - we had a natural conversation without any awkwardness. Back home I was used to people asking what is wrong with me. I appreciated the respect and professionalism. My disabilities did not matter in these contexts.
I remember with pleasure how mom learned word by word things to ask for in English, in these meetings, at dinners or various places where she was with me and my colleagues. Mom was asking for butter, spoons and other things in Mountain View offices, and so on. :-)
One evening in the first week with the team: we went to a nice restaurant with the team, for dinner. Once done, I went with mom and Rob (my manager at the time) in a cab. Once I went up the ramp, the wheelchair tipped off the back; in a second I could've been seriously injured. Rob and mom grabbed the chair, but the driver grabbed my hand down the elbow. That caused, obviously, a big wound underneath the clothing. Nobody saw that, mom estimated it, I did not scream or anything like that. Still, everyone saw, including other colleagues who were around, how fragile these simple moments are for me. It gave everyone a "good scare". I felt relieved nothing worse had occurred. That silly wound did not matter to me. I was more than happy to be there, things like that happen at home as well. It is all about enjoying life, irrespective of such nuisance.
Another story is again with Rob as my manager at the time, second meeting in London, autumn 2012. Having dinner I failed in epic ways to eat due to dysphagia. After half an hour of nonstop coughing at the table I gave up and left with mom back to the hotel room. My face was all red, I was sweating, etc. This was quite embarrassing but "normal" back home, yet it was disturbing to others seeing it. Rob was touched by the situation and he also went back to his room. Mom was in tears, obviously. I arrived back in my room and had an online chat with Rob.
In London again, I do not forget eating milk with some kind of dough mixed by a colleague, Heather. I am sure it was not much of a big deal for her to help me with that. Yet, I appreciated her help and kindness.
Another big decision was for me to go to a Mozilla team meeting in Sunnyvale, California, in spring 2013. That was quite a task. As usual, Mozilla was very helpful and supportive. At the destination, Alex, my older brother, was also ready with his support.
Once I was in Sunnyvale I felt again that dreams do come true. Me in Silicon Valley, in California, seeing all the tech companies there. Felt epic. Mom was happy as well. I felt that from my room back home where I went through so much hard time, work and study, I was able to go beyond that - there was a really good outcome, finally.
In Sunnyvale my current manager, Joe, helped me get inside a restaurant by carrying my chair, together with Anton - another colleague. I grabbed tightly to one of their arms, not because of the fear of wounds, but the potential embarrassment that a small wound would cause. As previous experiences tell me, in a split second, any simple thing can turn out quite bad. And... when I am with others, I can see they are not so much aware of the situation they are in control of. I just did my part, hold strong! :-)
Another story of Mozillians being awesome: we went to a dinner and I returned only to see some silly parts of the power wheelchair fell off. This was still in Sunnyvale, and this time Dave (one of my previous managers) together with Anton have helped me again. They spent half an hour or so mounting back that silly wheelchair part. Lots of sweat went into it. They did not give up and I appreciated it. I was speechless.
I will never forget how pleasant it was to have the technical discussions, to watch the talks and demos of my colleagues, and have the informal chats during dinners and such. Talking to Jim, Paul, Mik, Eddy and more of them.
Much respect and appreciation for the whole Firefox developer tools team in Paris, August 2013, where they all applauded Cecilia during a dinner in a fancy restaurant. As a nurse and cousin she was there to be my assistant at that time (she went with me instead of mom). Thank you Mozilla for your beautiful recognition of her efforts and help. That was a very touching moment for me. Of course, thank you Cecilia as well.
And I did not forget the birthday cake I got in Paris, end of August 2013. :-) Mozilla ftw!
In 2013 Marius had his cancer tumor and foot amputated. Several months of problems and distress for the whole family. Around that time one of our German friends, from Marius's circle of friends, fought cancer as well. Philipp Althoff passed away that year and it felt quite sad to see how one can live another day and someone else does not. Why? I mention Philipp here to remember him, his work and spirit. Thank you Philipp for being a great friend.
