February 28, 2010

We’re in Bangalore. I’m excited to have sethb and ragavan hang with me in my home town, meet some of my friends, and generally get some exposure to the city where my parents live. As far as work trips go, this one has been a rollicking good time so far. We got a chance to visit a Bollywood studio in Mumbai, actually had a celebrity sighting or two, and met some amazing people. But the Mozilla DevDay we are organizing in Bangalore is really the main part of our trip. We’ve “co-organized” the event with Mahiti, an open-source non-profit based in Bangalore, and the Centre for Internet Society. We bought plenty of schwag: t-shirts, wrist bands, posters, and even a few Firefox plushies. We’re expecting over 200 people (at least!) at the National Institute of Advanced Studies campus, where the event is held.

sethb acts as MC, and gives us a glimpse into Firefox.next. We’ve also got Lucian Teo and John Britton joining us to talk about Mozilla Drumbeat and Peer to Peer University. I give a demo-driven overview of the web platform’s promise similar to the one I gave at GNUnify in Pune, but this time, there are plenty of questions, and a 45 minute session runs to about an hour and half. We’ve also got Mahiti’s CTO, Sreekanth Rameshiah talking about Mahiti’s projects, and the Centre of Internet Society’s Pranesh Prakash talking about software patents, and the relevance of these to video on the web. ragavan runs a session on Mozilla Labs, once again prompting great questions. Each session is interactive, with lots of questions, even though the delicious lunch organized by the CIS folks introduces a kind of postprandial stupor.

Vineel Reddy, one of our campus reps and regional leaders, then shares a little bit about what it’s like to be part of the Mozilla Community. Vineel’s been interviewed by the New York Times for the slick video he produced likening Firefox to a sports car. That video, made on a shoe string budget, went viral very rapidly. Marketing, typically a corporate function in most “classic” companies, is often a community outreach endeavor for our project, with volunteers expressing their passion for participation in creative ways. Vineel’s story is inspirational, and he gets a lot of follow-up questions when folks approach him after his talk.

In the afternoon, I do something a bit scary. I run a “hack” session with live coding on screen. I think my example is simple enough: I solicit a camera from the audience (but end up using my Nano) and shoot some video of the MozDevDay folks applauding, which I then embed in a web page (with the <video> element and some JS, of course). It works, but it’s not smooth sailing. If you tempt fate, you’ll encounter the proverbial obstacle — Firefogg’s transcoded OGV file has to be renamed with a *.ogg extension to work. It’s not quite a bug I can diagnose, since *.ogv files do appear to work in general. Maybe it’s a Firefogg thing.

I could give you my own breakdown of MozDevDay in Bangalore, but what others say about the event is far more interesting:

• Lucian Teo on MozDevDay
• Ragunath Jawahar on the experience
• Manish’s breakdown of things
• And thoughts from a self-professed Chrome user in India

We may not have a dedicated office in India (yet), unlike other browser companies, but we do have a vibrant community of volunteers. They showed up in numbers to our Bangalore event, and I’m absolutely thrilled. We can’t succeed in India without them.

February 21

The guy working at the bakery knows where it is, or so he says. He gesticulates emphatically, pointing to the alley behind the neon INRI above the cross, which serves as an illuminating reminder that we’re in a big Roman Catholic neighborhood. I’ve been leading sethb and pike on a tour of Mumbai’s narrow winding lanes, all to further the discourse about the Open Web. We’re in Chuim Village on a Sunday night, after having left GNUnify 2010 in Pune. We’re on our way to the pad.ma offices and are following Sanjay Bhangar’s detailed directions. We’re here to talk to some of the Mozilla Mumbai community about HTML5, video, and emerging web technologies, and to ingest beer and delicious biriyani. We find out that Jan Gerber (who wrote Firefogg) and Sebastian Luetgert are in Mumbai as well, representing the impressive 0xdb.org movie database and working with pad.ma. It promises to be a very interesting evening, if we can actually find the place.

