Thoughts
posted in Mozilla by kumar on Tuesday May 6th, 2014 at 10:48a.m.
I've been working remotely from a home office with Mozilla
since about 2010 (4 years so far) and although it has challenges I still enjoy it.
You have to have some discipline and a routine.
Matt Gemmell's article on this has excellent pointers on routines and setting
up an isolated work space at home. I wanted to add a few
things to his post...
posted in Mozilla, Whatever by kumar on Wednesday Apr 9th, 2014 at 12:01a.m.
The OpenSSL heartbleed bug was a serious kick to the Internet's collective
ass.
This video provides a quick overview if you want the details.
In summary, an attacker could craft a payload with a fake size (up to 64k) and
trick openssl into sending a random chunk of server memory. WTF?!
To understand how bad this was I spent a minute hacking on this script
that was going around.
I pointed it at login.yahoo.com (which is no longer vulnerable) and tried to see
if I could catch a username and password flying by. I had one within 30 seconds.
That's how bad it was; you could read random parts of the server's memory which
may contain passwords, private keys, or whatever else OpenSSL was
processing for current site visitors.
I had stolen someone's credentials. Game over, right? How do you protect
yourself against something as bad as this? ...
posted in The Future, Whatever by kumar on Tuesday Apr 8th, 2014 at 10:15p.m.
Oh, hey! I almost forgot I have a blog.
Well, the colors are annoying to me and my comment system sucks
but, meh. I wanted to write a quick note about where
you can find stuff I write.
posted in Music, The Future by kumar on Monday Jun 18th, 2012 at 3:18p.m.
David Lowery wrote a piece on how downloading music is hurting musicians (which is a response to Emily White's piece on admitting to not buying music). Here is my response.
Music is a really interesting "product," especially when distributed digitally for $0.001 cents per download (production costs: bandwidth, storage, etc). The real production costs are for the time put in by the artist, studio fees, and creativity. Besides the creativity part, that formula sounds a little bit like the FDA drug market, right? It costs about $0.001 cents to manufacture a pill so the hefty price tag goes to recoup the money spent on drug research. Or does it? Yeah, selling drugs is a messed up industry...
posted in Startups by kumar on Sunday Feb 19th, 2012 at 12:28p.m.
In this article, a coffee shop entrepreneur laments a more "celebrity" entrepreneur who launched a similar startup but got more traction.
His conclusion: "The difference between the guy in the coffeeshop and the celebrity entrepreneur isn’t just press connections, money, and experience; ultimately it is this combination of factors."
I don't think this is true. A successful startup has very little to do with money and connections...
posted in The Future by kumar on Friday Jan 27th, 2012 at 10:07a.m.
At ORD Camp last weekend Ben Huh led a discussion about how we -- a group of geeks and artists -- can save the Internet. We won the fight against SOPA and PIPA for now but those laws will just sneak in through some other bill. Will wikipedia be there to black out again in protest? The fight is nowhere near from over and we have to get organized...
posted in Django, JavaScript, Mozilla, Python, The Future by kumar on Monday Sep 19th, 2011 at 2:50p.m.
Most people at Mozilla are remote so each quarter we sync up face to face as a group for an all-hands meeting. There are over 600 employees! We of course sync up in smaller groups more frequently but this is a chance to see what's going on across the entire Mozilla horizon.
So what's happening at Mozilla? We're on the cusp of a huge shift towards an open web platform. That is, something more than a web browser -- something you can run "native" apps on. There's a lot of work left to do, of course. Here is a random dump of interesting projects in the works...
posted in Mozilla, The Future by kumar on Sunday Jul 3rd, 2011 at 11:49a.m.
The release of Google Plus presents a unique opportunity to open up the social web. Why? Because it's a compelling product -- it's intuitive and fun with innovative features like circles, hangouts, sparks, etc. In many ways it's a clone of Facebook but that's just a reinforcement of what Facebook (and before that, Friendster) got right. If Plus continues to succeed then the optimist in me envisions this as a golden opportunity! ...
posted in Music, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Mar 30th, 2011 at 11:10a.m.
A few services have been popping up lately that let you stream music from any
computer or device (the so called "cloud"). Amazon just released theirs,
uncreatively named Cloud Player.
I'm pretty excited about this one because it's the first I've seen to actually
offer sane, reasonable pricing ...
posted in Mozilla by kumar on Tuesday Mar 29th, 2011 at 8:44a.m.
When I got my first Android "smart phone" it felt like a slow, hard-to-use computer
on dial-up Internet. Now I use an Android G2 (HTC Vision) which
I'd call a pretty snappy, easier-to-use computer. I can't say I do much on it
besides calls, texting, and Twitter but I'm excited that
Firefox Mobile has just been released. You'll need a newer Android phone (arm v7)
to install it and it's going to eat up a whopping 14MB (plus caching)
but, hey, Firefox is now mobile! ...
posted in JavaScript, Mozilla by kumar on Tuesday Mar 22nd, 2011 at 10:02a.m.
