Is Mozilla a Pure Metal or Alloy !!

I was reading a news item on Cnet.Com  related to Mozilla's quick release cycle quoting Mitchell Baker. Having had the privilege of working for Mozilla for some time, I ( like to think  that I ) understand the "atoms type"  that makes the Mozilla matter.

In fact, what makes an organization's personality / matter state ( or lack there of ) has a very interesting correlation to my other (ex) beloved field of study -- Many Body Interactions - in Physics.  In 1992 CE, when I got my Admission in to the Doctoral program in Physics I wanted to discover the fundamental equation(s) of many body interactions ( yeah .. I know .. I used to be a megalomaniac !! ) and I guess these days this is one of the best challenges, that many better people are trying to take on,  in the world of social engineering as well.

Here is the problem description -- When you start looking at atoms one by one, ranging from Hydrogen, Helium to Gold and Lead, most of them are basically similar and differ in atomic weight and number of electrons,protons etc., ( like fat people, tall people, lean people but all are people never the less ... )

When you bring a lot of Hydrogen atoms together, at some point it creates a new matter state called Hydrogen gas which suddenly acquires  its own personality ( material properties like specific heat, weight, viscosity etc.,)  When you bring together a bunch of Gold atoms, it creates a shiny metal that has color,weight, malleability,ductility and what not. Iron on the other hand has metal personality like Gold and also is magnetic.

So I used to wonder about what causes the union of a specific set of similar atoms to become gas or liquid or non metallic solid or metallic solid etc.,What is that magic number for a given type of atoms to enable the transition to matter state and how the matter's state is determined by individual atom's personality.

I tried to find that grand equation using which we should be able to figure out the final answer. I never found the answer but that is not the point of the story...

I am thinking that, Mozilla is  a collection of a tightly similar set of atoms that come together and that atomic specificity is deciding ( with a suitable size of assembly ) to shape the outcome of Mozilla's uniform matter state. On the other hand,   a suitable mix of different atoms also results in very useful outcomes (Like Copper+Tin+Zinc+Lead=Brass).

Neither state is a bad outcome. I personally prefer to see Mozilla  more like an alloy than a single metal type.

Managing right!!

Here is a wise tip I got from a good colleague ...

If you really want to grow to become a good manager ... Remember these unwritten milestones.

Fail to manage up , you will fail in three months.
Fail to deliver results, you will fail in six months.
Fail to manage team , you will fail in nine months.
Fail to manage peers, you will fail by next appraisal period.

I will double click on these points in due course.

William Gates III is a good teacher.

Bill Gates personal website http://www.thegatesnotes.com/  is a very interesting place to spend some quality time on.

In one of his book reviews titled "Life is what you make it"  on a book with same title, Bill Gates summarizes the core take aways of the book ...

To quote Gates """

In particular, Peter’s insights about the four core values he “absorbed” growing up in the Buffett home really resonated with me. They are:

• Trust in the belief that the world is fundamentally a good place and that all people, however, flawed, are—at the core—well-intentioned
• Tolerance for other people’s viewpoints and perspectives
• A passion for education—not in the traditional sense but as a way to approach life with curiosity and an openness to what others have to teach us
• A personal work ethic grounded in self-discovery and a commitment to finding something that you wake up every morning looking forward to
  
  """
   Gates Notes is fast becoming my favorite book mark. Have you been there yet !!!
  
  

Wars of next half century ...

It is already speculated by eminent scholars , economists and seasoned diplomats that wars in the second half of  21st century would be solely fought for water rights. Well ! little did they know that their predictions  would come true half a century earlier !!

Krishna and Godavari are two major water tributaries in southern India. There have been tribunals to manage the water rights for down stream states and upstream states and these tribunals have kept the peace intact for few decades up to now.

However, the upstream states have started building reservoirs with increasing heights in each decade and the down stream states are objecting to the same. One funny [ if not for the sadness of the reality ] side story in this saga has been that,  for most part, disputing states as well as the central government are usually ruled by same political party.