Earlier in the same Sunday, sethb, ragavan, pike and I spoke to the PuneTech community, consisting of local startups and techies in the Pune area. We talked about the entrepreneurial opportunities accorded by the open web. Here’s the presentation I used to stimulate discussion. I talked about HTML5 (inclusive of the WebApps APIs, such as the File API and Orientation Events), CSS3’s @font-face property, and discussed the potential this had for Indic fonts. We closed with demos of Ambiera’s amazing Copperlicht JavaScript 3D engine built on WebGL. There was lots of talk about what open video and the video API actually meant for web applications, and the questions flowed freely. sethb then ran an ad-hoc entrepreneur’s competition to come up with great open web applications, splitting the room up into groups of three. Ideas included an Indian equivalent to typekit.com and e-learning for the hearing challenged using the HTML5 video API to nest videos within videos (with sign language in the interior video explaining the exterior one). Gurminder gives us a summary.

There weren’t as many questions on Friday, when I gave a similar demo-driven talk about the open web as part of GNUnify 2010. ragavan talked about Mozilla Labs, and sparked much discussion about OpenID. It’s clear that identity is probably one of the juiciest problems on the web. pike gave an overview of advances the Mozilla project has made with respect to localization.

You’d think I’d be exhausted by the time we leave Pune and get to Mumbai, but I’m simply hyper by the time we arrive on Sunday evening. Following the guy in the bakery’s directions, we navigate our way up some stairs to a charming rooftop overlooking Chuim. The pad.ma folks have got us together for an eclectic evening of code and cinema, and have a large screen with a projector trained on it. My open web demos this time around are choreographed by fireworks from a local wedding, punctuating their punch. Attendees ask us a bunch of questions, and I relish the opportunity to geek out a bit with Sanjay, Jan, Sebastian, and folks from the gnowledge.org project (who have a bunch of SVG questions for me). Jan and Sebastian have put together really slick UI on 0xdb.org, and are passionate advocates of stylable scrollbars, a la WebKit. All the while, we’re drinking beers and eating Mumbai’s best biriyani.

Our trip is off to a great start. Firefox accounts for 30% of the Indian browser market, and it’s clear that we have a vibrant community here. We have a few days of meetings lined up in Mumbai, and I’m going into all of them fairly amped.

It’s also being cleverly co-opted as a symbol for MozCampMumbai, another amazing Mozilla community event, taking place on Sunday July 19 in Mumbai.

Speaking at MozCampDelhi was one of the highlights at the start of this year, and I’m sorry I can’t be at MozCampMumbai in person. Asa, Mary and I recorded a video for the occasion, which I suspect we’ll post on Air Mozilla before long. I spoke about font-face, HTML5 Video, and a few other things that I think are particularly relevant to folks attending MozCampMumbai.  If you’re attending MozCampMumbai and reading this after you’ve watched me prattle on in the video, happy MozHunt   Enjoy some vada-pav, hackery and conversations about the Web.

My buddy Cindy Li fixes things. Like the time she fixed my kitchen sink with a broom, or realigned my closet door with a kitchen knife. Her blog post on DIY VW Bug lightbulb changing received more comments than any other blog post she wrote. She’s also designed a bunch of stuff, and so I pestered her to give my blog a face-lift.

Matt Harris, who translated Cindy’s design into code for WordPress (and code is poetry), gave me a three-column HTML5 template and some widgetry. Cindy used a picture of me clambering over a rocky hillock in San Francisco as a metaphor for the ‘new new arunerblog.’

So there it is. I’ve given the medium a facelift, and I promise you’ll hear more from me on my shiny new blog.

For one, I now actually work for a browser company. Sure, some folks argued that I never really left (at least spiritually, since the last time around) but there’s a difference between just contributing and picking up a paycheck. And this time, we’ve got a fourth participant — Darin Fisher, who now works on Google Chrome, will join the discussion I moderate. This will be a fun session — we’ll have to break Darin in, but he’s been around the block, too, with past history working on Mozilla. It’ll be a spirited discussion (some of us will talk smack), and audience participation makes it all worth it. But really, we want to discuss where the web is going from here. The web is 20 years old now, and was feted where it was originally invented today, at a nuclear research institute (CERN) in Switzerland. With the JavaScript performance wars, escalation on the standards front about things like fonts and graphics, and the advent of a new entrant, where do these guys think it will all go?

