cd ./content/xul;
make;

and be done with it.

Unfortunately, for the reasons that are beyond my level of understanding, it never worked this way. Fortunately, the bits that you have to recompile are always the same so I created a small bash script that recompiles what I need plus the dependency:

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "$0" )" && pwd )"

cd $1 &&
make &&
cd $DIR/layout &&
make &&
cd $DIR/toolkit/library &&
make

Just place it in your build-dir and then:

./rebuild.sh ./content/xul

will do the rest

enjoy!

My last trip to China, where I had met with Mozilla community in Shanghai triggered me to write about it, so here it comes.

The Web

The Web is a virtual plane on which human interact. It’s an incredible and amazing plane which breaks a vast number of physical laws and, in consequence, economical laws, biological laws, psychological laws, and, maybe in a most profound way, social laws.

From the social perspective, the web changes everything because  it holds an unprecedented characteristic:

The Web almost fully neutralize three basic physical dimensions in which humans operate, and, if that was not enough, it also severely limits the fourth one – time!

Think about it for a moment, please. Isn’t it mind blowing that we’re here, now, as it happens?

Spatial dimensions

Things on the Web are equally “close” to each Web user and the “dimension” that is closest to replace spatial distance – connection speed – is just a temporary factor that is disappearing over the course of a few years becoming ignorable itself.

It may not be the first invention that reduces the eternal impact of spatial dimensions on human life – cars, planes, mail, they all contributed to the sense of the world getting smaller, but the Web just cut it off entirely. You have access to this text from each place on Earth at the very same moment and you can build meaningful connections with everyone on the planet using the same techniques we use to build connections with our neighbors.

The laws of physical proximity and its impact on our social life is being transferred onto the Web and suddenly everyone is socially close to everyone else.

Time

Similar shift happens with the fourth dimension. With mobiles devices, laptops, SMS, video chats, forums, and push&pull notification systems we’ve not only overcame physical distance limitations but we also built a plethora of technologies to store, in a lossless mode, every data byte transferred between human beings. Every piece of communication. Every smile, every word, every information, story or emotion that we manage to encode into any of the digital communication channels may be stored, multiplied, transformed and replayed forever.

Once again, the Web is not the first medium to do it, books, photographs, CD’s, vinyl and cameras where there before, but the Web brought it to the next level. Everything that manages to fit the web can be ripped of action-time limitation. It doesn’t matter when it happens, and how far did it happen. I can record my fingers typing this text and broadcast them to everyone around the world plus let anyone interested watch it in 100 years. All this interesting social/cultural/memetic implications about your daughter reading your blog posts from when you were sixteen kick in!

And the price limes is zero! It costs almost nothing and it will cost less and less! (making economy laws not fit anymore).

Physical vs. virtual

Hola, hola! – as many of my spanish fluent friends would say – but that’s all virtual. Yes, we removed spatial and time dimensions but only from information. Nothing changes in the realm of physical objects. No teleportation, no time travels, right? Right!

But information is the single most important tool in our social interactions and culture. I cannot copy my phone for free, or my water, but I can make million of copies of my thought or idea for free.

I cannot send my t-shirt to everyone on the planet, but I can send my 140-character twit. And from a social perspective the latter is more meaningful and has higher influence on my life!

It means I shape up my social life in a different way, for the first time ever I can ignore many of the limitations that physical world exposes on us without using funny pills, high-volume liquids and other home-made workarounds. It has massive impact on how can I group with like-minded people to work on projects that we find most interesting and it enabled the absolutely unique and phenomenal bloom of online communities of action like Linux, Mozilla, Wikipedia and thousands of others, small and big.

I’m pretty sure that philosophical, psychological, anthropological and social implications of those changes are more profound and yet to be studied, but let me leave you with this to bring my discovery.

