May, 2007

Personal stuff / politics / The Internets — 8 Comments
23
May 07

this is supposed to be a good thing?

in yesterday’s Financial Times, Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO, says:

Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, said gathering more personal data was a key way for Google to expand and the company believes that is the logical extension of its stated mission to organise the world’s information.

Asked how Google might look in five years’ time, Mr Schmidt said: “We are very early in the total information we have within Google. The algorithms will get better and we will get better at personalisation.

“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”

that doesn’t seem like a particularly good vision of the future. in fact, it seems sort of blade runner deterministic to me. grim.

for some reason, made me think of the Sports Night episode where they kept talking about something bad but indescribable coming:

Dan Rydell: Eli’s Coming.
Casey McCall: Eli?
Dan Rydell: From the Three Dog Night song.
Casey McCall: Yes?
Dan Rydell: Eli is something bad, a darkness.
Casey McCall: “Eli’s coming. Hide your heart, girl.” Eli is a inveterate womanizer. I think you’re getting the song wrong.
Dan Rydell: I know I’m getting the song wrong. But, when I first heard it, that’s what I thought it meant. Things stick with you that way.
—-
Dan Rydell: They say it’s always calmest before the storm. That’s not true. I’m a serious sailor. It isn’t calm before the storm. Stuff happens.

Weblogs — 2 Comments
22
May 07

akismet is fantastic

i have to say that since turning on askismet for blog spam filtering, life’s been great. it’s from automattic, makers of wordpress, and it’s just fantastic at dealing with all the blog spam. couldn’t be happier with it. between that & wordpress stats, automattic/wordpress.com is aggregating all the usage information from my blog & others, but it’s a fair trade for me, at least.

Personal stuff — 7 Comments
21
May 07

might be over-caffeinated

diet coke plus

huh — i just looked at my desk & realized that i’ve had 4 diet cokes & 3 coffees today. i think i may be drinking too much caffeine. starting tomorrow, less.

oh, and i have to mention that i find diet coke plus hysterical. it’s diet coke, fortified with vitamins! just like lucky charms.

we all knew it would happen — just another step on the long road towards being able to survive on a complete diet coke diet. and that’s just another step on the way to diet coke becoming sentient.

the downside of getting 15% of your daily recommended allowance of zinc, of course, is that it tastes like you’re drinking a can of diet zinc coke, which is approximately as tasty as it sounds. they use ace-k to cover up the metal taste, but licking zinc is a tough one to cover up.

Family / funny — Comments Off on that’s my boy
18
May 07

that’s my boy

TEMP-Image_2_20

for some reason, he loves gardening gloves (even while napping). goofy kid. 🙂

Mozilla — 21 Comments
18
May 07

growth around the world

We have a few things we keep an eye on here at Mozilla — one of them is where in the world our users are coming from — or, more specifically, what language version of Firefox they’re using. In particular, I’ve been watching this lately because the % of our users using the en-US (English, United States version) has been right at 50% for a while — and yesterday, for the first time, it went under half, to 49%, which means that we no longer have an English/US majority of users — and, in fact, have no particular language that’s in the minority. (In truth, our en-GB — English, Great Britain — version accounts for about 4% still, so we’re still English-language in the majority.)

This represents a ton of hard work by communities around the world — obviously our German & French communities are exceptionally strong as well, with the rest of Europe also making gains. Brazil is our most significant user population outside of North America & Europe, followed by Japan. But the fastest growth is coming from “other” — our long tail of languages. I’ll grab some more information over the next few weeks to talk about growth rates & what composes other, but thought I should highlight this milestone now.

I’m very proud of Mozilla to get to this point, and think it shows something very special about the global nature of what we’re up to.

Picture 2

  • en-US (English, US) 49%
  • de (German) 13%
  • fr (French) 7%
  • es-ES (Spanish, Spain) 4%
  • pl (Polish) 4%
  • en-GB (English, Great Britain) 4%
  • pt-BR (Portugese, Brazil) 3%
  • it (Italian) 2%
  • ja (Japanese) 2%
  • other (everything else) 12%

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