So.. time to get back into full pace Mozilla. I’ve started out these past couple of weeks since finishing exams catching up on where Mozilla is, and what has been going on around the Mozilla ecosystem. This weekend I shift my focus to clearing my inboxes, bugs, and getting back in contact with my mentees.

This is just the first of a number of posts that I have planned for my return to action. I’m going to stagger them though so that I can get into a much more regular blogging pattern. I have the feeling I’m going to need it in the coming year.

To all those who I’ve left in the lurch for the past two months. I cannot apologise more. Drop me an email if there’s anything I can do in the coming week to help out, or make a mends for my extended absence from the Mozillaverse.

Additional: This blog is now going to be dedicated to my activities with Mozilla. For anything else I will be using my Tumblr.

Need to look into some better security for my blog and site as a whole. Suggestions wanted!

I’m on a shared server (Dreamhost). I know that makes a difference in terms of some potential suggestions.

It’s not going to be easy but it is probably needed, as has been pointed out to me by some whose opinions I respect greatly. Don’t worry though… This is NOT me leaving Mozilla, never going to get rid of me This is only me taking the time to ensure that what I am working on within the Mozilla Community is getting all the attention and time it deserves.

In the meantime, expect to still get responses from me if you mark things as urgent, etc… I’m not dropping off the grid entirely, just not going to be looking at anything on mailing lists for a while. Going to be focusing on making life a little simpler for myself, as well as making myself the reliable Mozillian I once was. The Mozillian that I owe to myself, and everyone else.

Even with all the running round that I was doing I still had the chance to pitch in  at some workshops, pull up my sleeves and do some code, and more  importantly, help take the web from consumption to creation.

Why  all the running around though? Well I was privileged enough to  coordinate an amazing team of Mozilla Reps from all over the world, and  work side by side with them to help give the festival that Mozilla touch  that reps seem to have. I would try write-up my own personal experience  of the festival play-by-play, like I have done with so many other  events I’ve been lucky enough to attend, but I think with this one…  the Mozilla Festival is beyond any words in my arsenal.

Instead  I’d like to focus on thanking the wonderful Reps who came and helped out with the  Contribute Garage, which was busier than ever, with sessions about  contributing to Mozilla run by our very own Regnard Raquedan. Thanks to the Reps who went and did amazing work with people around webmaker, and those that ran sessions of their own.
This is the first time Reps have properly been deployed to such a large, open event, and boy did they shine. Not only did they represent Mozilla well… they fully embodied the spirit of the festival, and took obstacles in their stride, tackled challenging questions head on, and did themselves proud.

Contribute Garage

Continuing on from the good work that was done last year we have kept the contribute garage, and expanded it out into less of a booth that happens to be there, to a couple of small booths with experts on hand for both Mozilla as a whole, and FirefoxOS which we were lucky enough to have a number of devices running at the festival.

We showed people some of the amazing demos created in the past few months that now reside on developer.mozilla.org/demos. As well as ways to get involved with Mozilla, and more.

We even ran our own fireside chats about the “Myths about contributing to Mozilla” (lead by Regnard), and “How to become a Mozilla Affiliate and L10n Contributor”.

FirefoxOS

Our FirefoxOS demo space was very popular and had a continual flow of people to it, some asking about when its going to be released, others more interested about how it works, and some even wanting to take them home with them then and there!

We made good use of this interaction with people to go through some of the benefits of FirefoxOS over other platforms, as well as talk more about Mozilla as a whole. We didn’t let people get away with just coming over for the sticker, we asked them questions and got convocations going.

Science Fair & Demo Party

Mozilla Reps were not only at the festival during the day, we carried on into the night as well. On the first night the festival held its traditional “Science Fair”, and on the same day Firefox turned 8! So we setup a small celebration for Firefox… there were even balloons!

The second night we went and joined the festival participants at an amazing party and some joined in with the karaoke. In my opinion whoever sung “Smells like teen spirit” rocked it… oh wait… that was me!

Finally we had to say our goodbyes on the Sunday. We rocked it all weekend, but we needed to crash… and that’s exactly what we did, it was a short trip over to the Mozilla London Space, where we had take-out and watch a film as a group. I wont embarrass people by sharing photos from the last night, many of us fell asleep before the film even finished.

