Pete Moore: Weekly review 2014-07-30 |
Highlights from this week
Goals for next week:
Bugs I created this week:
Other bugs I updated this week:
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Karl Dubost: Reducing your bandwidth bill by customizing 404 responses. |
In this post, you will learn on how to improve and reduce the bandwidth cost for both the user and the server owner. But first we need to understand a bit the issue (but in case you know all about it, you can jump to the tips at the end of the blog post).
Starting a long time ago, in 1994, because of a spidering program behaving badly, robots.txt was introduced and quickly adopted by WebCrawler, Lycos and other search engines at the time. Now, Web clients had the possibility to first inspect the robots.txt at the root of the Web site and to not index the section of the Web sites which declared "not welcome" to Web spiders. This file was put at the root of the Web site, http://example.org/robots.txt. It is called a "Well known location" resource. It means that the HTTP client is expecting to find something at that address when doing a HTTP GET.
Since then many of these resources have been created unfortunately. The issues is that it imposes on server owners certain names they might have want to use for something else. Let's say, as a Web site owner, I decide to create a Web page /contact at the root of my Web site. One day, a powerful company decides that it would be cool if everyone had a /contact with a dedicated format. I then become forced to adjust my own URI space to not create conflict with this new de facto popular practice. We usually say that it is cluttering the Web site namespace.
What are the other common resources which have been created since robots.txt?
/robots.txt/favicon.ico/w3c/p3p.xml/sitemap.xml/crossdomain.xml/apple-touch-icon.png, /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png/humans.txtNote that in the future if you would like to create a knew well-known resource, RFC 5785 (Defining Well-Known Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs)) has been proposed specifically for addressing this issue.
In terms of bandwidth, why could it be an issue? These are files which are most of the time requested by autonomous Web clients. When an HTTP client requests a resource which is not available on the HTTP server, it will send back a 404 response. These response can be very simple light text or a full HTML page with a lot of code.
Google evaluated that the waste of bandwidth generated by missing apple-touch-icon on mobile was 3% to 4%. This means that the server is sending bits on the wire which are useless (cost for the site owner) and the same for the client receiving them (cost for the mobile owner).
It's there a way to fix that? Maybe.
So what about instead of having the burden to specify every resources in place for each clients, we could send a very light 404 answer targeted to the Web clients that are requesting the resources we do not have on our own server.
Let's say for the purpose of the demo, that only favicon and robots are available on your Web site. We need then to send a specialized light 404 for the rest of the possible resources.
With Apache, we can use the Location directive. This must be defined in the server configuration file httpd.conf or the virtual host configuration file. It can not be defined in .htaccess.
span> *:80>
DocumentRoot "/somewhere/over/the/rainbow"
ServerName example.org
span> "/somewhere/over/the/rainbow">
# Here some options
# And your common 404 file
ErrorDocument 404 /fancy-404.html
# your customized errors
#Here I put in comments the robots.txt and the favicon.ico but you can adjust to your own needs and send errors or not to specific requests.
The plain-404.txt is a very simple text file with just NOT FOUND inside and the fancy-404.html is an html file helping humans to understand what is happening and invite them to find their way on the site. The result is quite cool.
For a classical mistake, let say requesting http://example.org/foba6365djh, we receive the html error.
GET /foba6365djh HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Content-Length: 1926 Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8 Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 05:30:33 GMT ETag: "f7660-786-4e55273ef8a80;4ff4eb6306700" Last-Modified: Sun, 01 Sep 2013 13:30:02 GMT …
And then for a request to let say http://crossdomain.xml/foba6365djh, we get the plain light error message.
GET /crossdomain.xml HTTP/1.1 Host: example.org HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found Content-Length: 9 Content-Type: text/plain Date: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 05:29:11 GMT NOT FOUND
It is probably possible to do it for nginx too. Be my guest, I'll link your post from here.
Otsukare.
http://www.otsukare.info/2014/07/30/howto-custom-404-per-url
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Zack Weinberg: 2014 Hugo Awards ballot |
I’m not attending the Worldcon, but I most certainly am voting the Hugos this year, and moreover I am publishing my ballot with one-paragraph reviews of everything I voted on. If you care about this sort of thing you probably already know why. If you don’t, the short version is: Some of the works nominated this year allegedly only made the shortlist because of bloc voting by Larry Correia’s fans, he having published a slate of recommendations.
There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with publishing a slate of recommendations—don’t we all tell our friends to read the stuff we love? In this case, though, the slate came with a bunch of political bloviation attached, and one of the recommended works was written by “Vox Day,” who is such a horrible person that even your common or garden variety Internet asshole backs slowly away from him, but nonetheless he has a posse of devoted fanboys and sock puppets. A frank exchange of views ensued; be glad you missed it, and I hope the reviews are useful to you anyway. If you want more detail, Far Beyond Reality has a link roundup.
I value characterization, sociological plausibility, and big ideas, in that order. I often appreciate ambitious and/or experimental stylistic choices. I don’t mind an absence of plot or conflict; if everyone involved is having a good time exploring the vast enigmatic construction, nothing bad happens, and it’s all about the mystery, that’s just fine by me. However, if I find that I don’t care what happens to these people, no amount of plot or concept will compensate. In the context of the Hugos, I am also giving a lot of weight to novelty. There is a lot of stuff in this year’s ballot that has been done already, and the prior art was much better. For similar reasons, volume N of a series has to be really good to make up for being volume N.
With two exceptions (both movies I didn’t get around to) I at least tried to read/watch everything mentioned below, and where I didn’t finish something, that is clearly indicated. This is strictly my personal strategy for this sort of thing and I am not putting it forward as right or wrong for anyone else.
Links go to the full text of the nominated work where possible, a Goodreads or IMDB page otherwise.
Note to other Hugo voters: I’m making pretty heavy use of No Award. If you mean to do the same, make sure you understand the correct way to use it:
If you want to vote No Award over something, put No Award at the end of your ballot and DO NOT list the things you’re voting No Award over.
The ballot below (unlike the ballot I submitted) includes line items below No Award, so that I have a space to explain my reasons.
Ancillary Justice, Ann Leckie
Let’s get one thing out of the way first: this book features the Roman Empire (with aspects of Persia and China and probably a couple others I missed), IN SPACE! That was out of fashion for quite some time, and rightly so, on account of having been done to death. However, it has been long enough that a genuinely fresh take is acceptable, if done well, and I happen to think this was done very well. It does not glorify conquest, but neither does it paint the conquerors a uniform shade of Evil; it depicts a multitude of cultures (more than one on the same planet, even!); it has realistic-given-the-setting stakes and conflicts of interest, and believable characters both human and otherwise. I might not have chosen to tell the story out of temporal sequence; one does spend an awfully long time wondering why the protagonist’s goals are as they are. But I see why Leckie did it the way she did it.
Nearly every review of this novel talks about the thing where the protagonist’s native language doesn’t make gender distinctions and so e is always picking the wrong casemarkers, pronouns, etc. when speaking languages that do. I kinda wish they wouldn’t focus so much on that, because it is just one aspect of a larger problem the protagonist has: e didn’t used to be a human being and is, over the course of the novel, having to learn how to be one. E doesn’t know how to handle eir ‘irrational’ attachment to Lieutenant Seivarden either, and eir problem-solving strategies start out much more appropriate to the entity e used to be and progressively become suited to eir current state. It is also neither the most unusual nor the most interesting thing about Radchaai culture. I don’t believe I have ever before seen Space Romans with a state religion, a system of clientage, or a plot driven by a political quandary that the real Romans (as far as I understand) actually had.
Neptune’s Brood, Charles Stross
This reminds me of The Witches of Karres, in a good way. Distant-future setting, check. Packed to the gills with ideas, check. Self-contained storyline, check. Extraordinarily high stakes, check. Hardly anyone has any idea what’s going on, but they don’t let that stop them, check. It’s technically a sequel, but it might as well be a standalone novel, which is fortunate, because I bounced off Saturn’s Children really quite hard—the protagonist here is more congenial company, and the society depicted, more plausible. The plot is fundamentally a MacGuffin hunt, but played in a novel and entertaining manner.