Discovery – virtual artifacts of physical dimensions outlast them

Mozilla is special in the field. It’s maybe the most successful open project ever that has been growing since day one to the point where it is sustainable, meaningful, is successful in achieving most of its goals and is capable of transforming itself to maintain the position. One of it’s unique characteristics is its “hybrid” nature – non-profit community around non-profit goals successfully competing on a for-profit market with for-profit companies.

It means that more than other open communities we need to be aware of the existing center of gravity in form of a small group at the epicenter of the project that is able to make living out of working on Mozilla and hold power granted to them by the whole community to steer the project in the right direction.

And just like physical real force of gravity, this socio-organizational one impacts the dimensions by bending them. In our case, it recreates one artifact of the physical dimensions – perceived distance – and I believe that we have to be actively mitigating this bend.

While talking to people around the world, and to my colleagues from Mozilla who travel a lot, we all see the trend:

The further physically the person lives from the Western Europe/Northern America, the more the person feels that the Mozilla project *is* far away from them.

It’s fascinating that our brains recreate the spatial dimensions in our virtual/social map of our reality. Think about it. “Mozilla is“. What does it mean? Where do we locate it? Where is it physically? How far Mozilla is/happens from you? Further than your street? Closer than the war on the other continent? How would you locate it? Why would you need to locate it?

It’s not uncommon for our brain to build spatial representation of spatially-impaired reality. We do this for computer user interfaces (hence Firefox Mobile sidebars!), we do this for social connections (“this person is closer to me than the other“), we do this for emotions (“I’m attached to this book/music“), but we also do this for words! We cluster words together so that the word wardrobe and chair are close to each other while rose and flower will be in a different group further away.
And it has real world implications on how quick our brain can connect those words, recognize shapes and respond.  Think about it! Words! Spatial memory is fascinating and may have interesting applications on the computer UI design.

But here we are measuring distance from a virtual community of people that are connected via virtual reality. It’s against common logic that a person in Minnesota may feel further away from an activity between a guy in New Zeland and another guy in France that is being stored on the server in Iowa.

Unfortunately there are some implications of having a significantly sized center of gravity that makes our brain use artifacts of physical dimensions to measure the distance. I can think of several but things like – language, time zones, culture codes, are all spatially located in our brains, so when we see the same artifacts in the virtual world we may easily “locate” the virtual project in the same distance from us as those artifacts are.

Counterforce

It’s a tricky problem that cannot be easily solved by translation or cultural agnosticism that Mozilla is so strong in.

But I believe that we have to fight it because it’s an illusion.

It’s an illusion that keeps wonderful and talented people in China, Russia, Ukraine, and many other regions from making an impact on the web they care for, because they mistakenly believe that they’re far away from the project that represents possibly the shortest way for an individual anywhere in the world to shape up the possibly most important social tool in the world.

We can localize all resources, globalize and glocalize all activities, but in order to reduce the NA/Western European shift vector of Mozilla and closer represent how the World population really is distributed we need to break the illusion that Mozilla happens somewhere in a spatial reality and that there is a notion of distance.

Now, since Mozilla may be the first project ever to be big, open and on the web enough to experience it, it’s we who need to find ways to solve it!

Ideas?

Pontoon represents what, I believe, will be the future of web localization and I tried my best to rush it to the point where we will be able to verify if such an approach is realistic, but from there, I failed to find enough time to give this project the love it deserves.

Worry not, great ideas don’t perish, and it sometimes takes a vacuum to appear for a new leader to step in!

I had luck to drive Pontoon to the point where it attracted several souls from Mozilla community to keep pinging me, keep asking about it, and, what’s always the best result of an idea, to act.

In particular one gentleman, my long time friend from Slovenia – Matjaž Horvat, stepped up and took what was there, turned a crank, wrote some code, draw a mockup, moved pieces around, stitched it a bit, and probably invoked some primal magic to assemble new version of it, available here – http://horv.at/pontoon/.

He was able to take the source code to the next level and covered up the visual appearance and user experience zone which has been sorta ignored since we started and needed love. He was also willing to jump in and join me and we’re lucky enough to get Mozilla backing for this project which resulted in Pontoon having a new leader!