Shout out!

I want to say a BIG thank you once more to all the Reps who came to London for the Mozilla Festival, including those who weren’t sponsored. I also want to say a big thank you to the Festival organizers for making it all possible.

Other great write-ups!

• Mozilla Festival Blog
• Emma Irwin: My #MozFest
• Regnard Raquedan: Mozilla Festival Science Fair in Pictures

There are still plenty of ways you can get involved, and continue the spirit of the Mozilla Festival… just visit www.mozillafestival.org/participate to find out more!

This post is simply a precursor to my upcoming blog post, as well as a short, public note that I will only have internet access between 9am and 7pm BST until Monday… so if you need real-time communication with me till Monday it will have to be then. I will however still get email to my phone, just don’t expect very detailed responses for obvious reasons.

“Moments ago a Google Street View car passed, filmed me wearing a Firefox T-Shirt… Exact location: http://ottodv.com/fxsw” https://twitter.com/ottodv/status/84573401934610432 (2011-06-25)

About a year ago, I happened to be on vacation on the island of Saaremaa in Estonia when Google Street View cars were busy recording the scenery. Knowing they were around the idea got stuck into my head to try to get recorded by a Street View car while wearing a Firefox T-shirt. The only problem was knowing where they’d be at what time.

Luck came my way when a Google Street View car drove past the house where we where staying. I wasn’t outside, but I knew that road was a dead end, meaning they had to come back. Wearing a Firefox T-shirt I went outside and positioned myself on a piece of the main road where I thought they hadn’t been yet.

After waiting nearly a year for Google to upload the images to Street View, we can now see the result: it worked… more or less. Apparently the Street View cars have passed over this section of road more than once after a all, as a result I now appear with my Firefox T-shirt in some of the shots but not on others. What would have been the best location didn’t show up, but the ones before and after did.

Check it out: http://goo.gl/maps/LJwc

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cc-by-nc Oliver Quinlan

So last week was the Mozilla Learning Lab in London. I was unfortunately unable to attend the first day of the event (Thursday 24th May) due to having an afternoon exam that day. However I travelled up that evening and took a quick detour into the Mozilla London Space to say hi to those floating around, and also to steal a little bit of free wifi before the internet blackout zone that was my hotel… well… I say blackout zone, this was more due to me not wanting to pay extortionate amounts of money for the in room wifi/broadband options.

Thats the boring travel preamble out the way so lets move onto day two of the event, or for me day one . The morning was rather relaxed to start with. I went into the event with the plan of helping as many people as I could by acting as a floating developer. Anything that people needed a little extra help with that I could provide I would do. Turns out there was a guy, Ian Usher, who had been working with someone else on an idea the day before of a zombie game like creation to aid in teaching CSS Positioning within the new Mozilla Thimble app. Unfortunately for him his developer friend was unable to attend until the afternoon so I became his replacement, and work began.

cc-by paul_clarke

The idea need a little more refining after learning some of the constraints of Thimble, as well as some of the bugs… it is still in beta at the time of writing so… give it its dues it is one hell of an amazing tool that I cannot wait to work more with. This developing of the idea kept going for a while till we had something starting to take shape and then development of the code started and didn’t finish until the end of play testing today. In fact I think it will most likely continue for a little longer while I iron out a few more issues.

Still in day two of the event however we get to lunch time where my self and Ian went downstairs to a think tank like event on web making, that was also taking place at the same time, where we invited them up to see ours, and other projects that had been created for the learning lab. Lots of feedback was gained from this, and it turned out that not only did kids love zombies (well that is what we were hoping for), but so did movers and shakers in the education space. Turns out our implementation was missing something that people wanted to do once they had completed the main task… They wanted to change the zombies out for other people… turns out that Justin Beiber, David Cameron, and George Osborne are popular targets or being zombiefied.

So day two ended with some improvements to be made, comments to be added to the code presented to people using the Thimble app, and of course… sleep before day three of the event. Playtesting.

cc-by paul_clarke

This was a lot of fun. Turned out that overnight I had broken some things, while trying to fix them… so these changes were corrected ASAP. Also discovered some issues with the game in terms of sharing it out to friends once it has been completed, though these are being ironed out right now.