Lots of thanks to the German friends that Marius met online many years ago, Michael Auerbach, Dennis Schubert, Nina Markiewicz, Jan Frischmuth, Boris Eissrich and the rest of the bunch. Their support is not forgotten.
Around the same time I was reading the blog articles written by Eric Meyer known in the Web technology community, about his daughter's fight with cancer, Rebecca. Very touching and made me teaful. I just want to publicly thank Eric for his strength and courage to write about such a hard topic. Inspiring. This article I am writing here would not have happened without his touching words. (I do not know Eric personally.)
I would also like to mention fellows from the Web technology community who are fighting very hard for their lives and they do it in their best possible ways: Molly E. Holzschlag and Gervase Markham. Their stories and strength are inspiring as well. Best of luck to you both and lots of courage. Thanks for your great work. Please support Molly with a donation.
Last year (2014) I went to the St Thomas’ hospital in London. I did not know what to expect from the team of doctors. I did not expect miracles or perfection. On the contrary, the main doctor I was in contact with has specifically been honest with me about my prognosis, ever since August. There was no cure from the start, but I went there to try the best possible ways to fight the cancer and dysphagia.
Overall, the months I spent there do not feel like a hospital stay. It was months of experiences with people. I met people who are different, special and loving. The team of doctors and nurses was so much better than my previous experiences. There I met new people from Mozilla as well, and made really good friends. Catherine and Jess, you are angels, in a lack of better words. Many of my colleagues visited me in the hospital, and my manager visited regularly. Thank you all very much.
Mozilla was amazing in the given situation. There is no way for me to thank them for their support. I had hoped to do so with more work, to get back into the devtools projects and help as much as I could.
All these stories are about people who make a difference, with a small or big gesture. Every meeting with my colleagues felt humbling in a good way. The time where others help you out of their way, and you do not know how to thank them and you cannot give back. Makes you think.
All the medical procedures that I went through in London are insignificant compared to the experience of getting to know those people.
I mentioned people who I thank for various reasons, but there are more. Friends and relatives back home who are helpful, supportive and kind. People who have hosted my early websites and others who I worked with. I do not know if trying to list their names has any point here, and I will most likely forget someone important. Over the past weeks I have been working on sending them my gratitude, individually, face to face when possible, or online.
Some conclusions
All of the experiences I had bring me to some conclusions:
It is ironic for me to make such recommendations because if you would have known me all of my life, you would think it's not truly me. I did fail to do these things I am suggesting here. I was not this "nice", as explained already, having a lot of health problems I did not get enough peace to pay attention to such details. I was focused on living, like an animal. It is only in the past years I started learning the importance of such aspects. I am not a "new person" or anything like that, but it is good to be aware of these matters. They slowly change you.
All of these things I am writing about here lead me to suggest ways you can make a change in the lives of others outside your circles. Do not wait for anything. You can help friends, your family and relatives, but I see a lot of value in changing things far away from you. Do not focus only on "egoistic" ways of helping.
There is some kind of egoism in helping others. It makes you feel better, but it is a good kind, where everyone involved wins.
Choosing to help people you know is really difficult sometimes. You know that the money you give may not be used as you believe they should. You worry that the help you offer does not always reach the intended outcome. You worry about what others think of your gesture, others who probably feel they would need similar help. You get into the politics of family, relatives and friends. At the end it is easy to give up on making a meaningful and consistent difference for others. These are the kind of things that I have been thinking about lately. This is why I choose targeted donations to medical research. You do not need the recognition or fame. Just help with making the lives of others better. If you give all your energy to someone, you cannot ever expect them to be able to thank you properly. It is impossible. Do this only if you truly never expect or care what happens after you help that person.
Think about making a donation for medical research.
I would be very happy if you would donate money for EB research, but I would be equally happy if you pick any other medical research center to donate to. It is more important that you will be happier to have made a positive impact, do not mind me.
Why EB research? Because EB research is going quite well and there are clinical trials that will help future patients with EB to avoid a lot of the hardships associated with the condition. This condition is sufficiently understood nowadays and researchers are at a point where they work on several approaches for treating it, or to greatly reduce its impact. There are cell therapy, protein therapy, genetic patching and other approaches, each under testing in various stages and levels of success. It will still take years before patients get such treatments and they will not be magical. They will not fix everything, but getting these available to them is essential to improve the quality of their lives. For us a reduction of skin fragility by any percentage would mean the difference between life or death.
