Hey everyone. As you might have noticed, I haven't been around a whole lot over the past couple weeks. I have, as usual, dug myself into a bit of a hole, having gotten involved in a giant last-minute theater project. The show opens Thursday at which point regular, speedy service can return.

To those of you who have been blocked by me or are waiting on me for something: I apologize. QA Extension and Litmus work cometh again soon.

Major features of the extension include one-click access for nightly testers to run the tests in Litmus that need the most attention, and ways to notify testers when we need their help, such as before releases or when we hold special testing events. In short, the goal is to make it as easy as possible for moderately skilled users to get involved in testing Firefox and join the community.

In order to make this happen, we need your help. Many of the major features of this tool are in place, but we're looking a few good extension developers who are interested in volunteering to help make this a reality. I could especially use help with theming and styling of the user interface, security-related cleanup, and if you're really gung-ho, development around the user interface of the "come help us test" notification feature. So if you're a hot-shot extension developer interested in helping out with a project to improve Firefox's quality, drop me a note (a comment on this blog post is great, or ping 'zach' on irc.mozilla.org, or just email) and we'd love to have you on board.

Not an extension developer but want to help test Firefox? Head on over to QMO and come join us! :-)

Anyway, in the middle of all this, the Gizmodo guys came by, leading us all in the wave. For some reason, I ended up on the homepage, or at least the blurry version of me did. Here I am (white striped shirt in the middle, Firefox bag in front of me) with Andrew, Roger [Wagner, the creator of HyperStudio], Daniel, and the rest of the gang at O'Farrell and Stockton:

No formal reviews or anything at this point, but however much you wanted one before, you really want one, you really really want one...

Yesterday the Reality Distortion Field totally failed me. I've never come away from an Apple keynote as disappointed and pessimistic as I did today. It all comes down to choice, and Apple isn't offering us a lot of it today.

First, the iPhone. Mobile security is not easy: it's very hard to encode the notion of "do you want to allow this application access to your hardware?" in a small space and make it easy for users to understand what their choice means. Furthermore, monopolistic carriers want total control, and allowing developers to run code directly on the device opens up the mobile software market in a way that threatens a business model centered around $3.99 ringtones.

All that being said, allowing only, in Apple's words, "applications created with Web 2.0 Internet standards" (whatever those are) is a slap in the face to Apple's developer community. Don't get me wrong, the Web stack is wonderful, and it's the future, and for 95% of the apps that people develop, it's totally the way to go, but there are simply some things that cannot be accomplished without direct access to the OS like any other first-tier application. Cool stuff gets made when people have both easy ways to do easy things and limitless options available with which to be creative, to do the kind of things that no one has even thought of yet. Killer apps push the boundaries of what is possible. When all you provide is a small set of pre-defined APIs to hardware features defined by Apple, you limit developers to a small set of options, and that's hardly creativity at all.

Second, Safari on Windows. This is huge, and great for everyone, because it provides everyone committed to an Open Web the chance to say that the Web is more than a blue e, that standards and innovation on the Web are as alive as ever, and that the future is the Web. Apple has been firmly on the right side of this with Safari, supporting innovative work on the Web like the WHATWG and clearly is committed to an open Web.

And yet, just like the iPhone, Apple offers us "choice lite" with Safari, giving us something that looks kind of like choice, but only if your choices happen to line up with the options provided by Apple. Safari gives you a choice of search engines, but only if you choose Google or Yahoo. Even IE7 provides a one-click link to install new search plugins, and a great feature that helps advanced users build their own search providers. Want Windows Live, Ask, Technorati, IMDB, or a Wikipedia search in your Safari search bar? Too bad. Apple's decided that you get exactly two "choices." No more, no less.

And the lack of choice is more than surface-deep. Every day, developers upload extensions and themes for Firefox and Thunderbird. Mozilla prominently features the Shaver would say, Firefox Add-ons democratize innovation, making it easy for users to become authors and authors to become developers. Mozilla has guides and documentation and community resources available for the thousands of extension developers out there. The next great idea about Web browsers doesn't have to come from someone inside Mozilla, or Microsoft, or Apple; it can come from anywhere, and be available for anyone who wants it to install into Firefox as an extension. Extensions aren't just about developers; extensions give Firefox users the choice to use their browser as they see fit. Furthermore, Many great companies have based their products on the Mozilla platform, and used our work as a jumping off point for their own creations and innovations.

Apple refers to Safari as "open source," but when you look closely, they always choose their words quite carefully, describing it as "open source rendering." That's because, of course, Safari isn't really open source. Its rendering backend is open, but the Safari front-end, the user interface through which we actually use the browser, is all proprietary closed source. Sure, people have written several "extensions" for Safari, but these alterations are essentially hacks, software that hooks into Safari's closed infrastructure without permission from Apple. Apple doesn't write documentation to help people extend Safari, and they certainly don't have tools to make it as easy as possible for people to do so. So yes, Safari's rendering engine is open source, but if you actually want to innovate, do something new, or take advantage of the innovations of others, Apple doesn't offer you much in the way of choice.

