About:Community: Firefox 44 new contributors |
With the release of Firefox 44, we are pleased to welcome the 28 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 23 of whom were brand new volunteers! Please join us in thanking each of these diligent and enthusiastic individuals, and take a look at their contributions:
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2016/01/25/firefox-44-new-contributors/
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Doug Belshaw: 3 things to consider when designing a digital skills framework |
The image above was created by Bryan Mathers for our presentation at BETT last week. It shows the way that, in broad brushstrokes, learning design should happen. Before microcredentials such as Open Badges this was a difficult thing to do as both the credential and the assessment are usually given to educators. The flow tends to go backwards from credentials instead of forwards from what we want people to learn.
But what if you really were starting from scratch? How could you design a digital skills framework that contains knowledge, skills, and behaviours worth learning? Having written my thesis on digital literacies and led Mozilla’s Web Literacy Map for a couple of years, I’ve got some suggestions.
One of the most important things to define is who your audience is for your digital skills framework. Is it for learners to read? Who are they? How old are they? Are you excluding anyone on purpose? Why / why not?
You might want to do some research and work around user personas as part of a user-centred design approach. This ensures you’re designing for real people instead of figments of your imagination (or, worse still, in line with your prejudices).
It’s also good practice to make the language used in the skills framework as precise as possible. Jargon is technical language used for the sake of it. There may be times when it’s impossible not to use a word (e.g. ’meme’). If you do this then link to a definition or include a glossary. It’s also useful to check the ‘reading level’ of your framework and, if you really want a challenge, try using Up-Goer Five language.
It’s extremely easy, when creating a framework for learning, to fall into the 'knowledge trap’. Our aim when creating the raw materials from which someone can build a curriculum is to focus on action. Knowledge should make a difference in practice.
One straightforward way to ensure that you’re focusing on action rather than head knowledge is to use verbs when constructing your digital skills framework. If you’re familiar with Bloom’s Taxonomy, then you may find The Differentiator useful. This pairs verbs with the various levels of Bloom’s.
A framework needs to be a living, breathing thing. It should be subject to revision and updated often. For this reason, you should add version numbers to your documentation. Ideally, the latest version should be at a canonical URL and you should archive previous versions to static URLs.
I would also advise releasing the first version of your framework not as 'version 1.0’ but as 'v0.1’. This shows that you’re willing for others to provide input, that there will be further versions, and that you know you haven’t got it right first time (and forevermore).
Questions? Comments? Ask me on Twitter (@dajbelshaw). I also consult around this kind of thing, so hit me up on hello@dynamicskillset.com
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Mozilla Fundraising: Why did you decide to donate today? |
https://fundraising.mozilla.org/why-did-you-decide-to-donate-today/
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Cameron Kaiser: 38.6.0 available |
Speaking of, downloadable fonts were exactly the same problem on the Sun Ultra-3 laptop I've been refurbishing; Oracle still provides a free Solaris 10 build of 38ESR, but it crashes on web fonts for reasons I have yet to diagnose, so I just have them turned off. Yes, it really is a SPARC laptop, a rebranded Tadpole Viper, and I think the fastest one ever made in this form factor (a 1.2GHz UltraSPARC IIIi). It's pretty much what I expected the PowerBook G5 would have been -- hot, overthrottled and power-hungry -- but Tadpole actually built the thing and it's not a disaster, relatively speaking. There's no JIT in this Firefox build, the brand new battery gets only 70 minutes of runtime even with the CPU clock-skewed to hell, it stands a very good chance of rendering me sterile and/or medium rare if I actually use it in my lap and it had at least one sudden overtemp shutdown and pooped all over the filesystem, but between Firefox, Star Office and pkgsrc I can actually use it. More on that for laughs in a future post.
It has been pointed out to me that Leopard Webkit has not made an update in over three months, so hopefully Tobias is still doing okay with his port.
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Mozilla Privacy Blog: Addressing the Chilling Effect of Patent Damages |
Last year, we unveiled the Mozilla Open Software Patent License as part of our Initiative to help limit the negative impacts that patents have on open source software. While those were an important first step for us, we continue to do more. This past Wednesday, Mozilla joined several other tech and software companies in filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court of the United States in the Halo and Stryker cases.