Strictly in terms of the story, this is neck and neck with Ancillary Justice, but it falls short on writing technique. There was a great deal of infodumpage, paired with excessive showing of work—at one point the first-person narrator actually says “I am now going to bore you to death with $TOPIC.” I like geeking out about political economy, but not at the expense of the narrative. (Continuing with the comparison to The Witches of Karres, Schmitz was much better at giving the reader just barely enough detail.) The ending is almost Stephensonian in its abruptness, and a little too pat—it sounded good at the time, but half an hour later I found myself unconvinced that the MacGuffin would have its stated consequences. Finally, there’s an irritating and frequent stylistic quirk, in which multi-clause sentences are, incorrectly, punctuated with colons instead of semicolons.
Parasite, Mira Grant
You know how the movie studios sometimes do A/B testing to decide which of several different edits of a movie to release as the finished product? I want to do that with this book. Specifically, I want to find out whether or not it’d be a better book if there weren’t page-length quotations from in-universe documents at the beginning of each chapter. These documents make it much clearer what is actually going on, which is a good thing in that the reader might be completely lost without them, and a bad thing in that the reader can (as I did) figure out exactly where the plot is going by the end of chapter 2.
It’s reasonably well written, modulo some clumsy infodumpage in the middle, and it is a credible attempt to write a stock type of thriller novel (exactly which type would be a spoiler) without making the science completely laughable. Bonus points for actually being familiar with the geography, traffic headaches, and cultural diversity of the San Francisco Bay Area. However, it is, in the end, a stock type of thriller novel, and may not appeal if you don’t already like that sort of thing. (If you get to the end of chapter 2 and find yourself thinking “ugh, this is clearly going to be about X” … yeah, you can go ahead and put the book down.)
No Award
The Wheel of Time, Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson
The rules need to be changed so that completed gargantua-series are their own category, or perhaps some sort of special award, considering there might or might not be any completed gargantua-series in any given year. I’d be showing up at the business meeting with a revision proposal if I were attending the Worldcon.
Perennial latecomer to cultural phenomena that I am, I didn’t even notice that these novels existed until there were about seven of them, at which point the consensus on USENET (yeah, it was that long ago) seemed to be that they were not terribly inventive and the plot had ceased to make forward progress. So I didn’t bother picking them up. The Hugo voters’ packet contains the entire thing in one giant e-book file. I am on the last leg of a long plane flight as I type this, and I have just finished the first 8% of that e-book, i.e. The Eye of the World. I enjoyed it well enough, as it happens, and will probably continue reading the series as further long plane flights, sick days, and similar present themselves. If I don’t get too fed up with the plot failing to make forward progress, I may even finish it someday.
However, based on that volume plus the aforementioned USENET commentary and what I’ve heard from other people since, it is not Hugo quality, for three reasons. First and foremost, as I was told so long ago, it is not at all inventive. The setting is exactly what was being skewered by The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Worse, the plot of the first novel is Campbell’s monomyth, verbatim. (Well, the first few stages of it.) It escapes “Extruded Fantasy Product” territory only by virtue of having a whole bunch of characters who, at this point anyway, are all three-dimensional people with plausible motivations and most of whom are entertaining to watch. Second, I don’t have a lot of patience for whiny teenagers who spend much of the book refusing the call to adventure, distrusting the adults who actually know what’s going on, or both simultaneously. Yes, they’ve spent all their lives hearing stories starring the Aes Sedai as villains, but c’mon, Moiraine repeatedly saves everyone’s life at great personal cost, it could maybe occur to you that there might’ve been a bit of a smear campaign going on? Third, Jordan’s tendency to pad the plot is already evident in this one volume. It did not need to be 950 pages long.
Warbound, Book III of the Grimnoir Chronicles, Larry Correia
Noir-flavored urban fantasy, set in an alternate 1930s USA where people started developing superpowers (of the comic book variety) in roughly 1880. I would love to read a good detective noir with superheroes and/or fairy tale magic. This, however, is yet another jingoistic retread of the Pacific theater of the Second World War, shifted into the middle of the Great Depression, with The Good Guys (USA! USA! with superheroes) versus The Bad Guys (Imperial Japan circa 1934—an excellent choice if you like your Bad Guys utterly evil, I’ll admit—with supervillains) and a secret society trying to emulate Charles Xavier and failing at it because they’re too busy arguing and scheming. I almost gave up fifty pages into volume I because no sympathetic protagonists had yet appeared. Fortunately, someone whose story I was interested in did appear shortly thereafter, but it was still pretty slim pickings all the way to the end. This is not a case of bad characterization; it’s that most of the characters are unpleasant, petty, self-absorbed, and incapable of empathizing with people who don’t share their circumstances. Additional demerits for setting the story in the Great Depression, and then making nearly everyone we’re supposed to like, wealthy.
Ironically, one of the most sympathetic characters in the entire trilogy is the leader of Imperial Japan (known almost exclusively as The Chairman)—I think this was because Correia knew he needed a villain who wasn’t cut from purest cardboard, but it didn’t occur to him that he needed to put as much work into his heroes. And by the same token, it did not occur to him that he had failed to convincingly refute his villain’s philosophy: if your villain espouses the rule of the strongest, and is then defeated by superior technology, intellect, and strength of will, that in itself only demonstrates that force of arms is weaker than those things.
Regarding Larry Correia’s recommendation slate, all I care to say is that his taste in writing by others reflects the flaws in his own writing.
“Wakulla Springs”, Andy Duncan and Ellen Klages
Apart from a few unexplained-and-might-not-even-have-happened phenomena near the very end, this could be historical fiction with no speculative elements. Wakulla Springs is a real place and they really did film Tarzan and The Creature from the Black Lagoon there, and they really did turn various animals loose in the Florida swamps when they were done. However, if you squint at it a different way, it’s a fairy tale moved to the twentieth century, not any specific fairy tale but the bones of them all, with movie stars standing in for kings and princes, and rubber-suit monsters standing in for, well, monsters. And the characters are all just fun to be around.
Six-Gun Snow White, Catherynne M. Valente
This is overtly a fairy tale, specifically Snow White, moved to the nineteenth-century Wild West and shook up in a blender with the style and the form of the stories of Coyote. The first half of it is compelling, and the third quarter works okay, but the conclusion is disappointing. The problem is that if you’re going to retell Snow White, either you have to stick with love conquering all in the end (and you have to set that up proper), or you have to jump the tracks before Snow White eats the poison apple. And if you’re going to set Snow White up as a mythic hero after the fashion of Coyote, maybe you should give her at least some of Coyote’s miraculous ability to get back out of trouble? Valente deliberately avoided doing any of those things and so painted herself into a corner.
Having said that, I’m still giving this the #2 slot because I really like the concept, and it only fails by not executing successfully on its grand ambitions, which is a thing I am prepared to cut an author some slack for.
“Equoid”, Charles Stross
Marvelously creepy cryptozoological meditation on unicorns, their life cycle and role in the ecosystem, and why they must be exterminated. In the Laundry Files continuity, and does not stand alone terribly well. Also, stay away if you dislike body horror.
No Award
“The Chaplain’s Legacy”, Brad Torgersen
Remember what I said above about things that have been done already? This is a retread of Enemy Mine, breaking no new ground itself. Characterization is flat and style pedestrian. Not so boring as to make me put it down in the middle, and thankfully didn’t go for the cheap moral that I thought it would, but on the whole, disappointing.
The Butcher of Khardov, Dan Wells
An extended character study of an antihero of the most boring, clich'ed, and overdone type: mistreated due to his size and strength, doubly mistreated due to his uncanny abilities, learns from betrayal to take everything personally, believes the only thing he’s good at is killing people, and in his secret heart, just wants to be loved. Overflowing with manpain. Told out of chronological order for no apparent reason, causing the ending to make no sense. Vaguely folktale-Russia setting (with steampunk and magic) that a better writer could have done something interesting with; I am given to understand that this is in fact the WARMACHINE tabletop wargaming setting. I do not object to tie-in fiction, but neither will I cut it any slack on that account. For instance, the Butcher himself is an official WARMACHINE character; I don’t know if Wells invented him or just got tapped to flesh out his backstory; regardless, I do not consider that a valid excuse for any of the above.
“The Waiting Stars”, Aliette de Bodard
This one is difficult to describe without spoiling it, so I’ll just say that it’s a clash-of-cultures story, set in the extremely far future, and I liked how the two cultures are both somewhat sympathetic despite valuing very different things and being legitimately horrified by the other’s practices. The ending may be laying it on a little too thick, but I don’t know that it can be toned down without spoiling the effect.
