Last week at the Mozilla Toronto office, we celebrated as I clicked the “close milestone” button for Butter, marking the 0.2 release, codenamed “Ghostbusters”. It was also Dave’s birth-week, so we celebrated with a aptly themed cake. [Photo credit: Ben Moskowitz]

The repo has been moved to Mozilla’s github account, so feel free to clone the repo and follow progress: https://github.com/mozilla/butter

Considering the amount of work we did to roadmap Butter for the year, and the amount of time the team had to produce this release, I’m quite proud of our accomplishment. Butter already looks better, functions faster, and feels more solid as a foundation than its predecessors. This is a great start to a year of Butter, and 0.3 is just on the horizon.

A significant portion of the Mozilla Foundation’s effort this year will contribute to Popcorn Maker’s eventual success, culminating in a 1.0 release in or around November. We’ve correctly identified that achieving this is a tall order, so we planned and roadmapped harder than I’ve ever planned and roadmapped before.

This morning, CDOT student and Mozilla hacker, Jon Buckley discovered that the Firefox 9 Addons About Page uses Popcorn.js to augment a tutorial video about Firefox addons by adding apropos content to the page while the video plays.

Of course it’s great to see another example of Popcorn in the wild, but this is a use case we had never before considered. Using Popcorn.js to show synchronized interactive content, the page explains addons, what kinds of addons there are, and how a user can use them in Firefox.

After what seemed like a totally unproductive and inconsequential morning, and an equally slow and frustrating afternoon, I managed to at least prototype two rather important things that have been lingering around Paladin and CubicVR for a long time.

First, Gladius had a rendering engine, but it was almost entirely useless unless you really like clearing a canvas. Second, CubicVR.js could only draw to one canvas on a page. Not “one canvas at a time”, just one canvas.

Now, the hard part of both of those problems are dealt with, and it’s no coincidence that they were both attacked in the same day.

If you’ve been paying attention to the recent surge of activity surrounding implementation of game-related browser API’s, you’ve probably already caught wind of Mozilla’s stream of cross-platform gamepad-ready try-builds, supporting libraries and working RescueFox demos, or perhaps Google’s announcement of Scott Graham’s Gamepad API and his game to show it off.

Today, I’m happy to announce that, as far as I know, the first working prototype of force-feedback (rumble) support is available to play with. I also forked Jon Buckley’s input.js to augment its test suite with vibrational goodness.

After my recent stint in Europe for the Mozilla Festival and MozCamp I had the opportunity to reflect on the development environment of Popcorn Maker, courtesy of the 8 hour flight from Berlin to New York. The result is a version of Popcorn Maker which can be proudly labeled as 0.1, and very friendly to developers.

I just finished committing and issuing a pull request for the bones of Gladius’ graphics service. Alan and I have been talking about how to do this properly for at least two months now, so it really feels good to write down some code. Here’s how it looks:

Here I am, burning the midnight oil (literally), setting up a new server. So much work to do and so much catch-up to play. Since I’m not a sysadmin by trade, my working knowledge of what’s hip in the server world is relatively scant.

But, as I slowly copy over important files from my old setup, spin up new versions of old configs ( debian etch is … quite old now :( ), and learn what programs are coolest to serve static content now, it’s coming together again.

Good bye Apache, old friend. Good bye wordpress. Good bye PHP. I won’t miss you guys very much.

Hello modern web-development world. Should I be scared?