In the brief, we urge the Court to limit the availability of treble damages. Treble damages are significant because they greatly increase the amount of money owed if a defendant is found to “willfully infringe” a patent. As a result, many open source projects and technology companies will refuse to look into or engage in discussions about patents, in order to avoid even a remote possibility of willful infringement. This makes it very hard to address the chilling effects that patents can have on open source software development, open innovation, and collaborative efforts.
We hope that our brief will help the Court see how this legal standard has affected technology companies and persuade the Court to limit treble damages.
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2016/01/22/addressing-the-chilling-effect-of-patent-damages/
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Mozilla Addons Blog: Add-on Signing Update |
In Firefox 43, we made it a default requirement for add-ons to be signed. This requirement can be disabled by toggling a preference that was originally scheduled to be removed in Firefox 44 for release and beta versions (this preference will continue to be available in the Nightly, Developer, and ESR Editions of Firefox for the foreseeable future).
We are delaying the removal of this preference to Firefox 46 for a couple of reasons: We’re adding a feature in Firefox 45 that allows temporarily loading unsigned restartless add-ons in release, which will allow developers of those add-ons to use Firefox for testing, and we’d like this option to be available when we remove the preference. We also want to ensure that developers have adequate time to finish the transition to signed add-ons.
The updated timeline is available on the signing wiki, and you can look up release dates for Firefox versions on the releases wiki. Signing will be mandatory in the beta and release versions of Firefox from 46 onwards, at which point unbranded builds based on beta and release will be provided for testing.
https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2016/01/22/add-on-signing-update/
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Chris Cooper: RelEng & RelOps Weekly Highlights - January 22, 2016 |
Releng: drinkin’ wine and makin’ pies.Modernize infrastructure:
In a continuing effort to enable faster, more reliable, and more easily-run tests for TaskCluster components, Dustin landed support for an in-memory, credential-free mock of Azure Table Storage in the azure-entities package. Together with the fake mock support he added to taskcluster-lib-testing, this allows tests for components like taskcluster-hooks to run without network access and without the need for any credentials, substantially decreasing the barrier to external contributions.
All release promotion tasks are now signed by default. Thanks to Rail for his work here to help improve verifiability and chain-of-custody in our upcoming release process. (https://bugzil.la/1239682) Beetmover has been spotted in the wild! Jordan has been working on this new tool as part of our release promotion project. Beetmover helps move build artifacts from one place to another (generally between S3 buckets these days), but can also be extended to perform validation actions inline, e.g. checksums and anti-virus. (https://bugzil.la/1225899)
Dustin configured the “desktop-test” and “desktop-build” docker images to build automatically on push. That means that you can modify the Dockerfile under `testing/docker`, push to try, and have the try job run in the resulting image, all without pushing any images. This should enable much quicker iteration on tweaks to the docker images. Note, however, that updates to the base OS images (ubuntu1204-build and centos6-build) still require manual pushes.
Mark landed Puppet code for base windows 10 support including secrets and ssh keys management.
Improve CI pipeline:
Vlad and Amy repurposed 10 Windows XP machines as Windows 7 to improve the wait times in that test pool (https://bugzil.la/1239785) Armen and Joel have been working on porting the Gecko tests to run under TaskCluster, and have narrowed the failures down to the single digits. This puts us on-track to enable Linux debug builds and tests in TaskCluster as the canonical build/test process.
Release:
Ben finished up work on enhanced Release Blob validation in Balrog (https://bugzil.la/703040), which makes it much more difficult to enter bad data into our update server.
You may recall Mihai, our former intern who we just hired back in November. Shortly after joining the team, he jumped into the releaseduty rotation to provide much-needed extra bandwidth. The learning curve here is steep, but over the course of the Firefox 44 release cycle, he’s taken on more and more responsibility. He’s even volunteered to do releaseduty for the Firefox 45 release cycle as well. Perhaps the most impressive thing is that he’s also taken the time to update (or write) the releaseduty docs so that the next person who joins the rotation will be that much further ahead of the game. Thanks for your hard work here, Mihai!
Operational:
Hal did some cleanup work to remove unused mozharness configs and directories from the build mercurial repos. These resources have long-since moved into the main mozilla-central tree. Hopefully this will make it easier for contributors to find the canonical copy! (https://bugzil.la/1239003)
Hiring:
We’re still hiring for a full-time Build & Release Engineer, and we are still accepting applications for interns for 2016. Come join us!