Right now!! as we speak  ... an ex chief minister of Andhra Pradesh [ equivalent to a former  Governor of a state in USA ] is being arrested and detained with his large entourage for trying to reach out to a construction site on the upstream Godavari  a.k.a  Babli project.  Who arrested him ? You may ask !!  The arresting chap is the chief minister of Maharastra which is the so called offending state.  Not only that, the police of Maharastra state have blocked all major commercial land routes between the two states and preventing traffic from crossing state lines ... in direct violation of constitutionally guaranteed fundamental rights !!  and what does the SCOIN ( supreme court of India ) does ? nothing !!!

On a separate channel, Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka which are again adjacent states have been fighting over water rights on Krishna Tributary.

On top of it, politicians from the same state don't mind flaring up tensions to score political points and to gain their 15 minutes of fame and cause mayhem to trouble the public at large.  If Maharastra CM wants to be tough, the out of power opposition wants to be tougher and same goes with opposition and in-power political party dynamics in Andhra Pradesh. God!! these power hungry megalomaniacs will start a   national disintegration process

Idiocy and Indian Politicians

In a stark display of political expediency and Idiocy ... the Congress led  Andhra Pradesh government in India has decided to rename Cuddapah district as YSR district. More details are here http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Kadapa-district-named-after-YSR/articleshow/6142491.cms. So, with a pen stroke, hundreds of years of history and culture of that region in AP is washed out to be referenced by YSR this and YSR that.

Granted that Mr.Reddy was a very popular politician and he was born in the Cuddapah district. Granted that he was killed on the job while he was chief minister but what the hell these politicians think when they make these kinds of irrational decisions. Its one thing to rename an airport or a stadium after a dead politician with the intent of currying favors from the party bosses..  which is what Congies do with out any regard for history and culture. Its a totally different thing to rename a region after a dead politician and denigrate the culture and history of generations up on generations.

What if another political 'Sottai' comes from YSR district in few decades and dies on job. Do they rename the district as Sottai district!!

What next ? Bihar renamed as BR Ambedkar State and Maharashtra renamed after Ambani !!

Some one should send this guy Mozilla Swag!!

Look at this article http://www.sutor.com/c/2010/07/ibm-moving-to-firefox-as-default-browser/  ....

To summarize  ... he listifies reasons why IBM use Firefox browser as internal standard

Some of the reasons are

• Firefox is stunningly standards compliant, and interoperability via open standards is key to IBM’s strategy.
• Firefox is open source and its development schedule is managed by a development community not beholden to one commercial entity.
• Firefox is secure and an international community of experts continues to develop and maintain it.
• Firefox is extensible and can be customized for particular applications and organizations, like IBM.
• Firefox is innovative and has forced the hand of browsers that came before and after it to add and improve speed and function.

While other browsers have come and gone, Firefox is now the gold standard for what an open, secure, and standards-compliant browser should be. We’ll continue to see this or that browser be faster or introduce new features, but then another will come along and be better still, including Firefox.

I think it was Firefox and its growth that reinvigorated the browser market as well as the web. That is, Firefox forced competitors to respond. Their software has gotten better and we have all benefited. We’ll see this again as Firefox continues to add even more support for HTML5.

Damn! this is a heart warming write up !!

Some one should send this guy Mozilla swag .

Congrats Mike Shaver!!

I was reading an article  about Apple's arrogance &  HTML5  here. I was  very disturbed that the stupid demo site of Apple actually wants me to see  it only in  Safari.  Frak you Apple! You suck !!

A paragraph that caught my attention when I was reading this article is as follows ...

----  Mike Shaver, chief technology officer with Mozilla, the open-source operation that builds Safari-rival Firefox, was less diplomatic on Twitter. Having difficulty suppressing my contempt for Apple's arrogant and ridiculous HTML5 positioning today,  he said. ---- 


No one could have said it any better!!