I recommend you read a paper that summarizes the current state of EB research and where it is headed: Advances in understanding and treating dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa by Michael J Vanden Oever and Jakub Tolar, published in May 2014. EB is a rare condition with a lucky situation: much easier to study and understand compared to other conditions.
You should donate to help others get the treatments sooner.
This is the list of funds I trust for supporting EB research:
The Sohana Research Fund is in UK and I really appreciate how much Sohana does for raising awareness about EB. Her impact on the world is already quite important, having raised a lot of funds for research. Thank you Sohana, keep it up!
I would suggest you think of making a donation once per year, instead of buying a new phone or a new laptop, depending on how often you change things. See if you regret the choice. Can you skip an upgrade cycle every couple of updates? Pick any other device that is similarly acceptable to continue using. This is the amount you should donate. Think of the luxury you have. If you buy cars like others buy smartphones, then skip buying a new car, donate that money.
Medical research campaigns do not really go viral. We do not get a ton of people donating $5. You should consider donating as much as you are comfortable with.
Thank you very much for your time to read this article until here, and even more so if you will go ahead with making a difference.
The above concludes the first part of the article. I wrote more about the topics I touched upon in the previous sections, and I feel they belong in a single page, even if the whole document is quite lengthy. I have been suggested to split this part away, however I believe everything here flows together and it is related to how others have touched my life, for the better.
Please feel free to stop here, or go ahead if you want to know more about my perspectives on the topics below.
This whole article is not trying to give you some brilliant advice or ideas that were never heard before. It is mainly intended to send some of my thoughts to the circle of people who I can reach online. Thoughts that I hope will be positive.
Thank you.
On trust and choices
I did not trust much in the idea of making donations to anyone, to any charity or organization. Here in Romania, at least, there is a generalized mistrust in giving your money to anyone, unfortunately. You do not know what the money is used for.
My answer to the problem of trust is that you should, indeed, never give your money to anything you do not trust or care about. No problem. However, you are the one responsible for finding the organizations or causes you support and trust, if you ever want to do something like this. I did this last year. My experience in London taught me to appreciate the importance of medical research and donating to support it. The St Thomas’ hospital in London relies on funds from various charities for a lot of their EB research. They even had a dermatologist from Sydney working with the team for the purpose of learning more about EB, for one year, paid from the budget of a charity, from donations. That's epic for me. I'm glad to have met doctor Susan Robertson and to be her patient. She went back to Sydney and I am hoping her additional experience will be of benefit for more EB patients.
I saw how much more support other charities get in London, like Macmillan, compared to what I was used to. It is a different culture of giving back, unlike what I see back home. Not saying everyone in the UK is so giving, but I think it is a result of a better quality of life spanning more years than in Eastern Europe.
Mistrust blocks any chance to do or experience something good, beautiful. You get stuck in a lack of action. If we do not trust anyone how do we ever get any research done? How do we find love? Make great friends?
A lot of medical research only happens through donations because states and universities do not allocate too much funding for rare conditions. Cancer surely gets a lot of funds, but we can prevent EB patients from getting cancer by working on the main problem, which is more tractable.
I am not saying you should not make a donation for cancer, far from that. Actually please make your choice. Do not let your current lack of trust and indecision prevent you from making donations. Find a charity or organization you trust donating to - there are trustworthy ones.
I would like to point out that, at least, Europeans and Americans live in very good conditions that we take for granted too easily. The majority of us afford basic health care, a modest job, more than enough food (even if we complain about the quality), access to information, transportation, travels, technology and entertainment of many kinds. When was the human race so capable to provide such high standards of living for so many people? We have so many gadgets and we keep buying new ones as they come out.