Well, I don’t know about you, but all that hard work makes me hungry for pie. See you next week!
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Support.Mozilla.Org: What’s up with SUMO – 22nd January |
Hello, SUMO Nation!
The third week of the new year is already behind us. Time flies when you’re not paying attention… What are you going to do this weekend? Let us know in the comments, if you feel like sharing :-) I hope to be in the mountains, getting some fresh (bracing) air, and enjoying nature.
We salute you!
Thank you for reading all the way down here… More to come next week! You know where to find us, so see you around – keep rocking the open & helpful web!
https://blog.mozilla.org/sumo/2016/01/22/whats-up-with-sumo-22nd-january/
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Air Mozilla: Bay Area Rust Meetup January 2016 |
Bay Area Rust meetup for January 2016. Topics TBD.
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Mitchell Baker: Honored to Participate in New UN Panel on Women’s Economic Empowerment |
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Mozilla WebDev Community: Beer and Tell – January 2016 |
Once a month, web developers from across the Mozilla Project get together to talk about our side projects and drink, an occurrence we like to call “Beer and Tell”.
There’s a wiki page available with a list of the presenters, as well as links to their presentation materials. There’s also a recording available courtesy of Air Mozilla.
First up was shobson with a cool demo of an animated disco ball made entirely with CSS. The demo uses a repeated radial gradient for the background, and linear gradients plus a border radius for the disco ball itself. The demo was made for use in shobson’s WordCamp talk about debugging CSS. A blog post with notes from the talk is available as well.
Next was craigcook, who presented Proton. It’s a CSS framework that is intentionally ugly to encourage use for prototypes only. Unlike other CSS frameworks, the temptation to reuse the classes from the framework in your final page doesn’t occur, which helps avoid the presentational classes that plague sites built using a framework normally.
Proton’s website includes an overview of the layout and components provided, as well as examples of prototypes made using the framework.
If you’re interested in attending the next Beer and Tell, sign up for the dev-webdev@lists.mozilla.org mailing list. An email is sent out a week beforehand with connection details. You could even add yourself to the wiki and show off your side-project!
See you next month!
https://blog.mozilla.org/webdev/2016/01/21/beer-and-tell-january-2016/
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About:Community: This Month at Mozilla |
A lot of exciting things are happening with Participation at Mozilla this month. Here’s a quick round-up of some of the things that are going on!
Since the start of this year, the Participation Infrastructure team has had a renewed focus on making mozillians.org a modern community directory to meet Mozilla’s growing needs.
Their first target for 2016 was to improve the UX on the profile edit interface.
”We chose it due to relatively self-contained nature of it, and cause many people were not happy with the current UX. After research of existing tools and applying latest best practices, we designed, coded and deployed a new profile edit interface (which by the way is renamed to Settings now) that we are happy to deliver to all Mozillians.”
Read the full blog here!
Are you a passionate designer looking to contribute to Mozilla? You’ll be happy to hear there is a new way to contribute to the many design projects around Mozilla! Submit issues, find collaborators, and work on open source projects by getting involved!
Learn more here.
This weekend 136 participation leaders from all over the world are heading to Singapore to undergo two days of leadership training to develop the skills, knowledge and attitude to lead Participation in 2016.
Photo credit @thephoenixbird on Twitter
If you know someone attending don’t forget to share your questions and goals with them, and follow along over the weekend by watching the hashtag #MozSummit.
Stay tuned after the event for a debrief of the weekend!
If you’re interested in learning more about all the exciting new features, projects, and plans that were presented at Mozlando look no further! You can now watch the final plenary sessions on Air Mozilla (it’s a lot of fun so I highly recommend it!) here.
Share your questions and comments on discourse here.
Look forward to more updates like these in the coming months!
http://blog.mozilla.org/community/2016/01/21/this-month-at-mozilla/
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Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: Prioritizing privacy: Good for business |
This was originally posted at StaySafeOnline.org in advance of Data Privacy Day.
Data Privacy Day – which arrives in just a week – is a day designed to raise awareness and promote best practices for privacy and data protection. It is a day that looks to the future and recognizes that we can and should do better as an industry. It reminds us that we need to focus on the importance of having the trust of our users.
We seek to build trust so we can collectively create the Web our users want – the Web we all want.