When I read that  sentence, two thoughts raced through my mind....


The first one was ... "When did Mike Shaver became the CTO?" 


and the second one was very stupid   ... and a funny but impolite thought ... some thing like my six year old daughter commenting on my Quality engineering experience or my programming skill set. 


The second thought that went through my mind almost parallel with the first one was ... " I'm out of Mozilla  for a little while and everybody gets to be a Jedi " ....   on the lines of the  dialog  used by Han Solo in Starwars Episode VI. 


I know this is an inexcusable thought knowing how smart Mike is and how much his contributions have made a difference to the world of open web and how 'utterly under-qualified' I am to think like that. But in the spirit of openness, and in the spirit of a "leaf commenting on the tree" ... I thought I will share it with my Mozilla friends ... 


Congratulations Shaver, if that article referring you as CTO was not a typo.  


I hope your level of involvement in Firefox do not diminish on a technical and day to day level because of your promotion. 

Bigotry, and Political Hypocrisy : A case study of India

"WE, THE PEOPLE OF INDIA, having solemnly resolved to constitute India
into a SOVEREIGN SOCIALIST SECULAR DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC and to secure to
all its citizens ...." was the proudest sentence that made me  pump my chest up as an young Indian and as an idealist who believed in a new era of secular governance.

Little did I know that Secularism in India is an euphemism for "screw Hinduism in any way possible!!" 

In my late twenties, when I was a software developer working in India, Andhra Pradesh government has started an ambitious project to widen the roads and construct fly overs on all  major traffic arteries of Hyderabad to make it ready for vision 2020.

In Hyderabad, it not uncommon to see 4 x 3 feet cement constructions that are wrapped in a green flag representing some Muslim scholar's grave ... smack in the middle of a busy two way road.    If and when a road widening project or fly over construction is required to level such structures, not a single official or politician dare to touch these Muslim religious/memorial structures. No one dares to touch or bulldoze a boundary wall of a christian church or Muslim grave yard. But if it is a Hindu construction, they don't mind to relocate it to some other place. And all of this is done in the name of secularism.

About 500 years ago, one of the greatest south Indian Hindu kings, Krishnadeva Raya of Vijayanagar empire ruled most of South India. To commemorate one of his great triumphs, the king has constructed a seven storied grand entrance to an important temple of Lord Shiva who is one of the three primary deities of Hinduism. 

The AP government directly manages all the Hindu temples using a government board and those officials are experts at collecting the revenues and not channeling the funds back into temples' maintenance. As a direct consequence of this gross negligence, the 500 years old illustrious grand entrance to the temple of Shiva collapsed into a rubble two days ago.

If such a thing happens, heck , even if a crack appears on Charminar or any one of those Burial tombs of Muslim kings of old Hyderabad, all the hell will break lose. Same goes true for any Church as well. But, no one really cares about any Hindu temple or architecture. And, the bloody political class calls it "secularism".

 

Why you should not multi task !!

In my long career, it was not uncommon to see a bunch of engineers attending the Release meeting of Platform meeting or Product meeting with their laptops, fully immersed in their little worlds -- doing a 'body present - mind absent' routine. Well, in defense of some multitasking aficionados , they truly try to optimize on their time by attending a meeting as well as doing some thing else useful like .. say coding or chatting etc!!

In agile organizations, it is given that you always keep your eye on the IRC chat window, keep track of in-coming bugs, comment on relevant bugs, test/develop/plan etc.,etc.,

In my earlier assignment, one thing I did bad was, not being available in the IRC channel always. Even when I was on the channels, I did not pay much attention to the chat when I was busy doing my scripting/tooling etc.,

One thing I always tried to do was -- not to take my laptop into a meeting unless I needed it to present some thing or follow an issue on screen.

I suspect that some of my esteemed colleagues might have found my dislike for continuous multitasking as a short coming but ... that seems not such a bad tactic after all.

You don't believe me !!

Then please read this http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/05/how-and-why-to-stop-multitaski.html

Celik's entry at Mozilla ... about time!!

