Today was my last day at Red Hat.
I’ve had a really great time working here, it’s an amazing place full of really smart people; and I will miss them all.
It was hard to say goodbye, but I’m excited about where I’m going.
Monthly Archives: February 2008
product, brand… strong like bull
I am often inspired by Timbuk2. I’m a proud owner of one of their laptop bags and oddly hope that one day it will break just so I can design a new one of my own. Of course I’ve had this thing for almost 4 years now and it’s not wearing through at any points yet.
Their web site seems fun, friendly and light; which I have always assumed reflects their corporate personality. Take for example their Product Guarantee, which covers all defects but…
If your Timbuk2 product is otherwise damaged in the course of normal (or abnormal) wear and tear, you may not qualify for our warranty replacement, but we’re sure you’ve got a great story to go along with the marks.
Even their gift certificates are fun and realize the strength of their brand.
Recently, in another moment of hip and fun attitude, they released the Macbook Air Sleeve.
sleeve link via the ever cool, metacool
Posted in Design
planet gnome campaign finance report
Recently I found that the Huffington Post is running a site called FundRace 2008, which allows you to view campaign donation amounts from certain people, areas, job types, or employers. According to their website:
FundRace makes it easy to search by name or address to see which presidential candidates your friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors are contributing to. Or you can see if your favorite celebrity is putting their money where their mouth is.
It gives you a google map showing the donors in the area you searched for. Originally created by EyeBeam here are the details:
All calculations are based on public records filed with the FEC of contributions by all individuals totaling more than $200 (and some totaling less than $200) to a single Republican or Democratic presidential campaign or national committee for the 2004 and 2008 election cycles.
FundRace is updated according to the reporting schedule set by the FEC. Public contribution data is geocoded using public U.S. Census Bureau data. Dynamic maps are powered by Google Maps.
Using Fund Race application I did a quick search of bloggers syndicated on Planet GNOME who I’ve seen write on American political topics somewhat actively. Here’s what I found from a small list of people I tried searching for.
Individuals
$2,300 to Barack Obama
$300 to Ron Paul
$1,525 to Barack Obama
$600 to John McCain
And here is an incomplete list of companies active on Planet GNOME.
Companies
$57,620 was given by people who identified their employer as “sun microsystems*”.
$19,389 to Republicans $38,231 to Democrats
$19,940 was given by people who identified their employer as “red hat*”.
$5,074 to Republicans $14,866 to Democrats
$15,803 was given by people who identified their employer as “novell*”.
$4,710 to Republicans $11,093 to Democrats
$14,340 was given by people who identified their employer as “VMWare*”.
$2,125 to Republicans $12,215 to Democrats
$518 was given by people who identified their employer as “canonical*”.
$268 to Republicans $250 to Democrats
Caveats
Obviously this is U.S. centric and these numbers aren’t complete. They require accurate census data and the person had to have donated more than $200 to a single campaign, not just $200 in total to multiple campaigns.
Further
I found this tool really interesting precisely because it allowed me to create a report of my little world of who and how much people were putting towards different political agendas. Are we democratizing yet? Of course some people had already actively promoted how much and where it was going.
Now you should do your own searches, please drop the interesting ones in my comments.
I do find it a little weird that real addresses are shown for each person but I can see how you need that information to determine if you’re looking at the correct person, I’m sorry if anyone is upset about that.
Now I have to sweep the cutting room floor
After I got back from my trip to India I had over 1100 photos taken in my 3 weeks out there. Many of which were not great photos, or multiples taken to get a single good shot. This past week I finally got about half way through editing all the photos. (Note to others, current libgphoto2 libraries seem to have a hard coded 1024 fixed file limit which was not easy to overcome)
So I’m up to Varanasi right now with still a lot to go.
Here are some of my favorites so far
our boat approaching candles in the ganges
corner of the baby taj
The Taj Mahal at 6am in some heavy fog
Sending the right message
Mozilla Messaging has been formed! And yes, that’s me in there; I’ve made a new home with Mozilla Messaging so look forward to much more talk about email, calendaring, and communication in general. 