“The Lady Astronaut of Mars”, Mary Robinette Kowal
Elma, the titular Lady Astronaut, was on the first manned expedition to Mars; that was thirty-odd years ago, and she is now semi-retired, living on Mars, and torn between getting back into space and taking care of her husband, who is dying. Apart from the setting, this could be mainstream literary fiction, and a type of mainstream literary fiction that, as a rule, rubs me entirely the wrong way. This one, however, I liked. The characters all seem genuine, and the setting throws the central question of the plot into sharp relief, forcing us to take it more seriously than we might otherwise have.
“The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling”, Ted Chiang
Philosophical musing on the nature of memory and how technological aids change that. This used to be a professional interest of mine, but I didn’t think Chiang did all that much with it here. Told in two intertwined narratives, of which the story of the Tiv is more compelling, or perhaps it is just that the first-person narrator of the other half is kind of a blowhard.
No Award
“The Exchange Officers”, Brad Torgersen
Near future plausible geopolitical conflict in low Earth orbit, POV first person smartass grunt-on-the-front-line. Entertaining, but neither memorable nor innovative.
“Opera Vita Aeterna”, Vox Day
This isn’t a story; it’s an object lesson in why publishers reject 95–99% of the slush pile. The prose is uniformly, tediously purple, and nearly all of it is spent on description of rooms, traditions, and illuminated manuscripts. The characters haven’t even got one dimension. Nothing happens for the first two-thirds of the text, and then everyone in the monastery (it takes place in a monastery) is, without any warning, murdered, cut to epilogue. To the extent I can tell what the author thought the plot was, it could be summarized in a paragraph without losing anything important, and it would then need a bunch of new material added to make it into a story.
I’ve seen several other people say that this is bad but not terrible, comparing it positively to The Eye of Argon, and I want to explicitly disagree with that. If I may quote Sarah Avery, The Eye of Argon has characters; in the course of the story, something happens; several somethings, even, with some detectable instances of cause and effect; and it has a beginning, a middle, and (in some versions of the text) an end. It’s clich'ed, sure, and and crammed full of basic grammar and vocabulary errors, and that’s what makes it bad in a hilarious and memorable way. Opera Vita Aeterna, by contrast, is bad in a boring and forgettable way, which is worse.
There is no doubt in my mind that this is only on the ballot because it was included in Correia’s recommendations and then bloc-voted onto the shortlist by Day’s fanboys. To them I say: if you did not realize it was unworthy, you should be ashamed of yourself for being so undiscerning; if you knew it was unworthy and you nominated it anyway, you have committed a sin against Apollo, and may you live to regret it.
These are all good enough that rank-ordering them is hard; I’d be happy to see any of them win. They are also all floating somewhere around the magical realism attractor, which is not what I would have expected.
“The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere”, John Chu
Tell a lie, even a white lie, or even fail to admit the truth, and water falls on you from nowhere; this just started happening one day—otherwise this is a story of ordinary people and their troubles and their connections to each other, and the magic is used to explore those things. Very elegant in its use of language; bonus points for making use of the ways in which Chinese (Mandarin, specifically, I think) describes family relationships differently than English does. Emotionally fraught, but satisfying.
“Selkie Stories Are for Losers”, Sofia Samatar
I always did wonder what happened to the children after the selkie went back to the ocean. Not so much the husband. The husband got what was coming to him, which is the point of the selkie story itself; but the daughter, who usually is the one to find the skin that the husband’s kept locked in the attic or wherever; she didn’t have it coming, did she?
A kind storyteller might have it be that the daughter goes down to the ocean every Thursday afternoon, while the husband is out fishing, and her mother comes up from the waves and they have tea. Sofia Samatar is not a kind storyteller.
“The Ink Readers of Doi Saket”, Thomas Olde Heuvel
Based on a real Thai festival, Loi Krathong; in the story, the paper boats that are floated down the river contain wishes for the new year. The villagers of Doi Saket consider it their duty to collect the wishes and send them onward to Buddha in paper lanterns … and some of them, somehow, come true. Is it the intervention of the river goddess? Is it all just coincidence? Is it a scam to line the pockets of the village chief? It’s hard to tell. You will reach the end of this story not being sure what happened, and you will reread it and still not be completely sure. But it’s a fun read anyway.
“If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love”, Rachel Swirsky
A very, very old theme, here, but a take on it that would have been impossible not so long ago. I’m not sure it’s a story, though. More of a love poem. Or a curse poem. Bit of both, really. Still, it’s going to haunt me.
“Time”, Randall Munroe
Back in 2005 I doubt anyone would have guessed that the new nerd-joke webcomic on the block, xkcd, would still be around in 2013 (over a thousand strips later), let alone that it would run a 3101-panel epic starring two stick figure people who are building sandcastles on the beach … really elaborate sandcastles … meanwhile discussing why the ocean level seems to be rising up … and then setting off in search of the source of the river, since presumably that’s where the extra water is coming from … and it just keeps elaborating from there. It was presented in an inconvenient format (the link goes to a more accessible compilation), but it’s got everything one could want in an SFnal epic: engaging characters (it’s amazing how much characterization Munroe can pack into pithy dialogue among stick figures), a carefully thought-out setting, the joy of discovery, the thrill of the unknown, a suitably huge problem to be solved, and, of course, Science!
Saga, Volume 2, written by Brian K. Vaughan, illustrated by Fiona Staples
A love story against the backdrop of an endless galaxy-shattering war, sung in the key of gonzo, and influenced by the best bits of everything from M'etal Hurlant to Tank Girl to Tenchi Muyo! It’s hard to tell where it’s going; what we have so far could be summarized as “Romeo and Juliet IN SPACE! Neither of them is a teenage idiot, they’re determined to survive, and their respective sides are coming after them with as much dakka as they can scrape together on short notice.” The A-plot may not even have appeared onstage at this point. One thing’s for sure, though: Vaughan and Staples mean to put on one hell of a show. For a more in-depth description I refer you to io9’s review.
Strictly in terms of the content, I could just as easily have placed this in the #1 slot. “Time” gets the nod because Saga is not quite as novel, because the subplot with The Will and The Stalk seemed icky and gratuitous, and because volume 1 won this category last year.
Girl Genius, Volume 13: Agatha Heterodyne & The Sleeping City, written by Phil and Kaja Foglio; art by Phil Foglio; colors by Cheyenne Wright
I love Girl Genius, but it’s won this category three times already (in a row, yet!) and this volume, while continuing to be quality material, is nonetheless more of the same.
No Award
“The Girl Who Loved Doctor Who”, written by Paul Cornell, illustrated by Jimmy Broxton
What if the Doctor fell through a crack in time and landed in this universe, where he is a fictional character? Not a new conceit, but one with legs, and I think you could build a fine Doctor Who episode around it; unfortunately, this is not that. It is too heavy on the self-referential and meta-referential, to the point where I think it only makes sense if you are familiar with the show and its fandom. The story is rushed so that they can pack in more in-jokes, and the coda takes a turn for the glurge.
Meathouse Man, adapted from the story by George R.R. Martin and illustrated by Raya Golden
I think this was meant to be a deconstruction of the notion that for everyone there is a perfect romantic partner out there somewhere, just one, and all you have to do is find them and your life will be perfect forever. Which is a notion that could use some deconstructing. Unfortunately, between the male gaze, the embrace of the equally-in-need-of-deconstruction notion that men cannot comprehend women, the relentlessly grim future backdrop, and the absence of plausible character motivations, what you get is not deconstruction but enforcement by inversion: The only thing that can fix a man’s shitty life is the perfect romantic partner, but he will never find her, so he should just give up and embrace the hollow inside. (Gendered words in previous sentence are intentional.) I regret having finished this.
Gravity, written by Alfonso Cuar'on & Jon'as Cuar'on, directed by Alfonso Cuar'on
This is probably as close as you can get to the ideal golden age hard-SF Protagonist versus Pitilessly Inhospitable Environment story in movie format. (I have actually seen this abstract plot done with precise conformance to the laws of orbital mechanics: Lifeboat, by James White. But storytelling suffered for it.) There are places where they go for the cheap wrench at your heart, but then there are places where they don’t do the obvious and clich'ed thing, and this movie isn’t really about the plot, anyway, it’s about the spectacle. Clearly groundbreaking in terms of cinematography, also; I look forward to future use of the technology they developed. For more, please go read my friend Leonard’s review, as he is better at critiquing movies than I am.
