Just stumbled across this:

• Friend: “I heard about this thing called ‘Linux’.”
• Me: “Oh, I use Linux.”
• Friend: “What is it?”
• Me: “An operating system.”
• Friend: “Like Firefox?”

Haha

Oh thank heaven for the beauty of context-sensitive advertising.

As most people on the Mozilla project, I get quite a bit of bugmail from bugzilla. Needless to say, Google mail tries to adapt to this situation by delivering me the ads that they believe are the most appropriate for the mail I am currently looking at:

“Will you be reincarnated as a bug?”

Well, I hope not! What if they resolve me INVALID?

Minefield, pfft… what kind of name is that?

From a funny love letter Mozilla received. It’s part of a nice picture series wired.com took at the Mozilla headquarters. Check it out.

Awesome: Later this year, I will spend a few months doing research and writing my masters thesis as a grad student in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

It took a few months to get a handful of question marks out of the way, but now I am quite confident that it will work out just fine.

A lot of people may have heard the name Carnegie Mellon before, but for those who haven’t, CMU is a private university with a good computer science program. According to Wikipedia, the college is pretty decently ranked and was “named one of the “New Ivies” by the magazine Newsweek in 2006″.

Having been to the American East Coast only once before (on vacation to New York City), I am excited to see what the differences and similarities are between life there and what I experienced in Oregon and California. Oh, and if you happen to know Pittsburgh and around and would like to suggest something I certainly shouldn’t miss out on when I’m there, please drop me a line

Are you looking to hire a sysadmin?

An American friend of mine has just moved back to the U.S. after working in Germany for a while. He is currently looking for a job as a Sys/Network Admin or similar in Northern California (Sacramento or Bay Area).

If you are looking to hire somebody or know somebody who does, please check out his resume online and drop him a line, or leave a comment here and I’ll connect.

Thanks for your help!

Inspired by Philipp Lenssen’s fabulous idea to express idioms in code, I came up—just for fun—with the following 10 well-known song titles, written in horrible C/Java/PHP pseudocode.

Have fun… and take a guess in the comments!

// Song 1:
it = b

// Song 2:
for (i=0; i<people.count(); i++)
  people[i].attributes |= (shiny | happy);

// Song 3:
function get(want) {
  if (random.bool() == true)
    return want;
  else
    return null;
}

// Song 4:
//function leave() {
//  return new Color(0,0,0);
//}
// Oh, I think I screwed this one up, so here it goes:
// Version 2.0 of Song 4: 
function leave(me) {
  me.setColor(0,0,0);
  return me;
}

// Song 5:
who = fire.getStarter();
assert(who != us);

// Song 6:
function cry(person) {
  return (person.gender == female);
}

// Song 7:
person = king.getWife();
person.dance();

// Song 8:
life = me.getLife();
life.setSunshine(you);

// Song 9:
person = USGovernmentEmployees.getRandom();
while (person.boss != null)
  person = person.boss;
person.writeLetter();

// Song 10:
train = trains.getLine(A);
you.take(train);

Update: I fixed Song 4 and 9 because they made way too little sense. Oops

Ah, for those of you who have wanted to try out the latest Firefox 3 Beta all along but were hesitant because they feared it screwing with their local data (current profile etc.):

PortableApps offer the Firefox 3 beta as a USB-stick-ready package that won’t touch anything on your local computer, making it safe and fun to try out for anyone who’s feeling curious:

Mozilla Firefox®, Portable Edition is available packaged with Mozilla Firefox 3 Beta 3, allowing you to test all the latest features in the upcoming version without disrupting your current Firefox installation.

Have fun beta-testing!