thefoundation

40 Days to go

2010-08-09T06:56:31Z

I can't believe in only 40 days my internship will be over. What I've done in the last month in California besides working for Mozilla.

The Mozilla Summit

Hundreds of people from all over the world met at the Mozilla Summit, sharing ideas, talks and — in the evening — drinks. Whistler is a beautiful place and although most of the action took place inside of the Chateau Fremont, I still had the opportunity for one or two walks in the nature, and even some clubbing (and still made to the next talk before nine in the morning). At the last night all of us went up to Whistler Peak where we had a crazy party going on. I did not take any photos, but others did. The only downside to the whole event that I had to witness the German Football team losing to Spain in the World Cup semifinals.

All of us interns at Whistler Peak, taken using Josh’s 70ies Polaroid camera.

Living the Valley Life

Back from the Summit, I did a lot of American Culture stuff. With Mozilla we watched a Baseball Game in San Francisco (the Giants just barely won over the Florida Marlins, scores being equal at the last inning), we went to the theatres to watch Inception (all in all a pretty good movie). A week ago we took the Caltrain to San Francisco again for a Bar Crawl at Polk Street in Nob Hill. Because the bars close down pretty early in the U.S., the crawl starts at 4pm and everyone is pretty much wasted at 8 already. That was an interesting experience…

Crawling the Polk Street, at the Lush Lounge

Canoeing in Healdsburg

Yesterday we did a canoeing trip in, and I got so sunburnt. It was a lot of fun though. Most of us brought waterguns, the current was pretty easy (we capsized nonetheless, big fun) and the water had just the right temperature for a swim inbetween.

A friendly fellow attached a rope to this tree

A lot of Californians have a summer- or weekend-house along the river, which means that they have a beach pretty much for themselves less than an hour on the 101 from cloudy San Francisco. That is, if you do not count city traffic, where we got stuck for an eternity, with wheelchairs and elderly couples overtaking us on our way to the Freeway. Good opportunity to tune in to some radio. There is exactly one among 150 satellite stations playing alternative and indie music, some cultural shock! Metric seems to be pretty cool, and I should also check out Interpol again, as they do remind me of the Editors a lot.

Some of us interns at the Golden Gate Bridge (thanks for the photo, Chris)

The lengthy trip was totally worth it, as I was able to pay my second visit to the Golden Gate bridge since 2007. Now it's time for some Phantom Planet, as we are planning a trip to LA for the next weeks.

En Route To Whistler

2010-07-06T13:48:05Z

The two first weeks as an intern at Mozilla were like a blast. Now we are heading for the worldwide Summit 2010 in Whistler, Mountain View.

Independence day with fireworks in SF is just over, and we are already heading back to the city, this time for the airport. In the past two weeks there was not much time for blogging: Mozilla interns BBQ, awesome work at the Metrics team, and Germany advancing past the round of eight in the soccer world cup.

Before I board the plane, I want to share a picture of the custom keyboard I am using at Mozilla:

Mission accomplished!

Update:

Thanks to Pascal at Mozilla who gave me a keyboard with German layout.

72 Hours at Mozilla

2010-06-24T08:42:50Z

On Monday, my internship at Mozilla started, and I can tell you how great it is. Since everything is open source anyway, I am actually encouraged to blog and talk about my work there.

Mozilla has more than a hundred people at its headquarters in Mountain View, while even more contributors work from all around the world. There are more than thirty other interns here, involved in various projects from mobile development, to metrics (such as myself), to developer engagement. I am going to write more about the data integration project I am working on, but first I want to give a quick impression of what an internship at Mozilla entails.

There are various benefits that help you to relax when you need to, and to focus on your work otherwise. For example free snacks and drinks (even beer) are provided for everyone, there are some big screen TV sets (yes, I watched the German team advance in the World Cup today, wooot), as well as pool and ping pong tables.

Also, there are lots of small conference rooms, so whenever you need some quiet for work and/or a phone call, you can find a spot, or just hang out at Ten Forward which is like a bar, a living room and a cinema in one. Funny thing: All conference rooms are either inspired by the Star Trek series, or pick up on classic internet memes. Other than Ten Forward, there are for example Holodeck (where new interns are trained), All your Base and the Bikeshed.