Pacific Rim, screenplay by Travis Beacham & Guillermo del Toro, directed by Guillermo del Toro
It’s a giant monster movie, but it’s a really well thought through and executed giant monster movie. (Except for the utterly nonsensical notion of building a wall around the entire Pacific Ocean, which let us pretend never happened.) And I like that the scientists save the day by doing actual experimental science. Bonus points for not going grimdark or ironic or anything like that. Yes, earnest movies in which there was never any real doubt that the good guys would win were worn out in the 80s and 90s. But bleak movies in which there aren’t any good guys to begin with, and nothing ever really changes, certainly not for the better, are worn out here in the 2010s. Further bonus points for a close personal relationship between a man and a woman which does not turn into a romance.
Iron Man 3, screenplay by Drew Pearce & Shane Black, directed by Shane Black
Marvel continues to crank out superhero movies which do interesting things with established characters. (I particularly liked, in this one, that Potts gets her own independent source of superpowers and does not require rescuing, and that Stark is forced to work out his overprotectiveness issues on his own time.) However, in the end, it is another superhero movie with established characters. I said to someone on a convention panel back in 2001 that I wished Marvel and DC would allow their superheroes to come to the end of their stories, and I still feel that way.
(my official vote for this category ended at this point)
Frozen, screenplay by Jennifer Lee, directed by Chris Buck & Jennifer Lee
I didn’t get around to seeing this; I’m sure it’s another respectable installment in the field of Disneyified fairy tale, but I can’t really imagine its breaking new ground.
The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, screenplay by Simon Beaufoy & Michael Arndt, directed by Francis Lawrence
I didn’t get around to seeing this either, and I’m frankly more than a little burnt out on YA dystopia.
I have to abstain from this category, because I watch TV shows ages after everyone else does; I imagine I’ll get to current Doctor Who episodes (for instance) sometime in 2024.
I wanted to vote this category, but I have run out of time to read things, so I have to skip it as well.
And these categories, I have no idea how to evaluate.
Several of the qualifying works in this category are head and shoulders above everything that was nominated in the regular categories! I will definitely be looking out for more writing by Samatar and Gladstone, and maybe also Sriduangkaew.
Sofia Samatar (A Stranger in Olondria)
A form I haven’t seen attempted in some time: the travelogue of a fantastic land. In this case, Olondria is a great city, perhaps the greatest in the world, filled with merchants, priests, and books, and the traveler/narrator is a humble farmer from the islands in the south, come to Olondria to sell his peppers, as his father did before him. Well, that’s what everyone back at home expects him to do, anyway. In truth he has fallen in love with the literature of Olondria and, through the books, the city itself, and never had all that much interest in the family business to begin with. And then the plot catches up with him: there are two sects of those priests, and both wish to use him to advance their own interests: for you see, he is haunted by the ghost of a woman of his own people, whom he barely knew, but whom he was kind to in her last illness…
This has got everything one could possibly want in a work of SF and everything one could possibly want in a work of capital-L literature; the form is elegant and fitted precisely to the content; the characters are engaging, the narrative flows smoothly, one does not want to put it down. As I mentioned above, Sofia Samatar is not a kind storyteller; this book is painful to read in places. But, having completed it, you will not regret the journey.
Max Gladstone (Three Parts Dead, Two Serpents Rise)
Alternate-Earth (and you have to pay close attention to realize that it is Earth) fantasy. All gods are real, but many of them are dead; the wizards (excuse me, “Craftsmen”) made war on them and slew them, claiming their power in the name of humanity. That was some hundred years ago, and the world is still finding a new equilibrium. Each of these books shows a different piece of that, with very little overlap. Plotwise they are both mysteries, of the ‘investigation of a small incident leads to something bigger … much bigger …’ type, which I liked; it allows the stakes to be appropriately high while avoiding all of the overused quest fantasy tropes. And it works well for showing the readers lots of little details that illustrate how this is not the world we know. Gladstone is also excellent at characterization; even the NPCs who are only onstage in a scene or two feel fully realized.
The only complaints I have are that the way the magic works kinda squicks me out a little (this may have been intentional) and that the ending of Two Serpents Rise didn’t quite work for me (in a way which would be too spoilery to explain here).
Benjanun Sriduangkaew (“Fade to Gold”; “Silent Bridge, Pale Cascade”; “The Bees Her Heart, the Hive Her Belly”)
These are short stories. “Fade to Gold” is a variation on a Southeast Asian folktale, starring two people trapped by their natures and the demands of society; creepy, sorrowful, tragic. The other two are far-future magical-realist meditations on the nature of family, loyalty, and history in a setting where everyone’s memory is remotely editable. All are good, but the far-future ones may not be to everyone’s taste: e.g. if you don’t care for magical realism, or for stories where it’s not clear exactly what happened even after you’ve read all of it.
Ramez Naam (Nexus)
Near-future technothriller in which an elixir of brain-augmenting nanomachines, street name Nexus, offers people the chance to become ‘posthuman’…or could be abused to enslave humanity. Three different organizations are struggling to control it, and the protagonists, who just want to be left in peace to experiment on their own minds, are caught in the middle. Generally a fun read; occasionally clunky prose (particularly in fight scenes); overspecific about gadgets in use (lots of technothrillers do this and I don’t understand why). I am a little tired of cheap drama achieved by poor communication between people who are nominally on the same side.
Brain-augmenting nanomachinery, and the United States of America sliding into police state-hood, seem to be in the zeitgeist right now. I’ve seen both done with a lot more nuance: this gets obnoxiously preachy in places. (Recommendations in this category with more nuance: Smoking Mirror Blues, A Girl and her Fed.)
No Award
Wesley Chu (The Lives of Tao)
I gave up on this after three chapters. The story concept could have been interesting—two factions of immortal, nonphysical aliens, battling in the shadows of Earth’s history, possessing humans and using them to carry out their plans—but it’s got major problems on the level of basic storytelling craft. Those first three chapters are one page after another of unnecessary detail, repetition of information the audience already has, grating shifts in tone, boring conversations about trivia, and worst of all, self-spoilers. Maybe two pages’ worth of actual story happened, and a good chunk of that probably shouldn’t have happened on stage (because it was a self-spoiler). And I had been given no reason to care what happened to the characters.
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Kevin Ngo: Angular, Require, Grunt? React, Browserify, Gulp. |
The JS world moves quickly. New web tools are adopted faster than new Spidermans (men?) are produced. One second, it's AngularJS/RequireJS/Grunt. The next, it's React/Browserify/Gulp. Who knows, by tomorrow we could have some new shiny thing called McRib/Modulus/Chug. But the new workflows that come along never fail to keep development interesting and never fail to make our lives easier. Kay, it's time to freshen up. Let us answer: what is so streets-ahead about these new web technologies?
AngularJS/RequireJS/Grunt may be aging, but what does aging mean? I don't mean becoming obsolete. They're still fantastic tools that won't be going away any time soon. It just means these new technologies are becoming more ubiquitous and favored in modern projects by the community. A brief intro:
imports into JS.With these getting their swagger jacked, we'll explore what the new kids on the block are kicking around.
React is a JS framework from Facebook that also features two-way data binding. I can't really act as a super authority on React yet, but this comparison on Quora makes React focus more on modularity, less opinionated, with less code.
Though I do know some Angular. I can say the documentation isn't hot, it has a the learning curve consequently steepens, and it could use less boilerplate code.
The author of the post above says "if you like Angular, we think you'll love React because reactive updates are so easy and composable components are a simple and powerful abstraction for large and small applications."
To pull in a third-party dependency in RequireJS, one must venture out into the
internet and curl/wget/download/whatever the file into their project. Then they
can required. Any deisred updates will have to be refetched manually
Repeat this with multiple dependencies for multiple projects, and it becomes
a nuisance. Having to optimize RequireJS projects in another step is rotten
cherry on top.
Browserify piggybacks npm. Dependencies such as jQuery, Underscore.js,
React, AngularJS with Browserify support can be hosted on npm, specified
and listed all in package.json, and Browserify will handle the bundling
of these dependencies with your source code into a single file for you!
