Seth Wagoner’s Blog – Covering Interesting events in his life and our times.

Some good news. Lazarus Form Recovery, our little side project, has risen through the ranks and joined Interclue on the AMO “recommended list” – probably the highest accolade available in the world of browser add-ons, apart from perhaps a glowing review in the Mossberg column, as our colleagues at Surf Canyon recently achieved.

The AMO directory (addons.mozilla.org) is linked directly from the Firefox Tools|Add-ons menu, and add-ons from the recommended list are even featured within the browser itself, so the 30-40 add-ons on that list do get a lot of exposure, and having two in there at once really is a great honor, given how many they have to choose from.

I’ve been asked a few times how we managed it. The short version is in both cases I wrote to Mozilla and explained how our addon met their criteria for recommendation, which you can read at the bottom of this page, and not long after that they were recommended. So it’s really about having the right sort of add-on and the right sort of reviews, rather than doing much in the way of lobbying or cajoling.

Most of the credit goes to Karl, who put a lot of effort into making Lazarus almost flawless. My only significant contributions were the original concept, a few innovative implementation ideas (eg asymmetric encryption to get around having to enter a password), and letting him avoid our Interclue todo list for a month or three. It took a while longer to get Lazarus right than we expected, there are a bunch of edge cases where form recovery is hard, but we felt it was worth chasing them all down so we could honestly say “Never lose anything you type into a web form again”.

Part of the Interclue Manifesto says “We will never stop looking for more ways to increase the value of the time people spend online.”, and certainly being able to recover hours of typing that otherwise would have been lost has increased the value of my time online, and from the ecstatic reactions we’ve gotten from Lazarus users, I’d say we haven’t strayed too far from our core mission.

Here are some snippets from Lazarus reviews on AMO:

I guess that means they like it :-)

It’s also gotten good feedback from tech bloggers who picked up on it. Not a lot of mainstream attention so far, probably because I haven’t contacted any of them, but hopefully that will come with time. Hey Walt, about that column of yours….

While recently the precise definition of “torture” has been a hot button issue in the USA, I have just been reading about another form of cruelty that will hopefully one day be abolished by the Supreme Court, and that is the sentence of “Life without possibility for parole”. Having read the harrowing tale of Kenneth E. Hartman, it seems clear that the death penalty is probably a more humane sentence, which is really saying something. This isn’t a short blast of utter terror like an execution or being waterboarded, but rather an unending daily misery that lasts for decades.

Personally, I’d rather be waterboarded, despite having also recently read the harrowing tales of Mancow Muller and Christopher Hitchens, two pro-Iraq-war commentators who stepped up to the plate and found out for themselves exactly what Waterboarding is like, afterwards reluctantly declared they were in no doubt that it is torture, and although they certainly didn’t say it, effectively concluded that certain members of the Bush administration are liars and war criminals.

There are unlikely to be any conservative pundits imprisoned for life without the possibility for parole anytime soon, but I’m sure if there were, and they still had the ability to get published, they would be arguing just as vehemently that this much slower form of torture must also be abhorred and abolished by any decent and humane society.

The only good thing about LWPFP, vs actual executions, is that it leaves a small chance that these individuals may eventually be released and rehabilitated by a more enlightened America after a change in the law, which surely seems a little more likely now Obama is the one nominating replacements for the Supreme Court.

Last night I had the pleasure of presenting at the 5th Christchurch “Pecha Kucha” evening, where I was invited to present 20 slides for 20 seconds each on my subject of choice. I chose “Pimping your Firefox”, and although it was a bit of a last minute effort to pull it all together, I managed a fairly good 6 minutes 40 seconds judging by audience reaction. Pretty sure I made a few Firefox converts as well, as my first 8 slides were mostly dedicated to explaining why you should be using Firefox if you’re not using it already.

The 3 big reasons I gave were (1) It’s way faster than IE (with IE8 that depends on how you measure it – but Firefox is certainly much faster for highly dynamic sites) (2) It’s the safest browser available, and (3) there are over 5000 free addons available to help you “pimp it” to the max. I also talked about Firefox being an open project and the fact that you could, in theory, fix any bugs you find yourself (I could have spent another 6:40 explaining why this almost never happens in practice, starting with the fact that unless you’re an expert, you’ll never be able to tell what is a bug in the browser vs a bug in the page markup, webserver, or network services).

My next 11 slides were mostly dedicated to the various types of Firefox add-on that are out there, and on the last one I promised to post links to all the examples I used, so here they are:

Foxtab: See all your open tabs in a coverflow like visualization.
Personas: Radically pimp the look of your browser without even needing a restart.
Foxclocks: A world-time clock in your status bar.
ReminderFox: Tasklist with alarms etc.
Trashmail: An addon that lets you use a different (disposable) email address for every website you visit (we recently redeveloped this for Ferraro Ltd in Germany)
Flagfox: Information about the web server for this webpage, starting with a country flag icon in your status bar.
Interclue: Our flagship; tells you everything you want to know about a link before you click (ok, maybe not everything, but we’re working on that).
Lazarus: Our first major side project; securely & privately auto-saves content as you type, so you’ll never lose anything you enter into a webform again.
SimSidekick: Fun animated Sim-companions for your surfing, who do whacky things when you visit various “cool” sites on the net. We redeveloped the addon version of this for Freestyle Interactive, who built the no-addon-required version for their client EA, as part of what (I suspect) is the largest game marketing campaign of all time (for the Sims 3, of course).
Firebug, every web-developer’s must-have addon.
Zotero, the academic’s add-on of choice
Adblock Plus, the addon installed by over 50 million Firefox users, strips the ads from your webpages before they even get a chance to load.