On charities I would like to say one thing that bothers me: far too common you see their websites and presentations with too much pity and emotional content. Sad photos of EB patients and wounds, dressings, etc. You are given the impression that EB patients only know suffering and a life of hell, with no hope of ever doing anything in their lives, except you should give them money to help them live some more. Ironic and harsh. Why should someone donate money for that? This kind of messaging drives people away, and it even makes it too intense for any interested person to learn more. Even myself I sometimes disable images in the browser just to be able to focus on the content. If anyone wants photos and videos of EB patients they should have a dedicated section. I am not saying that showing others’ details of the condition is wrong. We need photos and videos, but not straight in your face. This is one reason why I do not show myself in public photos. Some feel too much when they see me.
My previous comment applies to other conditions and it does not apply to all EB charities either. Actually some EB related websites are very well done.
Some families personally present their cases. In such situations that is a lot more acceptable, because it is a personal choice. It also takes great courage to go public and campaign for what you want. I am weaker than that. :-)
My only gripe is with some charities that should encourage us to donate to research and show us the potential of patients. We are not limited to a world of pains.
I do not want this article to be a sad one, it may very well be, but for different reasons. Making a donation is about supporting a better life for future generations. It is about helping today's children to reach a better potential sooner and healthier. They all have a great potential to their lives. It is also about giving purpose and more meaning to your life, to touch others further away from yourself.
On love
This is probably the hardest part to write down, because it feels like every girl I loved would deserve a whole section. :-) silly me. I also do not want any of them to feel like X was "better" than Y for some silly reasons. Each love is unique and it never truly disappears. Each person is unique and special.
Like almost anyone I wanted a family, starting with a girlfriend and all the normal things in life. Given the situation I am in, this is obviously quite a task. Marius wrote an eBook on being a person with disabilities which includes ample sections about the problems we face in this kind of situations, in relationships.
Over the years I met some special girls, both offline and online. Each relationship failed for various reasons which I usually blame on my condition, the typical scapegoat. Special thanks go to Cristiana (lily), Corina, Livia, Alina and Claire.
These relationships failed before they even turned into anything like a proper girlfriend and boyfriend thing. With Cristiana it was just my first online-only thing, wanted more but nothing happened. With Corina things were offline, neighbors, the thing ended when I wanted more than a friend, but obviously the situation was more complicated. With Livia, again we had a good friendship which ended with a lot of suffering when I wanted more. Things were even more complicated, with too many mistakes. With Alina I kept an online friendship for almost 8 years before I had the courage to tell her my feelings, lol. We only met face to face a couple of years ago, when she came to Arad with her job for a short while.
Even with these unsuccessful relationships I feel it is much better than nothing at all. There was something, with each person. I know I will always be in their hearts. I know this sounds silly and optimistic, but there is more than that. Surely their feelings do not match mine, they cannot, because everyone feels things differently. Having even this (small?) amount of love and these experiences is really valuable.
I am going to focus a bit just on the latest special girl I met, and there is a good reason for that: Claire. I met Claire in November 2014, less than a week before I left the St Thomas’ hospital. She was there in the same ward as myself, as a patient, for several weeks. When I saw her a couple of times walking downstairs I was pleasantly surprised to see another patient there able to smile, to be gracious. She was obviously going through hard times, but nothing mattered. It is rare to see something like that. Someone else who is that strong. I was telling a friend she was like an angel. It is silly, but so many patients are disgruntled and sad in hospitals. She was different. I know myself, I am smiling going into surgeries, I come out smiling, except once when I was not feeling well enough. Seeing Claire she reminded of my way of being.
Like in silly movies I asked one of the nurses for Claire's phone number, so we met online and in the ward, and started to talk almost daily. Met her again in January this year, at the same hospital. Unfortunately, she continues to have her health issues.
Claire is a smart girl, she is pursuing a PhD in law and you can have a very lively discussion on politics, economy, faith and other topics with her. Did I mention she is kind? :-)
I do not want anyone to feel any kind of pity here. The point I am trying to make here is that there are special people out there with different medical conditions that need your support, and they make the best out of their life. Claire does as well. She has Lupus and if you want, please go ahead and make a donation to the St Thomas' Lupus trust from the St Thomas’ hospital in London, as per her wish. She fully appreciates and supports the team working there on Lupus.