Browserify even creates a dependency tree to figure out which modules need and
not need to be included in the bundle. Smart lad.
Gulp consist more of code whereas Grunt are structured more towards configuration. It can be a matter of preference, though many are starting to Gulp. Gulp makes pipelines, or streams, a prominent feature such that intermediary data or files are not needed.
Grunt is well-fleshed with its hundreds of plugins from the community. However, Gulp is getting there. In the short dip I've taken, Gulp had all the plugins I needed. Either way, you'll be well supported.
Here's my project's gulpfile. It uses reactify to precompile React JSX
files into normal JS files which is then pipelined to browserify for
bundling with dependencies. It compiles Stylus files to CSS. And everything's
nicely set up to watch directories and rebuild when needed. I'm pretty giddy.
var gulp = require('gulp'); var browserify = require('browserify'); var del = require('del'); var reactify = require('reactify'); var source = require('vinyl-source-stream'); var stylus = require('gulp-stylus'); var paths = { css: ['src/css/**/*.styl'], index_js: ['./src/js/index.jsx'], js: ['src/js/*.js'], }; gulp.task('clean', function(cb) { del(['build'], cb); }); gulp.task('css', ['clean'], function() { return gulp.src(paths.css) .pipe(stylus()) .pipe(gulp.dest('./src/css')); }); gulp.task('js', ['clean'], function() { // Browserify/bundle the JS. browserify(paths.index_js) .transform(reactify) .bundle() .pipe(source('bundle.js')) .pipe(gulp.dest('./src/')); }); // Rerun the task when a file changes gulp.task('watch', function() { gulp.watch(paths.css, ['css']); gulp.watch(paths.js, ['js']); }); // The default task (called when you run `gulp` from cli) gulp.task('default', ['watch', 'css', 'js']);
It's finally nice to get outside. Away from the codebase of work. Into the virtual world. Smell the aromas of fresh technologies. I've grown two years younger, and with an extra kick in my step. Expect more about React.
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James Long: Blog Rebuild: A Fresh Start |
About two years ago I wanted to start blogging more seriously, focusing on in-depth tech articles and tutorials. Since then I've successfully made several posts like the one about games and another about react.js.
I decided to write my own blog from scratch to provide a better blogging experience, and it has served me well. I didn't want something big and complicated to maintain like Wordpress, and I had used static generators before but in my opinion you sacrifice a lot, and there's too much friction for writing and updating posts.
Back then I wanted to learn more about node.js, redis, and a few other things. So I wrote a basic redis-backed node.js blogging engine. In a few months (working here and there), I had a site with all the basic blog pages, a markdown editor with live preview, autosaving, unpublished drafts, tags, and some basic layout options. Here is the current ugly editor:
Redis is an in-memory data store, and node handles multiple connections well by default, so my simple site scales really well. I've have posts reach #1 on hacker news with ~750 visitors at the same time for hours (reaching about 60,000 views) with no problem at all. It may also help that my linode instance has 8 cores and I load up 4 instances of node to serve the site.
You may wonder why I don't just use something like ghost, a modern blogging platform already written in node. I tried ghost for a while but it's early software, includes complex features like multiple users which I don't need, and most importantly it was too difficult to implement my ideas. This is the kind of thing where I really want my site to be my code; it's my area to play, my grand experiment. For me, it's been working out really well (check out all of my posts).
But the cracks are showing. The code is JavaScript as I wrote it 2 years ago: ugly callbacks, poor modularity, no tests, random jQuery blobs to make the frontend work, and more. The site is stable and writing blog posts works, but implementing new features is pretty much out of the question. Since this is my site and I can do whatever I want, I'm going to commit the cardinal sin and rewrite it from scratch.
I've learned a ton over the past two years, and I'm really excited to try out some new techniques. I have a lot of the infrastructure set up already, which uses the following software:
Check out the new version of the site at new.jlongster.com. You can see my progress there (right now it's just a glimpse of the current site). I will put it up on github soon.
I thought it would also be interesting to blog throughout the development process. I'm using some really interesting libraries in ways that are very new, so I'm eager to dump my thoughts quite often. You can expect a post a week, explaining what I worked on and how I'm using a library in a certain way. It will touch on everything such as build systems and cross-compiling, testing, front-end structuring. Others might learn something new as well.
Next time, I'll talk about build systems and cross-compiling infrastructure. See you then!
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Fr'ed'eric Harper: Le web ouvert avec Firefox OS et Firefox `a Linux Montr'eal |
Creative Commons: http://j.mp/1o9O86K
Mardi prochain, je serai au CRIM (situ'e au 405 avenue Ogilvy, suite 101) pour pr'esenter `a propos de Firefox OS, mais aussi de Firefox au groupe Linux Montr'eal. Lors de cette soir'ee, je ne discuterais pas avec ma client`ele habituelle, soit les d'eveloppeurs. En effet, la pr'esentation aura bien s^ur des aspects techniques, mais sera plus consid'er'ee comme haut niveau, pour les utilisateurs avec un int'er^et pour la technologie. Voici un avant-go^ut de la soir'ee:
Firefox OS, mais qu’est-ce que Mozilla avait en t^ete pour lancer une Xi`eme plateforme mobile sur le march'e! Quel en est le but? Quels en sont les avantages pour les utilisateurs, mais aussi pour les d'eveloppeurs? Qu’en est-il de Firefox et du web ouvert? Fr'ed'eric Harper de Mozilla viendra vous parler de ces deux plateformes, de l’Open Source et de l’Open Web au sein de cette organisation hors du commun.
C’est donc un rendez-vous `a 18:30 mardi prochain. Vous pouvez confirmer votre pr'esence sur diff'erents r'eseaux, soit Google+, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn et Meetup.
--
Le web ouvert avec Firefox OS et Firefox `a Linux Montr'eal is a post on Out of Comfort Zone from Fr'ed'eric Harper
Related posts:
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Joel Maher: Say hi to Kaustabh Datta Choudhury, a newer Mozillian |
A couple months ago I ran into :kaustabh93 online as he had picked up a couple good first bugs. Since then he has continued to work very hard and submit a lot of great pull requests to Ouija and Alert Manager (here is his github profile). After working with him for a couple of weeks, I decided it was time to learn more about him, and I would like to share that with Mozilla as a whole:
Tell us about where you live-
I live in a town called Santragachi in West Bengal. The best thing about this place is its ambience. It is not at the heart of the city but the city is easily accessible. That keeps the maddening crowd of the city away and a calm and peaceful environment prevails here.
Tell us about your school-
I completed my schooling from Don Bosco School, Liluah. After graduating from there, now I am pursuing an undergraduate degree in Computer Science & Engineering from MCKV Institute of Engineering.
Right from when it was introduced to me, I was in love with the subject ‘Computer Science’. And introduction to coding was one of the best things that has happened to me so far.
Tell us about getting involved with Mozilla-
I was looking for some exciting real life projects to work on during my vacation & it was then that the idea of contributing to open source projects had struck me. Now I have been using Firefox for many years now and that gave me an idea of where to start looking. Eventually I found the volunteer tab and thus started my wonderful journey on Mozilla.
Right from when I was starting out, till now, one thing that I liked very much about Mozilla was that help was always at hand when needed. On my first day , I popped a few questions in the IRC channel #introduction & after getting the basic of where to start out, I started working on Ouija under the guidance of ‘dminor’ & ‘jmaher’. After a few bug fixes there, Dan recommended me to have a look at Alert Manager & I have been working on it ever since. And the experience of working for Mozilla has been great.
Tell us what you enjoy doing-
I really love coding. But apart from it I also am an amateur photographer & enjoy playing computer games & reading books.
Where do you see yourself in 5 years?
In 5 years’ time I prefer to see myself as a successful engineer working on innovative projects & solving problems.
If somebody asked you for advice about life, what would you say?
Rather than following the crowd down the well-worn path, it is always better to explore unchartered territories with a few.
