Matt Brubeck: Planet Matt

I'm still studying French every day, but since you can't study French all the time, I needed another hobby. So now I'm learning Norwegian.

We're going to Norway this summer to visit some of my relatives, and I thought it would be fun and useful to learn some of the language first (even though Norway has a very high level of English proficiency). Since Assimil's French book + audio set worked so well for me, I looked for a similar course for Norwegian. Assimil doesn't have any English-to-Norwegian books, and the comparable ones I found from other publishers were extremely expensive, so I ended up buying Assimil's Le Norvégien… because why not study both languages at once? Anyway, I'm now having fun learning a new language that's quite different from French, though I'm still stuggling with the pronunciation.

After Norway we will continue on to Paris. Unlike our last trip to Europe, this time we are bringing Nora along. She started kindergarten this year and is working very hard at learning to read; we hope that'll help occupy her on the trans-Atlantic flights!

I haven't really posted in a while, so I'm going to try to write some catch-up posts about stuff that happened over the past year. First up: if you have talked to me at all recently, I've probably mentioned my new-found obsession with the French language.

It started when Sarah and I planned a trip to Paris last spring to celebrate our tenth anniversary, leaving the kid with grandparents for the week. The trip itself was great; along with the museums and dining and shopping, we also managed to stop by Mozilla's Paris office, and spend an evening with my old teammate Vivien and his lovely girlfriend Clarista.

I had started studying French a few months earlier in preparation, using Assimil and other resources. By the time of the trip I could read comfortably and could speak well enough to communicate, though my aural comprehension was exttremely weak. But I had so much fun learning that I've kept at it ever since: reading books and newspapers to build my vocabulary, using Anki to retain it, listening to Coffee Break French and Le journal en français facile to improve my listening skills, and occasionally chatting on Verbling to practice conversation. I'm pretty happy with my progress over the last year; I have a long way to go still but I'm getting closer to reading at an adult level and I am almost comfortable having simple conversations. :)

I've also been hanging out in the MozFR IRC channel and sometimes helping out with French-to-English translations. Recently Clarista honored both Sarah and me with posts on the Bonjour Mozilla blog that she runs.

Like the baritone ukulele that I picked up the previous year [oops, it looks like I never wrote about that either... I've been delinquent longer than I thought!], I like French because it's challenging and rewarding, and also completely unrelated to any of the stuff I usually do. Unlike the ukulele which I mostly just like to strum for my own amusement, I actually want to get good enough at French to put it to real use, so I'm spending quite a bit more time on it.

"While still in America, to get more benefit from the language course, I started relearning French. On the recommendation of a friend who is a linguist and mathematician, I got the self-study French course made by Assimil entitled Le Nouveau Français sans Peine (New French With Ease)."

"While still in America, to get more benefit from the language course, I started relearning French. On the recommendation of a friend who is a linguist and mathematician, I got the self-study French course made by Assimil entitled Le Nouveau Français sans Peine (New French With Ease)."

"Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to become a football fan."

"Like many of my friends, I have treated professional sports with cultivated indifference. But a year and a half ago, I decided to become a football fan."

"What happens when you’re a crimefighter and your sidekick grows up to be an arrogant, ungrateful douchebag?" Web series written by Mark Waid (Irredeemable; Incorruptible).

"What happens when you’re a crimefighter and your sidekick grows up to be an arrogant, ungrateful douchebag?" Web series written by Mark Waid (Irredeemable; Incorruptible).

"In this post, I’ll try to shed some light on how GCs work in a way that (hopefully) any developer can understand."

"In this post, I’ll try to shed some light on how GCs work in a way that (hopefully) any developer can understand."

"Just before you play a wrong note, your fingers were in a position that made that wrong note inevitable. Fixing wrong notes isn't about 'practicing harder' but about trying to unkink those systematically error-causing fingerings and hand motions."

"Just before you play a wrong note, your fingers were in a position that made that wrong note inevitable. Fixing wrong notes isn't about 'practicing harder' but about trying to unkink those systematically error-causing fingerings and hand motions."

Some science experiments and gizmos suitable for 4- or 5-year-olds.

Some science experiments and gizmos suitable for 4- or 5-year-olds.

