Posted 1 week, 1 day ago at 23:45. 0 comments
Mike Shaver and I met back in high school during the early ’90s. I took him under my wing and soon taught him the finer points of making taped announcements, how to drop a House of Pain remix on a crowd at *precisely* the right moment, and how to skip class to play cage basketball.
Despite all that, something must have clicked. Since high school, I’ve had the pleasure of working with him at four (!) separate companies. I owe my professional existence to Mr. Shaver, so I’m thrilled today to see him get a little back.
I raise my glass to you tonight, Mike. The handlebars are firmly attached to the bike now, my friend.
Current Tunes: Ananda Project - Cascades of Colour | Filed under Friends, Mozilla, Nostalgia
Posted 3 weeks, 1 day ago at 12:01. 4 comments
This post is primarily directed at my family, friends, and anyone who I’ve helped to install Firefox over the years. Hopefully my co-workers already know how awesome we are.
A new version of Firefox is coming out on Tuesday. Casual internet users may be asking themselves, “I already have a web browser. Why should I update to Firefox 3?” There’s lots of great stuff in Firefox 3, but several of the new features bear special highlighting for casual users:
Continue Reading…
Current Tunes: Casual, Rock Marciano, Vordual Mega, & Tragedy Khadafi - Think Differently | Filed under Build/Release, Family, Firefox, Friends, Mozilla, Software
Posted 2 months, 3 weeks ago at 11:23. 0 comments
Thanks to kev for coming over this past weekend to help me wire up my office for ethernet, and the rest of my house for phone. My office feels much less ghetto now, and it sure is nice to not be using wireless on my iMac any more.
Current Tunes: The Crystal Method - Blast | Filed under Friends, Hardware, House
Posted 3 months, 1 week ago at 14:07. 0 comments
My friend and co-worker, Mike Shaver gives a great interview over at howsoftwareisbuilt.com about just how Mozilla operates and what motivates us. I highly recommend it to anyone who’s had the misfortune of listening to me try to describe what Mozilla does.
Current Tunes: Dr. Dre - Deeez Nuuuts | Filed under Friends, Mozilla
Posted 6 months, 2 weeks ago at 01:56. 1 comment
Kev and I went to Pittsburgh last weekend to take in the Steelers game. We stared down the worst snowstorm in 60 years and said, “We’re too stubborn to change our plans!” This year’s pilgrimage was especially meaningful for me because I’ve been a Steelers fan since the early ’80s when the only NFL football you could get on TV in Canada were games that featured either the Steelers or the Cowboys.
We used to do this every year: pick an NFL team, preferably within crashing distance of someone we knew, and then go see a game. We’ve been stymied the last few years by the logistics of choosing a city and a time that worked for the 3 or so other participants that normally joined us in this venture. We were almost stymied again this year until Kev and I realized that the logistics for just 2 people were much easier to figure out.
Things that were reaffirmed to me this past weekend:
- If you can’t establish a running game, especially outdoors in winter, a) you suck, and b) you’re not going very far in the playoffs.
- Going to NFL games is a lot of fun, and a completely different kind of fun than going to CFL games or even hockey games.
- Traveling over the winter holidays for fun should only be attempted by trained professionals. Do not try this at home!
- Weather happens. Deal.
- Acting nice to airline staff gets you on to flights you might not otherwise get on. This works exceptionally well if the people in front of you in line try to blame the airline staff for the weather.
Kev and I will definitely be doing this again next year, and we’ve even picked a city: Seattle. As much as we love travel delays, we’ll be aiming for a game much, *much* earlier in the season though. Hopefully this will be enough warning for our slacker friends who were unable to join us this year.
Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago at 19:59. 2 comments
Today is preed’s last day at Mozilla. I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve written this blog post before.