Now I know you might wonder why I am suggesting people to donate both to EB and Lupus research. I could avoid mentioning Claire and Lupus, and just make a call to action here for EB research. I am not trying to convince you here to pick a charity. Just go ahead with making donations and supporting other causes.
I write here about Claire because it is the least I can do in her honor. In these past weeks I have been thinking a lot about how I can give back or show my love to the people I care about. This is one way, for Claire. It is difficult when you want to help or do something important, meaningful, for a special person and you cannot find anything to do. I see this with others who would do almost anything for me to get over this cancer. They feel powerless. I feel powerless as well. I cannot help Claire and others.
I feel that it would be egoistic to ask everyone here to simply donate to the cause I care about. I did that too much in 27 years. Now you choose if and how you touch others.
I also like the idea of having an impact in a completely unexpected direction in this world. I never knew about Lupus until I met Claire.
On faith
A topic closely related to love is faith and God. I want to mention that we, Marius and myself, were typically the target of various religious fanatics as we called them. Since early times they wanted to show us the light and love of God and even, recently, that of Allah (which is the same but not quite). What they initially achieved was causing rejection from both of us.
My cousin Simon helped with explaining things on demand, not like a spammer. To me belief in God starts with experiences, I cannot believe what I hear or read.
From my experience I would say that there might be something out there beyond human grasps that we cannot define, like afterlife and deities. Religions are only attempts to explain these matters. To claim there is only one truth is a big mistake. Humanity should not take that much pride in what it does. I am only closest to God and Catholic views because of social contexts, but this is not necessarily the "best" or "worst" deity out there, whatever that would mean.
On miracles I want to point out that too often that we want things to just happen, like in movies. We do not notice true miracles. The things me and Marius achieved were not something one would rationally bet on happening. Small achievements compared to what others have done, yet better than just a life of EB. Less than 10 years ago you could have asked any doctor or someone else to make an educated guess about us, and he would have not picked anything like how things really turned out. Seemingly impossible things can happen, even if there are very small chances. You only need to try and to have courage, to persevere.
I have an amazing family, got to have a great job, met great people, travelled to cool places, etc. Others do not get these, even if they have similar or the same condition. Is it all a coincidence or "little miracles"? I do not know, but I could have had it much worse, and throughout the years I "dodged" death perhaps more times than I can remember.
Even now, facing the prognosis I have, I cannot be sure about it. Until the very end there is always a way. I am entirely convinced that this cancer can be cured by today's medicine, that is if we include the alternative medicine as well. The only problem I face is finding the needle in the haystack. Very few other patients in late stages of cancer seem to have successfully overcome their illness, but none that I know of had EB. Were those miracles or not? It is all within the realm of humanity, but the actual finding is what makes it a miracle, nailing that very small chance. The question is how many of these "miracles" can one have in his lifetime? I cannot expect as many as I wish.
When you hear that man is made in the image of God you probably do not understand why. I see this with others, like my mom. She did and continues to give her life for her children, slowly, every day. Her sacrifices are like the symbolic sacrifice of Jesus for the sins of humanity. We have that desire to sacrifice ourselves for the ones we love. I would be so happy if my life would be so meaningful to at least one person out there, if I could have made a sacrifice for a higher purpose.
True love is about being there for the people you love, going through joy or unhappiness, sacrifices. When I hear some lover committed suicide because his partner decided to leave him it does not really point to how much he loved her. Unfortunately, having serious lifelong health problems such thoughts did cross my mind in different circumstances. Ultimately, I believe we have only one life to live, and we must make the best of it. If you abandon the project, then you deny any chances of improvements. Once you stop you cannot go back. I always hoped things will not be as bad as I am told, or as I expected them. I was generally right. :-)
I mentioned in this article all the love and support I got from the many people, which I really appreciate. I believe that the cumulated love is actually God's love. Ultimately, I feel like thanking him for all of this simply because it is all so much.