I’m proud to announce that I’m stepping down from Pontoon leadership position and Matjaz is taking over! I’ll be serving him as a mentor and a peer and I’m absolutely confident that the baby is in the right hands!

Please, join me in congratulating Matjaž!

You can also track his progress at http://horv.at/blog/ and on Twitter.:)

According to Michael Larabel Thunderbird will become the default choice for Ubuntu’s mail/newsgroup client! That’s a strong prove of progress that Thunderbird has made, and trust me, Ubuntu does not swap the defaults that easily.

Well, it now seems that we’ll have two of our products used as pretty important defaults in this most popular Linux distribution – Firefox and Thunderbird! (although we do have a strong competition for the browser slot).

Congratulations to the team working on Thunderbird!

Falsy Values is brought to you by the two people – Damian Wielgosik and Paweł Czerski – who made their way onto the Web Event Stage last year with their widely praised Front-Trends conference.

This year, they focus on hardcode JavaScript. This conference is not about soft disciplines, not about social science, it’s solely about hacking the modern Web.
With stellar workshops and talks, with names such as Douglas Crockford, Tantek Çelik, Tom Hughes-Croucher and our homegrown stars like Kornel “porneL” Lesiński, it has what it takes to be the powerful event to be at.

Now, such an event is not going to happen on its own, it takes passion, dedication and the one thing we all should value most – time – to shape it up and deliver.

One of the unique features of this conference is that it really is handmade by those two fellows who work 24/7 right now to plug all the cables in the right slots, bring supply to the tables and speakers to the microphone.

All hands on deck!

As you may have guessed from the title – we believe we could use some help during the event itself!

If you’re located in Warsaw, or if you will be here for the time of the event, and you’re looking for a chance to participate in what’s going to happen there, help us make it perfect, learn the unique lesson from behind the scenes, here’s your chance!

We’re looking for geeks who seek experience in helping us run this event. Several brave souls to support speakers, guide the crowd through the agenda, run fiercely to aid some brother in JavaScript arms who’s in danger of any kind (like – you know that moment when your WiFi doesn’t work?)

We expect you to be there with us (even an hour before the opening), assist when needed and enjoy the conference. We offer an opportunity to learn, gain experience and help us make the best event in the JavaScript world since Brendan invented this monster!

Get in touch with us! Email me (gandalf at mozilla dot org)  or contact Damian and Paweł directly and we’ll go from there. Hurry up, we only have 5-7 slots available!

Here are three things that constitute a milestone for me and should make it much easier to test and play with the features of it.

Toolbox

Toobox guides you through the examples of various localization scenarios and how L20n solves them. It blends incremental learning of features available to both developer and localizer. At the bottom it contains several more complex example that should rarely happen but constitute the latter part of Pike’s “easy things easy, complex things possible” mantra.

XPCShell tests

It’s a small (two at the moment) set of tests that run l20n code. It’s a great start point to play with how the library works and how the format works. You can adjust the compiled code, or the library code and see if it gives the expected result.

Live toolbox

What can be better than a toolbox for a geek? Yes. A live toolbox. A toolbox you can not only read, but one that you can actually touch, change, hack on and see the result live.

It’s a hack itself, so don’t be harsh pls, but it does the job. I even included a set of 7 examples (example1 to example7) that correspond to what you can find in the Toolbox. Feel free to modify the L20n code, see if it compiles properly, play with the compiled code, change the HTML or JS and see the results live!

Also, if you encounter a bug, you can save your code and send it my way so that I can investigate it. The compiler is just an initial approach, and a moving target right now as we still don’t have a finalized JS structure schema, but it works for most simple and medium complexity cases, so I’d say it’s ready for you to play with it!

Next steps

Now, that we have Firefox 4 released (yay!), and mozilla-central is open again, I hope to work on landing the initial set of L20n Gecko bindings which requires some updates to the patches themselves first. With that part, we’ll be able to start investigating migration away from current DTD/properties format into the wonderland of L20n.