:kaustabh93 is back in school as of this week, but look for activity on bugzilla and github from him. You will find him online once in a while in various channels, I usually find him in #ateam.
http://elvis314.wordpress.com/2014/07/29/say-hi-to-kaustabh-datta-choudhury-a-newer-mozillian/
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William Reynolds: Important changes to mozillians.org vouching |
Today we are rolling out new changes to the vouching system on mozillians.org, our community directory, in order to make vouching more meaningful.
mozillians.org has a new vouch form
Vouching is the mechanism we use to enable Mozillians access to special content, like viewing all profiles on mozillians.org, certain content on Air Mozilla, and Mozilla Moderator. Getting vouched as a Mozillian means you have made a meaningful contribution.
If you attended the 2013 Summit, there is no impact to how you use the site and no action required. But…we can use your help.
If you have vouched for others previously, go to their profiles and complete the vouching form to describe their contributions by September 30th. You can see the people that you have vouched listed on your mozillians.org profile.
If you did not attend the 2013 Summit, you can still use the mozillians.org site as you do now, until September 30th.
After September 30th, your profile will become unvouched, unless a Mozillian, who attended the 2013 Summit, vouches for you again.
Both volunteers and paid staff are being treated the same when it comes to receiving multiple vouches. That means everyone who wants to vouch for contributors needs to first receive 3 vouches – more information below.
Most importantly, no one’s vouched status is disappearing this week.
More details and an FAQ on the Vouching wiki page.
Thanks to the Mozillians.org Team who worked on this big initiative to make vouching better. The new vouching system was designed through discussions at Grow Mozilla meetings and several forum threads on community-building and dev.community-tools.
http://dailycavalier.com/2014/07/important-changes-to-mozillians-org-vouching/
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Dave Hunt: Performance testing Firefox OS on reference devices |
A while back I wrote about the LEGO harness I created for Eideticker to hold both the device and camera in place. Since then there has been a couple of iterations of the harness. When we started testing against our low-cost prototype device, the harness needed modifying due to the size difference and position of the USB socket. At this point I tried to create a harness that would fit all of our current devices, with the hope of avoiding another redesign.
If you’re interested in creating one of these yourself, here’s the LEGO Digital Designer file and building guide.
Unfortunately, when I first got my hands on our reference device (codenamed ‘Flame’) it didn’t fit into the harness. I had to go back to the drawing board, and needed to be a little more creative due to the width not matching up too well with the dimensions of LEGO bricks. In the end I used some slope bricks (often used for roof tiles) to hold the device securely. A timelapse video of constructing the latest harness follows.
We now are 100% focused on testing against our reference device, so in London we have two dedicated to running our Eideticker tests, as shown in the photo below.
Again, if you want to build one of these for yourself, download the LEGO Digital Designer file and building guide. If you want to learn more about the Eideticker project check out the project page, or if you want to see the dashboard with the latest results, you can find it here.
http://blargon7.com/2014/07/performance-testing-firefox-os-on-reference-devices/
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Mozilla Release Management Team: Firefox 32 beta1 to beta2 |
| Extension | Occurrences |
| html | 23 |
| js | 12 |
| cpp | 12 |
| java | 5 |
| sjs | 4 |
| h | 3 |
| xml | 2 |
| css | 2 |
| c | 2 |
| mm | 1 |
| jsm | 1 |
| ini | 1 |
| in | 1 |
| idl | 1 |
| build | 1 |
| Module | Occurrences |
| browser | 37 |
| js | 10 |
| mobile | 7 |
| toolkit | 5 |
| netwerk | 3 |
| gfx | 3 |
| media | 2 |
| widget | 1 |
| security | 1 |
| content | 1 |
| b2g | 1 |
List of changesets:
| Nicolas B. Pierron | Bug 1006899 - Prevent stack iterations while recovering allocations. r=bhackett, a=sledru - b801d912ea0e |
| Ryan VanderMeulen | Bug 1006899 - Only run the test if TypedObject is enabled. rs=nbp, a=test-only - 794d229b5125 |
| Blair McBride | Bug 1026853 - Experiment is displayed as "pending removal" in detailed view. r=irving,a=lmandel - ecdde13a0aaa |
| Byron Campen [:bwc] | Bug 1042873: Add the appropriate byte-order conversion to ChildDNSRecord::GetNextAddr r=mcmanus a=lmandel - fe0621be0dc3 |
| Magnus Melin | Bug 1038635 - Zoom doesn't work in the email composer. r=Neil, a=sledru - f9b0de65c69d |
| Brian Hackett | Bug 1024132 - Add one slot cache for stripping leading and trailing .* from RegExps for test() calls. r=jandem, a=lmandel - 2339e39f5ff4 |
| Danny Chen | Bug 1005031 - Video controls are displayed in the middle of the video. r=wesj, a=lmandel - 5a6749df6a78 |
| Markus Stange | Bug 995145 - Don't erase pixels from the window top when drawing the highlight line. r=smichaud, a=sledru - 4767a3451d00 |
| Byron Campen [:bwc] | Bug 980270 - Part 1: Plug a couple of common leaks in nICEr. r=drno, a=sledru - d8e7408cb510 |
| Matt Woodrow | Bug 1035168 - Use Map api to check if DataSourceSurfaces have data available in DrawTargetCairo. r=Bas, a=lmandel - dd517186b945 |
| Matt Woodrow | Bug 1035168 - Avoid calling GetData/Stride on a surface that we will later Map. r=Bas, a=lmandel - 2bc7c49698cc |
| Marco Bonardo | Bug 1024133 - Switch to tab magic URL not trimmed on key navigation. r=mano, a=sledru - a8dd4b54e15b |
| Makoto Kato | Bug 984033 - Large OOM in nsStreamLoader::WriteSegmentFun. r=honza, a=lmandel, ba=comment-only-change - ecfc5bee1685 |
| Richard Newman | Bug 1018240 - Part 1: Reinitialize nsSearchService when the browser locale changes. r=adw, a=sledru - bbfebb4ec504 |
| Richard Newman | Bug 1018240 - Part 2: Invalidate BrowserSearch engine list when locale has changed. r=bnicholson, a=sledru - d1e5cb0fbe70 |
| Victor Porof | Bug 1004104 - Disable caching when running netmonitor tests to hopefully fix some timeouts. r=dcamp, a=test-only - 00f079c876f6 |
| J. Ryan Stinnett | Bug 1038695 - Show all cookies in Net Monitor, not just first. r=vporof, a=sledru - bce84b70da30 |
| Richard Newman | Bug 1042984 - Add extensive logging and descriptive crash data for library load errors. r=mfinkle, a=sledru - 3808d8fbe348 |
| Richard Newman | Bug 1042929 - Don't throw Errors from JSONObject parsing problems. r=mcomella, a=sledru - b295f329dfd3 |
| Steven MacLeod | Bug 1036036 - Stop leaking docshells in Session Store tests. r=ttaubert, a=test-only - 24aaa1ae41a6 |
| Richard Newman | Bug 1043627 - Only re-initialize nsSearchService on locale change in Fennec. r=adw, a=sledru - 61b30b605194 |
http://release.mozilla.org//statistics/32/2014/07/29/fx-32-b1-to-b2.html
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Prashish Rajbhandari: How #MozDrive Started |
For me, it all started with a phone call..
It was a lazy Monday morning when I got a phone call from my very good friend Ankurman from Cincinnati. It was the very next day after the Memorial Day Weekend, which meant I slept late and was in no intention to wake up early.
“Prashish! You’ve got to listen to what I’m planning to do.”
“Hey! What’s up? It’s 4 in the morning here by the way.”
I sensed his sudden realization of the time zone difference from the tone of my voice.
“I’m sorry to have awakened you. Do you want me to call you later?”
“Nah. Tell me.”
Then Ankurman started narrating his story:
“Imagine driving across the lower 48 States in the US, exploring the unknown lands, meeting with amazing people from different backgrounds, the cultural diversity, while raising social awareness regarding the obesity epidemic in the US.”
I had this sudden excitement which got me off my bed immediately. I went straight to the kitchen to get some caffeine.
“Okaay, I’m listening.”
He narrated me about the idea of his campaign and what he planned to achieve. We talked for more than an hour talking about various other awareness campaigns.
Later that evening while I was digging through my pictures from the MozFest in London earlier this year, the Mozillian inside me had the eureka moment.
“What if I could also travel across the United States and share the true story of Mozilla with the people; that we Mozillians truly care for the open web and that to make a positive impact in the society is one of our ulterior goals.”
