A Mozilla Burial

It crossed my mind that the Mozilla billboard on the side of my building might be someone's idea of a joke -- but that would presume that anyone still working for Mozilla remembers who I am, which seems unlikely.

But you'll note that they didn't bother to tear down that billboard before pouring concrete right up to the property line, so perhaps when these condos are demolished decades from now to make way for some new construction the sign will be re-exposed and make someone go, "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

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16 Responses:

  1. John Adams says:

    I.. I can't even.

  2. gianteye says:

    Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes...

  3. How realistically (less so, given that I'm posting this publicly) could "the public" manage to sneak an update to the Firefox codebase of that fox icon finally chomping its own tail by 1 April, 2016?

    • jwz says:

      Nah, you have to plan these sorts of things with a lot more notice than that. You need to compromise the build machines, but they pay attention to those, so the best way is probably to find the least-monitored upstream library that's going to be automatically updated without anyone reading the diffs. Figure out how to get code into libcurses (that thing updates constantly for some reason -- spearfish a committer) that overwrites ImageMagick or libjpeg with obfuscated code that recognizes a fingerprint of the logo and swaps out a few dozen JPEG frames. JPEG code tends to be a crazy mess of numeric literals and tables of magic constants anyway so it's easy to hide in there.

      Good luck!

    • jwz says:

      Also that's not funny enough. Your joke should be funnier if you're risking prison for it.

      • I mean, just to be clear, I thought about whether I had the patience/time to do this before I said anything about it. Kinda like how I chatted with you about Postscript on IRC prior to this shitshow without actually talking about the specific thing I was going to do before I did it (but then, because I was 22, pointed out that I'd done that thing after the fact).

        Here, I'm just hoping somebody with more time than sense will go ... well, roughly follow the directions you provided. ;^>

      • PS, totally doable by 1 April, 2036, which is about how long those condos can be expected to last if they're still building them to roughly the same space in SF that they are in PHL.

  4. Lloyd says:

    If the fox eats its own tail it's Ouroboros, but the tail is red and bushy, so this fox must be named Rooibos.

    Mozillafrika! Lekker! Ship me off to Robben island.

    I bless the trains down in Africa...

  5. fubar says:

    Actually, I did bring your name up in a small meeting just the other day because I was ranting about MXR, the beast that will not die.

  6. Blowbackdoll says:

    The want you back :)

    jwz i want to ask you how to become a great programmer like you.

    Now this days , i learn C. Do you got some tips to guide me to the right way. I am taking this stuff very sireously.

    • John D says:

      Study philosophy. Don't use the internet. Never listen to anything your teachers tell you. Read stuff written by Donald Knuth, John McCarthy, Dennis Ritchie, and Rob Pike. Ultimately, you will end up simply not being a programmer.

    • Lloyd says:

      All great programmers have one great program in them, and everything they do and everything they learn serves that program.

      Stallman? emacs. Torvalds? Linux (and git was just to help Linus with Linux.) Wolfram? Mathematica. Carmack? Doom, and other games are variation. Ritchie? C compiler. Gates? Microsoft Basic.

      With jwz, it's Xscreensaver.

    • The Reality Czech says:

      >I am taking this stuff very sireously.

      No you aren't. For one thing, you're not even bothering to spellcheck. For another, you're expecting a unique, personalized answer to a generic question which has been asked and answered by the tech community literally millions of times over the years, so if you'd done any research at all, you wouldn't be asking this question.

      If you want to be a good programmer- hell, if you want to be good at anything- don't expect to be spoonfed what you need to know. Get comfortable doing a lot of research and reading. Only ask questions once you've expended meaningful effort establishing that the answers aren't already out there. Making you better at something is no one's responsibility but your own. Internalize that.