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Postbox Team: Email Filtering Strategies
If you’re like most people, you’re probably receiving too many messages. A great way to keep your Inbox from feeling overloaded is to filter out low-ranking messages while highlighting the important...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Blink, PNaCl, And Standards
When the Blink fork was announced, it came with an admirable commitment to good citizenship when adding new Web-exposed features. Unfortunately, Google has recently announced that they will expose...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Meeting Absenteeism
I have a bad habit of missing meetings that I should (and want to) attend. This is inexcusable given that my meeting load is actually very light. I have identified a few contributing factors. Many of...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Developer Parallelism
In Gecko we've often had N large projects be implemented by just one person each. This has some benefits; in particular it can be quite efficient, since coordination costs are low. It's also a good way...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Gradual Changes Afoot
I've been a manager at Mozilla for several years now. I became a de facto manager by necessity, when we established the Auckland office, and became a de jure manager a little later when the increasing...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Contributing Advocacy
Sometimes we make changes that are strongly justified but inevitably annoy some of our users. The Firefox 22 change to be aware of UI scaling on Windows is a good example. Some of the most helpful...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Movie Picoreviews
I've just returned home from another Bay Area trip for the LEAD program. I also met up with Dirk Schultze and some other Adobe developers for some work on SVG/CSS filters. Because of the Asiana crash...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Avoiding Copies In Web APIs
The Web platform has matured to the point where avoiding data copying is often an important optimization to reduce running time and memory usage. Avoiding data copies often requires careful API design....
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Happy Days
I gave permission from a writer to use an old wedding photo of ours for a story. We got married in Sydney because that's where my wife was living at the time --- I was at CMU in Pittsburgh. We had the...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: A Shock Of The Ordinary
Last night I watched a scene in an episode of the second season of Downton Abbey in which two sympathetic characters visit a church together and pray. That's it --- no plot devices, no subtext, no...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Mozilla Engineering Culture Talk Now Online
At the Mozilla "Web Rendering" work week in Taipei in May, I led a discussion of "Mozilla (really, Gecko) engineering culture". This was partly for the benefit of all the new developers in Taiwan but I...
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Robert O'Callahan: Mozilla Code Reviews Talk On Air Mozilla
In Taipei in May, as a followup to the engineering culture discussion, we had a session about code reviews, covering the topic from both the point of view of the code reviewer as well as the code...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: SVG-In-OpenType Progress Update
TypeCon is coming up and there's going to be a discussion there about competing proposals for advanced glyph rendering, especially coloured glyphs. That was an incentive for me to knuckle down over the...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Creating Screencasts On Linux
I had great difficulty creating a good screencast for the previous blog post. Various tools I tried all had horrible flicker problems in the captured video. I think the problem is related to the GNOME...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Indoi
Indoi is a new Indian restaurant on Short St in Newmarket, very close to the Mozilla office. It's my favourite Indian restaurant in Newmarket. The non-vegetarian thali lunch special is $15, which is a...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Servant Leadership
Every so often the principle of "servant leadership" is mentioned in discussions about management. Sometimes it's portrayed as something new and radical. It's definitely radical, but not at all new. It...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Debugging Transient Rendering Issues With GNOME Shell...
Debugging transient issues like flickering can be a real pain because it's difficult to see exactly what's happening when it only affects a few rendered frames. Enabling paint flashing in Firefox is...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Unexpected Visitors
Today I was working at home when two Korean women knocked on my door. They were from a "Bible study group" and wanted to "conduct a survey". They were obviously evangelists so, not wanting to waste...
View ArticleRobert O'Callahan: Blink
I blogged last time the browser engine count changed, so I think to be fair I should blog about this one too. I think this is good news for the Web. When we lost an engine, that was bad for engine...
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