You see, I was easily convinced by the idea of such public awareness campaigns. I was inspired by many stories of people traveling to raise funds for charity or awareness.
I found Tenlap by Greg Hartle, in particular, very interesting. Greg gave away all his possession and started off with $10 to understand and to create work in this world full of insecurity. He plans to travel to all 50 States, meet new people who are rebuilding their lives and then, launch businesses in areas new to him. All in 1,000 days. Gowtham Ramamurthy from my university just recently rode to all 48 States to raise funds for children and it was a massively successful.
The web is a global participative platform where everyone can have their own voice and opinion. Despite the presence of such a huge source of knowledge in the web, people are still confused about possibilities of the web.
People know Firefox as the browser with a blue globe and an orange fox around it.
But, we are more than a browser.
We are a global community of passionate volunteers and contributors whose mission is to serve the user above all, advance the state of the web and keep it open.
People need to know this.
People need understand the web better so that they can take control their online lives.
People need to know Mozilla’s mission, that we are more than a browser. They need to know what we are doing and how they can be a part of this global movement.
And it is our duty as Mozillians to spread this message to masses.
This is how #MozDrive started.
Follow the journey: Website, Twitter, Facebook or Feed.
Original Article: #MozDrive
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Raluca Podiuc: AF (analysis framework) and the task graph story |
http://amozillastory.blogspot.com/2014/07/afanalysis-framework-and-task-graph.html
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Kim Moir: 2014 USENIX Release Engineering Summit CFP now open |
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| Seattle skyline © Howard Ignatius, https://flic.kr/p/6tQ3H Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0 |
http://relengofthenerds.blogspot.com/2014/07/2014-usenix-release-engineering-summit.html
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Mozilla Open Policy & Advocacy Blog: Join Mozilla for global teach-ins on Net Neutrality |
(This is a repost from The Webmaker Blog)
At Mozilla, we exist to protect the free and open web. Today, that openness and freedom is under threat.
The open Internet’s founding principle is under attack. Policymakers in the U.S. are considering rules that would erase “Net Neutrality,” the principle that all data on the Internet should be treated equally. If these rule changes go through, many fear it will create a “two-tier” Internet, where monopolies are able to charge huge fees for special “fast lanes” while everyone else gets the slow lane. This would threaten the very openness, level playing field and innovation that make the web great — not only in the U.S., but around the world.
This is a crucial moment that will affect the open web’s future. But not enough people know about it or understand what’s at stake. Net Neutrality’s opponents are banking on the fact that Net Neutrality is so “geeky,” complex, and hard to explain that people just won’t care. That’s why Mozilla is inviting you to join us and other Internet Freedom organizations to educate, empower, organize and win.
Join the global Mozilla community and our partners to host a series of Internet Freedom “teach-ins” around the world. Beginning Aug 4th, we’re offering free training to help empower local organizers, activists and people like you. Together we’ll share best practices for explaining what Net Neutrality is, why it matters to your local community, and how we can protect it together. Then we’ll help local organizers like you host local events and teach-ins around the world, sharing tools and increasing our impact together.
In addition to increasing awareness of the importance of Net Neutrality, the teach-ins will also allow participants to have an impact by taking immediate action. Imagine hundreds of videos in support of #TeamInternet and Net Neutrality, thousands of letters to the editor, and thousands of new signatures on Mozilla’s petition.
We’ll be joined by partners like reddit, Free Press, Open Media, IMLS / ALA, Media Alliance, Every Library and Engine Advocacy.
1) Host an event. Ready to get started? Host a local meet-up or teach-in on Net Neutrality in your community. Our Maker Party event guides and platform make it easy. We even have a special guide for a 1 hour Net Neutrality Maker Party.
2) Get free training and help. Need a little help? We’ll tell you everything you need to know. From free resources and best practices for talking about Net Neutrality to nuts and bolts logistics and organizing. The free and open online training begins Monday, Aug 4th. All are welcome, no experience necessary.You’ll leave the training armed with everything you need to host your own local teach-in. Or just better explain the issue to friends and family.
3) Use our new Net Neutrality toolkit. Our new Net Neutrality teaching kit makes it easy for educators and activists to explain the issue and empower others. We’re gathering lots more resources here.
4) Spread the word. Here are some example tweets you can use:
https://blog.mozilla.org/netpolicy/2014/07/28/join-mozilla-for-global-teach-ins-on-net-neutrality/
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Mitchell Baker: Chris Beard Named CEO of Mozilla |
I am pleased to announce that Chris Beard has been appointed CEO of Mozilla Corp. The Mozilla board has reviewed many internal and external candidates – and no one we met was a better fit.
As you will recall, Chris re-joined Mozilla in April, accepting the role of interim CEO and joining our Board of Directors.
Chris first joined Mozilla in 2004, just before we shipped Firefox 1.0 – and he’s been deeply involved in every aspect of Mozilla ever since. During his many years here, he at various times has had responsibility for almost every part of the business, including product, marketing, innovation, communications, community and user engagement.
Before taking on the interim CEO role, Chris spent close to a year as Executive-in-Residence at the venture capital firm Greylock Partners, gaining a deeper perspective on innovation and entrepreneurship. During his term at Greylock, he remained an Advisor to me in my role as Mozilla’s chair.
Over the years, Chris has led many of Mozilla’s most innovative projects. We have relied on his judgment and advice for nearly a decade. Chris has a clear vision of how to take Mozilla’s mission and turn it into industry-changing products and ideas.
The months since Chris returned in April have been a busy time at Mozilla:
• We released major updates to Firefox, including a complete redesign, easy customization mode and new services with Firefox Accounts.
• Firefox OS launched with new operators, including Am'erica M'ovil, and new devices, like the ZTE Open C and Open II, the Alcatel ONETOUCH Fire C and the Flame (our own reference device).
• We announced that the Firefox OS ecosystem is expanding to new markets with new partners before the end of the year.
• We ignited policy discussion on a new path forward with net neutrality through Mozilla’s filing on the subject with the FCC
https://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2014/07/28/chris-beard-named-ceo-of-mozilla/
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Just Browsing: Fastest Growing New Languages on Github are R, Rust and TypeScript (and Swift) |
While researching TypeScript’s popularity I ran across a post by Adam Bard listing the most popular languages on Github (as of August 30, 2013). Adam used the Google BigQuery interface to mine Github’s repository statistics.
What really interested me was not absolute popularity but which languages are gaining adoption. So I decided to use the same approach to measure growth in language popularity, by comparing statistics for two different time periods. I used exactly the same query as Adam and ran it for the first half of 2013 (January 1st through June 30th) and then for the first half of 2014 (more details about the exact methodology at the end of this post).
Based on this analysis, the twenty fastest growing languages on Github in the past year are:
At the risk of jeopardizing my (non-existent) reputation as a programming language guru, I’ll admit that several of these are unfamiliar to me. Eliminating languages with less than 1000 repos to weed out the truly obscure ones yields this revised ranking:
We are assuming that growth in Github repository count serves as a proxy for increasing popularity, but it seems unlikely that Pascal, CSS and TeX are experiencing a sudden renaissance. Some proportion of this change is due to increasing use of Github itself, and this effect is probably more marked for older, more established languages that are only now moving onto Github. If we focus on languages that have started to attract attention more recently, the biggest winners over the past year appear to be R, Rust and TypeScript.
The fastest growing newish language is one that was unfamiliar to me. According to Wikipedia, R is “a free software programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics.” Most of the developers around the office said they had heard of it but never used it. This is a great illustration of how specialized languages can gain traction without making much of an impact on the broader developer community.
Of the newer languages with C-like syntax, both Rust and Go are gaining adoption. Go has a headstart, but a lot of the commentary I’ve seen suggests that Rust is a better language. This is supported by its impressive 220% annual growth rate on Github.
Two transpile-to-JavaScript languages made it onto the list: TypeScript and CoffeeScript. Since JavaScript is the only language that runs in the browser, a lot of developers are forced to use it. But that doesn’t mean we have to like it. While CoffeeScript is still ahead, TypeScript has the advantage of strong typing (something many developers feel passionate about) in addition to a prettier syntax than JavaScript. If it keeps up its 100% year-on-year growth, it may catch up soon.
