Mozilla

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call I’ll be talking about various systems for doing online presentations and related activities (e.g., screen sharing, attendee chat, audio and video broadcast, and so on), including Dimdim, WebEx, GoToMeeting, ePresence, MegaMeeting.com, and OpenMeetings; feel free to also share your experiences with these and other systems. I’ll be doing the presentation itself using one such system, Dimdim; click on “Join Meeting,” and enter the meeting room as “hecker” and the ID as “mozillaeducation.” However please use the standard Mozilla Education teleconference system for the call itself. ...

For this week’s instance of our weekly Mozilla Education call we have a presentation from Pascal Finette on the online course being done for the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge. The online portion of the course is being done using WebEx, and Pascal will (among other things) talk about their experiences using WebEx for online presentations and communication. We’re looking at Dimdim as a (partially) open source alternative to WebEx, and are using Pascal’s presentation as an opportunity to do a live test of Dimdim. We’d like to get as many attendees involved as we can, in order to do a proper test, so please attend this call if you can! ...

For those of you participating (or interested in participating) in our weekly Mozilla Education teleconference calls, here’s what to expect the next few weeks: First, for this week’s call Philipp Schmidt will be talking about the Open|Web|Content|Education course he’s helping us organize, and that we’ll be officially announcing this week. Next week (March 23) we’ll have Pascal Finette talking to us about the online course Mozilla Labs is putting on as part of the first Design Challenge. We’re still looking for a suitable topic and presenter for the March 30 call; please let me and Dave Humphrey know if you have suggestions. Finally, on April 6 we’ll skip the weekly Mozilla call and instead participate in the first of the teachingopensource.org teleconference calls, for anyone interested in the general topic of teaching open source practices. Hope you can join us! ...

Are you an undergraduate or graduate student who loves Mozilla and wants to help us teach the world about it? I’m happy to announce that we’re now accepting applications for a summer student internship with the Mozilla Foundation, in support of our new Mozilla Education program; for more information on the internship please see the detailed description. (Note: If you’ve already emailed us about your interest in this, we’ll be in touch if we need further information about it. But if you want to email us again feel free to do so. . . .) ...

Well, sort of. . . . One of our proposed Mozilla education activities for 2009 is creating a central web site for Mozilla educational resources and related content and activities. We don’t have a standalone site yet, but we do have the education.mozilla.org domain now up and redirecting to the Mozilla Education section of the Mozilla wiki. Keep an eye on the site as we continue to add more content over the coming weeks. Also, please feel free to add relevant content yourself; follow the site naming conventions so that we can keep consistency in our URLs. ...

As is evident from Mark Surman’s recent “Why Mozilla Education?” post and all the stuff we’ve been adding to the Mozilla Education planning page, we’re getting involved with a lot of activities around the general theme of Mozilla and education. In order to coordinate all these activities we’ve decided to hold a weekly Mozilla Education teleconference call among Mark, Dave Humphrey, myself, and others working in this area. Because Mozilla is a public project we’re inviting anyone to participate (or just listen in) who has an interest in Mozilla and education. ...

I’m not that fond of the Internet equivalent of chain letters, but I’ll make an exception this time because two people (Mark and Marco) tagged me on this. The rules once more: Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post. (Done.) Share seven facts about yourself in the post. (Almost.) Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs. (I’ll break this one.) Let them know they’ve been tagged. (And this one too.) The things: ...

Some of you may recall that about a year ago the Mozilla Foundation provided a grant to NV Access, an Australia-based nonprofit organization dedicated to developing NVDA, an open source screen reader designed for blind users of Windows applications like Firefox. This grant went to support NV Access hiring a developer (James Teh) to work full-time on NVDA. (The Mozilla Foundation had previously provided a smaller grant as well.) I’m happy to pass on the news that NV Access has now received financial support from Microsoft sufficient to allow Mick Curran (the original developer of NVDA) to also work full-time on NVDA. From my point of view this is a significant development for both NV Access itself, which has taken another step towards sustaining itself and the NVDA project for the long term, and for blind users of Windows. ...

A departure from my usual topics, in remembrance of my college math classes (and with a nod to Mozilla folks working on related areas like automated testing and software verification): Via Eric Drexler via Emergent Chaos comes this interesting review paper on formal proofs in mathematics and software to verify them. As a dual math/physics major I was well acquainted with jokes about the lack of mathematical rigor on the part of physicists, who often engaged in rather slapdash simplifications in their drive to get formulas they could use to explain experimental data and make further predictions. However physicists who cut corners are ultimately saved by the fact that nature will check their work and let them know if they’ve made bonehead mistakes. ...

Johnathan Nightingale recently addressed a very common question, namely why Firefox doesn’t automatically accept self-signed SSL certificates as being valid. I don’t have much to add to Johnathan’s discussion of the issues with self-signed certificates, but speaking on behalf on the Mozilla Foundation I do want to address some of the comments that I’ve seen people make with regard to SSL certificates, certification authorities (CAs), and Mozilla. First, a quick refresher: To support SSL web sites need a combination of a private key kept on the server and a public key embedded with other information (most notably the server’s domain name, and also in some cases the name of the organization operating the server) in a digitally-signed document, the certificate. When a browser connects to an SSL-enabled web server the server sends its certificate to the browser. If the certificate was digitally signed by a third party certification authority known to the browser, the certificate is treated as valid and the browser proceeds to use the information in the certificate to kick off the SSL protocol. (The public key in the certificate is used in setting up SSL encryption, the domain name in the certificate is double-checked against the domain name the browser was supposedly connecting to, and for Extended Validation certificates the organizational name in the certificate is displayed in the Firefox 3 site identification button to the left of the location bar.) ...