The new blink-182 song Dance with Me is extremely catchy, but it can't really be added to playlists or played at the gym, for example, because of the sexual joke at the beginning of the track. I mean, the whole song is about sex—fair enough—and individual sensibilities do differ. Still, the spoken part is so jarring that I wouldn't want to play the song in polite company.
I've encountered this problem before, usually with bonus tracks that play after several minutes of silence. They can be great songs, but there's no great way to add them to playlists, and there's no way to add the first song without the silence and the bonus track. It would be trivial for an app to implement a technical solution to this problem: just let the user choose an offset of some number of seconds and apply that offset whenever the song is played from a playlist. However, it's not clear if that would be worth the added user interface complexity. Most people would never use the feature, and they might be confused if they saw a menu item for it somewhere. Perhaps the easiest solution would be for publishers to release alternate cuts more often. Let's get a version of Dance with Me without the joke. Let's get Maybe I'm Just Tired without the bonus track.
Not long ago, an acquaintance had their identity stolen. The case was rather serious, with the perpetrators draining thousands of dollars from the victim’s bank accounts.
Recently, I learned that the Edge web browser references a different database of known phishing sites than Chrome, Firefox, and Safari do. A phishing link was texted to me, made to look like the Wells Fargo website. About one hour after I reported it to Google, it was banned in all of the latter browsers, but when I last checked, it was still accessible in Edge, allowing additional people to be scammed.
We should fix that. Perhaps Congress can do something; a rare bi-partisan issue. I would think it would be possible for these vendors to share lists of known phishing sites in a privacy-respecting manner.
Last week, I read the bizarre story of Governor Mike Parson of Missouri vowing to prosecute local journalists who notified his office of a data leak in a state website. In a press conference, he claimed that the reporters “decoded” the site's HTML in a “multi-step process,” struggling to pronounce the unfamiliar abbreviation and testing the credulity of his technologically-literate audience. (Does clicking View source involve more than one step? Perhaps among those who find mice to be confusing.)
As someone who started a career by clicking View source, I couldn't let this weird, funny, aggravating news story go. After calling the governor's office to call his actions, “respectfully, moronic,” I decided to create a change.org petition asking him to apologize, which I have copied below.
Last week, Governor Parson of Missouri vowed to prosecute reporters at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch who notified his office about a data leak in a state website. An attack ad has since been released calling the Dispatch “fake news.” I urge Governor Parson to apologize for these confused and senseless attacks on innocent journalists.
I'm a web developer with nearly twenty years of experience. I have worked at Mozilla, an important and influential internet company based in Silicon Valley. Governor Parson, I cannot convince you, but I assure you that the reporters at the Post-Dispatch did the right thing by notifying your office about this data leak. Any responsible technologist would have acted likewise.
By analogy, the reporters at the Dispatch inspected your tires, noticed that they were flat, and alerted you to that fact. They did not hack your car or flatten your tires. They simply alerted you to the fact that your tires were flat. In response, you vowed to prosecute them. Viewed this way, it is clear that your actions do not make very much sense.
I promise you that this is precisely what has happened here, except instead of tires, this situation involves social security numbers and a website. I cannot convince you that this analogy is correct, but as someone who genuinely knows what he is talking about, I implore you to listen. This is precisely what happened.
Allusions to HTML, a technology that you respectfully do not understand, do not change this fact.
Truthfully, I think you know that you are not making sense, but you see this phony controversy as an opportunity to bolster your image. I must say that you are failing. This race to the bottom is embarrassing.
Whatever the reason, and with all due respect, Governor Parson, you are not making sense. If you care about civil rights and the freedom of the press, I urge you to apologize.
Thank you.
The petition is cordial. A less forgiving text might have asked whether someone so maliciously stupid deserves to be governor. What would be achieved by making that point? It would be satisfying, of course, as it is now, but would it increase the likelihood of my message being heard? I don't think so.
As I mentioned in my previous blog post, published just before the release of The Social Dilemma, I do not hang around the enchanting digital battlegrounds of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok. I therefore ask that you consider sharing this petition on my behalf. Don't linger too long, lest you find yourself self-radicalizing and losing friends in the name of compassion and connectedness.
I was laid off last week. Officially, I was impacted by “significant restructuring”. I never expected to become so conversant with corporate lingo. It's one of the lesser skills I acquired during my 8 years at Mozilla, mostly after Firefox OS was announced as a priority. Another lesson: companies change.
I have come to appreciate ESLint very much in recent years. A robust and reliable JavaScript linter, ESLint can be used not only to detect common programming mistakes, but also to enforce a consistent code style. Its utility cannot be overstated. Your teammates and your future self will thank you for using it.
I recommend that ESLint be enabled before any code is written, but what about existing projects? A developer who runs ESLint on an existing codebase will certainly be overwhelmed; it will warn about scores of issues which had not been noticed until that point. Is there any way to gradually adopt its recommendations? More importantly, is there any way to prevent the number of problems from growing? Running the linter on CI is no solution. It will simply fail and annoy others.
I recently started work on a project at Mozilla which I’m calling Ensemble. Ensemble will be a minimalist data-sharing platform. It will allow data scientists to quickly and easily create public dashboards with no web development experience.
In the process of writing a project README, I realized I had accidentally written something like my software development manifesto, the distillation of my thoughts on creating valuable software. The document does discuss some specifics of this project, but the broader points apply more generally.