Conclusion

Mozilla Thimble is an amazing new tool that I cannot wait to use some more. It has great potential and is easy to use… there is no reason that those trying to teach things to people who have a basic understanding of the web shouldn’t look into this. Also… zombies are fun

More write ups

There are some more awesome write ups of the event that you can find. For more about Thimble I would recommend the post by Michelle Thorne.

• Michelle Thorne: http://bit.ly/MUPtRy
• Doug Belshaw: http://bit.ly/JExw5z

I will try to keep this list up-to-date with any posts I find, but no promises.

BarCamp Canterbury is an unconference that is a completely free to attend and based loosely around the theme of:innovative, unusual, and amusing examples of information and technology.

A technology conference with a difference: more like a gathering of enthusiastic people that are into tech, gadgets, science, crafts, or just about anything else that’s geeky and fun. There will be plenty of entertaining sessions and workshops on the day, and when sessions aren’t running, there’s usually other fun stuff happening: food and drink, games, conversation, silliness, and people hacking on projects. You can go to any session you like, and if you don’t find a session interesting, you can leave and go to another.

Last weekend was more than just fun, it was brilliant. BarCamp Canterbury had everything you could want from a gathering of geeks. It had robots, clocks, and lego! I feel privileged to have been able to represent Mozilla at such a great event, and even more so for having been able to attend!

I did several talks while I was there, and got a lot of good feedback from it. So what talks did I do?! Well, I used my short form “Who? What? Why? (Mozilla)” talk each morning, and both times got a good-sized audience, as well as a lot of interesting, in-depth, and sometimes difficult to answer questions (where I just didn’t know the answer but really wanted to know myself (did a little looking up in those cases). I got so many questions in fact that I had to do an entire extra session (AMA style) to get through them all. Questions ranged from getting people into web making, to how Mozilla got so big, to how to fix problems some people had encountered with Firefox.

I also did a talk on some of the new tools build into Firefox that make development easier, as well as the tools/resources created by Hackasuarus. Again, there were a good number of questions.

Something that I did off my own back was my presentation on being a good public speaker, which I made as interactive as possible by getting people to come up and use the first three picture slides from my deck to do a presentation on anything, using the tips and tricks I had just spoken about. This session was so popular that I ran it 4 times! I even took it a step further and ran a session at the end of the event on making slide decks using my favorite tools. HTML, CSS, JavaScript and DZSlides.

Was it worth Mozilla sponsoring this event. In a word… YES! There was a lot of interest in Mozilla, what we have done, and where we are going. I attended a talk on Teaching programming in 5 languages at once by Allan Callaghan. This talk was so inspiring and energetic, and on a topic that I think is still very relevant to Mozilla… Learning, Freedom, and the Web!

The language choice is simply because I am very comfortable / have more experience with php, and the framework is chosen for being robust, secure, and still being developed.

The wireframes that I have created are currently being worked on very kindly by Jan to be come much prettier mockups.

So… the wiki page where I will be putting the analysis section is https://wiki.mozilla.org/Mozilla_UK/revamp.

As for the code I am working on the tools are being developed under the name SandCastle, and there is a public git repository at https://github.com/fuzzyfox/SandCastle.

As ever, feedback welcomed / wanted.

proposed vertical version of Mozilla UK logo

Okay… so it appears that even though this revamp is still in the early stages there is a reasonable amount of interest in the project. So I thought I would make it easy for those of you who are interested to stay up to date. I will be periodically posting here about major updates, however for more minor things you should keep an eye on my tumblr where I will be posting about more mundane changes, as well as periodic photos of my paper based work. Until I get back to university and thus my scanner.

So for now here are the big changes since I last posted about the revamp. I have added the data flow and entity relationship diagrams to development the document, as well as added headings for future sections to be written, and the system requirements.

Biggest reason for not posting here every time a make a change, well… unlike with my A-Level I don’t have to blog this in every tiny detail, and I also now have my tumblr which is a much better format for quick updates than my blog which I am trying to keep free for more detailed, and important updates from myself.

If you have any feedback on this revamp feel free to drop a line to me, or if you are part of the UK community mailing list then send it there. In fact… I should probably post my updates there as well as my tumblr… so I will