One particular plane on which it’s pretty visible is localization as we’re involved in almost every aspect of the release, every little detail, every step of the product release, every engagement campaign and of course in every bit of discussion about the state of the web that happens in our respective countries.

The story

As an organization that has glocalisation imprinted on the very fabric of its universe, we always feel responsible for making sure that everything we do is localizable, so that our communities around the world can translate and adjust everything that Mozilla project creates and use it to promote the Mozilla mission in their regions.

That’s easy to say, much harder to do. Especially as we grow, and the number of projects that we touch goes up. Firefox 4 release brings an unprecedented number of web projects that are part of our push to make bring the web to the next level.

Those projects vary from HTML5 demo sites, through Mozilla Developer Network Demo Studio, social web projects for twitter and facebook, web games to new Mozilla Foundation campaign – Join Mozilla. In total, I believe, we’re preparing 12 separate projects that we call “special projects” that are going to more or less closely accompany Fx4 release (not to mention Firefox 4 l10n itself, and our major projects like SUMO, MDN, AMO).

Each of the projects is very different and unique, uses different set of technologies and is embedded into different environment and yet we need to unify it for our localization community so that they don’t have to learn how to localize each of them separately.

Given the usual amount of challenges multiplied by 12 different setups it could have been a mess and it should have been impossible, but thanks to a great work done mostly by Staś Małolepszy, our team of l10n-drivers unified the experience as much as possible and localizers are right now doing an amazing job by bringing those special projects to every corner of the Earth, to billions of people.

Below is a summary of what happens there.

Pre-process

First, Staś or me, we’re talking to the team that is working on the project, and we make sure that the UI of the project will be localizable and the technology makes localization possible. Then we work side by side with the developers of the project to make sure that what they code is internationalized basing on the excellent documentation of such process prepared by Staś.

Once the code is done, we’re analyzing if everything is localizable, and if the design is flexible enough to allow different forms of text to fit (longer strings or right-to-left). We also lobby for the “string freeze” to happen early enough to give localizers enough time before the release. At the same time we work with our webdev and IT teams to ensure that we will have stage servers that localizers can use to test their work and infrastructure in place to bring the latest translations live on the stage.

Finally, when we have the code, we’re string-frozen, we have the strings exported and the stage ready to be used, we post a message on the mozilla.dev.l10n.web newsgroup to announce the localization phase.

Localization

And that’s when the magic happens. From the moment of the announcement, we’re collecting “opt-ins” from our local communities interested in the given project. We even have a special app for that – “webby”. When they opt-in, we add their locale to Verbatim and we just sit there and wait with our jaws on the floor as the red bars turn into green, project by project, locale by locale.

It’s amazing and humbling to see how much energy and excitement is being generated around those projects. How people want to be part of the process of making those projects possible, and how eager they are to spread the messages across the world.

As I write those words, there are seven projects alive, localized into tens of locales and each day we see more requests for opt ins. Today, we’re adding the next three projects and I already know that the same will happen. It’s pure magic that may happen only in places like Mozilla, and with a community like the one we built here.

Over the next weeks we’ll bring those funny, exciting, challenging and important projects to many places on Earth, and together with the Firefox 4 release in 73 languages, we will bring the web to the next level.

We’re not done yet, but I wanted to share my excitement and respect to what our localization community is doing right now as they juggle those nearly 20 localization project balls in the air with such a grace.

Kudos to you, friends! You’re the rockstars of the Web and I’m honored to work with you.

It can be downloaded from an addons.mozilla.org listing, and the source code is available at builder.addons.mozilla.org.