Some things, however, don’t change much over the course of three years. Still no Apple — their PR machinery won’t allow it, given the publicity this thing has gotten. But Darin (who worked on Firefox and Chrome) will speak for Google’s use of WebKit, Charles McCathieNevile (worked on lots of W3C specifications; is Opera’s standards officer) will speak again for Opera, Chris Wilson will represent IE (worked on every single version of the thing, and is a CSS muckety-muck), and Brendan (invented JavaScript) will represent Firefox.

If you’re in Austin, say hi. If my voice holds up, you can also see me at Fray Cafe, telling a story.

Of course, mobile Firefox (Fennec) isn’t available on many devices, and we’ve got a lot of work left to realize the vision of the web being the platform of choice on mobile. How will that manifest itself? I got plenty of questions about WebKit vs. Firefox, and ease of use of each codebase for mobile projects. Mozilla’s platform (including XUL, extensions, and XPCOM) stands as a sometimes weighty alternative to WebKit, but people love the platform with its extensibility, and that’s where the promise lies. This theme will make a brief reappearance (amongst other themes) in my panel on March 16 at SxSW 2009, in which I’m sticking a Chrome guy, a Microsoft guy, an Opera guy, and a Mozilla guy together for a panel discussion on where the web is going.

Here’s my talk at OSiM 2009, available as a PDF file:

sethb and I don’t mean to tempt fate. We find ourselves whizzing through Lucknow on our way to the airport with that sinking feeling that we’re going to miss our flight. Our flight to Mumbai leaves at 7PM, and it’s already 645PM. A herd of buffalo blocks the road, and the driver’s nonchalance is both inspiring and enervating. We’re on our way to Pune (via Mumbai) for gnuNify 2009, where we’re scheduled to talk at the Mozilla Project Day.

We find that our flight is delayed, which means that though we make the flight (joy!), we eventually only get into Pune at 3.30a.m. (*sigh). Our talk is at 10a.m. w00t! We find ourselves chuckling with resignation.

Pune is sethb’s kind of town. This is where most of the Indian language localizers live and work (in particular, Marathi, Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati and Kannada), and they’re all attending gnuNify. The enthusiasm and hard work of the students really make sure the trains run on time at this conference. The lead organizer, Professor Harshad Gune, is on the board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and is one of the driving forces behind introducing open source ideas to the students at Pune’s SICSR (Symbiosis Institute of Computer Studies and Research).

sethb and I talk to a capacity crowd for about 3 hours. I talk about the Open Web again, and show all the usual demos (SVG, CSS, CSS+SVG, with Video bringing it all home). I also show Bespin running on localhost. I get some fascinating questions. In particular:

sethb’s session on localization introduces Silme and he gets a lot of follow-up questions.

The next morning was a real treat. Navin Kabra (who also runs Pune Tech) organized a “Breakfast with Mozilla” discussion, where sethb and I got a chance to talk to a bunch of technology entrepreneurs from Pune. The crowd is a really diverse one. We get technologists interested in topics like Bespin, addons.mozilla.org, and Ubiquity, as well as extension authors like the folks from Lipikaar. Someone from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative is in the audience. We also get business folks interested in learning how Mozilla makes money, how extensions can be monetized, and what Mozilla is doing on mobile platforms. I also get a chance to pick the collective brains of the entrepreneurs in the room about how we can increase awareness of Firefox in India. These topics warrant their own blog post.

Chintalgiri Shashank hasn’t been sleeping much. When he’s not building a satellite for ISRO or helping organize TechKriti 2009 (for which sethb and I are in town), he’s Mozilla’s Campus Rep. at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IITK). And a full time Master’s student there in the physics department.

Night Robotics

IITK’s annual TechKriti festival seems to have increased this place’s cranial buzz (if that’s possible). We hear about the “Build Your Own Supercomputer” project, in which students take some NVIDIA GPU components and string them together to do complex calculations, powered by hardware from the local market in Kanpur. Then we actually witness some guys tinkering away on robots — Shashank tells me they’ve been up for two nights trying to get their robots to do stuff. I’m in town with sethb to give a talk about the Open Web. I’ve got some experimental stuff to show off from Mozilla, too.

