June 17, 2008
Sometimes, what goes around does come around. I first started playing with Mozilla, a project launched by Netscape Communications, in 1998. That was a whopping ten years ago. I was in Bangalore, fresh out of college, and had finished a stint in Rajasthan as a substitute French teacher to dilute the effects of four years of undergraduate mathematics and computer science. Hiatus aside, grad school or profession or professional gadabout? The technology industry came calling with its dubious promises of intriguing work and the potential to travel (and a free cafeteria to eat in, and a free Internet connection), and Bangalore was the place to be, with its nascent information technology subculture.
Something stuck, because by early 2001, I was working for Netscape as Technology Evangelist on Mozilla. Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Extrapolations, Standards, Technology 
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March 14, 2008
Dear Chris, Chaals, and Brendan,
Thank you. For two years, you’ve put up with my jittery nagging a few hours before the panel, and for two years, it has rocked.
Dear Apple,
We really missed you. Our “Browser Wars” panel at SxSWi ‘08 was standing room only, with people lining up outside who couldn’t get in. We discussed stuff that was really relevant to Safari, touching on mobility, standards, security, JavaScript, and stuff like that — PC Mag has a rough record of the conversation. People love your stuff — the MacBook Pro and the iPhone were ubiquitous at the Austin Convention Center. And while you are open in your standards participation (working groups like Web API and HTML conduct business in the open), and while you are candid on the Surfin’ Safari Weblog, it would be great if your PR / Marketing department could let you come out and play with us. Maybe next year?
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Posted in Populism, Society, Standards, Technology 3 Comments »
March 8, 2008
The grackle birds are out in full force in Austin. They are noisy and obnoxious, but I only visit with them but once a year, when I, like scores of other Californians, descend on Austin, TX, for Geek Camp, aka South By SouthWest 2008.
Young-ish trendy persons with laptops and iPhones and loosely slung satchels meander around the Austin Convention Center. Panels are being held, and the sun is shining (mostly), and the after parties are kicking, and film makers, musicians, designers, and geeks are all coalescing, as per the norm.
Last year, I chaired a panel bringing Brendan Eich (Mozilla/Firefox, and inventor of JavaScript), Chris Wilson (Microsoft/IE, worked on every version of IE in recent memory), and Charles McCathieNevile (Opera — a standards titan who travels the world working on standards) to the table to discuss where the Web was going. It was a great panel discussion which embraced spirited debate.
A year has passed, and PC Magazine thinks we’re about ready to usher in the “boring era” of Web browsers. Really? A little bit like the End of History, where things were supposed to be all nice and boring after the end of the Cold War, but ended up being anything but?
OK, look. I’ll be the first to admit that the term “wars” shouldn’t be used when talking about Web browsers. This year, when I agreed to do the panel again at SxSW 2008, I used the term “war” to pack the auditorium. But let’s be frank about a few things.
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Posted in Populism, Society, Standards, Technology 2 Comments »
January 24, 2008
Another year, already, and change is the buzz word. I hear it in the speeches during the primaries (and from the pundits, who editorialize about the “change election”). It’s an election year, and we all want change. How time flies! Our astral mascot is a rodent, and we’re going to collectively do things differently this year. That’s the Zeitgeist-y feeling, anyway.
But change is really in the offing for me, too, so all this talk of change in 2008 resonates with me on a more personal level. I resigned from AOL to do my own thing for a little while, and so far, it’s been great. Here’s what I learned about hard decisions.
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Posted in At My Leisure... 1 Comment »
September 18, 2007
So I’m in Frankfurt Airport, after the long continental puddle hop from California, and I’m weary. I can’t see so well, because my eyes are a bit sore. I’m on my way to Spain to attend the Open Source in Mobile conference in Madrid, and I have my Indian Passport and a few sundry papers of visitation clutched tenuously in my hand. I’m merely transiting through Germany, and I’m trying to find the line where I can get my stamp, since I possess a valid visa to go to my next port of call.
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Posted in At My Leisure..., Populism, Society 1 Comment »
June 26, 2007
I believe in the general synchronicity of summer, and think June and July bring unexpected Jungian gifts. This is an eventful summer for me in many ways, but for now, a quick word on my professional life.