In short, what Apple announced today isn't really choice, it's a kind of preschool-esque choice lite: "Son, tonight you get to choose whether to eat brussels sprouts or broccoli for dinner!" You can choose to write your own applications for the iPhone, but not if you want to do something not on Apple's approved list. You can choose any search engine you want, as long as it's Google or Yahoo. You can choose to take advantage of Safari's open source backend, as long as you don't want to do anything to the frontend. It kind of looks like choice if you don't know any better, but eating carrots or cheesecake for dinner instead isn't a valid option: you've got to eat the sprouts or the brocalli or your parents won't let you go out and play.

There once was a time when Apple encouraged us all to Think Different, to be creative and do things that were never possible before. The Web is the ultimate creativity platform, and the one thing we know about creativity is that it flourishes in an environment of innovation and choice. Choice not only between a few pre-defined options, but from a palette of possibilities as limitless as the current technology allows. I might think sprouts are good; you might think broccoli is good, and we both should get to choose, but the truly creative one makes a totally new dish, combining the ingredients together, adding their own secret sauce, and serving up something new for everyone to try. Mozilla hands you the kitchen, gives you a few recipes that have worked well in the past, and lets you be the next Ironchef and serve your creation to the world. What Apple gave us at WWDC looks kind of like choice if you don't know any better, but really, it's not. The Web needs the true freedom for all of us to choose, create, and innovate.

If you run into any problems, please do let me know. The major things to watch out for are any problems around user authentication, especially for administrators, any trouble with the password reset feature if you use it, or any situation where you're seeing content that appears to be intended for someone else.

Those of you running your own Litmus installations (not very many of you I know) will need to run the populatedb.pl script to pick up the schema changes that have been introduced. In addition, you'll need to define the path to sendmail in your existing 'localconfig' file for the password reset feature to work:

our $sendmail_path = '/usr/sbin/sendmail';

There are two major changes in this update. First, administration groups let us designate separate product administrators with the ability to create and manage testcases for their products. This will give us the opportunity to designate many more administrators who want to write testcases and to compartmentalize our access control somewhat. Secondly, users who have forgotten their passwords can now reset them, validating their ownership of their account via email. Previously, users had to contact the QA team for assistance with their logins, so this is a big improvement. In addition, there are a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements.

Downtime is expected to be minimal, less than one hour, and should begin around 8pm PDT. After it comes back up, bug reports would be much appreciated (file in Bugzilla or just comment on this blog post). For a real good time, you can always try out the Forgot Password button on the login screen, just for laughs.

This summer, I'll be working again with the QA Team. Much of my work will continue to involve Litmus, our testcase management system. I'm working on user permission groups and account settings now (including a much needed forgotten password reminder), and there's lots more to do with Litmus after that, so keep those bug reports coming.

I also hope to spend some more time on the QA Extension project. At the end of last summer, I started on a Firefox extension to make it easier for new testers to help out with QA. The basic idea is a friendly wizard that helps users get set up with a Litmus account and serves up testcases in a little floating window. Eventually, the QA team would be able to send out notifications of upcoming testdays or pre-release testing events through the extension, or to push particular groups of testcases when extra testing is needed around a certain area (i.e. if major changes are made to, say, Search, we could ask users to run a few Search testcases). This is all mostly a Big Idea at this point, but I plan to work on finishing a prototype and taking this further. If anyone has any ideas or is interested in this project, I'd certainly be interested in hearing from you.

It's great to be back. If I haven't seen or met you yet, hello, and I'll be seeing you all around Mozillaland.

Awaiting the start of the press briefing, word came through that at least 60 people were dead in massive bombings in Baghdad. The final death count would prove to be at least 171 according to the Times. The news merited about 20 seconds on CNN, before the network cut to commercial and then back to inane patter and speculation about the VT shootings. Today, Monday's shootings merit 8 above-the-fold stories on CNN.com, while Wednesday's bombings go completely unmentioned anywhere on the homepage. From the Times, the bombings get a small link under the World section below the fold this afternoon.

We have no profiles of the Baghdad bombing victims. We have few harrowing live interviews with survivors. There are no press briefings, and there will be no "after-incident report" on the five bombs that exploded in Baghdad Wednesday. No one will ask why the warning signs weren't properly heeded, whether the police and the military did all that they could.

