June 1st will be my last day at Mozilla. I’ve learned so much over the years working there, and choosing to leave was the hardest decision I’ve had to make. I do not intend to disappear from the project, however, but my activity level will decrease. Feel free to continue to send review requests my way and cc me to bugs you want my opinion on, and I’ll do my best to reply in a timely manner.

So long, and thanks for all the fish.

It turns out that SF has a lot of streets with the name of past Presidents, so we spent about six hours walking from street to street. It was a lot of fun though; the weather was great, the people were great, and we got an awesome walking tour of the city.

In order to pull this off, you’ll need to get a handy little application from the Application Manager. Under the Network section, look for “Bluetooth Dial-Up Networking” in the Extras repository. After you install that, you will want to restart your device. Next, pair your N900 with you laptop (this varies per operating system. I used Windows 7 and these instructions will assume that). After pairing the device, add a new Dial-Up connection on that modem. The phone number will be *99# and you will leave the user name and password blank. Save the connection, but cancel it when it tries to dial (it will fail anyway). Now, launch the device manager, and find the Bluetooth modem that should have been installed when you paired the N900 to your computer. Open its properties, and go to the Advanced tab and set the Extra initialization commands to at+cgdcont=1,"IP","epc.tmobile.com". After this, you should be able to connect to the Internet though your phone.

To prove that it works, I wrote this on the train, and I’m posting while still on the train. :P

I found this particular wiki page to very useful in setting this up, but I found translating the instructions to Windows 7 to be a bit difficult at times.

I’m supposed to put the “rules” here, so here they are:
Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you.

Taggers:

• Joe Drew
• Gijs Kruitbosch
• Joshua Cranmer
• Terry

(maybe more – I’ve been putting this off for a bit)

Now for 25 Things:

1. I love to learn new things.
2. I’m oblivious to a lot of things in life. Some people equate that to me not caring, which is mostly wrong.
3. I’m shy, but if you know me, you might think I’m lying.
4. At one point, I forced myself to not have an opinion on a lot of things. This is now pretty natural. It is how I reduce stress in my life (don’t sweat the little stuff). As a result, I sometimes say that apathy is my anti-everything.
5. I love my job. I really really do.
6. I have never been to a concert. Ever.
7. I only drink mixed drinks and wine. With that said, I barely ever drink.
8. I love to read Science Fiction, but never make time to go get a book to read. Once I get the book I tear through it though.
9. I have an incredibly strong inability to lie. My only defense is not answering a question, or omitting information.
10. I can’t cook. I’m working on fixing that.
11. When I was young, I wanted to be an astronaut. I even went to space camp. Yes, it was awesome.
12. If you ask me a direct question, you’ll get an honest and sincere answer. You may also not like the answer. Or, you’ll get no answer (see #9).
13. I like random. I try to do something random every day. Keeps me on my toes.
14. I always have too many projects I’m “active” in. I’m working on changing that to make my life more manageable.
15. I have officiated soccer since I was 12. I don’t know why, but I like doing it.
16. I love humor. I employ it as often as possible (goes great with #13).
17. I love running. I don’t get to do it often enough.
18. It’s easy to gain my trust, and it’s easy to lose it. Getting it back is near impossible.
19. I’m generally open about myself, but there are many things that I am extremely reserved about.
20. I am essentially blind without contacts or glasses.
21. I don’t drink coffee. This tends to surprise people.
22. I have been on fire. Literally.
23. I often say things without thinking. Hilarity ensues.
24. I’m not big on talking on the phone. This probably has something to do with #23.
25. I love living in California, but it’s made me soft when it comes to fluctuations in the temperature.

Now for the folks I’m tagging. List of names ordered randomly by my computer. For the record, 25 people is a lot of people.

• Rachel Brown
• Alex Vincent
• Ben Newman
• Nicki
• Mike Connor
• Robert Chitoiu
• Dan Witte
• Mike Haslett
• Heather Wilsher
• Courtney Brooks
• Stephanie
• Andy Cross
• Cesar
• Jason Wojciechowski
• Justin Scott
• Robyn Brooks
• Stevie Staeger
• fantasai
• Kate Jones
• Matt Martin
• Blake Kaplan
• Paul Hayward
• Emily Samuels
• Heather Widgren
• Matt Poling

(If you want your last name removed from my website, just let me know.)

That’s right! You can now selectively clear data from a domain (and all of it’s sub domains) with two clicks of the mouse! This tries to clear everything we know about a site, with the exception of bookmarks. There are still a number of issues pending with this to make it even more powerful (help wanted!), but as it stands, it’s pretty nice. I am, of course, biased.

All this work made it in for Firefox 3.1 beta 2, but I’ve been lazy and am just now getting to it.

Click to see full image

Clearly, I write a lot about Mozilla, and as of late, performance has dominated that topic. It’s funny, because some time this week I was going to write another blog post about performance too…

Side note: It’d be really cool if someone made a WordPress widget that generated this.

Let me know if anything seems broken…

During today’s platform meeting, a great debate started about when we should branch for Firefox.Next. We had originally planned on branching roughly three weeks ago, but we are a bit behind schedule. It turns out this hurts our mobile efforts since the tree is essentially under lock-down, and has been since when we intended to branch. Folks on the call were arguing when would be a good time to branch, with suggestions ranging from now, to (I believe sarcastically) a month or two from now. Branching now means a lot of people have to land patches to bugs to both branches, and branching later means life is painful for mobile for even longer. It was clear to me that we weren’t getting anywhere with the argument and people were just digging into their positions, which is when I decided to do something a bit crazy. This quote from the backchannel chat sums it up nicely (thanks to whoever submitted it as I now have a record of my insanity). Essentially, I’m landing a bunch of patches to make a lot of other folks’ lives easier over the next few weeks or so. Here’s hoping I don’t keep taking steps to further my madness!

This does mean that I’ll be around online Thursday and Friday this week if you need to get a hold of me.