Firstly, buddy and fellow AOLer Kevin Lawver blogged with gusto about replacing me as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C. I’m going to be doing other things professionally within AOL, and Kevin, a Standards Titan at AOL, is the right guy to step up and bat for the company. I’m still going to be a member of various W3C working groups. And I got elected by the Advisory Committee to be a member of W3C’s Advisory Board, which serves an advisory role to the W3C staff. I’m honored to have been elected, and start “officially” in July. As a member of the AC, Kevin will face all the questions of the relevancy of W3C and AOL engineers making time to participate in standards that I did, and I wish him all the very best.
Secondly, the blogosphere has already been given an inkling of myAOL, a suite of web applications that I’m working on as part of a great team of AOL engineers. We’re going to launch it this summer. In particular, I’m part of the team working on Mgnet (pronounced magnet), a way to discover content through some innovative navigational metaphors. Can’t wait to go beta already!
The myAOL suite has been discussed in a “pre-release” capacity on TechCrunch and on Jeremy O.’s Web Strategist blog.
Posted in Extrapolations, Standards, Technology 1 Comment »
May 21, 2007
Brazilian cinema fascinates me because it marries the vibrancy of the New World (including intriguing racial identities and beautiful music) with stark urban realities. I mention a few of Brazilian movies I’ve seen and thoroughly enjoyed in a previous blog post.
Ricardo Elias’ The 12 Labors is as watchable as its peers, and shares thematic elements with Black Orfeu. Like the 1959 “cross-over” classic, the protagonist of The 12 Labors, Heracles, is named after a character in Greco-Roman mythology. The connection to mythology here, however, is not as pronounced. As we slowly learn, the mythical 12 tasks of Heracles (which includes slaying beasts, cleaning a filthy celestial stable in a day, and other impossible errands of redemption) serves more of a symbolic role in the story of a black youth in Sao Paulo.
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Posted in At My Leisure..., Society 1 Comment »
May 15, 2007
It was apparently a Kennedy family motto to never get mad, but instead to get even. Mere anger was by itself not a sufficient catharsis — an affront called for retaliation in kind. I recall this little dictum from my repository of Kennedy folklore because I’ve always found it an attractive philosophy. But what shape should the revenge take? And should one repay a dastardly act with something equally dastardly? Gandhi once famously said that if everyone espoused the philosophy of an “eye for an eye” everyone in the world would be blind.
Such ruminations on what constitutes revenge and payment in kind came to mind after I left the Kabuki theater following a screening of Kore-eada’s Hana. Remember that I said I’d review it as part of my role as a member of the citizen press corps? Hana is a beautiful, slow-moving treatise on the subject of revenge and forgiveness, steeped in Japanese samurai culture, and set in a time when the samurai are pretty much extraneous. Kore-eada’s story takes place in the Edo era (old Tokyo, circa 1701) when there are no battles to be fought, and the glorious samurai of yore basically sit around unemployed as festering malcontents.
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Posted in At My Leisure..., Society 1 Comment »
April 27, 2007
Thanks to the good auspices of Kevin Smokler (who I met at South By Southwest), I get a press pass to the San Francisco International Film Festival as part of the Citizen Media Press Corps. I love the movies with a passion, and the film festival circuit is a great place to catch movies that aren’t out in popular release yet. There are also some movies that you can probably only see on the festival circuit. For the next week, expect a lot of posts about the movies, which I’ll file under Society | At My Leisure. Here’s what I’ll be up to with my press pass audaciously hanging from my neck.
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Posted in At My Leisure..., Society 2 Comments »
March 17, 2007
“I don’t know what you’re so highly strung about,” Charles said to me, a few minutes before our panel was about to begin. I was anxiously asking him to wolf his breakfast down and rush to the Green Room, which is the panel ante room at SxSW. “It will be ok — trust me.” I often wish I was as calm as Charles about things.
He was right, of course. The panel I moderated on Web browsers at SxSW even got scooped by PC Magazine — yay! The article mentions the empty seats, which certainly caused a brief sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nobody likes to throw a party and have scant attendance. But the panel itself went swimmingly, and towards the end I’d say we had over 150 people in there. Thank you, Brendan, Chris, and Charles.
There was also some small measure of controversy, which I suppose is the mark of a good discussion. Dan Appelquist (who chairs the Mobile Web Best Practices Working Group, which I am also a part of) asked a good question about WICD, and Brendan’s answer spawned much discussion. Soon, our panel will be podcast, and everyone can see the exact quote in question. Regurgitating what Brendan said in second and third hand accounts may not lead to the most accurate discourse 
Posted in Extrapolations, Standards, Technology 1 Comment »