I could be very bitter about my untimely demise, but I am not. I wonder why? My answer to that is probably all the love and God have given me this peace. What more can I ask for when the end comes? Peace is the most important thing at the end. You could say it's my smartness and education, or whatever, that have have brought me to this peace, but I do not believe that. You can have smart and educated people going ballistic as well. It is something more than education. Maybe Christian brainwashing almost got me, lol. :-)
I want to recommended a movie on the topic of body and spiritual healing that is very well made, seemingly boring, but full of meaning: Lourdes (2009). Enjoy it.
A common question is why do we suffer so much if there is God and he loves us so much? It is the wrong question to ask, I would say. If there is a God, he is not going to do things how we imagine them in this reality. It is silly and limited. If God is love then he must also be freedom. You cannot love someone without giving them the freedom of choice. Freedom means anything can happen, good or bad. Even if you know something bad can happen you must allow your loved one the freedom to pick. You want freedom from your parents to choose what is right or not. If you do not do this, then it becomes a different kind of relationship. There is no love in a dictatorship, even in a "good" dictatorship - where you pick whatever happens with your loved ones and they do not get any choice. This is the same with God's love: his love does not prevent us from suffering, sickness, or from making bad choices for ourselves. We have that freedom.
It is good to pray or to meditate, to take your mind off the problems you have. You do not have to fully trust the deity you pray to. That comes in time. Also do not expect answers to your prayers as you want them. Things happen differently. I wanted the end of the suffering we go through. I am getting to that end now, but not exactly how I wanted.
As I wrote on Facebook in Romanian, in autumn 2014: you do not live until you get to "die". If you do not get to miss life for a while, you cannot really appreciate it.
I find the fear of death almost illogical. If you like your life, or life in general, death is part of the process of life. You must be prepared for it, and it will never be when you expect it.
I do not fear death at all. I expected it will be an early one. I am not happy to leave the things I like here, people, events, work, etc. I am also enthusiastic about technical progress. There is so much going on. I would like to see where we end up in 30 or more years. Silly, I know. :-)
Afterlife is another concept many are bothered by. There is no point to be worried about something that human language, psychology, intellect, etc cannot even begin to grasp. As such, I am waiting to see the afterlife peacefully, if there is anything like that. The various religions and cultures try to define this concept, deities and more, each with their own qualities, but I feel they are just exercises of imagination and human limitations.
I believe that faith starts with the courage to keep going in spite of all the disappointments, fears and failures you had or still have. How can you trust God if you fear death or you worry about tomorrow's big exam? You must face hard times with all the courage you can muster. That is faith.
It is silly how much time and energy people waste on anger and other problems, including myself. We cheat, lie, play games with each other, etc. We are mainly driven by fear. We think about what is next and we choose to avoid admitting feelings about the problems bothering us. We say half truths, we hide. We just do not fully admit what bothers us to the people around. Friendships, romantic relationships and families break up because of poor communication.
Being too honest also makes it easier for people to dislike and hurt you. It is a hard balance to keep between being yourself or being nice. I know I was mostly too direct, easily annoyed people. :-)
At the end I believe you do not really regret being honest. Mainly you get disappointed by the things you do wrong, the inexplicable complications that stem from miscommunication.
We fear too much and we trust too little. When someone tells you their own feelings the "best" option is to doubt him and make up your own version. That is really the recipe for disaster.
There is a song that captures this idea really nicely: Jem - Down to earth.
I am OK with all the people who did wrong by me, which is far fewer than those who did good. Those who do wrong only do it as a reflection or result of their fears, lack of trust and own problems.
I think having serious problems of any kind makes us more like animals. I have seen this with myself. It is much harder to be nice, educated, and considerate under the stress of pains, failures and frustrations. Survival mode kicks in quite subtly actually.
We compete and hurt others for little gains so often that we do not notice. We hear people say things and make assumptions. It is ridiculous how many times people assume I always like what Marius does, or often people think "you can't do that, right?" I see this in the technical world as well: just send an email to a technical mailing list and you will see replies from people who do not entirely read your message, or misinterpret what you write. Too many assumptions.