A few of the lessons learned and thoughts:

• builder is awesome, but it needs more real life users. A lot of bugs are only reproduced after you write your extension for some time, hundreds of revisions etc.
• AddonSDK is excellent for this kind of extensions. It has everything you may want and makes the whole code extremely clean and simple to write and maintain. Just look at it – about 50 lines of core code – your cat could read that.
• AddonSDK needs more real life users. Like with the builder, bugs show up only when you really use the extension you created.
• AMO is an excellent developer friendly platform – it gives me a lot of satisfcators in a form of stats, and ability to manage my extension release process.
• AMO-builder bindings need more real life users. I felt like I’m the first to try to push builder based extension to AMO – many trivial bugs that can be only revealed if you try to go through the whole thing.
• AMO’s review/release process is excellent for the extension of the Old Days. It gives us a pool of high quality, verified extensions, that are easy to find and safe to use. It does not work with agile development. Builder and AddonSDK makes creating ad-hoc extensions super simple and quick (literally, 2 hours and you’re done with the first version, every new version is about 15 minutes of work). When you then push it to AMO it feels like Matrix slow motion then – you suddenly wait days for a preliminary review, not to mention almost two weeks you have to wait for a full review. My last revised version is super old comparing to what I claim to be the “stable” one now

This issue requires a little bit of description. I do not try to say here, that what AMO reviewers are doing is wrong – quite the opposite, I believe the whole process is excellent and anything that is exposed to the millions of users should get some time to season and be tested and be reviewed. It’s just that AddonSDK/Builder gives you a totally different setup that fits different needs. I believe AMO will need a workflow for extensions that are created in 10 minutes, distributed in 20 minutes, updated 5 times during 4 hours and are becoming useless after one or two days.

Think of a conference where schedule is updated often and people have hard time to track it. Using AddonSDK/Builder you can create an extension for it in literally 20 minutes (xhr, panel, widget). AMO is excellent for distributing it, updating your users etc., but it requires very different approach than say, AdBlock or Firebug. Then, you add a feature (ability to mark the talk you want to attend and get a notification when its room/time changes) and upload a new version 15 minutes later. You want to switch all your users to the new one now. Then you fix a small bug affecting linux users, and update users once again.

It’s amazing that Firefox is becoming a platform where it is possible, and I can’t wait for such application for AMO

• AddonSDK requires a lot of users with their use cases. Myk’s approach is to iterate often which means to get version 1 ASAP and then add new features for version 2 instead of trying to build an ultimate solution without a release. I love this approach and it serves AddonSDK well, but now we need version 2 of many of the packages there – it can only be done if people start using the packages for a real life extensions and report what they miss. Like – Widget content cannot be easily themed. Or, you cannot control Panel’s scrollbar appearance. Jetpack team cannot plan for those use cases, they have to come from jetpack users. So be brave! Try things, report everything you need!
• There is a group of at least 500 people who deeply care about our release process. They’re ready to increase the amount of items on their screen to have a continuous updates on our progress toward Firefox 4. And it’s been just two days. It can motivate people to help, make them feel the sense of progress, help them understand the challenges better. It sucks outsiders closer to the inner circle. I believe we can do much more and the nightly users, mozilla planet readers and the audience of my extension deserve the chance to get more info which can help them start contributing!

It was a real pleasure and a good lesson to go through – simpleStorage, timer, panel, and contentScript communication stuff. I reported some bugs in the toolkit, in the builder and in the builder->amo release process. It’s all been fixed
The only real unresolved issues is that the widget affects the height of the toolbar. Reported as bug 626728.

So, 0.8 is ready and waiting, enjoy and fight that bug number down!

Source code as always available.

[update] Actually, Builder provided me an old version of my jetpack and I submitted it to AMO as 0.8. So now I added 0.9, but it has to wait to get a review – so if you want colorful plot, download it directly from here.

I was pondering through the planet mozilla and realized that despite great effort from our UX Team, Firefox 4 nightly does not show up the single, most important information piece about the state of my browser, it does not answer the question that our whole project is living now:

How many blockers do we have until we reach Release Candidate

Well, you probably can imagine everything from there – now, I present you the missing piece – Fx4 Hard Blockers Counter extension in its full glory.

Source code available.