Back when Firefox 2 was released (six years ago this week!), the Internet Explorer team started a friendly tradition of sending Mozilla a cake as congratulations. This continued for Firefox 3 and Firefox 4. After Firefox switched from major releases once or twice a year to incremental updates every six weeks, they sent us a cupcake for the next few updates instead. :)

I thought it would be fun to revive the tradition by ordering a cake for the IE team for the IE10 release today. Here it is right after I picked it up from Baked Custom Cakes, with a Firefox logo in painted fondant:

Fellow Mozilla developer Eitan Isaacson drove with my wife Sarah and me to Microsoft Building 50 in Redmond, where program manager Jacob Rossi helped us deliver the cake to a group of IE team members:

That's me on the left and Eitan on the right in Firefox hoodies.

The IE team posted their thanks through their official Twitter account. (As you can see from their picture, the bottom border of the cake was slightly restyled in transit.) Just 30 minutes later, Michael Bolan tweeted that the cake was gone. I hear the sugary Firefox logo was eaten soon after.

So congratulations to the Internet Explorer team on your latest release, and we hope you enjoyed the cake!

We (some Seattle-area Mozillians) delivered a cake to the IE team at Microsoft for their new releases! This continues the tradition that the IE team started by giving cakes to Mozilla for Firefox releases. More story at limpet.net/mbrubeck/2012/10/26/mozilla-ie10-cake.html

Includes Dvorak International layouts (with AltGr as compose key).

Includes Dvorak International layouts (with AltGr as compose key).

A few weeks ago I started working on the Firefox “Metro UI” project, for Windows 8’s Metro (or Modern) touch-screen environment. While we’re still working on getting our first preview builds ready for Windows 8 users to try out, you can already check out the current source code from the elm branch and build it yourself if you want to get involved and help us fix some bugs.

What you might not know is that you can run “Metro” Firefox even if you don’t have Windows 8. It’s been possible for a while to build and run on older versions of Windows using the -metrodesktop flag. Today I landed a patch to make this work on other platforms too. To build the latest elm source code on Linux or Mac OS X, follow these instructions:

1. Clone the elm repo: hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/projects/elm/
   (If you have already cloned mozilla-central or some other repo that shares with it, there’s a faster way to do this.)

2. Create a .mozconfig file with ac_add_options --enable-metro

3. Build Firefox as you normally would.

4. From your objdir, run dist/bin/firefox -metrodesktop (Linux)
   or dist/Nightly.app/Contents/MacOS/firefox -metrodesktop (Mac)

5. You can visit about:config and enable metro.debug.treatmouseastouch (then restart the browser) to simulate touch interaction with the mouse. Right-click to simulate the Windows 8 edge-swipe gesture, which displays the toolbars.

This is still experimental and mostly untested. Elm might accidentally break on non-Windows platforms from time to time (because of course we are doing all our main development and testing on Windows). While it’s not a perfect replacement for running in the real Windows 8 environment, I hope this is a useful option for adventurous Firefox contributors who want to experiment with the Metro code but don’t have convenient access to Windows 8.

Includes "Le journal en français facile" (the news in simple French), a daily radio program for French learners. The RFI site has other listening exercises and learning resources.

Includes "Le journal en français facile" (the news in simple French), a daily radio program for French learners. The RFI site has other listening exercises and learning resources.

"Grown-up nerd and seven year-old nerdling are visiting Washington D.C. next week. ISO amusement, entertainment, novelty and awesomeness."

"Grown-up nerd and seven year-old nerdling are visiting Washington D.C. next week. ISO amusement, entertainment, novelty and awesomeness."

"The 'Gumboots' album, should you be unaware, has been awarded it’s place in history due to a cassette copy which found its way into Paul Simon’s car stereo sometime in 1984-85 and providing him with the initial inspiration to seek out (and eventually travel to South Africa to record with) the musicians playing on the album." (via waxy.org)

"The 'Gumboots' album, should you be unaware, has been awarded it’s place in history due to a cassette copy which found its way into Paul Simon’s car stereo sometime in 1984-85 and providing him with the initial inspiration to seek out (and eventually travel to South Africa to record with) the musicians playing on the album." (via waxy.org)