According to an old saw, everyone always talks about the weather but no one ever does anything about it. The same could be said about functional languages. Programming geeks love them and insist that they lead to better quality code. But they are yet to break into mainstream usage, and not a single functional language figures in our top-20 list (although R and Rust have some characteristics of functional languages).
The language with the highest growth of all didn’t even show up on the list because it had no repositories at all in the first half of 2013. Only a few months after it was publicly announced, Swift already had nearly 2000 repos. While it is unlikely to keep up its infinite annual growth rate for long, it is a safe bet that Swift is destined to be very popular indeed.
The data for 2013 and 2014 from BigQuery was imported into two CSV files and merged them into a single consolidated file using Bash:
$ cat results-20140723-094327.csv | sort -t , -k 1,1 > results1.csv
$ cat results-20140723-094423.csv | sort -t , -k 1,1 > results2.csv
$ join -o '1.1,2.1,1.2,2.2' -a 1 -a 2 -t, results1.csv results2.csv | awk -F ',' '{ if ($1) printf $1; else printf $2; print "," $3 "," $4 }'
The first two commands sort the CSV files by language name (the options -t , and -k 1,1 are needed to ensure that only the language name and not the comma delimiter or subsequent text is used for sorting). The join command takes the sorted output and merges it into a single consolidated file with the format:
Language1,Language2,RepoCount1,RepoCount2
If the language is present in both datasets then Language1 and Language2 are identical. If it isn’t, then one of them is empty. Either way we really want to merge these into one field, which is what the awk command does. (A colleague suggested using sed -r 's/^([^,]*),\1?/\1/', but I decided that awk—or pretty much anything—is easier to read and understand.)
I then imported the entire dataset into Google Spreadsheet. The “2014 Projected” column is the 2013 value increased by the overall growth rate in Github repository count for the top 100 languages. This is used as a baseline to compare the actual 2014 figure and calculate the growth rate, since it is most interesting to measure how fast a language is gaining adoption relative to the growth of Github itself.
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/justdiscourse/browsing/~3/qBW1btZnF_k/
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Roberto A. Vitillo: Regression detection for Telemetry histograms. |
tldr: An automatic regression detector system for Telemetry data has been deployed; the detected regressions can be seen in the dashboard.
Mozilla is collecting over 1,000 Telemetry probes which give rise to histograms, like the one in the figure below, that change slightly every day.
Average frame interval during any tab open/close animation (excluding tabstrip scroll).
Until lately the only way to monitor those histogram was to sit down and literally stare the screen while something interesting was spotted. Clearly there was the need for an automated system which is able to discern between noise and real regressions.
Noise is a major challenge, even more so than with Talos data, as Telemetry data is collected from a wide variety of computers, configurations and workloads. A reliable mean of detecting regressions, improvements and changes in a measurement’s distribution is fundamental as erroneous alerts (false positives) tend to annoy people to the point that they just ignore any warning generated by the system.
I have looked at various methods to detect changes in histogram, like
Only the Bhattacharyya distance proved satisfactory for our data. There are several reasons why each of the previous methods fails with our dataset.
For instance a one class SVM wouldn’t be a bad idea if some distributions wouldn’t change dramatically over the course of time due to regressions and/or improvements in our code; so in other words, how do you define how a distribution should look like? You could just take the daily distributions of the past week as training set but that wouldn’t be enough data to get anything meaningful from a SVM. A Chi-Square test instead is not always applicable as it doesn’t allow cells with an expected count of 0. We could go on for quite a while and there are ways to get around those issues but the reader is probably more interested in the final solution. I evaluated how well those methods are actually at pinpointing some past known regressions and the Bhattacharyya distance proved to be able to detect the kind of pattern changes we are looking for, like distributions shifts or bin swaps, while minimizing the number of false positives.
Having a relevant distance metric is only part of the deal since we still have to decide what to compare. Should we compare the distribution of today’s build-id against the one from yesterday? Or the one from a week ago? It turns out that trying to mimic what an human would do yields a very accurate algorithm. If the variance of the distance between the histogram of the current build-id and the histograms of the past N build-ids is small enough and the distance between the histograms of the current build-id and the previous build-id is above a cutoff value K, a regression is reported. Furthermore, Histograms that don’t have enough data are filtered out and the cut-off values are determined empirically from past known regressions.
I am pretty satisfied with the detected regressions so far, for instance the system was able to correctly detect a regression caused by the OMTC patch that landed the 20st of May which caused a significant change in the the average frame interval during tab open animation:
Average frame interval during tab open animation of about:newtab.
We will soon roll-out a feature to allow histogram authors to be notified through e-mail when an histogram change occurs. In the meantime you can have a look at the detected regressions in the dashboard.
http://ravitillo.wordpress.com/2014/07/28/regression-detection-for-telemetry-histograms/
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Hannah Kane: Maker Party Engagement: Week 2 |
Two weeks in!
Let’s check in on our four engagement strategies.
First, some overall stats:
Note: I’ll start doing trend lines on these numbers soon, so we can see the overall shape.
Are there other things we should be tracking? For example, we have a goal of 70,000 Makes created through new user accounts, but I’m not sure if we have a way to easily get those numbers.
http://hannahgrams.com/2014/07/28/maker-party-engagement-week-2/
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Benjamin Kerensa: Until Next Year CLS! |
Community Leadership Summit 2014 Group Photo
This past week marked my second year helping out as a co-organizer of the Community Leadership Summit. This Community Leadership Summit was especially important because not only did we introduce a new Community Leadership Forum but we also introduced CLSx events and continued to introduce some new changes to our overall event format.
Like previous years, the attendance was a great mix of community managers and leaders. I was really excited to have an entire group of Mozillians who attended this year. As usual, my most enjoyable conversations took place at the pre-CLS social and in the hallway track. I was excited to briefly chat with the Community Team from Lego and also some folks from Adobe and learn about how they are building community in their respective settings.
I’m always a big advocate for community building, so for me, CLS is an event I try and make it to each and every year because I think it is great to have an event for community managers and builders that isn’t limited to any specific industry. It is really a great opportunity to share best practices and really learn from one another so that everyone mutually improves their own toolkits and technique.
It was apparent to me that this year there were even more women than in previous years and so it was really awesome to see that considering CLS is often times heavily attended by men in the tech industry.
I really look forward to seeing the CLS community continue to grow and look forward to participating and co-organizing next year’s event and possibly even kick of a CLSxPortland.
A big thanks to the rest of the CLS Team for helping make this free event a wonderful experience for all and to this years sponsors O’Reilly, Citrix, Oracle, Linux Fund, Mozilla and Ubuntu!
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BenjaminKerensaDotComMozilla/~3/e1JC6LuOujE/next-year-cls
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Benjamin Kerensa: Mozilla at O’Reilly Open Source Convention |
Mozililla OSCON 2014 Team
This past week marked my fourth year of attending O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON). It was also my second year speaking at the convention. One new thing that happened this year was I co-led Mozilla’s presence during the convention from our booth to the social events and our social media campaign.
Like each previous year, OSCON 2014 didn’t disappoint and it was great to have Mozilla back at the convention after not having a presence for some years. This year our presence was focused on promoting Firefox OS, Firefox Developer Tools and Firefox for Android.
While the metrics are not yet finished being tracked, I think our presence was a great success. We heard from a lot of developers who are already using our Developer tools and from a lot of developers who are not; many of which we were able to educate about new features and why they should use our tools.
Alex shows attendee Firefox Dev Tools
Attendees were very excited about Firefox OS with a majority of those stopping by asking about the different layers of the platform, where they can get a device, and how they can make an app for the platform.
In addition to our booth, we also had members of the team such as Emma Irwin who helped support OSCON’s Children’s Day by hosting a Mozilla Webmaker event which was very popular with the kids and their parents. It really was great to see the future generation tinkering with Open Web technologies.
Finally, we had a social event on Wednesday evening that was very popular so much that the Mozilla Portland office was packed till last call. During the social event, we had a local airbrush artist doing tattoos with several attendees opting for a Firefox Tattoo.
All in all, I think our presence last week was very positive and even the early numbers look positive. I want to give a big thanks to Stormy Peters, Christian Heilmann, Robyn Chau, Shezmeen Prasad, Dave Camp, Dietrich Ayala, Chris Maglione, William Reynolds, Emma Irwin, Majken Connor, Jim Blandy, Alex Lakatos for helping this event be a success.
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