For one thing, Dion and Ben have been up really late (like at 3.45a.m. their time — good for me, since that meant that I could chat with them in my time zone) tweaking Bespin for a sort of a special soft launch, exclusively for the workshop I’m doing as part of IIT Kanpur’s FOSSKriti event. They’ve given me a special URL which I can give to the students at the workshop, which I’ve titled “Hacking the Open Web.” My slides will follow soon-ish. Sure enough, there are some 11th hour bugs and quirks, and Ben sends me an email with a list of do’s and don’ts. The workshop has a capacity crowd of over a hundred, and I’m about to run an experimental web application on all the installations of Firefox in the IITK Linux lab — w00t! Shashank built me an ad-hoc projector screen with large sheets of paper, and in order to project my voice better, I strolled around the large room. The entire session was just really interactive, since I get stopped on my stroll with plenty of questions.

I started the workshop out with a general discussion of the Open Web, showing off some demos of SVG, Canvas, CSS+SVG, and bringing it all together with the video element invoking Ogg Theora content (layering SVG, CSS, and some Canvas action, stitched together with JavaScript, in different demos). There are some Flash fans in the crowd, who ask quite rightly whether all this will be made simpler with great tools, like what Adobe provides for Flash. We do need better tools, but I ask him to wait till I talk about tools in The Cloud.

The meat and bones of the workshop is really for folks to use Bespin, a day before it launches. My talk has some of Ben and Dion’s killer slides, describing (with eye candy) the “IDE in the cloud.” When we get out the starter gate, however, we hit a snag. My first exercise is to have students draw the Indian flag on screen (Deep Saffron, White, and Green). Turns out the Wikipedia entry on the Indian flag has an image in SVG, and I thought it might be fun to have a replica in Canvas. All the students name their project “IndianFlag” and suddenly start getting permission errors. Somebody smart figures out that about a hundred people can’t call their project the same thing, so I ask folks to add the last four digits of their cell phone numbers to their project names. That worked, and soon enough, people are playing around with Bespin, hacking on project IndianFlag0438 (or somesuch).

They identify all the early-stage common issues — no cut-paste (you can’t cut-paste from an image! Ben thinks that later on, an extension might help), and syntax highlighting for tab-delimited HTML files is just busted. There are, of course, general accessibility concerns and Bespin is still very much a work in progress. I stressed to the students that what I wanted them to absorb was that a graphics context coupled with high-performance JavaScript was where some promising directions on the web lay.

A smart student figures out how to use the Canvas2D context to draw the tricolor in about 20 minutes, and I enlist him to help the others. I’m still offering an honorable mention to anyone that can draw the Ashoka Chakra within the tricolor. This is a mixed audience of seasoned programmers (some Drupal hackers are there, as well as other Mozilla Campus Reps) and newbies. We didn’t have enough time for my jQuery examples (which I pinched from jresig’s talks), but I’d say the workshop was a success.

The next morning, I gave a talk on HTML5 and the standards process, which is also attended by a capacity crowd. Both sethb and I are pretty overwhelmed with the enthusiasm and thirst for knowledge that we encounter at IITK’s FOSSKriti event. It’s not all pure love, though — we get nagged about memory leaks again, and get questions about Chrome’s use of WebKit. Someone in the audience claimed that on his tests, WebKit outperforms Firefox, and wants to know whether our emphasis on platform means that we have performance compromises, which WebKit (being lean and mean and XUL-free) doesn’t have. Wow! That’s pugnacious. I’d like to take that question to the test-suite mat, and see what happens. I’m not above eating humble pie, but this one seems focused on a particular use case.

There are a LOT of contacts that I’m keen to follow up with. If you attended this event feel free to drop me some email or a comment — I’m still traveling, but will sift through my inbox when back — promise! I met students, professors, and professionals, and saw some artificial intelligence as well. This campus basically blew us away.

It’s about midnight, and a wedding party next door is boisterously dancing to loud drum beats, preventing us from drifting off to sleep.  sethb gazes out at the shadows behind the curtain with wide open, sleep-addled eyes.  Like me, he’s probably exhausted and jet-lagged, but he is curious and intrigued by what he is looking at.  It dawns on me that sethb’s adventurous curiosity will make him a great travel buddy as we do a Mozilla trip through India, hitting the road lean and mean.  It’s our first day in Delhi, and it’s set a high octane precedent for whatever else will happen.  Twenty or so hours ago, Seth got in from Europe, after FOSDEM; I got in at the same time from California and we meet up at Indira Gandhi Airport, Delhi.  We haven’t really slept much.