It was a good news to see (today) that Tantek Çelik joined Mozilla. Between Shaver, Jay, Celik and UI experts like Alexander Limi I hope Mozilla would make Desktop Class WebApplications enablment a first class citizen in the product strategy.

Should it  chose to accept ... Mozilla can really build kick-ass frameworks that would trounce the  Sproutcore like systems. But, knowing Mozilla and its mission, I don't  believe that would be a good enough justification to start such a project.

Mozilla does not believe in one-up-man-ship as a policy.

But, sooner or later ... the HTML5 based RIA world would become highly fragmented into many camps of looks&feels unless Mozilla like neutral players,  whose purpose of existence is -- to enable open and free web standards -- step in ... and step in sooner!! 

The worst day to look for ... is a proxy war between various rendering engines via HTML5 RIA generator frameworks.

VP8 and the future of Video in Circa 2015 or RIP H.264 ?

This blog post is neither  endorsed by Mozilla  nor represent their position. .. 

Few days ago I , Asa and a QA manager  were having a spirited discussion during a coffee break. It was few days before the Google I/O and before the world knew when and how Google is going to make the open source announcement of VP8 codec.

So, I asked Asa why should VP8 be successful other than the fact .. that it is backed by Google.... ( God knows, should it chose, Google can make even my dead Grandma the most famous person in the world !! ).

We had a long technical discussion on how Theora  / VP3 is a better codec at crappy bandwidths and how VP8 gives a better cost per bit performance over H.264 under majority of  pro-sumer video/web-video scenarios etc.,

But the point that caught my attention is that there is an excellent business reason why VP8 would become a dominant player and take over the lands ruled by H.264... (This is in addition to the technical and vendor support reasons ... )

The H.264 is a technology based on a bunch of patents owned by many companies including Apple,Microsoft etc., so for an individual to acquire H.264 license, it would a pain in all places to obtain licenses from multiple patent holders. So, all these companies patent pooled and delegated the job of H.264 licensing to a single vendor,  MPEG-LA,  who would become a one stop shop to dispense H.264 license and then distribute the proceeds on a pre-agreed basis to all patent holders minus its service fee.

Even though Apple is part of MPEG-LA consortium, it still needs to get a license to use H.264 in products it sells. So, when it pays a dollar to acquire a  license, it goes to the MPEG-LA and say,  Apple gets 10 cents as profit sharing from MPEG-LA when they do their books.

In effect, Apple payed a total of 90 cents to acquire H.264 license instead of the full dollar. So, it still fraking losing money every time it need to acquire a license. Same goes for all other companies in the consortium that use H.264 in their products portfolio. Only those companies that hold patents in the H.264 pool and do not make any products using H.264 get a true profit from the MPEG-LA bounty distribution.

So, what would be the reason --  why Apple or Microsoft would not switch to VP8!! Nothing !!!

Or, they can force MPEG-LA to come out saying they don't charge any thing for H.264 for next 20 years or some thing like that ... effectively making it a free codec. This would be  a questionable outcome if the only-profit-taking-partners object to it.

So, if I can look into the crystal ball ...  come year 2015, MPEG-LA may not have lot of chips on hand to play any video codec game. Either VP8 would become the most dominant player in video codec world and makes H.264 a bit player or hopefully, saner heads prevail at MPEG-LA and they would make H.264 an equally free and open source codec by that time.

Couldn't think of a better recent example of market economy creating a winner in the field of Web Video technology.

Leaving Mozilla very soon ...

After a long and fruitful consulting assignment with Mozilla, I am moving on to take up a full time position at Yahoo!

May 21st is my last working day at Mozilla. I aim to remain a committed and useful volunteer for the cause of open web and open standards and hope to continue my association with the good folks at Mozilla.

Getting a grip on multiple test run results ..