We maintain this fiction that our world is becoming more and more flat, and yet... Why is a Virginia Tech student's life worth more to me than an Iraqi's? Why is a Virginia Tech student's life worth more to me than a Darfurian's? I don't know, but it is. We keep up this fiction that we live in a flat world, and yet 33 horrific deaths in Blacksburg reverberate, and rightly so, for days while 171 deaths in Iraq, hundreds of thousands of deaths in the Sudan, and countless other deaths from preventable diseases and all the other heartbreaking causes in the world receive just moments of our attention in this round, round world. This world of ours, it's not flat at all.

The museum was closed for an "emergency holiday" on Monday and could not be reached.

Some timing they have with their emergency holidays. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just shut down for an emergency holiday whenever it becomes necessary? This is all a long way of saying that I too have come to the conclusion that I need to declare an emergency holiday, and while I don't believe I've done anything as stupid as leaving an extremely valuable gold bar sitting out with no security or even a plexiglases cover, it has been a long year.

As such, I'm declaring a holiday and heading out Friday to Boston for the Mozilla DevDay to reconnect with everyone and get back into the swing of things. With increasingly treacherous school commitments, I haven't had much time lately to do much of anything Mozilla-related besides keep a few things going and pop into irc to heckle folks every now and then. I've officially agreed to intern with MoCo again this summer, and I'm looking forward to seeing what's been going on over the past several months and seeing everyone again. Based on the Wiki, there's an insane number of people coming out to Boston, so it should prove to be quite the event.

From there, I'm visiting friends in the area and heading down to NYC to be with some family for Passover. After that, it's back up to Ithaca and into the pre-finals grind, but there's no reason to think about any of that now: I'm on emergency holiday!

The gist of the story is that a number of students allegedly cheated on an open-book take-home exam in a pass/fail course focusing on ethics. Jokes about the course's effectiveness aside, there is clearly something about this that, as the Times puts it, "seems odd." The conventional wisdom seems to be that with the stakes so low, a student would either have to be so incredibly lazy or such an incredibly poor student to need cheat on such an exam, in a pass/fail course no less.

I see it differently. With the stakes so low, why not cheat? Now sure, there's a sense of morality out there, sadly a rather antiquated one, whereby cheating is absolutely wrong and not to be done under any circumstances whatsoever, but beyond that, in the eyes of most students, what harm really comes from obtaining the essay questions early from a classmate? As a student in the higher education system, cheating in this case seems so natural, so painless, and so trivial, that, apart from a fear of getting caught, it seems almost a no-brainer.

Let me clarify here that I am by no means condoning such a breach of academic integrity. I do not cheat, and I expect others to do the same. Under any and all circumstances, by the time these students are getting a Master's Degree, they clearly ought to be well aware of the rules, and the moral and ethical lapse here, not to mention the complete failure of those who cheated to follow simple, clearly outlined directions is inexcusable under any circumstances.

That being said, consider the assignment. Students were given 90 minutes to read two questions, complete any appropriate research, construct responses, compose two eloquent short essays, rethink and revise their answers, and submit them for grading. Such an experience can hardly be considered meaningful, interesting, or even worthwhile. There is no reason the students cannot be given more time to review and ponder the questions, allowing them to develop more advanced and meaningful responses that would better reflect their knowledge and capacity for independent thought.

Furthermore, these are Journalism students. What is it that journalists are paid to do? They are paid to get the scoop, to get to and report the story faster and better then their competitions. Journalists equalize information asymmetry; when one group has information that others do not, they bring that information to all. And when, in the professional judgment of the reporter and his/her editor, the benefits of making such information public outweighs the potential disadvantages and risks, journalists frequently make public information that is deemed secret or confidential.

So in this situation, where students who took the 90-minute essay exam earlier then others, there existed a natural information asymmetry: students who already took the exam knew the questions, while students who had not yet began did not. Several students apparently did exactly what their training has taught them to do: get the story. They did so with apparent success, as some students had the opportunity to ponder and/or prepare their answers before starting the time-limited exam.

However, just as most reporters will not publish secret information when doing so is not in the public interest, or when the effects are particularly harmful (except in certain despicable exceptions), so too should these aspiring journalists-to-be have considered the consequences of making the exam questions more broadly available then permitted, which will doubtless extend to academic integrity hearings and irreparable harm to the reputation of the Columbia J-School. Certainly, these students should have considered their actions in this light, and hindsight acting in its usual ways, one of the Columbia students taking the exam today would certainly buckle down and complete the assignment as intended, no matter how much of a waste of time it may appear.

In a world where reporters just make stuff up nowadays, clearly ethics deserve more attention in future journalists' educations. But I feel that there is more to this story then an incredibly unfortunate ethical lapse on the part of several students. I believe that some of the blame here lies with the assignment as well.

The student-teacher relationship is a partnership. Teachers create meaningful opportunities to impart knowledge to students and allow them to demonstrate that knowledge in assessment activities. In return, students, in the ideal case, pursue these opportunities with tenacity and rigor. However, if the teacher creates assignments that are unrealistic, uninteresting, and otherwise meaningless to the students, pupils are likely to respond in kind with poor quality responses, uninteresting thought, and cheating.

