Last weekend I spent at FOSDEM 2010, the tenth installment of the “Free and Open Source Software Developers’ European Meeting”. It was my first time there, and it was great. It was a full-blown conference and meeting point for both big and small open source projects from all over Europe.

Let me outline some of the highlights:

• As expected, the Mozilla presentations were highly frequented, and the Mozilla Europe team presented great HTML 5 features that’ll make the future of the Web (and web developers’ future) bright. Another presentation focused on the importance of Hackability for making the future of technology what we want, not what we are being fed.
• Sunday I spent some time on the NoSQL track. It started off with a good presentation on what non-relational databases can do for you, and why they are not supposed to replace SQL. While NoSQL is a buzz word, it’s important to note that there is a potential for faster, smoother applications by dropping the rigid framework that relational databases impose on us developers when its advantages are not needed.
• Another NoSQL related presentation, Introduction to MongoDB, showed off the features of this particular, schema-free, document-oriented, database. I found it highly interesting for web applications and am looking forward to giving it a shot on an upcoming project.
• Finally, two Facebook engineers explained what Open Source projects they have used and improved to scale their infrastructure to accommodate its enormous user base. What’s impressive is that they have introduced improvements on almost all parts of the software stack. In order to serve pictures faster, for example, they wrote a file system that allows them to grab a file in a single read. Another interesting technology is HipHop, their PHP-to-C++ compiler. This ensures that they can hire PHP developers, yet have a ridiculously fast web application. That’s probably as ugly as it sounds, but luckily not everybody has to do it

On some of these issues, I am going to go into more detail in followup posts.

I also went to some presentations that affect my work on the Mozilla project slightly less:

• One of the keynotes, Evil on the Internet, was equally as insightful as it was scary. Not only are the scams out there on the Internet getting smarter and harder to detect, it is also frightening how long some scam sites stay online, if no-one feels responsible for them.
• Professor Andrew Tanenbaum showed off his MINIX microkernel, version 3, for which he recently received a significant research grant from the European Union. He would also like to see Firefox ported to MINIX, anyone want to help him out?

All in all, fosdem 10 was a great success, thanks to all the volunteers who made it happen!

As always, what I am writing here is my own opinion and not a statement on behalf of Mozilla Corporation.

When I was just visiting Wikipedia, I was greeted with this temporary error note (which, luckily, does not happen too often in spite of Wikipedia’s huge popularity):

And, even if this marks me as a Web 2.0 geek, I must admit: All I was thinking was — where’s the pet?

The first company to put a recognizable, even likable, “pet” onto their error pages was likely Twitter. And due to the horribly frequent outages associated with Twitter’s “growing pain”, we got to see the littlehuge fellow quite often. In the mean time, he seems to have swam away, at least I haven’t seen him in awhile. Yet, he’s not forgotten: the fail whale even has his own fanclub.

Another place where I saw a “fail pet” was yelp, whose error page was sporting a picture of an actual dog, apparently the company puppy “Darwin” (sorry for the tiny screenshot):

Now where’s yours, Wikipedia?

Of course, considering I so provocatively ask this question, you might respond: Well, where’s yours, Mozilla?

Here at Mozilla, we are not particularly proud of software failures, because unlike your regular web 2.0 start-up (think Twitter) where every service failure means more customers than anticipated, failures in Mozilla-land usually mean a crashed browser, (possibly) lost data and certainly frowning users^*). So when the Crash Reporter icon was redesigned, we could have gone ahead and hired Foxkeh as our “crash mascot”, but that would do the poor little fox wrong — and at any rate, we prefer associating mascots with good stuff here at Mozilla. So at the time, user experience engineer Alex Faaborg made sure we don’t create something too memorable, for example nothing like a second “Blue Screen of Death”. Of course, had Microsoft known at the time how appeasing error messages can become with a little help from the animal kingdom, they’d have hired the entire cast of Looney Tunes to show up in their dreaded error messages.

But this might well be one of the few things we have in common with Microsoft: No fail-pets for us, any time soon.

^*) On a side note, although it won’t make a user fell better whose browser just crashed: When Firefox crashes it is most often due to binary, third-party plug-ins like Flash, Acrobat etc., and not due to a bug in Mozilla software — as evidenced by the publicly available “top crashes” list and the bugs associated with it.

photo credit: flodIn a very well written article that was published in Sunday’s New York Times, Miguel Helft explains the post-”browser wars” web, and how Mozilla’s mission fits into this increasingly complex setup.

As indicated by the title — “For Mozilla and Google, Group Hugs are Getting Tricky”, the author puts some emphasis onto the Google/Mozilla relationship, which among the community tends to be a big point of interest. Quote:

“In many ways, Google and Mozilla are fighting the same battle, albeit not with the same objectives. They both contend that the Web should be open and based on common standards — Mozilla because it is its mission, Google because it is good for its business.”

Highly recommended reading, even for non-geeks, who are interested in Mozilla and the Web as a whole.

Link

Firefox 3.5 has officially been released:

What are you waiting for? Go download it!