In Pursuit of Mysteries

Mozilla Summit Attendees Reduced to Cannibalism

Here at the Mozilla Summit this week, we may soon we reduced to cannibalism. (Perhaps this is an existing Canadian tradition, I’m not sure…) Apparently, last night a rock slide dropped on the road between Whistler and Vancouver, B.C. This is the road used by everyone coming into and out of the town for visits and it hugs a cliff face next to a river for most of its length.

Since some of the rocks are the size of trucks and, I hear, the pile is 10 meters high in places, they aren’t sure when the road will be cleared. It is said that dynamite will be involved. Almost all of us are scheduled to fly out of Vancouver on Friday, which may make it interesting since the low-end estimate is two days for road clearance. There is another route around in the other direction but it turns the two and a half hour trip into eight hour one. Additionally, it turns out that the busses to take us back are all sitting in Vancouver right now so they’d need to get here and then go back.

Luckily, Whistler seems well stocked with food, beer, and bears, so we should avoid lifeboat team building events.

Update: The B.C. government has announced that the road will be closed for five days or so. Apparently, we will all be making the long trek around in order to get to Vancouver. This means that for my 3:45 PM flight, I’m probably leaving Whistler around 4:00 AM (assuming four hours earlier than my previous time). Wheee!!

Update 2: I wasn’t far wrong. I’m taking a 3:00 AM bus for eight hours to get to Vancouver from here the long way around. (I then get to wait almost five hours at the airport for my flight…) Others are leaving at 6:00 PM tomorrow, Midnight, and then 2:00 AM and the late morning… A bug has been opened as well, in true open source fashion. More commentary is available through blogs on planet.mozilla.org.

Our route:

Going to Canada Next Week

I am currently preparing, in the most loose of senses, for going to Canada on Monday. Mozilla does a summit every couple of years, which brings in members of the overall Mozilla Community together. The event for 2008, now that Firefox 3 is out the door, is taking place next week at Whistler in British Columbia. Whistler is well known, especially in my hometown of Seattle, as a ski resort (which you don’t normally visit in July and August). (As an aside, it turns out that Americans need their passports to go to Canada now, which is awfully strange having grown up crossing the border all the time without them…)

All of us working for the Mozilla Corporation and the recent Mozilla Messaging company will be attending this event. We’re leaving to the event on Monday morning and coming back on Friday. You can see a proposed list of sessions online. I haven’t figured out which sessions I am going to yet but I expect to try to make the ones on the foundation, open source philosophy, and perhaps the ones on the Mozilla Labs projects, like Weave and Ubiquity.

While I’m at the summit, I’ll probably be less available online than my normal ubiquitousness but I expect that I’ll be blogging. After I come back, I’ll only be in town for the weekend and Monday before I fly out of town for Las Vegas. I’ll be attending the Black Hat and DEFCON security conferences there through the weekend. I’m hoping to see a few friendly faces at each of these.

User Friendly on IE Cake

Apparently, the popular web comic User Friendly just did a cartoon about the cake that Internet Explorer sent to Mozilla the other day when we shipped Firefox 3.

You can see it on their site in full size but I’ve added it below in a smaller size as well:

This cake has gotten far more press than I think anyone expected. I guess people like it when conflicts can proceed with a certain amount of grace. As has been suggested, when IE8 ships, we should send the IE team a cake as well but we’ll make sure to include the recipe with it so they can make more of them…

Oh, and I like the little “The cake is a lie!” nod in the tiny cake graphic beneath the cake. :-)