Professor Friedman has now assigned the students a new essay, with the question available immediately and unlimited time up until its Thursday's due date. The new question: "You are the executive editor of a newspaper. You receive a tip from a credible source that one or more unspecified articles in recent editions of the newspaper contain fabricated material. No more details are given...What do you do?" Now there's a more interesting one...

I'm looking for a fancy DHTML/Web2.0/Interweb++ widget for text editing. Basically, I need text to appear as normal unadorned plain text, but when you double click it, it becomes editable. Focusing something else makes the text turn back to plain text again. I can kind of fake this myself by hiding and showing a form widget, but that's exceedingly ugly unless styled perfectly in a cross-browser way and I know that someone must have done this before. Note that I do not need rich text support, just plain text. If you've seen such a widget, a comment with a link would be much appreciated.

Bonus points if it works in IE, but Firefox-only would be ok for now.

I'll let you all know when I've got something ready to try out.

from the you-got-web-all-over-my-desktop dept. The more "applications" I try forcing into a tabbed web MDI model under a Mac, the more clumsy it gets. They aren't in my Dock, they can't be apple-tabbed through. Issues like this really frustrate me as I find myself wanting to use more web2.0 ajaxy fancy pants programs.

Since Taco was a nice enough chap when I've met him in the past, not to mention that this is something that bugs me fairly regularly, I've been thinking about how the browser can improve this situation. What follows is a fairly rough sketch of a solution that I'm calling the "appify" button.

Web applications would have a mechanism to identify themselves as potential applications through a meta tag, similar to microformats. This triggers the browser to display a subtle notification to the user that they may choose to appify the site. Potentially, if the site appears frequently in history, a more obvious notification could be given. When a web app is appified, several things would happen:

• Easy access is provided to the application. This could include (in a platform-appropriate way and depending on the wishes of the user: desktop shortcut icon, application kept in the Dock, Start Menu placement, bookmark toolbar, etc...
• First-Class Application Status - when an application is launched from one of these access mechanisms, it is treated as a first-class app by the OS. This means that it appears in the Taskbar/Dock as a running application, and alt/cmd+tab shifts between app and other applications.
• Streamlined Application UI - The UI should obviously be extremely similar to the normal browser interface. To do otherwise would provoke confusion.That being said, applications can, in my opinion, benefit from having extraneous non-application UI removed (bookmark toolbar, search bar, etc...). The URL bar should always be visible for phishing protection, but an application specific icon could appear along side.

Future implementations could include provisions for notification events, similar to the Gmail Notifier, and for document management, integrated with mozStorage.

This protocol has one nice advantage over previous solutions to this problem, such as Java Web Start: users can interact with content as either a site or an application, and the user experience of actually using the content is precisely the same. This is important because some people may want to treat a site as a commonly used application that needs to be easily accessed, while others may not. For example, I sign into Online Banking only occasionally, and do not mind typing the URL. Others may access their bank information multiple times a day and want this access on a first-class basis, the same way they launch Word or any other app. Appifying a site provides a different way to access it, but it does not change the way the site is used.

Appifying a web application is also a first step towards providing offline access. This is another problem all together, and this margin of the internet is entirely too small to contain its solution.

This is a pretty rough sketch right now, and I welcome constructive feedback. Certainly, it doesn't make sense to implement all of this in one go, and I'd say that the order of implementation should be the application access problem first, then first-class application status, and then any UI streamlining.

It might be interesting to do parts of this as an extension (though the platform-specific parts would pose some challenges), or perhaps through the Mozilla Labs program.

This past weekend was our fall break, so I took advantage of the time off to travel around and see some good friends, met an interesting fellow along the way, and crashed at various institutions of higher learning. All and all, it was great fun. Of course, the work tends to pile up when you're away. After a certain exam is over with, regular service should return to normal.

I'm setting aside a short block of time in the next few days to work on improving some of the installation infrastructure and documentation around Litmus. While this may seem like a little bit of a waste of time, after all, Litmus is only being used by Mozilla right now, and we already have it installed! However, I've heard a good amount of interest from several groups in using Litmus for other projects, and the lack of a reasonable installation process makes it pretty much impossible for them to get started. Ideally, new users will result in more patches getting folded back into the main Litmus codebase, improving things for everybody. In reality, the result will probably just be more support questions and maintenance headaches, but it's a nice thought.

Unfortunately, Litmus is only partially up and running at this point. The migration to a new server broke a lot of things, and I'm working on the ever so enjoyable process of untangling an intertwined mass of problems, one at a time. Right now, some basic functionality is available--you're able to access Litmus and view testcases--but you won't be able to login or submit results.

I am working on restoring full functionality as soon as possible, and I thank you all for your patience. Updates will be posted as functionality is restored.