Oh, hello Internet. Long time, no see. (That is, if this is the only way you keep track of me. I’ve been tweeting a bit more than I blog.)
This post is basically to bring you up to speed on what’s been going on since my last post, back in July. (I never was a very good blogger, you know. This is actually pretty good for me.)
A lot has happened since then, actually.
First off, I’m no longer working with the Bespin folks—I’m not sure I ever mentioned that. Though I felt a bit guilty about it, I made the decision around the time of the Summit, and I wound up not spending a whole lot of time with them while. (I was running out of things I could help with, anyway, with my JavaScript skills being as poor as they are.) During the Summit, it was announced that Bespin would be changing its name to Skywriter. It was a bit of an insider secret until it was officially announced a few months later, but that doesn’t even matter now. Mozilla decided to change direction slightly and focus more on developer tools as a whole. This decision eventually led up to what happened just the other day: Skywriter has merged with the Ajax.org Cloud9 Editor (ACE). This is the best of both worlds, at it puts the project in the hands of developers better equipped to take care of it, while also ensuring that the original Bespin/Skywriter work does not go to waste.
I also haven’t been much involved with Ubiquity since the release of 0.6. I do believe satyr continues to maintain it, but I don’t know if it will ever see another “official” release. (Satyr has always made snapshot releases directly from the repository, though.) It also doesn’t seem like Taskfox will emerge any time soon. It’s certainly not on the agenda (nobody’s working on it), and the new Panorama (formally TabCandy) is the primary focus of Mitcho, Aza, and others. If all goes according to plan, that will likely be my favorite feature of Firefox 4. (Of course, by the time Firefox 4 comes out, I’ll probably be using Firefox 4.next. I’ve been running 4.0 nightlies for a while now. Probably ever since TabCandy was merged to trunk, now that I think about it.) So I spend some of my days bothering the folks in #tabcandy, complaining about things they usually already know about.
But I do try to make myself useful, too. I’ve attempted to increase my involvement with the Mozilla.org team, as at least there I have the relevant skillset. Unfortunately, it’s been somewhat slow-going. I spent a lot of time at the Summit chasing Reed around trying to get reviews. But Reed is always super busy—thus, I’m still waiting on those reviews. (And I’m not the only one.) So I’ve offered to try to help carry some of the load, in terms of reviewing patches for the Mozilla.org website(s). So, I finally applied for (albeit very limited) commit access—some 6 and a half years since I filed my first Mozilla-related bug. I faxed my Committer Agreement in about a week ago, and hopefully the rest will be handled in the next week or so. I’m quite excited to be able to make a contribution that’s more than removing unused variables or adding half-working tab support.
But my life, unfortunately, has not completely revolved around Mozilla in this past half a year. I finished another semester of school, and the final semester of my undergraduate career (well, the first one, at least) begins on the 31st. On June 2nd, I will finally have a Bachelor’s Degree—in Linguistics. What happens after that, I’m not sure. These past two months have been hectic, as I’ve been applying to graduate schools for linguistics. Though I continue to be torn as to whether I really want to spend the next five years doing more linguistics (what does one do with a Ph.D. in linguistics, besides more linguistics?), my biggest annoyance thus far has been the cost. Between the application fees, the GRE score fees, and transcript fees(!), this process has cost me hundreds and hundreds of dollars! (Oh, and for a procrastinator like me, having to rely on—and worry about—other people’s schedules has been very difficult. There’s no turning an application in the night before if you also need recommendation letters from three other people.)
On the bright side, I have been gathering a lot of linguistics-related ideas that I want to blog about. I haven’t yet figured out how I’m going to do that—some of them are not more than a couple of sentences, so I may spew a bunch out at a time. I’ve also gotten involved with a new project designed to bring linguistics to the masses, à la Scientific American or Popular Mechanics: Popular Linguistics Online. I’ll be writing some things for them, as well as helping out with some of the technical stuff behind the scenes. Everything is very much in the early stages over there, but there is an issue out already, so I encourage you to check it out!
P.S. Please forgive the overuse of the word “so”. It’s 4:30 in the morning.