My thanks to Vanessa Coxhead from Pecha Kucha Christchurch for the invitation to present, and for helping me sort out my slides at the last minute. If you’re in Christchurch and have something you want to talk about with 20 slides for 20 seconds each, I’m sure she’d love to hear from you. If you’re somewhere else, just google “pecha kucha YourCityName” and there might be one closer to home!

Ada Lovelace was the world’s first programmer, writing code for a machine that never got finished, the Babbage differential engine. She died far too early at the tender age of 36 – the same age as her Father, Lord Byron. Today is her day, and to celebrate it over 1500 bloggers, including this one, pledged to blog about one of our Tech Heroines on this date[1].

I’ve found it really hard to pick only one Tech Heroine. I know so many of them. But you’re supposed to just pick one for Ada Lovelace Day so I’ll do a follow up post later mentioning several other Tech Heroines I could have written about (and might write about for #ALD10!) Several of my tech Heroines I know personally, but I think for today I’ll play it safe and talk about someone I’ve never met but have always admired: Gina Trapani. As a promoter of how software and technology can improve our lives, she is a first class Technoprogressive, and worthy of great thanks and praise.

Many of you will know her as the founding editor of the uber-famous (well, in tech circles) Lifehacker, a phenomenally successful blog covering tips, tricks, software and sites that offer a multitude of ways to improve your workflow and lifestyle. Sadly, the sheer number of suggestions forced me to stop reading Lifehacker a while ago – chasing up all those potential speed improvements wasn’t helping me get anything done in the short term! I’m looking forward to achieving a somewhat more measured pace of life improvement from reading Gina’s new blog; Smarterware.

The fact that so many of these posts were of good value, and the fact that Gina was churning out a dozen or more every day, day after day after day, is certainly a Heroic feat in my opinion. I don’t think I’ve managed a dozen blog posts inside a single month, let alone in a single day.

While researching Gina’s life (a remarkably easy task, given how much she has written or had written about her in the last decade), I discovered an article that mentioned the genesis of Lifehacker – it turns out she was already working for Nick Denton as a coder when he bought the domain name, and her enthusiasm for the what could be done with it made him offer her the editor job on the spot. Many will realize this was probably one of the best HR decisions Nick made in his life, and it has to be said he’s made some good ones in his time.

“The one blogger I wished we had landed at Weblogs, Inc. was Gina Trapani from LifeHacker. I tried every two months for a year I think… no offer was good enough. Very, very frustrating.” – Jason Calacanis

To go from being a full time professional coder (with a pretty impressive resume) to being a full time professional writer is no small feat. Both involve using a keyboard and your brain – after that the similarities start to die off pretty fast. So that’s another reason Gina is a Tech Heroine.

I was actually aware of Gina well before she started Lifehacker, in that she was one of the few girl geeks who was seriously blogging, and there was a time (pre-2004) when just running your own blog qualified you as being moderately cool. I looked in the WayBackMachine and discovered she’s been blogging since late 2001 – which makes her a serious early adopter. Here’s her first post.

Another reason she’s among my Tech Heroines is that she’s the author of quite a few Firefox Addons, and I would say she’s contributed just as much to the success of Firefox through constantly blogging about Firefox and Firefox add-ons on Lifehacker, and providing early examples of add-ons for people to learn from, as almost anyone who actually works for the Mozilla Foundation. They should give her a medal or something. One of the earliest “Top X Firefox Add-ons” lists features her app “About this site”.

For reasons that may not be immediately apparent, the success of Mozilla ranks up there with the success of Google, Wikipedia, and the W3C as reasons why the web is so damned useful today, as opposed to mired in a morass of crappy over-commercialized portal sites and walled gardens, so Gina’s contributions to the success of Firefox are no small thing in the world of Tech Heroism.

Gina has said that her book is one of the things she’s most proud of, so I really must get around to buying it sometime soon. [2] Her book is called “Lifehacker – 88 Tech Tricks to Turbocharge Your Life”.

If you can’t wait to get the book, or don’t feel like perusing thousands of lifehacker articles for your dose of wisdom from Gina, the interviews she gave to Tim Ferris and The New York Times should at least whet your appetite.

It’s not for nothing that in 2007 she was ranked 7th by Forbes in a list of 25 Web Celebrities, one above Mark Zuckerburg, the founder of Facebook.

Herein endith my tribute to Gina Trapani. To read about more Tech Heroines on Ada Lovelace Day, check out this huge list of posts, which is also available referenced by subject, and the locations of the bloggers writing about them!