That Web is based on relationships, the same way that the offline world is. When I log in to a social media account, schedule a grocery delivery online or browse the news, I’m relying on those services to respect my data. While companies are innovating their products and services, they need to be innovating on user trust as well, which means designing to address privacy concerns – and making smart choices (early!) about how to manage data.
A recent survey by Pew highlights the thought that each user puts into their choices – and the contextual considerations in various scenarios. They concluded that many participants were annoyed and uncertain by how their information was used, and they are choosing not to interact with those services that they don’t trust. This is a clear call to businesses to foster more trust with their users, which starts by making sure that there are people empowered within your company to ask the right questions: what do your users expect? What data do you need to collect? How can you communicate about that data collection? How should you protect their data? Is holding on to data a risk, or should you delete it?
It’s crucial that users are a part of this process – consumers’ data is needed to offer cool, new experiences and a user needs to trust you in order to choose to give you their data. Pro-user innovation can’t happen in a vacuum – the system as it stands today isn’t doing a good job of aligning user interests with business incentives. Good user decisions can be good business decisions, but only if we create thoughtful user-centric products in a way that closes the feedback loop so that positive user experiences are rewarded with better business outcomes.
Not prioritizing privacy in product decisions will impact the bottom line. From the many data breaches over the last few years to increasing evidence of eroding trust in online services, data practices are proving to be the dark horse in the online economy. When a company loses user trust, whether on privacy or anything else, it loses customers and the potential for growth.
Privacy means different things to different people but what’s clear is that people make decisions about the products and services that they use based on how those companies choose to treat their users. Over this time, the Internet ecosystem has evolved, as has its relationship with users – and some aspects of this evolution threaten the trust that lies at the heart of that relationship. Treating a user as a target – whether for an ad, purchase, or service – undermines the trust and relationship that a business may have with a consumer.
The solution is not to abandon the massive value that robust data can bring to users, but rather, to collect and use data leanly, productively and transparently. At Mozilla, we have created a strong set of internal data practices to ensure that data decisions align with our privacy principles. As an industry, we need to keep users at the center of the product vision rather than viewing them as targets of the product – it’s the only way to stay true to consumers and deliver the best, most trusted experiences possible.
Want to hear more about how businesses can build relationships with their users by focusing on trust and privacy? We’re holding events in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco with some of our partners to talk about it. Please join us!
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2016/01/21/prioritizing-privacy-good-for-business/
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J.C. Jones: Issuance Rate for Let's Encrypt |
Gathering data from Certificate Transparency logs, here's a snapshot in time of Let's Encrypt's certificate issuance rate per minute from 7-21 January 2016. On 20 January, DreamHost launched formal support for Let's Encrypt, which coincides with a rate increase.
Note: This is mostly an experimental post with embedding charts; I've more data in the queue.
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Air Mozilla: Web QA Weekly Meeting, 21 Jan 2016 |
This is our weekly gathering of Mozilla'a Web QA team filled with discussion on our current and future projects, ideas, demos, and fun facts.
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Soledad Penades: No more tap tap tap sounds: yay! |
A few days ago the fantastic Fritz from the Netherlands told me that my Hands On Web Audio slides had stopping working and there was no sound coming out from them in Firefox.
@supersole oh noes! I reopened your slides: https://t.co/SO35UfljMI and it doesn't work in @firefox anymore
http://soledadpenades.com/2016/01/21/no-more-tap-tap-tap-sounds-yay/
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Pierros Papadeas: Mozillians.org Profile Edit refresh |
Since the start of this year, Participation Infrastructure team has a renewed focus on making mozillians.org a modern community directory to meet Mozilla’s growing needs. This will not be an one-time effort. We need to invest technically and programmatically in order to deliver a first-class product that will be the foundation for identity management across the Mozilla ecosystem.
Mozillians.org is full of functionality as it is today, but is paying the debt of being developed by 5 different teams over the past 5 years. We started simple this time. Updated all core technology pieces, did privacy and security reviews, and started the process of consolidating and modernizing many of the things we do in the site.
Our first target was Profile Edit. We chose it due to relatively self-contained nature of it, and cause many people were not happy with the current UX. After research of existing tools and applying latest best practices, we designed, coded and deployed a new profile edit interface (which by the way is renamed to Settings now) that we are happy to deliver to all Mozillians.
Have a look for yourself and don’t miss the chance to update your profile while you do it!
