Posts by Al

Al’s Black Hat 2011 and DEF CON 19 Visit

Al

I attended Black Hat 2011 and DEF CON 19 this last week under the auspices of Mozilla. We generally have a bunch of us who are involved in facets of the security releases attending these back to back conferences every Summer in Las Vegas. This is for a few reasons but the primary ones are […] Continue reading

Another version of Firefox, another cake

Al

We shipped Firefox 4 today at Mozilla, where I work. This is a big deal for us and for the open web as well. (Go download it!) Following the friendly tradition, the Internet Explorer team just sent us a fine cake, as they have on previous releases: When we received one for Firefox 3, it […] Continue reading

Ace Monster Toys as a real hackerspace

Al

I’ve been meaning to post an update for Ace Monster Toys, the hackerspace that I co-founded recently in Berkeley. I last posted about it in mid-June. We had just elected our board and begun collecting dues while we were looking for a space to rent. I’m happy to tell people that we did find a […] Continue reading

A Visit to Seattle Hackerspaces

Al

While I was in Seattle visiting friends and family the other week, I had a chance to visit Metrix Create:Space and Jigsaw Renaissance. These are two of the public hackerspaces in the Seattle area. Metrix is run along more business and less club lines. People can show up and work on things, rent tools or […] Continue reading

Ace Monster Toys: All On Board

Al

Left to Right: Chris, Al, Shannon and his Mustache, Dr. Jesus, Mike, Neha The effort to get Ace Monster Toys, the East Bay Hackerspace, off the ground continues. We continue to meet on Monday nights at 7:30 PM, often at Berkeley Coworking. This last Monday we took another step towards becoming official by electing our […] Continue reading

Ace Monster Toys – a Hackerspace in Formation

Al

It is about time that I posted something that isn’t entirely Buddhist related. I did update the description of this blog to “Open Source Buddhism, Technology, and Geekery” recently. I’ve been posting mostly about Buddhism for quite a while given my focus on “open source” Buddhist efforts but I am a geek that works professionally […] Continue reading

Should Mozilla use Freenode for IRC communication?

Al

By and large, the Mozilla community uses an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server operated by MoCo at irc.mozilla.org (IMO). For day to day operations, IMO is used by a variety of groups and projects for communication. For the people that I work most closely with, we use the server for release management of security releases […] Continue reading

Kindle, E-books, and Hacking

Al

I’m a great lover of books. I spent much of my childhood with a room of the house dedicated to books (aka the “library room”). By the time I moved out after I college, I already owned hundreds of books and I continued to amass them over the years. Being a former occultist, I had […] Continue reading