[1] “Today” being a somewhat amophorus concept for me. Lets just stay I started this post on the 24th, NZ time, and will finish on the 24th, American time.

[2] My book reading has slowed to a crawl now the internet feeds me pretty much everything I need, but I make exceptions. It doesn’t help that book prices in New Zealand are at least twice what they are in the USA, if we’re lucky. This is another reason the internet is a great leveller – eliminating the edge once enjoyed by readers in large markets with better enconomies of scale. Imagine what it would be like if everything on the internet was priced differentially by where you lived, or you weren’t allowed to watch clips from an upcoming movie because it wasn’t available in your country….ok, bad example. Eventually the creative industries will realise how batshit crazy they are to do this to their international fans.

I spent the weekend with 150+ wonderfully intelligent, diverse and interesting folks at the 3rd KiwiFoo (aka Baacamp) event, held in Warkworth, north of Auckland, near the home of Nat Torkington and his wonderful wife Jenine, who co-organise the event with Russell Brown.

Kiwifoo is an “unconference” inspired by the orignal Foocamp in Sebastapol California. That means everyone participates and no-one knows what will end up on the schedule ’til you get there. There is no “audience” at an unconference (in this way it’s a bit similar to the SCA event I went to last weekend, but it’s the future, not the past that happens at a Foocamp). It’s also free, by virtue of the many sponsors, this year including Google (as always), Vodafone and Telecom (logos rarely seen on the same T-shirt!), InternetNZ, Catalyst, Silverstripe, Throng, Project X, Shift, and SMC NZ. [nb: will come back and add links later]. By necessity, it is invite only, but the good news is that Nat is now talking about running more than one a year, so there will be more chances to get invited. Alternatively, buy a ticket to Webstock, where many of the same people are going – the timing of Kiwifoo this year chosen carefully so they could invite the speakers Webstock paid to fly into the country! We didn’t get all of them at Foo, but those we did were *great* to have along.

The only bad thing about Kiwifoo is that no matter how much you do, you end up missing out on a lot more – there are 4-6 simultaneous session streams, and often you are torn between 2-3 of them or simply spending more time with someone new and interesting that you just met.

This year I attended some really enjoyable sessions on various diverse topics, including the Future of News, a session led by the formidable Julie Starr, who mostly managed to keep a lid on all the unruly journos in the room (not looking at anyone in particular). I was interested to hear that the pay rates at our major dailies are sufficiently low that most senior NZ print journalists are now independent – which doesn’t really surprise me.

On the other hand I was irritated I didn’t get to any of the economy/finance/banking sessions, which would have been really good since we had Rod Oram and Bernard Hickey at the conference, and if anyone should have a few clues on how well NZ is doing or going to do in the economic maelstrom of 2009, it’s those two. I did get to see them in action on the chosen saturday night debate topic of “Is New Zealand fucked?” (Rod: No! – Bernard: Yes!).

There were many folks I wanted to meet but didn’t, perhaps because a little more planning and a little less serendipity might have been required on my part, but the conversations I did have were superb.

eg (1) A chat with Ben Goodger over breakfast, (yes, that Ben Goodger), who told me some history of the Google Chrome project. One thing that surprised me was that they managed to keep such a major project under wraps until it was released. “We like surprises” was his comment on that one. Earlier on there was a valuable session co-hosted by Ben and Roc on the future of Browsers, which I intend to make a separate blog post about, adding some of my own thoughts with respect to user-scripting and other factors.

eg (2) Really enjoyed sharing a dram (or three) with Russell Brown and various other appreciators of fine scotch whisky. Russel had a very nice Springbank 15yo which didn’t last long, and I’d brought along a bottle of The Glenrothes Special Reserve, which was definitely my Whisky “find” of 2008, and folks agreed it was a very fine drop. It was sourced from the most excellent Whisky Galore, which has an excellent catalogue of whisky online for mail order purposes [and my birthday is October 2nd in case you were wondering :-)].

Most of the Public Address bloggers were there (at Foo, not necessarily the whisky table) including Emma Hart who just happens to be the partner of Interclue Senior Developer Karl Dearden, who was also there and having a great time.

Many folks asked how Interclue was going, and were impressed to hear that we’d racked up over a million downloads in the last year. Tim Norton was a bit shocked that he hadn’t heard how well we were doing, but I hadn’t exactly publicized that fact, partly because our download stats on AMO have been broken (alternatively reporting 0 downloads and over two million) and our internal stats are a bit off as well (but I roughly know by how much, and we’re almost certainly over a million at this point).

One thing I really should have done was type up a list of people I wanted to meet and things I wanted to see before I got there – it’s far too easy to miss rare opportunities, such as the chance to see a self-replicating machine in action, otherwise. I think the best idea would be to write down 20-50 and hope to achieve at least half, while allowing for as many serendipitous conversations and discoveries as possible.

I’ll blog more about Kiwifoo tomorrow! If you want to find out what other people thought, search for “kiwifoo” on twitter.