Luis pointed out, the name born from MailCo is Mozilla Messaging, a change that I believe brings the correct focus to the coming efforts.
Since the launch I’ve been reading lots of different articles about the launch and the related comments following peoples opinions.
- lifehacker: What Do You Want to See in Thunderbird?
- slashdot: Mozilla Opens Thunderbird Email Subsidiary
- ars: Mozilla Messaging reveals plans for Thunderbird 3
- lwn: Mozilla Messaging Starts up Operations
- More Links at: Mozilla Messaging Launches
Here’s a mix of common threads I’m seeing from the comments.
- Polish!
- Calendar Integration
- Better Search
- Shared Calendars
- Better LDAP
- Conversation View (gmail mail)
- Archiving Support
- Encryption (make it easy and by default)
- Phone Sync (Address Book, Text Messages, Phone Logs)
- Better OS Integration (Windows, OSX, GNOME, KDE, etc.)
- Better Address Book
- Import Outlook PST, .DAT files
- Exchange Server Support
- Better vCard Support
- Taggging (ala gmail)
- Sync contacts w/ GMail, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.
- New Mail / Reply Templates
And a very common theme is for making Thunderbird FAST AND LEAN!!
All excellent directions to look into. But that is a big list of tough items to handle all at once. I’d like to take the approach of focusing on our core goal and iterating many of these pieces as they align and become defined by our progress.
Email… and Calendaring?
David Ascher wrote an excellent entry launching Mozilla Messaging which unveiled the current plans for Thunderbird. Many comments in his blog and other articles relayed a feeling that these new Thunderbird plans would lose sight of improvements that are sorely needed to bring regular email up to speed. When actually there is a short and medium term set of fixes that need to be done in order to get the regular email experience up to speed.
In parallel to those email fixes we’ll be working on a plan of improving personal communication. There’s no secret agenda in this communications plan we’re going to be very open, honest, and looking for lots of feedback. But it includes improving calendar support inside Thunderbird, not as an additional tool to download but as another way to help people Communicate Effectively and Get Things Done.
Getting Things Done
I’ve got to make a run to the used bookstores in Central Square and look for a copy of Getting Things Done. If that doesn’t work out I’ve added that to my wishlist just in case. But email is usually a thorn in my side, I get so much of it everyday like so many other people and yet I feel like I’m fighting the tide of emails instead of sailing the seas. I like the set of mental tools that the GTD book provides for not languishing in the meta and instead diving into the guts of things and I want to see that inside my email. I want to feel a sense of control over my email again, like I used to have when I first started using email so long ago.
Extensions and innovating beyond ourselves
Since there are so many ideas out there on how to improve communication, organize email, handle attachments, integrate calendaring, and more there is no way a small team will be able to prototype all these ideas; much less implement them all. This is where extensions have to come into play. The Thunderbird extension system has fallen far behind that of Firefox and it’s constraining our communities ability to innovate in an area where so much innovation is possible. Extensions allow everyone to try to fix this problem with email and communication and it creates a vibrant feedback loop where we can all benefit; but I’ll talk more about this later.
My starry eyed view of the future of Thunderbird is a fast and lightweight platform for wrangling all my electronic communication, a supported, active, and vibrant extensions community building cool new ideas on top of an extensible platform can be tried, tested, and rolled into future releases. The future is bright.
Posted in mozilla
agent of
change
In a difficult moment today I had to tell all my friends at Red Hat that I’m leaving after almost 4 years here. I’ve taken on a new position at a different company which should be announcing very soon… (tomorrow?). I’ll still be working at Red Hat until the end of the month, transitioning my responsibilities before I continue on. I’m really going to miss it here, especially all the people I’ve had the pleasure of working with.
I’ll be continuing to stay in the Boston area for a while longer, but the next stop is Vancouver, BC. That’s aboot all the news for now…
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