Peter Evanoff’s Weblog

Peter Chan and I are teamed up for this project, and I think we complement each other well. He loves to chat online, and is a little shy in person. I am the opposite, so we will learn from each other.

Our first challenge, like everyone else, is “where to begin?”. At the beginning, of course, so off we go. I have installed FF portable (as well as Open Office) onto my memory stick, and am using it everywhere, just to make sure I get a proper feel for it. First lesson I have learned is that the extensions(add-ons) can have different behavior on different systems, so I have disabled them. The directory structure of the portable FF is slightly different than the Windows version “Profiles” vs “profile”. Little things for sure, but it provides a certain level of comfort and confidence to acquire these bits of knowledge. As Chris was telling us, this is the first project at Seneca that doesn’t have all the specs laid out for us, so we have the privilege of designing our own solution….

It reminds me of a quote I read about Thomas Edison, when it took him 99 failed attempts before finally inventing the light-build…A person asked him if he felt bad that he wasted so much time before getting it right, and he replied “I know of 99 ways NOT to invent a light-bulb, do you?”

Good luck All

We get started on our projects tomorrow, with Chris finalizing our preliminary selections and and officially assigning us to our new tasks. The tough part of the selection process has been determining what my strengths are and selecting an appropriate project, without any prior experience in dealing with software systems of this size and complexity. All the projects seem to offer many challenges, so I am playing this selection process with an open mind and will dive into the deep end with whatever project I am responsible for.

I just gotta keep swimming till I get to the other side!!

Hi all. I am looking forward to the challenges ahead, and hope to contribute something of significance to the Mozilla project. Today at Seneca we met Dave Humphrey, and he really pumped me up. His enthusiasm is infectious, and combined with Chris Tyler’s upbeat and positive style , I kinda feel obligated to push myself to greater heights.

I have read the “Cathedral and Bazaar”, and viewed “Revolution OS”, and enjoyed both. The strongest impression I had was that “open source == open minds”. In many ways it is counter-intuitive to think that you can give something away for free and still benefit, yet this is indeed true. I think many of us operate in a “zero-sum , your loss is my gain” mentality, when in fact if we cooperate and share with each other, we all win.

I found it interesting that the word “communism” was used in the video to describe the open source concept, and got everybody so riled up. Perhaps Czar Billy had something to do with that.

till later…