Nikos (on the front-end), Tasos and Nemo (on the back-end) worked hard to deliver this in a speedy manner (as they are used to), and the end result is a testament to what is coming next on Mozillians.org.
Our next target? Groups. Currently it is obscure and unclear what all those settings in groups are, what is the functionality and how teams within Mozilla will be using it. We will be tackling this soon. After that, search and stats will be our attention, in an ongoing effort to fortify mozillians.org functionality. Stay tuned, and as always feel free to file bugs and contribute in the process.
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Adam Lofting: Blog posts I haven’t written lately |
Last year I joked…
Thinking about writing a blog post listing the blog posts I’ve been meaning to write… Maybe that will save some time
— Adam Lofting (@adamlofting) November 20, 2015
Now, it has come to this.
But my most requested blog by far, is an update on the status of my shed / office that I was tagging on to the end my blog posts at this time last year. Many people at Mozfest wanted to know about the shed… so here it is.
This time last year:
Starting in the new office today. It will take time to make it *nice* but it works for now. pic.twitter.com/sWoC4kFNLc
— Adam Lofting (@adamlofting) January 28, 2015
Some pictures from this morning:
It’s a pretty nice place to work now and it doubles as useful workshop on the weekends. It needs a few finishing touches, but the law of diminishing returns means those finishing touches are lower priority than work that needs to be done elsewhere in the house and garden. So it’ll stay like this a while longer.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/adamlofting/blog/~3/DoEWpBapwiw/
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Tarek Ziad'e: A Pelican web editor |
The benefit of being a father again (Freya my 3rd child, was born last week) is that while on paternity leave & between two baby bottles, I can hack on fun stuff.
A few months ago, I've built for my running club a Pelican-based website, check it out at : http://acr-dijon.org. Nothing's special about it, except that I am not the one feeding it. The content is added by people from the club that have zero knowledge about softwares, let alone stuff like vim or command line tools.
I set up a github-based flow for them, where they would add content through the github UI and its minimal reStructuredText preview feature - and then a few of my crons would update the website on the server I host. For images and other media, they are uploading them via FTP using FireSSH in Firefox.
For the comments, I've switched from Disqus to ISSO after I got annoyed by the fact that it was impossible to display a simple Disqus UI for people to comment without having to log in.
I had to make my club friends go through a minimal reStructuredText syntax training, and things are more of less working now.
The system has a few caveats though:
So I've decided to build my own web editing tool with the following features:
The first step was to build a reStructuredText parser that would read some reStructuredText and render it back into a cleaner version.
We've imported almost 2000 articles in Pelican from the old blog, so I had a lot of samples to make my parser work well.
I first tried rst2rst but that parser was built for a very specific use case (text wrapping) and was incomplete. It was not parsing all of the reStructuredText syntax.
Inspired by it, I wrote my own little parser using docutils.
Understanding docutils is not a small task. This project is very powerfull but quite complex. One thing that cruelly misses in docutils parser tools is the ability to get the source text from any node, including its children, so you can render back the same source.
That's roughly what I had to add in my code. It's ugly but it does the job: it will parse rst files and render the same content, minus all the extraneous empty lines, spaces, tabs etc.
Content browsing is pretty straightforward: my admin tool let you browse the Pelican content directory and lists all articles, organized by categories.
In our case, each category has a top directory in content. The browser parses the articles using my parser and display batched lists.
I had to add a cache system for the parser, because one of the directory contains over 1000 articles -- and browsing was kind of slow :)
The last big bit was the live editor. I've stumbled on a neat little tool called rsted, that provides a live preview of the reStructuredText as you are typing it. And it includes warnings !
Check it out: http://rst.ninjs.org/
I've stripped it from what I needed and included it in my tool.
I am quite happy with the result so far. I need to add real tests and a bit of documentation, and I will start to train my club friends on it.
The next features I'd like to add are:
The project lives here: https://github.com/AcrDijon/henet
I am not going to release it, but if someone finds it useful, I could.
It's built with Bottle & Bootstrap as well.
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Nick Cameron: Closures and first-class functions |
I wrote a long and probably dull chapter on closures and first-class and higher-order functions in Rust. It goes into some detail on the implementation and some of the subtleties like higher-ranked lifetime bounds.
I was going to post it here too, but it is really too long. Instead, pop over to the 'Rust for C++ programmers' repo and read it there.
http://www.ncameron.org/blog/closures-and-first-class-functions/
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