Firefox 4 has launched! If you want to watch the whole planet
upgrade in realtime head over to
glow.mozilla.org (built by @potch, @jeffbalogh, and others!).
If you haven't already downloaded Firefox 4 then what are you waiting for?
After that, join the twitter party by using the #fx4 hashtag in
your tweet...
posted in Mozilla by kumar on Monday Mar 21st, 2011 at 1:27p.m.
Firefox 4 is about to ship! And it contains a massive amount of
enhancements, especially UI enhancements, blazing fast JavaScript, and more HTML5. I'll probably write more about
these hot new features and how important Firefox is to the international
community but first, this.
In the next week millions of people will begin upgrading to
Firefox 4. A large number of them will be upgrading from Firefox 3 so
they'll be disappointed to learn that when you type a name or phrase into the
Awesome Bar it no longer takes you directly to the website you are looking
for. Technically this feature was called Browse By Name but most people
probably understand it as performing a "feeling lucky" search in Google. The
forums and support site are already filling up with complaints.
Don't worry! The feature was just disabled, it wasn't removed entirely...
posted in JavaScript, Mozilla, The Future by kumar on Thursday Mar 3rd, 2011 at 2:04p.m.
The Internet was invented so that data could be decentralized and liberated.
Well, so much for that idea.
With the rise of services such as Facebook and Twitter we are back to the
original mainframe problem: everything is stored and controlled by a central
authority. Ironically, today's "to the cloud" meme is making us depend
on central authorities even more.
So what about data privacy? In this centralized
model we go about our online lives constantly posting data to all these different
servers that we trust...
posted in JavaScript, Mozilla, The Future by kumar on Thursday Mar 3rd, 2011 at 1:08p.m.
Firefox 4 is near the end of its beta cycle but what is so special about this
release? Why not see for yourself on the new demo site, the Web of Wonder
(requires Firefox 4 beta but some demos do work in Chrome and Safari).
I'll be honest, as a web developer, the new power of HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WebGL, etc
totally blows my mind...
posted in Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Friday Feb 25th, 2011 at 2:57p.m.
Fudge, the python mock tool, goes 1.0! You can grab it with
pip install -U fudge or directly from PyPI. This marks the end of a
long incubation period where the community and I used Fudge in real world scenarios to see what
worked and what didn't. I'm sure there are many more improvements to make but as of
1.0 I'm very satisfied with what we've accomplished. This is thanks to its small but vocal community of users, to all contributors
and to everyone who pointed out flaws...
posted in CHIRP Radio, Google App Engine, High Performance, Python, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Jan 5th, 2011 at 10:56a.m.
posted in Django, JavaScript, Mozilla, Python, The Future by kumar on Tuesday Nov 30th, 2010 at 9:59p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Saturday Nov 6th, 2010 at 4:14p.m.
posted in Chicago, CHIRP Radio, Java, The Future, Whatever by kumar on Sunday Oct 17th, 2010 at 1:12p.m.
posted in High Performance, Testing by kumar on Monday Aug 9th, 2010 at 12:09p.m.
posted in Google App Engine, Python, The Future by kumar on Tuesday Jul 27th, 2010 at 1:05p.m.
posted in PyCon 2010, Python by kumar on Tuesday Sep 29th, 2009 at 2:16p.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Sep 24th, 2009 at 9:16a.m.
posted in Music, Whatever by kumar on Thursday Aug 20th, 2009 at 9:32a.m.
posted in Django, Python, The Future by kumar on Thursday Jul 16th, 2009 at 3:57p.m.
posted in Java, JavaScript, Testing by kumar on Monday Jun 8th, 2009 at 2:38p.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday May 7th, 2009 at 10:58a.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python by kumar on Tuesday May 5th, 2009 at 12:54p.m.
posted in Python, The Future by kumar on Monday Mar 30th, 2009 at 2:51p.m.
posted in Chicago, Pycon 2009, Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Mar 26th, 2009 at 1:23p.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Friday Mar 20th, 2009 at 1:21p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Tuesday Mar 10th, 2009 at 11:21p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Monday Feb 23rd, 2009 at 2:49p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python, The Future by kumar on Thursday Feb 12th, 2009 at 2:48p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Testing by kumar on Tuesday Feb 3rd, 2009 at 11:34a.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Monday Feb 2nd, 2009 at 4:14p.m.
posted in Chicago, JavaScript, Python, Testing by kumar on Saturday Jan 24th, 2009 at 3:53p.m.
posted in Chicago, Whatever by kumar on Sunday Dec 21st, 2008 at 12:51p.m.
posted in Python, The Future by kumar on Friday Dec 5th, 2008 at 4:41p.m.
posted in Chicago, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Dec 3rd, 2008 at 10:58a.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Monday Nov 3rd, 2008 at 4:16p.m.
posted in GTAC, GTAC 2008, Java, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Monday Oct 27th, 2008 at 9:36a.m.
posted in GTAC, GTAC 2008, JavaScript, Python, Testing, The Future by kumar on Saturday Oct 25th, 2008 at 9:06p.m.
