Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2008/02/29

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 29, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The GNOME Foundation announced the GNOME outreach program for accessibility, which the Mozilla Foundation helped fund. CAs and related issues I gave preliminary approval to the application from VeriSign to add a new EV-capable root (bug 402947). I also worked on EV-related applications from Comodo (bug 401587), GeoTrust (bug 407168), and thawte (bug 407163). Public communication David continued work on various www.mozilla.org-related tasks. Conferences and events Zak spoke at a number of Norwegian universities February 25-27 on open source and Mozilla-related topics. Gerv attended FOSDEM. I continued work on arrangements for CSUN. Other Gerv worked on a script to assist with the proposed Bugzilla product/component reorganization. Upcoming events and activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on March 12 and at the CSUN conference on March 13 in Los Angeles CA. I’m also planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14, and other events later in 2008.

2008-03-06 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2008/02/22

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 22, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. CAs and related issues I gave final approval to requests from Go Daddy (bugs 403437 and 418958), QuoVadis (bugs 403665 and 418701), and Trustwave (bugs 409837, 409838, 409840, 418907, 418910, and 418902) to have their roots EV-enabled (or new EV-capable roots added, the case of Trustwave). I also did work on the application from VeriSign (bug 402947). Donations David did a blog post on the status of the Mozilla Foundation’s directed giving program. Public communication David worked on various www.mozilla.org-related tasks. Conferences and events I worked on arrangements for CSUN. Upcoming events and activities I’m planning to be in Mountain View on March 12 and at the CSUN conference on March 13 in Los Angeles CA. I’m also planning to attend the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1, 2008 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at a number of Norwegian universities February 25-27 on open source and Mozilla-related topics, at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14, and other events later in 2008.

2008-03-06 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

CMO and CRM

I don’t have time to follow every little bit of eMusic news, but I do find it interesting to look at eMusic’s press releases from time to time. One that recently caught my attention reports the hiring of Kip Morgan and Anna Punsal as Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) and Vice President of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) respectively. There are at least two interesting aspects here. The first is that this is a sign of where eMusic finds itself now that the rumored Amazon deal has fallen through (if it ever existed in the first place) and no new buyers appear to be showing up (at least if published rumors are any indication). As I’ve written multiple times, eMusic is not a Web 2.0 darling that can sell itself at an inflated valuation based on hype and promise; it’s a pretty conventional online service with a straightforward business model and a valuation that can be reasonably well estimated based on its financial results. (In fact, if I ever have the time I might take a shot at doing this myself; the result would likely be off by almost an order of magnitude, but the process itself might be interesting and educational, for myself if no one else.) ...

2008-02-25 · 4 min · Frank Hecker

NOW Ensemble, and more on indie classical

My last post on “indie classical” artists attracted a comment from Yancey Strickler of eMusic, to which I responded with a list of some of the composers and performers I’ve been listening to lately. Among those, one worth highlighting is the NOW Ensemble, whose album NOW was recently released by New Amsterdam Records. Since I’m a lousy music critic I’ll spare you any critic-speak except to say that I liked the album quite well, and the NOW Ensemble web site has streams of all the tracks if you’d like to sample it yourself. ...

2008-02-24 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2008/02/15

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 15, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures Still waiting on formal grant announcements. (Yes, I know, this is getting old.) CAs and related issues I worked on CA applications from Cisco, S-TRUST, and WISeKey. I gave final approval for Digicert to have its root enabled for EV (bugs 403644 and 416827). Conferences and events Zak Greant spoke at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10. I worked on arrangements for CSUN and (with Marco Zehe) for SightCity. Upcoming trips and events I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and (if possible) the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008. A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year. ...

2008-02-19 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Please eMusic, Select some indie classical

Now that I’ve gone and hyped eMusic Selects, I feel I’ve earned the right to make a suggestion, for any eMusic poobahs who may be reading this: As I understand it, eMusic will have monthly Selections, which at two per month adds up to 24 Selections per year. eMusic also has a fairly substantial group of people into classical music, and has been successful in getting subscribers to try out classical releases (as noted in this recent story). ...

