Well, I'm Back

It's great to spend a whole day talking about computer science with someone who is far better at it than I am. It's super-great when she's a old friend. No other method for restoring humility is nearly as much fun.

Google Maps' directions from the Wild Palms hotel to Mozilla end like a Neal Stephenson novel.

Is Google trying to kill us?

I'm about to hit the road again. On Sunday I fly to California for a MoCo Gecko team "work week" to plan out the next Gecko update. That should be exciting. I'll actually be staying in California for an additional week to attend the Berkeley OSQ retreat in Santa Cruz on May 15-16. In between I'll be hacking away at the Mozilla office and hanging out with some of my local friends. On Wednesday the 14th I plan to visit Stanford to give a talk.

Lately I've been spending most of my time beating down the last Firefox 3 blockers. In the last few days I've been writing test infrastructure so we can have automated tests for key events generated by different international keyboard layouts. For example, pressing "α" on a Greek keyboard should be able to trigger shortcuts (e.g., the HTML accesskey attribute) labeled with "α" or "a". There have been some nasty late regressions in this area; it's very complex and there are conflicting user expectations. Behaviours vary by platform and locale and even within platform versions.

One problem I've run into is that I need to be able to use GDK's keymap APIs with a GdkKeymap for the keyboard layout requested by a test, but as far as I can tell you can only get a GdkKeymap for the current keyboard layout for a screen. Having automated tests change the actual keyboard layout for your X screen is something we really want to avoid since it will have nasty side effects, especially if someone is trying to use their machine while running tests in the background... It's unfortunate because both Windows and Mac have reasonable APIs for working with application-selected keyboard layouts.

On the side I've been doing a bit of work to speed up our SVG filter code, especially Gaussian blurs, which seem to be everyone's favourite filter demo --- for the next Gecko release, of course. It shouldn't take long and when I'm done I'll write up what I did and what else can be done for filter performance.

Nick Bostrom writes an interesting essay on anthropic observations, as usual. I agree with him that the answer to Fermi's "paradox" --- "why hasn't spacefaring life colonized our entire universe in ways we can detect" --- is that there isn't any.

But I think he misses a powerful argument that the "Great Barrier" to spacefaring life is the difficulties in our past, not the dangers in our future. It seems that if current progress continues, we're at most hundreds of years away from developing self-sustaining, space-capable artificial life --- AI, if you like --- even if we take the brute-force approach of brain simulation. It's hard to think of inevitable catastrophes that could wipe out all of a multitude of space-based intelligent machines with reproductive capability, even they were all confined to our solar system. Even if we don't make it to that point --- and I will not be surprised if we (or God) write an end to our history --- since we made it this far, given enough other civilizations one of them would be luckier and make it all the way, and go on to colonize the universe in observable ways. But apparently they haven't.

This afternoon Matthew Gregan and I are heading down to Hamilton to talk about Firefox at the Waikato Linux User Group meeting. Should be fun if we don't get lost in the fog.

Yesterday was ANZAC day so our family went out with some friends to Bethell's Beach/Te Henga for some short walks and a picnic lunch. We did the "Auckland City Walk"; it was very nice but I'm unsure of the reason for the name, since there was nothing city-like about it. We actually walked up to the Waitakere Dam and then the others continued to Scenic Road while I went back to get the car and pick them up.

We had lunch near the beach and walked along the beach afterward. After that, we explored the remarkable sand feature up behind the beach. Basically sand has swept inland and formed a gigantic sand dune, damming a stream and forming a large freshwater lake, Lake Wainamu. The area is magnificently desolate ... if you ignore the trees and pastures all around it, and the lovely lake! It must be one of the best places near Auckland to shoot desert scenes (if you don't pan up too far) --- there was a group doing just that. Judging from the bad costumes it could have been a sequel to Blake's 7.

I watched Enter The Dragon last night. I have to put it on the list of "classic moves that have not stood the test of time", with Citizen Kane and Star Wars.

IT can embrace that Mac momentum, not just tolerate it, thanks to several shifts in computing that make the Mac a better enterprise fit than in the past -- first and foremost being a rising threat to Microsoft's other mainstay in the enterprise desktop environment, Internet Explorer.

Firefox, which has risen in popularity to account for 16.8 percent of browser use on the Web, according to Net Applications, as of December 2007, has broken IE's stranglehold on Internet app delivery, which it had maintained through ActiveX controls. Because Microsoft never released a version of IE for Mac OS X, Mac users were frozen out of ActiveX-based Web sites, making many SaaS (software as a service) offerings and enterprise-app Web clients off limits to the Mac.

But to ensure operability on Firefox, developers had to configure their wares to support Java instead of or in addition to ActiveX -- with Mac gaining compatibility as a client at the same time.

Not everyone knows that for all these years we've actually had ActiveX hosting support in our source tree, but we deliberately turned it off. Turning it on probably would have helped our market share in the short term --- probably still would if we turned it on today --- but we didn't, because that would not have been the right thing to do for the Web, or for the Mac and other non-Microsoft platforms.

Even on a bad day, I'm proud to have been a part of all this.

It's common knowledge that programming ability varies widely and that elite programmers are perhaps an order of magnitude more effective than run-of-the-mill programmers.

It's less widely known that the same is true of specification editors. I'm talking about people who write specifications for organizations like WHATWG and W3C, as well as people who write specifications internally as part of software development, particularly when they're writing specs for platform functionality --- APIs and formats that will be consumed by other software developers --- and particularly when compatibility constraints are important. Juggling the requirements of compatibility, ease of use, ease of implementation, evolvability, functionality, orthogonality, politics, performance, and so on is a delicate art that few people seem to be able to master.

Unfortunately, this work is usually seen as glorified QA and is thus grossly undervalued by organizations. Superstar developers are hard to find but at least their talent is recognised. Superstar spec editors are not well recognised and for that and other reasons they're far harder to find.

We don't know how to find these people, or train them. Like programming, a lot probably comes down to innate talent that cannot be taught. A computer science background is helpful, programming and QA skills are very helpful. Domain knowledge is very helpful too.

We have public organizations now --- WHATWG, and increasingly, the W3C --- where volunteers can try their hand at the task. The challenge is to get the right people to have a go, and to create visible career paths to encourage them to pursue it.

I sneaked off work today with my wife and we watched In The Shadow Of The Moon, being screened as part of a local film festival. It was brilliant! Amazing footage, very well put together, and the astronaut interviews are really good --- moving, funny, and insightful. I'm not a big fan of manned spaceflight but you can certainly see the appeal. Recommended.