First and most importantly, mad props to preed. We were both thrown to the wolves when Chase left, but by virtue of you being on-site, you had to shoulder the brunt of the build team burden. You held the team — and by extension the company and, dare I say, the project — together through sheer force of will in early 2006. It wasn’t always pretty, but stuff got done. You also set in motion many of the release procedure improvements and automation plans that are paying dividends now. Those of us who remain behind in the build team are profoundly grateful.
The build team is a much different entity today than when Chase left. For one, it’s actually a team now, implying more than 1 person. But have any of the other concerns Chase raised when he left been addressed? I personally notice a lot more Firefox hate in the blogosphere these days (I won’t dignify it by linking to it), much of it related to Mozilla not being open enough. Part of that comes from becoming a bigger target now in terms of market share. We’ve also grown concomitantly as a company.
Admittedly my perspective from inside the Mozilla corporation might seem skewed or Pollyanna, but I can now cautiously dismiss the opacity Chase saw at the time (and feared was endemic) to organizational growing pains. As we’ve grown, people who’ve traditionally had their noses in everything — Mozilla employees *and* community members — have had to learn to take a step back and trust the really smart people we’ve hired to do the jobs they were hired for. I think we’re doing a better job these days of keeping everyone abreast of what’s going on at a level that is sufficient to keep people from panicking that stuff is being dropped on the floor. That hasn’t been easy, and it does require a non-zero amount of effort from everyone involved on an ongoing basis to make sure that it’s always the case. Eternal vigilance, and all that.
We’re still incredibly small in a corporate sense, especially relative to the user base we are trying to support. We are also not perfect. It’s easy for people to take potshots at, e.g. Mitchell’s blog posts, but Mozilla is trying to do something no open source project has done before. People are right to call us out when we misstep (and there will be missteps), but you’ll have to trust me (and our track record) when I say that our heart is in the right place. We err on the side of being more open rather than less every single time it’s an issue and the community has a genuine interest or need to know.
We’ve lost some good people recently at Mozilla. It’s been very public and, at times, very painful. I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow…er, preed. There will be much sadness and scotch tonight, and not just because it’s a Monday.
It’s been a pleasure and an honor, sir.
Current Tunes: BT - Fibonacci Sequence | Filed under Build/Release, Friends, Mozilla
Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago at 22:07. 0 comments
Claire Madeline Shaver was born at about this time yesterday, and all involved are reportedly doing well.
I raise my glass to the 3 of you this evening!
Current Tunes: Michael Viner's Incredible Bongo Band - Apache | Filed under Friends, Parenthood
Posted 1 year, 2 months ago at 14:52. 0 comments
A pretty good indicator of where I am on the various adoption curves for internet technologies/meme-du-jours is what usernames are still available to me when I go to sign up. “Chris Cooper” is reasonably common as names go, so there is some degree of contention for the obvious contractions.
If “coop” is still available, I likely wrote the tool myself. Sometimes the tool is even named after me. If I end up with “ccooper,” I’m probably still ahead of the adoption curve, but tending towards the meaty section in the middle. If the tool in question start spitting out a suggested username with random combinations of letters like “chrisijcooper064,” I concede failure, and jump directly to “coopcoopbware,” which is a contraction of the wrestling name I was assigned in college, and as a username is rarely already taken for some reason.
Current Tunes: The Beatles - Glass Onion | Filed under Friends, Pop Culture
Posted 1 year, 4 months ago at 08:29. 0 comments
This morning was heart-wrenching in that “my son is growing up” kind of way, as Kristina started back at work and I dropped Will off at daycare for the first time. In honor of the occasion, and because I know Kris will need a little something to get her through the day, I’ve posted a little clip of Will laughing that we recorded this past weekend.
Oh, and for those who haven’t noticed the animated funkiness in the sidebar yet, I’ve begun posting pictures of Will to flickr. I haven’t abandoned the local gallery completely, but if I do it will Kev’s fault anyway since I saw the flash badge on his blog first.
Current Tunes: Ludacris - Stand Up (feat. Shawnna) | Filed under Family, Friends