posted in GTAC, GTAC 2008, Java, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Friday Oct 24th, 2008 at 3:58a.m.
posted in The Future, Whatever by kumar on Monday Oct 13th, 2008 at 11:04a.m.
posted in Presentations, Pycon 2009, Python by kumar on Friday Sep 26th, 2008 at 12:14p.m.
posted in The Future, Whatever by kumar on Saturday Sep 20th, 2008 at 12:56p.m.
posted in Google App Engine, Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Friday Sep 19th, 2008 at 10:44a.m.
posted in Django, JavaScript, Python, Ruby by kumar on Tuesday Sep 16th, 2008 at 10:18a.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Wednesday Sep 10th, 2008 at 3:05p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Aug 27th, 2008 at 10:26a.m.
posted in JavaScript, Music, Projects, Python by kumar on Monday Aug 18th, 2008 at 11:00a.m.
posted in Chicago, Google App Engine, Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Jul 31st, 2008 at 10:45p.m.
posted in Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Friday Jul 18th, 2008 at 10:51a.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python by kumar on Thursday Jun 12th, 2008 at 11:46a.m.
posted in Google App Engine, Python, Ruby by kumar on Monday May 5th, 2008 at 3:07p.m.
posted in Erlang, Python, The Future by kumar on Monday Apr 28th, 2008 at 5:56p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Tuesday Apr 22nd, 2008 at 10:54a.m.
posted in Google App Engine, Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Apr 17th, 2008 at 3:07p.m.
posted in Google App Engine, Projects, Python, The Future by kumar on Tuesday Apr 15th, 2008 at 9:55a.m.
posted in Chicago, Pycon 2008, Python by kumar on Saturday Mar 15th, 2008 at 2:06p.m.
posted in Data Mining, Python by kumar on Wednesday Mar 12th, 2008 at 4:49p.m.
posted in Python, Whatever by kumar on Wednesday Feb 13th, 2008 at 9:51a.m.
posted in ActionScript, Flash, JavaScript, Python, Testing by kumar on Monday Jan 28th, 2008 at 1:09p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Python, Ruby, The Future, Whatever by kumar on Friday Dec 21st, 2007 at 3:36p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Friday Dec 21st, 2007 at 12:45p.m.
posted in Chicago, Django, JavaScript, Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Dec 13th, 2007 at 4:45p.m.
posted in JavaScript by kumar on Monday Dec 3rd, 2007 at 5:32p.m.
posted in Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Monday Dec 3rd, 2007 at 9:46a.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Tuesday Nov 20th, 2007 at 2:02p.m.
posted in JavaScript, Presentations, Python, The Future by kumar on Sunday Nov 18th, 2007 at 11:58a.m.
posted in Chicago, Pycon 2008, Python by kumar on Wednesday Nov 14th, 2007 at 1:09p.m.
posted in GTAC, Java, Python, Ruby, Testing, The Future by kumar on Saturday Aug 25th, 2007 at 5:34p.m.
posted in Presentations, Python, TextMate by kumar on Wednesday Aug 8th, 2007 at 1:03p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Wednesday Jul 18th, 2007 at 5:10p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Tuesday Jul 3rd, 2007 at 10:12a.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Tuesday Jun 26th, 2007 at 10:31a.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Jun 21st, 2007 at 11:19a.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Wednesday Jun 20th, 2007 at 2:04p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Thursday Jun 14th, 2007 at 4:23p.m.
posted in Linux by kumar on Tuesday Apr 24th, 2007 at 7:48p.m.
posted in Projects, Python, Testing by kumar on Tuesday Apr 17th, 2007 at 1:31p.m.
posted in The Future by kumar on Wednesday Apr 4th, 2007 at 10:15p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Thursday Mar 29th, 2007 at 10:09a.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Mar 22nd, 2007 at 5:25p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Monday Mar 12th, 2007 at 2:32p.m.
posted in Python, TextMate by kumar on Thursday Mar 1st, 2007 at 2:31p.m.
posted in Pycon 2007, Python by kumar on Saturday Feb 24th, 2007 at 10:17p.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Monday Feb 19th, 2007 at 1:42p.m.
posted in Python, The Future by kumar on Wednesday Feb 14th, 2007 at 10:32a.m.
posted in Art, Chicago by kumar on Tuesday Feb 13th, 2007 at 10:26a.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Friday Feb 9th, 2007 at 10:12a.m.
posted in Chicago, Python by kumar on Wednesday Jan 31st, 2007 at 1:20p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Wednesday Jan 24th, 2007 at 5:10p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Wednesday Jan 17th, 2007 at 11:45p.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Saturday Dec 2nd, 2006 at 7:23p.m.
posted in Chicago, Design by kumar on Saturday Dec 2nd, 2006 at 3:40p.m.
posted in Python, Testing by kumar on Thursday Nov 30th, 2006 at 11:34a.m.
posted in Python by kumar on Wednesday Nov 29th, 2006 at 4:58p.m.
posted in Django, Whatever by kumar on Tuesday Nov 28th, 2006 at 9:25a.m.
