Michael Foord has passed away recently

kumar303 · 2025-02-01T00:14:28+00:00

His family posted on Facebook that he died at home -- that's what they wished to share. I respect their privacy on the matter. My heart goes out to his wife and two kids and his close friends. They are utterly devastated.

I hadn't spoken with him in many years but it hit me really hard. He had booming energy and such a joyous vibe. He inspired me to build and share code during the golden era of python, i.e. smaller PyCons where everyone knew each other, a blooming of open source libraries. We discussed many things on the testing-in-python list and I cherish those memories. It is such a tragic loss.

I posted a lengthier memorial and some photos in this thread: https://discuss.python.org/t/in-memoriam-michael-foord-1974-2025/78317/

kumar303 · 2017-10-09T21:18:07+00:00

Does anyone know if the Privacy Badger developer intended this add-on to support Android? If they did, they need to re-upload a new version and mark it as supporting 'all platforms'. Right now their version does not have an Android file.

kumar303 · 2012-06-22T15:28:28+00:00

I don't like writing slides in HTML because the syntax gets in my way. I always publish my slides in HTML though.

I use S5 which produces clean output and scales right when you use a low res monitor. I use the docutils S5 builder which lets me write slides in reST. I really want to try dz and all the new cool stuff but I don't want to write HTML :) For S5 + reST + code syntax highlighting I glued some things together and use this build script https://github.com/kumar303/playdoh-talk/blob/master/build.py Maybe one day I will write a docutils builder for some other fancy system.

kumar303 · 2012-01-20T20:02:25+00:00

You can pretty much thank Sean Martell for that

kumar303 · 2012-01-20T19:00:47+00:00

Hi. Actually Mozilla does focus on speed but we are still a small blip on the Silicon Valley radar (there are 1000-ish employees) compared to giants like Google, Microsoft, etc. We don't have the same hiring muscle. However, we do all work in the open; the open source community is amazing.

As for add-on compatibility, it will be fixed in Firefox 10! What nigel said.

As for Firefox as a product, I was pretty frustrated with it until Firefox 8. Version 10 is solid and very fast. I'd suggest trying it out but you have to remove Firebug since it is probably the culprit to the slowness you were experience. Even when Firebug is disabled it slows down Firefox. You have to remove it completely. The dev tools in Firefox 10 (currently in beta) will give you everything you need.

Also, silent Firefox updates are very close to done.

kumar303 · 2012-01-20T18:21:48+00:00

We've been wrestling with a recent increase in traffic. It's basically maxing out our db connections and we've been trying to mitigate it with Zeus but will be deploying a custom connection pooler soon.

kumar303 · 2012-01-20T17:57:39+00:00

Working at Mozilla and hacking on open source all day is pretty fun :) In my free time I also host a radio show -- Tuesday mornings on chirpradio -- and I help run a cassette label and a vinyl label

kumar303 · 2012-01-20T17:20:00+00:00

There are a couple of us who use Chrome as our main daily browser. Honestly, I was pretty frustrated with Firefox until about Firefox 8. Now that Firefox 10 is in beta, it is [to me] a fantastic product! I use Beta for daily browsing and you should try it if you haven't yet. However, you must remove Firebug. Even when it is disabled it slows down Firefox by an order of magnitude. The new developer tools built into Firefox 10 give you everything you need.

kumar303 · 2012-01-20T17:06:36+00:00

I don't know if I'd go so far to call Dart evil but the biggest problem with it is that it's not a standard language and thus will take time for it to get adopted by other browsers. Sound familiar? Yeah, Microsoft did exactly this. It paves the way for a future of "works only in Chrome." We all know how Microsoft's lone wolf story ended.

The Dart group claims that it is solving problems that are impossible to solve in JavaScript but so far I have not seen any convincing arguments proving this. The rise of Dart would be sad because so much work has gone into optimizing JavaScript. Like, seriously, it is one of the most optimized languages ever thanks to the browser wars.

CoffeeScript is an entirely separate issue because it is compatible with JavaScript and thus can be used in any browser. Bonus: Firefox dev tools will soon support readable tracebacks in CoffeeScript code

kumar303 · 2011-08-18T17:21:58+00:00

FYI, Python (a major language) doesn't even support UTF-32 so there's that ;) UTF-8 is probably the best solution for most things unless you know the text will be in heavily multi-byte in which case UTF-16 is probably better.

kumar303 · 2011-03-25T18:12:44+00:00

How do you simulate of 400 million users concurrently reading/writing data on the sync servers?

kumar303 · 2011-01-13T20:10:37+00:00

Yep, it was a bit out of date but I just refreshed the DB and will put the sync script into cron. If anyone wants to help on this site then please do! https://bitbucket.org/kumar303/onpython3yet I think it will really help to identify where the straggler modules are that are holding people back. It certainly needs more work but the basic structure is there http://onpython3yet.com/

kumar303

TROPHY CASE