Every Monday after the all-hands meeting there is free food for everyone, and every Wednesday evening there is Intern Movie Night (we watched Primer tonight: great, but mind-boggling). Yesterday, I was at lunch with the Metrics Team: There is some great seafood to be had in mountain view.

In July, there will be the Mozilla Summit in Whistler, Canada. I will make sure to write about that, too.

First day in California

2010-06-21T00:04:19Z

After nineteen hours of travel, with stops in London and Los Angeles, yesterday I arrived in Mountain View, CA. It is a beautiful place.

Mozilla takes great care of the interns, so now I am living in the Oakwood apartments, roughly a mile from the Mozilla offices. There are three other interns living with me at the apartment (one from the bay area, two from other parts of the states), and there are about two hundred interns at the complex, most of them interning at facebook. The weather is warm and sunny at about 70° F (about 22° C).

When I was looking for my roommates (they were out when I arrived), I had what I am going to think of as a stereotypical Silicon Valley experience: The first guy I asked invited me to his BBQ. Turns out he works at Google, and all his guests were Stanford graduates. Of course, one of them is just now getting his startup going. Another one of them actually worked on the Django project in Lawrence, Kansas together with the folks around Adrian Holovaty, Jacob Kaplan Moss and Simon Willison. So that was absolutely great.

Today we visited the farmers market, where strawberries cost half as much as in Germany and are four times as big. We just went out for some beef and vegetables, which we will put onto the grill later. I can't wait for tomorrow, when I will be meeting the people over at Mozilla...

Going to Mozilla

2010-06-18T17:07:33Z

Starting on Monday, June 21 I am going to intern at the Mozilla Corporation (MoCo) in Mountain View, California. Yay!

For quite some time I have been following the mozine and later PMO. So I am absolutely thrilled to have this opportunity, and this also means that this blog will get a new topic added. Not only will I get to know many more interns with whom I am going to live in Mountain View, and not only will I participate in the Mozilla project together with all the great people at the MoCo HQ. But also I will be attending the Mozilla Summit, the biennial meeting of people from all over the world that made great projects such as the Firefox web browser and AMO possible.

My internship position will be at the metrics department led by Ken Kovash and quite probably I will be allowed to go into the details of my project there, either at this blog or at a Mozilla blog.

Leaving for CA

If you plan to go abroad to the U.S. for an internship, I suggest you apply for the internship position(s) of your choice at least two months before the actual start of the internship. I was a bit late to the party and that led to a rather tight schedule: As a Germany based student at RWTH Aachen University, I had to invest some time in getting the visa. But fortunately there is a very helpful visa sponsoring partner, so everything went smoothly after all.

I do not know about other areas, but as a student in computer science you can expect compensation for an internship in the U.S. which is not necessarily the case in Germany. I applied at two organizations, and in both cases their offers covered living expenses and the flight to California. So I really do recommend that next spring you visit the web site of any company or organization you always wanted to get to know, and apply for an internship there. Make sure that the professional and academic experience on your resume matches the position you apply for, and prepare for two to three phone interviews.

Trip to Palau

2010-03-04T15:19:12Z

In June and July of 2009 Jule and I went for trip to Palau, Bangkok and Manila. It took us three flights, one night and a boat ride to get to our beautiful island in the Pacific.

From above the islands of Palau look like jungle worms wiggeling through the shallow tropical water. In fact, Wikipedia says, that the islands are the peaks of a giant underwater mountain range.

Some of the Rock Islands from above.

After two days of travelling we finally arrived on Carp Island. A small island (1km from side to side), owned by a palauan family, in the very south of the Rock Islands. It is one of the very few Rock Islands which you can visit. All the other Islands are uninhabited and are part of a big nature preserve. Some parts of the Rock Islands are even entirely closed for public. This is due to the inimitable marine wildlife, especially the Jelly Fish lakes which are very important to many research teams.

The Jelly Fish lake on Eli Malk.

On Carp Island we lived in a little bungalow right next to the islands jungle. The simple hotel was the only thing on the island. When we arrived on the island we were the only guests for about a week, so everything was very quiet and calm.

Our Island from above. It looks a little bit like a starfish. Photo by Ariane

We went kayaking around the islands to some small beaches on the islands right next to our island. It was just incredible. You could kayak alongside the bank and look directly into the jungle. There were a lot of tropical birds with very long white tails and carnivoral plants. We went snorkeling at one beach we found near the dive site turtle cove. It's amazing when you snorkel over the reef top and suddenly the reef under you drops off into the deep blue.