With more than 150K tests run with each check-in and at approximately
100-120 checks-in a day ... there are a tonne of test results out
there for any one to get a grip. Every engineer checks the test run
results of their putbacks and some people go through all orange and or
burning builds.

So, we have set-up a display dash board  to enable every one to
know every thing about every failure from every run .. ( lot of
every's). Here,  you can see the following.

What are the latest test failures across all runs on all platforms ?
What are the TOP failing tests ?
What are the total tests that have been failing in the timeline that
we have captured ?

We also provide  direct links to easily navigate to a test failure log
to build log to putback data. This of course  is in addition to some
nifty time-line graphs for each test failure.

So, without further ado, we would like to present the following URLs
for your kind perusal ...

http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/
http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/topfails
http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/tests

and a sample failure timeline

http://brasstacks.mozilla.com/topfails/timeline?name=automationutils....

Success!!

True success is some thing that you never need to announce your self!!

--Murali Nandigama

Highest Value Extensions that are not yet created for Firefox

We are going to start a pet project very soon that would identify the most wanted Firefox extensions that are not yet available in the Mozilla Add-Ons website.

The feeder data for this project comes from the web analytics tool to see the most searched for add-ons on the AMO site and then the  modulo of the data with available add-ons would provide the answer.

Based on this information, many useful jetpack extensions or Firefox Add-ons can be created to fulfill community needs.

Let us hope that we all be made aware of community add-ons' needs and let us all work together to fulfill the gaps. This would be an excellent opportunity for add-ons contributors to directly work on fulfilling an existing add-on gap.

Please stay tuned for further announcements ...

Fancy Friday @ Mozilla

Mozilla Cananda office folks apparently have started a counter culture tradition few months ago. That is  -- to ask ( voluntarily of course ) the team mates to come dressed up  full fancy on Friday. Like in three piece suites, Top hats, Various cultural garbs  and what not !! Heck you can even come to office dressed like those Senator types !!



To Quote  the original folks  who started off all this  --

""" Fancy Friday in the Toronto office started off  as "Jacket Friday",
     a deliberate counterpoint to the "Dress down  Fridays"
     many of us remember from former, more corporate gigs """ 

[ Did you see my python geek-ism in the triple quotes ;) ]

However, Mozilla USA , for what it is ... is  a way cool place to follow those Corporate customs and we come to office every day in casuals. So, for the fun of it, some Mozilla USA folks have sent a mail yesterday asking us to ( voluntarily of course ) to start adopting our Canadian brothers custom of 'Fancy Fridays'.

So far, I have seen a Scottish traditional dress, multiple pin stripe suites and ties. couple of bling blangs and not many took up the offer ( mia culpa!!) with enthusiasm even though some nice folks offered free photo sessions in one of our conference rooms for all ...

So, in the true Mozilla spirit ... next Friday I would come to office in South Indian traditional dress.

Ideation vs. Innovation

Long time ago, I happened to watch a video in one of the 'leadership for technical managers sessions'.  It is called -- The power of vision : By Joel Barker.  It became  a great paradigm shifter in my approach &  management style.

Recently I happened to come across a powerful corollary to the Power of Vision and I am sure that it would be very helpful to you too ...


Simply put, it states that having a great idea is not a substitute for implementing one... and that creativity, ideation and innovation are three different things !!

This would be a great short read for any one who is interested to know more ..


http://www.sixsigmaiq.com/Columnarticle.cfm?externalID=634&ColumnID=11&utm_source=sixsigmaiq.com&utm_medium=SMO&utm_campaign=LINKEDIN&utm_content=2_3_2010&mac=SSIQ_LinkedIn_SMO_2010&utm_term=SIXSIGNET&shownewswindow=1

On being a US citizen

After a 11 years of residency in the USA, today I have taken the oath to become a US citizen and with that accepted all privileges, rights and responsibilities that come along with it. It is a good feeling to become a full member of society where I have been living from so long.The first thing I did after taking oath is to register as a voter so that I can vote in the upcoming California elections to vote 'YES' on the open primary measure.