2008-02-18 · 3 min · Frank Hecker

eMusic Selects a strategy

I thought I should say a little bit about the new eMusic Selects program. eMusic really wants people to know about this; in addition to a link on the eMusic home page, there’s a press release, an eMusic Magazine article, a 17 Dots blog post, and a message board post. Presumably the folks at eMusic feel that eMusic Selects is strategically important to the future of eMusic, and we should take them at their word. So what’s going on here? ...

2008-02-18 · 5 min · Frank Hecker

Mozilla Foundation activities, week ending 2008/02/08

This is my report on activities related to the Mozilla Foundation for the week ending February 8, 2008. Projects for the week Here’s a summary of what Foundation-related activities went on last week; for more information about others’ activities please see the weekly status reports published by David Boswell, Gerv Markham, and Zak Greant. Grants and related expenditures The board approved another significant accessibility-related grant; details to come. CAs and related issues I worked on CA applications from GlobalSign, Go Daddy, Digicert, SECOM Trust, S-TRUST, and WISeKey. I gave prelimary approval for Go Daddy to have its roots enabled for EV (bug 403437) I gave final approval today for Digicert to have its root enabled for EV (bugs 403644 and 416827) Public communications Among other things, David participated in a www.mozilla.org planning meeting and helped create a plan for www.mozilla.org changes Conferences and events Zak worked on preparations for several upcoming events in which the Mozilla Foundation might participate. Upcoming trips and events I’ll be attending (at least part of) the CSUN conference March 10-15 in Los Angeles CA, the Freedom to Connect conference March 31 and April 1 in Silver Spring MD, and the Berkman@10 conference May 15-16 in Boston MA. Zak will be speaking at the Southern California Linux Expo February 8-10 in Los Angeles, the PHP Quebec Conference March 12-14 in Montreal, and other events later in 2008. A reminder: We’re still accepting donations to the Mozilla Foundation through our directed giving program. Help support Bugzilla, Camino, SeaMonkey, and the Mozilla accessibility project, as well as general Foundation activities for the coming year. ...

2008-02-11 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Welcome to the new blog

As of today I’m officially migrating from my old personal blog at http://hecker.org/ and publicizing the new blog at http://blog.hecker.org/. (This new blog is actually hosted at wordpress.com, but I’m using a hecker.org subdomain in case I want to move it to another service or server in future.) Most of the posts on this blog have been Mozilla-related, and I anticipate that continuing; I maintain an intermittently-updated hobby blog at https://swindleeeee.com/, but I don’t have the spare time to publish much other non-Mozilla stuff. If you want to see only Mozilla-related posts, subscribe to the Mozilla feed at http://blog.hecker.org/category/mozilla/feed/; if you don’t mind seeing non-Mozilla stuff occasionally you can subscribe to http://blog.hecker.org/feed/ instead. Finally, my Mozilla blog posts also get syndicated through planet.mozilla.org, so if you subscribe to the p.m.o feed you don’t need to subscribe to this blog’s Mozilla feed separately. ...

2008-02-04 · 2 min · Frank Hecker

Switching to a new blog

UPDATE 2024/01/01: This post is from a previous version of this blog; I’ve retained it for historical interest only. I’m moving my personal blog to http://blog.hecker.org; this is the last post in the Mozilla category of this blog (/mozilla). My future Mozilla-related blog posts will be published at http://blog.hecker.org/tags/mozilla. If you use a feed reader (which I recommend) please subscribe to http://blog.hecker.org/category/mozilla/feed instead of the previous feed URL (/mozilla/index.atom). I’ll keep the old blog online for the foreseeable future, so that old posts will still be available; over time I hope to migrate that old content to the new blog and set redirects from the old URLs. However I cannot guarantee that I’ll keep old content available forever or that old links will always work. ...

2008-02-04 · 1 min · Frank Hecker