The dive site Big Drop Off.

It was a bit like in Monkey Island, the computer game, so I had (and still have) the plan to write a script for an adventure computer game set in the Rock Islands of Palau :-)
We had a great time exploring the centre of the island, with all the mangroves, caves, crabs, shell roads and poison trees.

Jungle Man In the centre of the island.

DIVING

I went diving around 16 times at dives sites such as German Channel, The Big Drop Off, Turtle Cove and the famous Blue Corner! And I must say it was amazing. I've been diving before in Egypt and Bali (and Lake Constance ;-) ) and I've never seen so many big fish before! Nearly every dive we saw sharks, turtles and giant swarms of snappers or other fish.
I even had the luck to see a giant Manta Ray at the Cleaning Station in German Channel. We think it must have had a span of around 5 meteres! We were hiding behind some corals when the huge ray appeared behind us!

Reef Shark at The Big Drop Off.

The Blue Corner and the Blue Holes

My dives at the Blue Corner and the Blue Holes were amazing! The Blue Corner is a reef peak at a place were there is a lot of water coming from very deep seas and flushing over the edge of a 18m deep reef top. On our day we had very strong current, so we had to use reef hooks to secure us from being flushed away. We went down to about 20m and waited until the current moved us against the reef. As soon as we saw the edge we pedaled hard to reach the best spot. Just before the edge I felt the strong current catching me and blowing me up! And that's the moment where you have to get out you hook and grab a coral. We were hanging there like James Bond hanging onto the wing of a flying plane! The reef hook helped us staying at that spot.
The current was very strong and so I had to hold my goggles, otherwise the current would have blown it away. And that's not very good at 18m.
After all that action I now had the chance to look around and to experience what was going on around me. There were so many fish around me! Giant swarms and many many sharks!

A giant fish swarm. Photo by Ariane.

Some days later we went to dive the Blue Holes. And I must say, that for me, this place is as good as the Blue Corner!
On the reef top at a depth of around 7 meters there are several big holes going into the deep! We dived to the edge of one hole, deflated our jackets and jumped like some crazy base jumpers into the holes. It was amazing! It was a slow motion base jump! We went down the hole to a depth of around 30meters. When you look up you could see the light rays coming through the holes and drawing silhouettes of the fish. All the holes merged into one big cave which was open to the outside reef. We dived through a little window into the reef finished our dive.
This place really gives you the feeling of being weightless! You turn around and hover through holes and over edges like you're flying. Nice Image which shows a part of the holes.
There was just one creepy thing: On the bottom of the big cave there was a cross with a name on it. Some years ago, someone died while diving the holes.

GOING HOME

It was not very easy to leave to island. It was very lonesome and calm, and that's something way to rare. All you could here was the noise coming from the jungle and the waves of the ocean. And sometimes the guys from the hotel switched on the power plant ;-)

The entire Palau gallery

Google Earth Plug-in and Shiretoko

2009-05-10T15:11:16Z

While not officially supported, the Google Earth Browser Plug-in seems to work just fine with nightly builds of Mozilla Firefox 3.5, codename Shiretoko. Here is a simple hint to get it up and running.

When accessing the plug-in homepage using Shiretoko, Google tells you that your Browser version is not supported. Of course there is a reason for that. Messing around with untested software, especially with plug-ins, might hurt your user experience or data in ways I cannot predict here.

That said, the recent nightly builds on the Firefox 3.5 / Mozilla 1.9.1 branch seem to be pretty stable, at least on Mac OS 10.5. To get it running, you have to fire up about:config and change the key general.useragent.extra.firefox to something like Firefox/3.0.10. Now reload the Plug-in Homepage, download and install the Google Browser plug-in. After that, you have to keep the modified user-agent or the plug-in will cease to work.

Keep in mind that this might affect which add-on versions will be offered to you at addons.mozilla.org. Come to speak of it, I recently tried out the Minimap Sidebar that kind of gives your browser a Google Earth in the sidebar (or in a full tab). Really great: It allows you to switch between Google Maps, Google Earth and the awesome OpenStreetMap at any time without loosing position or bookmarks. It also integrates with various other location based services such as WikiMapia or loc.alize.us.