On technology
I will be abrupt here: no, the Internet did not fail. I read this article a long time ago and I still remember it. While I agree with the main points of the article, I consider my life an example of the amazingly positive impact of technology and the Internet. All of the miserable problems with the tech industry are minor compared to the improvements technology brings to the human quality of life. Without the Internet I could not have done what I did.
The latest example I have is with smart phones. I was a naysayer. I always used a PC, never a phone more than 5 minutes. I also was not much of a mobile person, staying at home most of the time anyway. Last year in March the bank I used started requiring a token device for authentication, or a phone. I could not use the token, but they were kind enough to offer me a pretty good smart phone (thank you very much Anda Daraban). That was my first phone that I actually used. I used it in the hospital in Hungary, then in London and so on. My left arm was not usable for many months, it is not usable now either due to the tumors and surgeries. I never expected that technology on these otherwise addictive gadgets was so accessible to me. I can type this article easily on my phone, I do not mind not being able to use a keyboard anymore. How is this not a great achievement of all the work that the tech industry has put in? It is all for commercial interests, I know, but we easily forget about what these things enable us to do. Countless patients in hospitals and other people in difficult times come to rely on technology that was not available a few years ago, making all the difference in the world for them. I would have suffered a lot more in hospitals and back home now, and last year after the surgery, without being able to stay in touch with the people I know from home, work and others.
This is also an example of how a simple gesture of help makes a huge impact. I did not expect, neither Anda did, that this phone would be so useful for me in such hard times.
Proud to be a Sucan
I cannot end this article without saying a few words about the people who did everything they could for me, my family.
Mom's sacrifices are endless and tireless. Me and Marius, in silly attempts at being funny, we call mom RoboCop, for her tireless energy, she is unstoppable. We call her many things including things she has to forgive, during stressful and angry times. She forgives, loves and moves on. She was and she will always be our guardian angel.
I specifically want to recognize mom's ability to overcome her limitations. Born in a remote village that not very long ago got electricity, she learned to accept new things, to travel to places she never expected, to do things that she believed are nearly impossible. She did and continues to do everything for us, for love.
Almost everybody loves their mom, but if there would be a kind of contest I am certain my mom would be among the winners, simply because not everyone would be able to do what she did, objectively. Not every mom is equal to other moms.
If there are saints and angels mom would be one of them, or she is closest to being one. She always does things for the benefit of the other, never for herself. She takes the lesser half of a plate, for example, even when splitting with strangers. She even gives it all. I wish I could be a quarter as kind as her. Today I would not feel like I did not help others much.
Dad, similarly, is a strong character who never ever gives up and fights for us, with his own qualities and personality.
My twin, Marius, has always made images representing his feelings, which is much more valuable than trying to be nice and fit in some contemporary art and style that people like right now. His work and its impact have a value that will outlive mine, and that makes me happy.
Alex, my older brother, did everything he was able to with helping us as well, more than he notices. His education and level of technical expertise is epic and his impact in robotics is going to be larger than he expects. I wish I could get to see where robotics will get to, and that will include a Sucan. :-) His success was always a model for me and Marius.
Proud of my parents and brothers. Thank you all.
I will end this with thanks everyone for their love and support. Thank you God.
PS. Now go touch the world a bit by making a donation to medical research, EB and / or Lupus research. Cheer yourself up! :-)
Articol disponibil si ^in limba rom^ana aici.
http://www.robodesign.ro/mihai/blog/touched?ref=feed&reftype=entry-link
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Mozilla Release Management Team: Firefox 38 beta9 to rc1 |
For this 38 RC release, as usual, we only took fixes for the last top crashes. We also uplifted some last minute improvements for one of the new features (in this case EME).
