January 2008
21 posts
traveling for mozilla →
Traveling for Mozilla is a humbling experience. It’s easy sometimes to look at the rise of Firefox as a market phenomenon, as a set of amazing numbers, as a set of graphs all trending up and to the right. And that’s true enough, of course — but the eye-popping numbers — the maybe 150,000,000 (we hit 50M daily users a couple of weeks ago, which roughly equates to 150M active) people around the...
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi →
I’d been meaning to read this graphic biography for some time now — finally picked it up yesterday and am really glad that I did, as it’s fantastic. It’s the story of a girl who’s about my age — born in 1969, I guess — who lived in Iran through the Islamic Revolution before eventually moving away. In a way that’s deceptively simple, she illustrates and illuminates some of what it must be like to...
incredible TedTalk (as usual) →
Another incredible TedTalk — this one by Ben Dunlap, President of Wofford College in South Carolina. Amazing story teller, amazing story, and brilliant conclusion. Reminds us of how great we can be. I’ve watched it twice now; will no doubt watch it again. Amazing.
good airport, bad airport →
Today I’m heading home from a week in Europe — left my hotel in downtown Copenhagen at 5:30a, and was at the airport, having done the human check-in and cleared security and eating my breakfast by 6:30a, waiting for my flight. An extremely low stress, efficient, and actually wonderful experience. Here’s what CPH looks like:
It’s an amazingly comfortable airport, and I found myself in a very...
great posts on china & asia & creative commons →
a couple of slightly old, but great posts on china and asia:
- a post on techblog86 (a great new blog on tech and startups in china) about the extremely fast rise of the chinese internet population and some details about it — 210 million people and growing quickly
- a fantastic recap by rebecca mackinnon (her blog is also highly recommended — she’s a wonderful voice about the internet reporting...
new features on opencongress.org →
I highly recommend taking a look at opencongress.org, a site put up by some amazing folks I know a little bit. An amazing site already that lets you track what’s going on in Congress, what particular legislators are voting on, how they’re voting, etc, the update is even cooler, as now you can put in your own profile, indicate the particular people, bills, and areas you’re interested in tracking,...
pesky congress getting in the way… →
…and not taking away our freedoms quickly enough. If they could work more quickly, Cheney could get back to his job of protecting all of us.
Bah.
does this look right? →
playing around with my wordpress template — think i’ll probably shift to something different before too long — but at a few folks’ urging, have switched (for the time being, anyway), to black text on white background, for readability, while retaining the same typography.
i’m clear that this is more readable, but think that it might be, um, what’s the word…ugly. lmk if you have an opinion. i think...
blogging from europe this week →
I’m spending the week with our team in Europe — first 2 days here in our Paris offices, then visiting Christian in Copenhagen, where we’ve set up a small office. Hoping to blog more than I have over the past couple of weeks. Have some things I want to write about my Mozilla experiences here in Europe, my experience with my Kindle after the first couple of thousand pages, our milestone of 50M daily...
my new job at mozilla →
Sometimes in life, you find an opportunity to make a difference in something you care about, and it feels like, even though you didn’t know it at the time, that the last few years have really just been practice, giving you the background, skills and ability to really help. And in a very few circumstances — once or twice in a lifetime if you’re lucky — the opportunity you get to make a difference...
more on why mozilla will not IPO →
Henry Blodget did a followup on his first post just now, with some further thoughts.
There are some details we should clear up in a further post (some of the mechanics are a little mis-stated in Blodget’s postings), but I want to focus on the intent. First, there’s no presumption that for-profit (or, more properly, non-tax-exempt) entities are bad and non-profits are good. As Henry suggests,...
small is the new big →
great writeup of one of the many reasons that we’re working hard to stay independent: it’s better for people who use firefox and thunderbird and songbird and miro and on and on…..
Firefox/Mozilla is NOT going to IPO — here’s why →
There’s been a bit of speculation today about Mozilla on Silicon Alley Insider (and NYT blog), and I’d like to set the record straight.
Irrespective of financials, Blodget is wrong about the desire and intent of Mozilla to do any public offering of stock. Mitchell’s written about this many times at great length: the work we do in the Mozilla project is a public asset (and a followup article,...
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb →
This was a very, very interesting book, and I had a lot of conflicting reactions to it. The content is great — and I’ve heard good things about his previous work, Fooled by Randomness. I found his writing style nearly unreadable, not to mention condescending and dismissive of anyone who thinks differently at all — but in spite of the stylistic issues, the content is great. He spends a lot of...
American Creation, by Joseph Ellis →
I think this was my favorite non-fiction book of the year. Fantastic, fantastic book, and a great continuation of the themes that Ellis started in Founding Brothers. As usual, Ellis conveys a huge sense of the humanity of our founders, and the real uncertainty of the time. Also as usual, he highlights the landmark differences between the 1776 mood of the Declaration of Independence and the 1787...
10 years ago today →
It was 10 years ago today that Brian Roddy and I drove to Sacramento to incorporate Reactivity (Bryan Rollins, our 3rd founder, wasn’t here yet). Seems like a lifetime ago — I wondered when we did that whether we’d make it 10 years, since the vast majority of new enterprises fail much sooner. We didn’t make it all 10, but we made it more than 9, with Brian and Mike and Peter and others selling the...
huckabee and pakistan →
Bah. The idea that Mike Huckabee floated last week in Iowa on Bhutto’s death, that her assassination underscores our need to strengthen our border with Mexico, is complete hogwash.
But more than that, it’s shameful — racist, uninformed, and cynical in its delivery. It’s embarrassing to me that a man with such a heinous point of view can be a front runner in any election, let alone one for our...
Terror Presidency, by Jack Goldsmith →
I don’t particularly agree with Goldsmith’s politics — he’s a very conservative lawyer who writes here about his time working in the Office of Legal Counsel in Ashcroft’s Justice Department — but I really liked reading this book. It gives a thorough analysis of Goldsmith’s work related to much of the 9/11-related opinions, and his eventual overturning of the infamous terror-memo. Goldsmith...
Born Standing Up, by Steve Martin →
I bought this book Christmas Day, as my first Kindle-only content (as an aside, it’s wonderful to be able to think to yourself “I’d really like to read X”, press a button or two, and have the book delivered to you). Took me just a day to read it — it’s a short book, but also a fun one. It doesn’t cover the period of Martin’s life that’s most familiar to me (and folks my age, I presume) — it goes...
Spook Country, by William Gibson →
Eh, fine. Probably not one I’d recommend. A passable prose effort from Gibson, but without any of the interesting invention.
Foreign Babes in Beijing, by Rachel DeWoskin →
I’ve got a bunch of reviews backed up, so am going to do a few brief ones before writing about a couple of fantastically amazing books I ended 2007 with. I got this memoir from Gen after our first trip to China last year — it’s an accounting of DeWoskin’s time in Beijing several years back — maybe 1999 or so — when she became a little famous in a Chinese soap opera about foreign attitudes called...