Earlier in the day, we attended an event at the Indian Social Institute called MozCampDelhi, put together by the inimitable Mohak Prince in just a few short days. Mohak (aka “~~~STigMaTa~~~ ~~~HaLLuCiNaTiNg AmBiGuiTy~~~” in all his emails) is a Mozilla Campus Rep in India, and has a real flair for organization.  Along with a really sharp crew of open source enthusiasts that helped put the event together, Mohak brought together an impressive audience of professionals, students, and hobbyists.  It was a great crowd for a Tuesday afternoon. It was also pretty illustrative of the use of Twitter, Wikis, and the blogosphere in India as instruments of event promotion and spontaneous UnConferencing. I sensed that this was going to be a really smart, savvy and interactive bunch of people, and I remember feeling really elated to be there.

MozCampDelhi’s afternoon session started out with a Skype presentation by Pascal Finette, discussing the Mozilla Labs Concept Series.  The important thing here is that contributions for directions the ‘fox can go aren’t restricted to those who can code; anyone can submit a prototype or an image or a video clip of themselves explaining something with interpretive dance (I exaggerate, but why not?).  Pascal’s talk stimulated discussion in the crowd about Creative Commons, and other lab projects such as Ubiquity and Weave.  Folks wanted to know whether localization initiatives were also part of the purview.

Seth then discussed localization initiatives. Against the backdrop of the BBC publicity about Firefox in Hindi [BBC] (amongst other languages like Gujarati, Marathi, Bengali, etc.), I was personally interested in the number of users of a localized browser at MozCampDelhi. Very few hands went up when I asked who used Firefox in a localized version, but this could be a function of the audience.  Seth got a great question about string transliteration across Indic languages, rather than always reinventing the wheel on a given Indic localization. This was something we took up with other folks in Pune.

As a bit of an intermission between talks, Mohak showed us a video telling the “story of Firefox.”  This just really cracked me up.  It had Dave Hyatt and Blake Ross as post-Netscape visionaries in a sort of animated version of the browser wars.  When I see stuff like that, I’m always reminded of the fact that my day job impacts people. Lots of people.

My talk was about the Open Web — I’ll have my actual slides on SlideShare soon.  All of my demos can be found on the Mozilla Library wiki, but in particular, I reused a lot of eye candy from Vlad’s talk on Web Graphics and Multimedia.  I showed the audience demos of SVG, Canvas, CSS, and the HTML5 video element (on a trunk build).  I also showed them the Bespin IDE running on localhost (later, at IIT Kanpur, I’d have students hack on code using Bespin — stay tuned for that update).  The questions from the audience were provocative.  Somebody asked us, somewhat pugnaciously,  if “Opera was simply a better browser.” *sigh There’s one in every crowd.  My opinion is self-explanatory, but I did point out to mobile enthusiasts that unlike Opera, we weren’t making a J2ME midlet for lower-end devices (and we weren’t providing a web proxy).  Instead, Fennec goes after smarter phones, and is still a work in progress. In general, the keenly expressed desire to look for alternatives to IE and Windows is really awesome to behold. It was a welcome question, and I got it again repeatedly at IITK and Pune as well. Firefox memory leaks were also pointed out in no uncertain terms, and this clearly is something I’m going to take back and look at closer.

Others were really curious about open codecs on the web, and wanted to know if existing formats (like Flash), by virtue of their widespread availability, would stymie the advance of Ogg Theora and Ogg Vorbis as open alternatives to the incumbents.  I pointed out that it was about the Open Web — that is, the intersection of fonts, graphics (SVG and Canvas), style (CSS), and video which is where the promise lay. That is, video as as first rate citizen of the web, not as something punted over a walled, rectangular garden (aka a proprietary third-party plugin) within a web page.

After it was over, Kinshuk Sunil got Seth and I to talk about stuff on candid camera. We’re both totally beat after we call the event a wrap, but my gastronomical enthusiasm convinces Seth to come with me and some family to Old Delhi for kababs (”Secret of Good Mood, Taste of Karim’s Food”). We haven’t really built much acclimatization time into this schedule.

Oh, and then the drums. They stop slightly past the witching hour, marking the end of Day 1. We’re off to Agra tomorrow, catching a 6a.m. train. So it begins.