| Extension | Occurrences |
| cpp | 14 |
| js | 5 |
| h | 5 |
| build | 5 |
| py | 4 |
| ini | 3 |
| in | 3 |
| voucher | 1 |
| jsm | 1 |
| java | 1 |
| info | 1 |
| inc | 1 |
| html | 1 |
| Module | Occurrences |
| dom | 20 |
| toolkit | 6 |
| testing | 5 |
| widget | 3 |
| gfx | 3 |
| browser | 2 |
| security | 1 |
| python | 1 |
| mobile | 1 |
| media | 1 |
| image | 1 |
List of changesets:
| Jacek Caban | Bug 1156131 - mingw cross compilation fixup. a=NPOTB - b9f3bdfbf395 |
| Jean-Yves Avenard | Bug 1158568 - Fix potential size overflow. r=kentuckyfriedtakahe, a=abillings - 8a61f534f496 |
| Edwin Flores | Bug 1159300 - Don't use decrypting Gecko Media Plugins for non-encrypted playback. r=cpearce, a=sledru - 28521384c589 |
| Randell Jesup | Bug 1159300 - Add a clone of gmp-fake that doesn't do decryption. r=glandium, r=cpearce, a=sledru - d262c6789549 |
| Jean-Yves Avenard | Bug 1148224 - Disable invalid tests. r=karlt, a=test-only - 03d9efe3dd1e |
| Ryan VanderMeulen | Bug 1146061 - Re-enable test_peerConnection_basicH264Video.html on Windows. a=test-only - a2843f37ba38 |
| Boris Zbarsky | Bug 1154505 - Speed up test_bug346659.html by dropping the extra gcs, since the test harness now does a better job of disabling the popup blocker. r=smaug, a=test-only - 31452d32ba4d |
| Mark Hammond | Bug 1090633 - Fix some focus related oranges with chats. r=mixedpuppy, a=test-only - dda1fe153565 |
| James Willcox | Bug 1159262 - Don't do EGL preloading hack on ICS and higher. r=jchen, a=sledru - e31ad7262160 |
| Masatoshi Kimura | Bug 1145844 - Update fallback whitelist. r=keeler, a=sledru - a61af55e410d |
| Bob Owen | Bug 1158849 - Only enable Windows content sandbox on Nightly because of thumbnail process. r=glandium, a=sledru - 742d81505cd3 |
| Robert Strong | Bug 1159826 - ensure_copy_recursive() leaks directory streams. r=spohl, a=sledru - 9edf93465d0d |
| Justin Dolske | Bug 1159814 - Change the Adobe CDM's homepage URL. r=gavin, a=sledru - db6a2986c24d |
| Chris Pearce | Bug 1159495 - Only report Adobe EME supported if required WMF codecs are installed. r=edwin, a=sledru - 60555feb4888 |
| Chris Pearce | Bug 1159495 - Only report that Adobe EME is available if we have a plugin-container voucher. r=edwin, a=sledru - 6e95db92c8d4 |
| Matt Woodrow | Bug 1155608 - Blacklist Intel G45 hardware decoding. r=k17e, a=sledru - 5f1ca8bf7e94 |
| Bas Schouten | Bug 1116812 - Consider DXGI_ERROR_INVALID_CALL a recoverable error for IDXGISwapChain::GetBuffer. r=jrmuizel, a=sledru - a1efc72ea226 |
| Robert Strong | Bug 1127481 - Run the updater from the install directory instead of copying it. r=spohl, a=abillings - dd9d5b512e0e |
| Steve Singer | Bug 1141642 - Fix disable-skia builds. r=jmuizelaar a=sledru - 538fd67bb637 |
| Ben Turner | Bug 1159967 - Handle logging after threads have shut down, r=janv, a=sylvestre - 257a4e9e8236 |
http://release.mozilla.org/statistics/38/2015/05/05/fx-38-b9-to-rc.html
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Matjaz Horvat: Terminology Search in Pontoon |
New release of Pontoon is out the door. It’s mostly a bugfix release eliminating annoying glitches like broken contributor profile links. Thank you for your first contribution to Pontoon, Benoit! 
Some new features are also available, e.g. displaying warnings on unsaved translations as suggested by flod. And — Terminology Search is now also available as a standalone feature, making it easier to access. It works similarly as the Search tab in the out-of-context translation panel.
Translations are taken from:
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Byron Jones: happy bmo push day! |
the following changes have been pushed to bugzilla.mozilla.org:
discuss these changes on mozilla.tools.bmo.
https://globau.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/happy-bmo-push-day-139/
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